Gillespie and de Rugy on Generational Warfare

Pattern: Children haven an obligation X to their parents, because otherwise strangers would have to fulfill X to those parents.

This is broken on two levels:

1) Children do NOT have an obligation to their parents (or uncles or aunts). They did not consent to being the children of those parents – it was forced onto them unilaterally. Instead, the parents owe their children for this non-consensual act of reproduction. Let us remember that it is involuntary, and that it causes harm as well as benefit. How am I obligated to someone who created an involuntary dependency on me unilaterally? A child is no more obligated to help their parents than any other person on the planet.

2) The argument ignores the free-rider problem, as well as incentives. Taking care of one’s parents can be so expensive that working harder just doesn’t make selfish sense anymore – you’d simply be expected to share all your profits with your parents to fulfill your mythical “moral obligation”. And in a welfare state with functioning taxation, the burden of the worst-case scenarios is distributed not only on many, but also adjusted to their means.

Incidentally, I fundamentally disagree with the libertarian notion that individual freedom and bodily autonomy extend to arbitrary unbounded property rights. If a person is rich enough so that they can live a nice above-subsistence life without ever working or being harassed again, how is it an infringement on their freedoms if their additional income is taxed, no matter how much? It may reduce incentives, but there is no magic right to accumulate arbitrary physical resources in the hands of a few. Libertarians would do better to focus on bodily autonomy, and on the right to say no of those who still have to work for a living – and to finally recognize that life itself starts with aggression: The non-consensual act of being dragged screaming into a physical world we know is filled with violence.

@kurt: They didn’t, unless you count democratic votes. This doesn’t invalidate my point 1).

You may argue it invalidates any obligation to solidarity in general. But then of course you can also ask: Why show solidarity with the wealthy as their wealth is taken from them? When did any children ever consent to the enforcement of property rights for strangers? It is enforced by ordinary physical violence by the police, after all. Which is also non-consensual. So there would not be any obligation to accept or support such enforcement, either. Which makes the whole moral criticism of coercive redistribution obsolete, and we’re back at “might makes right”.

That’s my point about reproduction: There may be consensual contracts within the system, but being a part of the system, as well as the nature of the system, is a non-consensual outcome determined by historical happenstance and maintained by physical violence.

So once we accept that these deontological injuctions are effectively self-defeating, and might really does make right, the question becomes, to what end what do we want to use our might? Maybe a somewhat peaceful functioning society with minimal misery and suffering and the degree of freedom that facilitates the good life.

Certainly there are problems with entitlements that need to be fixed. That does not mean, as this post suggests, that the main motivation for supporting entitlements is to facilitate people evading obligations to their families. This line of argument is both offensive to many people and totally ineffective at bringing us closer to real reform.

I have been a Hospice volunteer for 16 years. I have seen many people (mostly women) who have exhausted all of their savings in caring for a series of dying relatives. Many either don’t have any surviving kids or have kids who also live in poverty and can barely support themselves. It is fine to say that charities will help and our Hospice does provide services whether or not they can pay.

These people are still left totally dependent on Social Security and Medicare in the end. Your highly misleading statistics about the average wealth of seniors are not relevant to the high percentage of seniors who rely on these programs to stay out of poverty.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about the best way to reform entitlements. David, you need to realize the fairness issue cuts both ways.

My advice to younger generations, if they choose to listen, is to stop paying – and I assume that at some point they will stop paying. But it also seems to me that the younger generations are leaning left, so I have no problem with collecting, because it serves them right.

“Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I’m glad it does.

“The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality—it drains some of the life from them. It’s inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met—family and community really do have the action—then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.”

Charles Murray; Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI 2009

on the right to say no of those who still have to work for a living

Some people live on about $1.00 day. SO how much to you consider enough that one does not nee to work. Please be more concrete.

Children pay money to SS which is given to their parents so why is it that the politicians get credit.

@Floccina

I think those people are being harmed by being forced to live at subsistence-level poverty, or even below subsistence at times (e.g. malnourishment). This is especially true for the children, who never opted in and who cannot opt out (suicide).

Yesterday, I saw a documentary about hunger in India, where a slum dweller fathered seven (!) children and then complained that he couldn’t feed them. Neither the interviewer nor the man himself even raised the question whether this reproductive behavior is acceptable. I consider it child abuse. Some states of existence are worse than not being born. Libertarians usually do not address this as they see reproduction as a right not to be meddled with.

With increasing automation of production and even the service sector, we will see the low skills of billions of people becoming more and more worthless. As libertarians would have us accept unlimited migration of unskilled workers, most humans will then live on subsistence, and the malthusian nightmare will be exported to every nation that allows it. Work will not become voluntary, but competing with the machines will be so hard that wages will drop ever further. We will all live in a giant stinking slum world, with the McMansions of the ultrarich visible from outer space.

Of course, I’m exaggerating, but the trends are all there, and libertarianism doesn’t seem have an answer.

Perhaps you quoted too much? Or didn’t clearly identify what was a quote and what was not? Just guessing.

Dent,

It seems to me that you operate on two assumptions:

1) That there is some way to allocate resources that is more efficient than the libertarian ideals of property and free trade. Can you name a society in which top-down allocation of resources has resulted in the poorest members of that society being better off than the poorest members of more economically free societies? I think the poorest of the poor tend to show up in societies that hold this assumption.

2) That people’s lots in life are static and that they do not respond to incentives. Increased automation does not doom people to a malthusean distopyia. Rather it frees up their minds to find some other new way of cooperating with others. Rather than keeping people stuck in menial mind draining labor, they now have an incentive to find something else to do. I think people respond to incentives of this sort.

I find your conclusions difficult to accept because I’m struggling with what I think you’re assuming.

Yancey

I am sure that you are correct that David wanted to emphasis the difference between an entitlement and a safety net. That is a fair point but let’s remember Social Security and Medicare were designed to be a combination of the two, not just one or the other.

To be fair, David’s comparison of poverty rates between age groups was right on point and supported his argument well.

On the other hand, it’s hard to justify preferring a comparison of average net worth to a comparison of median net worth which would have been much more relevant.

Dent,

but there is no magic right to accumulate arbitrary physical resources in the hands of a few.

First, can you explain how this could possibly happen in a free market society? Second, can you give examples of this being worse in free market societies than in command and control societies?

Wealth ownership, like wealth creation, is NOT zero sum. That people are wealthy in free market societies is most certainly not the cause of others to be less wealthy.

[Property rights are] enforced by ordinary physical violence by the police, after all.

This is categorically false. Do you not steal from your neighbor solely because of the threat of arrest? Of course not. If the only constraint on theft and the total disregard for property rights was the threat of force, crime rates all over the world would be much much higher than they are now.

Libertarians usually do not address this as they see reproduction as a right not to be meddled with.

Libertarians have addressed this exhaustively. Forced sterilization and population control (i.e., killing people) are disgusting practices that have done far more damage than whatever good anyone ever thought they would do.

As libertarians would have us accept unlimited migration of unskilled workers, most humans will then live on subsistence, and the malthusian nightmare will be exported to every nation that allows it.

This is logically and empirically false.

My final beef with libertarianism is that it defends “rights” that don’t just affect the individual

Rights have never been about “just affecting the individual”. Rights, by their very nature, are about obligations imposed on others. The right to property obliges others to keep their hands off. The right to life obliges others to not kill you because they find your existence inconvenient.

@Ken:

Some of your points may have merit, but it seems you have treated some of mine quite uncharitably, e.g. I never gave reason to assume I condone forced sterilization or killings. I do, however, question the ethics of forcing children to live in a slum, or any similarly adverse circumstance, I do think parents should be held accountable for the consequences of their reproductive choices, and I do feel libertarians fail to address these issues adequately.

This has become quite an extensive debate; I’ll quit at this point.

@MingoV:

I had always assumed that when I turned 65, I would be instantly stupid, sick, and broke. If I had known I would live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.

My view of it is that you work until you die unless you are rich enough not to. I have never heard a logical reason why a cohort of able people should not work and are entitled to idleness at someone else’s expense.

According to the supporting data referenced, people retiring in 2010 will receive less in social security than they paid in social security taxes by about 10% – i.e. social security is self supporting. All of the “unpaid for/unearned” benefits are medicare benefits which is further asterisked as expected rather than realized and the link goes on to indicated that longer life is expected to result in increased medicare benefits

Comparing a program that is self supporting to one that is not and claiming that both are unjust seems a bit much, maybe you should separate your criticism of each program instead of trying to tie both together

That’s not what your comment read like.

Then you misread. However, I do condone the use of coercion for those who breed irresponsibly. For instance, I respect the government of China’s right to fine citizens who choose to have more children than the law allows. There are different types and degrees of coercion, and you directly jumped to the physically most intrusive ones. I favor market-based approaches that allow reproduction for those who can afford to feed their children, and punish those who can’t (and yet create children), just like any other child abuser.

No one is FORCED to live in a slum.

Of course they are. Are you seriously telling me children born into a slum are NOT forced to live there? What is a three-year-old to do, get a job in a rich household? Commit rational suicide? If you have to argue from fairy land premises that are clearly empirically false, it’s a warning sign of ideological blindness. Your assertion that no one is forced to live in a slum, even though hundreds of millions clearly are, is such a sign.

The resort to “it’s for the children” is the oldest bait and switch in the book for back dooring government intervention of all kinds.

You have it backwards. You think I start with a secret malicious wish to create Big Government, and then use the children as a tool to get there. The truth is, I really do care about the children, as well as non-human animals. Why? Because they NEVER CONSENTED and they CANNOT OPT OUT. This is the one textbook reason to justify coercive intervention in otherwise free private conduct. You would not define a “basic right” to abduct or adopt children, to hit children or to rape children. Neither should you define a “basic right” to create children under circumstances that are predictably detrimental. The precise definition of that point is a matter of degree, there is no all-or-nothing morality in legitimate precaution, just like there isn’t one in economic freedom.

If you want to have absolutes, ban all reproduction. That’s where the antinatalists end up, by rejecting all non-consensual physical conduct completely.

According to the supporting data referenced, people retiring in 2010 will receive less in social security than they paid in social security taxes by about 10% – i.e. social security is self supporting.

If people pay in more than they get back, they have no incentive to volunarily participate. And the people who retire in 2020 will get an even worse deal. And 2030 an even worse deal.

So Social Security is not sustainable either. (Though I agree it’s not as ridiculously unsustainable as Medicare.)

These programs replaces this enormous financial uncertainty with a simple and predictable tax. That does have a lot of value.

The problem, as with that wonderfully hokie line from Top Gun, is that both Social Security’s and Medicare’s “…egos are writing checks their bodies can’t cash.”

If Social Security and Medicare merely took cash built up by a generation, and distributed it within that generation, it would be one thing. What Social Security and Medicare are actually doing is making all the generations after the peak of the Baby Boom generation pay more money in than they can ever hope to get out. And it will get worse (paying more and more in, with getting out less and less) forever and ever.

Hi Dent,

If you want absolute non-interference laissez-faire instead, then at least for some of the children, the result will have so much negative utility that a rational person would very much rather not have been born. After all, children are starving, or suffering from pain syndromes, and where is their individual liberty NOT to go through that experience?

It is simply not possible for one person to decide whether another “rational person would very much rather not have been born.”

For example, look at Stephen Hawking. Obviously, he certainly would not choose to have ALS. I might even say that, were I in his situation, I would rather not be alive. But I strongly suspect that if you told him that, if you were in charge, you would have decided he shouldn’t be born, he would not view that in a positive manner. Or look at the girl, Emma, in that video. You or I could say that, in her place, we’d be unhappy. But *she* doesn’t seem unhappy.

So your “solution” to this problem appears to be laws and panels that say who can reproduce and under what circumstances, with the aim of somehow protecting those who are born. As with many cases of government intervention, I think the “solution” would almost certainly be worse than the problem.

A better “solution” to what you view as a problem might be to have “parental malpractice” civil laws, wherein a child who thought he/she was harmed by parents could sue for civil damages. At least, in that case, the “victim” would at least think he/she *was* a victim. This is in contrast to reproductive laws wherein the people allegedly being protected might not think they were victims at all. Of course, one example you give is a child born into a slum. If the child sued for “parental malpractice” damages, obviously very little money could be recovered (because the parents, after all, are living in a slum).

As for eugenics, if a potential parent has a genetic defect that can be predicted to induce significant suffering on the children, they should not be allowed to have children, unless there exist interventions that can prevent the suffering (and the parents can afford them).

Again, the idea that a legislature could decide which “genetic defects can be predicted to induce significant suffering on the children” is, I think, a very bad one. For instance, if Stephen Hawking’s ALS was genetic, would his parents have been allowed to have him?

Mark