Recently, I have had several converstaions with individuals of various political and philosphical backgrounds, the vast majority who happen to be statists. Many come from philosophies where they honestly believe government is a necessary evil; government has good intentions, they just happen to get messed up sometimes. These individuals maintain that without any kind of government, society would collapse and devolve into a Hobbesian dystopia where there is no monopolized coercion to prevent people from devouring each other.
Deriving from a natural rights philosophy and relying strongly on the non-aggression axiom, I have found that the conversation usually ends in “let’s agree to disagree,” and we go our separate, frustrated ways.
Despite this frustration, I find that it is usually easy to agree that voluntary action is preferable to coercive action whenever possible; however, statists, even minarchists, tend to refuse to admit that a society without legitimized coercion would be preferable or doable. This also leads to another dead-end in discussions with statists claiming that keeping government-funded (thus, coercively funded) programs over allowing a market to take over.
Depite any philosphical flaws a voluntaryist or market anarchist may find in this argument, one question tends to stop statists in their tracks:
If government programs are so preferable to private programs, then what is the harm with making them voluntary? Won’t people just opt to stay with the government programs?
One of two answers is usually given when this question is posed:
Nobody would pay to keep the government programs.
Rebuttal: So what? You’ve proved my point. If people don’t want a program, why should it exist?
Or:
People do not know what is best for them! (Which is just another form of the aforementioned response).
Rebuttal: And a central planner does? As Friedrich Hayek noted in The Use of Knowledge in Society, central planners do not have the information available in order to make all, or almost any decision in an economy.
Hayek noted:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated formbut solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (Emphases added)
I have dubbed the above question upon which this post revolves around “the statist’s dilemma,” because the affirmation of the question rejects statism while the negation of the question invokes Hayek’s knowledge problem and does not answer the problem of whether or not government programs would survive if they were made solely voluntary.
