WEBVTT NOTE 28. F.A. Hayek and The Concept of Coercion 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Chapter 28. F. A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:17.000 In his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek attempts to establish a systematic political philosophy on behalf of individual liberty. 3 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:28.000 He begins very well by defining freedom as the absence of coercion, thus upholding negative liberty more cogently than does Isaiah Berlin. 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek's system appears when he proceeds to define coercion, for instead of defining coercion as is done in the present volume, as the invasive use of physical violence or the threat thereof against someone else's person or just property, Hayek defines coercion far more fuzzily and inchoately, for example, as control of the environment or circumstances 5 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:26.440 for Hayek, coercion, of course, includes the aggressive use of physical violence, but the 6 00:01:26.440 --> 00:01:32.560 The term unfortunately also includes peaceful and non-aggressive actions as well. 7 00:01:32.560 --> 00:01:39.480 Thus, Hayek states that the threat of force or violence is the most important form of coercion, 8 00:01:39.480 --> 00:01:44.280 but they are not synonymous with coercion, for the threat of physical force is not the 9 00:01:44.280 --> 00:01:49.280 only way in which coercion can be exercised. 10 00:01:49.280 --> 00:01:57.000 What then are the other non-violent ways in which Hayek believes coercion can be exercised? 11 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:03.680 One is such purely voluntary ways of interacting as a morose husband or a nagging wife who 12 00:02:03.680 --> 00:02:10.040 can make someone else's life intolerable unless their every mood is obeyed. 13 00:02:10.040 --> 00:02:15.840 Here Hayek concedes that it would be absurd to advocate legal outlawry of sulkiness or 14 00:02:15.840 --> 00:02:21.400 for Nagging, but he does so on the faulty grounds that such outlawry would involve even 15 00:02:21.400 --> 00:02:23.940 greater coercion. 16 00:02:23.940 --> 00:02:28.020 But coercion is not really an additive quantity. 17 00:02:28.020 --> 00:02:33.880 How can we quantitatively compare different degrees of coercion, especially when they 18 00:02:33.880 --> 00:02:37.520 involve comparisons among different people? 19 00:02:37.520 --> 00:02:44.000 Is there no fundamental qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between a nagging wife 20 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:50.640 and Using the Apparatus of Physical Violence to Outlaw or Restrict Such Nagging? 21 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:56.040 It seems clear that the fundamental problem is Hayek's use of coercion as a portmanteau 22 00:02:56.040 --> 00:03:04.080 term to include not only physical violence but also voluntary, non-violent and non-invasive 23 00:03:04.080 --> 00:03:07.020 actions such as nagging. 24 00:03:07.020 --> 00:03:12.320 The point, of course, is that the wife or husband is free to leave the offending partner 25 00:03:12.320 --> 00:03:17.640 and that staying together is a voluntary choice on his or her part. 26 00:03:17.640 --> 00:03:23.680 Nagging might be morally or aesthetically unfortunate, but it is scarcely coercive in 27 00:03:23.680 --> 00:03:28.440 any sense similar to the use of physical violence. 28 00:03:28.440 --> 00:03:34.540 Only confusion can be caused by lumping the two types of action together. 29 00:03:34.540 --> 00:03:41.480 But not only confusion, but also self-contradiction, for Hayek includes in the concept of coercion 30 00:03:41.480 --> 00:03:48.360 not only invasive physical violence, that is, a compulsory action or exchange, but also 31 00:03:48.360 --> 00:03:54.480 certain forms of peaceful voluntary refusal to make exchanges. 32 00:03:54.480 --> 00:04:00.460 Surely the freedom to make an exchange necessarily implies the equivalent freedom not to make 33 00:04:00.460 --> 00:04:02.520 an exchange. 34 00:04:02.520 --> 00:04:09.520 Yet Hayek dubs certain forms of peaceful refusal to make an exchange as coercive, thus lumping 35 00:04:09.520 --> 00:04:39.520 The Theory of Money and Credit 36 00:04:39.520 --> 00:04:45.240 and appreciate tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike. 37 00:04:45.240 --> 00:04:52.160 Yet dismissal is simply a refusal by the capital-owning employer to make any further exchanges with 38 00:04:52.160 --> 00:04:54.520 one or more people. 39 00:04:54.520 --> 00:05:00.400 An employer may refuse to make such exchanges for many reasons, and there are none but subjective 40 00:05:00.400 --> 00:05:05.380 criteria to enable Hayek to use the term arbitrary. 41 00:05:05.380 --> 00:05:09.440 Why is one reason any more arbitrary than another? 42 00:05:09.440 --> 00:05:16.480 If Hayek means to imply that any reasons other than maximizing monetary profit are arbitrary, 43 00:05:16.480 --> 00:05:22.520 then he ignores the Austrian school insight that people even in business act to maximize 44 00:05:22.520 --> 00:05:28.600 their psychic rather than monetary profit, and that such psychic profit may include all 45 00:05:28.600 --> 00:05:34.080 sorts of values, none of which is more or less arbitrary than another. 46 00:05:34.080 --> 00:05:40.360 Furthermore, Hayek here seems to be implying that employees have some sort of right to 47 00:05:40.360 --> 00:05:46.320 continuing employment, a right which is in overt contradiction to the property rights 48 00:05:46.320 --> 00:05:54.520 of employers to their own money. Hayek concedes that dismissal is ordinarily not coercive. 49 00:05:54.520 --> 00:06:01.200 Why then in conditions of acute unemployment, surely in any case not of the employer's making, 50 00:06:01.200 --> 00:06:16.560 Hayek commits a similar error when he deals with the refusal to exchange made by a monopolist, 51 00:06:16.560 --> 00:06:19.400 the single owner of a resource. 52 00:06:19.400 --> 00:06:25.520 He admits that if I would very much like to be painted by a famous artist, and if he refused 53 00:06:25.520 --> 00:06:31.960 to paint me for less than a very high fee, or at all, it would clearly be absurd to say 54 00:06:31.960 --> 00:06:39.440 that I am coerced. Yet he does apply the concept of coercion to a case where a monopolist owns 55 00:06:39.440 --> 00:06:45.360 water in an oasis. Suppose, he says, that people had settled there on the assumption 56 00:06:45.360 --> 00:06:51.320 that water would always be available at a reasonable price, that then other water sources 57 00:06:51.320 --> 00:06:57.140 had dried up and that people then had no choice but to do whatever the owner of the spring 58 00:06:57.140 --> 00:07:00.760 demanded of them if they were to survive. 59 00:07:00.760 --> 00:07:06.480 Here would be a clear case of coercion, since the good or service in question is crucial 60 00:07:06.480 --> 00:07:09.060 to their existence. 61 00:07:09.060 --> 00:07:14.340 Yet since the owner of the spring did not aggressively poison the competing springs, 62 00:07:14.340 --> 00:07:17.320 the owner is scarcely being coercive. 63 00:07:17.320 --> 00:07:23.040 In fact, he is supplying a vital service and should have the right either to refuse a sale 64 00:07:23.040 --> 00:07:26.680 or to charge whatever the customers will pay. 65 00:07:26.680 --> 00:07:32.920 The situation may well be unfortunate for the customers, as are many situations in life. 66 00:07:32.920 --> 00:07:38.760 But the supplier of a particularly scarce and vital service is hardly being coercive 67 00:07:38.760 --> 00:07:45.080 by either refusing to sell or by setting a price that the buyers are willing to pay. 68 00:07:45.080 --> 00:07:50.720 Both actions are within his rights as a free man and as a just property owner. 69 00:07:50.720 --> 00:07:56.200 The owner of the oasis is responsible only for the existence of his own actions and his 70 00:07:56.200 --> 00:07:57.680 own property. 71 00:07:57.680 --> 00:08:02.360 He is not accountable for the existence of the desert or for the fact that the other 72 00:08:02.360 --> 00:08:05.440 springs have dried up. 73 00:08:05.440 --> 00:08:11.760 Furthermore, as Professor Ronald Hamowy points out in a brilliant critique of Hayek's concept 74 00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:15.200 of Coercion and of the Rule of Law. 75 00:08:15.200 --> 00:08:19.240 We are faced with what appears to be an insurmountable problem. 76 00:08:19.240 --> 00:08:22.680 What constitutes a reasonable price? 77 00:08:22.680 --> 00:08:26.360 By reasonable, Hayek might mean competitive. 78 00:08:26.360 --> 00:08:33.760 But how is it possible to determine what the competitive price is in the absence of competition? 79 00:08:33.760 --> 00:08:40.760 Economics cannot predict the cardinal magnitude of any market price in the absence of a market. 80 00:08:40.760 --> 00:08:46.500 What then can we assume to be a reasonable price, or, more to the point, at what price 81 00:08:46.500 --> 00:08:52.240 does the contract alter its nature and become an instance of coercion? 82 00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:57.520 Is it at one cent a gallon, at one dollar a gallon, at ten dollars a gallon? 83 00:08:57.520 --> 00:09:02.640 What if the owner of the spring demands nothing more than the friendship of the settlers? 84 00:09:02.640 --> 00:09:05.320 Is such a price coercive? 85 00:09:05.320 --> 00:09:10.720 By what principle can we decide when the agreement is a simple contractual one, and when it 86 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:12.120 is not. 87 00:09:12.120 --> 00:09:18.920 Moreover, as Hamowy states, we must face yet a further difficulty. Is the owner acting 88 00:09:18.920 --> 00:09:25.200 coercively if he refuses to sell his water at any price? Suppose that he looks upon his 89 00:09:25.200 --> 00:09:32.000 spring as sacred and its water as holy. To offer the water to the settlers would contravene 90 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:37.880 his deepest religious sentiments. Here is a situation which would not fall under Hayek's 91 00:09:37.880 --> 00:09:44.920 Hayek's definition of coercion since the owner of the spring forces no action on the settlers. 92 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:51.300 Yet it would appear that within Hayek's own framework this is a far worse situation since 93 00:09:51.300 --> 00:09:57.960 the only choice left open to the settlers now is dying of thirst. 94 00:09:57.960 --> 00:10:04.080 Let us postulate another situation. Suppose that there is only one physician in a community 95 00:10:04.080 --> 00:10:10.440 and an epidemic breaks out. Only he can save the lives of numerous fellow citizens, an 96 00:10:10.440 --> 00:10:17.080 action surely crucial to their existence. Is he coercing them if a. he refuses to do 97 00:10:17.080 --> 00:10:25.600 anything or leaves town, or b. if he charges a very high price for his curative services? 98 00:10:25.600 --> 00:10:30.960 Certainly not. There is, for one thing, nothing wrong with a man charging the value of his 99 00:10:30.960 --> 00:10:36.960 services to his customers, that is, what they are willing to pay. He further has every right 100 00:10:36.960 --> 00:10:43.560 to refuse to do anything. While he may perhaps be criticized morally or aesthetically as a 101 00:10:43.560 --> 00:10:51.440 self-owner of his own body, he has every right to refuse to cure or to do so at a high price. 102 00:10:51.440 --> 00:10:57.920 To say that he is being coercive is furthermore to imply that it is proper and not coercive 103 00:10:57.920 --> 00:11:04.080 for his customers or their agents to force the physician to treat them, in short, to 104 00:11:04.080 --> 00:11:06.800 justify his enslavement. 105 00:11:06.800 --> 00:11:12.780 But surely enslavement, compulsory labor, must be considered coercive in any sensible 106 00:11:12.780 --> 00:11:15.680 meaning of the term. 107 00:11:15.680 --> 00:11:22.560 All this highlights the gravely self-contradictory nature of including a forced activity or exchange 108 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:30.080 in the same rubric of coercion with someone's peaceful refusal to make an exchange. 109 00:11:30.080 --> 00:11:36.100 As I have written elsewhere, a well-known type of private coercion is the vague but ominous 110 00:11:36.100 --> 00:11:38.860 sounding economic power. 111 00:11:38.860 --> 00:11:43.700 A favorite illustration of the wielding of such power is the case of a worker fired from 112 00:11:43.700 --> 00:11:45.620 his job. 113 00:11:45.620 --> 00:11:48.340 Let us look at this situation closely. 114 00:11:48.340 --> 00:11:51.500 What exactly has the employer done? 115 00:11:51.500 --> 00:11:57.060 He has refused to continue to make a certain exchange which the worker preferred to continue 116 00:11:57.060 --> 00:12:04.020 making. Specifically, A, the employer, refuses to sell a certain sum of money in exchange 117 00:12:04.020 --> 00:12:10.580 for the purchase of B's labor services. B would like to make a certain exchange. A would 118 00:12:10.580 --> 00:12:16.300 not. The same principle may apply to all the exchanges throughout the length and breadth 119 00:12:16.300 --> 00:12:19.140 of the Economy. 120 00:12:19.140 --> 00:12:24.980 Economic power, then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. 121 00:12:24.980 --> 00:12:27.360 Every man has this power. 122 00:12:27.360 --> 00:12:32.260 Every man has the same right to make a proffered exchange. 123 00:12:32.260 --> 00:12:38.220 Now it should become evident that the middle-of-the-road statist who concedes the evil of violence 124 00:12:38.220 --> 00:12:43.820 but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the private 125 00:12:43.820 --> 00:12:49.820 Coercion of Economic Power is caught in an impossible contradiction. 126 00:12:49.820 --> 00:12:55.760 A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say, or what is the government to 127 00:12:55.760 --> 00:13:01.860 do if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? 128 00:13:01.860 --> 00:13:04.100 This is the crucial question. 129 00:13:04.100 --> 00:13:09.860 There are only two positions we may take on the matter, either that B is committing violence 130 00:13:39.860 --> 00:13:46.420 and that. In the terms of both doctrines, the libertarian and the economic power arguments, 131 00:13:46.420 --> 00:13:53.580 this violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If 132 00:13:53.580 --> 00:14:00.420 we adopt the economic power argument, we must choose the latter position. If we reject it, 133 00:14:00.420 --> 00:14:06.960 we must adopt the former. If we choose the economic power concept, we must employ violence 134 00:14:06.960 --> 00:14:13.900 is to combat any refusal of exchange. If we reject it, we employ violence to prevent any 135 00:14:13.900 --> 00:14:21.860 violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either or choice. The middle 136 00:14:21.860 --> 00:14:29.260 of the road statist cannot logically say that there are many forms of unjustified coercion. 137 00:14:29.260 --> 00:14:35.680 He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that 138 00:14:35.680 --> 00:14:42.560 that there is only one form of illegal coercion, overt physical violence, or he must say that 139 00:14:42.560 --> 00:14:48.960 there is only one form of illegal coercion, refusal to exchange. 140 00:14:48.960 --> 00:14:55.080 And outlawing the refusal to work is, of course, a society of general slavery. 141 00:14:55.080 --> 00:15:01.240 Let us consider another example that Hayek quickly dismisses as non-coercive. 142 00:15:01.240 --> 00:15:05.960 If a hostess will invite me to her parties only if I conform to certain standards of 143 00:15:05.960 --> 00:15:13.920 conduct and dress, this is certainly not coercion. Yet, as Professor Hamilley has shown, this 144 00:15:13.920 --> 00:15:20.400 case may well be considered coercion on Hayek's own criteria. For it might be that I am a 145 00:15:20.400 --> 00:15:26.000 very socially conscious person, and that my not attending this party would greatly endanger 146 00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:31.040 under my social standing. Further, my dinner jacket is at the cleaner's and will not be 147 00:15:31.040 --> 00:15:36.720 ready for a week, yet the party is tomorrow. Under these conditions could it be said that 148 00:15:36.720 --> 00:15:43.200 my host's action in demanding my wearing formal attire as the price of access to his home 149 00:15:43.200 --> 00:15:49.420 is in fact a coercive one, inasmuch as it clearly threatens the preservation of one of the things 150 00:15:49.420 --> 00:16:18.380 In Attempting to rebut Hamowy's trenchant critique, Hayek later added that, to constitute 151 00:16:18.380 --> 00:16:23.000 Without coercion it is also necessary that the action of the coercer should put the 152 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:28.340 coerced in a position which he regards as worse than that in which he would have been 153 00:16:28.340 --> 00:16:30.920 without that action. 154 00:16:30.920 --> 00:16:37.260 But as Hamowy points out in reply, this does not salvage Hayek's inconsistent refusal to 155 00:16:37.260 --> 00:16:44.740 adopt the patent absurdity of calling a conditional invitation to a party coercive, for the case 156 00:16:44.740 --> 00:17:14.740 The case just described seems to meet this condition as well, for while it is true that, in a sense, my would-be host has widened my range of alternatives by the invitation, the whole situation, which must include my inability to acquire formal attire and my consequent frustration, is worse, from my point of view, than the situation which had obtained before the invitation, certainly worse than had existed before my would-be host 157 00:17:14.740 --> 00:17:37.740 Hayek and the rest of us are duty-bound to do one of two things, either to confine the concept of coercion strictly to the invasion of another's person or property by the use or threat of physical violence, or to scrap the term coercion altogether, and simply define freedom not as the absence of coercion, but as the absence of aggressive coercion. 158 00:17:37.740 --> 00:17:47.740 and simply define freedom not as the absence of coercion but as the absence of aggressive physical violence or the threat thereof. 159 00:17:47.740 --> 00:17:56.740 Hayek indeed concedes that coercion can be so defined as to make it an all-pervasive and unavoidable phenomenon. 160 00:17:56.740 --> 00:18:05.300 Unfortunately, his middle-of-the-road failure to confine coercion strictly to violence pervasively 161 00:18:05.300 --> 00:18:10.200 flaws his entire system of political philosophy. 162 00:18:10.200 --> 00:18:16.460 He cannot salvage that system by attempting to distinguish, merely quantitatively, between 163 00:18:16.460 --> 00:18:21.700 mild and more severe forms of coercion. 164 00:18:21.700 --> 00:18:27.160 Another fundamental fallacy of Hayek's system is not only his defining coercion beyond the 165 00:18:27.160 --> 00:18:34.120 sphere of physical violence, but also in failing to distinguish between aggressive and defensive 166 00:18:34.120 --> 00:18:36.820 coercion or violence. 167 00:18:36.820 --> 00:18:43.000 There is all the world of distinction in kind between aggressive violence, assault or theft 168 00:18:43.000 --> 00:18:48.880 against another, and the use of violence to defend oneself and one's property against 169 00:18:48.880 --> 00:18:51.260 such aggression. 170 00:18:51.260 --> 00:18:54.860 Defensive violence is criminal and unjust. 171 00:18:54.860 --> 00:18:58.340 Defensive violence is perfectly just and proper. 172 00:18:58.340 --> 00:19:02.240 The former invades the rights of person and property. 173 00:19:02.240 --> 00:19:06.100 The latter defends against such invasion. 174 00:19:06.100 --> 00:19:11.260 Yet Hayek again fails to make this crucial qualitative distinction. 175 00:19:11.260 --> 00:19:17.260 For him, there are only relative degrees or quantities of coercion. 176 00:19:17.260 --> 00:19:23.480 As Hayek states that, coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided, because the only way 177 00:19:23.480 --> 00:19:27.620 to prevent it is by the threat of coercion. 178 00:19:27.620 --> 00:19:34.260 From this, he goes on to compound the error by adding that free society has met this problem 179 00:19:34.260 --> 00:19:39.600 by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state, and by attempting to limit this 180 00:19:39.600 --> 00:19:44.680 The State's power of the State to instances where it is required to prevent coercion by 181 00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:47.640 private persons. 182 00:19:47.640 --> 00:19:55.600 Yet we are not here comparing varying degrees of an undifferentiated lump we can call coercion, 183 00:19:55.600 --> 00:19:59.160 even if we define this as physical violence. 184 00:19:59.160 --> 00:20:05.760 For we can avoid aggressive violence completely by preventing it through purchasing the services 185 00:20:05.760 --> 00:20:13.320 of Defense Agencies, agencies which are empowered to use only defensive violence. 186 00:20:13.320 --> 00:20:19.760 We are not helpless in the throes of coercion if we define such coercion only as aggressive 187 00:20:19.760 --> 00:20:26.600 violence, or, alternatively, if we abandon the term coercion altogether and keep the 188 00:20:26.600 --> 00:20:32.400 distinction between aggressive and defensive violence. 189 00:20:32.400 --> 00:20:39.200 Ludwig's crucial second sentence in the above paragraph compounds his error many times further. 190 00:20:39.200 --> 00:20:46.600 In the first place, in any and all historical cases, free society did not confer any monopoly 191 00:20:46.600 --> 00:20:49.000 of coercion on the state. 192 00:20:49.000 --> 00:20:53.960 There has never been any form of voluntary social contract. 193 00:20:53.960 --> 00:21:00.960 In all historical cases, the state has seized, by the use of aggressive violence and conquest, 194 00:21:00.960 --> 00:21:04.560 Such a Monopoly of Violence in Society. 195 00:21:04.560 --> 00:21:11.000 And further, what the state has is not so much a monopoly of coercion as of aggressive, 196 00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:14.000 as well as defensive violence. 197 00:21:14.000 --> 00:21:19.720 And that monopoly is established and maintained by systematically employing two particular 198 00:21:19.720 --> 00:21:27.240 forms of aggressive violence, taxation for the acquisition of state income, and the compulsory 199 00:21:27.240 --> 00:21:33.480 Outlawry of Competing Agencies of Defensive Violence within the State's Acquired Territorial 200 00:21:33.480 --> 00:21:38.680 Area Therefore, since liberty requires the elimination 201 00:21:38.680 --> 00:21:45.960 of aggressive violence in society, while maintaining defensive violence against possible invaders, 202 00:21:45.960 --> 00:21:52.240 the State is not and can never be justified as a defender of liberty. 203 00:21:52.240 --> 00:21:58.120 For the State lives by its very existence on the twofold and pervasive employment of 204 00:21:58.120 --> 00:22:04.360 aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed 205 00:22:04.360 --> 00:22:06.520 to be defending. 206 00:22:06.520 --> 00:22:12.440 The State is qualitatively unjustified and unjustifiable. 207 00:22:12.440 --> 00:22:17.400 Thus Hayek's justification of the existence of the State, as well as its employment of 208 00:22:17.400 --> 00:22:24.080 of Taxation and Other Measures of Aggressive Violence, rests upon his untenable obliteration 209 00:22:24.080 --> 00:22:29.800 of the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, and his lumping of all 210 00:22:29.800 --> 00:22:36.720 violent actions into the single rubric of varying degrees of coercion. 211 00:22:36.720 --> 00:22:42.480 But this is not all, for in the course of working out his defense of the state and state 212 00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:50.460 Hayek not only widens the concept of coercion beyond physical violence, he also unduly narrows 213 00:22:50.460 --> 00:22:57.120 the concept of coercion to exclude certain forms of aggressive physical violence. 214 00:22:57.120 --> 00:23:04.600 In order to limit state coercion, that is, to justify state action within such limits, 215 00:23:04.600 --> 00:23:11.840 Hayek asserts that coercion is either minimized or even does not exist if the violence-supported 216 00:23:11.840 --> 00:23:18.280 and edicts are not personal and arbitrary but are in the form of general universal rules 217 00:23:18.280 --> 00:23:23.400 knowable to all in advance, the rule of law. 218 00:23:23.400 --> 00:23:29.160 Thus Hayek states that the coercion which a government must still use is reduced to 219 00:23:29.160 --> 00:23:36.200 a minimum and made as innocuous as possible by restraining it through known general rules, 220 00:23:36.200 --> 00:23:41.800 so that in most instances the individual need never be coerced unless he has placed himself 221 00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:46.400 He puts himself in a position where he knows he will be coerced. 222 00:23:46.400 --> 00:23:52.280 Even where coercion is not avoidable, it is deprived of its most harmful effects by being 223 00:23:52.280 --> 00:23:58.720 confined to limited and foreseeable duties, or at least made independent of the arbitrary 224 00:23:58.720 --> 00:24:01.480 will of another person. 225 00:24:01.480 --> 00:24:07.400 Being made impersonal and dependent upon general abstract rules whose effect on particular 226 00:24:07.400 --> 00:24:27.880 Hayek's avoidability criterion for allegedly non-coercive though violent actions is put 227 00:24:27.880 --> 00:24:30.880 baldly as follows. 228 00:24:30.880 --> 00:24:35.720 Provided that I know beforehand that if I place myself in a particular position I shall 229 00:24:35.720 --> 00:24:42.120 be coerced, and provided that I can avoid putting myself in such a position, I need 230 00:24:42.120 --> 00:24:44.280 never be coerced. 231 00:24:44.280 --> 00:24:50.220 At least insofar as the rules providing for coercion are not aimed at me personally, but 232 00:24:50.220 --> 00:24:56.680 are so framed as to apply equally to all people in similar circumstances, they are no different 233 00:24:56.680 --> 00:25:02.180 from any of the natural obstacles that affect my plans. 234 00:25:02.180 --> 00:25:08.500 But as Professor Hamowy trenchantly points out, it follows from this that if Mr. X warns 235 00:25:08.500 --> 00:25:14.560 me that he is going to kill me if I buy anything from Mr. Y, and if the products available 236 00:25:14.560 --> 00:25:21.120 from Mr. Y are also available elsewhere, probably from Mr. X, such action on the part of Mr. 237 00:25:21.120 --> 00:25:24.740 X is non-coercive. 238 00:25:24.740 --> 00:25:28.780 For purchasing from Mr. Y is avoidable. 239 00:25:28.780 --> 00:25:35.420 Hamowy continues, avoidability of the action is sufficient, according to this criterion, 240 00:25:35.420 --> 00:25:40.460 to set up a situation theoretically identical to one in which a threat does not occur at 241 00:25:40.460 --> 00:25:42.040 all. 242 00:25:42.040 --> 00:25:47.500 The threatened party is no less free than he was before the threat was made, if he can 243 00:25:47.500 --> 00:25:50.320 avoid the threatener's action. 244 00:25:50.320 --> 00:25:55.400 According to the logical structure of this argument, threatening coercion is not a coercive 245 00:25:55.400 --> 00:25:56.400 act. 246 00:25:56.400 --> 00:26:01.520 Thus, if I know in advance that I will be attacked by hoodlums if I enter a certain 247 00:26:01.520 --> 00:26:08.360 neighborhood, and if I can avoid that neighborhood, then I need never be coerced by the hoodlums. 248 00:26:08.360 --> 00:26:15.000 Hence, one could regard the hoodlum-infested neighborhood in the same way as a plague-infested 249 00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:26.560 both avoidable obstacles, neither personally aimed at me, and hence, for Hayek, not coercive. 250 00:26:26.560 --> 00:26:33.380 Thus Hayek's avoidability criterion for non-coercion leads to a patently absurd weakening of the 251 00:26:33.380 --> 00:26:40.700 concept of coercion and the inclusion of aggressive and patently coercive actions under a benign 252 00:26:40.700 --> 00:26:43.560 non-coercive rubric. 253 00:26:43.560 --> 00:26:50.420 And yet Hayek is even willing to scuttle his own weak avoidability limitation on government, 254 00:26:50.420 --> 00:26:56.280 for he concedes that taxation and conscription, for example, are not and are not supposed 255 00:26:56.280 --> 00:26:58.360 to be avoidable. 256 00:26:58.360 --> 00:27:05.100 But these too become non-coercive because they are at least predictable and enforced 257 00:27:05.100 --> 00:27:10.420 irrespective of how the individual would otherwise employ his energies. 258 00:27:10.420 --> 00:27:16.860 This deprives them largely of the evil nature of coercion. If the known necessity of paying 259 00:27:16.860 --> 00:27:23.180 a certain amount in taxes becomes the basis of all my plans, if a period of military service 260 00:27:23.180 --> 00:27:29.140 is a foreseeable part of my career, then I can follow a general plan of life of my own 261 00:27:29.140 --> 00:27:35.060 making and am as independent of the will of another person as men have learned to be in 262 00:27:35.060 --> 00:27:37.180 society. 263 00:27:37.180 --> 00:27:43.780 The absurdity of relying on general, universal, equally applicable, predictable rules as a 264 00:27:43.780 --> 00:27:51.220 criterion or as a defense for individual liberty has rarely been more starkly revealed. 265 00:27:51.220 --> 00:27:56.140 For this means that, for example, if there is a general governmental rule that every 266 00:27:56.140 --> 00:28:02.340 person shall be enslaved one year out of every three, then such universal slavery is not 267 00:28:02.340 --> 00:28:04.740 at all coercive. 268 00:28:04.740 --> 00:28:11.240 In what sense, then, are Hayekian general rules superior or more libertarian than any 269 00:28:11.240 --> 00:28:15.960 conceivable case of rule by arbitrary whim? 270 00:28:15.960 --> 00:28:20.360 Let us postulate, for example, two possible societies. 271 00:28:20.360 --> 00:28:26.900 One is ruled by a vast network of Hayekian general rules, equally applicable to all. 272 00:28:26.900 --> 00:28:32.080 For example, such rules as, Everyone is to be enslaved every third year. 273 00:28:32.080 --> 00:28:35.880 No one may criticize the government under penalty of death. 274 00:28:35.880 --> 00:28:38.980 No one may drink alcoholic beverages. 275 00:28:38.980 --> 00:28:44.240 Everyone must bow down to Mecca three times a day at specified hours. 276 00:28:44.240 --> 00:28:48.820 Everyone must wear a specified green uniform, etc. 277 00:28:48.820 --> 00:28:55.160 It is clear that such a society, though meeting all the Hayekian criteria for a non-coercive 278 00:28:55.160 --> 00:29:00.860 rule of law, is thoroughly despotic and totalitarian. 279 00:29:00.860 --> 00:29:06.780 Let us postulate, in contrast, a second society which is totally free, where every person 280 00:29:06.780 --> 00:29:14.060 is free to employ his person and property, make exchanges, etc. as he sees fit, except 281 00:29:14.060 --> 00:29:20.900 that, once a year, the monarch, who does literally nothing the rest of the year, commits one 282 00:29:20.900 --> 00:29:26.620 arbitrary invasive act against one individual that he selects. 283 00:29:26.620 --> 00:29:33.580 Each society is to be considered more free, more libertarian. 284 00:29:33.580 --> 00:29:39.700 Thus we see that Hayek's constitution of liberty can in no sense provide the criteria or the 285 00:29:39.700 --> 00:29:43.780 groundwork for a system of individual liberty. 286 00:29:43.780 --> 00:29:49.580 In addition to the deeply flawed definitions of coercion, a fundamental flaw in Hayek's 287 00:29:49.580 --> 00:29:55.860 theory of individual rights, as Hamowy points out, is that they do not stem from a moral 288 00:29:55.860 --> 00:30:02.660 Theory, or from some independent non-governmental social arrangement, but instead flow from 289 00:30:02.660 --> 00:30:05.180 government itself. 290 00:30:05.180 --> 00:30:12.380 For Hayek, government and its rule of law creates rights, rather than ratifies or defends 291 00:30:12.380 --> 00:30:13.540 them. 292 00:30:13.540 --> 00:30:18.620 It is no wonder that in the course of his book, Hayek comes to endorse a long list of 293 00:30:18.620 --> 00:30:24.460 of Government Actions Clearly Invasive of the Rights and Liberties of the Individual Citizens.