Isolation and Coercion

I am not sure where I got the following quote, but I copied it down because it seems to be pertinent to our current situation.

Modern society tends to be made up of lonely, isolated people. They will often feel like they are surrounded by people they don’t know, don’t like, and don’t trust. They can easily slip into assuming that people who don’t believe what they believe and don’t want what they want are a threat to them.

These feelings of vulnerability often develop into demands for political coercion with the aim of making people think and behave like us. If politicians stoke these fears, it can easily lead to bloodshed.

The problem is that we don’t know how to live with people who are different, so we want to force them to become like us. The Old Testament had rules that required foreigners living in the land to be treated with empathy and kindness. We need more of that empathy and kindness today.

Church and Government

Many Christians do not under the nature of government, so they incorrectly assume that the church and the government are similar types of organisation.

The church is a voluntary organisation. It cannot make people do things that they do not want to do. A pastor can put the guilts on people, and social pressure can pressure people into conforming, but if they don’t like it, they can ignore it. If the pressure becomes to great, they can simply leave.

In the Middle Ages, the church uses the power of excommunication to force people to do things. The people believed that if they were shut out of the church, they would lose their salvation, so they had to obey the commands of the church out of fear of damnation. That does not work anymore. If a church makes threats, a person can leave and go to another, or they can continue to be a Christian outside of the church. The church is a voluntary organisation that can exert moral pressure, but it cannot force people to do things against their will.

In contrast, the government an organisation with the power of coercion. It is not a voluntary organisation in which people join together for the good.

The government in any society has a monopoly on the use of force. This means that it can do things against their will. A government decide how much tax different people owe and the force them to pay it. If people refuse to pay, they can be fined or imprisoned. A government can punish people refusing to obey its laws and regulation. A government can make a citizen go and fight and die in a war, even if they do not support it.

Many Christians try to persuade their government to force other people to do things that they think they should do., but this a two-edged sword. It is a dangerous game to play because sometimes the government will use its power to force Christians to do thing they do not want to do.

In a free society, a church and the gospel is a much safer instrument for bringing social change, because it does not have the power of coercion. It can only bring about social change by persuading free people to change, but that is the best kind of change.

Coercion and the State

The textbook definition of a state is that it an organization can claim a monopoly of legal violence (coercion) within a territory. If it can make this claim, it is a state. A writer at the Mises Daily makes an interesting comment about the implications of this definition.

However, modern State leaders have understood this monopoly is not sufficient by itself to maintain their power. This is why they use ideologies to hide the violent nature of their authority and make the population more accepting of the state’s coercive methods.

In the West, since the nineteenth century, nationalism has largely filled the role of manufacturing consent to government domination, by drawing arbitrarily the contours of a fantasized historical and cultural community. After that came the welfare-state ideology which aims to develop a sophisticated system of fiscal redistribution that cultivates a strong feeling of economic dependence on the political class. And then came the ideology of democracy which allows the state to identify itself with society overall by promoting the illusion that the citizenry maintains control over the state bureaucracy.

Through these means, states in the West have been able to “legitimize” their monopolies over coercion.

For established states, achieving statehood confers a sort of title of nobility on the international stage. That is why many political movements aim to gain international recognition of their state. The status of “state” implies “civilized society”.

And yet, there is nothing honorable about the formation and maintenance of states. States are essentially bellicose and exploitative institutions. None of them can claim to be the fruit of a peaceful or contractual process.

Unfortunately, much of the problem comes from Western citizens themselves who don’t pay attention to their governments, which never hesitate to use a single tragic event in order to increase their power and their “protection” by limiting their citizens’ individual freedoms. By fueling and exploiting fear, governments create a vicious circle which exacerbates the security demands from their populations, which translates into an increase of states” prerogatives. Military spending increases in turn, which satisfies the powerful interest groups that make up the military-industrial complex.

Coercion or Consensus

If the state has power of coercion, and that seems to be its primary characteristic, then a state that takes actions that are not supported by a broad consensus has slipped into tyranny. It will be forcing people to do things against their will, without a moral basis for doing so.

This means that state action must be limited to things that most people support, regardless of whether they make their decision about these things on the basis of reason, emotion religion or just following the crowd. Unless that state stays within the lowest common denominator that everyone accepts, it becomes a tyrant. This is true whether the state is totally secular or listens to religious voices.

There are very few state actions that everyone will agree on, so the role of the state must be very limited.

The only question in Politics is this: When is force justified
(Lew Rockwell - The Left, the Right and the State)?

The Free Rider Problem (2) - Freedom or Coercion

Economists hate free riders, because they fear that free riding will prevent necessary services from being provided. If paying for defence or fire fighting is voluntary, too may people might free ride making the service uneconomic.

The popular solution to free riding is coercion and taxation. To prevent the free rider problem, payments for public goods are made compulsory. This usually takes the form of a tax or compulsory levy. A government is elected. They decide what defence or fire fighting services are required and then impose taxes to cover the cost. Free riding is eliminated, because everyone is forced to pay taxes.

The two options are freedom with free riding and coercion with no free riding. We have a choice between voluntary payments for services with a risk that some people will free ride and public provision with compulsory taxation. Economists choose public provision and compulsory taxation, because they hate free riders more than they love freedom.

Christians love free riders, because we are all free riders. We are free riders on Jesus. Christians received salvation through Jesus work on the cross. We pay nothing towards the cost, as Jesus paid the full price for everyone. Every Christian is a free rider.

(Salvation is not a true public good. Salvation is non-rivalrous because more and more people can enjoy its benefits without additional cost. Salvation is excludable, because those who refuse to repent and believe are shut out of its benefits. Salvation is a non-rivalrous, excludable good, so it does no meet both criteria for a public good.)

Doing Good

The world is full of people who love telling others what to do. These people are not a problem. Unless the persson telling you what to do is your parent or wife, you can mostly just ignore them. Because they are mostly ignored, they cannot do much harm. In fact, if they persuade someone to do something good, that's fine.

Hey! I am one of those who love telling others what to do. And most people have no problem ignoring me, but thats fine. I prefer them to be thinking and free than kowtowing to me.

The world is also full of do gooders. These are not people who want to do what is good. They are people who want to force other people do what they think is good. Again, this is mostly not a problem. We can just ignore them.

The problem arises when these do gooders get hooked up with politicians. An lets face it, most politicians are do gooders. Almost all politicians believe they were elected to make laws and regulations that will force other people do do what they believe is good.

People with the political power to force other people to do good are very dangerous, because they cannot just be ignored. Politicians of every persuasion believe that people should be forced to do what they think is good or right.

Most political commentators have no problem with this. It has become normal. Yet these same commentators are horrified by the the thought that a group of Christians might force God's will on other people. I know which I would sooner have. I'd prefer to be forced to do God's will than be forced to do the will of some of the flaky politicians that get to power in this modern world.

Actually both are wrong. God is not interested in imposing his will on people against their will. He does not want his people doing this and he certainly does not approve of politicians imposing their will on unwilling people.

I am puzzled that intelligent men are upset by one form of coercion, but welcome the other. Maybe it is because they hope to be the ones telling us what to do and making us do it.