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janeiro 25, 2005

Entrevista a Richard A. Epstein

O Prof. Richard A. Epstein, Prof. de Direito na Law School da Universidade de Chicago, é um dos mais brilhantes Juristas e pensadores libertários dos Estados Unidos. Este é um excerto interessante de uma entrevista sua à Reason magazine, abordando a essência do seu pensamento libertário e a forma como encara o papel do Estado.

"There is the kind of libertarian universe in which every individual has property rights in his or her own name, and all individuals have the exclusive right to use and dispose of their possessions--land, capital, so forth. Coordinated behavior takes place only through voluntary exchanges. That's a pretty austere world. Among other things, it precludes any government interference to prevent the premature exhaustion of common and pooled resources. And it prohibits any government system of mandatory taxation for any purpose whatsoever because it would be a forced exaction.

On the opposite extreme, there is a system in which you say the state can take from A and give to B because it wants to make B better off. It's quite willing to make A worse off to do so. That looks to most people like theft mediated by legislative behavior."

The traditional accounts of laissez faire and the welfare state have basically said that those are the only two viable alternatives that somebody can describe. And since it's perfectly clear to most people that we cannot have a world with zero taxation, zero police force, and so on, they feel we have to accept the world in which there is extensive government regulation and massive amounts of redistribution through taxation and other systems of social control.

What I said in Takings is, No, there's a tertium quid, a third alternative that allows government regulation and taxation to be used to overcome the holdout problems, the public goods problems, the coordination problems. But the quid pro quo is that if you want to use these coercive powers, you have to provide benefits to the individuals who have been coerced that leave them at least as well off as they were before the coercion takes place.

You can't ridicule this theory the same way that you can a naive version of laissez faire. You can no longer argue that you can't have any state at all. You can no longer argue that public rivers are going to be destroyed by pollution. You can no longer argue that it's impossible to extract oil and gas from underneath the earth in any kind of a sensible fashion. You can no longer argue that it's impossible to have a decent bankruptcy law.

Essentially the point that I'm trying to make in Takings--and I come back to it again in Bargaining with the State--is that you can have a world with forced exchanges without having a world of rampant redistribution, that you can abandon laissez faire without falling into the lap of the New Deal.

A entrevista completa aqui

Afixado por Gibel em 25 de janeiro de 2005, às 11:56

Afixadelas

O problema com a 3ª via proposta é:

Quem define que o "forçado a pagar" fica tão bem como antes?

Se for o individuo, estamos na situação 1 (porque aí não pode haver coerção, logo podemos considerar que se trata de mais um contrato livremente estabelecido).

Se for o estado/a maioria democrática, estamos na situação 2 (o estado sempre pode argumentar que quem foi forçado a pagar teve benificios intangiveis).

Parece-me que se está a tentar criar uma alternativa onde ela na prática não existe...

Afixado por João Branco em 25 de janeiro de 2005, às 23:16