Constitutional Amendments Say No

[peristaltor]

Some time ago, I asked the forum in the Friday Lulz tradition to imagine a world where money was excluded from the political arena. Few bit, most of those dismissed, probably for the same reason that people don't sit around dreaming of what the sky would look like green instead of blue.

Ah, it turns out (through NPR, of all places) that others

Comments

[montecristo]

First off, there is a vast difference between money and power. Money can buy power, where there are concentrations of it for sale, but the fact of wealth, in and of itself, is not the same thing as using force to violate the rights of others. The fact that someone owns four sports cars and I own one high-mileage sedan is not a violation of my rights, not where the market is allowed to function freely. Wealth can only exist through production. It is most easily and morally created through voluntary exchange. Power has only one moral, legitimate use: defense, which means much of politics, throughout history, has been an attempt by individuals and groups to live outside of and above the moral law. As Franz Oppenheimer correctly noted: there are two means to the acquisition of wealth: the economic means, via production through mutual cooperation and trade or the political means, which means, predation, expropriation, and theft.

Money is not "given" to people by "society." Wealth does not fall from heaven onto the heads of the "lucky." It must be produced first. After that it may be stolen, given, or traded. Only the latter two means of acquisition are moral. If you're going to take the premise that wealth does just rain down upon people then we have very little to say to one another. If you're going to start treating wealth and power according to their essential natures then we can talk.

...yet the power you decry as wrongheaded is the democratic power, not the concentrated money power.

As I have already pointed out, wealth and power have two different essential natures. It is you who are conflating them, as did Marx. The problem with Marx, and the very concept of "money-power" itself, is that you cannot wish property out of existence while human beings retain their existence. On the other hand, the decision to live according to a moral standard such as the golden rule means that power is naturally distributed and dispersed to the point that it allows individuals having a less ethical code of conduct much less opportunity to abuse and infringe the rights of others. Even if those immoral persons choose wrong, there is less power available for them to buy.

Your proposal to limit speech and control the options of other people who have not themselves violated anyone's rights is an immoral initiation of the imposition of force from the outset. There is no moral authority to initiate force. It is the use of evil means, regardless of whatever end is to be accomplished. It is the theory that you have the a priori right to beat up your neighbor and take his stuff because he might use that stuff to hurt you. It is a turning of the golden rule on its head. By that standard, force is all that matters, and your rich neighbor is equally justified in beating you up and taking your more modest possessions away from you on the premise that you'd only use what you have to attack him and do the same to him had you the opportunity anyway.

[peristaltor]

I strongly disagree.

[chron_job]

> The fact that someone owns four sports cars and I own one high-mileage
> sedan is not a violation of my rights, not where the market is allowed to
> function freely.

Lets tweak those dials up a bit....

How about a hypothetical situation where I own all the land where you might lie down and sleep, and you own no land? That in and of itself is not a violation of any rights, and is entirely possible in a small 'market'. What about when I use my power (legitimately?) to defend my property (you can't sleep on my land unless we enter into voluntary exchange, and I don't feel like volunteering!). That also isn't a violation of any of your rights, but now you sleep at my sufferance, because my right to prevent you from sleeping on my property is deemed legitimate, and backed up with some form of social power, and your 'right' to sleep when there is no place to sleep is academic.

If land is the ultimate source of raw materials on which human labor is expended to create 'wealth', you can't 'demand' those of me either... we must enter into voluntary trade for them, since the fruits of my land are mine. Your labor, for the fruits of my land. Now you work at my sufferance as well.

The land itself is not power. But the privilege to allow or prevent its use is backed up by the power of the society in which this conflict happens to be embedded.

What is true of one land owner and one tenant can also be true of groups of land owners and groups of tenants. What is plainly visible in our land example is less visible, but still true, in any means of production which can be owned.

Like our feelings about inherited wealth, the land that is the base of my 'power' was ultimately not made by me. I may feel I earned it, through my labor or my careful husbandry, but land ownership ultimately does, in many senses, 'fall from the sky'. Follow the chain of 'earned' ownership far enough, and it begins in theft, or luck. "Rights" to it are manufactured by societies for reasons of social utility. There's no reason not to modify those rights for other reasons of social utility.

[montecristo]

Your complaint is a common one in economic circles. It is the product of folk economic thinking. I call it the "Capitalists Will Buy Up the World and Eject Us Into Space" fallacy. If your complaint had a basis then why haven't "greedy capitalists" bought up even a small state in the U.S., say Rhode Island, and made evil "superfortunes" through various forms of "market blackmail." The problem underlying this fallacy is the failure to realize that all trade involves an exchange of values. As trade occurs, the market changes and values are reaasessed. The reason that it would be impossible for "capitalists" to buy up all of the land is that they could not offer anything in exchange that all other present landowners would consider more valuable than all of the land they would hypothetically be trading away. Where would a capitalist aquire such wealth in the first place? What other planet could a hypothetical capitalist trade to the rest of humanity to acquire the entirety of this one? Consider this: one of the richest men on Earth, Bill Gates, essentially derrives his wealth from the sale of the operating system Microsoft Windows. From each copy of Windows that is sold, Gates himself receives but a tiny fraction of the money for which the copy of Windows is exchanged. When we walk into a store and buy a copy of Windows, it is on the presumption that we want and value that copy of Windows much more than we want the two hundred dollars we are prepared to spend to buy it. The two hundred dollars represents but a very small fraction of our income, let alone our net wealth. Basically, the buy-up-the-world fallacy involves mistaken cause and effect perception. We see the "capitalist" as "controlling the market" and the "consumer" at his mercy, when in actuality, it is the consumer who imputes value to the factors of production, in the first case, and in the second, everyone in the market plays multiple roles, both as capitalists themselves and consumers, as those who hire and as those who labor. It is not as simple as the fallacious scenario implies.