Sure, many churches have tithes. But I think most people would not call tithes taxes, or taxes tithes. |
Use of language can be subjective, and the word "tax" means different things in different societies / contexts, as it does in Islam or the Baha'i religion that I've referenced. Besides, we're still talking about the Minarchist context, at least for the near future, so we are in fact talking about something imposed by the government. If/when we find ourselves in an Anarcho-Capitalist utopia where people maintain stable fertility rates without coercion, then we can call it something else.
Of course, Bush, Obama and Brown also argued that bank bailout keep the economy from collapse. This would mean, then, if they were correct, that the bailouts, in your view, are justified. |
When someone claims to have a moral imperative for justified use of force, the burden of proof is on them. If you kill someone in self-defense, you still have to prove that the perp represented clear and present danger (being on your property in the middle of the night and refusing to cooperate is probably proof enough). Etc. I believe those government bailouts do a lot more harm than good, and proving that would be beyond the scope of this thread. The necessity of reproduction is much more straightforward.
It is also essential to keep in mind that defense of a dysfunctional and immoral system is not a moral imperative! Even if those bailouts were a net benefit, which they aren't, they nonetheless are a side-effect of government's past interventionism in the market place. The government interfered with natural market signals by manipulating interest rates, the currency supply, redistributing wealth, providing financial institutions with a safety net, forcing them to provide bad loans (i.e. "ownership society"), monopolizing mechanisms of disclosure and oversight, and so on. That system is not worth saving, because its collapse would eventually lead to a better one. The need for human reproduction, on the other hand, is a consequence of nature - that is the
path that evolution has taken billions of years ago, and we all exist as a consequence of that fact. One can't choose to live, claim natural rights, and at the same time believe that the natural system that created him is immoral or does not constitute an imperative value!
Furthermore, there's the severity factor - the "economic collapse" the defenders of those bailouts claim they prevent would have been small and brief compared to the consequences of the demographic collapse we're heading toward. Their worst (some would say insane) fear-mongering sees the world economy decelerating its growth from 5% to 3% for a decade. Compare that to what would happen if the global fertility rates would stabilize at 1.5 children per woman (i.e. same as Canada today) - we're talking about the population shrinking from 6.5 to 4.4 billion in one generation, 3.0 billion in the next, 2.1 billion in the next, 1.4 billion in the next - indefinitely. The effect of having so many old people and so few young people becomes a big problem. The dysgenic effect of poorest people having the bulk of those children that are born is probably even more significant.
If birth rates are not falling below sub-replacement levels, if the economic consequences of that are not as bad as I describe, or if there is a way to fix this problem without use of force, then my justification for use of government force in this case is wrong.
Other things you say are interesting, but I still don't see an explaination as to why what you are proposing is not adding a new power to the government rather than being a scheme for the gradual abolition of government. Until you do that, you can frame this as being part of a policy of gradualism. |
Like I've said, it would help replace many existing government programs that perform a similar role more altruistically / less efficiently: welfare for people with children, health care benefits for children, public schools, and so on. An effort to take those programs away would otherwise be shattered with the argument that: "Sure, people should pull their own economic weight and all that, but what about idiots who have too many kids? And if having children becomes more expensive, fewer people will have them, and then the Muslims will just move in and take over."
Furthermore, this government program would preempt the efforts of the "Christian right" to use the government to legislate their morality: a prohibition on abortion, suppression of "gay rights", and so on. Natalism is at the core of what they are pushing, but they are doing it through irrational, immoral, and ineffective means. Their subconscious mind is telling them: "I do a lot of hard work by having and raising children, others should suffer the same plight as well". By commoditizing this responsibility, abortions and gays no longer matter as much. Sure, some intolerant religious bullshit will persist, but fewer reasonable people will be willing to side with them.
There are no down-sides to people choosing not to have children themselves and paying others to have larger families, and many up-sides. People will specialize either on their careers or on their children instead of trying (and most often failing) to juggle both. A large family getting an income for every child after the second one means one of the parents can stay home, which has certain developmental benefits for children and also facilitates use of homeschooling. More people will have grown up with siblings, which statistically tends to increase one's social skills, sense of responsibility, and so on. Many gay and otherwise childless individuals come to feel (or are made to feel) guilty that they did not have children - now they would have an institutionalized framework through which they can constructively rid themselves of that guilt while helping others. Since families will compete for the best childbirth grants from the best charities, it means more children will be born to better parents and fewer to worse parents, putting natural selection back on its track. And since people born into large happy families are more likely to start large happy families themselves when they grow up, there is a good chance this program can be phased out after a couple of generations because it would perpetuate itself naturally!
Why? I would say I certainly wouldn't, because I would run the risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy. |
I am arguing that an "appeal to nature" is an appeal to reality, and does not constitute a fallacy of relevance (
Wikipedia has a socialist bias on this). It should be distinguished from fallacies like
chronological snobbery,
appeal to tradition,
primitivism, and so on. Evolution is a part of nature, and so are the human beings and the things they do and create for their benefit.
I never said that the human race should abandon its attempts to solve the problem of falling birthrates through other means: robotics, human cloning, life extension, mind-to-computer uploading, etc, etc, etc. But we cannot count on those alternatives to save us in time, and as the economy begins to decline due to the demographic crisis so will our ability to pull ourselves out of it. In the meantime, the old-fashioned biological reproduction is still a moral imperative.
I would, instead, take a different tact, arguing that libertarian rights are mutually advantageous, or that they capture important intuitions that people hold. |
How do you validate the value of "intuition"? How do you decide whether something is "advantageous" or not?
The question of the origin of natural rights is very important. Just to accept an answer that sounds good to you, or to the majority of your audience, is to gamble on your irrational whim, subjecting all your subsequent judgments to an erroneous foundation that cannot be tested objectively. This is what religions have done for thousands of years, but we are challenged to try to do better.
To pursue an effective answer to those questions would require analysis of the broader context in which rational thought can take place: how do you know if something is true or false? The most objectively effective method of reasoning ever discovered by man is empirical science, which puts a hypothesis through experiments and thorough testing, but how do you test the proposition that human beings ought to recognize specific rights in other human beings? How do you tell if the hypothesis you have is valid? The answer to that is
competitive advantage: the best hypothesis is the one that will produce measurable results that are more desirable than any other hypothesis you (or anyone else) can think of and test.
Everything is relative. Whether something is "mutually advantageous" or "captures important intuitions that people hold" are just two out of countless different aspects of whether a particular social theory represents a competitive advantage over others. The importance of those attributes compared to other attributes is speculative until a system is tested as a whole. Whoever invented the popular religions came up with brilliant and useful systems, but their contradictions and falsehoods make them incompatible with modern scientific thought. Communists claimed that their theories made sense on paper, and certain aspects of their theories certainly are well thought-out (i.e. how to make central planning work) and very popular (i.e. equality, altruism, etc). And yet when it was implemented in practice and compared to other countries that were more capitalist - Communism was a clear failure every time. It's the end result that matters!
Our capacity for experiment is very limited obviously, we can't put a significantly-identical societies in different petri dishes, have each base its dominant social philosophy on a particular hypothesis, and then numerically measure the results through a microscope. (And those tests would need to be done millions of times to take random variation into account.) Thus nothing in social philosophy is bulletproof, but we must nonetheless base our arguments on the basis of competitive advantage as empirically as possible. We can take examples from history, conduct small-scale experiments, apply deductive / induction / abductive reasoning, and so on. Which is what we are doing here.
And thus I am asking you to contemplate two identical societies that take on two different social philosophies. The first, the one you seem to advocate, would be based on blind faith in "individual self-ownership". The second, the one I advocate, would base its moral philosophy on doing whatever it takes to achieve objective success, in other words evolution. The first society will pay any price, bare any burden to keep its ideology pure - no surrender, no retreat, no compromises, no exceptions. The second society too will discover "individual self-ownership", and if that's what works then that's the system it will use - for as long as it makes the most sense. The second society recognizes the need for moral imperatives to compromise with its mundane principles, the first one does not. Then both societies face a challenge: threat of economic decline due to falling fertility rates. You can see where this is going.
The philosophy that values success itself and keeps an open mind will succeed, while any specific dogma, no matter how brilliant, will eventually become a liability. No, this is not circular logic, this is self-validation. The most successful social philosophy is the one that most effectively applies rational thought to adapt its goals to the most valid evaluation criteria - the principles of evolution applied to social philosophy!
This is an error already, since not all moral obligations correlate need to rights, so even if it is true that the needs of evolution (which is not a good, per se) generate obligations, it doesn't follow that it generates rights. |
No, evolution is indeed the highest value that trumps all others (see above), and that expresses itself in perpetual metabolic, demographic, and eventually economic growth. In absence of God, what other means of objective value judgments can there be?
Everything here made sense, except this "do not interfere with your biological imperative to reproduce." If I were to interfere in all the other things you mention, like the means by which people protect their property, I would violate their rights. But interfering in my own biological imperative to reproduce seems to be violating my own rights. But that makes no sense! |
All rights exist on the basis of net benefit to civilization (see above). They (especially negative rights) apply to a specific individual, but their benefit and purpose don't stop there.
The moral imperative to catch and prosecute a killer, which would trump your right not to testify at his trial, doesn't come for the benefit of the person who died (who no longer has rights and might have no friends or family to press his interests) nor for your own safety (you individually might be so able to defend yourself that killer is not a threat), but because murder is harmful to the economy. If one murderer can get away with it, it will encourage others. As the murder rate goes up, so does the cost of protection, eventually making civilized society downright impossible.
The positive right to free exit makes travel less dangerous for everyone, bringing down the cost of a pizza you order delivered because the driver's salary would be negotiated in knowing he isn't likely to get shot if he parks next to the wrong house. And, once again, the example of secretly burying nuclear waste: harm is created without specific victims being known, they might not be born for another 10,000 years!
And if you base a moral system on reciprocity alone, then people who are willing to refuse certain rights are free to violate that right in others. (And if you don't have the right to consent to a violation of your right then it's not really a right, now is it?) A person who decided to swear off property ownership and give all his stuff away for ideological reasons, a person who is signing himself over into indentured servitude, or a person who is about to kill himself still have an obligation to respect the rights to property, liberty, and life in others.