02 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Tim Blair links to this bizarre piece of academic musing by some Australian university type called Christopher Shiel. Shiel is apparently 100% serious when he claims that actually the government is the source of all money and therefore we should give as much money as we can back to those nice chaps in the government:
They all do it of course. Drawing on the resurgence of folk libertarianism over recent decades, all parties now talk as if governments take money from individual taxpayers to spend, with conservatives more intent on emphasizing that they wish to give taxpayers back their money so they can decide for themselves how they wish to spend it. With the parties flinging it about, albeit the Howardians in an appreciably more drunken style than Latho's camp, it may help to remember that it's not really your money, at least as an individual. It's our money collectively, most of which has in fact been provided by governments, past as well as present. Indeed, if morality was the only policy consideration, most people should give a good deal of what they already have back to its rightful owner - the government on behalf of society as a whole.
He then goes on to quote extensively from the latest book by "distinguished Australian ex-pat philosopher, Peter Singer," called "The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W Bush". He states that Singer "takes us through the logic" of this statement in the extract.
Essentially the argument boils down to this: if it weren't for the government providing a legal system and civil society then we could not own any money because it would either be worthless or nicked by someone with a bigger gun. Obviously Shiel and Singer are philosophers who wouldn't dream of getting their neat hypotheses mucked up by actual examples or counter-examples drawn from history and so therefore don't understand the complete and utter falsity of their claim. The problem boils down to the fact that Messrs Shiel and Singer believe that it is impossible for civil society to exist without an overseeing "government" which is of course total codswallop.
One of the best places to look at for counter examples is the settlement of the USA. As settlers moved westward they frequently ended up ahead of the reach of government yet they still managed to claim land, buy and sell goods (and services), hire labour and so on. This is not the only example. Another would be modern day Somalia which is a land without any central government but where - despite this - commerce, trade and the exchange of money for labour continue unabated. I would be the first to admit that a single uniform regulatory framework administered by a single judiciary is apparently more efficient and thus allows for greater security of property for lower cost but that does not mean that the government owns the difference between what prosperity could be gained in an anarchy and one that pertains under a particular government.
From this we see two logical fallacies. The first is that property ownership and commerce requires a government. The second is that we owe the instrument of the improvement between two positions all of the gain of the difference between the two. If that were the case we'd have no incentive to use any improvement to do anything which would mean that we might as well all try and go back to a stone-age world because we would see no point in improving things.