Objectivism

[This was a forum post I made in response to a guy touting Objectivism.]

Objectivism, ugh. First off, the proposition that there are objective moral truths is by nature a supernatural claim. Since I don't believe in anything supernatural, Objectivism is right out.

Since I am a relativist (which I can easily defend as the only consistent moral position for a philosophy without supernatural elements), morality is the set of rules a society agrees upon. Now, this is not to say there can't be guidelines. It's a fairly simple rational argument to make that civil and political rights and equality are necessary for this process to function correctly (that is, each member of society must be free to partake in the making of the rules). So civil and political equality are what we may call "inalienable" rights. I think it is far from clear that there exist similar economic rights (for example, the right to own land or the right to the entirety of the fruits of one's labor).

Your attack on government, taxation, etc. are based on the naive subset of relativist moral structures in which the role of society is deemed irrelevant. Well, ok - it's generally naive, but can also be rooted in greed and selfishness. Basically, society doesn't exist to take away your freedoms - instead, exactly as you think of it, its purpose to ensure self-fulfillment.

It's a little like people who hear about the prisoner's dilemma and reciprocal altruism, and take this to mean (or as evidence of) that being vindictive and not helping others if they have not helped you is the best strategy. You aren't seeing the forest for the trees. A game like Snowdrift explains how cooperation and even always-generous strategies can be beneficial to one's situation.

Now, you'll probably argue "Well, it's ok as long as it's voluntary - you can't force people to pay taxes." This is again a problem of not seeing the forest for the trees. It is beneficial for the members of a society to agree to create a government that can force its citizens to do certain things. A good example of this is taxation. Governments are necessary. You have to build roads. To have roads, sometimes you need to take people's lands (Would you rather not have interstate highways? If you are against eminent domain, you are against having interstates.). To build roads, you need money. Once you have a road, you can conceivably use tolls to pay for maintenance, such that the only people who pay to maintain a road are the ones using it. However, to build it, you need money, and you have no way to know who will use and who won't. Therefore, it is in your interest that the government take money from everybody - sometimes you'll help pay for a road you won't use, sometimes somebody else will help pay for a road they won't use but you will - but if it wasn't forced, then people who would use the road could refuse to pay for it (the road would still get built if enough people needed it badly enough).

Government taxation of this kind is sort of a form of insurance. You are making sure that things get paid for by people who will benefit, at the expense of sometimes paying for things from which they won't benefit. Again, the short-sightedness and also greed/selfishness of people often obscures for them the benefits they will reap from certain things - allowing people with a broader view (e.g., politicians and bureaucrats - remember that we're talking ideally here, not as the system stands today) to evaluate these things and then tell us what to do (i.e., enact laws) is a way of both delegating decision-making and ensuring that the selfishness of others doesn't cause them to skip out on their obligations.

An example of the above is public transportation. Public transport is paid for partially by people who don't use it. But viewing it as "This is theft because I don't use the service" is naive. Public transport keeps a lot of people off the road, especially commuter transport. If the whole populace wasn't paying into it, the fares would rise, which would cause ridership to drop, which would put a lot more cars on the road, especially during rush hour. Congestion would skyrocket. Paying taxes for public transport when you don't use it is about paying to keep congestion low.

Another problem with Objectivism and related philosophies is that the idea that everyone is rational and can make informed decisions on all things is just false. Not only are most people not rational, but most people are uninformed. Read up on rational ignorance. As I touched on earlier, part of government is a contract between the people and their representatives for the representatives to spend their time gathering and considering that information that the people don't have time for. The stipulation is that once the representatives make their decision based on the information, the people are going to abide by that. Again, this ends up benefiting the people.

Now, on to collectivism in its proper forms (government, taxation, etc. alone are not collectivism). The above arguments are absolute, whereas the following paragraph is more a matter of the discretion of a society. Beyond the basic provisions of a society and government as hinted at above, there are many different options for a society to treat itself. From a libertarian viewpoint to full socialism, they aren't inherently wrong, but rather different approaches that each society must consider and choose between.

The welfare state is a form of further insurance, basically insuring that all people are supported in the most basic form such that they can achieve happiness. If you look at de-regulated laissez-faire capitalism, it tends toward a pseudo-feudalism where there are powerful economic entities to which most people are subservient. It's not a hard argument to make that the people at the bottom levels of these kinds of hierarchies are being oppressed, that economic circumstances prohibit them from pursuing and certainly from achieving self-fulfillment. Protecting people from such economic oppression and providing all citizens with a suitable basis for achieving self-fulfillment is the goal of the welfare state. In fact, it's actually striving to achieve what you claim is your goal by recognizing the practical implications of economic strategies (If you are born into abject poverty with no hope of getting out of it, then you have no hope of self-fulfillment. Objectivism doesn't ever correctly recognize these situations.).