CORRELATIONS BETWEEN COERCED

REDISTRIBUTION AND JUSTICE IN A

LIBERTARIAN SETTING.

A short assessment of the context between individual freedom and coercion in democratic governments from the perspective of classical libertarian thought. 23 July 2010

Prepared by: Mathias Royce, ID3915 Doctoral Candidate in Political Economy Swiss Management Center University Zurich, Switzerland

Prepared for: Prof. Kurt Leube Swiss Management Center University Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract:

Frédéric Bastiat, himself a renowned classical libertarian, once put the construct of the state

in question by proclaiming the following: "The State! What is it? Where is it? What does it do?

What ought it to do? (Bastiat, 1848)“Bastiat then already had an answer for his questions,

namely that "the state is the great fiction through which everybody endeavours to live at the

expense of everybody else (Bastiat, 1848)”. More than a hundred years later, Anthony de

Jasay examines the state in the context of constraining its citizens in order to subject them to

coerced redistribution and aims to arrive at a determination if democracy, under the aspect

of redistribution, is compatible with individual freedom and liberty and if redistribution

conducted by the state is just or if it purely follows inherent self-interests that manifest in

acquiring public consent?

Redistribution

When is redistribution just? Does distributive justice in the context of a state vs. citizen

relationship even exist? Logically, it does – but one needs to consider that “there can be no

distributive justice where no one distributes (von Hayek, 1978)”, hence distributive justice is

intrinsically linked with the act of redistribution. And in the same context, who would be in

the dominant and who would be in the weaker position? Is the state forcefully in the

dominant position since it can exercise its inherent monopole on force for coercive purposes,

i.e. to extract tax revenues from its citizens, or, is the state dependant on its citizens and their

inherent desire not to exploit the welfare state by e.g. being a dole-bludging deadbeat, only

to be a rather compliant member of society and find remunerated work in the first place, so

that income taxes used for redistributive purposes can be extracted? The provision of

minimum existence through non-coercive measures, e.g. compulsory insurance, can lead to

the emergence of a fully-grown welfare state (de Jasay, 2002). Contrary to the Hayekian view

that includes apparently non-coercive provisions by the state for its citizens on a subsistence-

level basis (von Hayek, 1960), de Jasay is more stringent in its definition of coerciveness and

redistribution and consequently includes compulsory insurance, for instance, amongst

coerced redistribution. With this rather staunch view de Jasay is aligned with other

libertarians, notably Nozick, who opposed redistribution as an end, enabled through

compulsory taxation as its mean, since it would be “morally on par with forced labour (Nozick,

1974)”. It is precisely this moral perspective that renders redistribution questionable, in the

sense that “some writers maintain that egalitarian (or other) reasons require the replacement

of a market system with socialism or some other system, e.g., an economy controlled by

workers' cooperatives. Others believe that a market system is not morally objectionable,

provided that it is supplemented by measures deliberately aimed at redistributing income or

wealth (Gordon, 1994). This clash of ideologies compellingly manifests in the libertarian

viewpoint of de Jasay who remarks the primordial, inherent and most striking characteristic of

ideological failure in Rawls’s contractarian approach on distributive justice (Rawls, 1971),

where for instance in the egalitarian sense, an applied Rawlsian difference principle which

aims to benefit those who are worst-off in society, could only be achieved through

widespread and far-reaching redistribution. Such benefits to the worst-off in society

correspond to transfer payments and these “governmental subsidy systems promote

inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing

efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation (Rothbard, 2009)”.

Liberty and Freedom

From a historical perspective and given the influence and authority Locke and Rousseau had

and still exercise on this topic, classical libertarianism defines freedom hypothetically through

natural law in context with prevailing ideas of social contract theory. Man’s state-of-nature as

ultimate expression of liberty and individual freedom is understood to be the logical antipode

to arbitrary expansion of state power. De Jasay’s pragmatic approach which entails his

understanding of individual freedom encompasses logical and innate characteristics rather

than being solely established upon morally-subjective, value-driven or supposition-based

features, only. This becomes apparent and observable when the two distinct effects of

expressed freedom are put in context with regards to their factual application. Individual

liberties thence regarded under de Jasay’s epistemological thought aspects are qualities that

are understood to be of “given” nature and any objection of such individual liberty must

originate from the objecting entity. These aformentioned attributes concerning liberties are in

stark contrast to individual rights which are “granted” rather than “given”, whereby the

claimant may be obligated with the responsibility to furnish confirmation of his or her right.

Rightism then seems to evolve as a mechanism to “solemnly recognize that people have

'rights' to do certain specific things and that certain other things ought not to be done to

them. On closer analysis, these 'rights' turn out to be the exceptions to a tacitly understood

general rule that everything else is forbidden, for if such were not the case, announcing

'rights' to engage freely in certain acts would be redundant and pointless (de Jasay, 2005)".

Von Hayek in comparison to de Jasay, sees freedom entwined with the inbuilt properties and

characteristics of moral rules that are applicable to groups, and advocates that freedom

constitutes a set of commonly accepted restrictions amongst the member of these groups

and that any claim to be freed from these constraints would be an “attack on all liberty

possible among human beings (Horwitz, 2006)”. “Freedom”, so von Hayek, “is order through

law” and as a consequence it cannot be “the absolute liberty to do as one pleases, rather it is

the recognition of the necessity of law and morality in order to ensure that human interaction

is cooperative and orderly (Horwitz, 2006).” In between these aforementioned beliefs rests

the libertarian support for a type of ‘negative’ freedom as endorsed by Isiah Berlin. This

‘negative freedom’ – or the “absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action

(Rothbard & Hoppe, 2003)” is methodologically associated in much closer fashion with de

Jasay’s beliefs on freedom, than compared to von Hayek’s beliefs. It is Rothbard indeed

himself, who accordingly drew an analogy between Berlin’s ‘negative’ freedom and his

definition of liberty, which encompasses an enforcement of libertarian ideals: the support of

the individual’s free will and personal freedom, expressed through the precept “that liberty is

the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual’s person and

property (Rothbard & Hoppe, 2003).” One could – and perhaps should, interrogate in more

detail the underlying motives of de Jasay’s theory on freedom since his theory neither

opposes nor contradicts, but solely puts the moral belief system theorised by the dominant

economic and political philosophers of the late period of the Austrian School in question. In

certain facets of his theory on freedom – moral aspects aside, de Jasay is rather strikingly

close to the theories of St. Augustine, St. Albertus Magnus or St. Thomas d’Aquinas.

Justice

A perhaps futile attempt to concatenate the Misean belief of justice into a single sentence

leads to the observation that only societies that are bound to rules of equal justice for all of

its members offer environments that allow the individual to pursue his or her own goals. Von

Mises’s assumption must then subsequently rest upon the belief of the ‘free society’ under

the philosophy of the classical libertarian school of thought and hence, endorse if not even

support capitalist free market principles, since it is the immediate result of the ‘free society’

and as such it is thence a logical consequence that results directly out of the desire of free

people interacting economically amongst each other. Since capitalist free market principles

and property possession and trade are intrinsically linked, it would be only natural to assume

that the inherent “solution to the problem of justifying private property must reduce itself to

questions of justice (Rothbard, 1970)”. A laconic, succinct and rather terse statement from

Rothbard that coevally aims at the shortcomings of utilitarianism in the context of the rather

subjective influences, which impact the understanding of value concerning the optimal sought

by utilitarian economists. Justice in the Hayekian sense is reflected through the presence of

fundamental norms, which he names the ‘rules of just conduct’ and which regulate the

societal interaction between men who not necessarily pursue the same immediate ends. He

fathoms subsequently that “liberalism is therefore inseparable from the institution of private

property which is the name we usually give to the material part of this protected individual

domain (von Hayek, 1966)“. De Jasay takes a quite distinguished approach on theorising

justice. In his opinion, the term justice is rather vague and from a political perspective rather

ambiguous with regards to its rational meaning. In spite of precisely such absence of an

exploited and rationalised instrument that strictly denotes the meaning of justice, de Jasay

eludes this apparent inadequacy by embarking on a philosophical digression. In doing so, de

Jasay constructs a pithy distinction between Aristotelian ethics which culminate in support for

the maxim ‘to each his own’ – as such his maxim is in logic second perhaps to Ulpian’s suum

cuique tribuere, and the aphorism to ‘treat equal cases equally’. Justice is being put not only

in the context of just or unjust private property considerations under Aristotelian ethics but

also, subsequent in enumeration but not in rank, it is being put in the context of rational

expectations that form the framework of society when generally evaluating just or unjust

individual actions or motives. In theorising the latter, de Jasay recognises a deficiency that

weakens this construct. It is the legitimisation of the definitional characteristics of equality

that seem to be inherently problematic in the ‘real world’. His theory is supported in the

Rawlsian definition of justice which employs rather suggestive methods of intellectualism in

delivering a connotation of fairness with reference to justice – rather than justice as a

meaning itself. His theory exemplifies the correlation of aforementioned justice and its

interaction with its social environment. Justice thence is no longer used to describe an

individual or collective action but merely a social condition – unfairness in this case. This latter

fact invites governments to exploit its citizens through means of rhetorical brainwashing in

the sense that governments make their citizens believe that through coerced redistribution

social injustice (Radnitzky, 2003) – which really should rather be referred to as social

unfairness, could be abolished through means of redistribution albeit it being certain, that

state intervention through redistribution will rather lead to an increase in coercion and loss of

liberties than anything else.

Works Cited

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de Jasay, A. (2002). Justice and its Surroundings. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

de Jasay, A. (2005). Liberalism, Loose or Strict. The Independent Review, v. IX, n. 3 , 427 - 432.

Gordon, D. (1994). Justice and Redistributive Taxation: James Buchanan versus Ludwig von Mises. The

Review of Austrian Economics Vo1.8, No. 1 , 117-131.

Horwitz, S. (2006). Hayek and Freedom. The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, Volume: 56, Issue: 4 .

Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Radnitzky, G. (2003, November 10). Gerecht und ungerecht: Anthony de Jasay räumt auf mit

intellektuellen Konfusionen. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

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