Frédéric Bastiat

You have seen the sailor who risks his life in the Strait of Hormuz, and the worker in the shipyard who builds the vessels that may be targeted. You have not yet looked for the consumer in Paris, the farmer in the Midwest, or the factory owner in Manchester who pays the invisible tax of your proposed solidarity. Let us follow the money a little further, and introduce the person who has been left out of the account.

I must concede, with full sincerity, that your diagnosis of the immediate beneficiaries is correct. HIGH CONFIDENCE When a state intervenes to secure a trade route through the threat of force, it is indeed the arms manufacturers, the shipping magnates, and the political class who see their ledgers swell. The visible beneficiary is the protected interest; the visible cost is the blood and treasure expended by the state. You are right to point out that commerce guarded by the bayonet is not free commerce, but coerced exchange. I do not dispute that the state often acts as a mechanism for legal plunder, transferring wealth from the many to the few under the guise of national security.

However, our frameworks diverge sharply on the nature of the alternative you propose. You speak of an “audit of solidarity,” implying that the current arrangement is a choice made by the masters of capital to enrich themselves at the expense of the common man. I argue that the current arrangement is a failure of imagination, a refusal to see the unseen consequences of removing the state from the equation entirely. You ask who bears the cost of the tension. I ask who bears the cost of the vacuum that would follow if we simply withdrew the guard.

Consider the merchant who wishes to send his goods from the East to the West. Under the current system, he pays a premium - through taxes or higher prices - to ensure the navy patrols the strait. This is a visible cost. But what is the unseen benefit? It is the certainty that his ship will arrive. Now, imagine we accept your premise that the state’s role is illegitimate because it serves capital. We remove the navy. The strait is no longer “guarded by the threat of war,” but it is also no longer guarded by the threat of any war. It becomes a highway for pirates, for privateers, for any power that wishes to seize the cargo.

The sailor you wish to protect is no longer risking his life against a state actor; he is risking it against a thousand private actors who have no interest in his safety, only in his cargo. The cost does not disappear; it merely changes form. It shifts from a predictable tax to an unpredictable ransom. The “freedom” you advocate is not the freedom of the common man to eat, but the freedom of the strong to prey upon the weak. In the absence of a common law enforced by a neutral power, the law of the jungle prevails. And in the jungle, the sailor is not a citizen with rights; he is prey.

You argue that the state decides the sailor is a “necessary expense.” I agree that this is a tragic calculation. But let us trace the consequence of your alternative. If we dismantle the mechanism that secures the route, the cost of insurance skyrockets. The price of oil, of grain, of manufactured goods, rises not because of a tariff, but because of the risk of total loss. The worker in the shipyard may lose his job, yes. But the worker in the textile mill, who relies on imported cotton, loses his livelihood because the cotton can no longer be delivered. The family waiting by the telephone is not saved; they are impoverished by the inflation that follows the disruption of trade.

The error in your reasoning is the belief that the state’s intervention is the primary source of harm. I contend that the state’s intervention, however imperfect, is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The “masters of capital” do not create the tension in the Strait; they merely navigate it. The tension exists because of geopolitical realities, not because of the market. To blame the market for the need for security is like blaming the umbrella for the rain. The umbrella is expensive, and it is often sold by men who profit from the storm, but without it, we are all soaked.

I do not defend the corruption of the political class. I defend the principle that security is a prerequisite for prosperity. Without the unseen benefit of a secure route, the seen benefit of lower taxes is an illusion. The money saved by the taxpayer is lost by the consumer. The wealth is not destroyed, but it is redirected from productive enterprise to defensive survival. We do not become richer by stopping the navy; we become poorer, and more vulnerable.

So, I ask you: when you strip away the “machinery” of the state, what replaces it? Not solidarity, but anarchy. And in anarchy, who is the first victim? It is not the oil company. It is the sailor. It is the worker. It is the family. You wish to save them from the state, but you condemn them to the pirate. Is this the freedom you seek? Or is it merely a different kind of slavery, one that wears the mask of liberty but carries the whip of necessity?

Eugene V. Debs

The workers who build the ships, who refine the oil, and who manufacture the munitions have a singular interest: they wish to work without fear of the draft, without the threat of the strikebreaker’s club, and without the hollow promise that their labor serves liberty while their wages remain stagnant. The decision being made does not include their voice. It should.

My friend across the table speaks with the clarity of a man who has studied the ledger but not the life. He argues that every dollar spent on a warship is a dollar stolen from the schoolhouse, the bridge, or the loom. He points to the “Unseen” workers - the shoemaker, the restaurateur, the car dealer - who suffer because the state has redirected resources toward the deck of the destroyer. I concede this point entirely. HIGH CONFIDENCE The arithmetic of taxation is brutal. When the government reaches into the pocket of the working man to fund the ambitions of the powerful, it is theft, plain and simple. The shoemaker does lose his customer. The bridge does remain broken. The libertarian is correct that the state does not create wealth; it merely moves it, and in doing so, it often moves it from the many to the few.

But here is where our paths diverge, not in the diagnosis of the theft, but in the identification of the thief. My opponent sees the state as the primary villain, a neutral arbiter that has been corrupted by bad policy. I see the state as the armed guard of capital. The question is not whether the government spends money on warships instead of schools. The question is why the government feels compelled to protect the supply chains of oil companies at all. Why must the taxpayer fund the security of private profit?

The libertarian argues that if we remove the state’s intervention, the market will correct itself, and the shoemaker will thrive. But look at the specific situation. The oil companies do not need the navy because they are weak; they need the navy because they are strong enough to demand protection for their monopolies. The “Project Freedom” is not a public good; it is a subsidy for private accumulation. The workers who build the ships are not free agents in a neutral market; they are conscripted into a system that values the flow of crude oil over the health of their children. The division my opponent proposes - between the state and the individual - is a false one. It divides the worker from his class interest by suggesting that his enemy is the government, rather than the class that uses the government to protect its property.

Consider the railroad strikes of my own time. The government did not send troops to protect the workers’ right to bargain. It sent troops to protect the railroad owners’ right to run trains through a strike. The cost was borne by the workers, who were beaten, jailed, and starved. The benefit went to the owners, who kept their profits intact. The “Unseen” in that story were not the abstract consumers of rail transport; they were the men lying in the mud, bleeding for a living wage. The libertarian framework tells us that the state’s intervention was the error. I tell you that the state’s intervention was the feature, not the bug. The state exists to enforce the property rights of the capitalist class.

My opponent’s analysis is sound regarding the mechanism of taxation, but it is blind to the purpose of that taxation. He sees a misallocation of resources. I see a defense of the social order. The shoemaker loses his customer not because the government is inefficient, but because the government is efficient at protecting the interests of those who own the means of production. To argue for less state intervention is to argue for a freer field for capital to exploit labor. It is to suggest that if only the government would step aside, the worker would be free. But the worker is not free when the boss owns the factory, the landlord owns the house, and the bank owns the debt. Removing the state’s protection of oil pipelines does not liberate the worker; it merely leaves him exposed to the raw, unmediated power of the corporation.

The solidarity audit reveals the truth. Who bears the cost? The worker, who pays the tax and risks his life. Who benefits? The oil company, which secures its supply. What divides the people bearing the cost? The illusion that the state is a neutral referee rather than a participant in the class struggle. The libertarian calls for the removal of the referee. I call for the workers to seize the field.

We must not be fooled by the language of “freedom” when it is used to justify the protection of private wealth. True freedom is not the absence of state interference in the market; it is the presence of democratic control over the means of life. Until the workers organize to demand that the resources of the nation serve the needs of the people rather than the profits of the few, the debate between the state and the market is a distraction. The shoemaker and the shipbuilder are brothers. Their enemy is not the government that taxes them, but the system that demands their labor to protect the property of others. Let us not argue over who holds the whip, but who shall break it.