Lane-style

There is a man in the Magdalena Valley whose coffee harvest has just been made impossible by the promise of order. He does not care about the moral architecture of the state. He cares that the price he receives for his beans is set by a committee in Bogotá, not by the market in New York or London. He cares that the “stability” his new leaders promise is the stability of a ledger that balances only if his labor is cheap enough to be ignored.

The socialist argument presented here rests on a premise I find both seductive and fatal: that wealth is an instrument for human flourishing, and that when ownership becomes a right to extract rather than a duty to provide, chaos ensues. I concede the first part of this observation. There is no virtue in hoarding. There is no dignity in extraction that does not correspond to service. If a man owns land but lets it lie fallow while his neighbors starve, he is not a guardian of wealth; he is a parasite on the energy of others. I agree that the acquisitive society, when it divorces property from responsibility, creates a hollow shell that invites the very strongman leadership the socialist fears.

But here is where our paths diverge, sharply and irreconcilably. The socialist sees the strongman as the enemy of the people, a usurper who consolidates power for the few. I see the strongman as the inevitable child of the socialist impulse. When you declare that ownership is a duty to provide, you do not abolish the right to extract; you merely transfer the power to define “provision” from the individual to the state. You replace the farmer’s judgment with the planner’s decree. And in doing so, you do not eliminate the strongman; you create the conditions in which he is the only one who can survive.

The socialist argues that chaos is the natural result of an economy that has forgotten its function. I argue that chaos is the natural result of an economy that has been stripped of its feedback mechanisms. When a farmer in Colombia decides how much to plant, he is responding to signals - price, weather, soil condition, his own family’s needs. These signals are local, immediate, and precise. When the state intervenes to ensure that wealth serves the “community,” it severs those signals. It replaces the farmer’s knowledge with the bureaucrat’s guess. The bureaucrat does not know the soil. He does not know the farmer’s capacity for work. He knows only the quota.

The “Donroe doctrine” mentioned in the opening statement is not an aberration; it is the logical conclusion of centralized control. When you remove the individual’s ability to act on their own knowledge, you create a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics. That vacuum is filled by force. The strongman does not rise because people are greedy; he rises because people have been rendered dependent. When the state claims the right to direct the flow of human energy, it must also claim the right to punish those who divert it. The “order” purchased by this payment is not peace; it is silence. It is the silence of the man who no longer dares to plant what he thinks is best, because he knows the ledger will not balance if he does.

I do not romanticize the frontier. I know the hardship. I know the backbreaking labor, the risk of failure, the loneliness. But I also know that in that hardship, there was a direction. The energy of the settler was directed toward survival, toward creation, toward the specific problem at hand. Today, the energy of the Colombian farmer is directed toward compliance. He spends his days navigating regulations, waiting for permits, and fearing the arbitrary whims of officials who claim to serve the community but serve only their own power. This is not flourishing. This is exhaustion.

The socialist fears the chaos of the free market. I fear the tyranny of the administered state. The free market is messy, yes. It is unpredictable. But it is also responsive. It allows the individual to correct their errors, to learn, to adapt. The administered state does not allow for error; it demands conformity. And in demanding conformity, it crushes the very energy it claims to protect.

We must ask ourselves: who is being served by this “moral architecture”? Is it the farmer, who is told what to grow and at what price? Or is it the official, who is told that he knows better than the farmer what the farmer needs? The answer is clear. The official is being served. The farmer is being managed. And management, no matter how benevolent its intent, is always a form of control.

The strongman is not the remedy for the chaos of extraction; he is the symptom of the disease of dependency. As long as we believe that the state can direct human energy toward the common good, we will continue to produce strongmen. The only alternative is to trust the individual. Not because the individual is perfect, but because the individual is the only one who knows their own life. The only one who can bear the consequences of their choices. The only one who can truly flourish.

The energy that built this country, and that could build Colombia, does not come from the top down. It comes from the bottom up. It comes from the man who decides, against all odds, to plant a seed. It comes from the woman who decides, against all advice, to save a dollar. It comes from the specific, unrepeatable energy of specific individuals. To block that energy is not to create order. It is to create a grave. And in that grave, the strongman will be the only one left standing, holding the shovel.

Tawney-style

The libertarian argument rests upon a vision of energy as a hydraulic force, distributed through the capillaries of individual choice, where the farmer’s decision to plant and the merchant’s decision to stock are acts of creation that require no central gravity to validate them. There is a profound truth in this observation of local knowledge. I concede that the central planner, armed with statistics but blind to the specific conditions of a particular field or shop, often errs in the allocation of resources. The market, in its purest theoretical form, is a mechanism for coordinating information that no single mind can possess. This is a point of significant strength in the opposing case, and one that any serious student of economic history must acknowledge.

However, the error lies not in the recognition of local knowledge, but in the assumption that the distribution of this energy is neutral, or that the “free society” described is one in which energy is merely distributed, rather than concentrated. The libertarian speaks of the farmer and the shopkeeper as if they stand on equal ground, their decisions weighted equally in the political and economic sphere. But we must ask: what function does the ownership of capital serve in this arrangement? If the ownership of land or machinery yields income without the owner performing any service - without bearing risk, without managing, without innovating - then that income is not a reward for function. It is a claim upon the labor of others, extracted by virtue of title alone. This is the functionless wealth that poisons the well of liberty.

The “strongman” phenomenon cited in Colombia is not, as the libertarian suggests, a mere weather pattern or an aberration of political gravity. It is the historical consequence of a society that has allowed economic power to become detached from social function. When wealth accumulates in the hands of those who do not contribute to the production of goods or services, but merely hold title to assets, it creates a class of persons whose interests are opposed to the general welfare. They seek to protect their rents, their dividends, their unearned increments. This concentration of power inevitably distorts the political process, for those who hold the means of life can purchase the means of governance. The “gravitational pull” is not natural; it is engineered by the structural inequality of condition.

The libertarian framework treats property as a right antecedent to society, a sphere of individual sovereignty that must be protected from collective interference. But property is a social institution, created and maintained by law. Its legitimacy depends entirely on the function it performs for the community. If the ownership of land prevents its cultivation, or if the ownership of patents stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, then the property right has ceased to serve its social purpose. It has become a barrier to the very energy the libertarian seeks to unleash. The farmer in Bogotá does not lack freedom because the state intervenes; he lacks freedom because the structure of ownership allows others to extract value from his labor without contributing anything in return.

We must distinguish between the efficiency of the market mechanism and the justice of the property system that surrounds it. The market can be efficient in allocating resources, but it is blind to the distribution of power. A society that elevates acquisition over function will inevitably produce a hierarchy of wealth that is not correlated with merit or service. This hierarchy then translates into political inequality, where the voice of the wealthy carries more weight than the voice of the worker. This is not a failure of the market; it is a failure of the ethical framework that justifies the market. The libertarian sees the strongman as a threat to individual liberty; I see the strongman as the inevitable political expression of an economic system that has forgotten that wealth is a means, not an end.

The historical record is clear on this point. In the early stages of capitalism, the accumulation of capital was often accompanied by genuine risk and genuine service. The entrepreneur organized production, bore the uncertainty of the market, and created new value. But as capital accumulated, it became possible to earn income without performing any function. The dividend, the rent, the interest - these became claims upon the future labor of society, justified by past accumulation rather than present contribution. This shift from functional to functionless wealth is the root of the crisis we face today. It is not a crisis of political doctrine, but a crisis of economic ethics.

To restore true liberty, we must not merely remove the state from the economy; we must reform the structure of property so that it serves function rather than acquisition. This does not require the abolition of private property, but it does require that property rights be conditional upon social utility. The farmer must be free to plant, but the landlord must not be free to extract rent from land that he does not cultivate. The merchant must be free to stock, but the monopolist must not be free to restrict supply to raise prices. Only when wealth is tied to service can we hope to create a society in which the energy of individuals is truly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few who claim ownership without contribution.

The libertarian fears the centralization of power; I fear the centralization of wealth. The two are not unrelated. When wealth is concentrated, power follows. The “hydraulic truth” of individual decision-making is only valid in a society where the starting positions are not radically unequal. If the race is rigged by the distribution of property, then the freedom to run is a mockery. We must look not only at the mechanics of exchange, but at the moral foundations of ownership. Without this, we are left with a system that is efficient in its exploitation, but bankrupt in its justice.