Can a cost-benefit analysis justify initiated force?

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Are some statist plans so good that it’s okay to use threats of violence to make others participate? To have any hope of justifying such a claim you would need to learn all of the following…

  • How much each person would value the benefits of your plan
  • How much pain each person would feel because of having to submit to your plan, or because of what they had to pay for it
  • That your scheme would actually deliver its promised rewards
  • That the people you took resources from would not have achieved better results following their own preferred plans
  • That your scheme could not be executed except by initiating force

In practice, statists never attempt to acquire this knowledge, nor would it be possible to do so. The claim that some cost-benefit analysis justifies initiated force is simply fraudulent. No such complete analysis is ever really done for any statist scheme.

By Perry Willis & Jim Babka

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