Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Jason Kuznicki
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Questions on Mises XI: A Stumbling Block
I've hit a serious snag in my understanding of Mises. I'm not just being Socratic.
Friday, January 5, 2007
Questions on Mises X: Now with Current Events Tie-Ins
More Mises. Extra libertarian teaser: Private money!
Now read, already.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
The Piece of Cake Paradox, Solved?
Over at Positive Liberty I've offered a possible solution to the piece of cake paradox I identified in "Questions on Mises VIII." Feedback is welcome.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Questions on Mises VIII: The Paradoxical Value of Cake. And Pennies.
Below the fold, a cakey conundrum. And pennies for your thoughts.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Questions on Mises VII: A Gold Standard by Any Other Name
Roughly a year and a half ago, the Positive Liberty commentariat and I discussed what a possible return to commodity money might look like.
For reasons unknown, these comments have since disappeared: I have a top-level post referencing the discussion in another post, but this second post has no comments at all.
Now, whenever a commenter writes something to me, I tend strongly to remember it. And as much as a year and a half later, I may want to reference it. So whatever is going on is unacceptable. Can any more technically adept readers help me?
In any case, a commenter made the following arguments, which I am going to have to summarize from memory, as they are quite relevant to a discussion of Mises' Theory of Money and Credit.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Questions on Mises V and VI: Two Questions on Fiat Money
Monetary self-education continues below the fold.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Questions on Mises IV: Updates and a Challenge to Historians
First I must say I have been thoroughly enjoying the public reading/discussion of Mises' Theory of Money and Credit. As I mentioned by e-mail to one discussion participant, a critical, public, written engagement with a text, carried out as you read it, constitutes a new form of reading, one that barely existed a few years ago and that certainly came into being during my lifetime. This way of engaging a text is not a book review, nor even a book discussion group, although the latter is the closest precedent outside the Internet. The only thing that prevents me from reading all of my books this way is how slowly I must go through the text. I'd have finished TM&C days ago if I weren't holding myself back to blog it. Discussion continues below the fold.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Twenty Questions On Mises, Part III: The Stars, Like Prices...
Beneath this silly headline, I would like to discuss what seems to me one of the most profound passages I have read so far in Mises' Theory of Money and Credit.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Twenty Questions On Mises, Part II: Spooky Action at a Distance
More on Mises, particularly concerning the definition of money, with a detour by way of Aristotle.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Twenty Questions on Mises, Part I
In economics I am almost completely an autodidact. I also know that autodidacts can sometimes be a crankish, blinkered, downright ornery lot.
It is therefore in a spirit of humility that I am reading Ludwig von Mises' The Theory of Money and Credit. Boldly -- or modestly, I can't decide which -- I plan to ask a series of questions as I go; perhaps some economists out there can enlighten me by answering them. I foresee this as a major blogging project, something that will go on for several weeks as I wend my way through Mises' dense, abstract, idea-rich prose.
I expect that most of the posts in this projected series will be short, simple, and hopefully helpful to other nonspecialists. To the best of my ability, I will include a synopsis of what Mises meant so that even those who have not read the text will be able to understand my questions and hopefully discuss them with me. (I understand, of course, that many of the questions will be the products of my own misunderstanding. I ask that you be kind to me when they are.)
Obviously, I intend the comments to be the most interesting part of the process. All posts in the series will be crossposted at Positive Liberty, but I will repost the most interesting and/or helpful comments at Liberty & Power as well. By commenting, you consent to letting me borrow your words in this way; I will keep attributions and links to the originals.
Archetypically, I'm aiming for twenty questions in twenty posts. The first is below the fold.
Thursday, November 9, 2006
Greens?
Roderick Long discusses a possible Libertarian-Green alliance below. I'm skeptical. Long writes, "The Greens’ ten values are perfectly consistent with libertarianism, though the means chosen to achieve them may not always be." I do not agree. I take issue in particular with the following value:
All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment.
This is just the sort of egalitarianism that libertarians have always opposed. It is not merely dangerous to a libertarian politics; the two are antithetical.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Questions for Pro- and Anti-War Libertarians
Matt Welch's questions for pro-war libertarians (at Reason Online) has provoked quite a debate at my other blog, Positive Liberty. More below the fold.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Serenity
A review of the film Serenity, which premieres on Friday. No spoilers.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Classical Liberal Takes on the French and American Revolutions
John Rowe and I have been writing about the French and American Revolutions at Positive Liberty.
Rowe's The French and American Revolutions came first; I replied with Hasty Notes on the French Revolution and more recently with A Classical Liberal Take on the French Revolution.
I've since realized that some of the things I was saying have really stepped beyond just summarizing the mainstream French Revolution historiography (which had been my intent at the start), and now I'm wondering if I will ever get the chance to turn these observations into a monograph. Comments and suggestions are welcome, either here or there.
Monday, September 5, 2005
Gibson, the State, and the Chronicle
As most of you probably know, a young man from New Orleans named Jabbar Gibson stole a school bus, evacuated some fifty people from his city, and reached the Astrodome well before the "official" evacuation.
As most of you probably know as well, he faces prosecution for his act. But if you want to see something even more remarkable, consider the mess that the Houston Chronicle made of Gibson's story:
No good disaster plot is complete without a triumph of individual initiative over unfeeling bureaucracy, and this one's no exception. At the gates to the Astrodome, Red Cross officials initially tried to turn away the bus because it was not part of the officially sanctioned evacuation of the New Orleans Superdome. Earlier, that rationale had led authorities to refuse to help a young mother with five children and a 95-year-old woman passenger in the car when they sought entrance to the relief center.
Luckily, someone with a heart eventually got involved. After a half-hour delay, Jabbar and his plucky band were granted sanctuary inside the Dome...
Looting and violence are unconscionable but were invited by the failure of federal, state and local authorities to reassert order or even provide basic sustenance for storm survivors. Hurricane Katrina will be remembered less for its rampaging winds and tides than for the inadequate disaster preparations it exposed.
People like Jabbar Gibson show us humanity at its best in trying circumstances. The chaos in New Orleans is a chilling reminder that when government fails to protect its citizens, fear, hunger and desperation can quickly rip the fabric of our civilization.
Beyond the distinctly misplaced warning against looters, note how a story of government mismanagement--and private initiative--got turned into a sermon about the power of the almighty state.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Friday, August 26, 2005
Iraq: Base and Superstructure
My latest on the unfolding disaster that is Iraq's constitutional process can be found here.
Monday, July 25, 2005
New Group Blog
My former personal site, Positive Liberty, is now a group blog featuring Timothy Sandefur, Jonathan Rowe, and Ed Brayton, each of whom is a lawyer or activist working on libertarian issues. We don't always agree, of course, but I've long thought that these three were among the best the blogosphere has to offer. I'm proud to have them aboard. Sandefur in particular has posted a critique of Hayek that may interest L&P readers.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Civility
When I was still green at Liberty & Power, I might have kept open the comment thread that I have just now closed.
To those of you who used my post as an opportunity for name-calling: Imagine in place of each comment where you insulted someone or made unjustified insinuations, instead you had written a single letter to a legislator about the issue of eminent domain.
They take roughly the same amount of effort. And which one do you think would do more to advance the cause?
No comments on this post either. Go find somewhere else to snipe at each other.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
"I'll Let You Know in a Couple of Years."
On a comment thread at Tom Palmer's blog, I remarked that in the wake of the Kelo decision, the only sensible thing for advocates of private property to do would be to petition the legislatures for stronger protection.
Another commenter in effect recommended heading for the hills by choosing properties that the government was unlikely to seize. He scoffed at my suggestion, saying in effect, "Oh, and how's that been going?"
Knowing the admirable slowness of most legislation, I replied, "I'll let you know in a couple of years."
It turns out that we didn't have to wait that long: The Connecticut legislature has already declared a moratorium on Kelo-style development projects while they rewrite the law.
Governor M. Jodi Rell is quoted as saying, "This issue is the 21st-century equivalent of the Boston Tea Party: the government taking away the rights and liberties of property owners without giving them a voice. But this time it is not a monarch wearing robes in England we are fighting; it is five robed justices at the Supreme Court in Washington... When government intrudes on our homes, it must have a defensible reason. In the New London case, the reason was not defensible."
I could not be more pleased.
[Hat tip: The ever-resourceful Ed Brayton. Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Monday, July 11, 2005
Testing Markets as Knowledge Aggregators
I am not an economist. As I've said before, I am a fan of economics, and as such, I've got a simple question:
Has anyone ever done empirical, controlled, double-blind, and otherwise scientific tests to examine how, how well, and why markets are able to aggregate knowledge?It would seem that by setting up dummy futures markets, in the style of IEM and Tradesports, albeit with outcomes that were set in advance but unknown to all participants, one might be able to determine the types of knowledge and the degree of knowledge aggregation that markets are able to handle, at least in the abstract.
Experiments like these would probably provide a lower bound to knowledge aggregation in markets, however, as inarticulate distributed information--"knowledge" in Hayek's knowledge/information dichotomy--would potentially come from sources that even its beneficiaries could not describe.
It strikes me--again, speaking as a fan--that there are at least three distinct types of knowledge that markets are now thought able to detect.
1) Insider trading. When a small number of market actors possesses all of the knowledge relevant to making a good decision, they will consistently act according to what they know. Given sufficient time, markets will notice this and follow suit.
It would be easy to design a series of experiments around this premise that would gauge under what conditions markets tend to recognize insider trading. It strikes me that when, for example, Tradesports offers futures on the identity of the next pope, they can only be expecting inside information to show up.
One other possibility is that the knowledge aggregated by the market is just a restatement of conventional wisdom, which often happens to be correct even about arcane processes like a conclave. A dummy market--say, in one of fifteen names drawn at random--would eliminate conventional wisdom. A small group of insiders would know in advance the name of the winner, be it Joseph Ratzinger or Bede the Venerable, but they would only be allowed to communicate their knowledge through transactions, not through any other venues. Would the market figure things out? Has anyone even tried to find the answer?
2) Articulate distributed information. Picture a market in very large nonprime numbers. If each participant in the market knew only one factor in a prime factorization of the winning number, would the market be able to identify the correct number unaided? The question is easily testable, and again, there would be no conventional wisdom if the market participants were unable to communicate with each other beyond their market transactions alone.
It seems that the outcome of a U.S. Presidential election is analogous to this second case. In an electronic market, each American participant will have some small amount of knowledge about the outcome of the election: Each one knows exactly how he intends to vote. Again, though, conventional wisdom gets in the way, and conventional wisdom is very often accurate.
3) Inarticulate distributed information. This is the "knowledge" that interested Hayek the most. Frustratingly, it's almost by definition impossible to test. Unlike 1) and 2), 3) would seem to depend on conventional wisdom. Arguably it is conventional wisdom. How could we potentially design an experiment around it?
Please, enlighten me.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Chappell on Nozick and Absolutes
Not long ago, I noted the following passage from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia:
What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or to do to establish such an apparatus.I was mildly critical as follows:
Perfect. It's succinct, crystal-clear, and altogether principled. Indeed, it's virtually the whole of libertarianism in a single sentence--so much so that I doubt if many non-libertarians would ever agree with it. To my non-libertarian readers: Do you accept Nozick's claim? Or do you find that agents of the state may do more than ordinary individuals acting in the state of nature?The very intelligent and avowedly non-libertarian Richard Chappell has taken up the challenge, arguing that Nozick's claim has no real meaning:
It is either trivially true, or patently false. For once we reject absolutism, the question of "what persons may and may not do to one another" will be influenced by situational factors (e.g. what the consequences of performing a particular action would be). And if one is acting through the apparatus of the state, then one is in a different situation than one would be in the state of nature.This, though, is not a valid logical inference: Because contexts as a class can influence the rightness or wrongness of actions as a class, it does not follow that this particular context will influence the rightness or wrongness of any individual action. Nor does it follow that the direction of influence will lie as you think it does. Some acts may well become immoral where previously they were permitted (consider an IRS auditor making sexual advances, for just one example!).
Now, this factor will influence what it is morally permissible for the person in that situation to do. The "all things considered" conclusion yielded by our moral theory will take this factor into account. On this interpretation, Nozick's claim is trivially true: of course what government agents may do is going to be limited by what they may do. It's tautological.
Alternatively, the claim might be that what individuals may do in different situations limits what they may do in this situation. And this claim, if we reject absolutism, is quite obviously false.
We might likewise argue by Chappell's own reasoning that the context of government agenthood actually shrinks the domain of legitimate moral action rather than expanding it, moral context being important and all. Neither one seems a priori true; a closer look at the nature of government is required to determine whether Chappell (on the larger-government side), Nozick (a minarchist), or, say, Murray Rothbard (who argued in effect that the context of government made all acts immoral), is ultimately correct.
As a different approach to the problem, I consider that ethical imperatives are contextually absolute. By this I mean that given the same exterior circumstances, two individuals of differing cultures, temperaments, inclinations, and characters are equally obliged to act according to the dictates of the same ethical injunctions. Such rules are always relative to the situation; they are never relative to what we happen to think or feel about them.
Now admittedly, finding just what these rules should be is at times be quite difficult, but without at least contextual absolutism, it is nearly impossible for ethics to be anything other than a purely descriptive activity.
Given my understanding of ethics as a contextual absolute, Nozick's statement may be rephrased as follows:
The moral character of an act is never affected by the context that the actor happens to be an agent of the government.It's not a statement about all contextual elements in ethics--merely about one, the quality of government agenthood. As such, I still think the statement has a meaning that may be debated. (I do concede that it has lost some of the apparent force of law that the previous formula had, and that it now requires a good deal of further support. I don't think, though, that the statement has been refuted outright.)
To give an example that I find particularly compelling, I would argue that if I were somehow to find myself in the state of nature (an elusive state, I know, but Nozick deals with this objection elsewhere), I would have no moral authorization to enter my neighbor's home, destroy his marijuana crop, and seize his growing equipment under the theory of asset forfeiture. Given that acts like these cannot conceivably be justified for individual actors in the absence of government, then if we accept Nozick's claim, it also follows that government may not do them either.
One possible way to refute Nozick's statement, I think, would be to come up with some activity that an individual or group of individuals could not do in the state of nature, but that they incontestably could do if ever they were lucky enough to become government agents. I suspect that for many liberals, social welfare programs and wealth redistribution systems would fall into this category, though for me they do not.
Other such activities might include taxation of nonconsenting individuals or a prohibition on vigilante justice (Nozick's comments on the latter are particularly interesting but off-topic at the moment).
I repeat my original point, then: Whether one agrees with the statement or not says more about your politics than it does about the truth of the statement itself. I still think it stands. Any takers?
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Friday, July 8, 2005
The Absurdity of Terrorism
I've got a comment on terrorism and its motivations at Positive Liberty. It's kind of long and therefore not posted here.
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Intellectual History
I've posted a longish piece on teaching intellectual history at my own blog, Positive Liberty. Responses are welcome, but preferably over there to keep them in one place.
Saturday, July 2, 2005
Nozick
Yes, yes, I know blogs are supposed to be timely. But mine has always been more like a commonplace book. My main audience is myself, my main objective--selfishly--to think in the disciplined mode of print. And, again selfishly, I like to get help from smart people along the way.
I'm reading Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia right now, an my first impression is... "Holy Jesus this is good!" I'd mentioned in the past being ashamed of not having read this book, and now I'm even more ashamed. Being told at an impressionable age that I need not bother with Nozick was surely among the worst advice I've ever gotten.
I have two quick notes in what will probably become an ongoing discussion.
First, on page xii of the Basic Books paperback edition, Nozick writes,
Even if the minimal state is the uniquely justifiable one, it may seem pale and unexciting, hardly something to inspire one or to present a goal worth fighting for. To assess this, I turn to that preeminently inspiring tradition of social thought, utopian theory, and argue that what can be saved from this tradition is precisely the structure of the minimal state.Perhaps it's the clarity of the prose, or maybe it's the invocation of utopianism (which reads weirdly to someone who grew up watching utopia collapse), but I now have a question, and a fairly serious one: Why do we ask these things of the state at all? Why do people expect the state to be inspiring, and why is inspiration considered--even by Nozick--to be one trait of a good political order? If anything, there are few impulses in all of human history that have caused more misery than the inspiration people take from the state, and we could at least plausibly postulate that the most uninspiring state has a good chance of improving on our current models.
At times like these I wonder if I am not an incomplete human being; just as I take very little feeling of the sacred from religion, so too I find nationalism, the modern religion, almost completely empty. The best way I can capture the strangeness of the emotion to me is by comparing it to how most people feel about some close relatives of the state. We do not ask insurance companies or the vendors of home security systems to be inspiring, and so too, it should seem, with the state.
Personally, I would much rather have everyone look to the state with the same level of affection that they now give to their insurance companies: They are useful at times, obnoxious at others, but in no case worth getting all teary-eyed over. And to die for your insurance company? Please.
My second note concerns this passage from page 6:
What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or to do to establish such an apparatus.Perfect. It's succinct, crystal-clear, and altogether principled. Indeed, it's virtually the whole of libertarianism in a single sentence--so much so that I doubt if many non-libertarians would ever agree with it. To my non-libertarian readers: Do you accept Nozick's claim? Or do you find that agents of the state may do more than ordinary individuals acting in the state of nature? (Keep in mind that under a government, of course the agents of the state may do more than ordinary individuals, for we have--voluntarily or not--delegated these powers to them, and they are acting as our agents, to do the things that we may otherwise have rightfully done.)
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Friday, July 1, 2005
Occasional Notes: A Heap of Trouble
Leitmotif: "The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world... which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance that no answers are possible. --Ayn Rand
I Wish I Wrote That (Part I):First, there is this piece by Julian Sanchez at Reason. Here's what I found so brilliant:
There's a famous philosophical puzzle, originally attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, known as the sorites paradox or heaps problem. It goes like this: Two or three grains of sand obviously don't constitute a "heap" of sand. And it seems absurd to suppose that adding a single grain of sand could turn something that wasn't a heap into a heap. But apply that logic repeatedly as you add one grain after another, and you're pushed to the equally absurd conclusion that 100,000 grains aren't a heap either...I Wish I Wrote That (Part II): Jonathan Rowe finds the reductio ad absurdam that might make school prayer advocates change their minds:
It's not a terribly deep puzzle, of course: It simply illustrates that some of our everyday concepts, like that of a heap, are vague or fuzzy, not susceptible to such precise definition. Try to define such concepts in too much detail and absurdity results.
The problem is, concepts like "interstate commerce," "public use," "unreasonable search," and "cruel and unusual" are similarly fuzzy. And stare decisis, the principle that cases are to be decided by reference to previous rulings, means that the Court's interpretation of those rulings looks an awful lot like a process of adding one grain at a time without ever arriving at an unconstitutional heap...
I could also see some fuzzy-headed multiculturalist "re-thinking" the prayer issue, especially in response to some of the "horror stories" of fundamentalist prayers in Alabama. Some school administrator would construct a "multicultural" prayer to be read over the loudspeaker every morning where Jesus is mentioned along with Buddha, Allah, and Hindu Gods like Ganesh and Pagan Gods of the Earth.From the Trenches: I continue to look for work, firmly convinced that at nearly thirty years old I must be good for something or other.
Now the fundamentalists who go to such schools would have to listen to such prayers that I think they would regard as blasphemous and worse than having no prayer at all. But if the Constitution outlaws only government actions that cause tangible harms or deny actual privileges or rights, I don't see any difference between a fundamentalist being offended by what he regards as a blasphemous prayer and a Muslim, Jew, Atheist, Polytheist or Freethinker being offend by the reading of a Christian prayer.
I just haven't found it yet, and, apparently, nor has anyone else. Yesterday I was writing a resume for myself using a model for people seeking work as foreign language translators. Two questions appeared that I had scarcely considered before:
Relocate?and
Target location?What mad luxury is this, that I might choose the place I wish to live? As tactfully as I could, I replied, With appropriate offer and Baltimore/Washington area; Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina; francophone Europe--And I thought myself king of the world, for a moment or two.
Supreme Court Watch: With the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, I think Catallarchy has the best suggestion so far: Nominate Janice Rogers Brown. Howl all you want, my liberal friends, I would far sooner see on the court a libertarian who happened to be a Christian, than to see same-sex marriage established beside more decisions like Raich and Kelo. (For the record, I've long said that there is no right to same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution, or rather, there is no grant of government power that would authorize recognition of those marriages. But then, there is no grant of any government power to recognize any marriage at all in the U.S. Constitution. See grains and heaps again.)
Ever the Spoilsport: A propos of my pessimism on same-sex marriage, commenter Scof writes,
Well I certainly appreciate your sober take on it all, versus, say, Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. CNN today has her money quote regarding California's domestic partnership bill: the "anti-gay industry's" reaction to the decision means "they won't stop until essentially the existence of lesbians and gay men is eradicated." Yes that's right, Kate, prepare for genocide! F'in nutball...Why yes, I'm sure her fears are completely without foundation.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty]
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Godless Baby-Eating Heathens
The Sixteenth Carnival of the Godless is up at Positive Liberty. Here's one story likely to be of particular interest to Liberty & Power readers:
The UK government may soon face a terrible clash of Silly New Laws: not only has it vowed to protect witches from discrimination, it has also vowed to clamp down on witches. The Wiccans are apparently following in the footsteps of their historical predecessors in seeking to slaughter children, although gingerbread houses appear not to be involved this time round.Of course, it almost certainly isn't really happening--it's the oldest urban legend in western civilization--but you never can be too careful when children are involved. Read the whole thing at The Sharpener.
This clash should be fairly easy to resolve in reality: we'll come to some kind of compromise. The government will issue empty statements and impose scary new laws as part of its War On Baby Eating, which will make a large proportion of the Wiccan community believe that we fear them and want to burn them at the stake. However, to make sure they don't lose the Wiccan vote, the government will also issue empty statements that most witches are perfectly OK, and impose scary new laws that make it illegal for anyone to suggest that witches eat babies. Nobody will be prosecuted under any of them, but at least satirists won't be left short of material.
However, we should be worried about the Metropolitan Police's clampdown on witchcraft for reasons that go well beyond lame analogies with the War on Terror. The story, according to the Met, is that young boys are being smuggled into the UK from Africa in order to be slaughtered as part of the spell-performing ritual at some of London's black (as in African, rather than Satanic) churches. I think we can probably agree that this would be pretty awful, if it were happening.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Torture, Evidence, and Rule of Law
Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars writes,
If coercive and abusive interrogation techniques are being used on someone who can genuinely be called a terrorist, someone who would fly a plane into a building full of innocent people or engage in suicide bombing, I have trouble working up much sympathy over it and I suspect most other people can't feel any at all. If those techniques used on such people are effective in getting information that may prevent such attacks, who could reasonably oppose them? But I have no way of knowing if they are effective in doing so, and neither does anyone else here.Because Ed is one of my closest blogfriends, I trust that he will not mind if I take him to task.
But I'll say this - they better be worth it. If we are not getting specific and credible information that is genuinely and directly helping prevent further attacks, then it is not worth the damage we are doing to our international standing and our ability to occupy the moral high ground. I understand that this is a catch-22 for the government to some extent - if they don't prevent attacks, they get criticized and if they act aggressively to prevent them, they get criticized. But I'm also concerned, as [Andrew] Sullivan is, about the migration of techniques whereby interrogation tactics that should be reserved only for those with real operational knowledge to be extracted are used against low-level, run of the mill detainees who don't know a thing.
My problems begin with the first sentence of these quoted paragraphs: If coercive and abusive interrogation techniques are being used on someone who can genuinely be called a terrorist... [then] I have trouble working up much sympathy.
In reply I have a simple question: How exactly does the American system of justice determine guilt or innocence?
Americans judge guilt and innocence in an open court of law, following well-established procedures based on tradition and statute. Before anyone "can be called a terrorist," with all the legal penalties thereof, they must first pass through this system--and be found guilty. Until then, the law and its agents must treat them as though they were innocent. Nor is this treatment negotiable. It's precisely what we are (supposedly) fighting for.
Now if indeed we are abusing terrorists, then at least conceivably their crimes might merit corporal punishment. Yet these individuals have not been convicted, they have not even been tried, and, at least to my knowledge, there is no legal authorization for the punishments they have received, which sometimes include being beaten to death. I may have trouble working up sympathy for terrorists, but I have great sympathy for the rule of law--and I fear that this, too, is being beaten to death.
Now these may seem like petty, legalistic arguments, and I'd freely concede that in some sense they are. But there is another reason, far graver and more practical than these, why the United States has no business torturing detainees: Torture doesn't work.
It may be utterly satisfying to beat someone when we ourselves have been hurt. Heck, I won't lie to you here: It is satisfying. It feels wonderful. And deep down, this is exactly why people torture.
But let's take a step back from the abyss here, and consider the victims of torture. Guilty or innocent--it hardly matters--these victims eventually learn that the beatings will stop when the torturer is happy again. Now the surest way to make a torturer smile is to gratify his delusions, to give him the sense that his work has been efficacious, and to convince him that he has, through torture, defeated the plots of his enemies.
In short, the torturer happiest of all when he hears the story that he already wants to hear. Torture produces little or no useful information. Mostly it produces fantasies that are negotiated at the crack of a whip.
I don't need to tell you, Ed, that historically, torture produced the appalling show trials of Stalin and Mao, in which ordinary citizens confessed to the most absurd delusions of their captors: Russian factory hands admitted to being Lithuanian saboteurs; lifelong communists avowed that they had secret loyalties to the czar; Chinese peasants even confessed to being capitalists. And with that, the beatings stopped.
Back in my own era of expertise, torture also produced the witchcraft trials of the early modern period, in which women--and sometimes men--learned that they could go free if only they confessed to flying through the air at night and worshipping the devil. Yes, a confession quite often meant freedom, but it also perpetuated the system whereby those who refused to confess were burned at the stake. In no case did it produce any meaningful knowledge.
To the degree that we have approached these horrors, the United States has done wrong. We are not yet a Stalinist regime, but the gap between us and them has narrowed unacceptably. It's time to hold ourselves to a higher standard--if, that is, it's not too late.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Evisceration
Denis Diderot is often quoted as saying, "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." He may not actually have said it, but for those who agree--and also for those inclined toward gentler methods--there is the Carnival of the Godless. I will be hosting the Carnival at Positive Liberty this Sunday morning, and there is still plenty of time for more submissions. Atheists, secularists, skeptics, agnostics, and doubters of all varieties are invited to submit their best recent work. Send your material to cotg-submission@brentrasmussen.com; posting guidelines can be found here.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Back Again
My freelance work is on hold for the moment, so I've returned to blogging. Current topics at Positive Liberty include the gold standard (I like it, but how???) and debt relief for the developing world (I don't like it, but when the horse is gone, you'd might as well close the barn door).
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Nebraska Same-Sex Marriage Amendment
I've posted some thoughts here, mostly on the misconceptions under which our legal system is laboring. If the rational basis test for civil rights cases undergoes a significant strengthening, is it possible that it might also come to be interpreted more strongly in the economic realm? We can only hope.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Barnett and Legitimacy Wrapup
My initial query on the legitimacy of government has prompted a number of replies. These have come from Ed Brayton, Timothy Sandefur, Mark Olson, and even Randy Barnett himself, the last of which prompted a brief reply from me. Readers are encouraged to participate in the discussions that have followed.
I will likely discuss other aspects of Restoring the Lost Constitution in the near future and will of course post links here when I do.
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
Barnett on the Problem of Legitimacy
At my own blog I have posted some questions on governmental legitimacy that arose from my reading of Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution. I am not offering a full review of the work (see this one by Tim Sandefur instead), but I do hope to start a series of discussions on various topics to be found within it. Other posts will follow soon.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Antibiotics Revisited
I continue to discuss antibiotics in the free market. The problem runs as follows:
Antibiotics stay useful only so long as they are not overused or stopped too early. Either one brings the spread of resistant bacteria. In a libertarian property rights regime, where drugs were in principle freely available to any who wanted them, what, if anything, would prevent the quick overuse of antibiotics, meaning a loss to both the drug companies who develop them and the consumers who want to take them only when they are genuinely sick?I've offered a number of solutions and responded to the feedback from my earlier post. Further discussion is welcome, as I really am just discovering these questions myself.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Antibiotics
I have a question about antibiotics as a public good over at Positive Liberty. Health policy is not my speciality, so it's likely that someone can set me aright pretty quickly. And no, it has nothing to do with this.
Video Cameras and Civil Liberties
It's tempting to think that the coming age of video surveillance poses insuperable challenges to civil liberties. But sometimes, the cameras are a peaceful protester's best friend. This comes via the New York Times:
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.Crossposted at Positive Liberty.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Cory Doctorow's Travel Woes
Many of you probably read BoingBoing already. If you don't, you should check out the story of sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow's ongoing difficulties with American Airlines, the FAA, the TSA, and some creepy undisclosed "regulations."
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Papal Prophecies: Saint Malachy and Gloria Olivae
Want to stake some cash on the papal prophecies of a twelfth-century Irish saint? Here, let me show you how it's done...
Sunday, April 3, 2005
Darwin/Spencer/Hayek
I have posted a reply to those who urged me to reconsider my views on Herbert Spencer. It may be read here (scroll down). The short verdict: He seems to offer a lot of good, but also one very serious mistake.
Saturday, April 2, 2005
A Review of Hayek's Challenge
At my own blog, I've posted a Review of Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge. I found it an amazing book, one that fully lived up to the warm recommendations it received.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Decision Soon on Raich vs. Ashcroft
Rumor has it that the Supreme Court will issue a ruling on Raich vs. Ashcroft early this week. Drug WarRant has a review.
For those of you who don't recall, Raich is the medical marijuana case that has tested the limits of federalism and the commerce clause. Other links worth following come from Talk Left, Last One Speaks, and yours truly, who gives some thoughts on the origin of our commerce-clause woes. I write:
All human activity goes on in a seamless web of give and take, sometimes with money, sometimes without. Today we understand that "commerce" is not so much a separate sphere of human activity as it is a way of thinking about our actions. We now view economics as a tool for analyzing the entire interconnected web of human behavior--much as we also view anthropology, psychology, or comparative history, each of which approaches that web from a different perspective.
Indeed, we would find it absurd to ask which behaviors were not psychological or historical. To us, all action has a psychological dimension, and all action is a part of history, for all human action may properly be considered from a psychological or a historical standpoint. We would never dream of giving Congress the power to regulate all psychological activity--and yet, in giving Congress the power to regulate all economic activity, we have done precisely the same.
But in 1787, it was taken virtually for granted that economics was merely a thing to be done in the marketplace, and that "commerce" was best understood in isolation from the rest of human life. The contradictions to this worldview were piling up all around, but the new insight had not yet arrived. Conventional wisdom, from the dawn of the so-called 'political arithmetic' in the seventeenth century, all the way through the late Enlightenment, held that "commerce" was a limited thing.
In other words, today's trouble with the commerce clause rests on a misunderstanding that predates the republic. Within their limited worldview, the framers intended nothing more than to give Congress a well-defined power over one branch of human life--and that only in one special instance. They never dreamed that two centuries of new social insight would turn the interstate commerce clause into the most powerful sixteen words in the entire Constitution.
Without quite realizing it, I was echoing Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution, which I have been reading in the meantime. The relevant pages are 278-291.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Friday, March 25, 2005
Never Mind Howling at the Moon
A few months ago I commented on one of the reasons why libertarians don't get respect. As I wrote back then,
It's the Party, stupid. The Libertarian Party is a badge of shame upon an otherwise reasonable branch of political thought.I stand by these words today. Everyone knows now that the Party is past its prime, and that even in its prime, the LP never was much to write home about.
In the 2004 election, the Party fielded a candidate who distinguished himself by claiming that use of the ZIP code is voluntary (which is true)--and that its use constitutes consent to be taxed under the Sixteenth Amendment as a "resident of a federal district of the District of Columbia."
Now this is a fat load of conspiracy-theory mumbo-jumbo. Sadly, consent is not required, save in certain theoretical constructs of the ever-hopeful libertarian mind. But wishing and dreaming will not make it so.
Nominating a fraud and a conspiracy theorist who is an embarrassment to the libertarian movement would be bad enough all by itself. Even more damning, however, is the fact that this individual did scarcely any better or worse than certain quite reasonable candidates that the party fielded back when it still looked like a rising star in American politics.
What this should tell us is that the problem with the LP runs far deeper than one presidential candidate. Consider this fisking of the Libertarian Party Platform written by the group bloggers at The 2% Company. I don't agree with everything it says, but its very existence should be a worrisome sign: By any objective measure, the 2% Company and their kind are exactly the voters the LP should be winning over. As proof, consider the group's short manifesto:
The Two Percent Company is an informal group of folks who are concerned about the current direction of our country and our world. In short, we believe that people have the right to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't interfere with the rights of others. Unfortunately, religious figures, politicians, and stupid or narrow-minded people are determined to impose their silly or dangerous beliefs on us.Can I get an amen here?
But the 2%ers can't stomach the Libertarian Party platform. And to be frank, neither can I. They write,
Taken in what we believe is its intended entirety, the Libertarian platform attempts to create something like a utopian commune existing on a political island separate from the rest of the world. This commune would have no central regulation for its monetary system, legislation or law enforcement; in fact, we'd be hard pressed to specify exactly what powers would remain with the government under the Libertarian system.There is a reason why the 2% Company can't figure out whether a government would or would not exist in the Libertarian utopia: The LP itself hasn't decided yet.
This indecision between anarcho-capitalism and some vague form of a state means that whatever platform emerges will be little more than a bunch of glowing generalities. Simply choosing in either direction would be better than the betwixt-and-between approach we have seen so far.
But when the intelligent, well-connected voter reads the LP platform, they do not see a pure, principled, ideological party stance. They see a whole lot of confusion--which is, of course, a pretty fair description of the party itself.
Again, let's look at the 2% Company's analysis:
The Libertarians on Freedom of Religion:Indeed.[From the platform.] We condemn the attempts by parents or any others -- via kidnappings or conservatorships -- to force children to conform to any religious views....and on Families and Children:[Again from the platform.] Families and households are private institutions, which should be free from government intrusion and interference. Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs, without interference by government -- unless they are abusing the children.So, which is it?
Granted, blathering unreason does have a long and illustrious history in party platforms, and neither major party could ever draft one without it. But not only is this unreason, it is lunacy of a particularly sparkling kind. It clutters the LP platform with a lot of far-flung distractions rather than focusing on the most important, near-term problems. If it is to have any success at all, the Libertarian Party should moderate its platform and focus on those problems that most likely could be solved through political action--and those that are the most pressing to the general public.
Suppose there were a party with a platform that looked more or less like the status quo--but that recommended abolishing most farm and business subsidies, ending the war on drugs, simplifying the tax code, easing the "decency" regulations, and bringing the troops home from abroad. It wouldn't make any other drastic changes, but would merely push for these issues alone.
This hypothetical party would have very real support among smart, young, influential voters--much more at any rate than the current LP. It is just this sort of compromise that enables action in party politics: Imagine that our hypothetical party had even a tenth of the seats in Congress. Would this not be an overwhelming force for our ideals?
Unsurprisingly, the 2% Company soon comes to the conclusion that so many others have reached about our current Libertarians:
So, we could embrace the Libertarian ideal, and work toward a Libertarian world where we'll all just wander the earth — free from borders and passports, tracking deer with the Indians through the middle of the Wal-Mart, bartering some extra ammo for a bottle of rye, allowing our six-year-old children to strike out on their own and make their precocious ways in the world, enjoying our unlimited freedom...and paying tolls. Lots and lots of tolls.What we have now in the way of political platform strikes the 2% Company--and yours truly--as a pure utopian fantasy, a plan that would be impossible to implement given our current starting conditions and that shows no effort whatsoever to connect the libertarian ideal to the world of the present.
Or, we can take the good ideas from the Libertarians, and discard the rest. The same can be said of any political party, and this is exactly the method that we recommend. If you research the ideas already in existence, weigh them rationally, choose what works, and fill in the rest with your own ideas, then when it comes time to cast your vote, you will be able to decide who best matches your own platform, and not just who belongs to a given political party that really doesn't represent your opinions at all.
As the 2% Company notes, "tolls" are the answer to everything. Tolls! Of all the most government-oriented, bureaucratic, statist solutions I could possibly imagine! No, I'm not really sure how roads would be financed in an ideal society. I do know that there are many worse things than what we have right now, and that staving them off might not be such a bad idea. I also know that liberty is remarkably resourceful. Perhaps in time we'll discover a workable solution to more public-goods problems--but we won't do it without some clear-cut libertarian successes elsewhere.
But the Libertarian Party isn't about politics; it's about a revolt against politics. "Well, yes!" some of you may say. I, however, find this a contradiction in terms--a political party without a politics is not a bold counter-cultural statement. It's a pipe dream, and it's a distraction from the real work of securing individual liberties given the conditions under which we now live.
Instead, I would advocate a platform that would move the present government--gradually and cautiously--toward a more minimal state. Focus on the most egregious and unpopular abuses. Don't sweat the small stuff, and ignore anything that can't plausibly be accomplished in a decade. Begin in the mainstream, and move slowly.
Anarchists: Don't write me off just yet. There's something in this for you, too, I promise.
Personally, I happen to be convinced that the private defense agencies of anarcho-capitalist theory would in no sense be private: Privateness ends when force is sufficiently concentrated. Second, even if I am wrong, and if anarcho-capitalism is the best social arrangement, getting from "here" to "there" will almost certainly have to be a gradual process--that is, if Libertarians don't want to face a massive backlash against their program, one that would even further discredit libertarian thought.
Let's suppose that the anarchists are right. Now let's imagine that the Minarchist Party has been in power for a good fifteen or twenty years. Government is a tiny fraction of the size it used to be, and private institutions have grown in proportion. Life is far better all around, and many people have learned firsthand the benefits of free markets and individual liberties. Won't the transition to anarchism be that much easier, with a weakened state and a libertarian-minded population? At any rate, the difference between "good government," if such thing exists, and "bad government," would certainly become clearer once larger numbers of people had been brought on board.
Electorally, too, a move toward the center could yield huge practical benefits. Just a few steps toward that political center--hate it though some of us might--there is a large, untapped reservoir of libertarian-minded voters who are repelled by the extremism of the LP. I've been using the 2% Company as an example here, but I think they are typical of a much larger segment of the population.
Even the LP's own favorite marketing tool, the Nolan Test, suggests as much. But the party has been unable to capitalize on these voters because it's always tried to do far too much, and far too fast. The libertarian-minded voters out there have never been more dissatisfied with both the major political parties, but until they are offered a reasonable-sounding third option, one that does not look like so much howling at the moon, they will never change their affiliations.
Never mind if howling at the moon really is the high-minded, principled thing to do. What on earth gave you the idea that party politics is about high-mindedness or principle? Conservatives and liberals move mountains in party politics, every single day. They get what they want, again and again, and we all know how few principles they can have.
Randy Barnett suggested recently that the Libertarian Party has hurt the cause of libertarianism by draining off the libertarians of both major parties and diverting their efforts into a losing battle. He's right--and I might even add to the critique: Once these people are in the party, they stop talking sense altogether, and they are lost as effective advocates on matters of political consequence. Compare the work done by the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Pacific Legal Foundation, NORML, even the many Objectivist groups out there. Every last one of them, without exception, has done more for libertarianism than the Libertarian Party.
It is a standard rejoinder from the advocates of the LP, that if you do not care for the party's tactics or approach--Hey, why not join up and try to change things?
But what nonsense this is! Have we ever heard its like from another political organization of any sort at all? And why should we not take it as a frank admission of intellectual bankruptcy? Even worse: What possible appeal can this rejoinder have to anyone at all? "You don't like us. So join our group." Oh please.
If libertarianism is going to be a party politics at all, it needs a clean break from the dead-end party that it has right now. It needs a new party, one that recognizes what party politics really is: In the system we have (again, love it or hate it), party politics is the art of appealing to the public. Our current party has not the slightest clue how to do this. Appealing to the public means compromising; it means making deals, it means jettisoning the radicalism--all for the purpose of doing what we can in this particular realm of human action. It's one where we have scarcely begun to make ourselves known.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Schiavo, Human Life, and Marriage
My thoughts on the Schiavo case can be found here. I agree entirely with those of us who have found the case a horrifying overreach by the federal government, and I am happy--yes, happy--to see the ruling today from the federal appeals court.
But what exactly was it that the social conservatives were hoping to accomplish in this case? I write,
Just as we honor the wishes of those who want, say, a Christian funeral service--or to be cremated and shot from a cannon--so too, we ought to give Terri Schiavo the treatment that she wanted in death. A decent respect for individual autonomy demands no less. This, my dear fundamentalists, is what it means to err on the side of life: It is to err on the side of respect for individual will, not on the side of mere protoplasm.I may be young, but I can still remember the good old days, back when it seemed like the left was the greater enemy of individual rights. How times change.
The second reason why the case really matters is because it is about... marriage.
With one hand the religious right is "protecting" marriage by denying committed same-sex couples the legal benefits of that state. With the other hand, they are making me wonder what good a marriage would do in any event: If Congress itself can step in and declare that the guardianship that comes with marriage is null and void, then marriage really is the weak and threatened institution that the religious right says it is. The only trouble is, the religious right is the one doing all the attacking. Never mind the egregious abuse of federalism that the case represents; far more to the point, it is also an egregious abuse of the marriage bond.
The hypocrisy could not be more perfect, as Randall Terry himself has taken the lead in both these efforts, demonizing gay marriages and infringing on the rights of straight ones. What people like him want is not to protect marriage--but to subjugate all marriage, all human intimacy, to their own political will.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Foucault for Classical Liberals
As I promised some time ago, I have provided my thoughts on Foucault for classical liberals. They are available at Positive Liberty. Like everything about Foucault, my presentation is incomplete, and I welcome commentary. Although I'm forcing myself to stay away from daily blogging until my dissertation is done, I will be sure to follow whatever discussion results.
Friday, March 4, 2005
Blogging, Ethics, and Liberty: A Symposium with Paul Musgrave
Paul Musgrave and I have lately completed a two-blog structured dialogue/ symposium/ seminar (gosh, what do you call these thingamajigs that emerge as components of a new spontaneous order?). It's on the theme of "Blogging, Ethics, and Liberty."
Here is a quick review of our posts. For those of you who have not been following the exchanges, you can start wherever you like or read everything straight through; each post can stand alone or be read as part of a dialogue.
I: Opening Remarks.
a.) Paul sets out the terms of the debate:
Blogs are perfectly exclusive spaces in which writers may express any opinion with no prior censorship. By processes we can define as exogenous, some bloggers will have audiences approaching or exceeding medium-sized newspapers or radio stations. Aside from the remote legal sanctions that can be applied to the exercise of free speech (especially loose in the United States), what, if any, ethical obligations do bloggers have to the wider public (defining ethical obligations as self-imposed restrictions on content)? I argue that there are some few ethical obligations, that enforcement will be extremely difficult given the self-selecting nature of blog audiences and the incentive structure governing the behavior of agents in the game, and that many constraints we may think of as 'ethical' in the first consideration are actually credibility-building measures.There's much more in the full post.
b.) I add my bit, which is a sort of mock-Platonic exposition on The Good as relates to blog posts: What is it we're after, anyway, when we read a blog?
II. Replies and Reconsiderations
a.) Paul replies, noting the very different stances (and even genres) we have used, questioning what each of these stances mean for readers, writers, and those who do a little of both.
b.) Struck by the lack of the social in my initial remarks, I attempt to re-introduce it--by way of catallactics (and also by a diversion through the online world of Diablo II). The result is, in my own words, a quasi-catallactic theory of blogging. Obviously, it's heavily inspired by my recent reading on Hayek.
c.) Paul replies again, discussing strategic link behavior, blog traffic, webrings, and group blogs as examples of spontaneous order in the blogosphere. I am afraid he is pessimistic:
So what happens to the civilising influence of blogs in this regard? I am afraid that I must end on a pessimistic note. Since bloggers' utility from participation in the life of this virtual community comes from such different sources, and because there is no clearly viable and immediately obvious standard that we can use to measure the value of blogging, we are left with a situation in which the civilising effects of a market society are almost nonexistent. There are few incentives to be polite to your 'opponents' if unremitting hostility and disdain win you more readers and more links.III. Unresolved questions
Is there a currency in the blogosphere, or anything like it? Can there ever be one? What media or forms of exchange best allow complex information transfer among blogs, including esteem, interest, political alignment, and style? Comments on any section of the symposium are welcome, and we may yet reopen it if substantial new issues arise.
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Thursday, March 3, 2005
On Voltaire
Once after I delivered a paper, a professor commented to me, "Your understanding of Voltaire is really very different from mine. You make him sound like such a good person."
And on the whole I do think he was. In The New Yorker Adam Gopnik explains Voltaire's enduring appeal:
There couldn’t be a better model of an improvisatory, anti-authoritarian intelligence, whose whole creed rests on individual acts and case-by-case considerations. He believed in the English model of trade and toleration, not the Jacobin model of ideology and intemperance... Voltaire’s spirit was one of tolerant cosmopolitanism, even though he didn’t have the insight to see that one challenge for the cosmopolitan spirit would be how well it tolerated those who had no wish to be cosmopolitan.He was not perfect by a long stretch--but there is still a lot to admire. [Via Arts & Letters Daily; crossposted to Positive Liberty.]
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
A Legislative Purpose
This Reuters news item informs us that the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging Alabama's law against sex toys. Given Lawrence vs. Texas, it would seem that the case should be a no-brainer: What interest could the state possibly have in criminalizing "[devices] designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs?" I mean really, what's the rationale for it?
My favorite part of the law, though, is going to leave me smiling all day long. It makes a special exemption for "a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial or law enforcement purpose."
A legislative purpose?
[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Kelo and Eminent Domain
I am a bit surprised to see that the day came and went without a single Liberty and Power blog post on Kelo vs. New London, which was argued before the Supreme Court today. With Ashcroft vs. Raich, Kelo makes this Supreme Court term arguably the most important in many years for advocates of limited government, freedom of commerce, and private property rights.Kelo seeks to overturn the established precedent holding that governments may seize private property and, provided a "just" compensation is given--then transfer it directly to other private entities. The rationale? So-called "public interest."
Now this is clearly not what the Fifth Amendment envisioned when it held that governments may seize property for "public interest." The plain meaning of the amendment was to provide for the building of government facilities alone; indeed, this section of the amendment seems written precisely to avoid the conditions under which we now suffer. And suffer we do; since 1982, eminent domain has been used some ten thousand times to transfer private property from one owner to another.
Clearly this is grossly unfair. It represents a major step toward the disintegration of private property rights in any sense whatsoever, for when the government can take your property, directly and wholesale, and transfer it to someone else, "your" property can hardly be called your own.
Here is the New York Times on the case; from what I can tell (and quite surprisingly), the Justices seemed to be leaning toward the homeowners and against the government, although it's still far from clear how they will rule:
If a city wanted to seize property in order to turn a "Motel 6 into a Ritz-Carlton, that would be OK?" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked.O'Connor is exactly right to be asking this question, because once eminent domain can be used in this manner, there is no remaining principle to which one can appeal. Eminent domain as it now stands is a license for governments to micro-manage the economy; this license must be revoked.
"Yes, your honor, it would be," Horton replied.
The justices expressed sympathy for the longtime residents. At the same time, they questioned whether they have the authority to stop the town's plans.
Timothy Sandefur has a substantial collection of links about Kelo; in recent days his blog has been giving the issue thorough and detailed coverage. There are editorials, interviews, news pieces, and primary sources, including Sandefur's amicus brief, which very convincingly argues for the homeowners. Mr. Sandefur's work is always marked by its sound reasoning, well-chosen arguments, and deep erudition. I encourage readers to pay him a visit and educate themselves on the case.
[Crossposted at Liberty & Power.]
Friday, February 18, 2005
Evolutionary Psychology and the Blank Slate
A lot of research in recent years has addressed the idea that free markets are fundamentally not natural to humans, and that, while large-scale free-market societies may be good, our brains have not been evolved to act in them. As Will Wilkinson writes (via Tim Sandefur),
A growing scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology specializes in uncovering the truth about human nature, and it is already illuminating what we know about the possibilities of human social organization.This argument accomplishes several things. First, it dispenses with the old Lockean idea of tabula rasa. The idea has been the source of a great deal of nonsense just lately in political thought, and I am glad to see that something is combating it. I do have some reservations, however.
Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand the unique nature of the human mind by applying the logic and methods of contemporary evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.
The main working assumption of evolutionary psychology is that the mind is a variegated toolkit of specialized functions (think of a Swiss Army knife) that has evolved through natural selection to solve specific problems faced by our forebears. Distinct mental functions--e.g., perception; reading other people's intentions; responding emotionally to potential mates--are underwritten by different neurological "circuits" or "modules," which can each be conceived as mini computer programs selected under environmental pressure to solve specific problems of survival and reproduction typical in the original setting of human evolution, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the "EEA." Strictly speaking, the EEA is a statistical composite of environmental pressures that account for the evolutionary selection of our distinctively human traits. Loosely, the EEA was the period called the Pleistocene during which humans lived as hunter-gatherers from about 1.6 million years ago up until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
According to evolutionary psychologists, the basic constitution of the human mind hasn't changed appreciably for about 50,000 years. Thus the evolutionary psychologist's slogan: modern skulls house Stone Age minds.
Wilkinson writes:
The key political lesson of evolutionary psychology is simply that there is a universal human nature. The human mind comprises many distinct, specialized functions, and is not an all-purpose learning machine that can be reformatted at will to realize political dreams. The shape of society is constrained by our evolved nature. Remaking humanity through politics is a biological impossibility on the order of curing cancer with pine needle tea [as attempted, pitifully, in North Korea]. We can, however, work with human nature--and we have. We have, through culture, enhanced those traits that facilitate trust and cooperation, channeled our coalitional and status-seeking instincts toward productive uses, and built upon our natural suspicion of power to preserve our freedom.These are all laudable goals. But Locke's idea has had many positive consequences, too. For instance, tabula rasa was instrumental in the fight to jettison monarchy's "natural" claims over humanity: No one, Locke said, was born to rule. It has also been helpful in combating racism, sexism, and other forms of collectivism. We now accept that no one is "born" to be a peasant or a slave, just as no one is "born" to be king. We arrived at this consensus chiefly through tabula rasa reasoning.
Properly understood, tabula rasa was a wonderful heuristic that helped establish the modern idea of the social contract. It is still the best theoretical foundation for government that we have, and I would submit that even anarchists often reach for it in formulating their private, fragmented social contracts. It seems important to me to consider that in abandoning at least the presumption of tabula rasa, we may end up doing more harm than we imagined.
Admittedly, the foundations for tabula rasa were always fairly weak. Stories abounded even in Locke's day of nobles whose progeny were id