The Debate

Two months ago, I wrote an article about consent. Being read by just 40 people as of the time of me writing this article, it clearly did not generate the storm that I expected, but it did generate an interesting discussion on my Discord server.

In the article, I brought attention to the fact, that power disparity has an ugly tendency to render (lack of) consent irrelevant, and how this applies not just to children, but to adults too. An example I picked out was prostitution, and how it renders consent rather dubious: sure, in the case of a hypothetical self-employed pimpless prostitute, no one is holding a gun at her head to force her to have sex with people against her will, but she still has to do it to earn money, because the alternative is most likely starvation or jail. You could say "Why won't she get a proper job?", but the fact is, prostitution tends to be the absolute last resort of someone who ran out of other options.

In that Discord discussion, we had three participants: me, Mr. Chow (whose real name I do know, but won't disclose for privacy reasons) and Mrs. Madi (whose real name I do not know). I argued, that while you can't really call it rape, it's definitely not a textbook example of consent either. Madi argued, that sex in that kind of consent is a type of coercion, but Chow made the counterargument that coercion requires a rational actor to make a threat of violence. I made the argument, that a rational actor is not necessary, if the end result is going to be the same, and Chow accused me of comparing "being left to your own devices" to violence, arguing that if the unbearably negative consequences occour through no fault of the other party (which is already subjective to begin with), it is not coercion.

The debate went nowhere, because Mr. Chow and I had a vastly different definition of "voluntary" (him using it to mean anything that isn't achieved by direct coercion, me using it to mean things you do out of your free will, excluding things you do out of fear of negative consequences for refusing to). What followed was a debate between him and I about UBI, and about how just about every economical policy is coercive by nature.

Every society is coercive

Chow and I agreed that taxation is coercion. In fact, it fits the textbook definition of coercion: you either pay up, or you'll face the armed goons of the mafia government. Both Chow and I are at least adjacent to Anarcho-Capitalism, with me being only held back from being full-Ancap by my support for Universal Basic Income. However, among my counterarguments to Chow, I neglected to mention one thing.

That even the most Libertarian or Anarchist government requires coercion to remain existent. In a hypothetical Anarcho-Capitalist society, street lights, roads, police, etc. would be privatized, and thus - unless the city is run by some suspiciously wealthy super-charitable saint - most likely financed by forcing every resident of an area to pay some kind of subscription fee, which is taxation with extra steps. Failure to pay up? Then you're expelled! Is this not coercion? Pay up, or we will violently evict you.

How is this any different than the mafia government forcing you to pay protection money taxes? It's no different. A society based on 100% voluntary co-operation can only work if the society is extremely small, like a paleolithic tribe of hunter-gatherers with only 30-35 members. The moment society grows to a size that not everyone even knows each other anymore, society - no matter how libertarian - can only be maintained via coercion.

My friend argued that UBI is inherently coercive - as someone has to pay - but is the alternative (the current work-or-die system we have) any less coercive?

Against your own will and without your own consent, you are forced into a highly exploitative system where you require proper credentials to even have a job to begin with, and once you have your job, you basically have to work 9 to 5 every weekday, and once you are done with that, the government comes to collect their protection money tax your income. And you have no choice. Refuse to pay up, and you'll be taken to jail for tax evasion. Even if you became an independent farmer, the government goons would still come to collect their protection money property taxes and social insurance. That's how mafia works.

"Being left to your own device" - this sentence cannot be uttered with a straight face in an early 21th century context. Most countries don't allow homesteading, they won't let you get away with occupying unoccupied land without a permit, without buying it, etc. And no, you cannot really escape the government either - with the exception of Antarctica (good luck surviving there) and international waters, every inch of this planet is accounted for, and is the property of a government. If you think that creating your own country in the middle of the ocean would be a viable idea, read up on the Republic of Rose Island.

Every society larger than a tribe is coercive by default. The question is not how to eliminate coercion (as the only way to do it is to regress back to the Paleolithic), but how to redirect it for the benefit of as many individuals as possible. Implementing UBI via the taxation of those who employ robotic workforce would benefit everyone, while the ones who own robots would have to settle for eating caviar every week instead of every day. Boo-hoo. As much as I oppose wealth redistribution by principle (unless it's UBI, which is awesome), I'd rather have society coerce a small minority (which already has enough money to sustain an above middle class lifestyle) than the majority. And yes, I am fully aware that we can't just "tax the rich, höhö", because they're smart enough to outsmart the system, and will simply leave if we plug the loopholes - I'm just thinking out loud, rather than proposing actual practical solutions.

Any society larger than a tribe of 30-35 hunter-gatherers is too complex to be maintained by rational actors acting completely voluntarily.

The Labour Crisis of 2021 Spring/Summer and UBI?

In our debate, we briefly touched on the recent (at the time of writing this article) labour shortage in the United States of America. None of us in the debate are Americans, so our opinions are that of outside observers.

For everyone else, who is just as non-American as the three of us, long-story short, after the whole Covid-19 drama is starting to recede, the expectation was that people would return to work, go back to the office, etc. That's not exactly what happened.

American workers started quitting en masse as a response to the demand to go back to the office. 40% of millenials are considering quitting their jobs right now.

At the same time, unemployed Americans are highly reluctant to go (back) to poorly paid (minimum wage) jobs that pay less than unemployment subsidies, demand unpaid overtime, forbid expressions of individuality (e.g. piercings, tatoos, etc.), etc. As a response to so-called "labour shortages" (people being unwilling to take jobs that don't even pay a living wage), several American states are cutting unemployed subsidies.

I made the argument, that the labour market wasn't a truly free market, but a rigged market (rigged in favour of the buyers: the employers), as the politicians are artificially inflating supply (whipping people back into employment by cutting unemployment subsidies) to drive down the prices (to force people to take minimum-wage jobs). Mr. Chow made the counterargument, that unemployment subsidies are artificial to begin with, and that getting rid of them doesn't qualify as market manipulation.

I did not make any counterarguments, but if I did, I would have made the counterargument that the existence of unemployment subsidies is/was the status quo, and forcefully altering said status quo via a top-down government decision is a form of market manipulation.

My friend prides himself in his ability of logical reasoning, yet, if you ask me, he was making a moral value-judgement at that time.

If parents leave their infant child - someone who cannot realistically fend for themself - alone in the wilderness where the child's chances are survival are basically zero, is that not comparable to violence? No, it's not violence in the literal sense, but the end result is the death of a human being anyway. The death of a human being who was depending on you, with the person's death having a direct connection to your negligence. We as a society made that a crime equivalent to murder, because no matter how much you try to get rid of morals and emotions, at the end of the day, you can't expect an infant child to function as a person independent from their parents or other caretakers.

The same logic can be applied to adults too. Whether society owes you anything or not is not a logical statement, but a moral value-judgement. At the end of the day, if we consider the act of leaving an infant child or animal dependent on you to "their own devices" an act comparable to murder, what's stopping us from applying the exact same logic to adults, who depend directly on either their workplace or the government for their survival, and wouldn't last a day if put out to the wilderness with nothing but their clothes and a few agricultural instruments?

Real life isn't a video game. Real life isn't Minecraft, where you just get someone stranded on an island with nothing but their fists, and you can just expect them to craft tools after punching trees and build houses out of diamonds. Real life is a complex "game" where just about everything that a dependency on everything.

Even in the article "Consent", I explored just how arbitrary is our division between child and adult: if the number of years that have passed since your birth is below a socially defined number, somehow, you cannot have sex, and can only be a passive victim of rape - but above that arbitrary number, apparently, you're only a victim if you were literally held down and violated, power disparities be damned. Again, I have to emphasize that real-life isn't black-and-white like that. Real life is complex.

So, if you are a child, leaving you to your own devices is equivalent to murder, but if you're an adult, it is somehow not? Isn't this the most logically inconsistent idea ever?

Long story short: if you refuse to get a highly abusive minimum-wage job that pays you less than unemployment subsidies (being paid for literally nothing, or for looking for a job), and the government cuts your unemployment subsidies in order to whip you back into work, you are definitely being coerced.

How to minimize coercion?

Just like how we'll never ever live in a society that doesn't have any violence, we'll also never live in a society without coercion. So, if we are to set a realistic goal, we can't make it "erase coercion" - we can only make it "minimize coercion".

UBI may be considered coercive insofar that the money has to come from somewhere (which means taking the money from someone else, which is coercion), but I'd rather coerce a couple of rich dudes who'll remain billionaires even after being coerced, than the 99%, who are already struggling hard to begin with.

You know what true freedom is? True luxury?

I'll tell you what it's not: it's not villas, exotic carts or expensive food. Those are fake luxuries. Real luxury is to have the freedom to wake up and go to bed whenever you want, do whatever you want on your day, and still have a roof over your head and food on your table. That is real luxury. That is real freedom.

The way I see it, by guaranteeing this freedom for our citizens, we decrease the amount of coercion, not increase it. With a Universal Basic Income, workers could be be no longer coerced into doing extra unpaid overtime with the only "reward" being not being fired (which is equivalent to their continued survival in a system where having a job is a de facto requirement for survival). Women could be no longer coerced into nonconsensual sex for their mere survival - because if your mere survival (you need to have money to buy food, to avoid starving to death) depends on you having sex (as a prostitute), I do not consider that voluntary and consensual.

Yes, a few people - billionaires - would have to be coerced, but this would decrease the amount of coercion everyone else has to face. It would increase the weight behind the consent of everyone else.