Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Roderick T. Long
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Happy Birthday, Herbert Spencer
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Today marks the birthday of Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820---8 December 1903), a thinker whose contributions to philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, and political theory earned him the status of required reading in most universities a century ago. Today he is largely forgotten -- except in ludicrously inaccurate caricature as a "Social Darwinist" who supposedly advocated letting the poor and weak die off in order to improve the breed. (Nope, he never said it.) These days most of Spencer's works are out of print; no historic plaque marks his London residence (38 Queen's Gardens, just north of Kensington Gardens; I paid my respects there last May), and his grave is overgrown and neglected. Happily, however, interest in Spencer seems to be reviving of late.
Spencer was one of the last stalwarts of classical liberalism, holding up the banner of peace and freedom, and inveighing against regimentation and the régime of status, long after the liberal mainstream had sold out to collectivism and militarist imperialism. After working as a railroad engineer and an editor at The Economist, Spencer devoted the rest of his life to developing, over the course of many volumes, an integrated and systematic theory of life and society. His political philosophy (which I summarize in Herbert Spencer: Libertarian Prophet) anticipated -- and influenced -- much of contemporary libertarian thought. Likewise, his theories of spontaneous social order, pattern-perception, and the self-defeating character of direct utilitarianism anticipate the work of Friedrich Hayek; his evolutionary cosmology anticipates that of astrophysicist David Layzer and chemist Ilya Prigogine; his writings on the relation between statism, militarism, and male supremacy anticipate the insights of radical feminism; and his pre-Darwinian (1852) critique of creationism could have been written yesterday.
One of Spencer's contemporaries described him as a "prophet whose greatest discoveries can only be duly appreciated after two or three centuries." Let’s hope we can accelerate that process a bit. (For a list of online works by and about Spencer, click here.)
Monday, April 18, 2005
Molinari Society 2005 - Call for Abstracts
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
The Molinari Society will be hosting its second symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, December 27-30, 2005. We plan a two-hour session, with two papers, and hereby solicit abstracts on the general topic of "Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin." Papers should address the general question of whether libertarianism should be thick or thin ("thin" libertarianism is libertarianism understood as a narrowly political doctrine, while "thick" libertarianism is libertarianism understood as essentially integrated into some broader set of social or cultural values) and may (but need not) also address the connection between libertarianism and some specific position or set of positions (environmentalism, left-anarchism, Aristotelianism, feminism, egalitarianism, Christianity, secular humanism, the labor movement, etc.).
Send abstracts to Roderick T. Long at:
BerserkRL@gmail.com
(Those interested in being a commentator at the session should do likewise.)
Deadline for receiving abstracts: 5 May 2005
Notification of acceptance / rejection: 15 May 2005
Accepted papers due: 1 November 2005
Sunday, April 17, 2005
JLS 19.1 advenit
The latest issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies -- and the first one to appear under my editorship -- is out. See the contents summary here.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Rock Me Ludwig
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
At the last Austrian Scholars Conference several of the faculty, including myself, were brutally conscripted into performing a musical skit based on the songs that Ludwig von Mises and the other members of the Mises Circle back in 1920s Vienna used to sing at dinner after meetings of Mises' Privatseminar. (The lyrics were written by philosopher Felix Kaufmann, a member of both the Mises and Vienna Circles.)
For this performance Jeff Tucker actually did most of the singing while we drank wine, scarfed down chocolate creams, and read our lines off notes. Guido Hülsmann played Mises (appropriately, since in the songs Mises is about to abandon Vienna for Geneva, just as in real life Guido is abandoning Auburn, the Vienna of the South, for Angers); Walter Block played Hayek ('cause you need a moderate to play a moderate …); and so on. I was cast as the villainous Hans Mayer, a follower of Max Weber who later ditched Austrian economics for National Socialism.
This painfully unrehearsed performance is now available in online video format. Don't say I didn’t warn you.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
JARS Fell on Alabama
Bettina Bien Greaves has a review of the latest issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (a symposium issue on Rand and the Austrians which includes contributions by L&P-er Steve Horwitz as well as your humble correspondent) on the Mises Institute site.
1. Can you believe I'm posting this before Chris did? He's getting slow .... :-)
2. Looks like Greaves has already received her copy. How come I haven't gotten my copy? >:-(
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Moscow Bound
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Moscow, Idaho, that is. I'm off to the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference to deliver a paper on how to reconcile the fact that past and future selves cannot differ in their properties with the fact that some of the properties of future selves are not yet determined. (See the abstract here.) Back Monday!
In the meantime, those wanting something to grumble about can read of anarchists for conscription and Randians for genocide.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Because The World Is Round It Turns Me On
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In the past I've griped about Jared Diamond's excessively deterministic approach to the influence of geography on history. Today Gene Callahan tackles the same subject, from a Collingwoodian/Misesian/Oakeshottian perspective, in The Diamond Fallacy.
To Gene's excellent article I just want to append some quotations -- two from Collingwood and two from Mises:
It is not nature as such and in itself (where nature means the natural environment) that turns man's energies here in one direction, there in another: it is what man makes of nature by his enterprise, his dexterity, his ingenuity, or his lack of these things. The 'unplumbed, salt, estranging sea', as a nineteenth-century poet called it, echoing with some servility this eighteenth-century conception, estranges only those people who have not learned to sail on it. When they have discovered the art of navigation, and become reasonably skilled mariners, the sea no longer estranges, it unites. It ceases to be an obstacle, it becomes a highway. Beset with danger, no doubt …. but no human being has ever put safety first and stayed at home if he thought, as who has ever not thought? that something he wanted was waiting for him at the other end of the road. And if he did, it would still be his thought about the dangers, not the dangers themselves, that kept him at home.For more on the Collingwood/Mises connection, see my essay R. G. Collingwood: Historicist or Praxeologist?.
(Collingwood, Principles of History, pp. 93-4)
When people … speak (as … Montesquieu, for example, did) of the influence of geography or climate on history, they are mistaking the effect of a certain person's or people's conception of nature on their actions for an effect of nature itself. The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes.
(Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 200)
The geographical interpretation of history failed to recognize [that t]he environment works only through the medium of the human mind. … The natural conditions which render skiing a very useful means for traveling were present both in Scandinavia and in the Alps. But the Scandinavians invented the skis, whereas the inhabitants of the Alps did not. For hundreds, nay thousands of years these peasants were closeted during the long winter months in their mountain homes and looked longingly upon the inaccessible villages down in the valleys and upon the unapproachable homesteads of their fellow farmers. But this desire did not activate their inventive spirit. … Different men and the same men at different times respond in a different way to the same stimuli.
(Mises, Money, Method, and the Market Process, p. 290)
To say that man reacts to stimuli and adjusts himself to the conditions of his environment does not provide a satisfactory answer. To the stimulus offered by the English Channel some people have reacted by staying at home; others have crossed it in rowboats, sailing ships, steamers, or, in modern times simply by swimming. Some fly over it in planes; others design schemes for tunneling under it.
(Mises, Theory and History, p. 245)
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Update With Croutons
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Yesterday was the Ides of March. I celebrated by polishing off a Caesar salad.
I'll be at the Austrian Scholars Conference this week, giving a paper on corporate social responsibility and appearing on a panel of Austrians-with-websites. Jeff Tucker also threatens to conscript me into something called "Mises: The Musical" -- what that is about remains to be seen (or, um, heard).
For those who missed Gary Galles' Mises Daily article on Molinari’s birthday, go un-miss it!
Two relatively new blogs worth reading are Kevin Carson’s and
David Hart’s. Clicke, lege.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
State-Nicknamecraft as Soulcraft
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Did you realize that the state of Alabama has no nickname?
No official nickname, that is. It's sometimes been called the Yellowhammer State, the Cotton State, or the Heart of Dixie, but apparently none of those ever received the approval of our elected Solons. (No doubt it's been called other things as well. I note that under medieval Icelandic law, it was illegal to call someone by a nickname he didn't like.)
Anyway, after years of languishing in forlorn nicknamelessness, some Alabamians have decided to start a political crusade to get the state a nickname. I gather there's a bill being sponsored in the state legislature; I haven't followed the story very closely. But my eye was caught by the latest manifesto on the subject, a letter by John S. Lucas IV in the March 9th Opelika-Auburn News. I hereby quote an excerpt. Note: I am not making this up.
It is my opinion that a colorful, clever and politically sensitive moniker can have a far-reaching impact on the collective psyche of this state's inhabitants. A proper nickname may actually serve as a means to unite Alabamians -- solidifying a common ground of state brotherhood as Alabamians encounter each other out of state.At first I thought (hoped?) the author was being satirical, but no such luck. (By the way, the author's suggestion was "the Rocketing River State." I'm not making that up either. No, there's no Rocketing River in Alabama, but we do have rockets in Huntsville, and rivers passim.)
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Gee Whizardry
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Congratulations to my colleague Nels Madsen for his Academy Award for Technical Achievement. Nels, an Auburn professor of mechanical engineering who co-teaches an interdisciplinary science-and-humanities course with me, worked on the motion-capture system used in Lord of the Rings (particularly for Gollum) and Polar Express, as well as the upcoming King Kong and Chronicles of Narnia.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
The Strange Jurisprudence of Ward Churchill
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Last night I watched the embattled Ward Churchill on C-span. I give his performance a mixed review. His speech was a rousing blend of insight and obfuscation; he made many points that desperately needed making, yet his tone often savoured overmuch of Richard Mitchell's bewildered priest, justly condemning his opponents for selective outrage while engaging in complementary selective outrage of his own. Churchill also did a fair job of rebutting some of the more hysterical interpretations of his original article (though even on a charitable reading he's still guilty of collectivist confusion), and I was pleased to hear Native American libertarian activist Russell Means get a name check. But Churchill quickly lost credibility during Q&A, thanks to his bullying attitude toward dissenting audience members.
The most interesting point in the evening, however, came when one audience member asked Churchill how he could reconcile his claim to First Amendment protection for his controversial views with his position that Columbus Day celebrations should be banned. Part of Churchill's answer was that no one has a right to celebrate or downplay something as evil as the North American genocide that Columbus inaugurated.
The extent to which this response plays into the hands of Churchill's own critics is ironic, but not my present concern; the fact that Churchill's support for free speech is selective, while regrettable, isn't especially surprising or unusual either. (As for his take on Columbus, he has a point -- though, characteristically, an exaggerated one.)
What is unusual (or new to me, anyway) is the Constitutional argument Churchill offered for his position. He claimed that the First Amendment right to march in commemoration of Columbus Day is overridden by the Ninth Amendment right of Native Americans not to be subjected to celebrations of their ancestors' subjugation.
Now I'm always happy to see the oft-neglected Ninth Amendment actually getting remembered. (Churchill asked the audience whether anyone could recall what the Ninth Amendment says. Nobody could. One audience member gave it a stab but ended up paraphrasing the Tenth Amendment instead. For the record, the Ninth Amendment reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It was included to meet the concerns of those like Alexander Hamilton who worried, presciently in the event, that a Bill of Rights might encourage future interpreters to suppose that any rights not specifically listed as protected has been surrendered.) But Churchill's invocation of the Ninth Amendment embodies a novel twist.
Churchill evidently reads the Ninth Amendment as acknowledging not merely rights in addition to those enumerated, but rights contradicting and overriding those enumerated. This is the looniest interpretation of the Bill of Rights since the Clinton administration's claim that the Second Amendment protects only the Federal government's right to bear arms (an interpretation so ludicrous that even the most extreme gun-control advocates were seemingly embarrassed to embrace it). It would appear that for Churchill the Ninth Amendment means: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed as actually endorsing any of the rights enumerated."
Does Churchill really find his bizarre interpretation plausible, or is he simply employing a cynical stratagem of power politics? Either way, it doesn't speak much in his favour. Still, given the mass-murderers who currently run our country I can't get too excited about Ward Churchill’s sins. Plus he was more entertaining than Bill O'Reilly, and probably uttered a higher percentage of true statements; if he had a regular show I reckon I'd watch it. No danger of that in Bush's America though.
Sunday, February 6, 2005
The Virtue of "Selfishness"
Chris mentions Rand's effort to reclaim terms like "selfishness" and "recast them in a new and nondualistic framework."
Although, as I mentioned, I tend to avoid using the term "selfishness," I make a case both for and against Rand's usage here:
http://praxeology.net/unblog11-02.htm#ego
Friday, February 4, 2005
18.4 + 41
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The newest issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies -- vol. 18, no. 4 -- is devoted to the interconnections between militarism abroad and plutocracy at home, and ranges from the Treaty of Westphalia to the sociology of William Graham Sumner; I summarise the contents here.
In other news, I turn 41 today.
Thursday, February 3, 2005
One More
Here's the link I tried to post earlier, to my own Rand centenary notice:
http://mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1738
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Does the Bill of Rights Apply to Iraq?
With regard to David's post below, here's an excerpt from my blog from July 2003.
U. S. forces haven't been able to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq yet, but when it comes to weapons of individual self-defense it's another story.
Most readers of this web journal will understand why the U. S. military's imposition of Nazi-style gun control on Iraq is evil -- arguably even more evil, in terms of consequences at least, than gun control in America. (If you and your family were civilians living in the chaos of postwar Iraq, wouldn’t you have an unusually pressing need for a gun?) I want to raise a different question: is it constitutional?
The Second Amendment reads: "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." Since Article VI establishes the Constitution as "the supreme law of the land," every branch and department of the U. S. government is bound by the Second Amendment, including the military.
But does this language protect civilian gun owners in Iraq? After all, "the people" referred to in the Second Amendment are surely the American people, not the human race generally.
Iraqi gun owners are obviously not American citizens. But a case could be made that they are nevertheless part of the American "people" in the constitutional meaning of that term For they are, after all, people under the jurisdiction of the U. S. government.
Should the phrase "the people" then be interpreted narrowly, to mean American citizens only, or broadly, to mean anyone under the jurisdiction of the U. S. government? I am persuaded by Lysander Spooner's arguments in The Unconstitutionality of Slavery that constitutional ambiguities should always be resolved in whichever direction is most consistent with natural justice, so that "all reasonable doubts must be decided in favor of liberty." As he notes in Chapter 17:It is a universal rule of courts, that where justice will be promoted by taking a word in the most comprehensive sense in which it can be taken consistently with the rest of the instrument, it must be taken in that sense, in order that as much justice as possible may be accomplished. On the other hand, where a word is unfavorable to justice, it must be taken in its most restricted sense, in order that as little injustice as possible may be accomplished.A prohibition on infringing the rights of anyone subject to U. S. jurisdiction is certainly more favourable to liberty and justice than a ban on infringing the rights of U. S. citizens only; hence the former interpretation, resting on a "more comprehensive sense" of the phrase "the people," is to be preferred.
Even if this reasoning should be rejected, however, there are other arguments against the constitutionality of the U. S. campaign to disarm the Iraqi citizenry. Here's one: according to the Second Amendment, an armed citizenry (which is what "militia" means in 18th-century English) is "necessary to the security of a free state." So, by the standard endorsed by the Constitution, what is the condition of a state that has been deprived of this necessary condition? Obviously it must be an unfree state -- a slave state. But the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery "within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" – including Iraq. (Nor will it do to protest that the Thirteenth Amendment means to outlaw only chattel slavery; the wording specifies that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" shall be permitted, thus ruling out a narrow reading. The condition of a disarmed populace is certainly one of involuntary servitude.)
Second, whether or not the Constitution contains a specific prohibition on the imposition of gun control on a noncitizen populace, there is arguably a general prohibition to the same effect. The Tenth Amendment denies to the U. S. government all powers beyond those granted. Where in the Constitution is the U. S government granted the power to infringe the right of noncitizens to bear arms?
The answer, I may be told, is in Article IV, section 3: "Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." Well, what does this mean? Should it be interpreted narrowly, to mean simply that such territory falls under the authority of Congress (rather than, say, of the President)? Under that reading, the provision concerns the apportioning rather than the expansion of authority. Or should it be interpreted broadly, to mean that the Congress is granted an unrestrained and arbitrary power to bind such territory in whatever manner it pleases? Under that reading, the bill would be a grant of despotical power. To quote Spooner once more:
[W]here words are susceptible of two meanings, one consistent, and the other inconsistent, with justice and natural right, that meaning, and only that meaning, which is consistent with right, shall be attributed to them, unless other parts of the instrument overrule that interpretation.Hence we are under no obligation to give Article IV, section 3, a liberticide construction.
Operation Iraqi Enslavement is unconstitutional. What are the implications of this finding? First, President Bush is in violation of his oath of office (again) and deserves immediate impeachment (still). Second, military personnel who implement Bush's gun ban are carrying out illegal orders, and so are legally obligated to cease and desist immediately.
Finally, to pass from the constitutional level to the level of policy analysis: Saddam Hussein was by all accounts a brutal dictator, yet he apparently felt no need to render the Iraqi populace defenseless by disarming them. What fate must George Bush have in store for them, if he feels that need? ...
As the mainstream political spectrum stands, those most enthusiastic about the First Amendment are often those least enthusiastic about the Second, and vice versa. In practice, however, governments that suppress either one of these freedoms usually turn out to suppress the other as well. In my previous post, I discussed the U. S. military's current policy of disarming civilians in Iraq. Today, in the August 2003 issue of Liberty (Alan W. Bock, "Free to Obey," p. 10), I learn that the Coalition Provisional Authority is laying down a "code of conduct" for the Iraqi media. According to Coalition spokesgoons, the code is necessary to "stifle intemperate speech that could incite violence and hinder efforts to build a civil society." In newly liberated Iraq, there's "no room for hateful and destabilizing messages that will destroy the emerging Iraqi democracy. All media outlets must be responsible."
Is this legal? Not under natural law, obviously. But I don’t think it's legal under U. S. law either. Despite talk of a "Coalition" Authority, Iraq is effectively under U. S. rule. It follows, according to the Constitution, that Iraq is under the authority of Congress: "Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." (Article IV, section 3) So if censorship is being imposed on Iraq, by what authority is this being done? Not by extra-Congressional authority, because no extra-Congressional entity has any legal authority over Iraq; the Constitution places the relevant authority squarely in Congressional hands. And not by Congressional authority either, because, as the First Amendment stipulates, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." (Note that the First Amendment does not say: "abridging American citizens' freedom of speech or of the press"; the prohibition is quite unrestricted.) Under the Constitution, U.S.-imposed censorship in Iraq could be authorised only by act of Congress; and under the Constitution, censorship is something that Congress is expressly forbidden to authorise.
So long as the Iraqi people are under U. S. rule, they are entitled to receive the full protection of both the First and the Second Amendments.
Don't hold your breath, though.
Don't hold your breath waiting for American citizens to receive the full protection of those Amendments either, of course. Still, the courts do throw us a scrap or two of protection in the name of the First and Second Amendments. What our rulers are doing to the Iraqi people is a good indication of what they would be doing to us, were it not for the few remaining shreds of liberty that the courts are willing to uphold.
Why aren't liberals complaining about U. S.-imposed censorship in Iraq? Why aren't conservatives complaining about U. S.-imposed gun control in Iraq? Wasn't this war supposed to be about bringing freedom to the Iraqi people? Doesn't the Bill of Rights define what the United States means by "freedom"?
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Free At Last
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
All hail George W. Bush, the Liberator!
During his deification inaugural address today, our Prince President announced: "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling."
Well, golly. As an anarchist, I'm one of the unwilling. And finally, an American President has promised that the American government will stop imposing itself on me, as well as on all similarly unwilling persons!
In short, the American state has peacefully withered away, and a purely voluntary association now stands in its place. This has got to be the best second term ever.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Re: Apology Accepted. Apology Extended
I would like in turn to thank Wendy McElroy for her gracious reception of our apology, as well as for her own counter-apology, which I am likewise very happy to accept. I am proud to count her as a colleague, and relieved that any bad feelings have been avoided or amended.
In my earlier agitated frame of mind I neglected to say -- I am also sorry to hear about Joan Kennedy Taylor's poor health. My best wishes are with her.
Second Response to Wendy McElroy
While we continue to be puzzled by Wendy McElroy's interpretation of our paper as a charge of homophobia against her and Joan Kennedy Taylor, a charge we most emphatically had no intention of making and do not regard anything we said in our paper as plausibly embodying, we are certainly eager to avoid contributing even slightly or inadvertently to promoting any such impression regarding two writers for whose work we have considerable respect and admiration despite our various theoretical disagreements.
Accordingly, the latest public draft of the essay uses the term 'Radical Menace' rather than the analogical use of the term 'Lavender Menace,' and adds an explanatory footnote, in order to avoid the possibility of unintentional misunderstandings.
We apologize for any misunderstanding generated by our earlier terminology.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Response to Wendy McElroy
I've posted the following in in the comments section but I want to put it here too:
=====================================
I'm dismayed and mortified to see that our piece is being interpreted as a personal attack and/or accusation of homophobia against Wendy McElroy and Joan Kennedy Taylor, two thinkers for whom Charles and I both have enormous respect. Our criticism of some of their ideas was certainly not intended as a personal attack on either. "Lavender Menace rhetoric" was never intended by us as a code word for homophobia.
The phrase is explictly introduced in our paper to pick out the rhetorical strategy of "[dividing] the feminist world ... into the 'reasonable' (that is, unthreatening) feminists and the feminists who are 'hysterical' or 'man-hating' (so, presumably, not worthy of rational response)." This strategy we chose to call, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the "Lavender Menace" approach. We also said explicitly that McElroy and Taylor show "considerably more understanding of, and sympathy with, classical feminist concerns than the anti-feminists who employ this strategy" -- in other words, we were not atempting to lump them in with anti-feminists or lesbian-baiters, but merely pointing to ways in which we thought their approach made unfortunate concessions to that enemy.
I had been looking forward to seeing Wendy's comments on our piece, and while I expected disagreement, it never occurred to me that she would take it as a personal attack. The culture of personal attack on the internet is one of my chief betes noires, and I would never willingly contribute to it. (In my defense I'll note that of the others who've posted here agreeing or disagreeing, no one else raised such an interpretation either.) Wendy, please believe me that no such attack was intended; I'll make sure the paper is emended or footnoted to forestall any further such interpretation.
=====================================
See also Charles' comments here.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Reclaiming Libertarian Feminism's Radical Legacy
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
(Apologies to Chris Sciabarra for this post's title.)
The paper that Charles and I presented at the APA is already stirring up controversy -- even among folks who haven't had a chance to read it yet!
But now the latest draft of Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved? is available online.
"Back to the 19th century!" doesn't sound promising as a feminist slogan; but for those seeking to close the gap that currently exists between feminism and libertarianism, we argue that the 19th century is the place to look. We also argue that, in many ways, the natural complement to libertarianism is not mainstream liberal feminism but the radical feminism often maligned as "gender feminism." Check it out!
Saturday, January 1, 2005
Incipit MMV
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
On September 14, 2001, three days after the destruction of the World Trade Towers, economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that "the terror attack could even do some economic good. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. ... Rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending."
And now -- on December 29, 2004 -- C. Fred Bergsten of the Institute for International Economics has opined on NPR's Morning Edition that the recent catastrophic tsunami in South Asia -- which by the latest estimates has killed fifty times as many people as the 9/11 attacks -- will bring economic benefits to the countries affected:
Like any disaster, you get negative effects through destroying existing property and people's health, but you do get a burst of new economic activity to replace them, and on balance, that generally turns out to be quite positive.(Conical hat tip to Christopher Westley for the Bergsten quote.)
Over time, properties that have been destroyed will be fully replaced, and probably by better and newer substitutes, so at the end of the reconstruction process, the countries will probably be wealthier.
If it weren't a violation of the nonaggression axiom, I'd be tempted to favour requiring, at gunpoint, anyone who seeks to pontificate on economic subjects to first read Frédéric Bastiat's essay What Is Seen and What is Not Seen (along with Henry Hazlitt's elaboration thereon). It's bad enough when people fall for the Broken Window Fallacy in one of its comparatively subtle forms, as in the arguments for protectionism, public works, wartime prosperity, or Keynesian macro policy; but when distinguished "experts" happily swallow it in the blatant and naked form of that very absurdum to which Bastiat and Hazlitt sought to reduce the subtler versions, some sort of public shaming seems called for.
For me the case is not primarily strategic, since I'm far more in inherent sympathy with the left's economic and cultural concerns than most libertarians are (and part of the point our panel were making in Boston is that libertarians have done too little justice to such concerns); but it certainly is at least strategic. The statist right, which now controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and much of the media, is, as Lew rightly observes, "the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our time," and it's in the interest of libertarians to build bridges with the left, who have been "solid on civil liberties" (at least by comparison) and "crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush administration."
While there are, admittedly, plenty of authoritarian types on the left (as everywhere else), there are also plenty of people whose instincts are firmly anti-authoritarian but who have been lured into supporting state socialism because it's been sold to them as the only effective counterweight to state capitalism. These leftists are our potential allies, but no alliance will be forthcoming so long as we continue to confirm most leftists' impression of libertarianism as a variant of conservatism.
As I've written elsewhere:
The 1960s, too, were a time of political confusion, cultural conflict, ideological disappointment, and an unpopular war; but back then, libertarian scholars were a tiny remnant, much of their output confined to mimeographed broadsides of small circulation, and so were unable to take full advantage of the opportunities for libertarian education that such a situation offered. Today our numbers are rapidly growing, and our potential audience is as wide as the internet.This time around, we are much better positioned to make a success of the left/libertarian coalition that Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, Leonard Liggio, and others sought to build four decades ago. Let's get to work!
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Boston Anarchist Thinking Brigade
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
A reminder to anyone who's planning to attend the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meetings in Boston (home of Samuel Adams and Benjamin Tucker!) this coming week: the Molinari Society will be holding its first symposium from 2:00 to 5:00 on Tuesday, December 28th. The topic is "Libertarianism and Feminism"; the scheduled presenters are Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska - Lincoln) on "Liberty, Gender, and the Family"; Elizabeth Brake (University of Calgary) on "Free Love, Marriage, and Individual Sovereignty: From Stephen Pearl Andrews to Laura Kipnis"; and Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute) and myself on "Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?"
There are other libertarian sessions on offer that same day -- John Hasnas and Aeon Skoble on Hayek from 9:00 to 11:00, and then from 11:15-1:15 a choice of either Jan Narveson (inter alia) on economic justice or Doug Rasmussen on Rand. (See the full program for details.) So the hardiest souls can enjoy seven hours, nearly uninterrupted, of libertarian philosophy. (I fear I can't muster up such hardihood myself; I'll be at the 9:00 panel, which I'm chairing, and the 2:00 panel, which I'm on, but I doubt I'll have sufficient endurance to take in an 11:15 session as well. That's no excuse for you, however.)
Merry Krishna to all!
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Tussling With Tidwell
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
No, not Cameron Tidwell! I’m talking about Rudy Tidwell, a theocratic columnist for the local paper. (See my previous gripe about one of his columns.) I usually try to avoid reading him, so as to maintain my serenity, but I succumbed a couple of times recently; the fruits of my weakness follow:
My December 5th letter to the Opelika-Auburn News (not published):
To the Editor:My December 18th letter to the Opelika-Auburn News (published today):
Rudy Tidwell (Dec. 5) objects to hearing members of the anti-homosexual lobby called "homophobic," since, he says, this term falsely implies that they have a "persistent, abnormal, or irrational fear" of homosexuals.
Well, the anti-homosexual lobby has been loudly proclaiming for some time that allowing gays to marry would somehow, inexplicably, lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage, and thereby to the destruction of civilisation itself. In addition, Senator Rick Santorum has stated that legalising homosexuality will also lead to the legalisation of child abuse. Then of course there's Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who claim that American gays have provoked God into sending hurricanes and terrorist attacks toward the United States.
Gee, sounds like "persistent, abnormal, or irrational fear" of homosexuals to me.
Roderick T. Long
To the Editor:I thought the one they didn't print was a bit more important than the one they printed, but who can fathom the ways of the Opelika-Auburn News?
Last February, in the pages of the Opelika-Auburn News, Rudy Tidwell attacked the poem "Invictus" (and insulted its author) for expressing the viewpoint "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." Mr. Tidwell called such a viewpoint "the essence of sin." (I remember because you published my response on Feb. 22.)
In today's column Mr. Tidwell praises the poem "The Winds of Fate" (which he incidentally misattributes to the infamous Henry Ward Beecher; it is actually by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1915) for expressing substantially the same viewpoint -- that it is "the set of a soul" and not the winds of circumstance that determine our fate.
I'm glad to see that Mr. Tidwell has changed his mind.
Roderick T. Long
Monday, December 13, 2004
Submission is Ecstasy
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I'm pleased to announce that, starting next year, I’ll be assuming the editorship of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. For details, see the full announcement.
As I note there, since "scholarship progresses through civil but vigorous debate, not through confinement in an echo chamber," as incoming editor of the JLS I "enthusiastically solicit contributions from across the ideological spectrum, both within and beyond the libertarian movement." If you’re writing a scholarly article that bears on libertarian thought, please consider submitting it to the JLS. Submit, submit!
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Goodbye and Good Riddance
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I'm tempted to cheer Tom Ridge's departure. Problem is, I cheered when Janet Reno left, and they replaced her with John Ashcroft; then I cheered when Ashcroft left, and they're replacing him with Torture Bertie. So there's no reason to think Mr. Panic Button's replacement is going to be any sort of improvement. Still I can say this much: I won't miss Ridge. Not even a little bit.
When Good Texans Do Bad Things
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Don't miss a great LRC piece by Jeff Tucker today on The Glories and Pathologies of Texocentrism.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Fiery Braille?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Do you have a "pre-9/11 mindset"? I do! For some reasons why that might not be such a bad thing, see my article on LRC today.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
L&P-ers in RAE
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The latest issue of the Review of Austrian Economics is out this week; this one features an article by L&P-er Steven Horwitz on the Misesian microfoundations of Hayekian social order; Steven's review of L&P-er Chris Sciabarra's Total Freedom; and my own article offering a Wittgensteinian defense of Misesian methodology. Tolle, lege.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Better Dead Than Opiated
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
If you think the War on Drugs is a threat to freedom in the U.S., wait till you see what it means for Afghanistan.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
The Open-Source Society and Its Enemies
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Microsoft is apparently now attempting to use patent law as a club against open-source competitors like Linux, as well as against the basic protocols of the internet itself; see the story here.
Anyone still think intellectual property laws are something other than pure evil?
Écrasez l’infâme!
Science and Skepticism
[cross-posted at Mises Blog]
Philosopher John Searle has recently argued that the progress of empirical science has now made possible a "new kind of philosophy" no longer beset by the skeptical doubts that worried Descartes and Hume. I agree that philosophers needn't be troubled by such skeptical doubts, but I don't think the case against skepticism depends in any way on the progress of empirical science; on the contrary, we can take empirical science seriously in the first place only because we already have grounds for rejecting skepticism. See my discussion, which also touches on such topics as praxeology and socialist calculation, here.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Tough Love at 50,000 Volts
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
We're all a little bit safer now that cops in Miami are using Taser stun guns to protect us from children as young as six. Most recently, a twelve-year-old girl was immobilised with a 50,000-volt zap to her neck and lower back, in order to prevent her from ... um ... playing hooky from school.
Well, it's about time these menaces to public safety got what they deserve! (I mean the kids, of course.)
So remember, kiddies, the policeman is your friend ....
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Rednecks or Greenbacks?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Mises Blog]
An interesting economic demographic from Charles Johnson: contrary to much Democratic hand-wringing and Republican gloating, it appears that Kerry won the working-class vote, even in the red states; and the wealthier a voter was, the likelier she apparently was to vote for Bush. Degree of economic benefit from the existing system may thus be a better predictor of Bush support than fundamentalist religious convictions are (though I agree with Chris Sciabarra that the religious issues are relevant).
In other words: perhaps "it's the plutocracy, stupid!" After all, it's the economic élite who have traditionally been the chief boosters of the corporatist-imperialist state. (See, e.g., Roy Childs' Big Business and the Rise of American Statism; Walter Grinder and John Hagel's Toward a Theory of State Capitalism; Chris Sciabarra's Understanding the Global Crisis; Joseph Stromberg's Political Economy of Liberal Corporativism and The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire; and Kevin Carson's Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital.)
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Exit Strategy
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
My recent posts on secession have generated some commentary over at Mises Blog; see here, here, and here.
Anarchy Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
As a follow-up to my earlier post on the disenfranchisement of the world under American hegemony, check out this site. (Thanks to Cameron for the link.)
Telling the world "sorry" is fine, but what next? Most of the opponents of our Prince President don't fundamentally question the electoral system itself. They've been taught that the only alternatives to "democracy" (and by "democracy" they mean this ritual whereby the populace gets to pick between two marginally different doofuses every four years) are various forms of dictatorship. Few of them yet recognise that there are -- to put it somewhat paradoxically -- forms of political order more democratic than "democracy." As long as the "other 49%" still accept the basic legitimacy of the electoral system, their expressions of regret, however sincerely meant (and I do appreciate the "Sorry, Everybody" site -- particularly as a counter to the prevailing international tendency to view the entire American populace through the lens of that blood-red electoral map), will ring objectively hollow.
Herbert Spencer argued for the citizen's right to ignore the state. Now that "democracy" apparently means that 51% of the American electorate gets to rule the other 49%, plus the rest of the planet, what the world most urgently needs is the right to ignore the United States.
Monday, November 8, 2004
Anarquismo!
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Mises Blog]
My Mises U. talk on objections to anarchism has been translated into Spanish by Larry Nieves and is posted over at El Liberal Venezolano. I don't read Spanish well enough to understand the translation, but there it is.
Friday, November 5, 2004
Most Likely to Secede
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In my previous post on secession and the red/blue divide, I forgot to include a link to Secession.net. This is a worthy outfit whose goals include the following:
Legitimatize Secession of Small Political Entities: the United Nations and human rights organizations give lip service support to autonomy and self-determination movements; we promote factual and moral arguments for the right of individuals, communities large and small, and national sub-groups to seek independence.Of course there are also many relevant articles in back issues of Formulations.
Promote Nonviolent, Libertarian and Decentralist Political Visions: ones that will replace centralized, authoritarian economic-political institutions and offer concrete nonviolent strategies for achieving true peace, freedom, justice and prosperity.
Influence Existing Secessionist Movements: too many movements want to replace one big, centralized authoritarian state with two or more smaller ones. Only a worldwide movement promoting the radical goals of freedom for individuals and communities can legitimatize the aspirations of hundreds of suppressed national and regional groups for freedom.
Promote New Secession Movements: billions of people are ready for radical decentralist alternatives and secessionist strategy, they just need a firmer philosophical basis and a little encouragement to begin organizing their own movements.
Network among these Movements to coordinate nonviolent secessionist strategies and tactics.
Causes Which Impel
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
As the blood-red electoral tide oozed across the map of America's heartland, many in the blue states were starting to think about secession (see, e.g., here and here). Most such talk has been meant as a joke, but it might be worth taking more seriously. As I've suggested before (see here, here, and here), secession is an attractive solution to problems ranging from terrorism to anti-gay laws. The blue states certainly have the population and the economic might to make a go of it on their own; and the division in the country is so strong right now that people who ordinarily wouldn't consider secession as a serious option might now be more willing to give it a listen. Plus, a successful secession by the blue states would make it easier for black (i.e., anarchist) and sea-green (i.e., libertarian) regions to secede from them. And even an unsuccessful secession campaign would at least give issues of consent, sovereignty, and legitimacy a much-needed airing. So in Rothbard's words: "U. S. Out of the Bronx!" (For a general discussion of secession see David Gordon's anthology Secession, State, and Liberty.)
Chuck Munson objects that secession advocates would be abandoning anti-Bush residents of the red states: "If we want to change minds of the folks living in Bush Country, we should support progressives, radicals, and anarchists living and agitating out here." As a resident of an extremely red state myself, I have no eagerness to be abandoned either; but secession need not equal abandonment. Before the Civil War, many abolitionists favoured secession by the North in order to end the covenant with death and agreement with hell represented by the Constitution's fugitive slave clause. But they certainly didn’t intend thereby to abandon the slaves; on the contrary, they expected to be able to combat Southern slavery better from outside the Union than from within it. I expect that political activists in seceding blue states would likewise continue to seek influence over events in the Union, just as Europeans tried (unsuccessfully, alas) to influence this past election. (By the way, when Americans complain that Europeans have no business telling Americans how to vote, they seem to be forgetting -- even leaving aside considerations of humani nihil a me alienum puto -- that the United States is rapidly transforming itself into a world government, and that other countries have accordingly as good grounds for lamenting their lack of representation in American politics as American colonists in 1776 had for lamenting their lack of representation in the British Parliament.)
For those who still find talk of secession far-fetched, Charles Johnson makes a good case for a less extreme form of activism: trying to get referenda on the ballot. Charles writes:
Nearly half of the states in this country empower you and [me] to gather signatures and put laws straight on the ballot without having to lobby legislators or roll logs or hope the least-worst major candidate might consider making a speech about it sometime. … [W]hen I vote on an initiative I don't have to worry about spoilers, parties, trade-offs between candidates, or anything of the sort. It's a simple up or down and I can make my choices on each issue on the ballot independently -- rather than trying to figure out which dude will line up with more of my choices on the whole than the other (and whether that dude can get elected or whether I should vote for someone who's a bit worse but in a position to win, and…). … We've been building a vast network of interlinked volunteers with a do-it-yourself political ethic …. [H]ow about we start putting those resources to work in the 20-odd states with voter initiatives? (And while we're at it, bringing them to bear on the state legislature in states that don't yet have voter initiatives.)So there’s my suggested solution for the Blues of the Blues: referenda in the short run, secession in the long run. Let's get to work.
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
A Crumb of Consolation
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
One minor (well, okay, very minor) bit of solace regarding today's election results: according to the count so far, Badnarik received only slightly fewer votes than Nader, despite having been accorded far less publicity by the media. How well might he have done otherwise?
Ubi Libertas Ibi Patria
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The latest (Dec. 2004) issue of Reason magazine has an article by Brian Doherty, "Revolt of the Porcupines!," about the Free State Project and other attempts to establish autonomous libertarian regions. Because of my history of involvement in the free-nation movement (most notably through the Free Nation Foundation and Libertarian Nation Foundation), Doherty interviewed me some months ago for the story. Here's the paragraph that features an excerpt from that interview. (Please note that I am not responsible for the misdescription of me as “the” brains behind LNF!)
The Free State Project is the most recent and successful face of libertarian separatism -- or, as some call it, libertarian Zionism. To be sure, many involved in the search for new libertarian communities reject such terms. Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the brains behind the Libertarian Nation Foundation, a group dedicated to theorizing about the possibilities for libertarian polities, tells me he doesn't like the term separatist because "the attraction is not that I don't want to live near or interact with nonlibertarians. Most of my best friends are nonlibertarians. We don't want to live by ourselves but simply want a chance to demonstrate to the world that libertarian principles actually work. We want to escape from government, not escape from ordinary decent people" who happen not to share their political philosophy.
Monday, November 1, 2004
Kerry or Badnarik?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
FERRIS: Are you going to be as impractical as that?While I hear a lot about "undecided voters" on the news, I don't personally know anybody who is undecided between Bush and Kerry. I do, however, know quite a few people who are undecided between Kerry and Badnarik. I certainly can't blame anybody who ends up choosing Kerry as a means to unseating the most dangerous president of my lifetime. But as the last grains of pre-electoral sand are running out, I think it's worth explaining once more why I'm voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.
REARDEN: The evaluation of an action as "practical," Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
FERRIS: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else?
REARDEN: That is what I am doing right now.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Two recent posts (see here and here) from Robert Bidinotto offer a convenient foil. Bidinotto argues that those who support Michael Badnarik (or, as Bidinotto mistakenly calls him, "John" Badnarik) are forgetting that "the 'perfect' is the enemy of the 'good'." (Whenever anybody invokes that phrase, some compromise of principle always seems to be in the offing.)
Bidonotto aims to be making a case for Bush over Badnarik, rather than for Kerry over Badnarik. That’s because Bidinotto assumes, first, that a Bush victory would promote libertarian values better than would a Kerry victory, and second, that a vote for Badnarik "is a de facto vote for Kerry." I think the first assumption is clearly false; if we look at results rather than rhetoric, Bush comes out as objectively far more anti-liberty than Kerry. I'm not sure the second is true either; certainly I would vote for Kerry over Bush if I had to choose between the two, and this is likewise true of most of the Badnarik supporters I know -- so it's not obvious that most Badnarik votes would otherwise have gone to Bush. (It's true, though, that Badnarik, bless him, is specifically targeting Republican voters in an attempt to hurt Bush.)
But Bidinotto's argument is worth addressing apart from these two assumptions. For if his argument, with those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Bush over Badnarik, then the same argument, without those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Kerry over Badnarik. Thus Bidinotto's argument counts, objectively, as an argument on behalf of Kerry; those of us who plan to vote Libertarian tomorrow thus need a reply to Bidinotto's argument in order to justify voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.
Bidinotto's argument, briefly, is this: When faced with a choice between voting for a lesser evil (whether you think that's Bush or Kerry) who can win, or endangering that candidate's chances by voting for a principled libertarian (which describes Badnarik, whatever his personal eccentricities) who cannot win, Bidinotto thinks that the principled choice is to vote for the lesser evil, whereas to risk hurting the lesser-evil candidate by supporting the one who can't win is moral fanaticism. For Bidinotto, "the difference between a man of principle and a fanatic .... comes down to whether you primarily view moral principles as means to your ends (values), or whether you primarily view moral principles as ends in themselves." Badnarik supporters, he suggests, are moral fanatics who "cast purely symbolic votes for Principle," thereby expressing their "moral commitment to the platonic Ideal" -- but insofar as this choice helps to get the worse of the two viable candidates elected, it counts as "an objective sell-out of our lives, our security and all we hold dear, for the sake of a subjective feeling of smug self-righteousness." Those who hold principles, not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieving values in real life as far as possible, will vote for the least bad viable candidate.
This argument doesn't sway me, for two reasons. First, as an Aristotelean I cannot accept Bidinotto's dichotomy between principles as means and principles as ends. And I'm surprised that Bidinotto accepts it; for he himself has previously argued (see his article Survive or Flourish? A Reconciliation) that principles adopted as means to maintaining our lives become constitutive parts of the kind of life we aim to maintain. Hence on Bidinotto's own neo-Aristotelean view, the principled person cannot regard her principles merely as strategies for advancing some independently specifiable mode of life, but must regard adherence to those principles as part of the mode of life to be advanced. (The quotation from Rand at the top of this post arguably expresses the same idea; Bidinotto is in effect condemning Badnarik supporters as impractical, and the proper reply is Rearden's: that depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.)
Second, even if one were to adopt a purely strategic attitude toward one's principles, Bidinotto's conclusion still does not follow. The strategic point of acting on principle is to think long-range, rather than sacrificing significant longterm gain for the sake of some slight but immediate advantage. As I wrote in a piece titled Thinking Beyond the Next Election: A Strategy for Victory:
In playing chess, a sure way to lose is to spend your first few moves capturing as many of the opponent's pieces as possible. It’s much more important to let those juicy-looking pieces go than to allow them to distract you from your main mission of building a strong presence at the center of the board.Bidinotto considers this sort of argument, but only to dismiss it by asking: "Does anyone believe that Ross Perot had any enduring impact on the major parties, or on ensuing debates about economic policy? And will anyone be talking about Ralph Nader's views two weeks from now?"
I think the same lesson applies in politics. In crafting our strategy we need to plan several elections ahead, not just one. ... If we plan ahead only as far as the next election, then it's absolutely true that a vote for a candidate who loses is an ineffective vote.
But if we think ahead four years, or eight years, or twelve years, then a vote can do more than just elect a candidate. A vote can help to build a vote total which, even if it is a losing vote total, can, if it's big enough, draw more attention and support to the losing candidate and his party or cause.
This has two beneficial effects: First, it increases the good guys' chance of winning in the future. Second, it forces the major candidates to move in our direction in order to avoid precisely that.
Well, who cares what anybody is talking about two weeks from now? That’s short-term thinking again. What matters is what gets talked about four years from now; 2000 could be dismissed as a fluke, but if Nader makes the Democrats lose two presidential races in a row, I find it hard to believe that they won't scramble their hardest to win back Nader voters in 2008. Indeed, fear of Nader may already have influenced the Democratic nomination process by making more conservative candidates like Lieberman, Gephardt, and Clarke too risky. (As for Perot, he sacrificed much of the influence he could have had through his own erratic behaviour, and through not running a second time.)
There is historical precedent for the strategy I favour. As David Friedman points out in his book The Machinery of Freedom:
I believe the answer is that we should learn from our enemies; we should imitate the strategy of the Socialist party of 60 years ago. Its presidential vote never reached a million, but it may have been the most successful political party in American history. It never gained control of anything larger than the city of Milwaukee but it succeeded in enacting into law virtually every economic proposal in its 1928 platform -- a list of radical proposals ranging from minimum wages to social security.And it did this precisely by forcing the Democrats to move leftward in order to keep voters away from the Socialists. No doubt there were, in every election year, left-wingers who told the Socialists "This election is too important! You must support the Democratic candidate to prevent the even-less-socialistic Republican from getting in." If the Socialists had listened, their influence would have been zero; there would have been nowhere for socialistically inclined voters to go, and so the Democratic Party would have gone on taking such voters' support for granted and never thrown them so much as a bone.
My argument is not intended as a criticism of those who think, not unreasonably, that the Prince President is so egregiously horrific that this election really is a case where preventing his re-election immediately is worth the setback to any longterm LP strategy (especially if they have doubts about the LP's longterm viability anyway). These are trade-offs that each individual must judge for herself. (I would note, however, that those who do not live in a swing state still have no good reason to vote for a major-party candidate.) It's also not intended as a criticism of those who are so disgusted with the electoral process that they prefer not to vote at all. While I don't buy the argument that voting is inherently immoral (see my counter-argument here), nor the argument that voting is pointless unless a single vote is likely to determine the outcome (I believe in an imperfect duty to contribute to public goods, so the fact that something would be good if lots of people did it is a reason, albeit a defeasible one, to do it), there is nothing inherently obligatory about voting (since the duty to contribute to public goods is imperfect, we can pick and choose which public goods we contribute to -- which is also why I'm not a vegetarian, but that's another story) and the whole process is pretty distasteful. My argument aims merely to explain my reasons for supporting Badnarik, and to show that Bidinotto's arguments against those reasons do not succeed. (And Bidinotto should be relieved that I'm not persuaded by his arguments, since if I were, I would be voting for Kerry.)
One final topic: Bidinotto also condemns the Libertarian Party for promoting "a philosophical package-deal that links free-market economics with absolutely [loathsome], Leftist positions on other vital issues, such as criminal justice and foreign policy -- positions which the L. P. now insists are integral aspects of 'libertarianism.'" I won't take the time now to defend those particular positions (I've defended the anti-punishment position here and here, and the military non-interventionist position passim), but I do want to make two points.
First, there is nothing specifically "Leftist" (in Bidinotto’s sense) about these positions, which were being defended by libertarians and classical liberals long before being borrowed (and mangled) by statist socialists. William Graham Sumner, for example, analysed the connection between imperialism and plutocracy in such articles as "War" and "The Conquest of the United States by Spain"; does Bidinotto think Sumner was a "Leftist"? (For that matter, as Chris Sciabarra reminds us, Ayn Rand adopted an anti-interventionist position with regard to Korea, Vietnam, and both World Wars. Was she a "Leftist"?)
Second, the LP does not enforce any "party line" with regard to these positions. They may be in the LP Platform (actually the anti-punishment position isn't, strictly speaking), but Libertarian candidates have never been, and are not now, bound by the Platform; Badnarik's own running mate, for example, is (regrettably) a pro-interventionist and a supporter of the "war on terror."
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Southward Aye We Fled
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Tomorrow I'm off to the Alabama Philosophical Society meetings in Mobile, and so will be incommunibloggo for a few days. Back Sunday!
To console yourself during my absence, check out this excellent reply by Lew Rockwell to those who still think a Bush victory has more to offer libertarians than a Kerry victory.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Division of Household Labour
I posted the following in the comments on Jim Otteson's post (below), but thought it was worth saying in the section for regular posts as well:
I don't think an asymmetrical division of household labour is a sign that something is necessarily wrong. But in light of the social expectations and practices that tend to encourage and reinforce this policy -- and in light of the more vulnerable position it tends to put women in -- I think it's reason for suspicion/concern. Whether that suspicion/concern is warranted in any particular case will depend on a variety of factors, but it's something that deserves attention. (As Foucault said when accused of seeing inimical power relations everywhere: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.")
As for whether, in those cases where the division is problematic or objectionable, it's "probably the man's fault" -- again, not necessarily. Men respond unconsciously to social pressures and expectations just as women do. The power relations about which feminists complain needn't be deliberately planned by anybody; to borrow a Hayekian (or really Fergusonian) phrase, they are often "the products of human action but not of human design."
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Platonic Productivity
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Women on the job market make, on average, 75 cents for every dollar men make for the equivalent jobs.
What explains this wage gap? Various possibilities have been suggested. But some Austrians have argued that there is only one possible explanation: women are less productive than men.
The argument goes like this: If employers pay an employee more than the value of that worker's marginal revenue product, the company will lose money and so will be penalised by the market. If employers pay an employee less than the value of his or her marginal revenue product, then other companies can profit by offering more competitive wages and so luring the employee away. Hence wage rates that are set either above or below the employee's marginal revenue product will tend to get whittled away via competition. (See Mises and Rothbard for this argument.) The result is that any persistent disparity between men's and women’s wages must be due to a corresponding disparity between their marginal productivities.
As Walter Block puts it:
Consider a man and a woman each with a productivity of $10 per hour, and suppose, because of discrimination or whatever, that the man is paid $10 per hour and the woman is paid $8 per hour. It is as if the woman had a little sign on her forehead saying, "Hire me and earn an extra $2 an hour." This makes her a desirable employee even for a sexist boss.The fact that the wage gap does not get whittled away by competition in this fashion shows that the gap must be based, so the argument runs, on a real difference in productivity between the sexes. This does not necessarily point to any inherent difference in capacities, but might instead be due to the disproportionate burden of household work shouldered by women -- which would also explain why the wage gap is greater for married women than for single women. (Walter Block makes this argument also.) Hence feminist worries about the wage gap are groundless.
I'm not sure why this argument, if successful, would show that worrying about the wage gap is a mistake, rather than showing that efforts to redress the gap should pay less attention to influencing employers and more attention to influencing marital norms. (Perhaps the response would be that since wives freely choose to abide by such norms, outsiders have no basis for condemning the norms. But since when can't freely chosen arrangements be criticised -- on moral grounds, prudential grounds, or both?)
But anyway, I'm not persuaded by the argument, which strikes me as [ominous pause for effect] more neoclassical :-o than Austrian, in that it ignores imperfect information, the passage of time, etc. I certainly agree with Mises and Rothbard that there is a tendency for workers to be paid in accordance with their marginal revenue product, but the tendency doesn't realise itself instantaneously or without facing countervailing tendencies, and so, as I see it, does not license the inference that workers' wages are likely to approximate the value of their marginal revenue product -- just as the existence of equilibrating tendencies doesn't mean the economy is going to be at or near equilibrium. I would apply to this case the observation Mises makes about the final state of rest -- that although "the market at every instant is moving toward a final state of rest," nevertheless this state "will never be attained" because "new disturbing factors will emerge before it will be realized."
First of all, most employers do not know with any great precision their workers' marginal revenue product. Firms are, after all, islands of central planning -- on a small enough scale that the gains from central coordination generally outweigh the losses, but still they are epistemically hampered by the absence of internal markets. (And I'm rather skeptical of attempts to simulate markets within the firm ŕ la Koch Industries.) A firm confronts the test of profitability as a unit, not employee by employee, and so there is a fair bit of guesswork involved in paying workers according to their profitability. Precisely this point is made, in another context, by Block himself: "estimating the marginal-revenue product of actual and potential employees .... is difficult to do: there are joint products; productivity depends upon how the worker 'fits in' with others; it is impossible to keep one's eye on a given person all day long; etc." But Block thinks this doesn't much matter, because "those entrepreneurs who can carry out such tasks prosper; those who cannot, do not." Well, true enough, but an entrepreneur doesn't have to solve those problems perfectly in order to prosper -- as anyone who has spent any time in the frequently insane, Dilbert-like world of actual industry can testify. (The reason Dilbert is so popular is that it’s so depressingly accurate.) A firm that doesn't pay adequate attention to profitability is doomed to failure, certainly; but precisely because we're not living in the world of neoclassical perfect competition, firms can survive and prosper without being profit-maximisers. They just have to be less crazy/stupid than their competitors. Indeed, it's one of the glories of the market that it can produce such marvelous results from such crooked timber.
Even if women are not generally less productive than men, then, there might still be a widespread presumption on the part of employers that they are, and in light of the difficulty of determining the productivity of specific individuals, this presumption would not be easily falsified, thus making any wage gap based on such a presumption more difficult for market forces to whittle away. (Similar presumptions could explain the wage gap between married and single women likewise.)
Hence a wage gap might persist even if employers are focused solely on profitability, have no interest in discrimination, and are doing the level best to pay salary on marginal productivity alone. But there is no reason to rule out the possibility of deliberate, profit-disregarding discrimination either. Discrimination can be a consumption good for managers, and this good can be treated as part of the manager's salary-and-benefits package; any costs to the company arising from the manager's discriminatory practices can thus be viewed as sheer payroll costs. Maybe some managers order fancy wood paneling for their offices, and other managers pay women less for reasons of sexism; if the former sort of behaviour can survive the market test, why not the latter?
I should add that I don't think my skepticism about the productivity theory of wages is any sort of criticism of the market. The tendency to which Austrians point is real, and it means that markets are likely to get us closer to wages-according-to-productivity than could any rival system. (Since neoclassical perfect competition is incoherent and impossible, it does not count as a relevant rival.) If employers have a hard time estimating their workers' productivity (the knowledge problem), or sometimes cannot be trusted to try (the incentive problem), that's no reason to suppose that government would do any better. Employers are certainly in a better (however imperfect) position to evaluate their employees' productivity than is some distant legislator or bureaucrat, and they likewise have more reason to care about their company's profitability (even if it's not all they care about) than would the government. So there's no reason to think that transferring decision-making authority from employers to the State would bring wages into any better alignment with productivity. People in government are crooked timber too, and (given economic democracy's superior efficiency in comparison with political democracy) they're even less constrained by any sort of accountability than private firms are.
Nothing I've said shows that men and women are equally productive; it's only meant to show that, given prevailing cultural norms and power relations, we might well expect to see a gap between men's and women's earnings even if they were equally productive (which is at least reason for skepticism about claims that they are not equally productive).
I would also add that even if there are persistent problems -- non-governmental but nonetheless harmful power relations and the like -- that market processes do not eliminate automatically, it does not follow that there is nothing to be done about these problems short of a resort to governmental force. That's one reason I'm more sympathetic to the labour movement and the feminist movement than many libertarians nowadays tend to be. In the 19th century, libertarians saw political oppression as one component in an interlocking system of political, economic, and cultural factors; they made neither the mistake of thinking that political power was the only problem nor the mistake of thinking that political power could be safely and effectively used to combat the other problems.
As I have written elsewhere:
As students of Austrian economics (see, e.g., the writings of F. A. Hayek) we know that the free market, by coordinating the dispersed knowledge of market actors, has the ability to come up with solutions that no individual could have devised. … [But as] students of Austrian economics (see, e.g., the writings of Israel Kirzner), we also know that the efficiency of markets depends in large part on the action of entrepreneurs; and on the Austrian theory entrepreneurs do not passively react to market prices (as they do in neoclassical economics), but instead are actively alert to profit opportunities and are constantly trying to invent and market new solutions. … [W]e should remember to balance the Hayekian insight against the equally important Kirznerian insight that the working of the market depends on the creative ingenuity of individuals. … I see our role … as that of intellectual entrepreneurs; our coming up with solutions is part of (though by no means the whole of) what it means for the market to come up with solutions. We are the market.We know -- independently of the existence of the wage gap -- that there is plenty of sexism in the business world. (Those who don't know this can verify it for themselves by spending time in that world or talking with those who have done so.) Once we see why the productivity theory of wages, though correct as far as it goes, goes less far than its proponents often suppose, it does not seem implausible to suppose that this sexism plays some role in explaining the wage gap, and such sexism needs to be combated. (And even if the wage gap were based on a genuine productivity gap deriving from women's greater responsibility for household work, the cultural expectations that lead women to assume such responsibility would then be the sexism to combat.) But that's no reason to gripe about "market failure." Such failure is merely our failure. Instead, we need to fight the power -- peacefully, but not quietly.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The Form of Sound Words
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I've argued previously that if the argument-by-historical-definition against same-sex marriage were legitimate, it would follow, by analogy, that there are no married couples in the United States today. Here's some further ammo for that position.
In an 1853 debate over "free love" (i.e., the separation of sex and state) with libertarian anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, communitarian Horace Greeley (of "go west, young man" fame) defended his conception of marriage as both State-sanctioned and indissoluble (or nearly so -- he admitted adultery as legitimate grounds for divorce, though added that he "should oppose even that, if it did not seem to be upheld by the personal authority of Christ"). From this conception Greeley inferred, logically enough, that no relationship that is not State-sanctioned and not indissoluble (except for adultery) counts as marriage at all:
[T]his reminds me of the kindred case of two persons in Nantucket who have advertised in the newspapers that they have formed a matrimonial connection for life, or as long as they can agree; adding, that they consider this partnership exclusively their own affair, in which nobody else has any concern. I am glad they have the grace not to make the State a party to any such arrangement as this. But true Marriage -- the union of one man with one woman for life, in holy obedience to the law and purpose of God, and for the rearing up of pure, virtuous, and modest sons and daughters to the State -- is a union so radically different from this, that I trust the Nantucket couple will not claim, or that, at all events, their neighbors will not concede, to their selfish, shameful alliance the honorable appellation of Marriage. Let us, at least, "hold fast the form of sound words."In Greeley's day, most jurisdictions within the U.S. recognized no grounds for divorce other than adultery (though that was beginning to change, hinc illć lachrymć). Today that is no longer true. If, by Greeley's definition, marriage is inter alia a union that is legally indissoluble (except for adultery), and if current U.S. law recognises no such indissoluble unions, that means that, by Greeley's definition, nobody in the U. S. today is married.
33 years after Greeley's animadversions against this unnamed Nantucket couple, a similar event occurred: Kansas free-love activists Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker announced their marriage. Regarding marriage as a "wholly private compact" of no concern to anybody by themselves, Harman and Walker had conducted their own marriage ceremony without involving either State or clergy. For this impertinence they were imprisoned. One of the presiding judges in the case -- ironically named Judge Valentine -- raised the question whether the couple's crime was a) living together as a married couple without actually being married, or b) getting married but in an illegal fashion. Valentine came down on the side of (a), but on somewhat different grounds from Greeley's.
Judge Valentine, unlike Greeley, granted that genuine marriage did not require any ceremony of the State: under common law "the mere living together as husband and wife of a man and woman competent to marry each other, with the honest intention of being husband and wife so long as they both shall live, will constitute them husband and wife, and create a valid marriage." (He also seemed to require, again unlike Greeley, not that the marriage be actually indissoluble but only that the partners intend that it not be dissolved.) But he rejected the legality of the marriage for a different reason:
"In my opinion, the union between E. C. Walker and Lillian Harman was no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them. … In the present case, the parties repudiated nearly everything essential to a valid marriage, and openly avowed this repudiation at the commencement of their union."What "essentials" had the couple repudiated? In their marriage ceremony Harman had declined not only to vow obedience to her husband (such a vow being repugnant both to her feminism and to her libertarian anarchism) but also to vow love unto death: "I make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act, always, as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate." She also declined to submerge her individuality in another's by taking her husband’s last name: "I retain, also, my full maiden name, as I am sure it is my duty to do." Walker for his part vowed that "Lillian is and will continue to be as free to repulse any and all advances of mine as she has been heretofore. In joining with me in this love and labor union, she has not alienated a single natural right. She remains sovereign of herself, as I of myself, and we ... repudiate all powers legally conferred upon husbands and wives." In particular he repudiated any right as husband to control his wife's property; he also acknowledged his "responsibility to her as regards the care of offspring, if any, and her paramount right to the custody thereof should any unfortunate fate dissolve this union." Harman's father added: "I do not 'give away the bride,' as I wish her to be always the owner of her person." (Sears, p. 85.)
(Quoted in Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America, p. 94.)
In Judge Valentine's eyes, then, the "essentials" of marriage apparently included not only an intended commitment for life but also the wife's duty to obey her husband and take his last name, and the husband's right to rape his wife, to control her property, and to control her access to her children (rights that the husband did indeed traditionally enjoy under 19th-century American law -- and which survived longer into the 20th century than you may think).
If, then, we apply Valentine's 1887 definition of marriage to our own time, then any couples that are joined under marriage statutes that fail to require the wife's legal subordination to her husband, or fail to require her to take her husband's last name, or do not give the husband total control over his wife's body, property, and children, are not married at all. If Greeley and Valentine were to timewarp their way to the present day, they would see no unions that they would recognise as marriages -- not, at least, if they were to "hold fast the form of sound words."
So my question, to those today who maintain that same-sex marriage is a contradiction in terms, is this: on what grounds is your definition, which rules out same-sex unions but allows dissoluble, non-patriarchal heterosexual unions to count as marriages, to be preferred to Horace Greeley's or Judge Valentine's?
Monday, October 18, 2004
Déjŕ Bush
I recently came across a letter-to-the-editor I wrote back in 1988, as a graduate student, explaining why I was voting for Ron Paul rather than for Bush pčre or Dukakis. Much of it seems relevant, mutatis depressingly few mutandis, to the upcoming election. Read it here.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Their Land
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In last night's debate, did anybody besides me notice how much John Kerry's market-socialist plan for fixing health care sounded like President Bush's market-socialist plan for fixing Social Security?
In related news, I've recently posted on my website an article I wrote in 1996 trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade local gun-rights activists to vote for the LP; it's my attempt to deal with the "wasted vote" argument, and is obviously meant to apply more broadly than just the gun issue. Check it out here.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Presidential Hermeneutics
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you've got to do in a way that passes the test -- that passes the global test -- where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.
-- John Kerry, 1 October 2004
He said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. That's what he said. Think about this. Sen. Kerry's approach to foreign policy would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.
-- George W. Bush, 2 October 2004
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ... The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
--Thomas Jefferson, 4 July 1776
He said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. That's what he said. Think about this. Mr. Jefferson's approach to foreign policy would give "the opinions of mankind" and "a candid world" veto power over our national security decisions.
-- George W. Bush, 5 July 1776 [alternate history timeline]
Saturday, October 9, 2004
They Fought the Law ...
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and Green candidate David Cobb deliberately got themselves arrested at the Bush-Kerry debate in St. Louis last night in order to protest the exclusion of third parties from the debate process.
This doesn't strike me as a particularly useful tactic, though given that they did it I'm glad they did it together; people may be (somewhat) less likely to say "oh, those crazy Libertarians" if the Green candidate was involved also (and ditto, mutatis mutandis, for the Greens). But the question as to whether this would be good or bad publicity may be moot, since the establishment media have been almost entirely silent on the incident.
Friday, October 8, 2004
The Civil War, Part Deux
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Needless to say, my last post has generated a lot of feedback, both public and private, from both sides -- each explaining to me why the sins, if any, of its favoured camp are venial, while those of the other's favoured camp are mortal. I would prefer not to be drawn into evaluating the pros and cons of particular persons or policies -- both because doing so would go against the eirenic object of my post, and because, for reasons I explained last time, I regard such comparisons as largely a red herring. (Notice that I never said, and nothing in my post depended on saying, that the two sides were equivalent; assume that whichever side you think is worse really is worse, and my arguments still apply.) But I do want to comment on one particular issue.
Which is more problematic: seeking strategic association with powerful establishment promoters of statist evil, or seeking strategic association with powerless fringe promoters of statist evil? Half of my correspondents think the former is more problematic, on the grounds that establishment politicos are actually engaging in repression and mass murder right now, and it's worse to commit crimes than merely to advocate them; also, they argue that one is more likely to be corrupted into compromise by powerful pals than by powerless ones. The other half think the latter is more problematic, since there is an excuse for associating with the establishment folks (they set policy, they're widely respected and influential, so it's hard to avoid dealing with them), whereas there is no analogous case for associating with groups that, while perhaps no more intrinsically objectionable than the ruling class, are powerless (and so cannot offer as much aid, nor is there any pressing need to interact with them) and unpopular (and so are more likely to harm the reputation and public perception of those who associate with them).
In short, the very same power differential between the two types of statists is cited by Catoites as grounds for regarding Mises-style alliances as more suspect than Cato-style alliances, and is cited by Misesites as grounds for regarding Cato-style alliances as more suspect than Mises-style alliances. My reaction to this is that each side has a valid point; there is a respect in which Cato-style alliances are more problematic than Mises-style alliances, and there is a different respect in which Mises-style alliances are more problematic than Cato-style alliances. It seems to me that intelligent libertarians of good will could reasonably disagree about both the relative and the absolute weights of these two respects.
By "relative" I mean: which of the two respects is more problematic? By "absolute" I mean: which respect (one? both? neither?) is so problematic that its costs outweigh its benefits? When I call for peace I'm not calling for a consensus on the right answer to either the relative or the absolute question (nor have I suggested any such answers myself); I'm just suggesting that someone can reach the wrong answers to those questions and still be a valuable friend of liberty, worthy of respect. (I would also add that no organisation or movement should be judged solely by the most provocative persons in it, nor should those persons be judged solely by the most provocative things they happen to say.)
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
The Civil War
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
No, not that one. (Though the two are related.) I'm talking about the war of insults and accusations between (people associated with, and/or sympathetic toward) the libertarian movement's two most influential think tanks, the Cato Institute and the Mises Institute -- a conflict that for a while looked like it was winding down, but now sadly seems to be heating up again. I won't link to the relevant posts or name specific names because I have no desire to fan the flames further; but as someone with ties to both organisations I feel a responsibility to say something about the issue. This will probably get me in trouble with both sides, but here goes.
a) Each side accuses the other side of taking some un-libertarian positions. For example, Catoites criticise Misesites for opposing immigration, while Misesites criticise Catoites for favouring vouchers. Well, first of all, neither institution is monolithic in this regard; not everyone at Cato is pro-voucher and not everyone at Mises supports border controls. Each of these groups is much more internally diverse than it appears when viewed, from a distance, by the other group. But second -- okay, I think each criticism is right as far as it goes. I think the anti-immigration position popular among Misesites is a mistaken application of libertarian principles; and I also think the pro-voucher position popular among Catoites is a mistaken application of libertarian principles. But I don't think either position is crazy, or something no intelligent libertarian of good will could hold. (And the same goes for many other policy issues that divide Catoites and Misesites.) After knowing, respecting, and learning from people in both camps, I find it hard to take seriously the accusations from either side that the other side is not sincerely libertarian.
b) Each side accuses the other side of engaging in personal attacks and of uncharitably distorting the other side's positions. Yes, I think both sides have been guilty of such unfairness. I may be told that one side did this first, or has done this more. Well, suppose that's right. As Rothbard would say (though not necessarily in this context!): so what? One doesn't excuse the other; it's unfortunate whoever does it, whenever and however much. Nor, however, do I find it plausible to suppose that either side is being deliberately dishonest in these distortions. When you think your opponent's position is fundamentally screwy, you are likely to be impatient at the prospect of sorting out the position's precise details.
c) Each side accuses the other side of cozying up to horribly anti-liberty groups. Catoites accuse Misesites of making common cause with the racist-homophobic-theocratic-populist right. Misesites accuse Catoites of selling out to the mass-murdering regulatory imperial Beltway establishment. Catoites are horrified when Misesites give banquets in honour of theocratic economists; Misesites are horrified when Catoites give banquets in honour of establishment politicians. Each demands to know why the other side doesn't denounce such folks instead of fęting them. (And each side is inclined to suppose, wrongly in my judgment, that the other side's expressions of horror are either instances of unaccountable looniness or else disingenuous, a cover for some hidden agenda. Again, I know the people on both sides too well to find such accusations plausible.) Well ... the forming of strategic alliances with nonlibertarian groups is a tricky matter. There's the attractive possibility not only of winning aid from statists but of influencing them in a libertarian direction. (Religious conservatives, for example, surely make less dangerous neighbours once they've been converted to anarchism.) On the down side, there's the risk of lending their anti-libertarian positions legitimacy, as well as the danger that influence can be a two-way street. Catoites and Misesites are each convinced that they're doing a good job of handling their own strategic alliances but that the other side has fallen to the dark side. (Murray Rothbard experimented with many different alliances -- Objectivists, Goldwater Republicans, New Leftists, moderate Democrats, paleoconservatives -- at different points in his career, and the Cato and Mises Institutes each partake of the character of whichever alliance Rothbard was pursuing at the time of their respective foundings.) I myself am not particularly comfortable with either the Beltway-style alliances or the paleo-style alliances (I'm personally more inclined toward the New Left sort of alliance that Rothbard was pushing in ’68 -- though I recognise that it has its perils as well); and I certainly don't think either side has negotiated its alliances flawlessly and without erroneous compromise. But I do think each side has been, in its own way, a powerful force for libertarian education, and I can't deny that these risky alliances have played a role in these organisations' success in advancing the cause of liberty.
In short, I am convinced that each side in this conflict tends to exaggerate its opponents' shortcomings, and to underplay arguably analogous shortcomings in its own record. Someday these two camps will put their quarrels behind them and unite; when they do, they will defeat the State. I fear the current wounds may run so deep that any such resolution will have to wait until all the current participants have died off; but I can always hope.
Monday, October 4, 2004
Madness Below, Sanity Above
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In South Korea, protestors are taking to the streets and clashing with cops. (See here and here.) What's the reason for all this anti-state activity? The protestors want to stop the government from repealing a law banning ... anti-state activity. (Y'see, the protestors were engaging in right-wing anti-state activity in order to force the government to keep prohibiting left-wing anti-state activity, so it all makes sense. Sort of. Oh yeah, and apparently left-wing anti-state activity includes propaganda on behalf of South Korea's friendly totalitarian neighbour North Korea. Which surely strains the concept of "anti-state," but whatever.)
Meanwhile, in a saner universe: Congratulations to SpaceShipOne for completing two private space flights in succession, thereby winning the X Prize and, more importantly, laying the groundwork (spacework?) for a future of peaceful commerce, rational minds, and venturing spirits. (Check out this delightful parable on the insanity of governmental space research.) Earth is going to be a much nicer place to live once it has to face actual competition.
Sunday, October 3, 2004
Smash the Plutocracy!
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I'm pleased to announce that I've received permission from Reason magazine to post Roy Childs' classic 1971 essay Big Business and the Rise of American Statism on the Molinari Institute website. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time this excellent specimen of radical libertarian social analysis has been made available online. Drawing on Austro-Randian methodology and New Left historiography, Childs develops a libertarian interpretation of the Progressive Era, showing that government regulations supposedly designed to curb the power of the big corporations were actually introduced at the instigation and for the benefit of those corporations. I find this essay quite useful for libertarian outreach to the left (as well as for left-libertarian outreach to recovering-Republican libertarians). Read it here.
Friday, September 17, 2004
Shelter from the Storm
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Well, Ivan has passed over Auburn, with less damage than predicted. My power was out for only 19 hours -- compared with two days for my last hurricane (Fran, Chapel Hill NC, in ’96). Auburn’s email server is back up. I can begin to recover from my IWS (Internet Withdrawal Symptoms). Oh, and, like, cook food and stuff.
I haven’t been in to the office yet but I assume things are all right on campus. Tomorrow's Auburn-LSU football game is still scheduled to go ahead (classes may be cancelled, but not the really important things ....).
Alabama's gulf coast is in much worse shape -- I hope my friends at Mobile's University of South Alabama are OK. (More selfishly, I hope Orange Beach and Gulf Shores are back in shape in time for our end-of-October philosophy conference there.)
Yesterday the automated phone message at Alabama Power was saying that power would be restored "at 5:00 p.m., October 1st." Happily, they seem to have gotten to things a bit sooner.
Thanks, Aeon, for sending me to that great photo!
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Tempest-Tost
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Auburn University is directly in the path of Hurricane Ivan, so I will probably be incommunicado for a few days. Auburn's email server is shutting down tonight as a precaution (so any email to me will presumably bounce for a while); also, power is likely to go out all over the area tomorrow, and might not be restored for several days. So farewell, civilisation!
Saturday, September 11, 2004
9/11 + 3
Today, on the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I have little to say that I didn't say on the second anniversary.
Monday, September 6, 2004
Greener Than Thou
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I just finished watching the Badnarik/Cobb debate. I thought Badnarik did an adequate job, but economics is not his strong point, and he did not seem able to give the kinds of convincing economic responses to Cobb’s economic dirigisme that a Harry Browne, for example, might have.
The remark of Cobb's that most called for response, and didn't get much of one, was this: "It seems self-evident to me that if health care is privatised, only the rich will be able to afford health care." The fact that Cobb finds this "self-evident" is the most important failing on his part, as it demonstrates his complete lack of understanding of the market. The less affluent outnumber the more affluent. Why on earth would anyone market services just to a minority of their customer base? Why would anyone provide health care just to the wealthy few when they could make far more money by catering to the poorer many? Health care costs are driven upward by government-granted monopolies and subsidies; they would be driven down by genuine market competition.
Badnarik should have talked about the history of cheap health care for the poor before government got into the health care business, and should have explained more clearly how government favours the wealthy while markets favour the poor.
Badnarik did say that markets can achieve Green goals better than governments can. But he didn't explain how. I look forward to the day when Libertarian candidates present their positions in the Green-friendly manner of Mary Ruwart's Healing Our World.
On a different point: I would also like to have seen Badnarik call Cobb on Cobb's claim to stand for nonviolence. What I wrote about Kucinich a year ago on this point applies equally to Cobb today: Cobb's economic policies amount to an expansion of violence, not a diminution of it.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Anarchists and Terrorists
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Arthur Silber has joined the ranks of the anarchists! Welcome, Arthur! (He adds that his anarchism is only "provisional," but we certainly don’t intend to let him leave ....)
In other news: check out this fascinating interview with internet-freedom activist and "suspected terrorist" John Gilmore.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Polyannish on Polygamy
Tossing another two cents into the Bean/Horwitz debate below:
My question in my initial comment was "If the State of Illinois were to declare interracial marriages invalid, should the university roll over and refuse to grant benefits to interracial couples?" I haven't seen an answer to that yet.
And on polygamy: I certainly think polygamy should be legal (regardless of whether it's likely to be stable and regardless or whether it's likely to win public acceptance). But there is certainly an argument for same-sex marriage benefits that isn't there for polygamous-marriage benefits: namely equal treatment. If a heterosexual couple can get certain benefits, it's only fair that a same-sex couple be offered equal benefits. But if there's no limit to how many spouses I can bring to the table, all eligible for benefits, than I am putting a greater burden on the financial resources of my employer. The employer is entitled to draw a reasonable limit on the number of spouses to be supported -- but I don't see how the gender of the spouses is relevant. (In a sense this isn't an argument for denying benefits to polygamous partnerships at all. The employer can say: each employee can get X amount of benefits for the sum total of all his/her spouses, be that number one or more than one ....)
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, Is It Allah?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Apparently Pat Robertson is telling his followers that the God of Islam is actually a pagan moon god with no relation to the Judeo-Christian Biblical God. An internet search reveals that this silliness has become quite common on the Christian right.
Not being a Christian, Jew, or Muslim -- nor a worshipper of a moon god, for that matter -- I suppose I have no dog in this fight. (The one true god is of course Zeus, whom the Greek philosophers identified with reason or the logical structure of reality.) But c'mon!
The word "al-lah," "al-ilah," simply means "the god" in Arabic (thus mirroring the New Testament's term for God -- ho theos, "the god"). Christians and Jews writing in Arabic have always used the term "Allah" for the Judeo-Christian God; indeed, as the 6th-century Umm al-Jimal inscription in Jordan shows, Arabic Christians were using "Allah" as a term for God before Islam even arose. "Allah" means God the One and Only. Period.
Now it may well be true that the term "Allah" was also used in pre-Islamic times for a less impressive deity, a member of a polytheistic pantheon. But so what? As is well known, exactly the same is true of the Hebrew terms "Yahweh," "El," and "Elohim," used in the Bible as names of God. Early Jewish tradition assigns Yahweh a wife, Asherah. The term "Yahweh" was used by the Moabites as another name for the Canaanite god Ba'al; indeed, "El," "-ilah," and "Ba'al" are all obvious cognates, and are recognised by Biblical scholars as having a common origin. And the word "Elohim" shows its polytheistic origins in its very structure: it is the result of adding a masculine plural ending to a feminine singular noun (thereby strangely deriving a masculine singular: "he is the goddess-men"). If Islam has pagan roots, so do Judaism and Christianity.
The fact that the Arabic term for God once referred merely to one god among many no more proves that Muslims today are worshipping a moon god than the fact that the Hebrew terms for God once referred merely to one god among many proves that Jews and Christians today are worshipping a tribal deity with many wives. Etymology is not theology. St. Paul had more sense than many of his modern followers when he accepted, as legitimate references to the Christian God, pagan Greek verses describing Zeus as an immaterial, monotheistic creator. What god one worships presumably has more to do with how one conceives of her than with what names one calls her. [For any Kripkeans who may be reading this: no, I'm not rejecting causal origin as irrelevant; I think it's one, but only one, element in the disjunctive complex that determines a term's meaning. But that's a story for another day.]
So how does Islam conceive of God? Do Muslims in any interesting sense worship a "moon god"? The answer lies in the Qur'an, verses 6.75-79:
Thus did we show Abraham the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, that he might be among those possessing certainty:In other words: moon god my ass.
When the night grew dark upon him, he beheld a star. He said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: I love not things that set.
And when he saw the moon rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord. But when it set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be one of those who have gone astray.
And when he saw the sun rising in splendour, he said: This is my Lord! This is the greatest! But when it set he cried: O my people! Behold, I am no longer deceived by your false encumbrances.
For surely I have turned my face toward him who created the heavens and the earth, as one by nature upright, and I am not of the idolaters.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Beyond the Ballot
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I have an article on Victor Hugo and democracy on LRC today.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
The Second Empire Strikes Back
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The years 1848-1852 were particularly interesting times (in the Chinese sense) for France; I'm currently reading through accounts of this period by such contemporary witnesses as Tocqueville, Dunoyer, Proudhon, Molinari, Marx, and Hugo. (This was also of course the period in which the "problem of the best régime" was finally solved -- in theory though alas not in practice -- by Molinari in his works The Production of Security and Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare.) Some of these writers favoured the revolution of 1848 and some of them opposed it, but they all agreed in condemning the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852.
Most recently I've been reading Hugo's searing account (in Napoléon the Little and History of a Crime) of the December 1851 coup that brought Napoléon III to power, thus paving the way for the Second Empire. Hugo shared Acton's and Rothbard's conviction that the historian should be a hanging judge, and he levels unanswerable denunciations not only of the coup (and the mass detentions and mass murders attendant thereon), but also of the court intellectuals who whitewashed the crimes of the self-styled "Prince President" (a term I'm tempted to start using for Bush II) and glorified his oppressive and bloodthirsty modus operandi.
I was irresistibly reminded of Hugo's account of the Empire by reading Jeff Tucker's excellent critique of American conservatism on LRC today. As Tucker points out, today's apologists for sanguinary statism, like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, are still "screaming for blood, exalting the imperial state, decrying the very basis of civilization (peace), and demanding the jailing of dissidents." (Read it now.)
Hugo saw the Second Empire as an anachronism, a throwback to a less civilised era, and he felt confident that the peaceful and enlightened 20th century would see the end of such barbarism. On the contrary, of course (as Molinari among others predicted quite clearly), the 20th century mostly followed the model of the Second Empire -- and the 21st so far seems to be following suit.
Unrelated P.S. - In addition to the MP3 and PDF versions of my anarchy talk to which I previously linked, there is now an HTML version.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
More Anarchy Is Upon Us!
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Last week I linked to an audio file of my Mises Institute anarchism talk. There’s now a written transcript online as a PDF file here.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Anti-Gouging Idiocy
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized
discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science."
But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on
economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
-- Murray N. Rothbard
In the wake of Hurricane Charley, we're seeing the usual governmental threats of violence against "price gougers." This is such an insane policy that even the barest acquaintance with economic principles should be enough to expose it as the disastrous bungle it is -- but economic ignorance seems to know no limits.
So let's haul out the Econ 101 basics. Here's how the market’s self-correction mechanism works.
When there's a shortage of some good, what needs to happen? Obviously, production of the good needs to be increased -- and in the meantime, consumption needs to be rationed. This is precisely what the price system accomplishes: the shortage of the good gives sellers an incentive to raise prices. This in turn simultaneously signals the consumers to constrain their consumption of that good and gives producers an incentive to step up their production and provision of that good. As a result, the shortage is redressed. (The same corrective process, in reverse, occurs in response to a glut.)
Now what happens when government imposes a price ceiling? The economy's self-healing signals are suppressed. By preventing the price from rising, government causes the good to be supplied in smaller quantities than it would otherwise be. As a result, the shortage is prolonged.
Would it be nice if, in the wake of a catastrophe, sellers provided necessary goods at below the new market price, out of the goodness of their hearts? Sure; if some charitable sellers are willing and able to do that, that's great. But anybody who's going to do that will do it with or without the anti-gouging laws; and if they can provide sufficient quantities to address the shortage, would-be "gougers" aren’t going to make any profits anyway. If "gougers" are making profits, that shows that there are too few charitable sellers to cure the shortage; the prospect of making profits at the new, higher market price is what draws "gougers" into the market. The sane response would be to welcome in the "gougers"; competition among them will quickly restore supply and eliminate the shortage (thus eliminating the opportunity for further "gouging" as well). Instead, government bans the "gougers" and so perpetuates the shortage. Following up a natural disaster with the artificial disaster of anti-gouging laws simply compounds the problem; first people get hit by a hurricane, which causes the shortage, and then they get hit by the government, which fights tooth and nail the market"s attempts to fix the shortage. The best analogy to anti-gouging laws would be a doctor who keeps ripping the scabs off his patients' wounds as fast as they form.
Price controls cause and maintain shortages. Always and everywhere. This is one of the simplest and most basic economic laws there is. It's known to anyone who knows even the rudiments of economic reasoning (a description which apparently does not apply to our elected officials). Nor do the laws of economics suddenly go into abeyance because there's been an emergency; those are not among the laws that rulers have the power to suspend.
Is it a bad thing when hurricane victims have to pay extra-high prices for necessities? Of course (just as it's a bad thing when you’ve got scabs forming on your body). And any (peaceful) measures that can get those goods to the people who need them at a lower price, or even for free, would be worth supporting. But anti-gouging laws do not replace high-price opportunities to buy necessities with an equal number of low-price opportunities to buy the same necessities; instead, they reduce the total number of such opportunities in the present and extend that reduction farther into the future. In the face of catastrophic shortages, no governmental response could be more criminal.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Anarchy Is Upon Us!
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
At the Mises University on the evening of August 6th, I was assigned to be the "mystery speaker." Jeff Tucker asked me to pick a controversial subject, so I picked anarchism (though I’m not sure that counts as a controversial subject before that particular audience!).
Anyway, an MP3 audio file of my talk is now online here. I talk about some of the chief objections to anarchism and I offer counter-arguments. (One issue I don't talk about is military defense under anarchy, but for that issue see my anarchist resources page.) I find the sound of my voice somewhat annoying, and the sound of my laugh incredibly annoying (it all sounds so much better in my head than it does from the outside), but hey, it's what I've got.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Molinari Society Update
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The first Molinari Symposium has been scheduled! The venue is the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Boston, December 28th. The topic is "Libertarianism and Feminism." The participants include Elizabeth Brake, Charles Johnson, Jennifer McKitrick, Aeon Skoble, and your humble correspondent. More details here.
Sunday, August 8, 2004
News from the Front
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
A: We don't make quantitative predictions.
I've just finished a week of Mises University, lecturing on apriorism, abstraction, and anarchy. It's encouraging to see the hordes of bright, committed, hardcore Austro-libertarian students that come to these conferences; the ruling class has no idea what's about to hit it in a few years.
My JLS article Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism is now online. (And for an earlier but longer draft see here.) I argue that despite the Taoists' good press among libertarians, it was actually the Confucians who were the truest forerunners of libertarianism in ancient China.
I've been reading Tocqueville's and Hugo's memoirs about the 1848 revolution. Their ability to delineate, with a few brief anecdotes and descriptions, the character of the principals on the various sides is devastatingly effective.
I see in the news that the U.S. puppet régime in Iraq has temporarily (?) banned the al-Jazeera network. Apparently those pesky al-Jazeera reporters "have been showing a lot of crimes and criminals on TV," which "transfer[s] a bad picture about Iraq." So this paternal time-out is intended to give those nattering nabobs of negativism "a chance to re-adjust their policy against Iraq."
Um ... Operation Iraqi what again?
Sunday, August 1, 2004
To Serve Man
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Two weeks ago I discussed what I called the "paradox of religious conservatism" -- namely, the fact that those who are allegedly dedicated to the supremacy of spirit over matter are in practice committed to subordinating the spiritual aspects of human life to the merely biological aspects. The latest confirmation of this comes in the form of an anti-feminist screed from the Vatican titled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World.
While the insulting phrase "a woman is not a copy of a man" (insulting in its implication that feminists do regard woman as a "copy of a man"), which news reports have most often quoted from the document, does not in fact appear to occur in it, the rambling diatribe certainly does condemn the "human attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning," and complains that among feminists "physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary."
For the Vatican, by contrast, women's biological role as mothers determines their spiritual destiny, which is -- you guessed it -- a "capacity for the other." As I've noted before (see here and here), one of the strategies of patriarchy is to define the function of women as fundamentally other-directed. Of course the Vatican document is quick to assure us that "in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be 'for the other'" (as if such a celebration of servility would be any more palatable if the servility were reciprocal) -- but women, we are told, are "more immediately attuned to these values," and it is their task to "live them with particular intensity and naturalness." One of the chief function of women, the Vatican opines, is to serve as a "sign" of this doctrine of universal servility by exemplifying the distinctively feminine virtues of "listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting," and thereby "recalling these dispositions to all the baptized."
In short, although every human being is called to self-immolation, women are supposed to specialise in it -- and all because of the reproductive role that nature happens to have assigned them. Isn't this precisely the biology-worship I've been complaining of? (Needless to say, these men in dresses also have no patience for those who "call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father" and "make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent." Here too, the spiritual must be subordinated to the biological rather than vice versa.)
The Vatican anticipates the charge of biology-worship and seeks to rebut it. Although "motherhood is a key element of women's identity," this "does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation"; on the contrary, the "Christian vocation of virginity”" contradicts "any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny." (Of course, for a religion that condemns birth control, virginity is the only alternative to motherhood on offer.) Still, virginity is described as a kind of metaphorical extension of biological motherhood:
Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.In short, even women who are not mothers in the literal sense are still expected to model their human interactions on motherhood in a way that goes beyond what is asked of men. The Vatican, more subtle than its Baptist brethren (no surprise there!), insists that woman's role as a "helpmate" marks her not as an "inferior," but rather as a "vital helper" on a man's "own level" -- but all the same it is woman, not man, whose essence is defined in this other-regarding way. It is femininity, not masculinity, that is defined as "the fundamental human capacity to live for the other and because of the other." (From an individualist perspective, what greater insult to women can be imagined?)
The Vatican seeks to evade the charge of biology-worship by insisting that male and female are not purely biological categories. (Though when feminists say precisely this, the Vatican attacks them for emphasising gender over sex!) Although the "temporal and earthly expression of sexuality" is "transient and ordered to a phase of life marked by procreation and death," the distinction between male and female is described as "belonging ontologically to creation" and therefore as "destined ... to outlast the present time," albeit "in a transfigured form." Those who in the present life take vows of celibacy "for the sake of the Kingdom" are prefiguring "this form of future existence of male and female." But far from being the negation of biology-worship, this point of view elevates women's biological role in reproduction to a metaphysical principle entailing special duties of feminine servility from which even the grave will apparently offer no escape. (Though insofar as feminine self-immolation is supposed to be an inspiring model for men to imitate, this conception is no picnic for either sex. Thus patriarchy and altruism are complementary parts of an interlocking system that oppresses both men and women -- albeit not equally.)
The Vatican throws a sop to the feminists by acknowledging that "women should be present in the world of work and in the organization of society," and "should have access to positions of responsibility." But can women really be expected to compete on equal terms when they must also shoulder the special burden of serving as a visible "sign" of the servile virtues?
The Vatican also pays women the old false compliment of a special feminine "sense and ... respect for what is concrete," as "opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society." That sounds very nice; but propagating such a view of women is hardly likely to enhance their success in intellectual careers. (Admittedly some feminists have made precisely the same mistake, trumpeting hostility to abstraction as some sort of liberating "feminine voice" and "ethics of care," when in fact such stereotypes are more plausibly regarded as artefacts of women’s subjection.)
The document's tepid support for women's "access to positions of responsibility" is vitiated by its condemnation of feminists who "emphasize strongly conditions of subordination" and urge women to "make themselves the adversaries of men." Should feminists ignore the existing conditions of subordination? It is such conditions, and not those who point them out, that are responsible for adversarial relations between men and women. The goal of feminists is to abolish these adversarial relations by abolishing the conditions of subordination that maintain them.
The Vatican's insistence that men and women are equal partners is likewise belied by the document's stress on the "importance and relevance" of the fact that in incarnating himself as Jesus Christ, God "assumed human nature in its male form." Even for those who accept the (to my mind blasphemous and un-Biblical) notion that God once became a human being, one might have thought that he picked a male form for the simple reason that a female preacher in first-century Palestine would have had even more trouble gaining a hearing than Jesus did. But the Vatican apparently sees it as signifying that divinity is more appropriately expressed in male rather than female form. Thus patriarchy is undergirded by patriolatry.
In one of his better moments, St. Paul wrote that in Christ "there is neither male nor female." (Galatians 3:28.) In short, our physical biology does not determine our spiritual vocation. The Vatican document ingeniously interprets this passage in precisely the opposite sense, to mean that "the distinction between man and woman is reaffirmed more than ever," in that the "rivalry" which has "disfigured the relationship between men and women" will be replaced with harmony once the sexes reconcile themselves to their Church-assigned roles. In short, the ideal held out to women is: peace through surrender.
To this, the only proper answer can be: no peace without justice!
Écrasez l’infâme!
Friday, July 30, 2004
Bill O'Reilly Reports for Duty
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The other night I saw Bill O'Reilly interviewing Michael Moore. As one would expect from such a collision of blowhards, more heat than light was generated. But there was one memorable moment: Moore asked O'Reilly whether he would be willing to sacrifice the life of his son or daughter to secure Fallujah. O'Reilly refused to answer; but he did say that he would readily give his own life to secure Fallujah.
So let me get this straight. If the insurgents in Fallujah announced that they would surrender on condition that they first be allowed to behead O’Reilly -- and if U.S. intelligence sources assured him that the insurgents’ promises were reliable -- would he happily turn himself over? Really?
If he would, then he's plumb loco. If he wouldn't, then he should stop lying.
This Mind Is Your Mind
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I’ve been saying for years that so-called "intellectual property rights" are really attempts to claim ownership over the contents and activities of other people's minds -- and are thus radically inconsistent with property rights in the libertarian sense, which are grounded in the principle of self-ownership. (See the Molinari Institute's anti-copyright page for the libertarian case against IP.)
The latest salvo from the IP thought police offers striking confirmation of this thesis. The Richmond Organization, a music publishing company that owns the legal rights to Woody Guthrie's socialist anthem "This Land Is Your Land," is suing the makers of the popular Bush-versus-Kerry cartoon that uses the song to satirise the American political process.
Their grounds? The cartoon "threatens to corrupt Guthrie's classic -- an icon of Americana -- by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie's unifying message." (See Jesse Walker's story here.)
In short, this "Richmond Organization" is claiming the right to control what people think when they hear a song. What despot ever demanded more?
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Antiwar Libertarianism: Principled or Pragmatic?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Randy Barnett asks how non-aggression in interpersonal ethics translates into non-intervention in foreign policy. I'm largely in agreement with what Gene Healy says in response here, but let me add a few points. (Much of this I've said before, but it's worth saying again.)
I agree that the relationship is not of the straightforward form "if individuals shouldn't invade the boundaries of other individuals, then states shouldn't invade the boundaries of other states." For one thing, a state does not have the same kind of right over its boundaries that individuals have over their own boundaries. (Indeed it couldn't, so long as individuals with those sorts of rights exist within the state's borders.)
Indeed, I would go farther. Since I regard states as inherently illegitimate and criminal organisations, I would say that a state has no rights at all; thus it has neither a right to invade nor a right not to be invaded.
Still, we can ask what we as citizens have a right to try to get the state to do. So long as we are ruled by states, and until we can succeed in shutting them down for good, we are justified in trying to direct them toward activities that protect rights rather than violate them. Hence we are within our rights to call the cops or lobby our legislators, even if those cops and those legislators have no right to hold the positions they hold.
So why isn't it legitimate for citizens to direct their government's armed forces to invade dictatorships and liberate the people there? Why isn't that like calling the cops when you hear screams coming from next door?
I think there are two chief points of disanalogy. First: although invading a dictatorship is not per se a violation of rights, realistically the way the state is going to handle such an invasion will involve massive violence against innocent civilians. This is not merely a prudential objection to interventionism (though it is at least that -- creating more recruits for our enemies is hardly in our interest); directing the state to behave in such an enormously rights-violating manner is itself a violation of the non-aggression principle. (For the limited scope of permissible "collateral damage," see here and here. Anyway, I'm not just talking about "collateral damage"; given the incentive structures involved in state systems, sending the armed state into a territory is a sure recipe for deliberate rights-violations. The Abu Ghraib scandal was not an "anomaly"; it was the state manifesting its essential character.)
Second: war is the health of the state -- that is, given how states actually operate, calling for military expansion means calling for the state to augment its power here at home. This means not only the increased taxation that Gene talks about, but also the eroding of civil liberties, and the fueling of the neofascist corporatism that Chris Sciabarra and Arthur Silber have explained so well. Citizens who urge their governments to engage in military interventions are calling for more rights-violations, not only abroad but at home.
Bentham rightly characterised war as "robbery, having murder for its instrument ... operating upon the largest possible scale ... committed by the ruling few in the conquering nation, on the subject many in both nations." Does war necessarily have to take this form? Not at all; there are ways of conducting military operations that avoid these problems. But states by their nature will not conduct military operations in that way. Hence as libertarians we run the risk of violating the non-aggression principle if we direct our states into war.
I might be asked: don't these arguments apply just as much to defensive as to invasive military action? I think they do apply to defensive action also -- but not "just as much": fewer foreign civilians will be killed in a purely defensive war, the lower costs of defense mean a lower tax burden, and the absence of prospects for plunder will moderate the neofascist aspects. On the other hand, admittedly, governments will probably curtail civil liberties even more in a defensive than in an invasive war. More importantly, however, the question really does not arise as to whether libertarians should favour military action in such a case, because there is simply zero chance of the state's forgoing military action in the case of a direct attack, and so there would be no point in libertarians agitating for military action. It is only in the case of interventionism that the issue of what libertarians should support even arises.
Randy will presumably say that even if my case for noninterventionism is sound, it is merely a "pragmatic judgment of the sorts of rightful actions that will or will not yield good consequences" and "does not follow from Libertarian principles." I disagree. The problem with sending the state to war is not just that doing so has bad consequences, but that the bad consequences are rights-violations. So for me, at any rate, the case against military intervention is an application of the nonaggression principle (though I think purely consequentialist considerations would also tell against such intervention). Nor am I simply claiming that a policy of nonintervention "indirectly leads better to the protection of rights than alternative policies." I don't see rights as something whose protection should be maximised (which would allow trade-offs whereby more rights protected over here makes up for a few rights being violated over there) but as side-constraints (ŕ la Nozick) to be respected. The nonaggression principle is not a call to decrease the total amount of aggression in the universe by whatever means necessary; it is a call to refrain from aggression oneself. It is addressed to the individual human soul, not to some mythical central planning board with authority to dispose of human lives at will.
One further point in closing. I speak here for myself, not necessarily for other antiwar libertarians. Many antiwar libertarians take their positions for primarily consequentialist reasons; and many libertarians who opposed the invasion of Iraq favoured the invasion of Afghanistan (which I opposed). So they shouldn’t all be tarred with the brush of my extreme deontological views! (Strictly speaking, my views are really virtue-ethical rather than deontological, but that's a long story.)
Badnarik on the Road to Damascus?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Badnarik’s website used to have an "issues" section which included, inter alia, a position statement on abortion. In it, Badnarik said that, after much wrestling with the issue, he was inclined to view abortion as a rights-violation. I can't remember whether he said explicitly that it should be illegal, but that would seem a plausible inference.
Shortly after he won the nomination, the "issues" section abruptly vanished from the Badnarik website. When the "issues" section reappeared a few weeks later, there was no longer any mention of abortion. (And there still isn’t -- I just checked.)
But today I notice that AOL's candidate information page carries a new position statement on abortion. Badnarik now says that "the decision to abort must remain the sole province of the mother, the father, and their own consciences," and is "not an issue for government intrusion."
That's a move in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. But I wonder what the story is.
Monday, July 26, 2004
Flaming Swords, Devilish Anarchists, and Boolean Logic: The First War on Terror
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
On September 6th, 1901 -- almost exactly 100 years before the 9/11 attacks -- President William McKinley was fatally shot by a somewhat bewildered Polish anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.
The results were in fact eerily similar to those of the 9/11 attacks: nationwide hysteria, fueled by the government and its claque, was unleashed against immigrants and ideological dissidents. All anarchists, whether revolutionary or pacific, were lumped together without distinction, as Muslims would be a century later; newspapers called for boycotting or exiling this "brood of vipers," and laws were passed to bar anarchists from entering the country. It was in this atmosphere that Theodore Roosevelt, the most direct beneficiary of Czolgosz's act, issued his famous pronunciamento: "The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other." (Compare Franklin Graham's description of Islam as "a very evil and a very wicked religion.")
Two recent additions to the Molinari Institute's online library shed light on this dark period for civil liberties.
One is U.S. ex rel. Turner v. Williams, the 1904 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of anarchist labour organiser John Turner, on the grounds that anyone who "avows himself to be an anarchist" must be assumed to mean the term "in the popular sense" of "one who seeks to overturn by violence all constituted forms and institutions of society and government," and noted: "If that be not the fact, he should have introduced testimony to establish the contrary." (In other words, the burden of proof was placed, unconstitutionally, on the defendant.) Appealing on Biblical grounds to the claim that "the realm where no human government is needed" (namely Eden) is barred by a "flaming brand," the Court concluded that government "cannot be denied the power of self-preservation" and so booted out of the country a man against whom, by the Court's own admission, no legal case had been made.
The other is Henry Bool's Apology for His Jeffersonian Anarchism, a 1901 pamphlet which to my knowledge has not previously been made available online. Henry Bool of Ithaca, N.Y., was a successful and widely respected businessman whose well-known anarchist sympathies had aroused little concern -- until the McKinley assassination, when the Ithaca Journal, with whose owner Bool had previously been on friendly terms, announced (rather disingenuously) that it had "learned with surprise and indignation" that some Ithaca residents were "believers in this dreadful doctrine" of anarchism. Identifying Bool specifically as "an avowed Anarchist," the paper demanded legislation "to rid this land entirely of these emissaries of the Devil," and urged citizens in the meantime "[n]ot to recognize these foes of our Republic on the streets; not to buy of them or sell to them; not to employ them or work in their employ." While the paper was careful to express disapproval of any vigilante violence against anarchists, Bool considered such violence the likely outcome of the Journal's "incendiary editorials" and "inflammatory pabulum," and was not surprised when he soon began to receive anonymous threats through the mails.
When Bool wrote to the Journal to protest at seeing his peaceful and evolutionary Tuckerite brand of individualist anarchism conflated with the terroristic anarchism of Czolgosz (if Czolgosz even was an anarchist, which is debatable), the editors refused to publish his letters, telling him that they had had "quite enough of anarchists of whatever stripe" and would gladly "help hang or deport every one of them." Bool's pamphlet contains the paper's O'Reilly-esque fulminations along with his own rejected replies. (I'm happy to report that, a century later, the Ithaca Journal takes a more favourable attitude toward Bool -- though the paper's own dishonourable conduct in his regard is neatly glossed over even now!)
Thursday, July 22, 2004
A Greener Shade of Brown
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I just today (well, yesterday by the time I'm writing this) came across the website of Lance Brown, who's already running for the LP nomination in 2008 (the first presidential election in which he'll be old enough to be eligible). It's the first I'd heard of him, but then I don't generally follow LP politics terribly closely (apart from my one stint as a delegate in '96) so I'm probably behind the curve.
In any case, after spending some time perusing his website (actually a vast network of websites) I'm favourably impressed; on the basis of what I've read so far, he seems more like "my" kind of libertarian than were any of the three candidates for the LP nomination this year. In other words, he's a Rand-reading computer geek with a left-friendly, feminist-friendly, labour-friendly, Green-friendly approach.
That's basically the approach that characterised the libertarian movement in the glorious 19th century, before the rise of state socialism scared libertarians into their long and ugly 20th-century alliance with conservatives. One of Brown's many websites is called GreenLiberty.org, advertised as being dedicated to "pursuing Green values using Libertarian principles"; I was particularly curious to have a look at it, but it seems to be out of service for now. However, for Brown's general outlook see his article The Essential Hurdle for Libertarians, which says the things that libertarians should be saying more often.
I'm a bit grumpy, though, over his admission that he isn't "very well-read" in Austrian economics. Come 2008, he'd better have read up on the Austrians if he's going to be answering the hard economics questions. That's especially true if he wants to reach out to the left; those constituents will be wanting to know why they should vote for a free-marketer like Brown rather than for Nader or the Green candidate. Perhaps he should start with Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People. (As long as I'm grumping: Brown also has a fondness for keeping pronouns in the subjective case regardless of what this does to the grammar of the sentence. Argh! Still, I bet he can pronounce "nuclear" correctly.)
Anyway, Brown looks like a breath of fresh air, at least to us bleeding-heart libertarians who would like to see the movement lose its right-wing image and extend its appeal to the anti-authoritarian left. He's definitely a candidate worth watching.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Herbert Spencer versus the Undead
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The lies about Herbert Spencer just won't die. Like creatures in a horror movie, no matter how many times you kill them they just keep coming back. The latest recycled slander against the valiant old libertarian turns up in Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism; for one more try with the mallet and stake, see my reply here.
In other news: on LRC today, Pat Buchanan writes: "Since Henry Wallace, then, 60 years ago, no vice president has been dumped." Um ... what about Gerald Ford dumping Rockefeller for Dole in 1976?
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Iraq, Then and Now
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Before the fall of communism, Republicans were fond of pointing out that people were risking their lives to get out of communist countries, and risking their lives to get in to capitalist countries. This, they insisted, was all one needed to know in order to evaluate the respective merits of the two systems.
Interestingly, the Republicans have been remarkably slow to appeal to that test lately -- perhaps because this time the results would not favour their position.
As Lew Rockwell points out, in the days of Saddam Hussein "people from all over the region wanted to come to Iraq"; by contrast, under the American puppet régime "those who come are there for jihad, while the flow otherwise runs in the opposite direction."
And that's no surprise. Iraq under Hussein was one of the most liberal societies in the Arab world. Of course that isn't saying much, and it's quite consistent with the undeniable truth that Hussein was a murderous, dictatorial thug. The fact that most Iraqis were better off under that murderous, dictatorial thug than they are under the American occupation is a shameful indictment of U.S. foreign policy.
Those of a Panglossian disposition may insist that Iraq's current wretched condition is merely temporary, a result of the war, and that in a short while, once the last pockets of resistance have been stamped out, it will become a shining, free, prosperous oasis to which immigrants will eagerly flow. Soviet apologists were saying the same thing about Russia for seventy years.
But what is the plan for achieving this miracle? As La Boétie and Hume have taught us, no ruler can maintain power by force alone. And as Rockwell reminds us, Hussein didn't. But the U.S. is trying to. Only failure can result.
Charles Dunoyer began his career as a dissident journalist bitterly attacking the reigning monarchy in France. After its overthrow, the excesses of its republican and imperial successors eventually led him to call for the monarchy's restoration. I used to attribute this to a weakening of Dunoyer's libertarian principles, and to some extent I still think it was. But I understand how he felt.
Friday, July 16, 2004
The Paradox of Religious Conservatism
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
for they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh,
but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit.
-- Romans 8: 4-5.
Religious conservatives are a puzzle. They like to denounce socialism and ethical relativism; they also like to denounce the materialistic conception of human beings as mere animals. They often profess skepticism at the findings of evolutionary biology.
And yet, in practice, they enthusiastically embrace all the vices they purport to attack.
They tend, for example, to accept "divine command theory," which holds that what makes something right (or wrong) is the fact that God commands (or forbids) it. The upshot of such a view, of course, is that God's commands must be viewed as completely arbitrary and random. After all, if God had reasons for commanding and prohibiting as he does, then those reasons, rather than God's will, would be the basis of the action's rightness or wrongness -- an intolerable restriction on God's "freedom." Hence such conservatives are as hostile as any relativist to the notion of a rationally intelligible moral order. They too regard morality as being a matter of groundless whim; they just think the whim is God's rather than ours.
Despite their surface opposition to socialism, they typically embrace both a socialistic ethics, subordinating the fulfillment of the individual to the collective good of society, and a socialistic cosmology, denying the possibility of order emerging except through top-down control. Such commitments must inevitably corrupt one's politics in a socialist direction. (This is why it is a mistake to suppose, as many paleolibertarians do, that religious conservatism can be combined in a stable fashion with political libertarianism. Where their treasure is, there will their heart -- and sooner or later their politics -- be also.)
Religious conservatives also take biology-worship to grotesque extremes. They often regard gender roles as fixed by sociobiology, thus denying free will and treating hormones as having greater normative weight than reason. They debase the concept of marriage by subordinating its spiritual meaning to a merely biological function. In opposing abortion, they appeal to a definition of personhood in terms of material, biological characteristics rather than in terms of the nature of rational agents; that's how a clot of protoplasm gets elevated to the status of a legal person by the mere possession of human DNA. (And then they propose to enslave women to the incubation of such protoplasm.)
One would think they had never heard of the idea that human beings possess a spiritual dimension which transcends their merely animal functions. Yet this is precisely the idea for which they have always claimed to stand.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
The FMA: A Victimless Crime?
[cross-posted on Austro-Athenian Empire]
A correspondent asks me what rights the Federal Marriage Amendment would have violated. Gays would still have had the right to have private, non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremonies, he argues; they would simply have forfeited governmental benefits to which no one has any right anyway.
I think this is too quick. These "governmental benefits" include rights that any couple either should have (e.g., the right not to have employer-paid insurance for one's spouse counted as taxable income, or a citizen's right not to have his/her noncitizen spouse deported) or should be able to contract into (e.g., the right to make medical decisions for one's spouse when necessary). These are not special state-conferred privileges we're talking about. (Of course marriage does come with such privileges also. So does being a police officer or a physician -- but that's no argument for banning gays from being police officers or physicians. Instead we should be fighting to get rid of the privileges.)
Wouldn't civil unions solve such problems just as well as marriage? Maybe. But such a "separate but equal" approach strikes me as repellent. What would we say if black couples could have "civil unions" but only white couples could legally "marry"? (And in response to those who reject this analogy on linguistic grounds, arguing that marriages are heterosexual unions by definition, see my post from a year ago: Who Defends Marriage?.)
In the present case, however, debating the merits of civil unions is beside the point, for
the Federal Marriage Amendment would arguably have banned civil unions as well. Recall the actual wording of the proposed Amendment:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.As I read this language, the Amendment would have forbidden states to offer even civil unions to gays. After all, it forbids construing any state law (present or future) to confer "marital status or the legal incidents thereof" to "unmarried couples or groups." I take the choice of "or" rather than "and" to mean that even laws conferring only the "legal incidents" of marital status (rather than marital status itself) are forbidden -- and that would seem to ban civil unions too.
For that matter, it's not at all clear to me that the Amendment couldn't have been used to ban private ceremonies as well. The second sentence of the Amendment is a restriction on state and federal law (or construal thereof), but the first sentence is completely open-ended: couldn't it be read as authorising the federal government to interfere with same-sex marriages wherever in the country they occur, just as the 13th Amendment is generally interpreted as authorising the federal government to interfere with slavery wherever in the country it occurs? This wouldn't be a Spoonerite reading of the FMA, of course -- it conflicts with Spooner's Seventh, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Rules of constitutional interpretation -- but we all know it isn't Spoonerites who would have been doing the interpreting. In 1886, Lillian Harman and Edwin C. Walker were imprisoned for conducting their own non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremony; would the Rick Santorums and Roy Moores of this world be more lenient on same-sex couples who did likewise?
Sniffing Glue with Rick Santorum
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Senator Rick Santorum, chief supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment, has said that his effort "was not about hate" but was simply a matter of "doing the right thing for the basic glue that holds society together."
Given Santorum's infamous comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, one may be forgiven for doubting his sincerity when he denies being motivated by prejudice. But suppose we give him the benefit of the doubt, and grant that he was merely seeking to defend society's matrimonial glue. What would one have to believe in order to accept Santorum's position?
First, one would have to believe that marriage in its present form is necessary for the preservation of the social order. But why should anybody believe that? Marriage in its present form -- as a heterosexual, monogamous union of legal equals -- is the exception, not the rule, in history. (Has the Senator read his Bible?)
Second, one would have to believe that allowing homosexual couples to marry would threaten the status of heterosexual marriage. But why would it do so? Is anybody really going to say, "Gee, I was all ready to marry someone of the opposite sex, but now that gay marriage is legal I won't"? If anything, providing recognition of homosexual marriage probably strengthens the institution of heterosexual marriage by reinforcing the legitimacy of marriage per se. (Indeed, one might well think that is a better argument against gay marriage than any Santorum has offered!)
Finally, even if the first two points were to be granted, one would have to believe that government has a right to restrict the free choices of individuals in order to promote socially beneficial institutions -- which amounts to believing that government has the right to enslave the individual for the sake of the collective. It's easy to see how a Communist or a Nazi could accept this third premise. But it's harder to see how Santorum can justify such a collectivist and authoritarian delusion after writing the following words:
To the Founders, these God-given truths -- that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- are no more open to discuss or debate than the laws of gravity. They are simply there, part of the created order. And because they are divinely sanctioned, it followed that even if a wicked and depraved majority tried to subvert them in the name of "democracy," the moral minority would be obliged to resist the majority’s wishes in the name of moral truth.On the issue of gay marriage (and many other issues, of course), Santorum has precisely attempted to organise a "wicked and depraved majority" in a coalition to subvert a minority’s claim to "equal and inalienable rights" -- thereby proving that the principles of ’76 mean more to him as tools of rhetorical manipulation than as genuine living commitments. Happily, in this case God hath brought the counsel of the heathen to naught.
Left at the Altar
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
So the Federal Marriage Amendment has failed. Thank the gods for small mercies!
This isn’t over, though. The Republicans are threatening to make this "an election year issue" -- that is, they'll be trying to get more bigots elected so they can bring the Amendment up again next year. Still, for now it's pleasant to see Congress frustrating the Bush gang's tyrannical ambitions on some issue. (And of course the Amendment's supporters have also forfeited any claim to be defenders of decentralisation.)
Friday, July 9, 2004
A Concrete Example
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
After the libertarian (r)evolution, when there's no more news about presidents and senators and occupation forces, what will fill our newspapers?
After all, as Gertrude Himmelfarb teaches us, the political realm is the Realm of the Rational. So after the death of politics, as Karl Hess called it, won’t we be thrown back on what Himmelfarb considers the irrational "inanimate forces" of civil society?
On the other hand, Hess described politics as a form of "residual magic" that "denies the rational nature of man." So maybe, just maybe, there's scope for rational activity outside the political sphere. And in a libertarian society some of the front page space currently devoted to blather about the State might give some attention to actual, rational achievements of the sort that under the current régime get buried somewhere in the back pages.
Which brings me to a subject far more interesting, and far better deserving of respectful attention, than the sanguinary antics of the ruling class. I refer of course to concrete.
The concrete of the future, that is. Concrete that's stronger, more flexible, and – would you believe transparent?
Well, translucent anyway.
Check out the story here.
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
The Logic of Jihad
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Jacob Levy has responded to my previous post. Concerning the analogy I there drew between confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in military policy and confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in the economy, Jacob writes that it's "fallacious to treat the cases as so closely analogous" and indeed that I have "usefully offered one of the neatest accounts I've seen of the fallacy that leads people to treat strict non-interventionism as a matter of libertarian principle" -- since "Politics is not economics, and international politics is really not economics, and terrorism is really, really not economics."
Jacob has usefully offered another example of the mistake for which I chided him earlier: criticising antiwar libertarians (in this case, me) for something other than what they said. In the present case he has misunderstood the point of my analogy. The point was not to argue that, just as libertarians oppose intervention in the economy, so they should oppose intervention in foreign affairs. Indeed, as I said explicitly in my original post, the purpose of that post was not to argue for the antiwar position at all, but only to complain of Jacob's mischaracterising of that position.
The analogy I was making was thus not between the case for economic libertarianism and the case for antiwar libertarianism. Rather, the analogy I was making was between an (imaginary, and to libertarians obviously ludicrous) bad argument against economic libertarianism and an (all too real, and alas, apparently not obviously ludicrous to all libertarians) bad argument against antiwar libertarianism.
However, since Jacob has raised the question of the former analogy, let's consider whether there is one.
One possible misunderstanding needs to be gotten out of the way right off the bat. It might be thought that antiwar libertarians are treating military intervention per se as a violation of the nonaggression principle. We are not. Insofar as military intervention is being conducted in order to overthrow or defang an unjust régime, it could in principle be justified as defensive rather than initiatory force.
I say "in principle" because military intervention in the real world usually involves violations of the nonaggression principle, since such interventions cause collateral damage (for the libertarian case against collateral damage see here and here) and are funded through tax extortion -- as well as indirectly advancing aggression by fueling civil liberties violations and the military-industrial complex back at home. "War is the health of the State," and all that. (See Chris Sciabarra's Understanding the Global Crisis: Reclaiming Rand's Radical Legacy and Arthur Silber's I Accuse: To Those Who Pave the Way for the New Fascism.)
But let's leave all that aside and asks whether, in purely economic terms, the libertarian arguments against economic intervention apply at all to military intervention. And surely they do. Remember, this is government action we're talking about; given the severe informational and incentival problems that governments inherently face, the odds that they will intervene where and how they ought are just about nil -- and the results of such failures are much more sanguinary than an inefficient Post Office.
As David Friedman reminds us: "It is difficult to run a successful interventionist policy, and as libertarians we do not expect the government to do difficult things well." (Machinery of Freedom, p. 215.) Jacob complains that in its handling (i.e., losing) of the Iraq War "the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility." This apparently came as a surprise to him -- whereas it's exactly what the antiwar libertarians expected and predicted. Why should states stop acting like states when they're fighting terrorism? (Jacob thinks Kerry will be better; I'm not sure why.)
But the parallel between military interventionism and economic interventionism is stronger still. Back in 2002 I argued as follows, and the argument still strikes me as compelling:
Ludwig von Mises used to argue that a market economy regulated by governmental intervention, hailed by many as a middle path between socialism and laissez-faire, is an inherently unstable system: each additional interference with private commerce distorts the price system, leading to economic dislocations that must be addressed either by repealing the first intervention or by adding a second, and so on ad infinitum.Now Jacob's objection to this line of reasoning is that it assumes terrorist behaviour is predictable in the same way that the behaviour of economic actors responding to a price control is predictable -- that it ignores subjective factors like ideology. For Jacob there's "no invisible hand that leads the radical Islamists of the world to respond violently to our wrongs rather than our rights, or even more frequently to our wrongs than to our rights."
I'm reminded of Mises' argument every time the boosters of America's current rush to empire tell us: "Well sure, maybe you dovish types are right when you say that the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided if we'd pursued a less provocative Middle East policy. But it's too late to debate that issue now. We can't turn back the clock; we have to deal with the situation as it currently exists. Given the threat we face now, we have to pursue that threat and eliminate it."
The problem with this argument is that it's timeless. Hawks were saying things like this long before 9/11, about the threats that we faced then. Every time America goes off on one of its bombing or invading romps, resentment grows among the bombed and invaded. From this resentment sprout new threats to America's security. To protect against these threats, America engages in further bombing and invading, which creates still more resentment, which breeds still new threats, prompting still more bombing and invading, and so on ad infinitum.
Mises' insight that interventions breed more interventions is as true in foreign policy as it is in domestic economy. And just as the logical endpoint of the cycle of economic interventions is complete socialism, so the logical endpoint of the cycle of military interventions is world conquest. In both cases, the only way to avoid the goal is to stop the cycle.
Invisible hand? I'm talking about a visible fist. And I don't see how I'm ignoring ideology; I'm just making the quite ordinary observation that people are more likely to respond violently to people who attack them than to people who don't. That doesn't mean unprovoked attacks don't occur; it just means that provoking produces more violent responses than non-provoking. If what the terrorists hate about us is our freedom and prosperity, why aren't they attacking Switzerland? Can Jacob really claim with a straight face that U.S. foreign policy has nothing to do with al-Qaeda's behaviour?
Suppose I go out into any street in the world -- Peoria or Fallujah -- and start randomly punching people on the street. I feel fairly confident in predicting that the percentage of people who hit, kick, or shoot me will be far higher among those I hit than among those I didn't hit. As I wrote in my very first blog entry ever:
Do the terrorists hate us for our (relatively) libertarian culture, or for our un-libertarian foreign policy? Well, pretty obviously, both. The question is whether they would be motivated to give their lives in an attack on this country if they had only the cultural grudge against us, rather than the military grudge as well? Sure, I imagine some would still be willing. ... All the same, I for one find it hard to imagine al-Qaeda having quite as easy a time recruiting suicide hijackers on the basis of a mere horror of Baywatch.And recruitment is really the issue here. Jacob thinks it's "simply untrue that the Iraqi sanctions prompted 9/11," since those sanctions were not "a wrong of any great importance to Bin Laden." Now I don't know whether bin Laden cared about the Iraqi sanctions or not, but the sanctions certainly were one more grievance that helped to fuel resentment against the U.S. in the Islamic world. I rather suspect that bin Laden was thrilled with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, since it simultaneously hurts one enemy (Hussein) and makes another (the U.S.) look bad -- while bringing much closer the prospect of a fundamentalist régime in Iraq. But bin Laden has nevertheless loudly proclaimed his outrage over the invasion, because he's playing to an audience, and that audience isn't us.
What matters is not so much what bin Laden cares about aswhat his potential recruits care about -- and I don't see anything "mechanistic" about the assumption that there might be correlations between a) the amount of damage the U.S. inflicts on the Muslim world, b) the number of Muslims who feel angry and resentful toward the U.S., and c) the number of potential al-Qaeda recruits. This isn't any sort of praxeological law; it's just common sense. Assuming that there's no such correlation, that anybody who becomes a terrorist would have been a terrorist anyway, seems enormously unrealistic. Indeed, in the context of defending U.S. foreign policy it seems like wishful thinking of, well, Panglossian proportions.
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
A Scent of Lemon on the Waves?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
My friend Jacob Levy, in answer to a query from my friend Aeon Skoble, writes that he won't be voting for Michael Badnarik because Badnarik's position on the War on Terror "falls below my threshold of a responsible understanding of the state of the world right now. It's out of the realm of policy disagreement and into the realm of a view of the world that I can't responsibly wish the inhabitant of the White House to hold."
The object of Jacob's condemnation is Badnarik's view that the 9/11 attacks were a response to previous U.S. interventions in the Middle East, and that continuing such interventions does more to exacerbate the terrorist threat than to combat it.
While I regard Badnarik's position on this matter as quite correct, my present purpose is not to defend that position (I think the antiwar libertarians have already made that case overwhelmingly), but rather to take issue with the way Jacob characterises that position.
Jacob describes Badnarik's position as a "silly Panglossianism about politics that says, 'Any wrong must be traceable to another wrong; if only we never did anything wrong, no one would ever do anything wrong to us.'"
That would indeed be a silly position. But it is not Badnarik's position, nor is it the position of antiwar libertarians generally. The following three propositions are distinct:
a) The kind of interventionist foreign policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke terrorist attacks than to deter them.Note that (a) does not imply (b), and (b) does not imply (c). We antiwar libertarians have been defending propositions (a) and (b), but in doing so we are not committed to (c) -- and no antiwar libertarian known to me has endorsed (c).
b) The specific attacks the U.S. suffered on 9/11 were primarily a response to its interventionist foreign policy, and the further interventions with which the U.S. has responded are making future terrorist attacks more rather than less likely.
c) The U.S. would never suffer any attacks if it did not have an interventionist foreign policy.
Compare the following three propositions:
d) The kind of interventionist economic policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke economic crises than to deter them.Most libertarians accept propositions (d) and (e); but of course this does not commit them to the absurdity ŕ la Fourier of (f). Isn't accusing antiwar libertarians of Panglossian silliness a bit like accusing libertarians in general of not believing in earthquakes and floods?
e) The Great Depression was primarily the result of the U.S. government's interventionist economic policy during the 1920s, and the further economic interventions with which the U.S. government responded served mainly to lengthen the Depression rather than alleviating it.
f) The U.S. would never suffer any economic crises -- i.e., there would be no earthquakes, no floods, no hurricanes, etc. -- if it did not have an interventionist economic policy.
Sunday, July 4, 2004
What Mean These Stones?
Last Fourth of July I posted the following editorial on my blog. Here it is again:
Is the Fourth of July -- or Independence Day, as I still like to call it -- a day for celebrating the United States of America, or is it instead a day for celebrating the principles on which the United States was founded? I suspect most Americans would answer: "both." But the nation founded in 1776 parted company a long time ago with the principles of ’76. We can celebrate one or the other, but not both.
According to the Declaration of Independence, "whenever any form of government becomes destructive" of people's rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it is "the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." The Declaration adds that one sign of a government's becoming unacceptably despotic is its having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." Today the (constitutionally unauthorised) Federal bureaucracy comprises over five million employees. Are they harassing our people and eating out their substance? Check out James Bovard's books Lost Rights, Freedom in Chains, and Shakedown.
The Declaration also maintains that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Right now the U. S. government is also the government of Iraq, and has recently suggested it intends to remain so for the next ten years. [Update one year later: Now Iraq is governed by a U.S. puppet régime instead of by the U.S. directly. The same point applies.] Does that government in any sense rest on the consent of the governed? Odd that a nation born in rebellion against an empire should end by becoming an empire itself.
The Constitution protects, inter alia, "freedom of speech, or of the press," "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," and the right to "just compensation" for any “private property ... taken for public use” -- all rights that are currently under assault from the U. S. government in the name of fighting the "War on Drugs" and/or the "War on Terror." The Constitution also guarantees that "no person" (not "no American citizen," but "no person") shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" -- another provision currently plunging down the Memory Hole.
Moreover the Constitution specifies a narrow reading of delegated powers -- "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people" -- and a broad reading of reserved rights -- "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." These provisions obviously bear no resemblance to any political system currently existing in Mid-North America.
Aristotle said that a political community is defined by its system of government; when it abandons one system of government for another, it undergoes not alteration but destruction. By that standard, the nation whose birth is commemorated on July 4th no longer exists. We cannot celebrate it, we can only mourn it. But we can celebrate, and reaffirm our commitment to, the libertarian principles on which it was founded.
Thursday, July 1, 2004
Rous'd from Icy Trance
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Contrary to what the news media have been blaring, the most important news story today is not the sordid kangaroo-legal jousting between the deposed Iraqi despot and the puppets of the victorious American despot.
Of far deeper significance, in the long run, are the revelations coming to light -- dazzling, glorious light -- one billion miles away. The discoveries of the Cassini probe will be remembered when the names of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein are long forgotten. It is not people of their ilk who will take human civilisation to the stars.
To paraphrase a passage from Atlas Shrugged:
There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as Bush and Hussein have brought them out of the cave and up to Saturn? There's your proof that another kind of men do exist; think of them and forget Bush and Hussein.It’s often said that signals from space come to us from the past. In this case, they come from our future.
See the latest Saturn images here.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Free Saddam Hussein!
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
According to Saddam Hussein's lawyer, by officially relinquishing sovereignty over Iraq before relinquishing custody over Hussein, the U.S. has legally committed itself to releasing Hussein. Since Hussein has prisoner-of-war status and has never been charged with a crime, the transfer of sovereignty automatically triggers a requirement under international law that he be set free.
Claiming no expertise in matters of international law, I'm not qualified to evaluate this argument. But no matter how legally airtight the argument might turn out to be, we all know there's not a chance in hell that the Bush régime would ever go along with it. Although Bush appealed to international law to justify invading Iraq in the first place, his real respect for international law is as bogus as the "sovereignty" that was handed over today.
Now don't get me wrong; I'm no great enthusiast for international law per se. It's mostly a bunch of agreements among criminal gangs, and as such has no inherent authority. But it does have some utility as a check on especially bad behaviour by such gangs, and it keeps alive the idea that there are standards of justice higher than the State. In the current global climate, with the United States trying to play Roman Empire to the world, external institutional restraints on its arbitrary power are to be welcomed.
A tepid cheer, then, for international law. And if international law says to free Saddam Hussein, then by all means free him. At this point, George Bush unleashed is a lot more dangerous than Saddam Hussein unleashed.
A rant on the GOP website titled International Law Treachery denounces those "shallow and dangerous elitists" who "help the terrorists" by letting niceties like international law get in the way of "absolute victory" in what to right-thinking Americans is a "war unlike any other," a "battle between the forces of good and evil."
Golly, that sounds familiar…. Remember, back in the 1950s and 60s, when conservatives used to say that anyone who talked about constitutional rights had to be a Communist? The Cold War was a "war unlike any other" too, a war in which ordinary legal protections had to be sacrificed for a greater goal. That was when William Buckley urged us to "accept Big Government for the duration," since "neither an offensive nor defensive war can be waged" against international Communism "except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."
Which in turn sounds a lot like Lewis Mumford back in 1940, arguing that the United States must "temporarily" adopt fascism at home in order to combat fascism abroad. World War II, I guess, was yet another "war unlike any other." Come to think of it, haven't they all been?
Friday, June 25, 2004
Demolish the Duopoly
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
OpenDebates.org is hosting an online petition to include third-party candidates in the presidential debates, as well as to make the debates less like press conferences and more like actual debates.
As of this posting, 6626 people have signed the petition. We can do better.
Click here to sign the petition.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Austro-Athenian Space Opera
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I've made two discoveries that I highly recommend.
One is a website called onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml. On this site one can type in a definition and get a list of all the words that definition might fit -- a task it seems amazingly good at.
The other is a libertarian science-fiction trilogy by John C. Wright, comprising The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcendence. (Thanks to Stephan Kinsella and Kevin Vallier for the recommendation.) While from a literary standpoint it's nothing spectacular, this thoughtful, imaginative, and suspenseful tale of a libertarian hero in rebellion against a libertarian utopia is definitely worth reading. Wright avoids the usual clichés of libertarian fiction by portraying conflicts among different varieties of libertarians, rather than between libertarians and statist oppressors. Even the most despicably evil characters turn out to be basing their actions, in a twisted way, on libertarian premises of a sort. And every time you think you've figured out the who, what, and why of the plot, Wright tosses a new surprise your way.
The books are also filled with sly references to delight both libertarians and science-fiction fans -- from Asimov’s three laws of robotics (mercilessly skewered here) and Lovecraft's "rugose cones" (who talk like Randian villains) to Spencerian sociology, Mises' Law of Association, and lines lifted from Roark’s courtroom speech. The dominant philosophical influence here is clearly Rand; even the main character's name is as much a nod to an incident in Atlas Shrugged as it is to Greek mythology, and a central plot point in the third book turns on the truth or falsity of Randian doctrine.
Along the way many issues of current contention in libertarian and/or Randian circles get raised and dramatised, including punishment, military ethics, survival-versus-flourishing, and Sciabarra-style concerns about the cultural prerequisites for liberty. And what other book features a Greek demigod and a Shunyavada Buddhist debating polylogism and spontaneous order while plunging into a star aboard a thousand-mile-long spaceship?
The only aspect that marred my enjoyment somewhat (apart from the inexplicably frequent misspellings and the like – can't Tor Books afford copyeditors?) is the presence of ludicrously antiquated gender stereotypes that one would be embarrassed to include in a novel set in the present day, let alone in a future thousands of years distant, populated by super-intelligent cybernetic minds who leap from one synthetic body to another at the drop of a hat. Good grief. Too much Heinlein, I suspect. (And oh yeah, one more thing -- the Oeconomicus is not Xenophon’s only surviving Socratic dialogue.)
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Anarchist Athens
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
LRC is "reprinting" two of my articles on the libertarian aspects of ancient Athens: The Athenian Constitution: Government by Jury and Referendum and Civil Society in Ancient Greece: The Case of Athens. (For the original versions see here and here.)
The articles were written in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and my thinking has undergone various sorts of evolution since, so I'm not prepared to stand by everything I said in them; but I certainly still endorse their central thesis: Contrary to the claims of so many historians, ancient Athens was neither a majoritarian, mob-rule democracy nor an organic, communitarian collective; instead, it was in many respects a quasi-anarchistic free-market constitutional republic -- and thus, like medieval Iceland, a valuable model for our libertarian future.
In addition to the sources cited in the articles, today I would recommend M. H. Hansen's wonderful book Polis and City-State: An Ancient Concept and Its Modern Equivalent, a devastating critique of modern-day mythology about the polis.
Monday, June 21, 2004
The Sky Is No Longer the Limit
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Congratulations to the team of the SpaceShipOne project, who achieved the first manned non-governmental space flight today.
The present may belong to messianic thugs like George Bush and Osama bin Laden,
but the future lies with peaceful commerce, rational minds, and venturing spirits.
Today's triumph brings that future one step closer.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Brazen Evil
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
William Saletan of Slate has compiled a chronological series of quotations from Bush, Rumsfeld, etc., showing how, even as the abuses at Abu Ghraib were becoming public knowledge, the Administration continued to mouth the line that U.S. troops had forever rid Iraq of "torture chambers and rape rooms." (Thanks to Charles Johnson for the link.)
What ever happened to the Republicans who were so outraged by Clinton's lies about his sex life? Their capacity for indignation seems to have mellowed a bit.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
This Hurts Big Brother More Than It Hurts You
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I've spent the past week teaching at the Mises University, and the weekend before that at a Liberty Fund conference in Milwaukee (a surprisingly beautiful city, by the way). Hence the eerie lull in my blogging; things should pick up now.
On my return from Milwaukee I found the following red-white-and-blue love-note in my checked luggage:
NOTIFICATION OF BAGGAGE INSPECTIONThe note closes by thanking me (rather presumptuously) for my "understanding and cooperation."
To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transport Security Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage. As part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected. Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection.
During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag, which was resealed.
If the TSA screener was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the screener may have been forced to break the locks on your bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, and has taken care to reseal your bag upon completion of inspection. However, TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.
On the reverse of the note, the same message is repeated in Spanish, except that the footnote identifying the relevant statute (Section 110(b) of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, 49 U.S.C. § 44901(c)-(e), if you're curious) has been omitted (though not the footnote marker), as has the cryptic slogan "Smart Security Saves Time."
What a bunch of lies. The TSA is not "required by law" to inspect my baggage, since no statute in conflict with the Fourth Amendment has any validity as law. Had my baggage been locked (it wasn’t), the TSA screener would not have been "forced" to damage my property; where's the "force"? Nor is there any reason to suppose that the TSA "sincerely regrets" any of this. If folks at the TSA really are agonising over their participation in warrantless searches, they are free to quit any time and start looking for honest work.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Convention Newsflash
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I've just finished watching C-span's coverage of the Libertarian Party convention. The three-way race for the top spot was the closest I've seen; most observers had been predicting a final showdown between Aaron Russo and Gary Nolan, but in a last-minute upset, Michael Badnarik squeaked through with the nomination. (A vice-presidential candidate had not yet been chosen when C-span's coverage ended.)
While none of the three contenders has the glibness or the gravitas of Harry Browne, I had grown increasingly disenchanted with Russo, and Badnarik seems fine (a bit weak on abortion -- perhaps he needs to read today’s post from Charles Johnson -- but acceptable), so I am reasonably content with the outcome.
Badnarik for President!
The VP choice has now been announced: existentialist guru and liberhawk Richard Campagna. Oh well.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Fogbound
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The latest issue (Summer 2004) of the Laissez Faire Books catalogue carries, on p. 46, a condensed version of my article "Roads to Fascism: Sixty Years Later." For the complete version, see here or here.
Lew Rockwell reminds us that while attention focuses on the Iraqi prisoners mistreated at Abu Ghraib, the thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered by U. S. troops pass unremarked in the press.
I'm off to London tomorrow -- back in a week!
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Are We All Consequentialists Now?
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
The current (June 2004) issue of Reason magazine carries the following letter to the editor. (I've restored my original formatting, plus a section -- marked in brackets -- that Reason deleted for space.)
To the Editor:One clarification: while I agree with Kant’s indictment of the consequentialist conception of morality as an instrumental strategy for promoting human welfare, I disagree with his remedy. For Kant, the solution is to sever the connection between morality and human welfare entirely; I instead follow the classical Greek tradition in tying the two together more closely, making morality an essential component of human welfare rather than a mere external means to it. For details see my book Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand; my articles Egoism and Anarchy and Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?; and my review of Leland Yeager's Ethics As Social Science.
In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are "all consequentialists now."
Fortunately, it is not true that we libertarians are all consequentialists now. I say "fortunately," because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.
The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences.
Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people.
[If the only reason I do not steal is that I'm afraid of being caught, then how am I morally superior to the thief? Likewise, if the only reason I don't slaughter my neighbors is that doing so happens not to maximize social utility at the moment, then how am I morally superior to a mass murderer?]
As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate -- or even to be prepared to subordinate -- one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.
Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.
David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that "concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is that non-consequentialist moral considerations establish only certain broad parameters, leaving it to consequences, custom, and context to make them more specific.
The parameters are not infinitely broad, however; and I do not see how they could be broad enough to license one group of people, called the government, to reassign title to the fruits of another group's labor at the first group's sole discretion. Hence even if taxation and eminent domain had good results -- which in the long term they rarely do -- they would stand condemned on non-consequentialist grounds as slavery and plunder.
Roderick T. Long
Department of Philosophy
Auburn University
Auburn AL
Friday, April 23, 2004
Marx and Spencer: Celebrity Death Match
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I recently came across an article called Cooperative Urges by Glen Gibbons. It begins like this:
In London's Highgate Cemetery, about midway between the grave sites of Karl Marx and George Eliot, is an overgrown tombstone with the name Herbert Spencer inscribed on it. The generally neglected circumstances of the plot echo Spencer's failed effort to apply to human society some of the principles Charles Darwin espoused for evolutionary biology -- such concepts as survival of the fittest and natural selection. Consequently, the 19th century British social philosopher never earned the sort of lasting recognition accorded his eternal neighbors.And then the rest of the article goes on to extol the benefits of cooperation.
Against the arguments that human progress reflected the benefits of cooperation and community, Spencer's followers extolled the benefits of individuals and individual enterprises vanquishing the less effective among them, securing the place of the strong and weeding out the weaker.
But sometimes the world is not quite so Darwinian as it's made out to be, especially in human affairs. Sometimes qualities and resources are complementary and their judicious combination, synergistic.
By now I should be used to such misrepresentations of Herbert Spencer -- and Gibbons' article doesn't even come close to being one of the most egregious in this regard. (See my article Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues as well as this follow-up.) But to see Spencer, one of history’s greatest champions of "synergistic cooperation," being described as an opponent of such cooperation, and to see him being compared unfavourably in this regard to Marx, of all people, is truly surreal.
For Marx, society is characterised by inherent conflicts of interest among economic classes, conflicts that can ultimately be resolved only through violent revolution and expropriation; it's no coincidence that the chief legacy of Marxist régimes has been mass death. For Spencer, by contrast, such ideas belong to the misguided "militant" model of society, against which Spencer championed the "industrial" model of peaceful cooperation and mutual benefit. When Spencer speaks of the "survival of the fittest" (a phrase Darwin borrowed from Spencer, not vice versa), he means that cooperative modes of interaction, being "fitter," are destined in the long run to displace conflictual modes of interaction, and he regarded social progress as a matter of increasing fusion among people’s interests.
He explained his view over and over in books such as Social Statics, The Principles of Sociology, and The Principles of Ethics, but he might as well have been tossing his books into the ocean as far as modern discussions of Spencer go; everyone's sure what he said, what as a "Social Darwinist" he must have said, but no one seems to go to the trouble of actually reading him.
It is misleading in any case to think of Spencer as applying Darwinian theories to society; Spencer's Social Statics came out in 1851, predating Darwin's Origin of Species by eight years. As Friedrich Hayek notes in Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
It was in the discussion of such formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at least clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his contemporaries were able to apply to biological evolution. ... A nineteenth-century social theorist who needed Darwin to teach him the idea of evolution was not worth his salt.And far from being a "failed effort," Spencer’s work offers far more valuable contributions to the understanding of human society than does the work of essentially reactionary thinkers like Marx.
According to Gibbons, Spencer's modest gravesite is "overgrown" and "neglected" in comparison with its bombastic Marxian neighbour because Spencer "never earned the sort of lasting recognition" that Marx enjoys. It would be more accurate to say that Spencer has earned such recognition but hasn't received it. As contemporary society lurches ever further back into the "militant" mode of dirigisme at home and warmongering abroad, a thoughtful reassessment of this much-maligned but seldom studied philosopher is long overdue. (One of the goals of the Molinari Institute is eventually to make all of Spencer's works available online.)
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
The Power of Language and the Language of Power
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Geekery Today reminds us of the following marvelous quotation from George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language":
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:My only quibble with what Orwell says here is the qualification "In our time." Though admittedly the vague, mushy sort of writing that Orwell criticises here is quintessentially contemporary, euphemism of some sort is a pervasive and universal feature of (nonlibertarian) political speech -- and not accidentally so. Government, by its nature as a coercive monopoly, necessarily violates the norms of peaceful cooperation and reciprocity whose approximate observance is a precondition for social existence.
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
As Ludwig von Mises writes in Human Action:
It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.This is why in political speech it is always necessary to "name things without calling up mental pictures of them." Admittedly, however, the rise of democratic and egalitarian ideologies has made the state's need for obfuscatory language all the more urgent, since such ideologies have largely disabled traditional appeals to natural social hierarchies. Even less than its predecessors can the modern democratic state afford to acknowledge its essential role as instrument of the ruling class.
Yet in the end it is not quite in the interests of state power for its basis in violence and exploitation to be entirely obscured. After all, the state's being known to command vast coercive means is crucial to its influence in the first place. Hence the need for language that mystifies the violence of the state. As I wrote in Equality: The Unknown Ideal:
On the one hand, statist ideology must render the violence of the state invisible, in order to disguise the affront to equality it represents. Hence statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.
Yet on the other hand, the effectiveness of governmental edicts depends precisely on people being all too aware of the force backing up those edicts. Hence statism can maintain its plausibility only by implicitly projecting a kind of grotesque parody of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: just as bread and wine must be transformed in their essence into the body and blood of Christ in order to play their necessary spiritual role, whilst at the same time they must retain the external accidents of bread and wine in order to play their necessary practical role, so the violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence. (This sacralization of state violence explains how proponents of gun control, for example, can regard themselves as opponents of violence whilst at the same time threatening massive and systematic violence against peaceful citizens.)
But to ignore or mask the violence upon which socioeconomic legislation necessarily rests is to acquiesce in the unconscionable subordination and subjection that such violence embodies. It is to treat those subordinated and subjected as mere means to the ends of those doing the subordinating, and thus to assume a legitimate inequality in power and jurisdiction between the two groups.
Shut Up and Obey
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
During last night's press conference, when asked about the similarities between the Iraq and Vietnam quagmires, our Commander-in-Chief replied: "I think that analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."
The point of this answer was obviously not to give grounds for thinking the analogy false (something he made no serious attempt to do), but rather to suggest that invoking such an analogy is disloyal.
Of course, Bush has never shown any grasp of the distinction between grounded belief and motivated belief.
Monday, April 12, 2004
How to Frustrate the Anti-Semites
The Nazi-style anti-Semitic group "JewWatch" has managed to get its site into the #1 spot for Google hits on the word "Jew." A counter-effort is underway, to get as many sites as possible to post links to the (sane, objective) Wikipedia definition of "Jew" (like this: Jew) to push that site in the #1 spot instead. If you have a personal website, see this site for more info about how and why to do this.
Sunday, April 4, 2004
Abraham Postscript
See more on Abraham here.
And His Axe Was Made of Gold
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In my last post I raised the question why Jews and Christians apply different standards to Abraham and Deanna Laney, praising one and condemning the other.
William Marina offers an answer:
unlike Laney, who killed her two sons, Abraham did NOT kill his son, Issac [sic], but instead made a Covenant with Yahweh. Tit for tat, monotheistic worship and rewards as a Chosen people, in exchange for no more human sacrifice.The fact that Abraham didn't go through with it is a difference, certainly -- but hardly a relevant one. The point is that Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac, and relented only because God sent a reprieve at the last moment. Presumably Laney too would have relented if she had heard a voice giving her different instructions at the last minute. The only difference between Laney and Abraham lies in what they were (eventually) ordered to do, not in their willingness to obey immoral orders.
Hence I cannot agree with the correspondent who wrote me to say: "God was testing Abraham; if He hadn't intervened, we don’t really know whether or not he actually would have killed him." The entire story loses its point unless we assume that Abraham was prepared to go through with it; otherwise how could he be taken to have passed the "test"? In the Bible, God, upon relenting, says to Abraham: "now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me." Unless God has been hoodwinked by Abraham here, the clear implication is that Abraham was indeed prepared to kill his own son.
This correspondent also writes that the two cases differ because Abraham, unlike Laney, "had three whole days with his son ... to talk about it, and it was with his son's consent." This correspodent must own a different version of the Bible from mine; in my Bible (the text is Genesis 22) Isaac is still clueless at the last minute ("Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"), and nothing is said about his consent.
Another correspondent points out that Abraham, presumably unlike Laney, "had a history of communicating with God and receiving the fruits of those actions." But when a voice you have reason to trust tells you to kill your own son, surely that's a reason to stop trusting that voice. The test of a message's divine origin is its conformity to the moral law; as one of Abraham’s descendants famously remarked, "by their fruits ye shall know them."
As for William Marina's "covenant" interpretation, I can’t find that in Genesis 22 either. God doesn't say "sign onto the following list of odd dietary practices, and I'll stop demanding human sacrifices." (When had he ever demanded them in the first place?) Instead God says:
because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:In short, a vast and flourishing progeny is Abraham's reward for being willing to sacrifice his son. Nothing is said about an end to human sacrifice being part of the reward. (And if it had been, how would that help? On this reading of the story, the crucial fact remains that Abraham was prepared to kill his own son, and I do not see how this can be interpreted as an admirable intent on his part.)
That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;
And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.
Saturday, April 3, 2004
God Said to Abraham, Kill Me a Son
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Few Americans feel much sympathy for Deanna Laney, the woman who bludgeoned two of her children to death in response to alleged instructions from God.
Yet most Americans believe in the existence of God and in the possibility of receiving communications from him. Nor do they necessarily doubt that Laney had some experience which she interpreted as such a communication.
Why, then, do they not hail Laney’s actions as a sublime expression of faith?
I suspect they do not do so because they think Laney should have regarded the horrific content of the communication as evidence that it did not come from any authority worth obeying.
And surely they are right to think this; a command to slay one’s own children seems far more likely to be the product of delusion, or perhaps of some malicious spirit, than an injunction from a wise and loving deity.
Yet of those who condemn Laney, vast numbers are Jews and Christians who have nothing but praise and admiration for the biblical patriarch Abraham’s readiness to obey the divine command “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains ....”
So what’s the difference between Abraham and Laney? Why shouldn’t Jews and Christians praise Laney as Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) praised Abraham, as a “knight of faith” who achieved a “teleological suspension of the ethical”? Or if Laney is to blame for not wondering whether it truly was God that was speaking to her, why isn’t Abraham likewise to blame for wondering the same thing? There seems to be some cognitive dissonance here.
As Sartre notes in Existentialism is A Humanism:
If I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell, or from the subconscious, or a pathological condition? What proves that they are addressed to me? ... If a voice addresses me, it is always for me to decide that this is the angel’s voice; if I consider that such an act is a good one, it is I who will choose to say that it is good rather than bad.When people praise on the Sabbath what they condemn every other day of the week, we are entitled to suspect that some hard thinking has been shirked.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
No Pity, No Praise - Part 2
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
In a previous post I expressed ambivalence about the conflict between the villainous Microsoft and the still more villainous E.U. Now it turns out that the E.U.'s regulatory policies may actually benefit Microsoft more than they hurt it; thanks to Charles Johnson for sending me a link to this story. As is so often the case (e.g. antitrust), government policies advertised as adverse to corporate interests turn out to be corporate welfare in disguise.
No ambivalence necessary -- they're all in it together.
Friday, March 26, 2004
Tashlanarchism
I've been having an online debate with Tibor Machan on whether anarchism and minarchism can be reconciled or not. (He says yes, I say no.) The entries so far:
Long: The Great Divorce, Part 1 Machan: Some Initial Replies Long: The Absent State? Machan: 'Government' vs. 'State' Long: The Great Divorce, Part 2
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
No Pity, No Praise
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
It’s hard for me not to have mixed feelings about the E.U.'s decision to hit Microsoft with a $600 million fine.
On the one hand, as an opponent of the concept of "intellectual property" I can't buy the portrayal of Bill Gates as purely a heroic entrepreneur being persecuted for engaging in voluntary exchange; as I see it, Microsoft's market share does rest in large part on an unjust monopoly. (For an anti-IP libertarian analysis of Microsoft, see François-René Rideau's piece here.)
On the other hand, Bill Gates' enemies often turn out to be far worse rights-violators than he is -- like Janet Reno, or the creators of Microsoft-targeting internet viruses and worms. It certainly seems so again in this case; as a continent-gobbling super-state in the making, the E.U. is a much more invasive monopoly than Microsoft, and transferring $600 million from the lesser to the greater evil is nothing to cheer about. It’s a bit like the difference between the Postal Service -- which, like Microsoft, at least provides a genuine and worthwhile service, albeit in an unjust and inefficient monopolistic manner -- and, say, the DEA or IRS, whose "services" should not be performed by anybody, whether monopolistically or otherwise. They're all criminal organisations, but some criminal organisations are surely worse than others. (For example, I'd rather live under the Mafia than under the Taliban.)
My attitude to the whole affair, then, is -- to paraphrase Benjamin Tucker -- No pity for Microsoft, no praise for the E.U.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Disunion Now
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Now that Israel has blown to bits the leader of Hamas (and various people in his vicinity), Palestinian militants are vowing revenge -- against Israel's enabler, the United States.
O fortunate Spain, which was in the enviable position of being able to sever its ties with the United States' "war on terror," and which has finally, sanely, done so. If only we could do likewise.
Back in the days when Spain's imperialist career was ending and ours beginning, William Graham Sumner defended the virtues of "isolation" in his famous essay The Conquest of the United States by Spain:
When the rest are all in a quiver of anxiety, lest at a day's notice they may be involved in a social cataclysm, who would not be isolated out of reach of the disaster? What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.As I argued a year ago, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the option that Spain has recently exercised is not strictly closed to us:
Terrorists are, by their nature, collectivist-minded. Only a collectivist would slaughter the innocent members of a group in order to punish the guilty members. The terrorists' quarrel is with a political entity known as the United States of America. Let us withdraw from association with that entity and repudiate the actions of its leaders.A century ago, Sumner warned Americans not to take Spain as our model. Today, I suspect he would be urging the opposite.
This may sound like an unrealistic proposal right now. Given what it would take to make it a realistic proposal, there's a sense in which I hope it remains unrealistic. But if Bush's war results in the kind of massive wave of terrorism on U.S. soil that I fear is all too likely, we libertarians should stand ready to point to secession as an increasingly viable and attractive solution. ...
In his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington asked: "Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?" In every region of the U.S., American citizens should now be asking themselves: Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of the United States, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of American ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?
Dialectical Feminism: The Unknown Ideal
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Robert Campbell invites us to consider feminists as falling into two groups. (It's not clear whether the division is meant to be exhaustive.) One group, the "individualist feminists" or "libertarian feminists," hold that "equality of rights is getting close to being consistently recognized in countries like the United States," and that "further feminist efforts, in this part of the world, should be narrowly targeted at those remaining areas where the legal and political systems privilege men over women." The other group, which he calls "collectivist feminists" (his target is roughly equivalent to "radical feminism," broadly understood), maintain that "men are the oppressor class; women are the victim class; and women are consequently entitled to take over the oppressor role, at least for the next few thousand years." (This last is a sarcastic caricature on his part, but presumably it could be rewritten, less tendentiously, as something like: "men are largely an oppressor class; women are largely a victim class; and women are consequently entitled to employ the power of the state to enact legislation specially favouring women's interests.")
What bothers me about this way of slicing up the political terrain is not that it is inaccurate; on the contrary, I think it is depressingly accurate in its characterisation both of libertarian feminists and of radical feminists. Rather, what concerns me is the implicit suggestion that to regard something as a legitimate object of feminist concern is ipso facto to regard it as an appropriate object of legislation. On this view, radical feminists see lots of issues as meriting feminist attention, so naturally they favour lots of legislation; libertarian feminists prefer minimal legislation, and so they must think that relatively few issues merit feminist attention. Now this is descriptively all too true; most radical feminists do spend a great deal of time working to increase the power of the state, and most libertarian feminists do spend a great deal of time telling radical feminists to "get over it." But as I see it, both sides are making the same mistake: they both think of feminist concerns and legislative activity as going together.
One reason I keep pointing to the individualist anarchists of the 19th century (henceforth "the anarchists" for short) as the proper model for feminism is that they did not make this mistake. They were both libertarian feminists and radical feminists.
What is radical feminism? I pick, more or less at random, two characterisations from the web. Here's one from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism:
Radical feminism views women's oppression as a fundamental element in human society and seeks to challenge that standard by broadly rejecting standard gender roles.And this one is from students.washington.edu/intemann/radical.html:
Many radical feminists believe that society forces an oppressive patriarchy on women (some masculists claim that patriarchy oppresses men also) and seek to abolish this patriarchal influence. Because of this, some observers believe that radical feminism [should] focus on the gender oppression of patriarchy as the first and foremost fundamental oppression that women face. However, critiques of the above view have resulted in a different perspective on radical feminism held by some which acknowledges the simultaneity or intersectionality of different types of oppression which may include, but are not limited to the following: gender, race, class, sexualist, ability, whilst still affirming the recognition of patriarchy.
Main Tenets of Radical FeminismTwo related facts ought to strike us in these characterisations:
1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy.
2. Patriarchy is a hierarchical system of domination and subordination of women by men. It consists in, and is maintained by, one or more of the following:3. To end the oppression of women, we must abolish patriarchy. This will potentially involve:
- Compulsory motherhood and constraints on reproductive freedom
- Compulsory heterosexuality
- The social construction of femininity and female sexuality as that which is "dominated"
- Violence towards women
- Institutions which encourage the domination of women by men, such as the church, and traditional models of the family
- Challenging and rejecting traditional gender roles and the ways in which women are represented/constructed in language, media, as well as in women's personal lives.
- Fighting patriarchal constructions of women's sexuality by banning pornography, and rejecting traditional heterosexual relationships.
- Achieving reproductive freedom
- Separation from patriarchal society?
First: apart from the silliness about banning pornography (which in any case was described merely as something the abolition of patriarchy might potentially involve), nothing about the radical feminist program as here laid out is inconsistent with libertarianism; various problems are identified as evils to be combated, but nothing is said about the means, statist or otherwise. Plausibly, it is concern with the goal of eliminating patriarchy, not adoption of any particular means to this goal, that makes someone count as a radical feminist.
Second: the radical feminist program here outlined is not terribly different from that of the anarchists; while the anarchists opposed governmental discrimination against women, they certainly did not think that the obstacles facing women were limited to this. On the contrary, they saw the oppression of women as a vast and pervasive social problem of which state action was only one component. (For documentation, see Wendy McElroy's excellent anthology Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century, as well as -- if you can find a copy -- the elusive first edition of her earlier anthology Freedom, Feminism, and the State. And as Chris Sciabarra reminds us, there is a long and illustrious libertarian tradition of regarding political and cultural forces as interlocking but distinct aspects of oppressive social systems.)
Of course today's radical feminists do in fact, for the most part, seek to employ state coercion as a means to their ends; and in this they differ from the anarchists, who taught that while coercive evils might legitimately be met with violent resistance, noncoercive evils must be combated with nonviolent means such as boycotts, moral suasion, etc. But I can't see that state coercion is essential to the radical feminist program; for the most part, radical feminists seek statist means to their ends because, like nearly everyone else in our society, they've been brainwashed into thinking of statist solutions as the only effective means of social change.
As for radical feminism's ends, not only are they not intrinsically un-libertarian, but they also strike me as largely legitimate. I see the problems of which radical feminists complain as genuine ones. That is not to deny that radical feminists often describe those problems in exaggerated and hysterical terms (e.g., the claim that all heterosexual intercourse is rape). But that's hardly a failing unique to them. Don't many Objectivists, particularly those of the Peikoffian stripe, often identify genuine problems while likewise describing them in exaggerated and hysterical terms? To attack radical feminist concerns merely because they are often advanced in an extremist fashion is to ignore (and incidentally alienate) all those radical feminists who advance the same concerns in a more reasonable fashion.
I also don't think their concerns are inherently "collectivist," though I certainly agree that they are often defended in collectivist terms. Often, not always. This is a remarkably diverse group we're talking about, and should not be simplistically identified with its loudest and most politically connected representatives.
In their willingness to use state power, today's radical feminists, most of them, admittedly fall short of their anarchist predecessors. But today's libertarian feminists likewise tend, in all too many cases, to fall short of their anarchist predecessors to the extent that they treat only state action as a legitimate target of feminist criticism. Much libertarian feminist literature (such as Joan Kennedy Taylor's What To Do When You Don't Want To Call the Cops) strikes me as advising women to adapt themselves docilely to existing patriarchal power structures so long as those structures are noncoercive. This sort of advice only reinforces the idea that drives radical feminists toward statism -- namely, the assumption that state violence is the only effective means for combating patriarchy. In my judgment, it is perfectly appropriate for libertarian feminists to recognise the existence of pervasive non-governmental obstacles to women's well-being, and to seek non-governmental solutions to those problems; there are no grounds for libertarian feminists' concerns to be "narrowly targeted at those remaining areas where the legal and political systems privilege men over women."
Analogy: Ayn Rand called for a movement to promote Romantic art. Should that movement's concerns be "narrowly targeted at those remaining areas where the legal and political systems privilege" non-Romantic over Romantic art? Of course not; Rand was concerned to combat social and cultural forces, not just legal and political ones. So What's un-libertarian about feminists doing the same?
As I've written elsewhere:
It may be objected that postmodernists complain not only about legal, governmental barriers to such participation, but private, economic-cultural barriers as well. This is true; according to postmodernism, harmful power relations permeate not only the governmental sphere but the private sphere as well. But isn't this true? Don't Objectivists, too, regard cultural forces as formidable obstacles to personal achievement, even when they are not codified in law? Weren't most of Howard Roark's battles in The Fountainhead fought against private power? Don't many of Rand's stories -- Ideal, Think Twice, The Little Street -- dramatise the soul-destroying effects of non-governmental cultural forces? Didn't The Objectivist give Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique a positive review?Robert Campbell is correct in noting a tendency for radical feminists to believe a) that there are pervasive non-governmental forces oppressing women, and b) that these forces must be fought by state violence. He is also correct in noting a tendency for libertarian feminists to believe c) that there are no, or few, such forces, and d) that women should not resort to state violence to promote their interests. My point, however, is that while (a) is essential to radical feminism, (b) is not, and likewise that while (d) is essential to libertarian feminism, (c) is not. (Opposition to state power is definitive of libertarianism, while resort to state power, as we've seen, is accidental to rather than definitive of radical feminism.) Hence the form of feminism I favour, like that favoured by the 19th-century individualist anarchists, is both libertarian and radical, embracing (a) and (d) while rejecting (b) and (c).
Of course postmodernists regard the free market as the cause of such problems, and increased government control as the cure. On this point Objectivists must part company with them. But just as Objectivists can agree with religious conservatives in condemning relativism, without regarding government programs inculcating morality as the proper response to the problem, so Objectivists can agree with academic leftists in condemning various forms of non-governmental oppression, without signing on to the Left's political agenda.
The "sensitivity toward feminist concerns" that I've been recommending is thus a sensitivity toward (a). I favour such sensitivity, first, because I think there are serious social and cultural obstacles to women's well-being in contemporary society, obstacles that are reinforced by, but no means reducible to or solely dependent on, the political system; and second, because as a strategic matter it's suicidally imprudent to encourage non-libertarians to believe that their goals can indeed be achieved only through state violence.
I haven't responded specifically to Campbell's comments on Naomi Wolf because I think our different interpretations of her story depend less on the precise nuances of Wolf's prose and more on the interpretive frameworks we're bringing to the text. My purpose in this post has been primarily to explain my interpretive framework, and thus to explain why, given that framework, I am bound to find Campbell's division of the contemporary feminist scene into virtuous individualists and villainous collectivists unhelpful. At the risk of sounding like Chris Sciabarra yet again: I see the conflict instead as a false dualism in need of being dialectically transcended.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Pi in the Sky
[cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Three news items that caught my eye today:
Police recently found a house in Fresno with a pile of butchered corpses and, nearby, a pile of coffins. According to the AP report: "Authorities did not know why the coffins were there and said it might be a coincidence."
A coincidence? Jeez, d'ya think?Today's Opelika-Auburn News quotes Alabama Governor Bob Riley on the subject of the state's social services: "We can tell you how many people we serve. We can tell you how much we spend. But we can't tell you whether it's effective."
For a moment I thought Riley might be experiencing a glimmer of economic understanding. But no, he was calling for (what else?) more studies.
In fact Alabama's state government, as a monopoly insulated from the price system, is inevitably going to be deprived of any way to assess its own effectiveness -- as Mises and Hayek explained long ago. But the Governor has already shown through his past actions that he is far from understanding this lesson.The third item, also in the Opelika-Auburn News, was a remark by Bob Cloud, math teacher at Auburn's Drake Middle School and organiser of "Pi Day." "The students deal with circles every day in the real world," he explained. "They need to know the attributes and properties of circles."
As a justification of geometry this is weak. The likelihood that the average person will have a burning practical need to calculate the area or circumference of a circle is actually fairly slim -- and most kids are too savvy to be fooled into thinking otherwise.
The real reason one should know geometry is not for some further pragmatic purpose but for its own intrinsic nobility and beauty, and because it is inherently shameful for a rational being to be ignorant of the basic principles of reality. As Aristotle writes in the Metaphysics:
All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves ... not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything .... Of the sciences, also, that which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results. ... For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize ... Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end ... for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake.Or as Ćlfric put it more succinctly in his Colloquy, we should be "eager for learning" in order not to be "like stupid cattle that know only grass and water." This is the original notion of a liberal education -- an education befitting a free human being. Our students deserve to hear the truth: the life of the mind is not a means to some higher practical end; it is itself the highest practical end.
Serfdom USA
[cross-posted on In a Blog's Stead]
This year marks the 60th anniversary of three classic works warning about the rise of fascism in the United States and other Western democracies. Check out my article on LRC today: Roads to Fascism: Sixty Years Later.
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Cogito ERGO Sum
I was glad to see Robert Campbell’s reference to writing for the "feeble forces of Ergo, an approximately weekly Randian newspaper that came out of MIT" back in the early 1970s. I too wrote for Ergo during my college days at Harvard (early 1980s in my case). I'd be curious to know when the newspaper finally closed down (I remember hearing that it moved from MIT to Harvard at some point after I left) or to hear which Ergoites went which way when the Peikoff/Kelley split hit the fan.
Friday, March 5, 2004
Huh?
Robert Campbell asks what strikes me as a strange question: whether recent calls -- by myself among others -- for greater sensitivity among libertarians to left-wing concerns count as advocating "unquestioning adoption of hulking great slabs of ideology labeled 'feminism,' 'multiculturalism,' or 'environmentalism'?"
I call the question strange because I would have thought that the answer was obvious -- namely, no.
Haven't I, in this very forum, recently criticised the eco-terrorist faction within the Sierra Club? Likewise in this very forum last fall I wrote, inter alia:
"One can criticise Columbus, and the European colonisation of America generally, without either denying the existence of some admirable qualities in the colonisers or rejecting Western civilisation per se."and
"I'd have liked to see a question that distinguished between labour unions per se, which are as legitimate as any other voluntary enterprise, and labour unions as recipients of government-granted privileges, which are as illegitimate as government-granted privileges to any other enterprise."Aren't these precisely the sorts of "relevant distinctions" that Campbell claims I "haven’t gone even this short distance" to make?
As for my own blog, I've recently noted there that "the environmentalist movement includes a number of people who are quite properly classified as enemies of civilization" (though I also observed that they "hardly constitute the majority of environmentalists"). And in a piece I've linked to more than once from L&P, I wrote that "a great deal of silliness and even downright evil has been perpetrated in the name of political correctness," and that left-wingers' "concerns about hegemony and domination ... melt away when the hegemony and domination are being exercised by the state for politically correct purposes." I also accused many feminists of taking their complaints to "absurd extremes," and of defending policies that "involve an increase in state violence."
In short, I don't think the charge that my attitude to the left is uncritical can possibly be sustained. Portraying me -- or Gus diZerega, or Steve Horwitz -- as indiscriminate apologists for all things left-wing would admittedly make it much easier for many libertarians to dismiss the criticisms we've actually been making; but it would not be accurate.
There is of course no shortage of libertarian comment on the many defects of the left. What there is a shortage of is libertarian recognition of, and sensitivity to, many of its legitimate concerns.
Thursday, March 4, 2004
Wearier of Young
Citing Cathy Young's criticism of Naomi Wolf, Gene Healey asks whether those on my side of the fence think Reason magazine is "getting its cultural marching orders from the Right these days?"
Reason magazine in general, probably not. But Cathy Young? She's a perfect example of what I've been complaining about, and her piece on Wolf is particularly shabby.
Let's look at what she writes about Wolf, and compare it with what Wolf actually wrote:
Now she claims in a New York magazine cover story that some 20 years ago when she was a student at Yale, Bloom, her mentor, came over to her apartment to read her poetry over a nice glass of amontillado, and ended up groping her thigh.This misleadingly suggests that Wolf invited Bloom to come over to her apartment alone, thus cueing the reader to send some blame Wolf's way. You'd never guess from Young's account that there were other people invited to the dinner.
The incident ended there, but Wolf says that it destroyed her self-esteemWolf says nothing of the kind.
and is very upset that Yale did not pursue her recent complaint (even though the deadline for filing a formal harassment charge expired years ago, and it's not entirely clear from her account what it was that she wanted the university to do).Wolf says what she wanted to Yale to do. Did Young and I read the same article?
While Wolf claims that she was motivated by a sense of duty toward other women at Yale, a cynic might be forgiven for thinking that her coming forward was a publicity ploy from a former mini-celebrity with a flagging career.In other words, Young baselessly insinuates that Wolf is lying about her motives. (And the title “Crying Wolf” further insinuates that Wolf is lying about more than that.)
"A cynic might be forgiven ...?" Sorry, no.
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Bastiat Sat on the Left
Like Steve Horwitz, I tend to see myself as closer to the left than to the right. I also agree with Rothbard's analysis in Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (which he wrote before his paleo turn), where he characterises the left as in many respects seeking libertarian ends through reactionary means.
Alas, as I've noted before, today's libertarians are, too often, all too close to the right in their insensitivity and dismissiveness toward feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and other left-wing concerns.
Re the Naomi Wolf flap, libertarians who sign on to the right-wing idea that blowing the whistle on sexual harassers somehow counts as promoting victim-class status for women are a perfect example of what I'm talking about; since when does fighting back count as embracing victim status??! (If that counts, what wouldn't count?)
In the 19th century, libertarians were in the forefront of both the women's movement and the labour movement. (See, e.g., Frank Brooks’ The Individualist Anarchists and Wendy McElroy’s The Debates of Liberty.) And this didn't mean merely that they wanted to abolish governmental interference with the freedom of women and of labourers (though of course they did want that); they also wanted to bring about (through noncoercive/nongovernmental means, of course) a radical social transformation of the power relations between men and women, and likewise between employers and employees.
So what happened to libertarian's former left-y edge? It seems to have been blunted by the century-long alliance between libertarians and conservatives against state socialism. That alliance is understandable enough, given the way socialism dominated the past century like an all-devouring monster; still, the libertarian movement couldn't be expected to lie down for so long with right-wing dogs without picking up some conservative fleas -- er, attitudes.
Here's hoping that the century that has just begun will see libertarianism return to its roots in the cultural left. Part of my goal in founding the Molinari Institute was to help work toward just such a result.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Latin Lover
Re Dave's Greek/Latin question:
I'm not sure what was the case during Jesus' time, but a couple of centuries later Greek was the common language of the eastern part of the Empire (including the Middle East and thus Judea) while Latin remained the common language of the western part (including western Europe).
What bugs me is that the Roman soldiers appear to be speaking ecclesiastical Latin rather than classical Latin. When Pilate tells the crowd "ecce homo," he pronounces the "cc" soft, as in medieval Latin and modern Italian. But during that period the "cc" would still have been pronounced hard -- "eck-ay" rather than "etch-ay." Gibson makes his Romans sound like Catholic priests!
This would seem a minor glitch to most people, but to a classicist it's like Washington crossing the Potomac in a motorboat.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Even More Wolf
I don't think Gene should worry about offending me; I hang out with libertarians of all stripes, and am sadly accustomed to hearing far more un-PC remarks than anything Gene is likely to say! ("This is the movement we have chosen ....")
But I do think we as libertarians should be worried in general that non-libertarians will be offended, and justifiably offended (i.e. this isn't just a strategic concern, though it is that inter alia), by our tendency to shoot from the hip on questions like these.
(By the way, it was mainly the "twit" rather than the "self-dramatizing" I was objecting to -- or I was objecting to the "self-dramatizing" only insofar as it was coloured by by the "twit." I don't think self-dramatisation per se is a vice; a life has narrative structure, after all.)
Angel Redux
I still think Gene is missing the point (as is Appelbaum). Wolf's decision to tell her story now isn't about her own victimhood; she's trying to prevent other people from being victims, and she can't consistently advise others to come forward if she's unwilling to come forward herself. She's not saying that a hand on the thigh has wrecked her whole life; the message she's sending is precisely not to "spend the next 20 years feeling victimized by an incident." (Should harassers not be held accountable? How are they going to be held accountable unless victims are encouraged to speak up?) Calling Wolf a "self-dramatizing twit" for doing the right thing seems uncalled-for, and is precisely the sort of weird offensiveness that too many of us seem to pride ourselves on.
Wolf Redux
Call me politically correct (my view on political correctness is that while academic leftists could use less of it, libertarians could use more of it) -- but I'm puzzled at Gene Healy's reaction to the Naomi Wolf / Harold Bloom story. In criticising Wolf for "typing breathlessly about this incident twenty years after the fact," he ignores the reasons she gives for doing so; they seem like pretty good reasons to me, and I hope her example helps to strengthen the courage of others. (I also don't see why Gene finds the vomiting incident implausible -- unless explainable in terms of alcohol or physical revulsion. It doesn't seem so to me.)
Constant on Blowback
[cross-posted on Praxeology.net]
Nearly two centuries before the September 11th attacks, French liberal author Benjamin Constant issued the following prophetic warning:
The force that a people needs to keep all others in subjection is today, more than ever, a privilege that cannot last. The nation that aimed at such an empire would place itself in a more dangerous position than the weakest of tribes. It would become the object of universal horror. Every opinion, every desire, every hatred, would threaten it, and sooner or later those hatreds, those opinions, and those desires would explode and engulf it.
There would certainly be something unjust in turning such fury against an entire people. An entire country is never guilty of the excesses that its leader makes it commit. ... But the nations that are the victims of its deplorable obedience, will not be prepared to acknowledge its secret feelings, feelings that its conduct belies. They will reproach the instruments for the crimes of the hand that directs them.
-- The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1813)
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Vote Note
In response to David's contribution, just a quick clarification: in my earlier post I took myself to be endorsing, not criticising, the voting-as-self-defense argument.
A Vote Answer
To answer David Beito's and Pat Lynch's questions:
I don't think voting is terribly important as a strategy for libertarians, at least in comparison with education and the like. However, I do vote.
I don't think voting is immoral, since I accept Lysander Spooner's argument that voting counts as self-defense rather than as a sanction of the system. (See also Herbert Spencer's discussion, as well as my critique of voluntaryist anti-voting arguments.)
Nor do I think voting is irrational; if the rational-choice argument against voting worked, it would also prove that it's irrational to try to walk across the room, because no individual step is of any use unless it is followed by all the other steps, and no step by itself can guarantee that it will in fact be followed by other steps.
I always vote for the Libertarian candidate when there is one, not as a means to the end of electing him or her (since that has not been a realistic goal in any election in which I've voted) but as a means toward enhancing the prominence of the movement. (And the smaller the number of people voting for a particular candidate, the larger the difference each of those individual votes makes.)
Is Russo the ideal person to represent the LP? Does he have the professionalism and credibility of a Harry Browne or a Ron Paul? In my judgment, no. Browne and Paul came across like statesmen; Russo comes across like a Hollywood producer -- unsurprisingly, since that's what he is. Not knowing much about the other candidates for the nomination, I don't know who I would support if I were a delegate to the nominating convention. But I'm not a delegate, so that choice isn't mine to make.
In the upcoming election I currently prefer Kerry to Bush, but since the odds of Kerry's losing by a single vote are effectively zero, I'm not worried about splitting the anti-Bush vote by voting for a third-party candidate; and I'm more interested in making a tiny contribution to the long-term growth of the libertarian movement than in making a much much tinier contribution to the short-term victory of a lesser evil. Thus I expect to vote for the Libertarian candidate, whether it's Russo or someone else. But I certainly have no quarrel with any libertarian who chooses to vote for Kerry, or not to vote at all.
I do have a quarrel with any libertarian who votes for Bush. What could be the libertarian case for Bush? Even if we leave aside his warmongering, and his horrendous record on civil liberties -- he's not even a fiscal conservative! He may favour slightly lower taxes in the short term than do most Democrats, but his massive explosion in Federal spending can only mean higher taxes in the long term.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
The Man Who Would Be President
[cross-posted at Praxeology.net]
Aaron Russo, the current frontrunner for U.S. Libertarian Party presidential candidate nominee, spoke at Auburn University tonight. I went to listen.
Since 1972 the LP has run seven candidates for president, of whom I've met four. If Russo wins the nomination, he'll be the fifth. Here are some first impressions:
Russo's campaign, should he be nominated, will be very different from that of Harry Browne, the LP's candidate for the last two presidential elections. Where Browne focused on the economic case for liberty, Russo focuses on the moral case. (My ideal candidate would focus equally on both, but she's not running.) Browne's delivery was always polished, professional, and dignified -- presidential, in fact -- while Russo is more rough-hewn, with a rambling, inflammatory, and self-dramatising style that I initially found off-putting, though I warmed to him considerably by the time the session was over. I was particularly pleased that he seemed like someone that left-wingers and right-wingers could equally relate to.
Judging on presentational style alone, however, I think the press would find Russo easier than Browne to justify not taking seriously; and given his rights-focused approach, I also wasn’t able to judge how well prepared Russo is to handle the hard questions about economic policy. On the other hand, Russo's colourful personal style, along with his status as a nationally prominent Hollywood producer, could work to his advantage with the press. Russo also said that he plans to draw on his own considerable financial assets to raise the profile of his campaign, though he declined to offer a ballpark figure.
Where does Russo stand on issues that divide libertarians? Some answers that emerged:
Why this last isn't an equally good -- or bad -- case for deporting native-born welfare recipients (who surely outnumber immigrant recipients) wasn't clear. But to his credit, Russo did acknowledge that it would be difficult to conduct a war on immigration without thereby fueling the police state still further, and admitted he wasn't sure how to address the problem. (Still, why not just focus on privatising welfare, or at least on making immigrants ineligible to receive it, rather than harassing peaceful immigrants because they might apply for assistance? And for a decentralist like Russo, why is this a Federal rather than a state issue anyway?)
For the most part Russo's libertarianism seemed fairly hardcore, though he did suggest that drug prohibition, while "ignorant," would have been "legal and proper" if achieved through constitutional amendment. I also wasn’t sure precisely what he meant in saying that public schools should be run "like" private schools.
The centerpiece of Russo's campaign is opposition to the military draft; he offered some disturbingly persuasive evidence that a reintroduction of the draft is quietly in the works, and Russo plans to use his campaign to win publicity for this issue.
Monday, February 16, 2004
More Anarchy!
For those who've been following my online debate on anarchism with Robert Bidinotto, my latest contribution is here.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Thinking Like a State
[cross-posted at Praxeology.net]
Suppose you owned a mostly vacant lot that happened to contain a famous historical landmark, one that attracted visitors from all over the world. What would you do?
Would you put a fence around the site and start charging admission?
Or would you plunk a 300-pound concrete slab down on top of the site "to prevent it from becoming a tourist attraction"?
Guess which option the U.S. Army chose in connection with Saddam Hussein's "spider hole"?
Such is the difference between governmental incentives and the incentives of private enterprise.
(Of course it’s debatable who owns the hole; but that's another issue ....)
Friday, February 13, 2004
High Sierra
[cross-posted at Praxeology.net
As a longtime believer in greater cooperation between libertarians and the Left, I was pleased to hear that the Libertarian Party has invited Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, to speak at the LP's upcoming national convention. (See the story here.)
I've long been puzzled by the hostility between libertarians and environmentalists. Environmentalists warn against the unintended consequences of ignorant intervention into self-ordering ecological systems, but have no similar qualms about intervening in self-ordering economic systems; libertarians have precisely the inverse set of concerns. These are two groups that really need to sit down and talk with each other.
Having read a number of Pope's articles, I fear I'm rather skeptical of LP National Chair Geoffrey Neale's insistence that Pope is already quite market-friendly. But as Neale says, "you can't learn how to talk to the Left unless you're willing to occasionally listen to the Left as well." And Pope certainly deserves credit for fighting to resist the looming takeover of the Sierra Club by eco-terrorist and anti-immigrant activist Paul Watson.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Operation Perpetual Failure
[cross-posted on In a Blog's Stead]
I have mixed feelings about Edmund Burke, who penned both some of the most pro-libertarian and some of the most anti-libertarian passages in English literature -- often within a few lines of one another. But his warning to Parliament in his 1775 speech On Conciliation With the American Colonies is equally good advice concerning the U.S. occupation of Iraq today:
The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.And for all those who, like Claude Rains in Casablanca, are "shocked! shocked!" to find there are no WMDs in Iraq after all, I recommend Charles Johnson's recent posts here and here.
The defenders of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" are labouring under a double modal burden: the task they set themselves was both unnecessary and impossible.
Monday, February 9, 2004
Armey of Darkness
[cross-posted on Praxeology.net]
I just finished watching, on C-Span, an extremely frustrating Cato Institute panel on Hayek. The panelists were Hayek biographers Bruce Caldwell and Alan Ebenstein -- and, for no reason I could discern, Senator Dick Armey. Caldwell and Ebenstein could barely get a word in edgewise, as Armey monopolised the event, rambling on about faith and humility, and generally making liberty sound about as much fun as a hair shirt.
It was Hayek, Armey said, that had made possible Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and all the Republican "heroes of liberty" currently occupying Congress. (A rather harsh thing to say about Hayek, I thought.) When asked a question about the income tax, Armey opined that "even the most extreme libertarian" recognises the need for government and the income tax. (I recognised several anarchists in the room, no doubt grinding their teeth. And anyway, didn’t the United States do without an income tax for over a century?) Armey was asked to relate his response on the income tax to the legacy of Hayek, but failed to do so -- perhaps mercifully.
The effrontery of this self-satisfied politico calling himself a Hayekian was truly grating.
(Another moment of annoyance, albeit minor by comparison, came when an audience member asked whether there might be a tension between the Wittgensteinian and Misesian aspects of Hayek's thought. This was a question of some interest to me, since I'm just finishing a book manuscript on connections between Wittgenstein and Austrian economics. But Caldwell and Ebenstein both inexplicably interpreted the question as being about Wittgenstein’s influence on Hayek, even after the questioner explicitly clarified that he wasn’t asking about influence.)
Sunday, February 8, 2004
Would Amendment Ban Civil Unions?
Following up on Steve Horowitz's question: I’m not sure how the proposed Assault On Marriage amendment would in fact be interpreted by the courts, but Andrew Sullivan's interpretation seems to have some merit. The amendment explicitly applies not only to "this constitution or the constitution of any state" but also to "state or federal law."
Suppose a state legislature passes a law giving marriage benefits to unmarried couples (same-sex or otherwise). The proposed amendment would appear to make such a law judicially unenforceable. After all, any attempt to apply said law would involve construing state law to confer the legal incidents of marital status on unmarried couples. The amendment's language doesn't say that the prohibition applies only to the attribution of implicit rather than explicit conferral.
I've long ago given up expecting conservatives to care about individual rights. But it seems they no longer care about states' rights either.
Sunday, February 1, 2004
The Big Wolowski
[cross-posted at Praxeology.net]
Murray Rothbard in several of his works refers favourably to an article on property rights by the 19th-century French economists Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur. (Rothbard sometimes refers to Wolowski as Léon Wolowski, perhaps confusing him with the Léon Faucher who wrote a rather similar article on property for Charles Coquelin's 1852-53 Dictionnaire de l'économie politique.) I thought the article deserved to be placed online, so I decided to track it down.
Rothbard usually cites the article from Lalor's Cyclopedia of Political Science.
I had trouble tracking the volume down until I tried the alternate spelling Cyclopćdia, and started treating "Lalor" as the editor's name rather than as part of the title. Then it turned out that my own university library possessed a copy. Joseph Lalor's Cyclopćdia turns out to be a massive work -- three volumes of about 1000 pages each, in tiny print -- of mostly classical liberal opinion on a variety of subjects. Many of the entries are by prominent French libertarians of the day, including Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, and Gustave de Molinari. These entries, an introduction informs us, are mainly excerpted from various French reference works, most of which are not named; the translators are usually not credited either. (Lalor seems to have been a bit cavalier with sources.) Rothbard seems to have assumed that the Wolowski-Levasseur piece was written expressly for the Cyclopćdia, but I began to suspect that this was not the case.
Two of the French reference works the introduction does deign to mention as sources are Coquelin's above-mentioned Dictionnaire and Maurice Block's Dictionnaire général de la politique (1st edition 1863-4, 2nd edition 1884). I already knew the piece wasn't in the Coquelin Dictionnaire, but wondered whether it might be in the Block. Happily, the Bibliothčque Nationale website turns out to carry an online PDF version of the second volume (only) of the second edition (only), and I was able to confirm that this did indeed contain the Wolowski-Levasseur article "Propriété." Since Wolowski (1810-1876) would have been deceased by 1884, I surmise that the article first appeared in the original 1863-64 edition, though I have not confirmed this.
On examining the original French version I discovered that the English translation, the version Rothbard knew, was greatly compressed by comparison with the French version, which contained, for example, an interesting critique of intellectual property absent from Lalor’s English version, as well as a note from Wolowski providing important iformation about the article’s authorship:
"At the moment when we began the drafting of this article, a serious indisposition prevented us from devoting to all the necessary time to it. Our friend, M. Levasseur, kindly agreed to come to our aid with his invaluable assistance; the form given to the expression of thoughts common to both of us belongs to him." [Translation mine – RTL]The Lalor version of the article is now available in the Molinari Institute online library, at: http://praxeology.net/LW-EL-PLV.htm. We plan in the future to post the complete version, both in the original French and in a new English translation; but until then, at any rate the version that Rothbard read and recommended is easily accessible for the first time.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
EYES WIDE SHUT
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Today's Opelika-Auburn News contains a piece from the Mississippi Press of Pascagoula discussing the Jose Padilla and Guantanamo Bay cases. The piece affirms that "the right to counsel is sacred and should be granted to every American citizen," but notes that "not all the detainees are American citizens," and concludes: "In no way are they entitled -- nor should they be -- to legal representation."
This is a very different theory from that on which the United States was founded. The Founders embraced the Ciceronian and Lockean theory that the rights enshrined in the Constitution are natural rights, inherent in human nature per se, and so are universally applicable to all human beings; they are not the products of parochial legislation or the privilege of a select few.
In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote:
Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. ... His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. ... Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual.Alexander Hamilton, in The Farmer Refuted (a debate with authoritarian conservative Samuel Seabury), likewise wrote:
The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. [Emphasis mine -- RTL] You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty, is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society. ...(Yes, Hamilton had his libertarian side!)
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Two centuries later, Americans now apparently believe that those liberties they still enjoy are a special gift they have been granted by a generous government. Those liberties are now seen as a privilege of birth, not a right of all humanity; hence they may be denied to those outside the charmed circle of U.S. citizenship.
Thomas Jefferson had harsh words for this style of thinking. In the last letter he ever wrote, Jefferson observed:
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.Too many eyes are closed again these days. Magnesium, anybody?
Monday, January 19, 2004
CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY
Another point about consumer sovereignty: producers are consumers too. Suppose you want to hire me to teach a philosophy course with only multiple-choice tests, but I refuse to offer the course unless I can give essay tests. Does this conflict with consumer sovereignty? Not at all. Teaching the course my way is a consumption good for me; it's part of the price I demand for my services. And of course each of us is free to take or leave the other's offer.
If you're a service provider, sometimes you compete with your customers for your own services. The customer is always right -- because the party to whose wishes you ultimately decide to cater, the party you treat as being "right," is thereby your customer.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
TODAY BAGHDAD, TOMORROW BARSOOM?
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
On January 10th, the London Telegraph, in a story titled "George W. Bush boldly goes to Mars," hailed Bush’s plans for a manned Mars mission as an expression of "mankind's loftiest ambitions."
Now I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone. I long to see Mars and other planets visited, colonised, even terraformed. I've watched the progress of the latest Mars rover with fascination. Indeed, the need to renounce NASA was probably the biggest hurdle for me in becoming a libertarian originally. But I cannot endorse a space exploration program led by an institution both inept and criminal, and funded by extortion.
The Telegraph lectures us: "To begin such an endeavour at a time when the US government is already running a large budget deficit is, in its way, heroic. ... It would be nice if those who habitually dismiss the President as selfish and insular would for once acknowledge his largesse."
The terms "heroic" and "largesse" would apply if Bush were putting up his own money. When instead he proposes to fleece the taxpayers -- taxpayers already cringing in the shadow of Bush’s looming deficits, which dwarf his laughable "tax cuts" -- the appellations seem grossly misplaced.
A nonviolent approach to space exploration is perfectly possible: get the State off the economy's back, thereby freeing up the resources and efficiency of the market sector to fund a cheaper and less militarised private space program. (See the marvelous satire How the West Wasn't Won.) But this would be disaster for the bureaucratic/corporate plutocracy that plans to milk the U.S. taxpayers for billions of dollars.
The Telegraph acknowledges that in "strictly practical terms,"
Bush's Mars project makes "little sense," but gushes: "Americans, thank Heaven, do not always think in strictly practical terms." The Mars mission, we're told, will "ennoble every member of the human race."
The original meaning of the word "ennoble" is "confer an unearned income on special interests by government fiat at the expense of exploited serfs." Someone's going to get ennobled, alright.
Friday, January 16, 2004
FELONIOUS MONK
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
There's been some discussion recently on L&P (see here, here, and here) as to whether ex-felons should have their Second and Fifteenth Amendment rights restored. Let me add a couple of points in favour of this.
a) The most fundamental justification of the right to bear arms is self-defense. To the extent that the right to vote can be justified, it is likewise primarily on self-defense grounds. To say that ex-felons should be denied these rights is to say that they should be forever denied the right of self-defense. Anyone who cannot be trusted with that right cannot be allowed safely on the streets in any case. If someone can't be trusted with a gun or a ballot, how can they be trusted with knives, baseball bats, chainsaws, or any of the other tools to which they will have access once they get out of prison? (Indeed, as I've argued elsewhere, the right to vote should be extended to currently incarcerated prisoners as well, to "prevent ... those in power from automatically disenfranchising their opponents simply by incarcerating them." For obvious reasons this doesn’t apply to the right to bear arms, however.)
b) In the particular case of the Second Amendment, there is no effective way of enforcing a ban on gun ownership by ex-felons without interfering with the rights of non-felons. How, for example, would one prevent an ex-felon from obtaining a gun except by requiring every gun owner to be licensed, registered, etc.? Such prior restraint is incompatible with both natural justice and the Constitution.
The conduct of ex-felons can be specially regulated in a society that is itself generally regulated, but not in a free society, for in a free society there is no effective way to police their conduct or enforce the required restrictions. Anyone who is not a candidate for exile or perpetual imprisonment must be granted full liberty of action.
Monday, January 5, 2004
WAS ADAM SMITH TOO OPTIMISTIC?
[cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Robert Theron Brockman II thinks the passage I quoted from Adam Smith earlier this week (see here and here) is "overly optimistic." Pointing to Smith’s line "All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished," Brockman writes:
This is demonstrably untrue. If said fraud, perfidy, or injustice is perpetrated by themselves, their clan, their tribe, their race, or their nation, men’s tolerance (and often enthusiasm) for such things is greatly increased. This is most easily observed at the national level. Most people (including and especially Americans) consider the people of other nations largely expendable, and are willing to justify exceptional amounts of betrayal and "collateral damage" to the extent it furthers "national greatness." Any loss of life on one's "own soil" (hundreds of miles away owned by strangers), justifies massive (poorly targeted) retaliation and collective punishment.I agree with everything that Brockman says here (see, e.g., my article Thinking Our Anger) – except his evaluation of Smith.
The values of Secular Humanism (or even Christianity) are very, very rare. Most of the planet operates under either tribalism or that scaled-up form of tribalism we call nationalism. I think it's despicable but there you are.
Smith was by no means unaware of the fact that when "said fraud, perfidy, or injustice is perpetrated by themselves, their clan, their tribe, their race, or their nation, men's tolerance (and often enthusiasm) for such things is greatly increased." On the contrary, this is one of the central themes of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. As Smith writes at III. i. 4. 91-93:
It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable. He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. ... So partial are the views of mankind with regard to the propriety of their own conduct, both at the time of action and after it; and so difficult is it for them to view it in the light in which any indifferent spectator would consider it. ... This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.Smith – along with his contemporary David Hume – consciously modeled his account of moral and aesthetic properties on the dispositionalist account of colour that had been popularised by John Locke and others. According to colour-dispositionalism, to say that a fire engine is red is to say that it has a tendency to look red to – i.e., to cause sensations of redness in – physiologically normal humans in standard lighting conditions. The fact that the fire engine doesn’t look red under weird lighting conditions, or in the dark, or to a person who is colour-blind or just plain blind, is thus no objection to calling it red. Analogously, according to Smith and Hume, to call an action or character trait morally good is to say that it has a tendency to cause a feeling of moral approval in psychologically normal humans under conditions of impartiality (i.e., when they are evaluating conduct with which they have no personal connection). Bias is thus seen as a factor that distorts moral perception in the same way that nonstandard lighting distorts colour perception. (There are various differences between Smith's and Hume's accounts but they need not concern us here.)
So when Smith says that all human beings "abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished," he means this in the same sense as the claim that all human beings perceive fire engines as red. All human beings do perceive fire engines as red – when they are able to get a proper look at them. Whenever a red object fails to look red, it is because some obstacle – either constitutional (e.g., visual impairment) or circumstantial (e.g., nonstandard lighting) – interferes with the perceiver's getting a proper look. Likewise, all human beings perceive "fraud, perfidy, and injustice" as abhorrent when they are able to get a proper look at them. Whenever these fail to appear abhorrent, there is either a constitutional obstacle (e.g., psychopathy) to proper perception or a circumstantial one (e.g., bias). (Moral vice, to which there is no precise analogue in the colour case, stands somewhere between these alternatives; it is like a habit of refusing to look at fire engines except in bad lighting.)
There are difficulties, to be sure, with Smith’s theory – particularly as regards Smith's vacillation as to whether our emotional dispositions make things moral or are responses to independent moral facts. (Hume certainly leans toward the former, more subjectivist reading, but Smith is less resolute on that point.) But I don't think he’s guilty of a misreading of human nature.
Sunday, January 4, 2004
ADAM SMITH AGAINST UTILITARIANISM
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith offers what strikes me as an extremely insightful discussion of the role of utilitarian arguments in moral thinking. I often find myself trying to remember or paraphrase this passage, so I finally hunted it down (a process made easier by the Liberty Fund search tool). It's at II. ii. 22-23:
Sometimes too we have occasion to defend the propriety of observing the general rules of justice by the consideration of their necessity to the support of society. We frequently hear the young and the licentious ridiculing the most sacred rules of morality, and professing, sometimes from the corruption, but more frequently from the vanity of their hearts, the most abominable maxims of conduct. Our indignation rouses, and we are eager to refute and expose such detestable principles. But though it is their intrinsic hatefulness and detestableness, which originally inflames us against them, we are unwilling to assign this as the sole reason why we condemn them, or to pretend that it is merely because we ourselves hate and detest them. The reason, we think, would not appear to be conclusive. Yet why should it not; if we hate and detest them because they are the natural and proper objects of hatred and detestation? But when we are asked why we should not act in such or such a manner, the very question seems to suppose that, to those who ask it, this manner of acting does not appear to be for its own sake the natural and proper object of those sentiments. We must show them, therefore, that it ought to be so for the sake of something else. Upon this account we generally cast about for other arguments, and the consideration which first occurs to us, is the disorder and confusion of society which would result from the universal prevalence of such practices. We seldom fail, therefore, to insist upon this topic.
But though it commonly requires no great discernment to see the destructive tendency of all licentious practices to the welfare of society, it is seldom this consideration which first animates us against them. All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.
ANARCHY IS ORDER
I've been having a running online debate over anarchism with Robert Bidinotto; he maintains that the rule of law depends on the existence of a "final arbiter" in society, whereas I maintain that the rule of law not only does not require, but is actually incompatible with, such a final arbiter. For those who are interested, here are the relevant links:
Bidinotto's original article: The Contradiction in AnarchismI'll post a link to my counter-counter-counter-reply as soon as I've written it!
My critique of Bidinotto's article: Anarchism as Constitutionalism
Bidinotto's reply: Contra Anarchism
My counter-reply: Anarchism as Constitutionalism, Part 2
Bidinotto's counter-counter-reply: Contra Anarchism, Part II
Monday, December 22, 2003
VAE VICTIS
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
Who should try Saddam Hussein?
The Nuremberg trials have had both a positive and a negative legacy. The positive legacy is the affirmation of a higher moral standard to which government rulers are subject and in the name of which they can be called to accouint. But the negative legacy is the notion that the vanquished may legitimately be tried by the victor.
As John Locke famously pointed out, no one can be trusted to be a judge in his own case. Thus, apart from emergency situations when instant action must be taken, plaintiffs should submit their grievances to a third-party arbiter.
(Locke further takes this principle to support the establishment of a single monopoly arbiter. Of course it does no such thing. The inference from All disputes should be submitted to a third-party arbiter to There should be a third-party arbiter to whom all disputes are submitted is no more legitimate than would be the inference from Everyone likes at least one TV show to There's at least one TV show that everyone likes. In fact Locke's principle rules out a single monopoly arbiter – for a single monopoly arbiter would have to be a judge in its own case in any dispute to which it was a party.)
Locke's principle obviously rules out a trial by the U.S. – especially since the U.S. president has already called for Hussein's execution, thus nullifying any semblance of a fair trial. But it equally rules out the legitimacy of having the new Iraqi government try Hussein. (I say "Hussein" rather than "Saddam" because I am not on a first-name basis with the man; I’m not sure why everybody else seems to be.) The problem is not just that any Iraqi tribunal is likely to be a U.S. puppet (though that is certainly an obvious concern). Even if the U.S. had no influence on the Iraqi government at all, as long as Hussein is being accused, not of crimes against selected individuals, but of crimes against the Iraqi people as a whole, a government purportedly representing the entire Iraqi people cannot legitimately try him, since by doing so they would be acting as judges in their own case.
The only legitimate course of action would be for both the U.S. government and the Iraqi government to recuse themselves and hand Hussein over to a genuinely independent tribunal.
Don't hold your breath.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
JUS IN BELLO
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
I have a problem with both sides in the debate over Lt. Col. Allen West.
West's defenders say his actions were justified because they resulted in information that helped to avert an attack on his unit. Let's think what that means. If such a defense is correct, then why should it apply solely in this particular case? Wouldn't it follow that torturing prisoners of war is justified whenever it might result in information that could prevent an enemy attack? (And if you think beating a bound prisoner and discharging a gun near his head isn’t torture, ask yourself whether you'd feel the same way if Iraqis had done it to an American soldier instead of vice versa.)
Are we really prepared to toss out the window this most basic protection for POWs, this hard-won victory of the party of civilisation over the party of barbarism? If so, to what principle can we appeal when our own soldiers receive abuse from enemy captors?
Those who defend such conduct are fond of saying "This is war!" – as though this were some sort of unanswerable, blanket license for suspending the requirements of morality. But if folks in the inter arma silent leges crowd really do regard morality as a mere human contrivance, to be discarded whenever it grows inconvenient, the self-righteous moralising tone of their pronouncements seems a bit incongruous.
But I have a problem with many of West's critics as well. What West did was wrong, but there's little justice in letting punishment fall on him while giving a pass to the authorities who put him in such an untenable position in the first place. (And the Army's weaselly treatment of West, threatening to prosecute him not for what he did but for refusing to resign meekly and quietly, has been inexcusable.) When arrogant princes like Bush and Cheney, who have presided over countless bombings of innocent civilians, hang someone like West out to dry for a far lesser crime, it's hard to feel anything but disgust.
Monday, December 8, 2003
PRIZE OF WAR
[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]
A lot of people were outraged when Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 – a choice which people are still protesting.
I'm no fan of Arafat, but look at the list of folks he shares that dubious honour with. There are certainly some good people on that list (including, I believe, the only libertarian: French economist Frédéric Passy, recipient of the very first prize in 1901, and perhaps the only person ever to accuse Gustave de Molinari of not being sufficiently libertarian!), but it also includes such pestilent warmongers as:
Theodore Roosevelt – 1906As far as I'm concerned, the Nobel Peace Prize became meaningless as of 1906. Arafat is welcome to it.
Woodrow Wilson – 1919
Henry Kissinger – 1973
Mikhail Gorbachev – 1990
Sunday, December 7, 2003
MODERNITY MODERNISED
An improved-format version of my article Two Cheers for Modernity is up at SOLO, along with some reader responses.
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