Sometimes we talk about the “agreement”, “consent”, “social contract”, “free market”, “social mobility”, etc. We talk about people cooperating in a society in various ways. However, we shouldn’t confuse individual initiative and adaptation, for buy-in to the situation, or for blame and shared ownership of what has happened.
First, I want to give a personal example; then I will write about the economic conditions; then I will write a little about immigration; then I will conclude with a reminder that as much as we talk about liberal democracy and how great it is to live in such societies, they have to be defended from the actions of hostile armies – an obligation for which we never gave consent.
Let’s start the review by talking about elections. At the time of this writing, I have cast ballots over 6 cycles (2000-2020) of American imperial elections. At no point did I vote for an incumbent, or for an incumbent party.
A brief and incomplete digression into strategic voting to frame the point:
- One school of thought is that you should vote for the major opposition party because they have the best chance of winning, and you will at least get some good changes
- Another school of thought is that if you want to get the thing you actually want, you have to vote for the candidates who want that as well, regardless of their current level of popular support
The closest I’ve come to any endorsement of the current direction or leadership, would be my vote for Barack Obama in 2008, who was the major party challenger to the incumbent major party. The ballot I had contained Independent, Libertarian, Green, etc. candidates, and so there were alternatives to the major two parties, for which I acknowledge I might have voted. That was followed by not voting for him in 2012, after e.g. he attacked Libya without congressional authorization; as it so happened, following his re-election, he followed up with other disagreeable actions, including the Syria debacle, and an attempt at more gun-grabbing. That is to say: in 16 of the 20 years, the imperial decisions were made by someone for whom I didn’t vote; and my vote for 4 years of an establishment leader, was reactive against the direction of the previous administration. That is: I consistently sent a signal (in multiple ways) of disapproval and non-consent, to little/no effect. That is on top of the 18 years in which I had no vote at all (because I was a kid).
So, the “best case” scenario, in which you consider that voting for the winning candidate obligates me to accept the responsibility for all their actions, is to pin ~1/10 of the blame e.g. for the accumulated national debt, on me (even that is not accurate, since not all of it was accumulated while I was alive). Sure, I can agree to pay 1/10 of the taxes as everyone else, right? I can do 1/10th of the military service, right? You get the point: I directly did not choose any of this. You certainly could criticize other aspects of my behavior, attitude, or reactions to the situation, as being not optimally constructive; but I have made my opposition to e.g. the uncontrolled deficit spending, crystal clear; and in the respect that my vote might mean something, I have applied the requisite force of rejection at all times.
On the related point: I can choose to build my factory, establish my clinical practice, and generally put down roots in a place, that at the time, has a legislative and cultural climate favorable/agreeable to me. But, the duration of that investment is over decades, over which time, even if I continue to vote as I have, the other people moving in, out, or changing their minds, may very well change that situation. They might go from law and order to leniency; from low-tax to high-tax/big-government; they might institute a moralistic regime, or repeal it. For a relatively commodity worker, we can talk about moving to a more agreeable place as something like consensual government and association; but I can’t “consent” to losing millions of dollars/years of work when someone else changes their mind, and I certainly can’t consent to having illegal immigrant criminals turned loose on parole raping and murdering my daughter. We might accept it as an unfortunate reality of e.g. the freedom of movement and democracy – but telling someone to bite the bullet is not an agreement.
In the matters of economics, we all recognize not merely that people have to work, but that certain people have to make certain decisions based on their current station in life, and that society as a whole has to allocate the most capable people to certain assignments.
Housing that shields us from the elements must be created (unlike e.g. food which at a certain population level, could be gathered). Although we recognize that, at some level and contingency, housing is a human right, someone has to gather the material and shape it, into a house – all of which is economic work. If we ignored all disabled people, rights to property, etc. for the moment, then one could conceive that individuals might be able to make the decision whether or not to build their own house, in a place that suits them. However, at the current population level, we are very far from abundance in land/fresh water, and trees, even; national borders exist, etc. Under the regimes of conservation, mitigation e.g. of pollutants, noise, etc., you have to comply to zoning policy that you did not create, and you must grapple with the realities of large population, geography, etc. that you also did not create. Then, when we say that we are going to hold the line on e.g. infanticide of cripples, we ask the able-bodied members of society to do more, so that we can provide for them as well. The able-bodied members of society might not have agreed with the decision to have kids (in general or specifically to the disability), but if they want to cooperate with the other members of society e.g. to hold the line on murder, they have to put out. Once the consequences of inaction are clear, your adaptation to the situation is not a matter of consent to the first principles or to the creation of the current situation; it only is a matter of mitigating the damage.
Economic efficiency also is not, in the grand scope, a matter of individual consent. We all recognize that some large subset of modern farming practices e.g. maintaining the advances of the Green Revolution, is essential sustainably to feed the world’s current and increasing population. Those practices in turn rely on division of labor, respect for property rights (re: Zimbabwe turning to famine after the confiscation from the white farmers), some levels of chemistry and automation, etc. But, lowering the number of people/economic output required to feed the population, to a suitably safe level to avoid famine, means that at the absolute minimum, 30+% of the population would be surplus labor. As it is, the economic contribution to agriculture in industrialized economies is more like 1-10% of the labor force (depending on what you count). So it is not merely the question that farmers need to be efficient in how they work; it also is the case that the rest of the population has to find a way to be useful to the farmers. Maybe the farmers want you to be an artist; maybe they want you to decorate their homes. Maybe they want you to be a house servant/domestic worker, while they ride the tractor all day long during the harvest season. Unless you are willing to say that the farmers have to work for everyone else/a serfdom, then you have exactly two options:
- A rotation into/out of farming, similar to a military draft, so that the burden equally is spread
- Demand from farmers dictating what people do (whether or not the so recruited workers agree with it)
The similar situation applies with Amazon warehouse and delivery workers: you can hate Amazon’s flea market mess of a site (that’s a nice way of putting it), their toleration of counterfeiting, exploitation of third party vendors, super hostile IT work climate, etc. – but if people are buying from them, then that’s where the jobs are, and unless you want to starve, or force your fellow citizens to put you on welfare, then you have to work for them. You don’t get to choose from all the jobs you want to do in your current location; even as an entrepreneur, you only can choose from the jobs/work for which people are willing to pay. That might mean you have to move to a jurisdiction with legal regimes, social norms, and other elements, with which you don’t agree. In that case, your choices are between letting your family members suffer and die, or putting up with whatever garbage the government, your employer, or your fellow citizens directly, dump on you.
The similar situation applies to the relatively favorable case of the sort-of-voluntary immigrant (of course the involuntary immigrant e.g. Rohingya didn’t constructively choose): even if you have the language skills, do you know all the business practices and regulations? Do you have the money to spend years learning about them, or the capital to start your own business? No, you moved abroad because your country was economically and/or politically hostile, and you could not estimate that you would be able to accumulate such wealth. To support yourself right now, you have to work in a way that suits your current capability and wealth, which by no means makes you eligible for the universe of jobs in the economy.
As for the matter of the white collar worker: consider that your family members are sick, or that you have a large extended family. You don’t have the choice to work in your passion job, if it doesn’t pay well; you get to choose from whichever professions you can enter, that can pay those big bills. If your family members get sick in the middle of your career, but the professions that could pay those bills e.g. medical doctor, are effectively closed to people over 40 due to a combination of formal barriers and economic practicalities (are you going to go without any surplus income for 5-10 years while your family members’ medical bills have to get paid?), you’re out of luck. Considering e.g. the constraint of nonviolence further bounds your options, you are going to have to take whatever you can get in that situation; your agreement to take on that job isn’t concurrence in the economic organization of the country.
Thinking further ahead: if you realize that at some probability (even absent any e.g. genetic predisposition), you, your family members, and your friends, will be sick, fall on hard times, etc., you are going to look to get a job that allows you to build up enough savings/income potential to handle that situation. That is to say: you are not going to do menial work/janitor/clerical/food service; you are going to go work for the hedge fund, medical doctor, software engineer, etc. However, someone has to do those other jobs; not everyone in the society can choose to be highly paid. Your best case scenario is that the menial jobs pay living wages and you have universal health care; but in that case the responsibility for handling these calamities falls on the taxpayers and not you most directly. That is, it’s the taxpayers’ decision whether to help out your loved ones, not yours. If they don’t pay you a living wage, you’re SOL. The situation in which you can tell someone to go work a better job, only works if there are better jobs that they can take on; that is a contingent statement on particulars of the situation, so not universally valid.
And of course, there is the brutal reality that people build nuclear and biological weapons to try and enslave everyone, so we are forced to pay many billions of dollars a year, and perform the related work, to limit the damage that they choose to do to us. When insufficient numbers of people sign up for the all-volunteer army (the typical situation in the West), we have to raise taxes even more to entice people financially to join up, or else we drag them in off the street, and use coercion to keep them working for us.