Money, weapons, and power: a response
Ashley’s recent post about the challenges of being transgendered in Weapons Of Mass Destruction Part I deserves a proper response. I intend to respond to Part II separately in an upcoming post. She writes:
It seems to me that we Transgendered, as a group, are not overly prosperous. Oh, I know that some of us are, but they seem to be the exceptions.
She goes on to relate some stories about the economic hardships of various transgendered people she has known ‘“ hardships that come about because certain people shun the transgendered. In the stories, their employers fire them or refuse to promote them. Then she states that society ‘œuses money as a weapon against the transgendered’:
Think about it. Money is the perfect weapon. You can’t exist in this world of ours without it. And to get it you have to work. Deny access to work, you deny access to money.
At first I assumed she was speaking figuratively. I soon discovered she wasn’t. First she cites Marx and then attempts to use historical references to support her thesis:
If Marx is right (and I think he is) those in control of the society would, of necessity, use money to control the others.
Let’s look at history.
In ancient Rome the Patrician class used money to control the Plebian class (which was vastly larger and potentially dangerous). Keep them poor. Give them the bare means for subsistence (bread) and distraction to keep them occupied (circuses).
Here, her confusion becomes apparent.
What is money?
Let’s start with Money:
Money is used as an intermediary for trade, in order to avoid the inefficiencies of a barter system, which are sometimes referred to as the ‘˜double coincidence of wants problem’. Such usage is termed a medium of exchange.
Money may also be used as a store of value, although whether our fiat currency system allows such a usage is highly debatable. The important point here is that money is a tool used to trade wealth. It provides an easy way to exchange what you have produced for what others have produced.
This point is critical ‘“ the whole reason for money to exist is trade. If you want what someone has produced, you offer them an amount of money representing the amount of your own labor you are willing to trade for that item. This is a completely voluntary relationship. If you don’t want what they have to trade, then you don’t trade your money to them. If they think their goods are worth more than the amount you’re willing to trade, they refuse to sell to you. The transaction does not occur unless both parties agree to it voluntarily.
What is a weapon?
Back to Weapon:
A weapon is a tool used to apply or threaten to apply a force in combat
A weapon is what someone uses when they don’t care to come to a mutual agreement. When someone wants the fruits of your labor without having to convince you to trade it voluntarily, that’s when they use a weapon. A weapon is used to physically harm you so that you hand over your money or the fruits of your labor against your will.
Money only comes into existence once a society has reached a certain level of civilization. Weapons, on the other hand, have been used by brutes since at least prehistoric times. They’ve been used to take food or land from others, to rape, and to kill. Weapons are used to apply physical force, which is the opposite of voluntary trade.
What is power?
Now let’s return to Ashley’s first history reference. She asserts that in ancient Rome, the Patrician class used money to control the Plebeian class by keeping them poor. So it sounds like the Patricians just refused to trade with the Plebeians, and that’s how they kept them poor? They just refused to hire them for work or buy goods from them? Not quite.
The Patrician class was able to keep the Plebeians poor by exercising political power. Only Patricians were allowed to run for political office, so the entire Roman Senate was Patrician. Initially, Plebeians were not even allowed to know the laws being enforced against them.
Clearly, money was not the tool of control ‘“ it was political power. The nature of political power is the power of physical force. Government has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force to achieve its ends. This was the weapon used to keep the Plebeians poor.
Now let’s continue with Ashley’s other examples:
What was the Spanish Inquisition really about? It was about purging the wealthy Spanish Jewish class from the nation (and stripping them of their wealth to boot).
So was money the ‘˜weapon’ used to achieve the Spanish Inquisition? Of course not. They didn’t pay the Jews to leave, and if they had you could hardly call money a weapon. The government set up a way to legally torture and kill them ‘“ with real weapons. Once again, political power ‘“ physical force ‘“ was the tool used to take their wealth.
The Spanish conquest of South America? It was about enslaving an entire people (talk about marginalizing) so they could steal their gold and silver.
This is another example of a government using ‘˜legal’ physical force against a group of people. Money was the object, but not the weapon.
The colonization of North America? That was about stealing an entire continent from the Native Americans. (To them, the land was the wealth.) And then, to control them, they were herded onto barren reservations and left with no skills or opportunities to survive or prosper in this strange new world that had replaced theirs.
Ashley continues making the same mistake over and over again. Stealing is an act of force. It’s the opposite of trading. The settlers didn’t get the land by refusing to trade with the Native Americans ‘“ they used physical force to drive them off of it, with the backing of a government.
Every new minority immigrant group that ever came to this country? Forced to take all the menial low-paying jobs nobody else will do. (My God! There goes the neighborhood!)
That almost seems kind. These days we seem to want to throw immigrants right back out of the country. In any case, a menial low-paying job is appropriate for an immigrant who has no skills, but even a skilled immigrant can have trouble getting a good job thanks to all the laws that have been passed to make it harder for them ‘“ laws that make licenses, certifications, degrees, etc, from other countries worthless here. This is, again, political power at work.
And then there’s the most heinous, calculated, blood-chilling and cynical example of all: the Nazis and the Holocaust they perpetrated against an entire people. They methodically passed laws denying German Jews access to work and stripping them of their financial assets.
Exactly! Here Ashley hits the nail on the head without even realizing it. The Nazis used the government’s monopoly on physical force to take the wealth of the Jews, and eventually to march them into gas chambers. The weapon being used here is physical force ‘“ and not just physical force on an individual level, but the legalized force of government coercion.
Money is not a weapon; it is a tool of voluntary trade.
The difference should be obvious at this point. If you’re still confused, try to imagine using money to force someone to do something. Now imagine using a gun to do so. See the difference?
So what exactly is Ashley complaining about? She is complaining that some people refuse to enter into voluntary trades with the transgendered (refuse to hire them). This is certainly true, but it is not the same as using physical force against them. This is where the line is drawn between freedom and tyranny.
Refusing to enter into trades with people we disapprove of is something free people do every day. For instance, I wouldn’t use a dating site that grudgingly accepts gays after having lawsuits filed against them. I might avoid businesses owned by Mormons or companies who don’t offer same-sex benefits. It is my right as a free individual to choose who I will and won’t associate with. They are free to live their lives as they see fit, and I am free to live mine as I see fit, without either of us exerting physical force against the other. This is the nature of individual freedom.
Meanwhile, many groups use the government to take my money against my will. Through the wonders of government coercion, I fund all sorts of businesses, charities, projects, schools, and wars I disagree with. If I don’t pay for them, people with guns come and take me to jail. Some people are thrown in jail just for smoking marijuana, or trading sex for money, or any number of other victimless crimes that only involve two adults engaged in voluntary trade. This is the nature of tyranny.
I would certainly encourage Ashley and any other transgendered to put themselves out there and convince people to hire them by making rational arguments, changing minds, and setting a good example. Even better, start your own businesses and compete with the bastards that wouldn’t hire you.
But don’t confuse the exercising of freedom with the exercising of political power. If you can’t tell freedom from tyranny, you’re likely to trade the former for the latter. We have precious little freedom left as it is.
—-
Bill posts at the gaycapitalist.com, a blog about politics, economics, philosophy, and more.
Photo credit: stock.xchng
It upsets me that Ashley put a lot of effort into a post, and even shared a lot of personal information about herself and her friends, and that other posts and comments seem to keep coming criticizing small pieces of her argument, without acknowledging the painful truths she presented.
The fact is that by discriminating against transgender people, companies and businesses refuse to allow access to society/the economy in the way most people interact with it. (Most people have jobs, not small businesses – not everyone can or wants to assemble the capital to start a small business, nor does everyone have the temperament for it). Like similarly qualified non-transgender people, transgender people should be able to hold jobs.
It seems like there have been a lot of comments/posts by people who have identified themselves as non-transgender or at least not identified themselves as transgender that are picking apart aspects of ashley’s post, but not acknowledging the real hurt, pain, and injury that she so carefully described in her post that was/is being faced by the people she knows.
I don’t need to go to wikipedia or the dictionary to know that a weapon is something that someone uses to hurt someone else. Ashley gave several historical examples of money being used to hurt a group of people, and then bravely put herself on the line by using personal examples her friends have encountered in the world of money/non-access to employment being used to hurt transgender people.
Why is there such a backlash to this argument? So much interest in picking apart the details, but avoiding the part where transgender people are actually hurting? I think it’s hard to admit that our society hurts people or to witness (even indirectly) examples of others hurting. Wanting to avoid that is part of being a caring human being. But by avoiding the fact that transgender people are being hurt, we do a disservice to the transgender community
Thank you very much for your well-written post. Although I do acknowledge Ashley’s pain, many of her posts seem focused on her problems, rather than exploring possible solutions. Part of me wants to feel sorry for her, but a larger part feels angry. I have a lot of difficulty with her opinions because the majority of transpeople I know are far too busy being successful in their new lives to have time for bemoaning what they lost during their transition.
Wtto: Small pieces of the argument? She argued that money is a weapon. This was the crux of her argument, not a small detail. There is a backlash against this argument because it is false.
We are all hurting. Transgendered, gays, lesbians, even straight people have their problems. No matter what our problems are, it is not an excuse to equate people leaving you alone with people physically attacking you. That is a terrible corruption of morality, and even if you wrap it up and package it with a very sad story, it is a destructive idea that must be called out.
Alex: Agreed.
Bill and Alex, I agree with you. But I also think you have to acknowledge that trans people are 3x as likely to be unemployed as the rest of America. Unfortunately, a lot of trans women turn to sex work as a means of earning a living and this puts them at a much higher risk for violence. (To clarify, I am pro sex work. And I also do not want to perpetuate a stereotype that all trans women are sex workers.)
WTTO makes a good point that a weapon is anything that can be used to hurt you. Words can be weapons. And I think that the high rate of homelessness, the high rate of hate crimes, and the high rate of substance abuse amongst the trans community that is endemic of a group that is severely economically disenfranchised are all forms of violence. Consequently, I think Ashley’s argument is valid.
Alex, I think that it’s really dismissive to say that Ashley is just complaining about her own personal problems. Ashley has written several times about owning her own business. So I hardly think she qualifies as someone who is moping about the house feeling sorry for herself. I would say the same thing to anyone who responded to one of your posts. I hardly think they qualify as someone weeping about their mistakes and I think there is something very valuable to be learned for you sharing your story with us.
I think the very knee jerk reaction amongst LGB and cisgendered straight folks to tell trans folks to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps is more than just inconsiderate – it’s willful ignorance with very real physical and emotional consequences for the transgendered community. It’s really hard to pull up the bootstraps when you don’t even own any boots.
Figuratively speaking, a ‘weapon’ can be anything that can be used to hurt you. But you should never make the mistake of taking this literally and then equating all use of both figurative and literal weapons. This is the mistake Ashley makes, and it’s completely unacceptable to let this kind of equivocation stand.
Why? If words are weapons, we can not allow free speech. If money is a weapon, we can not allow free trade. If sex is a weapon, we can not allow people to choose their partners. If all such actions are equated with the use of real weapons – the use of physical force – then they must be brought under government control.
As I wrote, I first thought Ashley was using the term figuratively. Then she literally compares her treatment to that of Jewish people under the Nazis. That sort of confusion is a recipe for tyranny, and is why Ashley’s and WTTO’s arguments are not valid. If you all want to advocate tyranny, then by all means do so. Just don’t disguise it as compassion to protect people from ‘weapons’. No real weapons were used in any of Ashley’s examples of the treatment of the transgendered.
If she wants to denounce actual physical violence, I’m all on board for that. If she wants to denounce unfair discrimination, I’m all on board for that. The moral mistake is equating the two. They are very different things, both morally and metaphysically.
I’ll agree with you on that one, Bill.
If you agree with that, it does not surprise me that you see Ashley’s argument as valid. You are stating that it is ok to use weapons – real weapons – against people for their words, even if those people have never physically harmed anyone.
Ah, the irony. Who’s sharing moral ground with the Nazi’s now?
To quote my favorite movie The Big Lebowski, “say what you like about the tenants of national socialism, dude, but at least it was an ethos.”
Oh, Bill. I think we are having a misunderstanding here. I would agree that speech shouldn’t be restricted. That’s why I quoted your comment. But I’m not going to hijack your thread, ‘cuz that’s not the point of the discussion.
I think it’s possible to agree with the both of you, and here’s why. I think violence is bad. You said you think violence is bad. Ashley is making the point that economic violence is committed against the transgender community through employment discrimination. I agree with her about that. You disagreed about the terminal impact of employment discrimination. You said that this is a voluntary relationship, which it is. But you never denied that employment discrimination is higher in the transgender community that it is in the rest of society. Pointing out this discrimination is not akin to pissing and moaning about one’s lot in life. The entirety of Ashley’s series is about the economic impacts of being transgender. Employment discrimination is an economic impact. You might disagree with her choice of semantics, but you can’t deny the mathematical reality of the situation.
Ah, then yes I misunderstood your intent.
I agree that transgendered people suffer employment discrimination, and that it is higher in the transgender community than the rest of society. I never denied it because it’s true. If this is all she had said, there would be no need for me to respond to anything. If all she had done was point out the discrimination, I doubt many would take it as ‘pissing and moaning’. But that wasn’t the point of her post.
There is no such thing as “economic violence”. Violence is the use of physical force. If someone isn’t using physical force, it’s not violence. Ashley is comparing employment discrimination to being physically violated. She uses unrelated historical references in a way that is intended to draw sympathy to her cause, the same way politicians invoke the Nazis every time they want to invade another country. And worse, she implicates money – a requirement of any free society – as the very tool of oppression.
That is what is objectionable about her post, and what needed to be responded to. Money is not a weapon. Denial of employment is not violence. To avoid being accused of ‘pissing and moaning’, I recommend avoiding comparing one’s own experience to Jewish people under the Nazis.
As I have read this article, it seems to be arguing that it was perfectly acceptable for the racist majority to deny hiring of African Americans in the past and that it was an act and expression of freedom for racist employers and businesses to deny African Americans access to work and services.
The failure to realize that money, as it is used in trade, represents a measure of power through the control of resources is quite frankly, pathetic. I require no POLITICAL power to purchase and hoard all of the food of a particular community. If it so pleased me and I had the available wealth, I could purchase the foodstuffs of an entire community and deny food to those who lived in ways I disapproved, effectively asserting the power to decide who lives and who dies over the people of that community. Such is perfectly legal in most capitalist systems and the presence of food-stamps does nothing to correct it, such is merely the giving of money to one who has none for the purchase of food. The choice of who one does business with is one fundamentally related to the exercising of power over others.
To this day African Americans are still statistically underemployed and paid far less than their white counterparts, regardless of education and experience. Companies and small business owners often avoid discrimination laws in a number of creative ways and legally. So long as a reasonable explanation not related to someone’s status as a protected class is given, not hiring someone is perfectly legal, whether that excuse was the true reason or not.
When the overwhelming majority of businesses and companies refuse to employ transgendered individuals, when stores and businesses sometimes have recognizably transgendered persons ejected from their property… this is an exercise of tyranny and the employment of one’s “freedoms” as tools to oppress and threaten the existence of particular groups of persons. Transgendered persons, in the United States have an estimated 75% unemployment rate, in many states transgendered persons can be denied access to government assistance like Welfare and Food-stamps simply because they are transgendered. Maybe your faith in capitalism is more important than your respect for the lives of other human beings, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to denigrate someone expressing the pain they have felt in a system in which the majority of persons reject that person’s humanity and imagine them to be a monstrous embodiment of insanity or sin.
Imagine for a moment you were born into a society that recognized persons with your hair color to be the spawn of Satan, or radically insane and sick, but there were no laws coinciding with this cultural belief. Instead, the people of the society simply chose to refuse to sell food to you, refuse to allow you to rent or buy property from them, refuse to give you a job. Have they not used their culture and wealth as a weapon to condemn you to death? I think they have.
I am transgendered and I live in a state where transgendered persons are not recognized as a class protected from discrimination. There are several companies in my state whose corporate bodies have regulations regarding such but none of the local branches honor the agreement. I have been repeatedly denied employment because of such, been ejected from restaurants and even once denied food-stamps (to clarify, this is an assumption, my case manager expressed clear distaste for my status as a transgendered person and I was later rejected in my application despite the fact that my income and other factors were all at levels and states that should have qualified me for such assistance). Homosexuals and bisexuals seem to like to think they understand what we are going through, but you fail to realize that like race, being transgendered, particularly during transition, is not something that is entirely concealable. The life of a visibly transgendered person is far worse then many of the LGB persons of the LGBT movement can imagine. Perhaps you should try living it for a while.
Anonymous,
First of all, your scenario where you can purchase all the food in a community, deny it to some people, and have zero competition pop up to fill in the gap is a fantasy. The only way you could accomplish that is through force – typically, regulation serves as a nice barrier to entry to protect entrenched businesses. What’s ‘pathetic’ here is your lack of understanding of basic economics.
The exercising of property rights is not the exercising of tyranny. I should be able to kick whoever I like off my property – gay bashers, fundamentalist Christians, whoever. It’s my property. Property rights are the basis of all other freedoms. Your body is your most basic property.
Unfortunately, through your own support of government force, you are implicitly supporting those who would use government force against the transgendered. Rather than opposing government tyranny, you seek to use it for your own ends. Instead of opposing the idea that, in principle, it is wrong for the government to force you to do things, or use force to prevent you from doing things with your own body and property, you support the notion that it’s fine for the government to do that. You just want to quibble over the details of what should be permitted under government tyranny. By your own reasoning, using government force against the transgendered is not inherently wrong. You just want to use government force against a different group.
I believe that initiating force against anyone is morally wrong. If some people refuse to trade with you, that is their right as free people. If the scenario where every single person in the world refused to trade with you actually came about, then you probably did something to deserve it. There are many people in the world who will unfairly judge you, but it’s highly unlikely that every single person in the world will do so.
But, since you yourself endorse the use of government force against peaceful people, I have little sympathy for you. You have endorsed tyranny. Hope you enjoy it.