But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Kinsella has had a love-hate relationship with left-libertarianism for some time now. And evidently one of the things about us that sticks in his craw — especially those of us at Center for a Stateless Society and Alliance of the Libertarian Left — is our predominant view of the rich as a parasitic class who derive most of their wealth from state intervention in the economy rather than productive activity. To counter this view of things, he cites a passage from a five-year-old US News article (Rick Newman, “How the Government is Swallowing the Economy,” Nov. 9, 2009):

Economist Gary Shilling has calculated that 58 percent of the population is dependent on the government for “major parts of their income,” including teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors. By 2018, Shilling estimates, an astounding 67 percent of Americans could be dependent on the government for their livelihood.

This means, Kinsella argues on his Facebook page, that the bottom 58% (or the extrapolated 67%) of the population are “parasites” who live off the wealth produced by some other segment of the population. Never mind that Shilling never actually specified the actual income levels of members of that 58% who get money from the government, so Kinsella has no reason for jumping to the conclusion that it’s the bottom 58% in income; we’ll just stipulate for the sake of argument that it really is the bottom 58%.

In the course of this diatribe Kinsella conflates, blurs or ignores so many distinctions that the result is a big hot mess. The original “53% vs. 47%” slogan, originally created by Erick Erickson of RedState.org in 2011 as a counter-meme to Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” and then inadvertently revived by Mitt Romney during his presidential campaign, conflated payment of taxes with economic productivity (I wrote about it here, here and here).

Kinsella, somewhat similarly, conflates the receipt of direct government spending as any portion of one’s income with being a net productive drain on society, and living entirely on the production of those who don’t receive direct monetary aid from the government. To emphasize the point, he telescopes the entire bottom 58% (or 67%) from Shilling’s statistics into a category of “lowlifes” living on “WIC cheese.” Further down in the comments below his original post he explicitly states that “[t]he dregs clearly do not produce [the wealth],” and that “the bottom 2/3 produce nothing.”

But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

…[D]on’t be fooled by the fact that some of us aren’t paying any income taxes. We pay lots of taxes — to rich takers who live off our largesse. The portion of your rent or mortgage that results from the enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use through artificial property rights is a tax to the landlord. The 95% of the price of drugs under patent, or Bill Gates’s software, is a tax you pay to the owners of “intellectual property” monopolies. So is the portion of the price you pay for manufactured goods, over and above actual materials and labor, that results from embedded rents on patents and enormous brand-name markups on (for example) Nike sneakers over and above the few bucks a pair the sweatshops contract to make them for. So is the estimated 20% oligopoly price markup for industries where a few corporations control half or more of output.

The great bulk of state-enabled parasitism takes the form, not of checks paid directly out of the US Treasury, but of nominally “private” transactions: paychecks to that 67% of timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees and electronics assemblers that amount to less than the value they produce, or checks from customer for inflated prices far above the actual cost of providing the goods and services they’re purchasing, that result from corporations, landlords, etc. being put into a privileged monopoly position by the state. Most of the taxes that most of us pay aren’t in the form of checks made out to the IRS. They’re made out to nominally private businesses that are actually branches of the state.

And as C4SS Fellow Erick Vasconcelos mentioned:

In Soviet Russia, over 95% of citizens depended on the government for most of their income. I suppose they were just a bunch of parasites exploiting the hardworking Randian heroes in the Politburo.

But what we’ve discussed so far isn’t the only example of sloppy thinking in Kinsella’s post. Take another look at the composition of that “bottom 67%” in Kinsella’s US News quote:  …”teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors…”

Let’s break that down. First of all, welfare recipients are the category that at first glance looks most like a prima facie case of parasitically living off government largesse funded by others. But as above, it’s conflating the payment of taxes to the nominal state and the receipt of nominally public funds with the real degree of exploitation or parasitism.  I have repeatedly argued, in column after column at C4SS, that most of the upper class’s extraction of wealth from society comes not from direct government transfer payments, but from corporations’ and landlords’ “private” gouging of the public in their roles of worker, consumer and tenant. The privileged classes transfer wealth upward from the producing classes to themselves, through “private” taxation in the form of state-enabled monopoly rents, with a front-end loader. When the resulting polarization of wealth becomes too economically and politically destabilizing, the state transfers a tiny fraction of it back downwards with a teaspoon to the most destitute of the exploited, to increase aggregate demand somewhat and keep outright homelessness and starvation from reaching sufficient levels to bring the system down.

Programs like welfare and food stamps — which by themselves are a small minority of total human services spending — amount to the capitalists using their state to clean up a problem they themselves created, acting through their state, in the first place. By Kinsella’s standard, it’s “parasitism” when government buys crutches for people, even though it worked in tandem with business to break their legs in the first place — and then adds insult to injury by subsidizing the crutch industry in the process.

Second, including Social Security — which may well constitute a majority of total government payments to the “67%” — is especially disingenuous, because Social Security is an entitlement funded entirely by payroll taxes on the recipients’ own wage income over their working lifetime.

What’s more, under the terms of Reagan’s Social Security “reform,” the revenue from the payroll tax increase was used over a period of about twenty years to offset the lost revenue from tax cuts for the rich. And nothing remained of the actual increased payroll tax payments but a stack of government bonds in the “trust fund.” That means that, over a twenty year period — in the name of “keeping Social Security solvent” — a major part of the tax burden was shifted directly from the super-rich to payroll taxes on working people.

Third, a good many of the categories in that list are taxpayer-funded positive externalities to big business.These are all examples of the phenomenon James O’Connor described in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, of big business remaining artificially profitable only because it can externalize a growing share of its operating costs and inputs on the taxpayer. The state is being driven to larger deficits and a growing debt precisely because it takes an ever-increasing amount of direct and indirect subsidies to keep corporate capitalism profitable.

The main function of teachers is to impart the skills and attitudes that will transform their budding human raw material into useful, compliant “human resources” for their employers. The first state public school systems were created in the mid-19th century when factories needed workers who would show up on time, obey orders, and line up to eat and piss at the sound of a bell. The public educationist literature from the turn of the 20th century is full of explicit statements that the public schoolsl exist to fit children into their niche in the social hierarchy. If you don’t believe it, look at the role of Bill and Melinda Gates and other billionaires in promoting charter schools, Core Curriculum and the like.

Soldiers? Whose interests do you think are served by the wars they fight in? Remember the old Vietnam-era joke about General Mills, General Electric and General Motors? Have you noticed that every country defeated by the US gets a new government that rubber-stamps the latest so-called “Free Trade Agreement,” starts taking orders from the World Bank and IMF, and auctions off its economy to global corporations? How much of US security policy is dedicated to maintaining US access to the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea oil basins, keeping the sea lanes open for oil tankers, and otherwise guaranteeing “clean, safe and abundant energy” to the American corporate economy?

And of course the government contractors building all those subsidized highways that make giant corporations with large market areas artificially profitable against smaller, more efficient producers serving local markets, or promote urban sprawl and real estate interests at the expense of poor people whose neighborhoods were destroyed by freeways.

Stephan Kinsella should be fully aware of what my positions, and those of other libertarian leftists, actually are. I suspect he is fully aware that we believe looting and exploitation by the rich takes the form of monopoly rents and other forms of nominally private exchange, and not direct government transfer of revenue from poor to rich. No doubt he disagrees with that. If so, he should argue against our actual position — not disingenuously pretend that some idiotic statistic about the “67%” is a response to what we actually believe.

Over at the “Bleeding Heart Libertarian,” Jacob T. Levy’s entry, “A worry about the basic income,” proposes that while the unconditionality of a basic income might be promising in theory, there are serious worries as to a basic income remaining universal for long. He quotes Don Boudreaux to begin,

That policy might well be better than what we currently have, but I fear that the chances are high that we would soon hear – not long after its implementation – cries such as “You are hypocritical to object to government policy X because government is the root source of your income. Because government guarantees each of us an annual income of at least $10,000, our prosperity and well-being and civil peace spring from this policy. As such none of us has any right, or strong grounds on which to stand, to engage in civil disobedience or even to oppose government regulation.

Boudreaux’s worry is apt. The history of modern government welfare stems from 19th century German chancellor Otto Van Bismarck, who stated that welfare was a way to bribe and distract the working class. Indeed, even the more benevolent advocates of the German welfare state admitted that the program was meant to be paternalistic, so that a state had control of a worker’s life. Those who became dependent on the state would be necessitated to obey its commands as Frederic Howe explained,

The state has its finger on the pulse of the worker from the cradle to the grave. His education, his health, and his working efficiency are matters of constant concern. He is carefully protected from accident by laws and regulation governing factories. He is trained in his hand and in his brain to be a good workman.

Not much has changed in the justification for the welfare state or how it is used. American intellectuals took the ideas of Bismarck and over the 20th century transformed America into a vast welfare state. Thaddeus Russell notes that one of the founding documents of today’s welfare state, “The Other America” is highly paternalistic. The author, Michael Harrington, claims that the poor are naturally dependent on their betters, the wealthy.

As will happen, the culture of the elites trickled down into the American subconscious. Today, Americans exist in a reactionary craze over those who, for a plethora of reasons, do not work. This can be unfortunately be seen quite well even among the working class, who rightfully believe they have been overworked and are resentful towards those who can successfully avoid such toil. Levy points out that even when conditions for welfare have no foreseeable economic benefits to anyone, Americans will still demand that discipline be implemented in such programs. Simply put, after working 8-16 hour days, you do not want to be informed that your neighbor sat at home and smoked weed. Why should they, who are not disciplined enough to work, get to enjoy themselves?

As much as some leftists claim that they want autonomy for the poor, people are naturally skeptical of those who they strictly associate with unemployment or shiftlessness. I will here posit a possible explanation for why: people are averse to being ripped off. As a result, a basic income or any other welfare program will inevitably lead to the disciplining nature of being treated as a ward of the State. Libertarians should stop entertaining new schemes for using the violent arm of the state to create social stability. Society is not stable and caging it will not sedate its members.

Leftists are right to point out that employment can be restraining of autonomy, of individual creative action. However, they often ignore that their own worldviews are rarely respecting of autonomy themselves. The Progressive Left rightly knew that control of the poor was necessary in order to maintain societal order. If the poor become too free, too distanced from the prevailing culture of work, discipline and promoting the “social good,” the Progressive path of our culture is in trouble. The point of all welfare schemes is not to allow the individual to flourish for himself, but for the collective to be carefully cultivated for the State’s interests.

We must begin focusing on the liberation of mutual aid if we truly want the end of careerism, of working for the purposes of others through our most vibrant and alive years. Local organizing by lodges and fraternities was the norm in America and England before the Bismarckian ideal of welfare became the enforced norm.

The problem for Wilentz is that when guys like these disclose that the government conducts comprehensive surveillance in ways that would have made O’Brien drool, it puts the entire progressive agenda in jeopardy. He writes,

To them, national security is not a branch of the government; it is the government, or it is tantamount to being the government: a sinister, power-mad authority.… It is impossible, therefore, to reform this clandestine Leviathan from the inside. And so the leakers are aiming at de-legitimating and, if possible, destroying something much larger than a set of NSA programs. They have unleashed a torrent of classified information with the clear intent of showing that the federal government has spun out of control, thereby destroying the public’s faith in their government’s capacity to spy aggressively on our enemies while also protecting the privacy of its citizens. They want to spin the meaning of the documents they have released to confirm their animating belief that the United States is an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions. [Emphasis added.]

At first glance, that seems odd. If individuals are willing to risk their lives and liberty to reveal that the government vacuums up vast quantities of information on everyone — without probable cause or even grounds for suspicion — why do their larger agendas matter? Shouldn’t progressives care about this even if they disagree with other things the leakers believe?

But it matters to Wilentz. Employing a dubious logic, he apparently reasons thusly: We have a government worthy of support because of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and protection from “our enemies.” Leaks which reveal that this government spies on us indiscriminately erode confidence in that government and, by implication, all those good things. Therefore, people with apparently libertarian motives who leak that information are to be reviled.

If you caught that bit of question-begging above, well done! Wilentz repeatedly assumes what is in dispute. For example, he fears that “the public’s faith in their government’s capacity to spy aggressively on our enemies while also protecting the privacy of its citizens” is being destroyed, yet he never gets around to showing that the government can do both things. He claims, without evidence, that the government is worthy of allegiance and is not “an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions.” But as Henry Farrell writes at Crooked Timber, “There’s plenty of evidence both of imperialism and hegemonic drunkenness.”

Wilentz commits another bit of question-begging. He says Snowden, Assange, and Greenwald share a “political impulse that might be described … as paranoid libertarianism.”

Oh my! The qualifier paranoid suggests that libertarians unreasonably believe that the government may not have the best interests of regular people at heart. Wilentz assumes — without argument — that we libertarians are wrong about that. But if we’re right, then paranoia is a baseless charge. So Professor Wilentz is obligated to show that we are wrong before he uses that defamatory qualifier.

He will have a tough time pulling off that feat, for throughout American history the government has destroyed as much freedom as it could get away with. As Chris Hedges sums up (in a mock Obama speech, “What Obama Really Meant Was …”),

Americans were steadily shorn of their most basic constitutional rights and their traditions of limited government. U.S. intelligence agencies were always anchored in a system of secrecy — with little effective oversight from either elected leaders or ordinary citizens.…

In the 1960s, the U.S. government spied on civil rights leaders, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and critics of the Vietnam War, just as today we are spying on Occupy activists, environmentalists, whistle-blowers and other dissidents. And partly in response to these revelations decades ago, especially regarding the FBI’s covert dirty tricks program known as COINTELPRO, laws were established in the 1970s to ensure that our intelligence capabilities could not be misused against our citizens. In the long, twilight struggle against communism, and now in the fight against terrorism, I am happy to report that we have eradicated all of these reforms and laws.

Wilentz seems to live in fear that the baby — the welfare/warfare state — will be thrown out with the bathwater — the admitted “abuses” by the NSA. (He does not regard the NSA as abusive per se.) “Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal,” Wilentz writes. “In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”

If only it were so.

Peter Frase at Jacobin makes an interesting point when he sees in Wilentz’s article “an attempt to conflate the ideal of the liberal state with the existing national security state, in an attempt to force defenders of the welfare state to also embrace the authoritarian warfare state.” He continues,

I think that when leftists set themselves up as defenders of government against libertarian hostility to the state, they unwittingly accept the Right’s framing of the debate in a way that’s neither an accurate representation of reality nor a good guide to political action.

The Right, in its libertarian formulation, loves to set itself up as the defender of individual liberty against state power. And thus contemporary capitalism — often referred to by that overused buzzword, “neoliberalism” — is often equated in casual left discourse with the withdrawal of the state.

But in the works that developed neoliberalism as a category of left political economy, this is not how things are understood at all. Neoliberalism is a state project through and through, and is better understood as a transformation of the state and a shift in its functions, rather than a quantitative reduction in its size.…

The growth of the surveillance state … clearly makes up a central part of the neoliberal turn, and is not something ancillary to it.

Aside from Frase’s placing libertarians on the Right, this is good stuff. (Likewise, Wilentz explicitly places FFF on the Right, demonstrating either his poor research skills or his sense of humor.) Both the establishment Left and the establishment Right offer flawed package deals: the former’s consists in the welfare/warfare state, while the latter’s consists in the warfare/“free”-enterprise state. (Enterprise is not really free because the political environment is deeply corporatist.) In practice, the two are hardly different except for their rhetorical emphases. The point is to hold various constituencies in line by having them believe they must accept the whole package.

Neoliberalism is corporate statism, not the freed market. As Frase says, “it’s a state project through and through.” But contrary to Frase, libertarians (unlike most conservatives) know better than to conflate “contemporary capitalism” with “the withdrawal of the state,” although at times many libertarians talk as if they don’t. Otherwise, Frase gets it right. The welfare state, warfare state, and corporate state are of a piece. The government interventions needed to assist well-connected economic interests and to carry out world hegemony create permanent structural economic problems and hardships for the most vulnerable in society. To buy off the victims and reduce the chance of civil strife, the power elite builds an intrusive welfare bureaucracy designed to toss crumbs to the trapped population. In other words, the welfare state is a mechanism of social control made necessary by the corporate-welfare/warfare state.

So in the end, despite his errors and calumnies, Wilentz is right in a way he doesn’t know. One cannot critique the surveillance state without critiquing the rest of the existing political apparatus.

.

But mainly there’s an endless supply of resentment against “welfare queens,” and friend-of-a-friend stories about the luxurious tastes of those using food stamps at the checkout line, whose cumulative effect is to reassure the middle class that their real enemies are to be found by looking down, and not up.

If your resentment is directed downward against the “underclass” and recipients of welfare-for-the-poor, it’s most definitely misdirected.

First, let’s look at the little picture, and consider the net effects of state policy on the actual recipients of welfare. Consider how state policies on behalf of land owners and real estate investors, like the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, drives up rents and closes off access to cheap living space. Consider how licensing schemes and “anti-jitney” laws, zoning laws against operating businesses out of one’s home or out of pushcarts, and regulations that impose needless capital outlays and entry barriers or overhead costs, close off opportunities for self-employment. And consider how zoning restrictions on mixed-use development and other government promotions of sprawl and the car culture increase the basic cost of subsistence. You think the money spent on welfare for the poor equals that drain on the resources of the underclass?

Next, look at the big picture. Consider the total rents extracted from society as a whole by the dominant economic classes: The inflation of land rent and mortgages by the above-mentioned absentee titles to unimproved land; the usurious interest rates resulting from legal tender laws and restraints on competition in the supply of credit; the enormous markups over actual production cost that result from copyrights, patents and trademarks; the oligopoly markup (once estimated by the Nader Group at around 20% of retail price in industries dominated by a handful of firms) in industries cartelized by government regulations and entry barriers …

Now consider, out of this vast ocean of rents extracted by state-connected parasites, the miniscule fraction that trickles back to the most destitute of the destitute, in the form of welfare and food stamps, in just barely large enough quantities to prevent homelessness and starvation from reaching high enough levels to destabilize the political system and threaten the ruling classes’ ability to extract rents from all of us. The state-allied landlords, capitalists and rentiers rob us all with a front-end loader, and then the state — THEIR state — uses a teaspoon to relieve those hardest hit.

Every time in history the state has provided a dole to the poorest of the poor — the distribution of free grain and oil to the proletariat of Rome, the Poor Laws in England, AFDC and TANF since the 1960s — it has occurred against a background of large-scale robbery of the poor by the rich. The Roman proletariat received a dole to prevent bloody revolt after the common lands of the Republic had been engrossed by the nobility and turned into slave-farms. The Poor Laws of England were passed after the landed classes enclosed much of the Open Fields for sheep pasture. The urban American blacks who received AFDC in the 1960s were southern sharecroppers, or their children, who had been tractored off their land (or land that should have been theirs, if they had received the land that was rightfully theirs after Emancipation) after WWII.

As Frances Fox Piven and Andrew Cloward argued in “Regulating the Poor,” the state — which is largely controlled by and mainly serves the interest of the propertied classes — only steps in to provide welfare to the poor when it’s necessary to prevent social destabilization. When it does so, it usually provides the bare minimum necessary. And in the process, it uses the power conferred by distributing the public assistance to enforce a maximum in social discipline on the recipients (as anyone who’s dealt with the humiliation of a human services office, or a visit from a case-worker, can testify).

So don’t resent the folks who get welfare and food stamps. Your real enemies — the ones the state really serves — are above, not below.

Tom Knapp’s proposed World’s Smallest Political Platform:

The Libertarian Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.

In addition to Wirkman’s objections, I have a sequencing objection. Figure the state as Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s novel, Misery. She wants to help the patient so much she’ll never willingly let him go. To a libertarian, much of what the state does looks like providing crutches or shackles. To an anarchist, I suppose everything the state does looks like that. Crutches are actually important for the injured. If you’re to completely heal, though, you have to give them up at the right time. And some badly injured people are never going to be able to do without them – e.g. my mother with her walker.

But the crazy nurse wants you to keep your crutches whether you need them or not, and she’ll chain you to the bed, if necessary, to keep you in her “care.” If she has to, she’ll cut off your foot, for your own good. Radley Balko specializes in investigating how this kind of “caregiving” perverts the legal system. Robert De Niro’s repairman in Brazil tries to get around shackles the state in that movie has put on free exchange.

So we want to remove most or all crutches and shed most or all shackles, depending on how, for lack of a better term, anarchistic we are. But which shackles and which crutches when? The “liberal” “libertarian” answer is: first take the crutches from those best able to bear their own weight, and remove the shackles from the weak before the strong. So: corporate welfare before Social Security before Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Drug prohibition before marginal income tax rates.

Most libertarians would agree that it’s a messed-up state that:

• Creates a massive crime problem in poor minority neighborhoods with a futile, vicious and every more far-reaching attempt to prevent commerce in popular, highly portable intoxicants that leaves absurd numbers of young men with felony records, making them marginally employable.
• Fails to provide adequate policing for such neighborhoods.
• Fails to provide effective education in such neighborhoods after installing itself as the educator of first resort.
• Uses regulatory power to sharply curtail entry into lines of business from hair-care to ride provision, further limiting the employment options of people in such neighborhoods.
• Has in the past actively fostered the oppression of said minority, up to and including spending state money and time in keeping its members in bondage.
• To make up for all of the above, provides a nominal amount of tax-financed welfare for the afflicted.

But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!”

People have diverse interests and priorities, and we don’t all have to work on my issue of the moment. But given finite political energy, we can for instance agitate to stop paying Big Sugar tax dollars to foul the Everglades with runoff or end the inheritance tax. We can pressure the government to curtail torture or Medicaid These are not close calls.

Libertarian institutions that walk this walk include Radley Balko (he’s an institution, as far as I’m concerned), the Institute for Justice and . . . well, help me out here.

Now, I’m pretty sure Tom Knapp wouldn’t disagree with me, and has said similar things himself. If I were to guess at a defense, it would be that, practically speaking, political temperaments differ. It’s better to have instinctive “right-wingers” agitating to curtail state power than to expand it. Even if they’re trying to remove shackles from the strong, that’s better than loading more on the weak. Better that “conservatives” oppose net neutrality than support war with Iran, as it were.

There may be something to that. The other big defense is that government action tends to crowd out private and communal action. On this theory, we may not be able to predict what will replace state schools or Medicare, but human ingenuity is vast and, like the song goes, “There’s no telling what we’ll do when we’re free.” This is an appealing, romantic vision. It even speaks to me. But I disagree that we can always be so sure that the short to medium-term results of ending a subsidy for the marginal will be benign. It seems to me that it might take us “millions of intricate moves” to live humanely without government, or with very little government, and kicking the props out from under the poor is more likely to be a late move than an early one.

NB: I realize that non-libertarians reject the simile of the State as crazy Annie Wilkes, and disagree that crutches-and-shackles fairly describes the whole of state action. Like Mortitia Addams, “I can respect that.”