Never Let A Libertarian Accuse You Of Putting A Gun To Someone’s Head

I think Libertarianism, as a political ideology, is nonsensical for many reasons. But one of the worst things libertarians do is try to morally condemn others for violating some value that they themselves need to violate just to get their own philosophy off the ground.     

For instance, Libertarians claim to oppose coercion and government interference in private businesses. So if someone were to support a social democratic reform, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, libertarians will often accuse them of “putting a gun to the employer’s head” because that would require forcing the employer to pay that wage.

The problem is libertarians do not oppose coercion, violence, or government interference in private businesses. I would argue they are quite fond of those things. In fact, an ideal libertarian society would have guns pointed at your head at all times. A recent conversation I had with a libertarian can perfectly illustrate what I mean.

In a conversation about how to raise the income of the working poor, I argued one way could be strengthening collective bargaining rights or unions. The line of reasoning is simple: Given that a decrease in the share of income going to the middle-class and income inequality rising over the decades strongly correlates with the decline in union membership, and since union jobs generally pay more than non-union jobs, an implementation of policies that make it harder, or even illegal, for employers to disrupt unions would raise the wages of working people. I see this as a good thing because I think income inequality is bad and that people should have democratic rights where they work.

They obviously disagreed, but for bizarre reasons. Their first response was:

“I’m all for collective bargaining [as long as] there is no coercion involved through violence or governmental intervention.”

Now this is a strange objection. Coercion and governmental intervention already play an essential role in maintaining present day employer-employee relations. Indeed, they would play an essential role even in their ideal system. And this is true in a practical sense and in a theoretical sense. In the practical sense, at-will employment, or an agreement that allows an employer to fire someone for any reason, is enforced by employment law. It’s not backed by some God-given right of employers. The government grants the employer with that right and protects it through threat of force against workers who do not like that idea. Workers are coerced to accept this property relation.

In the theoretical sense, granting particular rights to anyone entail “restrictions on behavior” which are coercive. Christopher Schimke lays this out in his  critique of Libertarianism. Schimke refers to rights as being “correlative with duty.” In other words, if you have a right to do something, then others have a duty not interfere with you as to violate that right.

This means that in a laissez faire capitalist system where employers are granted a private property right to exclude people at-will from their property, others have a duty not to interfere with that right. If I were to walk in a place of business and sit down to simply use WiFi, the owner would have the right to violently remove me for not buying anything. In fact, I can be removed for almost any reason. This would happen even if I never initiated force against anybody. In the case of using WiFi, I would only be sitting there.

The fact is all property relations that involve owners and users require force and violence to maintain. So the question is not whether there is going to be coercion or violence applied in a employer-employee relationship. Rather, what employer-employee relationship do we desire such that we would be willing to justify the coercion necessary to maintain it. A libertarian opposing forced collective bargaining rights on an employer on the grounds that its coercive doesn’t cut it. They need to argue why at-will employment is desirable to more workplace democracy.

After delivering a simplified version of these arguments, they did not engage with them. Instead, they ignored them and went for the memorized NPC libertarian kill shot:

“The difference between my values and yours is I don’t want violence or coercion applied to anyone. Whereas you are completely willing to point a gun to the head of the people you disagree with if they don’t comply with your values.”

This would only make sense if they were opposed to violence and coercion in all instances. However, as I have shown, libertarians are fine with using force and violence to uphold an employer’s right to remove anyone for any reason from their property. They are also fine with employers having vastly more power than workers which is enforced by violence too.

So when a libertarian says a gun is pointed at the head of the boss, all they are saying is that they support the existing private property relationship. In other words, libertarians do not oppose these proposals because they involve coercion. They oppose them because it violates a system they like.

Incidentally, when libertarians defend stronger private property rights for employers instead of workers’ right to organize, they are implicitly arguing for governmental intervention themselves. As Nathan J. Robinson points out in an article in Current Affairs,

They pretend that all they want is freedom from the state’s meddling, but actually they just want the state to defend those who have property (much of which may have been accumulated illegitimately through conquest and terror, though apparently this has no effect on the legitimacy of property rights).

Libertarians could conceivably make a case for why employers having the right to run workplaces like dictatorships is better than people having democratic rights where they work. But instead, they oppose social democracy by trying to appeal to a principled opposition to coercion when they clearly don’t oppose it at all. I think this is beyond cowardly.

You should never let a libertarian get away with arguing against progressive policies by telling you that you are pointing a gun to someone’s head. Just make them defend the gun they already have pointed at yours.