Forced choice

Introduction

What exactly is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

Thomas Sowell

I find this quote extremely interesting because it is an excellent example of the fundamental, shall we say, “misunderstanding” between libertarian and socialist.

A libertarian (and most likely the original author) sees the quote as it applies to taxation, with the perspective that taxation is essentially the government misappropriating a share of somebody else's profit.

But the interesting thing is that (most likely beyond the interest of the original author) this quote can be applied just as well (with an obviously socialist slant) to the employer profiteering from the work of their subordinates. This is in fact the starting point of Marx's analysis of the capitalist system: the worker produces, but the capitalist profits off the work.

Libertarians object to this interpretation on the basis that employment is voluntary, whereas participation in the taxation system is not: the employer doesn't coerce the employee to sign the employment contract, whereas the government coerces people to pay taxes on threat of violence (a favorite metaphor being that of robbery at gunpoint).

I argue that this is, in fact, not really the case in general: subordinate work is (generally) no more a result of a voluntary action than participation in the taxation system, and in fact, if anything, the reverse is true.

The starting point of my argument is the definition of the term voluntary: an action is voluntary if it's the result of the free will of the actor. This in particular requires that the actor has multiple options, and that such options are feasible. In other words, the actor should be able to choose, and the choice must not be forced.

So, the question is: do people accept to do subordinate work out of their own free will? And conversely, do people accept to pay taxes of their own free will?

The answer libertarians give to the second question is: no, people accept to pay taxes because they are thus coerced by the threat of violence from the government, that is the same entity you pay taxes to. Hence, payment of taxes is not voluntary.

Interestingly, libertarians claim that the answer to the first question is: yes, even if the alternative to the subordinate work is death (e.g. by starvation), because the employer is not responsible for the (prospective) employee to be in such dire straits —even more, the employer figure is frequently depicted as a savior, in practice, coming to the aid of the desperate (for a price).

The libertarian argument therefore pivots on the distinction between duress (claimed to be the condition under which people accept to pay taxes) and necessity (claimed to be at worst the condition for which people accept to do subordinate work). My counterargument will be twofold: this being a “distinction without difference” in this context, and the first claim being actually situational at best.

Mother of invention

In many (most?) judicial systems there is a clear distinction between being in a state of necessity versus being in a state of duress. The distinction is important (in a criminal case) because the circumstances and conditions under which one or the other can be successfully used as defense are very different.

However, beyond the technical distinctions, necessity and duress (in the judicial systems) share one fundamental common trait: they are valid defenses because it is understood that —under those kinds of circumstances and with those kinds of conditions— the actor had no other (reasonable) course of action: the course of action is essentially forced, against the otherwise better judgement of the actor.

This translates integrally outside of the judicial system, and at least as far as the duress (contextually: being forced to pay taxes under threat of violence) is involved, the libertarians are quite ready to support it. Obviously nobody in a sane state of mind would go as far as getting themselves killed for not paying taxes (a consequence that would entail going against the government in every subsequent step, to the point of starting a firefight against cops sent to arrest them): paying taxes is thus the only reasonable course of action, but it is obviously not voluntary, because the choice is forced by the state of duress.

What at least some of them seem to miss, however, is that the same applies just as well in the «work or die» case: the employer not being responsible for the state of necessity of the prospective employee1 (and there being a contract signed, but we'll get back to this other aspect further on) does not make the choice to accept subordinate work any less forced: people in a state of necessity will accept work in exchange for the possibility to survive whatever the conditions offered, simply because they have no other (reasonable) course of action.

So yes, even if the employer isn't the one forcing it, the choice for the employee is still forced (by the circumstances), and thus participation cannot be considered voluntary; it is not a result of the free will of the employee, but the only possible (sane) course of action. It's not an actual choice.

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Buddhist parable

Of course, this is situational: it holds only for the cases where subordinate work is accepted out of a state of necessity; under any other circumstance, a person entering an employment agreement as an employee can be considered acting on their own free will.

Still, the existence of such situations should not be overlooked, not only because they are very real situations2, but because they have far-reaching repercussions that end up involving those that are not in a state of necessity, too.

Survival and the free market

The lack of perception or acceptance, in the libertarian mindset, of the forcing mechanism behind the submission to employment contracts in a state of necessity can actually be framed in a wider downplaying of the influence or importance of survival, that reflects also in their opinion in other topics (e.g. healthcare) that I will not discuss here.

I suspect that the reason why this is generally overlooked or downplayed is that this is one of the (many3) reasons why the nice, pure, abstract, clean, mathematical rules of self-regulation of the free market from neoclassical economics do not apply in the real world —in fact, this is arguably the single most important reason why. But I take consolation in the fact that even supporters of classical liberalism like Hayek ultimately acknowledged its importance, if in a rather superficial way.

Briefly put: survival does not abide by free market rules.

More specifically, demand for survival is almost perfectly inelastic. There is literally only one way to reduce demand (death4)), and there is literally only one way to increase it (bear more people). Price does not affect demand for survival in any way. People will pay literally anything if their survival depends on it. They will go bankrupt, sell out themselves, their family, their whole community5 at any level, mortgage their future and that of the future generations, just to be able to survive.

Mi nono fava i matoni
Mi babo fava i matoni
Faso i matoni anca me
Ma la casa mia
'ndov'è?

My granpa made bricks
My papa made bricks
I make bricks as well
but my house
where is it?

I matoni, poem by Calzinazz in Fellini's Amarcord

The most obvious consequence of this, as mentioned already, is that decisions taken under necessity for survival aren't really an expression of free will: they are a forced choice. More, there is not just an imbalance in the contractual power of employer and the employee: there is the most possible lack of balance; the prospective employee with no (other) options for survival has absolutely no contractual power, while the employer can decide everything: working conditions, hours, pay.

And particularly, in topic, the employer can extract a nearly arbitrarily large share of profit from the employee's work, leaving the latter with only the bare essential for survival and energy to work and nothing else. (In fact, arguably potentially even less than that, as testified by the growing number of people needing more than one job to make ends meet even in certain parts of the world.)

Even more explicitly, this implies that even when the employer may not be responsible for the state of necessity of the prospective employee, they are responsible entirely on their own for the nature and contents of the contract: there cannot be any contribution from the prospective employee, because the latter has no contractual power. The contents of the contract are thus forced onto the employee in these circumstances (in contrast to voluntary agreements, where both parties have the power to influence the final form of the contract before accepting it).

But on top of that, just the existence (“within range”) of people in such conditions completely destroys the “market value” of everybody else: in such circumstances, employers have an essentially infinite contractual power not only in the challenge with prospective employees that must depend on them for survival, but with every other prospective employee as well, since for whatever condition requested by the prospective employee, the employer can always lower the bid leveraging the possibility to opt for the ones in state of necessity.

In other words, even people that are not in a state of necessity will not find work at better conditions that those in a state of necessity, as long as there are others in state of necessity that can do the same work6. (And of course, this may ultimately bring the aforementioned people down into a state of necessity, potentially triggering a vicious cycle, but I digress.)

Way out

A consequence of what has been argued so far is that guaranteeing survival for everyone is a necessary precondition to ensure both free will of the actors and —possibly somewhat paradoxically— the freedom of the work market. Without it, talking about voluntary agreements for subordinate work is situational at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.

(And of course, once this is established, a whole new can of worms opens, with the what (should be guaranteed), how (it should be done) and who (should be doing it). But this is neither the time nor place to discuss it.)

Only by removing necessity from the equation it becomes possible to claim free will in the stipulation of subordinate work contracts. And it's not hard to see how that would also put some significant constraints on, if not completely eliminate, employers' profiteering, since prospective employees will be in a position to demand compensation in proportion to the profit generated by their work.

Community service

Secondary introduction

The second point of my response is particularly troublesome because I have found, in libertarian circles, some impressive misunderstandings and confusion, when not intentional misrepresentation, on the nature and role of governments, even from a purely theoretical perspective.

The most annoying part of this is the apparent inconsistency with which the argument is treated by at least some of them.

On the one hand, a manifest absolute distrust, when not a straight repulsion, for even the concept of government (or the flawed perception/misrepresentation thereof), of which the liberal use of metaphors such as the robbery at gunpoint is just an example: along this line, governments are considered to be intrinsically unable to operate efficiently and justly, taxation is inherently morally unacceptable, etc. On the other hand, the same individuals that ride the previous argument will happily flaunt examples of specific nations that have benefited from more liberal (in the classical sense) economic policies.

Now, aside from the factors that they like to overlook in their analysis7, my biggest issue with this inconsistency is the underlying hypocrisy: if something is intrinsically bad as claimed, there should never be a circumstance where it happening should be depicted positively. A robbery at gunpoint is a robbery at gunpoint.

(How would you feel about someone spending their time talking about the reprehensibility of rape, and then pointing at a group of people and enthusiastically proclaiming «but hey look, this particular group of people only rapes their victims once a year! Isn't that great?»)

An argument could be made that these are examples of things happening despite the government, but this doesn't hold when the results shown are an effect of government choice (the economic policy), so if anything this would be detrimental to their strongly held belief about the conceptual incapacity of governments. And of course, any assumed extrapolation («think how much better it would be if the government wasn't there at all») falls flat on the partiality of their analysis of the causes behind these «success stories».

I have long suspected (and have recently had confirmation in at least one case) that adherence to this particular creed isn't really a position one gets to after thorough critical reasoning, but instead mostly stems out of a single thought: «I want the government to leave me alone.»

The superficiality of such a thought wouldn't even be a problem, if not for how it propagates into the creed itself, leading to strong belief and confirmation biases not only in the analysis of information, but even in the acquisition of the simplest of definitions —with a wonderfully ironic bandwagon effect, and the misconceptions propagating from individual to individual simply because they resonate with the personal perception and desire, even in the face of what even a marginally more critical study would bring forth.

Possibly undeserved rants aside, I've been thinking for a long time about the best way to approach this topic overcoming the divide that stems from the misconceptions about the concept of government, and ultimately I've only found a solution that doesn't satisfy me and most likely will not satisfy the readers either, but is the only one I can think of that has any chance of avoiding misconceptions.

Objectives

As a reminder, my primary objective in this section is to illustrate that the answer to the question «is participation in the taxation system voluntary or not?» is only situationally negative, in the sense that while there are situations where government coercion forces a choice, this is actually not the case in general, especially today.

I will build my argument from the bottom up, with a much broader perspective that will ultimately restrict to the case of taxation as a special case. The argument itself will actually avoid, at least in the first part, discussing the nature and role of the government in the matter8. This is possible specifically because the role of the government on the matter is actually secondary, and the topic can be introduced without it.

At a later stage however, the government will be introduced, hopefully in a manner the clarifies (at least to the receptive minds, so if you're a lost cause you can stop reading now, spare yourself the wasted time and carry on proudly in your ignorance, while content in your certainty that my argument is moot and taxation is robbery) some of the misconceptions about its aforementioned nature and role.

Finally, I will get to the core, and illustrate how, except for the worst cases, the actors do have multiple valid alternatives to participation in the taxation system, and that the latter is therefore voluntary.

Where you belong

Humans are not monads. From birth to death, save for exceptional circumstances, humans spend their time being members of, and interacting with, social groups9.

In what follows, I'm going to use term community10, rather than social group, mostly for two reasons: the first is that it takes less effort to write; the other is that at least for the social groups that we'll be most interested in for the later stages of the argument, the sense of identity or belonging and consequence cohesion will influence the argument. Still, most of what I'm going to say will hold for any (or almost any) social group: the families or clans one is born in or decides to create, the condominium or gated enclave they live in, the university they attend, the township where they reside, the fan club of a team, the developers or users of a specific piece of software or hardware, workers in the same company, etc.

While membership in a community is usually (intended or assumed to be) voluntary, this is not always the case. For example, one doesn't choose the family they are born in; they may choose who to create a new family with (which is voluntary), but they may also be forced into marriage with a specific person (which is not); they may choose to buy an apartment in a condominium (which is usually voluntary), but they may also come to own it e.g. by inheritance (which might or might not be); they may reside in a township because they chose to move there (which is usually voluntary), but they may be there simply by birth and inability to move out (which is not).

In the assessment of whether a membership is voluntary or not it is also important to take into account the possibility to leave the community, were the member to decide so. If one doesn't choose to be a member of a community (e.g. because their membership is the byproduct of being born there), but they have the option to terminate such membership (e.g. by leaving) and they do not do so, then the membership should be considered voluntary, since it's by their own free will that they choose to remain a member even though they didn't decide to become one in the first place. Conversely, one may join a community of their own free will, but find themselves unable to leave it afterwards even though they wished to do so: their membership should then be considered not voluntary.

Depending on the community, membership may be formally defined and established (e.g. by signing a contract), but it also might not be. An important thing to note is that the existence of a contract has no bearing on whether the membership is voluntary or not: someone may have been coerced into signing the contract (e.g. forced marriages), making the membership not voluntary, and conversely there are communes that one may join without signing any contract, making this a voluntary membership without any contract. And of course there's possibility that a contract was signed voluntarily, but either because of terms in the contract, or for other reasons, the member may be prevented from leaving at a later time, making their continuing membership not voluntary anymore despite the existence of a contract11.

For appropriate combinations of formality and voluntarity of the membership, situations can arise where an individual is considered by the community among its members, but the individual does not consider themselves a member of the community —even when they formally are. As we shall see, this ends up having only limited practical bearing on my points, but it does affect what is know as the cohesion of the community. Ultimately, a growing number of such members can lead to the disintegration of the community itself, but somewhat paradoxically can also lead to even worse situations, where communities keep existing formally, but practically void, and this does have a non-trivial bearing on some of the points I'm going to make.

Communities themselves can also be members or parts of wider (higher level, so to say) communities. This carries some form of transitive property of membership, such that being a member of a community that is a member or part of a wider community effectively transfers memberships (directly or indirectly) to the higher level. Voluntary membership in a community cannot come without voluntary membership to the higher-level community, even if just implicitly: if I choose to live in an apartment in a condominium (thus voluntarily joining the community of that condominium) I cannot claim non-voluntary membership in the township the condominium is a part of.

Staking claims

Many communities stake a claim on land. This may just be the union of the land owned by each of its members, but it may also include land that is not owned specifically by any of the individuals. The validity of any such a claim, just as with individuals, ultimately depends on the peering and higher-level communities accepting the claim itself. In fact, it could be argued that the claim only makes sense in relation to the other communities.

Lack of acknowledgement of the claim from peering or higher-level communities is (and has always been) one of the main causes (if not the main cause) of conflicts between communities, even when disguised under different pretenses. Ultimately, the claims are usually functional, in that rather than merely a claim on the land as an abstract surface they are claims on its exploitation for arbitrary purposes (living space, mining, cultivation or whatever other mean).

(There is actually a fertile field of discussion about how far can the exploitation of the claimed land be carried, focusing on the unity of the ecosystem and thus the side-effects that the exploitation of the owned land has on the other communities and their lands, but again this would veer the discussion off-topic.)

It should be noted that these claims are not necessarily formally defined, and the boundaries of the extension on which the claim is staked may be fuzzy; this has in fact been the case for most of human history: clear-cut borders are actually a relatively recent invention. And yet, today one would be hard-pressed to find land over which no community has staked a claim —and by contrast it's considerably much easier to find land with multiple claims.

(The reader might have noticed that when discussing the validity of the claim I have focused on its acceptance by other communities, rather than by individuals. This is intentional: it is technically possible for an individual to challenge a claim staked by a community, but such a challenge carries little or no value (regardless of its ethical justification) without a community supporting it, be it a peer or higher level one, simply because of the balance of power.)

Acknowledged claims effectively define an “area of control” for the community that becomes important in defining the terms of relationship between individuals external to the community and the community itself.

Compass and ruler

Communities have rules.

They may be written or not, formally defined or in a continuous state of flux and reinterpretation, forming a consistent system or in conflict with each other and with sophisticated (or arbitrary) resolution mechanisms. The processes by which the rules are defined varies between communities (from being dictated by a single individual to consensus decision-making), but one of the defining characteristics of community membership is acceptance of the rules themselves —be it voluntary (in case of voluntary membership) or not (coerced by the same mechanism that coerce membership).

Community membership entails following the rules (in fact, in some cases it's actually defined simply by this). Not following the rules will usually results in the community exacting punishment from the member in violation; the punishment itself is in fact part of the rules themselves (again, either “in writing” or informally), and may anything ranging from a simple reprimand all the way up to loss of life, or anything else in-between or beyond: corporal punishment, shunning, ostracization or other forms of exclusion, temporary or permanent loss of property, personal freedom or rights, etc.

There's more to this in fact, since community rules apply not only to the community members, but also non-members within the community area of control; it might be the case however that different sets of rules (and different forms of punishment) apply to members and non-members.

Something that bears highlighting is that, in general, the community exacts the punishment, even when only part of it (potentially even only a single individual) is directly involved in effectively carrying it out (from trial to execution), as a consequence of punishment for the violation being itself part of the rules, and community membership requiring acceptance of the rules. How this reflects on the individual members, however, is obviously affected by how cohesive the community is12, and most importantly whether membership is voluntary or not.

Community, change, cohesion, coercion

Communities change. The compoisition changes, with influx of new members and departure of the old, the circumstances surrounding it change, as well as the internal balances.

More to our interest, community rules change: by different means depending on the internal regulations of the community, and for a variety of reasons, but they can and do change. The impact that each individual can have in affecting a rule change depends on a number of factors, but most importantly on their ability to garner sufficient support within the community power structure, and on the cohesiveness of the community itself.

When I talk about the power structure within the community, it's important to keep in mind that it doesn't necessarily imply any form of coercion, since the power can just as easily come from a voluntary mandate from the rest of the community, a typical example being the so-called BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) in many free software or open source projects: they are a figures of authority simply because they are acknowledged as being the most important figure within the community (e.g. the founder of the project itself —without whom the community wouldn't even exist in the first place).

[BDFL]: Benevolent Dictator For Life

{

Effect of cohesion: more cohesive might make it harder to change the rules if going against the cohesion, but easier if manage to win the cohesive part over; lack of cohesion might make it easier to subvert the power structure, but also harder to convince people over, so which is better depends on the mechanism by which the community accepts rule changes

}

{

Changing the rules may be easy or not, but unless it's effectively impossible (without resorting to violence), it is still an option.

Changing the rules requires either sufficient power/prestige/whatever within the community, either individually, or by building enough consensus for the proposed change.

This affects your options; not satisfied with the community? You can: (1) (try to) change it (2) (try to) leave.

And yes, just because it's not easy doesn't mean it's not an option.

}

{ Taxes and the government: paying your dues and executive power }

{ Paying your dues. }

{ Executive powers. }

{ The government didn't put you where you are, it's just administering the community and the area the community has control of, as per its mandate. (aka if you want to blame someone, blame the community the government is an expression of)}

{ «The citizens can't really affect the government!» Exigology }