The Core Dispute Between Political Philosophies: The Proper Gov’t Response To Abusive Power
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
When you get down to the core of competing political philosophies you realize that the fundamental argument between all of them is over how each thinks a government should deal with huge imbalances in bargaining power between competing interests such as the employers and employees, sellers and buyers, landlords and tenants.
The Anarchists’ Answer
On one extreme, anarchists say that a government should do absolutely nothing to remedy vastly unequal bargaining power, nothing to prevent or protect the weaker parties in situations where their wealth and freedom is under attack from those with much greater power.
In the anarchist political religion, if you can cheat someone, steal their money, whatever, the government must leave you entirely free to do whatever you’re powerful enough to get away with and it’s solely the responsibility of the victim to find some way to protect himself against you without resorting to any government action.
The anarchist says that the bank can do anything it wants and the borrower’s only choice is to either accept the loan on the terms demanded or do without.
An anarchist country is a survival-of-the-fittest, law-of-the-jungle, dog-eat-dog society where there is an unrestricted exercise of power by one side over the other without any fear of government interference or restriction.
The Libertarians’ Answer
The libertarians are a little to the left of the pure anarchists. They say that everyone should be free to do anything and everything they can get away with short of theft and violence.
In their political religion the government is allowed to operate a police force that seeks to protect individuals against rape, robbery and murder, but otherwise the government may not prevent a business from selling contaminated and unsafe products, forming monopolies and cartels, discriminating against racial and religious groups, polluting the air and water, misrepresenting their goods and services, levying outrageous fees, etc.
In their society it’s up to the weaker person or group to find some non-government way to defend themselves from powerful people and organizations that seek to take their money and their freedom.
The Communists’ Answer
At the other end of the spectrum are the communists who say that in order to avoid the mistreatment of the weak by the strong, all imbalances in power between adversarial groups must be eliminated.
Because communists believe that the profit motive inherently drives all sellers, employers and landlords to abuse their power over buyers, employees and tenants, they decided that the best way to eliminate the abuse of the weak by the strong is to have a benevolent government assume the sole role of seller, employer and landlord.
The communists’ idea is that since the government has no profit motive, it is akin to a neutral escrow holder and thus when it performs the role of employer, seller and landlord the government will act fairly because it has no incentive to mistreat employees, consumers or tenants.
A communist country is one where all power resides in the government which in theory will fairly exercise that power as a benevolent dictator in order to ensure the fair treatment of everyone.
The Socialists’ Answer
Socialists are a little less restrictive than communists. They generally demand that in order to prevent sellers and employers from using their vastly greater power to abuse employees and consumers, that the major industries should be owned and operated by the government but that smaller businesses that have far less power and far fewer employees and customers may still be allowed to be in private hands.
The Someplace In The Middle Answer
Every other political religion falls someplace between these two extremes, but the goal of all of the philosophies between the two extremes is the implementation of some policy about how the government should or should not react to massive mismatches in power between employers and employees, sellers and buyers, landlords and tenants and any other individuals and groups that are in highly unbalanced, adversarial relationships.
In a non-anarchist capitalist society, the role of the government in protecting individuals from the self-serving, abusive actions of corporations and institutions that have vast power over human beings is a matter of debate and disagreement.
The Market Resolves The Issue When There Is Equal Power
In a non-anarchist capitalist society, those situations where the two opposing sides, buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, employer and employee, have roughly equal bargaining power, their transactions will generally be fairly resolved by market forces.
Where the bargaining power of the sellers of a product is roughly equal to that of the buyers of that product, the market will generally set a price and terms that most buyers and sellers will consider to be more or less reasonable under the factual circumstances.
The Market Does Not Resolve The Issue When Bargaining Power Is Greatly Unequal
In a non-anarchist capitalist society, disputes over the exercise of government power arise in regard to those situations where the bargaining power between sellers and buyers, employers and employees and landlords and tenants is materially unequal.
In those situations, the much stronger party will use its overwhelmingly greater bargaining power to impose extreme terms, conditions and prices that are vastly more favorable to itself than the terms that would have been agreed to in a negotiation between two parties with roughly equal bargaining power.
The Fundamental Questions About Government Action
The disputes between the liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, over the nature and extent of government regulations affecting employers, sellers, and landlords is really a disagreement over
- 1) how extreme the imbalance in power between the two sides needs to be in order to justify government involvement in the first place and
- 2) if there is to be some government action, the type and extent of the remedy the government should impose in order to moderate that imbalance in power.
For example, there is a huge imbalance in the bargaining power of the buyers of unskilled labor — employers — and the sellers of unskilled labor — unskilled workers.
In industries where the unskilled workers’ terms of employment are negotiated by a single representative on behalf of the workers (a union agent) and a single representative on behalf of the employer, the negotiated terms generally include paid sick leave, paid vacations, medical insurance, pension contributions, compensation for on-the-job injuries and an hourly wage that is two or three times higher than the compensation that is paid to an unskilled worker who bargains with the employer only for himself/herself alone.
The question then becomes
- 1) should the government do something to remedy the extreme imbalance between the bargaining power of the individual, unrepresented workers vis a vis employers? and
- 2) if so, what form should that remedy take?
How This Question Might Be Answered
In industrialized countries the answer to this question has generally been
- 1) “yes” and
- 2) wage and hour regulations which provide a set of basic terms that include workers’ compensation, a minimum wage, overtime rules, and the like.
With wage and hours laws the government isn’t increasing the bargaining power of the unskilled worker, but rather it is providing a “floor” or set of minimum provisions that are closer to what more powerful employees have been able to negotiate but that are now applied to all employees.
This isn’t the only possible mechanism the government could have used to remedy the huge imbalance in bargaining power between employers and workers.
- The government could have established a state-run union that all non-union workers were automatically enrolled in and it could have held negotiations on their behalf with an elected or appointed employer representative to set minimum terms of employment for those workers.
- The government could have prohibited employers from hiring anyone not already in a union unless and until an employer representative reached an agreement for the minimum terms of employment with a government-appointed bargaining agent for all such workers in that state.
I’m sure that there are numerous other mechanisms that might be adopted to remedy the huge imbalance in bargaining power between employers and workers. The point is that
- Employers exploit their overwhelming bargaining power to greatly reduce their obligations to individual workers compared to the terms of employment that would have been negotiated between employers and fully united workers,
- In the non-anarchist view, the government’s job is to ameliorate, rectify, modify or remedy the huge imbalance in the relative bargaining power of the two sides in such a way as to obtain terms that are reasonably similar to the terms that would have been negotiated between two adversaries of roughly equal bargaining power.
Greatly Unbalanced Power Also Affects Buyer & Seller Transactions
This bargaining power imbalance issue not only affects employers and employees. It applies to transactions between individual buyers and banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, medical providers, providers of transportation and communication services, pharmaceuticals, etc. (sellers).
In all these situations the bargaining power of the seller of those goods and services is vastly greater than that of the individual human customers.
If a seller has a monopoly or is part of a cartel, the seller’s massively greater bargaining power will result in a price for that product that is far higher than the free-market, competitive price would be.
To remedy that situation, the government might simply make cartels and monopolies illegal in the assumption that without them a reasonable price would be set by the free market.
But the government might use any of several other strategies to remedy that huge imbalance between the cartel seller’s bargaining power and that of the buyer. For example, it could
- Require that the sales price on qualifying products be no greater than Cost + Overhead + A Profit Margin Of XX% and that the purchase price be no less than Cost + Overhead + A Profit Margin Of YY%
- Limit sellers’ annual profits on the sale of qualifying products to no more than XX% of qualifying costs.
Summary
The real issue in all political systems is:
“What, if anything, should the government do in situations where the bargaining power of major classes of adversarial interests (employers/employees, sellers/buyers, landlords/tenants) is vastly unbalanced?”
- Anarchists and Libertarians say, “Do nothing.”
- Communists and Socialists say, “Eliminate the imbalance in power by the government itself becoming the employer, seller and landlord.”
- Those in the middle say, “Adopt rules and regulations that in some cases, to some extent, modify, rectify or ameliorate the imbalance in power by imposing minimum terms or terms similar to those that would have been agreed to in a negotiation between parties of equal bargaining power.”
- Which cases where the government should act,
- What mechanisms the government should employ, and
- To what extent the government should remedy a large imbalance in bargaining power between the adversarial groups
are the practical battlegrounds between competing political ideologies.
Do you:
- Set terms that are beneficial to the country as a whole, e.g. a minimum wage
- Set terms that are similar to the terms that have been independently negotiated by similar parties of relatively equal bargaining power, e.g. some percentage of the compensation that has been agreed by employers to be paid to union members who are providing similar types of services
- Set terms that seem required by fundamental ideas of fairness, e.g. the employer must provide medical treatment for on-the-job injuries
So, the philosophical battle is —
- Should the government in some way institute some mechanism to remedy or ameliorate cases of extremely unbalanced bargaining power between adversarial groups such as employers and employees, buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants or
- Should we live in a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, law-of-the-jungle world where the stronger the bargaining power of one side, e.g. Goliath Bank, versus that of the other party, e.g. Joe Sixpack, the more favorable to Goliath and the more onerous to Joe Sixpack are the terms that Goliath will be free to impose without fear of any government restriction?
The Anarchist Fairy Tale
One note: the anarchists will tell you that the government should do nothing and they will try to sell that idea with the false claim that the government doesn’t need to do anything because all these abuses fueled by the imbalance of power will automatically fix themselves.
Of course, that’s a lie, but it’s also irrelevant because the anarchists’ philosophy isn’t contingent on whether the abuses actually do fix themselves or not.
The “everything will fix itself” story is like the guy telling the girl, “Of course after I have sex with you I’ll still love you in the morning.”
It’s just a promise designed to close the deal, but the deal is never contingent on that promise actually being kept.
Anarchists don’t say the government should do nothing so long as the abuses flowing from the imbalance of power fix themselves, but if they don’t go away on their own after XX months then the government can go ahead and make them illegal.
Anarchists will never, ever, ever under any circumstances allow the government to end abuses of power that don’t fix themselves because freedom for powerful corporations from any government restraint is all they care about. The real-world consequences for human beings from that policy are unimportant to them.
Once the guy gets the girl to take off her skirt, still loving her the next morning is something he’s no longer concerned with.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
