3. Direct Effects of Intervention on Utility
In tracing the effects of intervention, we must explore both the direct and the indirect consequences.
In the first place, intervention will have direct immediate consequences on the utilities of those participating.
On the one hand, when the society is free and there is no intervention,
In short, everyone's utility ex ante will be maximized, provided we take care not to
interpret utility in a cardinal manner.
Any exchange on the free market, indeed, any action in the free society, occurs because
it is expected to benefit each party concerned.
If we may use the term society to depict the pattern, the array, of all individual exchanges,
then we may say that the free market maximizes social utility, since everyone gains in utility
Coercive Intervention, on the other hand, signifies per se that the individual or individuals coerced would not have voluntarily done what they are now being forced to do by the intervener.
The person who is forced into saying or not saying something, or into making or not making
an exchange with the intervener or with a third party, is having his actions changed
by a threat of violence.
The man being coerced, therefore, always loses in utility as a result of the intervention,
for his action has been forcibly changed by its impact.
In autistic and binary interventions, the individual subjects each lose in utility.
In triangular interventions, at least one and sometimes both of the pair of would-be
exchangers lose in utility.
Who gains in utility ex ante?
Clearly, the intervener, otherwise he would not have made the intervention.
In the case of binary intervention, he himself gains directly in exchangeable goods or services
at the expense of his subject.
Perhaps we may note here the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the
free market and binary intervention as the economic as against the political means to
the satisfaction of one's wants.
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled
to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires.
These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor
of others.
I propose to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for
for the Labor of Others, the Economic Means for the Satisfaction of Needs, while the unrequited
appropriation of the Labor of Others will be called the Political Means.
The State is an Organization of the Political Means.
In the case of autistic and triangular interventions, the intervener gains in a sense of psychic
In contrast to the free market, therefore, all cases of intervention supply one set of
men with gains at the expense of another set.
In binary interventions, the direct gains and losses are tangible in the form of exchangeable
goods or services.
In other cases, the direct gains are non-exchangeable satisfactions to the intervenors, and the
direct loss is being coerced into less satisfying, if not positively painful, forms of activity.
For the development of economic science, people tended to think of exchange and the market
as always benefiting one party at the expense of the other.
This was the root of the mercantilist view of the market, of what Ludwig von Mises calls
the montane fallacy.
Economics has shown this to be a fallacy, for on the market, both parties to an exchange
will benefit.
One of the roots of this fallacy is the idea that in an exchange, the two things exchanged
are or should be equal in value, and that inequality of value demonstrates exploitation.
We have seen on the contrary that any exchange involves inequality of the values of each
On the market, therefore, there can be no such thing as exploitation.
But the thesis of an inherent conflict of interest is true whenever the state or anyone
else wielding force intervenes on the market.
For then, the intervener gains at the expense of the subjects who lose in utility.
On the market, all is harmony, but as soon as intervention appears on the scene, conflict
is created, for each person or group may participate in a scramble to be a net gainer rather than
a net loser, to be part of the intervening team, as it were, rather than one of the victims,
and the very institution of taxation ensures that some will be in the net gaining and others
in the net losing class.
It has become fashionable to assert that John C. Calhoun anticipated the Marxian doctrine
of class exploitation, but actually Calhoun's classes were castes, creatures of state intervention
itself.
In particular, Calhoun saw that the binary intervention of taxation must always be spent
so that some people in the community become net payers of tax funds and the others net
recipients.
Calhoun defined the latter as the ruling class and the former as the ruled.
Thus, few comparatively as they are, the agents and employees of the government constitute
that portion of the community who are the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the
taxes.
But as the recipients constitute only a portion of the community, it follows that the action
of the fiscal process must be unequal between the payers of the taxes and the recipients
It is then manifest that taxes must be, in effect, bounties to that portion of the community
which receives more in disbursements than it pays in taxes, while to the other, which
pays in taxes more than it receives in disbursements, they are taxes in reality, burdens instead
of bounties.
This consequence is unavoidable.
results from the nature of the process, be the taxes ever so equally laid.
The necessary result then of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the
community into two great classes, one consisting of those who in reality pay the taxes and
of course bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government, and the other of those who
who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements and who are, in fact, supported
by the government, or the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in
reference to the fiscal action of the government, for the greater the taxes and disbursements,
the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the other, and vice versa.
Since all state actions rest on the fundamental binary intervention of taxation, it follows
that no state action can increase social utility, that is, can increase the utility of all affected
individuals.
A common objection to the conclusion that the free market, in unique contrast to intervention,
Which faces the utility of every individual in society points to the fate of the entrepreneur whose product suddenly becomes obsolete.
Take for example the buggy manufacturer who faces a shift in public demand from buggies to automobiles.
Does he not lose utility from the operation of the free market?
We must realize, however, that we are concerned only with the utilities that are demonstrated by the manufacturer's action.
In both period one, when consumers demanded buggies, and in period two, when they shifted to autos, he acts so as to maximize his utility on the free market.
The fact that, in retrospect, he prefers the results of period one may be interesting data for the historian, but is irrelevant for the economic theorist.
For the manufacturer is not living in period one anymore. He lives always under present conditions and in relation to the present value scales of his fellow men.
for Men, Voluntary Exchanges in any given period will increase the utility of everyone,
and will therefore maximize social utility.
The buggy manufacturer could not restore the conditions or results of period one unless
he used force against others to coerce their exchanges, but in that case social utility
could no longer be maximized because of his invasive act.
Just as some writers have tried to deny the voluntary nature and the mutual benefits of
free exchange, so others have tried to attribute a voluntary quality to actions of the state.
Generally, this attempt has been based either on the view that there exists an entity, society,
which cheerfully endorses and supports the actions of the state, or that the majority
endorses these acts and that this somehow means universal support, or, finally, that
somehow, down deep, even the opposing minority endorses the acts of the state.
From these fallacious assumptions, they conclude that the state can increase social utility
at least as well as the market can.
Schumpeter's insights on the fallacy of attributing a voluntary nature to the state deserve to
be heeded.
Ever since the prince's feudal incomes ceased to be of major importance, the state has been
living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes,
had to be deflected from these purposes by political force.
The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services
of, say, a doctor, only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific
habits of mind.
Having described the unanimity and harmony of the free market, as well as the conflict
and Losses of Utility Generated by Intervention, let us ask what happens if government is used
to check interventions in the market by private criminals, that is, private imposers of coerced
exchanges.
It has been asked, is not this police function an act of intervention?
And does not the free market itself then necessarily rest on a framework of such intervention?
And does not the existence of the free market therefore require a loss of utility on the
part of the criminals who are being punished by the government?
In the first place, we must remember that the purely free market is an array of voluntary
exchanges between sets of two persons.
If there are no threats of criminal intervention in that market, say, because everyone feels
The Police Function is therefore solely a secondary derivative problem, not a precondition of the free market.
Secondly, if governments or private agencies, for that matter, are employed to check and combat intervention in society by criminals,
It is certainly obvious that this combat imposes losses of utility upon the criminals.
But these acts of defense are hardly intervention in our sense of the term.
For the losses of utility are being imposed only upon people who, in turn, have been trying
to impose losses of utility on peaceful citizens.
In short, the force used by police agencies in defending individual freedom, that is,
in defending the persons and property of the citizens, is purely an inhibitory force.
It is counter-intervention against true initiatory intervention.
While such counter-action cannot maximize social utility, the utility of everyone in
and Society Involved in Interpersonal Actions.
It does maximize the utility of non-criminals, that is, those who have been peacefully maximizing
their own utility without inflicting losses upon others.
Should these defense agencies do their job perfectly and eliminate all interventions,
and their existence will be perfectly compatible with the maximization of social utility.