I don’t know what it’s going to take to trap that dratted Batman . . .

So in our discussion about limits on governmental authority, here is Greg missing the point about my response to his support for wealth transfer programs as an essential component of any legitimate government structure.  The nub of our argument is whether we (acting in our capacity as the government) have the authority to maintain a system of involuntary servitude (known in polite society as “wealth transfer programs”).  I say no; Greg not only says we do, he says involuntary servitude is a moral imperative.

Now, I’m not ready to declare Greg a socialist, but if political philosophies were Venn diagrams, I don’t see how these two statements describe different circles:  (a) “I hold that there is no justification for the existence of the state that does not, in principle, justify the existence of some transfer-type programs as circumstances permit” (Greg Forster); and (b) “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs” (Karl Marx).  Marx’s was pithier, but the whole point of both statements is to justify forcing one person to labor against his will for the benefit of someone else.

Jurisdictional limits make government actions pursuant to either of these statements illegitimate.  Prudential limits may or may not.  What is the difference between the two?  Think of it this way:  It is the difference between “I think that is a bad idea” and “You may not do this.”  One expresses a prudential limit (the former), the other jurisdictional.  The latter exists out of deference to your rights.  The other simply expresses the community’s sense of the best way of accomplishing an objective over which the government otherwise has jurisdiction.

Marx did not recognize jurisdictional limits to government authority.  It appears Greg does not either, which (I think) is the primary reason he misunderstood my post.

Here is what I mean.  In analyzing what I said about limits on governmental authority, Greg made a significant deductive error that led to some straw-man fun with Mongo the Martian Monkey God.  From my argument that wealth transfer programs violate the equality mandate, and consequently exclude “the foundational concept that there are both prudential and jurisdictional limits on government authority,” Greg said only these two positions could possibly follow:

1.       Support for “the equality mandate” as he understands it.

2.       Opposition to all limits on government authority.

The best evidence this is a deductive error is that it does not account for the conjunctive “and” (even though he correctly reproduced the emphasis).  In response to what I said, there are actually at least four positions one may take:

1.       Support for “the equality mandate” as I understand it.

2.       Opposition to all jurisdictional limits on government authority (that is, totalitarianism).

3.       Opposition to all prudential limits on government authority (despotism).

4.       Opposition to all limits on government authority (despotic totalitarianism).

Greg missed the other two potential positions because he didn’t account for the distinction between “prudential” limits on government authority, on the one hand, and on the other “jurisdictional” limits.  That’s why his description of my position seemed odd to him.  So yes, all political philosophers have always believed in some limits on government authority.  It’s just that not all of them have recognized jurisdictional limits, and that is the key to understanding the proper relationship between the people and their government.  Without that understanding, you can never have a proper understanding of rights.

Accounting for the difference between these types of limitations is one of the great achievements of Western political philosophy.  It distinguishes between (a) that which the government should not do because it would not be conducive to human flourishing, and (b) that which the government has no authority to do, no matter how helpful the government might think it would be.  There can be no protection of rights without the second type of limitation on government authority.

When the government sets out to take the bananas you had saved for an offering to Mongo the Martian Monkey God, you might try arguing prudential limits.  That is, you could argue the government ought not take the bananas because your Mongo ministrations benefit the community, give you a sense of fulfillment, and inspire you to be more productive so you can acquire even more bananas to give to Mongo.

Maybe the government will be persuaded.  Maybe not.  Maybe the government will decide that “Bananas for Mongo” makes a mockery of religion and the community and so your bananapalooza must be stopped.  Now you have no option but to retire to your banana-free home to contemplate other ways of magnifying Mongo.  Or of making a more persuasive case.  But if this is all you have, you cannot demand that the government agents cease and desist when they show up to take your bananas.

Asserting jurisdictional limits, however, will yield a significantly different result.  One of those limits is that the government may not violate your rights (if it could, they wouldn’t really be rights, would they?)  A bundle of those rights finds expression in the equality mandate – a mandate that precedes government.  So whatever the government might want to do about your Mongo madness, it may not rightfully violate the equality mandate in doing so.

Therefore, before the government acts, it must first identify how your proposed action will violate someone else’s right (thereby making him less than your equal), and how the proposed government action will maintain or restore everyone to their state of essential equality.  If it cannot make this threshold showing, then the government’s action will itself violate the equality mandate by making you less than equal to your countrymen.

Because the government has no authority to violate the equality mandate, any act in derogation of that mandate will be, by definition, tyrannical.  Thus, if the government cannot establish jurisdiction, the Mongo admirer may rightfully demand that the government agent leave his bananas alone.  Demand, not request.  Assert, not persuade.  And if the government persists in acting outside its jurisdictional limitations, the people are within their rights to dissolve it and start over.  That is the difference between prudential and jurisdictional limitations.

Finally, in fine Orwellian fashion, Greg asks what “equality” is, and then refers to an unidentified “larger philosophical framework” in which “equality” means that one person may coerce another into unwillingly serving his needs.  And then he says I haven’t engaged his argument.  But I have.  I challenged him to show how one person can coercively subjugate another to his need.

I think Greg has not engaged my argument.  So let me put it more directly.  It is the proponent of coercive action who bears the burden of establishing the right to coerce.  Greg does not do this.  Instead, he identifies an objective and moral good (such as the duty to rescue) and then he elevates it to the status of a right enforceable against your neighbor by subjugating him to the other’s need.  But he never describes how it is that he wrestles the duty to rescue into the government’s jurisdiction.

That’s the point of the jurisdictional analysis and the equality mandate.  That is how we determine the locus of enforcement.

So Greg’s mission, should he choose to accept it, is to describe how he distinguishes between those obligations enforceable by government and those that are not. If he cannot do that, then he has no principled basis for arguing against oppressive and tyrannical governments, nor does he have any foundation for the assertion of rights.

I knew this day would come.  Over the years, I have learned that Greg’s opinions are the product of careful thought and keen insight.  And almost without fail, I am quick to confirm him with a hearty “Greg Forster is quite right!”  But once in a while I would hear something that seemed out of place – a passing comment that didn’t mesh, a turn of phrase that flowed uneasily in what I had thought was his stream of thought.  And as those instances accumulated, I started to think there might be some deep difference in the principles that inform our respective opinions.

Thus, I was not terribly surprised when Greg unmasked himself as “not a libertarian.”  That’s okay with me – I don’t think I’m a libertarian either.  What did surprise me was the thorough-going rejection of the equality mandate and the foundational concept that there are both prudential and jurisdictional limits on government authority.  Let’s take a close look at his proposition.

Greg says “I hold that there is no justification for the existence of the state that does not, in principle, justify the existence of some transfer-type programs as circumstances permit.”  Before I give my response, I want to explain how I understand this statement so Greg can correct me if I go astray.

First, Greg refers to my prior posts addressing the illegitimacy of wealth transfer programs (see, for example, here, here and here), so I will assume that when he speaks of “some transfer-type programs,” he is talking about the programs as I defined them.  My definition of such a program is one in which the government takes the fruit of someone’s labor, against his will and without compensation, to give to someone who has not worked for it.  The recipient might be someone in abject poverty, or it might be a fabulously wealthy multi-national corporation.  Either way, the mechanism is the same.  The government decides who shall receive the fruits of someone’s labor, and on what terms.  Not the person who labored.

Second, Greg doesn’t just defend the existence of wealth-transfer programs as, perhaps, a necessary evil, or because we don’t know what else to do in the face of an immediate and pressing need.  Instead, he says that such programs are justifiable as a matter of principle.

Third, he places this power – the power to take from those who produce wealth to bestow on those who do not – at the center of the state’s very purpose.   But even that does not capture the centrality of that power in his formulation.  For Greg, it is not just important that the state have this power.  It is an irreducible prerequisite.  It is a power without which there can be no justification for the state to exist at all.

Think about that for just a bit.  Greg says one of the necessary functions of the State is taking your property so that it may give it to someone the State thinks ought to have it.  Now, it is true he puts a qualifier on this – the power is not exercisable except as circumstances permit (presumably this is a concession to financial realities).  That, however, is not a jurisdictional limitation, but a prudential one.  So as circumstances do permit – that is, insofar as the State can siphon off your money without collapsing the economy – it has all the authority it needs to “spread the wealth around,” as a certain president so infelicitously put it.  That, Greg says, is one of the core functions of the State, in the absence of which there can be no basis for a State at all.

The Founders and Greg have dramatically different views about what justifies the existence of the State.  In the Founders’ view, the purpose of the State is to enforce the equality mandate, a pre-existing set of rights.  In our culture, that mandate finds its most prominent and eloquent expression in our Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The very next self-evident truth identified in the Declaration describes the purpose of government in relation to that mandate:  “That to secure these rights [the equality mandate quoted above], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  I don’t think you can derive wealth-transfer programs from the protection of life, liberty, and property (otherwise known as the pursuit of Happiness).

In fact, wealth-transfer programs are directly at odds with 2/3rds of the unalienable rights contained in the equality mandate.  Think of it like this.  What is the difference between (a) the government taking 2.3 months of your wages, against your will, to give to someone who did nothing to earn them, and (b) making you work for someone without pay, against your will, for 2.3 months every year?*

We instinctively recognize the latter as involuntary servitude.  But the former is no different as a matter of principle because wages are simply the liquidated value of the labor you performed.  Either way the government is taking the fruit of your labor against your will to give to someone else.  It is impossible to say that a government is protecting your liberty and property when it is stealing both through wealth-transfer programs.

So when Greg says wealth-transfer programs are one of the necessary justifications for the existence of the State, he is really saying the Founders got it all wrong.  The State does not exist to protect your rights, it exists for the purpose of, inter alia, enforcing involuntary servitude.

I will forego an exposition on Locke for the moment, and instead content myself with three observations that can serve as the basis for further discussion.  First, fostering and promoting involuntary servitude is, under the analytical framework Locke explained in his Second Treatise, a tyrannical act.  I’ll have to see some pretty powerful quotes to be convinced that Locke somehow abjured his Second Treatise as thoroughly as Greg suggests.  In any event, the Founders said that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [securing the equality mandate], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . . .”  Our Founders certainly didn’t understand Locke the way Greg apparently does.

Second, there is no facial difference between Greg’s formulation and the one offered by Marx.  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” sounds an awful lot like “there is no justification for the existence of the state that does not, in principle, justify the existence of some transfer-type programs.”  I’m willing to bet they would apply the principle differently.  But that is a matter of prudence, not authority.  The problem is that they would both employ the same principle.

Third, I think it would be helpful if Greg would indicate whether there are any jurisdictional principles that inform his analysis.  I agree, for example, that we have a duty to rescue.  But the locus for enforcing a duty is not automatically the State.  And with respect to the duty to rescue, it can’t be there.  Keep in mind that the State is just us – a collection of co-equal people.  You do not surrender that equality simply because another has need of you to do so.  Indeed, if it is possible for another’s need to strip you of your equality, to become his involuntary servant, then you were never equal to begin with.  Which would mean the Founders were all wet about that self-evident business.

To harmonize the Founders and Greg, therefore, the Declaration would have to read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, except when one man requires the uncompensated and unwilling service of another, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain conditional Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty (when not otherwise in a condition of servitude), and the pursuit of Happiness, but not until others have taken what they need of him.”

Uninspiring, and a little clunky, no?  But perhaps the Founders would agree with Greg after all and they wrote the Declaration the way they did because they knew the version above wouldn’t roust anyone out of bed when the British came a-calling.

As Sherlock might say, the game is afoot!  Back to you Greg.

* A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the government gives away to others approximately 2.3 months of your labor every year.

What a curiously disjointed debate we’ve been having over the subject of guns – gun ownership, gun violence, the right to carry guns concealed.  This isn’t anything new.  In fact, it’s been disjointed for as long as I can remember.  Whittled down to its barest essence, this is how we talk about it:

Random Politician:    “In light of [insert here the latest horrific and senseless mass shooting], we need to do something to control gun violence.  And so I am introducing a bill that bans assault-style rifles, limits magazine capacity, and requires a universal background check before purchasing a firearm.”

Gun Owner:  “Wait just a doggone minute.  I have a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.  You’d better not be thinking for even a minute that we’re going to let you interfere with our right to defend ourselves and go hunting.”

Random Politician:  “No, we’re not going to do that.  But you don’t need an AR-15, or a 30-round clip to go hunting or protect yourself.  And we certainly don’t want felons and others who are prohibited from owning guns to skirt the law by getting their weapons through a back-alley transaction with some sketchy arms-dealer.  These are just common-sense regulations.”

Gun Owner:  “The Second Amendment settled this question in 1791!  You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!”

And so it goes, with the combatants warily circling the Second Amendment, but never looking directly at it.  Neither side is eager to engage the other on what this constitutional provision actually means.  And that’s because one side can’t find in it the historical succor it wants, and the other fears what would happen if it did.

Here’s the thing.  The Second Amendment was written as a very practical response to the way the world worked at the time of its enactment.  That’s not to say there isn’t an unchanging principle that undergirds it – there is.  But it is to say that some of the practicalities of the world circa the 1790’s just don’t obtain anymore.  Let me see if I can explain.

The Second Amendment says this:  “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  A terse statement, with a dash of enigmatic grammar.  But there can be no doubt that the Amendment sees the right to keep and bear arms as somehow related to a well-regulated militia.

The historical understanding of the rationale for this connection may surprise some and offend others.  So instead of paraphrasing it in my own words, I’ll direct you to someone with great historical and scholarly heft.  I give you the late Joseph Story, who was once a Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1811-1845) and Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University (back when that meant something about the caliber of your constitutional analysis), and will always be the author of “A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States.”  He is still considered to have provided the most authoritative commentary on our Constitution.  And his temporal proximity to that document grants him unmatched credibility on the subject.

If you are prone to the vapors, you might want to sit down for this.  In describing the purpose of the Second Amendment, Justice Story said:

“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia.  The friends of a free government cannot be too watchful, to overcome the dangerous tendency of the public mind to sacrifice, for the sake of mere private convenience, this powerful check upon the designs of ambitious men.”  Exposition, §450.

Oh my.  Can it really be that a Justice of the Supreme Court suggested that a significant inequity in martial capabilities between the national government and the people might pose some danger to our liberties? Well . . . he not only suggested it, he emphasized it:

  “It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people.”  Story, §451.

That’s the danger Justice Story saw.  So how does this relate to the Second Amendment?  He said the State-based militias, composed of citizens with the right to keep and bear arms, would act as a deterrent to federal overreach, and even provide a military response if necessary:

“The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. . . . The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpations and arbitrary power of rulers; and it will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”  Story, §451.

So, as it turns out, the Second Amendment is not, in the first instance, about hunting, nor personal self-defense.  According to Justice Story, it’s about a military response to federal encroachment on the citizenry’s liberties.  In the 18th and 19th centuries one could still speak of such things in rational terms.  After all, the military’s basic firearm wasn’t much different from what Farmer John used to hunt deer.  And when we adopted the Second Amendment it hadn’t been that long since a citizen-army (with, admittedly, some significant outside help) defeated the world’s premier military power. There just wasn’t that much disparity between a regular army’s basic weapons and what was available to everyone else.

That’s just not the case anymore.  Not by a long shot (pardon the pun).  Farmer John still has the rifle he uses to hunt deer, and his neighbor might have a Smith & Wesson handgun with a 17-round clip.  But so what?  The United States military has aircraft that can engage targets before they are even seen, cruise missiles that can cross entire states, tanks that fire on the run with pinpoint accuracy, and aircraft carrier groups that each contain more military might than the world’s most powerful countries when the Second Amendment was written.

Even if we were to determine the federal government had so seriously infringed on our rights that an armed response was necessary, what could we do about it?  That’s right – nothing.  As a practical matter, we long ago grew beyond the justification for the Constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms.  The necessity of a hyper-capable, permanent military made militias obsolete as any kind of counter against the “usurpations and arbitrary power of rulers,” as Justice Story would say.

That’s why our gun debate is so disjointed.  If pro-gun activists invoked the primary meaning of the Second Amendment, they wouldn’t be talking about hunting or self-defense.  They would be talking about State-based militias with enough combined firepower to resist our federal military if necessary.  They would also be talking about forming those “well regulated” militias, complete with the obligations, training, regulations, and accountability to State governments that go with them.  If you want the right, you’ve got to take the correlative responsibilities as well.  But we don’t talk about this, of course, because no one seriously contemplates ever challenging the military power of the United States.

The pro-gun crowd tends to ignore the primary justification for the Second Amendment, and focuses instead on its derivative benefits.  That is to say, the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear firearms so that you can participate in a well-regulated militia.  Once that right is protected, however, you can then use the arms for any other legitimate purpose as well.  But it starts with the militia.  If you can’t defend the necessity for a militia, then the Second Amendment doesn’t count for very much in your argument.

Anti-gun activists, on the other hand, are also afraid to talk about the real Second Amendment.  If they did, the conversation wouldn’t be about banning “assault rifles” or high-capacity magazines anymore, it would shift pretty quickly to identifying what types of real assault rifles – military-grade weaponry, that is – the citizens must have so that they may form effective militias.  And that might call to mind the Swiss militia and the rampant non-violence attendant on every Swiss male between 19 and 34 having a military weapon sitting in his closet.  That’ll douse the more fiery anti-gun rhetoric in a heartbeat.

If we aren’t willing to engage the primary meaning and purpose of the Second Amendment in our gun debates, then we must instead rely on the natural law right to provide for oneself – both food (through hunting) and self-defense.  Just because this is not the motivating rationale and purpose behind the Second Amendment doesn’t mean the rights don’t exist or may be infringed by the government at will.  But it does mean that reasonable regulations are permissible.

Should the government limit the capacity of a magazine?  Should it outlaw scary looking guns?  The answers will differ depending on whether we are talking about participation in a militia, or instead self-defense and hunting.

The nature of the right informs its exercise.  If you’re talking about potentially having to fight as part of a militia, you’ll want the biggest, baddest, highest-capacity weapon you can keep pointed in the right direction while you’re firing it.  If you’re instead talking about hunting or self-defense, you won’t likely need that machine gun you’ve had your eye on.

These are questions of prudence, not principle.  They require us to conduct cost-benefit analyses, not draw up in battle formations.  So if there is evidence that fully automatic weapons create a public hazard that outweighs their utility in exercising your right to hunt and self-defense, there is an opportunity for reasonable regulation that is fully consistent with conservative principles.  But let’s make sure it’s actual evidence, not scare tactics.

To do this, however, we have to re-joint our conversation.  We have to accurately identify the source and nature of the right we are trying to protect, and then take a hard look at whether the way we propose exercising that right creates an unjustifiable public hazard.  There is a way through this thicket.  We just have to be jointed, so to speak.

Clever questions, Riddler, but there are answers.  Let’s start with this:  The good news is that I’m not saying that the federal government’s primary activity is establishing and maintaining a system of involuntary servitude.  I’m just saying that that’s what consumes 2/3rds of federal expenditures.  The primary activity of the federal government is still – for now – legitimate:  national defense, national infrastructure, administration of justice, interstate commercial regulation (though not everything that’s called interstate commercial regulation actually is), etc.

The bad news is that federal wealth transfer programs constitute involuntary servitude regardless of whether we traditionally characterize the recipients of the programs as “strong” or “weak.”  To the extent strength and weakness have anything to do with the analysis, it is in the relationship between the producers and the ones compelling the uncompensated transfer of value.  In this play, the federal government stars in the role of the strong, while the producers – regardless of how much wealth they have – are the weak.  Why?  Because in relation to the federal government, everyone is weak.  Just because the “strong” decide to give the fruits of your labor to someone comparatively less strong than you has nothing to do with whether you are on the wrong end of involuntary servitude.  So . . . on to your numbered points.

1.         I’m not changing my position on the question of whether elections are imperfect indicators of the public’s policy preferences.  As I agreed in the comments to your post (see here, here, and here), elections can’t tell us anything about the public’s policy preferences unless the policy in question was a significant part of the candidate’s message.  Involuntary servitude, or the lack thereof, hasn’t been part of anyone’s campaign in living memory.

But more importantly, this doesn’t really matter after all.  Elections cannot legitimize involuntary servitude any more than they could legitimize slavery in antebellum America.  If slaves had been given the franchise and voted overwhelmingly to continue slavery, it would have been no less an abomination than before.  And that’s because although an individual may choose to give himself over to another person, he may not choose to give over his neighbor.  So while those who vote to sell themselves into slavery (or involuntary servitude) may be scored as having voluntarily chosen their fate, the same cannot be said of those who voted to the contrary.  And even though there may be only one standing alone with his dissenting ballot, the majority’s decision to make him an involuntary servant cannot change the fact that, for him, it is still involuntary and therefore illegitimate.

This is the essence of Locke’s insistence that we assess the legitimacy of government action in terms of whether individuals in the state of nature had a pre-existing quantum of authority that they could delegate to the state to exercise on their behalf.  No one in the state of nature has the right to force me to serve him without compensation.  Although all society decide I must do so, it acts only with power, not authority.  And in acting without authority and against my will, it acts tyrannically.

You say holding the position I do means I must wrestle with the implication that almost no Americans are libertarians.  You are (as I like to say) quite right.  I mentioned in my original post that if involuntary servitude were put to the people as a constitutional amendment it would likely pass without much trouble.  I’ve already struggled with the dearth of libertarians in this country.  There just aren’t that many.  Involuntary servitude has seeped so far down into the foundations of our society that, for at least one of the major parties, it is actually a moral mandate.

This is an admittedly broad brush (though perhaps not quite so broad as you imagined), and accurately so.  But it doesn’t mean we have crossed the line dividing a legitimate government from criminal enterprises masquerading as a government.  We must, perforce, speak in terms of degree.  It would be rare indeed to find a government free of any illegitimate activity whatsoever.  Although most federal expenditures are made in service to the institution of involuntary servitude, it still does not comprise the core of what the government is about.

2.         Coercively collected taxes do no violence to my thought experiment.  I’ll begin by acknowledging that if taxes were strictly voluntary, the government would collect next to nothing.  The key here is understanding the link between the collection of taxes and the uses to which they are put.  It is one connected transaction.  When the government spends money on tasks properly within its portfolio, it may legitimately coerce taxes to pay for them.  Why?  Because you must pay for what you receive, whether you wish it or not.  For example, we may be compelled to pay for our armed forces because the right to self-defense is something that can be, and was, properly delegated by the citizenry to the federal government.  If someone refuses to pay for that properly delegated function he’s not a libertarian, he’s a deadbeat.

3.         Perhaps we are saying something similar here, but in different terms.  You say that moral consensus can be the basis for defining the proper subject of government authority, but only “within the bounds of moral law.”  If by moral law you are referring to Locke’s concept of delegability, then we might be on the same page.

But still I think you might be asking too much of moral consensus.  So let me ask a question in return.  Whether we have a vegetarian diet or not has no obvious moral implications.  Would you say that if society came to the moral consensus that vegetarianism is superior that it could legitimately prevent meat-eating?  It seems that moral consensus is incapable of ruling out this gross governmental overreach, unless we say that the moral law incorporates the Lockean concept of delegability (which in turn is premised on the natural law of equality).  And if that is what moral law includes, then we are essentially saying the same thing.

Last week I wrote about how 2/3rds of all federal government expenditures support the institution of involuntary servitude (in which you work for the benefit of another without compensation for your efforts).  I thought it might make your servitude a little more palatable if you knew who you were serving.

A few days ago the editors of Bloomberg asked this provocative question:

So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?

Here’s their reasoning:

Banks have a powerful incentive to get big and unwieldy. The larger they are, the more disastrous their failure would be and the more certain they can be of a government bailout in an emergency. The result is an implicit subsidy: The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail.

The size of that subsidy, they say, is about equal to the banks’ regular annual profits.  So . . . how do you like spending part of your annual 2.3 months of involuntary servitude ensuring that the banks’ owners make a regular profit?  I’ll check, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any of that on my bank statements.  You?