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Commodify
Your Comrade! by Bob Murphy
Now,
just to be clear, I don’t agree with this charge.
I think it is entirely possible to be a hard-nosed aficionado of
laissez-faire, and at the same time be an altruistic pushover.
After that disclaimer, however, I’ll spend the rest of this
essay arguing that the world would be so much better if only we did view
each other as “mere” commodities. As
a general rule, people take care of their property.
Certainly, some people take better care of their property than
others, and it’s probably even true that some people take better care
of others’ property than those others do themselves.
Nonetheless, for any given person, he almost always takes better
care of his stuff than he would of somebody else’s stuff,
or of stuff that no one owns. This
point is illustrated easiest by considering natural resources. Liberal activists are always whining about the plight of the
humpback whale or bald eagle. Supposedly
government needs to step in and protect these poor creatures from the
natural rapacity of man. (Notice
that for these people “nature” isn’t good when it refers to human
nature.) But
hold on a second. Why
don’t we need to put chickens, cows, or horses on the endangered
species list? After all,
don’t humans have an incentive to slaughter these animals into
extinction much more than the bald eagle? Yes,
they do. In fact, these
animals are so valuable in serving human ends that we have made them property.
As such, they are bought and sold on the open market, and have an
associated price. Therefore people will take great care with these animals, for
any creature lost to carelessness or whim represents a financial
(opportunity) cost—that animal could have been sold. At
first glance, my analogy may seem silly.
After all, chickens and cows are bred for the sole purpose of
human consumption. Surely
we don’t want people to treat each other like animals! That’s
entirely true; I certainly aspire for more in my personal relationships
than what a cow can provide. (I
leave the obvious sheep jokes to the immature reader’s imagination.)
However, as I argued above, the world right now is so fucked
up that it would be a huge improvement if we all did treat
each other as pieces of property. Let
us drop the romanticism for a moment and consider man as nothing but a
machine. Even so, he is
quite an impressive one at that. There
is no more versatile an instrument than a human worker.
All of the impressive capital equipment in the most advanced
factories is impotent without human oversight.
A group of people is—among other things—a storehouse of
potential output, just waiting to be tapped. This
insight shows the absolute stupidity of eugenics schemes. No matter how allegedly “inferior” a certain race is,
those people are certainly smarter and more useful than, say, horses.
Had Adolf Hitler proposed extermination of horses, in order to
raise the average intelligence of the organisms in Germany, his plan
would have immediately been seen as nonsense.
But when Hitler persecuted Jews and others, he removed some of
the most productive and talented individuals in Europe (through death or
emigration). Thus the Nazis
sacrificed material goods for the sake of ideology, just as any bleeding
heart. Had the Nazis truly
been ruthless and calculating, they would never have taken, say, skilled
bankers and placed them in concentration camps. These
reflections remind me of a speaker who came to Hillsdale College one
time. (He managed to offend
even that crowd with his racist remarks, a rather impressive
feat.) He ranked various American ethnic groups according to IQ and
other measures of “worth,” and found that Asians were first,
followed by Caucasians, with blacks at the bottom.
In reference to the mushrooming numbers of the “inferior”
groups, the speaker declared, “It would be better for society if these
people had never been born.” But
that conclusion doesn’t follow at all, even if we concede the
speaker’s other claims. By
his own logic, it would be better for Asians if whites were
eliminated. And of course, taken to the extreme, it would be better for
me—quite possibly the smartest man alive—if all of you people
disappeared. (I assure you
this is not the case; I’d be bored out of my mind.) We
often overlook the actual material value of human beings because we have
been conditioned to view such considerations as crass. But unfortunately, when people aren’t allowed to value
others on the basis of self-interest, the result isn’t, as the
do-gooders intend, a world of selfless brotherhood.
On the contrary, when people aren’t reminded of how precious—in
a purely material sense—human life is, they tend to waste it, just as
surely as they mistreat bald eagles or polluted rivers (another unowned
resource). This
issue has consequences for the stateless society.
A typical objection to a private legal system based on
restitution rather than retribution, is that rich people could commit
crimes with impunity, since they could easily afford the “fines.” In
the first place, this objection overlooks the fact that right now rich
people (not to mention politicians) literally get away with murder,
through direct bribery or other unsavory mechanisms.
At least in market anarchy, the payment would be made in public. But
there is a more sophisticated response to the objection.
Let’s take the caricature to the extreme, just to prove a
point. Let us suppose that,
in a hypothetical anarchist society, the only punishment for murder is a
$1,000 fine. What would
happen in such a world? The
statist recoils in horror at the thought:
Why, Bill Gates could slaughter guests at a cocktail party to
reenact his favorite scenes from Clue! Well,
he could, but how many people would go to his next party?
Indeed, how many people would deal with him at all after
such horrific behavior? People
can still condemn the immoral, even in the absence of strict
“official” sanctions. But
even these arguments miss the truly intriguing angle.
If it’s legal for Bill Gates to kill, then it’s also legal
for others to kill Bill Gates.
After his homicidal conduct, outraged guests could take up a
collection. Once they hit
$1,000, they could afford his murder. Of
course, the analysis can’t stop there.
Rich people and other public figures would alter their wills to
reflect the new circumstances. In
the event of their murder, people could establish trust funds to finance
revenge upon their killers. Soon
enough, people would find that the “official” sanction of
$1,000—which is clearly below the level that would be set in an actual
private system—would be supplemented with other retaliatory costs.
It would be incredibly reckless for anyone, even the rich, to
engage in murder sprees. And
what about the pauper, who can’t afford bodyguards or setup trust
funds? Well, who wants to
kill such a person? Is it
really worth $1,000? Keep
in mind, we are assuming that every killer is fined, which is
different from the present system in which killers serve jail time only
in a fraction of the cases. For
a simple example, there would be virtually no robbery homicides.
It would defeat the purpose to mug someone and shoot him, if the
mugger knew he’d be out $1,000 for his crime. This
sort of “economist” talk will surely cause eyes to roll. Skeptics may point out that people commit crimes for all
sorts of reasons, and that pecuniary motives do not determine an
individual’s conduct. This
is true, but in the aggregate, it would certainly make a
difference if people knew they’d be fined (however lightly) for every
crime. After all, women
consider many factors when deciding to have a baby.
But surely the welfare state leads to far more births than would
otherwise have occurred. Of
course, the commodification of man would do the most good in the arena
of politics. If government
officials could only be made to feel even a fraction of the human cost
of their actions, their worst excesses would be curtailed.
Imagine if Harry Truman viewed Japanese civilians, not as his
enemy, but as pieces of property. In
that case, Hiroshima would never have happened; the residents could have
offered a perpetual stream of millions of dollars as ransom on their
continued existence. But
no, such a scheme would never have worked.
The tender hearted American voters would have vomited at the
thought of their fearless leader extorting protection money from
helpless women and children. Why,
that would be tantamount to slavery!
How crass! How
inhumane! So instead Truman nuked them all to smithereens. discuss this column in the forum
Bob
Murphy is a graduate student in New York City. He is a columnist
for LewRockwell.com
and The Mises Institute,
and has a personal website at bobmurphy.net.
He is also Senior Editor for anti-state.com. |
One
of the most popular smears of capitalism is that it involves a
“commodification” of human beings.
