Abe the Slave

Doesn’t the law of large-numbers have a wee bit to do with this?
Repeat the experiment, but with a 100 people? A 100,000? 100,000,000?
At what point are there enough Abel’s working that if *this* Abel decides to Relax, it doesn’t matter?
The ends of the spectrum are indeed valid points, i.e., if *All* Abels relax and don’t work, then all Harrys die. If *All* Abels are forced to work, then it is your conundrum.
But there is the entire spectrum in between, where the conundrum is – partially – solved, and the taxation system makes sense…

HOW ABOUT WE FINISH THE PARABLE?

If Able needs to wear a shirt to get into a store, that’s an exchange. Cause and effect. It is a cost of entry.

If Able needs to respect property rights to participate in the local market. That is a price of entry into the market. If Able needs to respect manners, ethics and morals, then that is a price of entry into the group that cooperates — even if their only cooperation is negative: to respect life and property by avoiding theft, fraud and violence. If able wants something that he canot produce, he must exchange something for it.

These are all voluntary exchanges.

If Able works harder than others, and they take from him, that’s involuntary taking. It’s a theft. If Able works harder than others and others exchange something with him for it, It’s not a theft. It’s voluntary exchange. If others are materially unproductive, and have nothing to trade with Able, then what else do they have?

They have status. Status signals increase Able’s opportunity to be even more productive by assisting him in concentrating human capital. With that human capital he can exercise his mind, his abilities and his knowledge further. He can eventually control 80% of the resources simply because he knows best how. And others have voluntarily given that control to him.

Status also improves his access to desirable mates. Desirable mates further increase his status. And with that status people who are not productive like Able, will attempt to imitate him. Since, that is the purpose of status in our evolutionary system: to inform others who to imitate.

Status is our natural compensation. Status has been our compensation since before we had money, and a division of knowledge and labor. Very likely before we had speech. Perhaps before we were sentient.

But wait. Now, what happens in the Parable of the island?

Instead, one of the other nine people specializes not in being productive, but in preaching. In preaching redistribution. His name is Cain. Cain makes the argument that it is a moral duty to support the less productive people. Cain offers Job and Lot jobs if they forcibly take from Able in order to fulfill the moral demands of the non productive that Cain has been preaching. Cain then redistributes half of what he takes from Able, and demonizes Able for his reticence.

Able is deprived of the status, the future productivity he could create with control of his assets, his influence on the others in making them more productive through imitation, and deprived of the mates he could enjoy. And his genetic legacy is even deprived of the better genes he might capture.

Not only is he deprived of these things, but Cain has now stolen that status. Job and Lot have stolen his productivity, and status. This has all been involuntarily transferred (stolen) from Able, in order to profit Cain, for the benefit largely of Job and Lot, and for some symbolic benefit of everyone else.

On the horizon are nine other islands. Eight of those islands succumb to the proces of involuntary transfers. One does not. On that one Island Erik is ten times as productive as all the others, and they herald Erik at the quarterly festivals. Erik organizes the other people on his island in exchange for the product of his efforts. Over time, the people on Erik’s island become increasingly more productive, and genetically more competitive. On the other islands, the opposite happens. Because it’s dysgenic.

Humans object to involuntary transfers and are highly agitated by them. If the taxes are used for purposes that the productive agree with, then this objection usually disappears. But status is the human currency and money and ‘objects’ are just means of obtaining it. Because in the end, we are just gene factories algorithmically searching by trial and error for better solutions than those we have today. And we cannot alter that behavior. We will simply create black markets.

This is the insight of the Propertarians. That human nature is little more than emotions attached to changes in property.

On another much bigger island, the Crusoe tribe develops respect for property, but then, afterward Kevin discovers a hoard of coal that can be used for cooking fires on his property. And simply sells buckets of it at high prices to everyone on the island. The Friday tribe wants it very badly and so the Crusoe tribe must defend it. Furthermore, the Crusoe tribe already pays the cost of respecting property by forgoing opportunities for theft fraud and violence. These are a high cost for any society to develop. So, since they pay to defend the territory, and pay for property rights, they see his high prices as an involuntary transfer. The locals object because the resource is part of the island, the product of Kevin’s labors. They are comfortable paying a high price for his labor, but not for the resource, in which by any and all accounts they are shareholders. He’s not actually adding anything of value. He’s just created a toll booth, and an expensive tool booth, in order to gain access to a precious resource. He’s no different from an extortionist.

This parable can be extended to answer all moral and ethical questions of politics. The reason for that explanatory power, is that human nature is propertarian in origin. We are property calculators, and our emotions reflect changes in the state of our perceived property. THe primary difference between individuals is just which property we categorize as shareholder, and what we see as individual. But emotions are descriptions in changes in state of individuals’ perceptions of property. We could not have evolved as sentient beings otherwise. It would be impossible.

The change in politics over the past century and a half, has been driven largely by the inclusion of women into the work force and the voting system. They have expanded government. They have done so by using the government not to resolve conflicts in priorities, and not to concentrate productive capital, but to redistribute from the productive to the non productive using the artificie of government. The classical liberal model of institutions was designed for farmers heading nuclear families: business owners who participated in the market. But very few people actually participate in the market as business owners today. Most sell effort or skill for wages, or join bureaucracies to seek rents rather than participate in the market and its risk. And the productive class who participates in that market cannot defend itself from the unproductive classes using the institutional model built for egalitarian farmers. So the society polarizes as the factions compete over futures that are diametrically opposed to one another: one which appropriates money without status compensation, and one wich desires status compensation, and control over norms, in exchange for money.

Mediterranean, Russian and Slavic men have abandoned their societies because of endemic corruption. i.e., because of Involuntary transfers. The black market won and the society is not impossible to fix. Status signals in southern italy, spain and greed are anti-social. In ireland they’re anti-productive Luddic signals. In the states, vast numbers of hispanic and african american males have developed alternative masculine signals outside of the market and outside of the nuclear family. These signals are spreading to other males who are disenfranchised. Males over 50 are dropping out of the work force (and not voting over 50 and under 34) out of hopelessness. The wealthy abandoned society in the sixties, and have been out of sight since then. We do not even know their names. Many people do not know that they even exist. Their status has been totally appropriated. And they are only members of society in sense that they reside here.

You can redistribute money, but not status. Status, not money is our motivator. Society is constructed of a web of signals. otherwise it’s just a mechanical process that we each exploit for our individual benefit.

If it is immoral to tax Abel, it must be moral to let Harry starve. If it is immoral to let Harry starve, it must be moral to tax Abel. Libertarians prefer the first, most people prefer the latter.

1) I agree with Arthur, compulsory work is not slavery. Slavery is not about being forced to take part into a group, but exactly the opposite. Being excluded from a group by force….
2) This assumption is very misleading about productivity and society in my opinion. I mean it’s really hard to imagine someone was born 10 times more productive than 90% of population, before any interactions with others. Our individual productivity is strongly impacted by our interactions and the way we use it (think of politicians). This means the question is highly endogenous: imagine that there is no society/cooperation without ‘tax’ on any island, and that without society Able productivity is not 10 but 1 (8 others are at 0,5) and Harry dies. Then in cooperation let’s give them the 10,1 and 0 productivity but Harry can be saved. Curt (productivity 1) would then advise Able not to cooperate, unless others make him King, God, or Kim Il Sung. Pb is God stopped working after one week. But Harry is far more productive as a King (he has the best First name and is is quite bad at work). What about the KIS option?
3) I thought in the Cain and Abel story, Cain was the industrious brother, founders of cities in the end, and Abel willing to abide by high moral standards more than ultra productive. May be you inverted names, may be it’s unrelated.
4) Curt, are you intentionnaly threatening in any way Karl’s property rights upon his blog on this one?
5) I am indeed a strawman

I wonder is Caplan is against laws that mandate that parents feed their children. After all, every single newborn is a “Hapless Harry” and their parents are the Able Abels. If a mother were to refuse to redistribute their bodily fluids (milk) in order to feed that hapless harry, we today would criminally punish her if that Hapless harry starved. Does Caplan believe that this is a law that enslaves parents? And what is his belief about abortion? Cause that newly fertilized egg is most certainly another “hapless harry”, a true parasite on the mother’s body, one that can cause actual harm and even possible death. Does he believe that a woman has the right not be be enslaved by this parasite?