Thoughts on Pragmatarianism with Xero

Here is a short Mises.org discussion between me and Xerographica about tax-choice or pragmatism. It was a doctrine I was largeky unfamiliar with. It insists that people must pay taxes to the state but that they may choose to what government programs those taxes are spent. It differs from anarcho-capitalism in that it still believes in the coercive authority of the state. We ended up getting into a discussion on the implications of "the invisible hand" and Xero tried to convince me that the person who truly understands human fallibility would be the one who continues to support the coercive authority of the state to exist. I took issue with this and here is the conversation to date:

James Rick said 22 hours ago:

I like the idea, and I would certainly promote tax-choice in politics but I’d like you to tell me exactly what the real difference between anarcho-capitalism and pragmatarianinsm is. Is it only a conflict of means towards the same ends?
By my thinking, the U.S. government would exist in an anarchist society much the way the Catholic church exists now. The Church used to have crazy powers over a lot of things but now has almost no coercive power outside of the Vatican and is an institution capable of promoting social good. Could not the same happen with the institutions of government. In “Alongside Night” the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre says that government institutions will likely become workers syndicates in an anarcho-capitalistic society (agorism vs. ancaps aside).
Is the difference between this and pragmatism simply that pragmatist institutions would still claim some sort of official claim as representatives of the people rather the worker’s syndicates? Because I believe such pretentions to authority, even if people have the right to opt out, can be dangerous.

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Xerographica said 20 hours, 25 minutes ago:

Here’s the main difference…
Anarcho-capitalist: the state is not necessary
Statist: the state is necessary
Pragmatarian: the state may or may not be necessary
Buddha, Socrates, Smith, Bastiat, Hayek all argued that our perspectives are extremely limited. For example, if you came to me with a business plan…I could give you my opinion on your business plan but I couldn’t truly say whether your business was or wasn’t necessary. The only way to figure out if your business is necessary is to start it and see if anybody purchases your product/service.
Pragmatarianism sounds like a ridiculously good idea to me. But if nobody “buys” it then well…the markets have spoken. Ideas can always be ahead of their time.
There wouldn’t be any pragmatist institutions though. There would only be institutions in the private sector and institutions in the public sector. Given how limited my perspective is…there’s no way that I…or anybody else…can truly know which institutions would be in which sector. That would be up to the market to decide.
What would happen in an anarcho-capitalist system if you felt that an institution was becoming dangerous? All you could do was encourage people to boycott it and start up your own institution to try and compete with the dangerous institution. It’s the same exact thing in a pragmatarian system. If you felt the Dept of Defense was dangerous then you could encourage people to boycott it and then start up your own organization that had none of the same flaws as the Dept of Defense.
Call your organization the Bleeding Heart Militia and use it to stop genocide in Africa and I’m sure some people would donate money to your organization.

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James Rick said 20 hours, 6 minutes ago:

Right, and I’m a big fan of all those guys and thats the number one arguement I have with statist friends: “How do you know all this when the market doesn’t?” It’s funny because most of them will agree with Socrates that “all that I know is that I know nothing” but they will still insist that they are right on social issues like gay marriage and deny others the right to choose.
I’m just not sure you could call a pragmatarian idea “The State”. Do I have the right to opt out of it entirely and make no contributions to any sector of it, whatsoever?
Also, if I think an organization is dangerous I would boycott it, but if I have to chose between government organizations and the choice to opt out entirely is removed, then it isn’t a true choice.
I don’t know if youre saying I would or not be able to opt out entirely, thats why I’m asking, but your site’s by-line “make all governmental donations tax dedecutable” sounds like you have to donate to something.
From what I gather though, pragmatarianism sounds like a great “middle-way” or “golden-mean”. I can see why you brought the Greeks and Buddha into this. Of course Bastiat and Smith are there because, well, we are still libertarians, right?

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James Rick said 20 hours, 2 minutes ago:

I read the discussion again and I’m not sure you gave a satifactory answer to the question, “why be taxed at all?”
Do we have to put some money in, or is it okay to do nothing? It isn’t truly voluntary if I have to put a certain amount of money into at least one of a certain selection of organizations. The power to choose between two master does not make a slave free.

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Xerographica said 19 hours, 8 minutes ago:

Why be taxed at all?
If I said that taxes should be optional then I would be saying that the proper scope of government does not include forcing people to pay taxes. But if I said that then I would just be an anarcho-capitalist.
As a pragmatarian I say that the proper scope of government should be determined by taxpayers. So if taxpayers do not feel that forcing people to pay taxes is within the proper scope of government then they would just boycott the IRS out of existence.
If you get a chance you should check out my post on libertarianism and the free-rider problem….and my post on anarcho-capitalism vs civilization.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 51 minutes ago:

Right, thats what I thought and why I’m definately an ancap. If some people donate enough to the IRS to keep it in buisness, those people are exercising coercive power over me and are essentially filling the role of “the secretive band of robbers” which Lysander Spooner talks of in “no treason”. They are the voting class which controls the non-voting class, except its not by ballot anymore.
That is if you believe the ballot actually did anything, but thats not relevant here. What is relevant is that you’re still giving power to a coercive, large-scale democracy.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 38 minutes ago:

I like pragmatarianism as a stepping stone, but I don’t support the right of some people to fund the IRS. They may fund the IRS voluntarily but the IRS will be securing funds from others involuntarily. Even if they choose where in government those funds go.
Quick thought on your anarcho-capitalism vs civilization: I think you’re taking a bit of what might be called an ethnocentrist view of civilization. Alliegence to a tribe or religion rather than nation is in no way inferior to what you call “civilization” which is just about the most subjective term on the market. I agree with David Graeber in that sometimes we make this “us and them” distinction between “civilized” and “non-civilized”. Why would allegience to extended kinship relations, tempered with self-ownership and propert rights, be an undesireable thing. Compared to nationalism, it rocks.
I actually think of myself as a human being first, a Rick (my family) second, Cathagnostic (agnostic who supports the Catholic church for social justice and social solidarity) third, and a whole bunch of things after that. I’d say “American” (which to me is someone who who was born on either of the American continents) is pretty low. Involuntary member of the tax farm known as America might be up there, but that title would be gone in an ancap society.

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Xerographica said 18 hours, 14 minutes ago:

It boils down to fallibilism. Having lived in a stateless society for a year my best guess is that a state is necessary. But I could be wrong. Are you willing to admit that there’s a chance that you might be wrong as well? If you’re not willing to admit that there’s a chance that you might be wrong…then how are you any different than a statist?
Again…here we see Hayek’s Conceit vs Humility and Buddha’s parable of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant. Rothbard said that if there was a button that would instantly and entirely abolish the state then he would push that button until his thumb blistered. But what if his theory was wrong? Do you think Hitler and Mao thought that their theories might be wrong?
Having studied International Development Studies at UCLA I can tell you for a fact that brilliant brilliant people have no idea why some countries develop and other countries do not. They have their theories…but time and time again their theories have been proved wrong. By saying that the state is not necessary you’re saying that you know better than all those brilliant brilliant minds.
Maybe you know something that none of us do. Maybe you can actually touch the entire elephant. Therefore, maybe you’re the only blind man that can actually “see”. But isn’t that what all the blind men think? Throughout history…the only people who could truly “see”….Buddha, Socrates, Smith, Bastiat, Hayek, etc…were the ones who fully understood just how little they could actually see.

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James Rick said 18 hours, 3 minutes ago:

You’re assigning some sort of confidence to me that I clearly don’t have. I don’t think my ideas are infallible, hell most of em can’t even be considered “my” ideas. But I don’t think democracy or a pragamtist idea of allowing people to essentially pick their poison is any less fallible. I admit my fallibility, in fact I’ll swear by it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take a stand on something I believe. After all, I could be wrong that murder is evil or genocide unacceptable, but that doesn’t mean I won’t stand against them with all I can.
In the same fashion I’ll stand against a coercion I think is wrong, though not to the extent that genocide is.
And the Rothbard, Hitler, Mao comparison is a little ridiculous. I get your point but try to use Hitler-relations sparingly.
Couldn’t we be wrong about “the invisible hand” anyway. Kevin Carson in “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisble Hand” how capitalism was largely a political change, resulting from the interests of the establishment, not a sponatneous market order. Sometimes libertarians do over-estimate our own liberal conceptions of the free-market and property rights or our ideas of “civilization”. Rothbard probably did. But couldn’t we be just a little wrong about how great the invisible hand really is. I mean Smith used the analogy like six times to mean six different things (I forget the exact number). Perhaps we shouldn’t base our entire moral philosophy on the idea that we are unworthy to have a moral philosophy?

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Xerographica said 17 hours, 12 minutes ago:

Saying that you’re an anarcho-capitalist is signalling that the state is unnecessary. If you’re not confident that the state is unnecessary then why call yourself an anarcho-capitalist?
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying that Rothbard was the same as Hitler and Mao. The difference is quite clear. Rothbard never had the opportunity to press the button while Hilter and Mao did have the opportunity. Maybe if Rothbard had had the opportunity then perhaps he would have thought twice about pressing the button.
You’re not quite catching my drift if you solely associate the invisible hand concept with Adam Smith. He just coined the term but the idea is really no different than Buddha talking about the blind men and the elephant. We all have different values and access to different information. Bastiat’s Seen vs Unseen covered the idea of different values and Hayek’s Conceit vs Humility covered the idea of different information.
So it’s all the same idea expressed in different ways from different angles. We all have extremely limited but unique perspectives… therefore.. .tolerance… cause there’s a really good chance that we might be wrong.
Now…personally I’m not smart enough to go down the path of being wrong about tolerance. I’m just smart enough to understand just how little we can truly know. That’s what makes me a pragmatarian.

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James Rick said 6 hours, 45 minutes ago:

I am fairly confident the State is unneccesary, and even if I wasn’t, it is possible to be a pessimistic anarcho-capitalist. See Kinsella:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kinsella/kinsella15.html
The difference between Hitler, Mao and Rothbard has absolutly nothing to do with the abilty to press the button. It has every thing to do with the application of violence. It’s about morals, not goals. Means, not ends.
I’d just like to bring up Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”.
I’d say we’re both pretty humble people who accept a basic idea of the invisible hand that certainly transends Adam Smith (The problem is that in modern thinking the phrase is almost exclusivly associated with Smith and markets. Mostly becasue niether Jesus or Buddha ever actually said anything about an invisible hand. The ideas are applicable and worthy of thought, but they are still an idea, as infallible as the rest. Bastiat is a different story, and “the seen and unseen” is important here, but either way the invisible hand is percieved by most as a sort of Gordon Gecko “Greed is Good” thing).
Popper theorised that tolerance cannot completely by accepted because to do so would be to tolerate intolerance and hence, tolerance dies. The difference between us right now is that you are willing to tolerate some coercion. You will allow the taxpayer to choose to whom he is enslaved but he is still a slave. Therefore, I would say, in your humility, you are tolerating intolerance.
You are essntially, asserting your right to say that all people MUST donate to the state. This does not sound very tolerant to me. I don’t think there is any arguement whatsoever in the idea that a form of minarchism (like Pragmatrainism) is “more tolerant” simply because it allows the state to exist. That would be saying it is more tolerant because it tolerates intolerance, hence, Popper’s paradox.
It isn’t about our infallibility to know whether or not the state is neccesary, it is about our infallibility to control our fellow man through force and his infallibility to control us through force. I accept that Man is too infallible to do so, I also accept that it is deontologically, not just consequentialistly, wrong. I will not tolerate slavery simply because I may be wrong about the neccesity of it. As Stephan Kinsella argues in the link above, “crime may never disapper, but that doesn’t mean I have to support it.” (Paraphrase). It also doesn’t mean I have to tolerate it, due to my own infallibility.

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James Rick said 5 hours, 58 minutes ago:

Just a quick relation with the blind men and the elephant: (Although I remembered it as being mostly about religious tolerance, I looked it up again and realised it could be applicable to political theory as well):
A pragmatist is essentially saying, that because I know not the whole elephant, I must contribute my effort to support alternate interpretations of it. They would force the man who believes it is a wall to contribute to the man who believes it is a pillar.
An anarcho-capitalist would be saying, You should support others’ views of things, but no one is going to force you to.
It is the application of force which shows the governmentalist to be doing wrong, not the fact that I believe his social theory to be flawed.

David Graeber and Western Expansion or Picked Last in Gym Class

Anthropologist David Graeber had this to say about the expansion of the "West" in his pamphlet "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology",



There has long been a related debate over what

particular advantage “the West,” as Western

Europe and its settler colonies have liked to call

themselves, had over the rest of the world that

allowed them to conquer so much of it in the four

hundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it a

more efficient economic system? A superior military

tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity,

or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?

Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did it

have to do with more individualistic family

arrangements? Some combination of all these

factors? To a large extent, Western historical sociology

has been dedicated to solving this problem. It

is a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptions

are that it is only quite recently that scholars have

come to even suggest that perhaps, Western

Europe didn’t really have any fundamental advantage

at all. That European technology, economic

and social arrangements, state organization, and the

rest in 1450 were in no way more “advanced” than

what prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, or

most any other urbanized part of the Old World at

the time. Europe might have been ahead in some

areas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certain

forms of banking), but lagged significantly behind

in others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agricultural

technology, techniques of land warfare). Perhaps

there was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps what

happened was just a coincidence. Western Europe

happened to be located in that part of the Old

World where it was easiest to sail to the New; those

who first did so had the incredible luck to discover

lands full of enormous wealth, populated by

defenseless stone-age peoples who conveniently

began dying almost the moment they arrived; the

resultant windfall, and the demographic advantage

from having lands to siphon off excess population

was more than enough to account for the European

powers’ later successes. It was then possible to shut

down the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industry

and create the space for an industrial revolution,

and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such an

extent that in technological terms—particularly

industrial and military technology—it fell increasingly

behind.

A number of authors (Blaut, Goody,

Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been making

some variation of this argument in recent years. It

is at root a moral argument, an attack on Western

arrogance. As such it is extremely important. The

only problem with it, in moral terms, is that it

tends to confuse means and inclination. That is, it

rests on the assumption that Western historians

were right to assume that whatever it was that

made it possible for Europeans to dispossess,

abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of other

human beings, it was a mark of superiority and that

therefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting to

non-Europeans to suggest they didn’t have it too. It

seems to me that it is far more insulting to suggest

anyone would ever have behaved like Europeans of

the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.g.,

depopulating large portions of the Andes or central

Mexico by working millions to death in the mines,

or kidnapping a significant chunk of the population

of Africa to work to death on sugar plantations—

unless one has some actual evidence to suggest they

were so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear to

have been plenty of examples of people in a position

to wreak similar havoc on a world scale—say,

the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—but

who didn’t, not so much because they scrupled to,

so much as because it would never have occurred to

them to act this way to begin with.

In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on how

one chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the

authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yet

another accomplishment which Westerners arrogantly

assume they invented themselves, and therefore

define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matter

of commerce and financial instruments. But that

willingness to put considerations of profit above

any human concern which drove Europeans to

depopulate whole regions of the world in order to

place the maximum amount of silver or sugar on

the market was certainly something else. It seems

to me it deserves a name of its own. For this reason

it seems better to me to continue to define capitalism

as its opponents prefer, as founded on the

connection between a wage system and a principle

of the never-ending pursuit of profit for its own

sake. This in turn makes it possible to argue this

was a strange perversion of normal commercial

logic which happened to take hold in one, previously

rather barbarous, corner of the world and

encouraged the inhabitants to engage in what

might otherwise have been considered unspeakable

forms of behavior. Again, all this does not necessarily

mean that one has to agree with the premise

that once capitalism came into existence, it

instantly became a totalizing system and that from

that moment, everything else that happened can

only be understood in relation to it. But it suggests

one of the axes on which one can begin to think

about what really is different nowadays.

Graeber blames the expansion of the West not on its military might or technological prowess but simply on its bloodlust which he claims was fuelled by capitalism, which to Graeber is no different than pure, unadulterated greed.

First, though I agree with Graeber on many things, I have to take issue with the definition of capitalism he chooses to use. One cannot define capitalism as simply a social structure that values the acquisition of material wealth more than you can define socialism simply as a social structure that values fried chicken. In any economic system, people value different things and certainly there are people in capitalist societies that value wealth above all else but I don't think I would be wrong to say that those people are in the minority. Graeber rightly identifies that capitalism is not determined as a matter of law or technology but is wrong in asserting it is the social acceptance of greed. Rather, I maintain, that it is defined by the social acceptance of capital and free-trade (I use the term loosely) and the ability of individuals to use their own subjective judgement in determining what is of value to them. Early forms of Western capitalism were, of course, more structural and take on a structural, rather than cultural, definition. When speaking of history, it makes the most sense simply to define capitalism as private property and trade which don't of themselves imply freedom.

Second, I think he is wrong to place the rise of the West as a world power solely on our adaptation of "capitalism", variations of which have existed as long as trade has throughout the world. The rise of the "West" (if you can call the horrific effects it had on the rest of the world a "rise") was caused by more than a multitude of factors, cultural and structural. To take the emotionally anti-west view that we were simply less moral than other powers at the time ignores the fact that China, India and the Islamic world were, at the time, looking inward, so to speak. China, which was isolationist to the point of xenophobia for most of its existence, had just ended its brief experiment in expansion with the close of the exploratory voyages under the Admiral Zheng-He and India, which had never really been expansionist in the first place, was still splintered from the fall of the Gupta Empire. The Islamic world was experiencing the opposite of an Enlightenment as people turned to Sufi mystics and Islamic piety rather than the natural sciences. In essence the West simply caught the rest of the world asleep at a time when truly devastating expansion was the most possible.

I think of the West as something of the kid who gets picked last on the soccer field when it comes to the realm of world trade. Western powers had taken a very long time to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the Classical period which left Europeans pretty much the least powerful and least wealthy continent out of Europe, Africa, and Asia throughout the Post-Classical period. Europeans had wanted to engage in the luxury goods trade but had little to offer the rest of the world except depleting supplies of gold. With the beginning of exploration and the dawn of the truly global marketplace--America and Oceania were in contact with the rest of the world for the first time-- Europeans began to see the riches around the world for the taking but with little economic power, political power would have to do. After colonisation, economic power followed political power and the West emerged as the world's hegemony. I think of this as the kid on the soccer field who has little to offer the rest of the players feeling so left out and wanting to play on the field so bad that one day, while all the other players are relaxing in the shade, he brings a gun to the fields and shoots them all, claiming the field as his own. A grotesque metaphor perhaps, but one that I think strikes closer to the heart of the matter (and the heart of darkness) than  simply blaming the White man's greed.