Apparently this quotation from General Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord is well-known, but I just came across it for the first time (in one of the latest Ender books):
I divide officers into four classes – the clever, the lazy, the stupid, and the industrious. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite nerves to deal with all situations. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the high staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be removed immediately.
Turns out there’s dispute both as to the authenticity and as to the precise wording of the quotation. But it’s a great line in any case.
Maybe not a quote to bring up before your class. 😉
OT:
There’s an issue I hope you can help me with:
I believe in the classic Rothbardian strategy of supporting any move to reduce state action. However, some might say that libertarians should only support policies that reduce intrinsically illicit state actions (e.g. taxes, warfare, welfare), while state policies that serve to uphold property rights should be supported (e.g. catching and punishing thieves and murderers). I’m a little stuck on how to address this and wondered if you had any reading recommendations.
I’m much more of Bastiat guy than a Rothbardian. Bastiat addressed these topics in “The Law” and “Economic Sophisms.” Essentially, the welfare state starts at the top and cascades down. The plunder at the top perverts the law; it turns the law into an instrument of plunder. The consequence of that is that all the classes will then rationally seek to use the law for their own advantage. Addressing the “poor man’s plunder”as Bastiat called it) without first addressing the rich man’s plunder is a futile exercise. Bastiat even went as far as to lay out the argument for the poor man’s plunder, the right to relief, that he himself had no rejoinder for.
From “The Law”
Well, it’s complicated.
On the one hand, even the “legitimate” things the government does (by which I mean things that would be legitimate if they weren’t a) monopolised and b) tax-funded) are nearly always tightly interwoven with things inherently illegitimate. The cops and courts that are “catching and punishing thieves and murderers” are also catching and punishing drug users, sex workers, and other people who have not violated any libertarian rights. And even when the people caught are genuine rights-violators, the way they are treated tends to violate libertarian rights. (I think “punishment,” in the sense of any coercive treatment that goes beyond what’s required for restraint and restitution, violates libertarian rights. Thieves don’t belong in jail; they belong in the market, having a portion of their wages garnished to pay back their victims.) So it’s very difficult to uphold “legitimate” state actions without upholding illegitimate ones too.
On the other hand, there are certainly plenty of cases of particular state actions that do more good than harm. Not being a utilitarian, I don’t think a rights-violating course of action becomes legitimate merely because it does more good than harm. But when you’re surrounded by other agents who are all conflicting with each other in rights-violating ways, assessments of who’s doing more good or more harm can be relevant in deciding which actions it would or wouldn’t be okay to sabotage.
Many anarchists think it is never justifiable to call the cops. I agree that calling the cops is something that one shouldn’t do without careful consideration of both ethical and prudential issues, but I don’t agree that it’s always forbidden.
Consider the following case. A is trying to kill me. The only way I can prevent this is by calling the cops. I live in a jurisdiction where the punishment for attempted murder is death, and I think that’s wrong. I’m not against using deadly force to defend myself, but once the attacker is captured, killing him is no longer necessary and so no longer justified. I know that if I call the cops [assume, not too realistically, that the cops will actually arrive in time to save me, will successfully capture A without accidentally shooting me, and that the court will find A guilty], A will be unjustly killed. Am I thereby complicit in A’s unjust death if I call the cops? I don’t think so. When the state kills A after a court trial, the killing is not defensive and so is not just. But when I call the cops, I’m doing so while A is still attacking me, and so my action is defensive.
Thanks for the response. I can see that the issue of which policy to support as a citizen or activity cannot be separated from the issue of personal behavior and the ethics of our interaction with the state.
If I could sum up what I think your position is:
– A consistent libertarian anarchist can call the cops in self-defense.
– But a consistent libertarian anarchist cannot support measures to increase police power or spend more on the police, regardless of the ends at which the policy is aimed. Really no policy can be be supported except one that decreases police power and police presence. So the libertarian can’t support e.g. increasing number of cops on the beat, even if that is supposed to be necessary in reducing crime.
– A consistent libertarian also can’t call the cops against anyone not assaulting or directly threatening him. E.g. can’t call the cops to arrest drug users in a neighboring abandoned property or in a public space.
Am I on the right track?
That all sounds right. Though I would add that calling the cops even in self-defense is going to be legitimate only in certain restricted circumstances. If the likely result for the perp if I call the cops is worse than what I would be justified in inflicting in self-defense, then I shouldn’t call them. (Example: calling the cops to stop a shoplifter, in a jurisdiction where the penalty for shoplifting is death.).
OK great. Talking about this whole immigration control issue got me thinking that I really need a theory for approaching really existing states and state policies.
What are your thoughts on other aspects of dealing with the state? E.g. I know there’s a lot of debate in libertarian circles over the morality of accepting government money or voting. I know that you support (or at least don’t condemn) voting. Do you have ideas about the other areas?
The LP’s vice chairman Arvin Vohra has been in hot water recently for some of his radical comments on things like age of consent laws. But what I really wondered about was his attacks on anybody who accepted government money or sent their kids to government schools. Apart from being a very questionable political strategy to morally condemn the bulk of potential voters, it got me thinking again about these questions! Was he right to condemn those people?
If you insure against property crime, you almost certainly will have to file a police report before filing an insurance claim.
If you engage in an act of self-defense with a firearm that results in any nontrivial harm to the assailant, the cops eventually will be involved, whether you call them or not. You could rack up a misdemeanor or possibly a felony charge for failing to report that. Obviously, if the the self-defensive action turns out to be lethal with a dead body on the ground, you have little rational alternative to notifying the cops.
Most, if not all, states now have mandatory reporting laws for crimes against children that carry an automatic felony for failure to report.
Generally speaking, black market fraud is the one definitive area where no one calls the pigs, anarchist or not.
Vohra has made some facebook posts with the explicit intent, IMO, to rile up the republican-lite wing of the LP. If you go by the outrage of Patrick McKnight or Caryn Ann Harlos, the LP is harboring a “Hate America” NAMBLA proselytizer. If you go by sentiment of most radical libertarians, the LNC is infested with a “fragile caucus” intent on reaffirming the old standby, “with friends like these, who needs enemies.”
I’m not entirely sure how Bastiat helps us determine the right strategy here. Is he saying that we should not dismantle welfare for the poor before we dismantle it for the rich? I can see the attraction of that, but it runs into the same trouble as other conditional approaches to dismantling the state. This fear of the consequences of a partial retraction are what led me to accept state-controlled borders as a necessary temporary measure.
Bastiat is saying the fish rots from the head. I would add that the rotted head would simply divvy up the spoils of the captured poor man’s plunder(what are they going to do with it? Use it to pay down the deficit? lol). if you want the rotted head to control gutting the body, you are going to get some nasty motherfuckers wielding a uniform and a gun. The state, particularly the state’s security apparatus, grows bigger, not smaller.
Btw, the average border control salary ~ 90K, with full government benefits of pension and health care. Talk about government welfare!
That doesn’t really answer my question, though.
It should. A strategy of “dismantling” of the state from the bottom up will simply grow the state in the second worst possible way it can grow, The first is war.
That sounds too much like the arguments for controlled borders. E.g. we can’t remove limits as long as we have a welfare state and immigrants will increase welfare rolls. There might be truth to that but increased demands on welfare could also increase pressure to dismantle the welfare state. And it’s not clear how any rollback of the state can proceed painlessly.
I don’t object to focusing efforts on dismantling corporate welfare, by the way. But if the opportunity to reduce state appears in any form, we should take it. Politics constrain our options.