Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

NO: DOLLARS ARE NOT MORE INNOCENT THAN VOTES.

—“Dollars are not at all like votes. A vote may be a slight thing in a large electorate but is, nevertheless, a proactive, illiberal, gratuitous, coercive move against others but spending a dollar, by contrast, is not coercive at all; not even one iota.”– David McDonagh

Assuming however, that rule of law limits the externalities that can be produced by the spending of that dollar to those that are productive, and that the transaction involving that dollar is reciprocally productive, fully informed, warrantied, and voluntary.

Libertarians seem to have a problem with complete sentences despite the first principle of economic theory: the broken window’s demand for full accounting. Yet libertarians speak in incomplete sentences using not full accounting but rational justification. And they do so in order to rely upon suggestion: causing the audience to subjectively substitute that information that is not provided in the incomplete sentence. So this obvious conflict between the first principle of economics which requires full accounting, and the use of justificationary rationalism to circumvent it by means of incomplete sentences and suggestion is the reason for the failure of the program to produce intellectuals that produce meaningful results, rather than simply attracting justificationists: free riders.

It is not market activity that creates demand for authority and then state. But the externalities to the transaction that create demand for authority and the state.

Why? Because humans retaliate, even at high cost, against any imposition of any investment that they have made. So liberty is constructed by the suppression of any activity that causes retaliation.

Ergo, this is why the NAP is a fraud. Because it does not specify the scope of the prohibitions one may not aggress against without encouraging retaliation (demonstrated interest), and therefore generates rather than suppresses demand for the state. Hence why the only existential semi-libertarian polities have existed in border regions under the defense of states and empires, who tolerate free riding on the commons in exchange for holding territory in the state’s name at a discount – thereby preventing other states from doing the same without invoking retaliation.

One may not impose a cost upon that for which others have borne a cost. And that constitutes every form of capital that humans produce. And since some capital is strategic rather than productive, then that which demarcates competition between preferences is TRUTH content.

ERGO: votes are proxy for violence. Dollars are a proxy for expenditures of time, mind, effort, and resources – usually from the proceeds of trade that created a surplus because of a division of knowledge and labor.