ANDREW: You’ve explained to me how in the libertarian society of the future, everyone will be free and their rights will not be violated. However, many people will be coerced in a noncoercive way, and a lot of people will be effectively slaves in a rights-respecting manner. Some people will be effectively killed in a rights-respecting manner. Why are you dedicating your life to making this society possible?
CODE NAME CAIN: I really take issue with the way you describe things. You twist words so that “freedom” and “rights” end up sounding like they are not always good things.
ANDREW: Can you just answer the question?
CNC: If you insist – but it will be a complicated discussion. To begin, [t]he natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between… private property owners is decidedly nonegalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist [71]. After all, the “permanently” rich and the “permanently” poor are usually rich or poor for a reason. The rich are characteristically bright and industrious [George W Bush comes to mind], and the poor typically dull, lazy, or both. [96-97]
ANDREW: You talk almost as if lower-class people were so different from productive geniuses that they form a separate subspecies.
CNC: Well, there is something to that. As Edward Banfield says in The Unheavenly City, “if [the lower-class individual] has any awareness of the future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future.” Thus “permanent” poverty… is caused by… a person’s present-orientedness… (which is highly correlated with low intelligence, and both of which appear to have a common genetic basis) [97].
ANDREW: Are these ideas related to your criticism of democracy?
CNC: In a democracy, a politician understands that bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies, whereas geniuses and superior people will not. [145] For [this] reason… a democratic ruler undertakes little to actively expel those people whose presence within the country constitutes a negative externality (human trash which drives individual property values down). [145]
Therefore democratic rulers tend to subsidize bums, and every subsidy always produces more of the behavior subsidized – whether good or bad. By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor (bad), more poverty will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed (bad), more unemployment will be created. [195] As a result of subsidizing… the careless, …the drug addicts, the Aids-infected, and the physically and mentally “challenged” though insurance regulation and compulsory health insurance, there will be more… carelessness, …drug addiction, Aids infection, and physical and mental retardation. [99]
Thus we see that the welfare state promotes the proliferation of intellectually and morally inferior people, and the results would be even worse were it not for the fact that crime rates are particularly high among these people, and that they tend to eliminate each other more frequently. [185]
