The State - (8) - [Draft]

Part Two - The State - (8) - [Draft] - Freedom Needs a Strong State - Organising and Defending Freedom Requires Massive Collective Action and Resources

Image credit. Continued from here and here.

§ 34 - Freedom Is a (Vast Bundle of) Public Good(s)

At this point, it is helpful to recall our earlier finding (see § 26 and § 27) according to which the state is society's lynch-pin facilitator and main provider of public goods. In this capacity, the state is able to crucially expedite (e.g. by financing infrastructure projects) or directly provide (e.g. by running the judicial system) socially useful services and goods that no other agent is capable of delivering.

Freedom may be thought of as being based on

• a vast network of collective achievements (public goods), 

whose delivery is

• out of the reach of private providers, 

because the latter either

• have no incentive,

or

• lack the capacity 

to deliver these socially desirable goods.

§ 35 - Only with the Help of the State Are We Able to Defray the High Cost of Liberty

Non-government agents do not possess the coercive means to break the resistance of those unwilling to contribute to the common goals

• necessitated by collective needs,

• defined by collective decision making processes 

and

• enforced, implemented, and defended by collective institutions of affirmative action (normally involving the state). 

Hence, private agents are incapable of pooling and directing society's resources to anywhere near the extent required for effective, comprehensive, and large-scale provision of public goods. Put differently, freedom is simply too expensive to be delivered through the means attainable by private agents within their budgetary constraints. No private party is wealthy and powerful enough to afford by its own efforts and resources all the liberty it may personally enjoy in a liberal-democratic state, let alone ensure such liberty to all his fellow citizens.

Private agents need to be linked up (regulated, nudged, guided, coerced and materially endowed) by the agency of the state in order to attain sufficient levels of public resources and facilitative capabilities to render freedom feasible.

§ 36 - Freedom, Rights, and Costly Remedies - Why There is No Negative Liberty, Only Positive Liberty

Underlying the encompassing and organic inclusion of the state in the freedom project is the very nature of rights themselves.

Rights appear to come in two distinct forms:

• negative rights that demand of us forbearance, i.e. not to do certain things, like not trespassing on somebody's premises, 

and

• positive rights that require us to positively do something, like the police overpowering a hostage-taker, rather than merely refraining from doing something. 

At closer inspection, it transpires however that every right is a positive right, in that

• for any right to be taken seriously and thus be generally observed, 

• we need to engage in positive action which at least 

• credibly signals that contravention will not be condoned. 

A "purely negative" right that promises the community, say, protection against police abuse will become operative only when we institute means to positively take action with the effect of deterring, otherwise preventing, and punishing infringement.  

One way of looking at liberty is to think of her as a state of affairs precluding actions classified as arbitrary. Rights help us identify arbitrary actions. By explicitly specifying or indirectly implying actions that must not be engaged in if certain conditions of freedom are to prevail, rights thereby determine duties of correct conduct and remedies against misconduct. Demanding correct conduct and specifying remedies in case of contravention is meaningless in the absence of an apparatus capable of enforcing the rights from which the corresponding demands of conduct (duties) and punishment (remedies) are derived. The apparatus is costly, and can only be implemented within the framework of a state.

Even though of considerable currency, the widespread dichotomy between

• positive liberty (consisting of positive rights) 

and

• negative liberty (consisting of negative rights) 

turns out not to hold once we come to realise that even

• forbearance cannot be ensured without performing positive acts of deterrence and enforcement,

• immunities are predicated on entitlements (to have a right enforced),

• negative liberties do not become operatively real unless positive liberties (entitlements to enforcement) are effected,

• the liberty of a person (to be free from some grievance) depends on the community's subsidy, i.e. its active contribution of efforts and resources supporing enforcement, and that

liberty is

• not a matter of "small government," when "small government" means a reduction of government interference, 

but that, instead, liberty is

• in need of "big government," when "big government" means that the vast host of rights that we acquire during the course of liberty's growth is actually to be enduringly sustained.

In sum, in maintaining a free society, i.e. a regime of protected rights, we depend on the competences, capabilities, and resources of public agents.

The rights that constitute liberty evaporate in the absence of costly remedies. Rights correspond with duties and the latter's performance is predicated on the threat of socially costly punishment of dereliction. Liberty hinges on enforcement power. As we have explained above (§ 34), only the state has the competence, capability, and resources to put the defence of rights into effect. Therefore, all rights are claims to affirmative state action. Ultimately, all rights are benefits provided by the state.

Such is the nature of the tight and indissoluble nexus between liberty and the state. This is what I had in mind, when I wrote at the outset of the chapter that liberty is a state-project.

Freedom is not a private product; she is being collectively produced, maintained, and defended. Her lynch pin and load-bearing framework is the state. In a certain historical period, the state may have been incapable of supporting liberty (in total or parts of her), and even today freer world, the state may be abused so as to violate or even destroy freedom, but whenever liberty becomes feasible she is the result of capabilities residing in the state. 

Continued here.