tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72572636971070316212024-03-18T02:48:13.396-07:00LiberaLawCommentary and debate: law, politics, public policy, and legal, moral, and political theoryGary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-66535342469399294062020-07-11T06:53:00.002-07:002021-03-10T14:45:00.170-08:00Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">I learned a few minutes ago that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Lash">Nicholas Lash</a> had died earlier today.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of <a href="https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/so/2018/chapter07-section4.html#heading2-23">an earned DD</a> from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William James to Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I remember a seminar session on Antony Kenny's <i>God and Two Poets</i> in which Nicholas offered an amazingly close reading Hopkins's "The Windhover"—he could obviously have been an outstanding literary critic.)<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">I learned an immense amount from him. <i><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Easter-Ordinary-Reflections-Experience-University/dp/0268009260/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Easter+in+Ordinary&qid=1594475470&sr=8-2">Easter in Ordinary</a></i> was probably the single most important book I read during my time as a PhD student at Cambridge, offering as it did a way past a deeply pathological view of religious life and experience (even if I am now more sympathetic to James—an object of critical scrutiny in the book—than I perhaps was then) and forming the basis of a significant portion of my dissertation on friendship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">Nicholas unequivocally enjoyed and admired Thomas Aquinas and Karl Rahner, but he was not the architect of any sort of vast, unified philosophical or theological edifice. While he occasionally wrote book-length treatments of important issues, he metier was the extended essay, and most of his books were thus collections; I was pleased to review one of those he published later in life, <i><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Beginning-End-Religion-Nicholas-Lash/dp/0521566355/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+beginning+and+the+end+of+religion+nicholas+lash&qid=1594475546&s=digital-text&sr=1-1">The Beginning and the End of 'Religion'</a></i>, which included three chapters drawn from Teape Lectures he had delivered in India, a place with which his family had significant connections. He once observed to me that he was going to spend time in the US producing "that book on the Creed that every theologian writes at 60." But his book, <i><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Believing-Three-Ways-One-God/dp/026800692X/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&qid=1594475577&refinements=p_27%3ANicholas+Lash&s=books&sr=1-9&text=Nicholas+Lash">Believing Three Ways in One God,</a></i> seems likely to remain current long after many of the relatively forgettable contributions to the genre to which he alluded, full of sinuous, memorable prose I found consistently quotable (I remember subjecting the late Roy Branson to my oral interpretation of a page or more of the book during a phone call sometime in the '90s).<br /><br />I opted to attend the first meeting of an undergraduate lecture course for which he was responsible during my initial term at Cambridge. He entered the room precisely at the scheduled time, long black gown swaying (at least then, senior members of the university were expected to wear their gowns while lecturing). He began speaking, and continued doing so for full fifty minutes of the scheduled class period. He spoke in perfect, complete, complex sentences that could have been transcribed and published without editing. Even when, in a seminar, he seemed to be drifting off, with eyes closed, he could snap to attention at the end of a presentation and pose a devastatingly incisive question.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">A redoubtable interlocutor, Nicholas came close to petrifying me during my student days. When I was first introduced to him, he asked me what I was working on; I offered something that evidently sounded to him like jargony gobbledygook, he responded, in effect, "Come talk to me once you can say that clearly in English." In the university schedule of lectures and seminars for my first term at Cambridge, the listing for the philosophy of religion seminar over which he presided featured the notation, "Please see Professor Lash." Was attendance at the seminar by invitation only, I wondered. I went to see Nicholas. Not to worry, he said; the notation was just there to keep "the wrong sort of animal from getting into this particular zoo." In a seminar conversation, he supposedly once snapped at a student who’d referred to him as “Nicholas”: “My name is 'Professor Lash.'”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">Snark came easily to Nicholas, who was well-known for his sardonic snort. During one seminar session, he registered the absence of two members of the Faculty whom he evidently thought would come to blows over the topic being discussed and of both of whom he was clearly inclined to be somewhat dismissive; referencing the long-running and once-famous comic strip, he noted that "neither Mutt nor Jeff was here." It was with great glee, on another occasion, that he called my attention to the encomium—in French, presumably thanks to a speechwriter—that Ronald Reagan had delivered, as a newly elected member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, celebrating, per protocol, the previous occupant of his seat in the Academie, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Urs_von_Balthasar">Hans Urs von Balthasar</a>, once described, as Nicholas observed, as "the most cultured man in Europe." <span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Another time, in the course of an informal group conversation, I urged the view that divine command accounts of ethics were primarily characteristic of a strand of Protestantism. Nicholas shot back with a response something like: “So Moses was a Protestant?” </span></span><span style="color: #1c1e21;">In a book review, he once quipped that many philosophers of religion seemed to mean by "the Christian tradition" whatever they happened to recall having been taught as children. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">The rule, as I understood it, was that no one could serve as one of my dissertation examiners who had played a substantial role in reviewing the dissertation before its submission, so I asked him to comment on one chapter that fell squarely within an area of his expertise. He had no obligation to read it, but he did so, offering me lots of useful comments. As it turned out, he was on sabbatical at Notre Dame at the time of my <i>viva;</i> in any case, though, I benefited from his considerable insight.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">I had the amusing experience of hearing Nicholas and John Hick (who had been my teacher at Claremont) offer each other almost parallel back-handed compliments (not in each other's presence). Nicholas once said of John: "He's a very fine philosopher, but he really ought to learn more theology." And John said of Nicholas something that might have amounted to: "His prose is like a chambered nautilus, curving back on itself and returning again and again to the same topics from different perspectives. He's really brilliant, but he would benefit from being more of a philosopher." (John also criticized my characterization of Nicholas as a Wittgensteinian, even though he had considerable affinity, I think, with the Wittgensteinian Thomists, because he wasn't a Wittgensteinian fideist a la D. Z. Phillips.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: inherit , serif;">Nicholas was the uncle of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes (his sister, the novelist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lash">Jennifer Lash</a>, was their mother). While I last saw Nicholas in the flesh in 2005—we gossiped over Indian food during a brief visit I made to Cambridge—I was frequently reminded of him as I saw Ralph Fiennes on screen more recently, since, when beardless, the now middle-aged nephew looked increasingly like his uncle as I remember him in 1988 (he would have been roughly the age Ralph is now). He was a thoroughly elegant dresser (I recall him as regular wearer of French cuffs) whose aristocratic demeanor and delivery seemed vaguely at odd with his lefty politics.<br /><br />A reviewer of the first edition of my first book observed (I suppose on the basis of an over-hasty count of index entries) that the figure by whom I had been most influenced was Nicholas. I doubt that’s the case. But he was and is someone who has influenced my life and thought substantially. He will not be remembered for having created a school of disciples—there was nothing of the guru about him, nor, as I’ve said, of the system-builder—but he will continue, I hope, for years to come to inspire the reminder that understanding can be profoundly difficult; that language can be a source of betrayal as much as of enlightenment; that idolatry is a persistent temptation to which good theology ought to function as a prophylactic—and to serve as a model of stellar intellect, breadth, perceptiveness, and wit.<br /><br />See Nicholas on video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF6H8i7LLbw">here</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sh5uCnUIsI">here</a>. And <a href="https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/13170/nicholas-lash-dies-aged-86?fbclid=IwAR3BbswMRzzhVsZ1PDke9cNtXKMXrL2Za0x03GD5c675pBLYWIZyBsOPua8">here</a>'s <i>The Tablet</i>'s obituary.<span style="font-size: 10.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-53675874332282082532016-08-02T09:50:00.004-07:002016-08-02T09:50:58.824-07:00First DailyNerve TestHere's a test question for those who want to explore DailyNerve, a great new site designed to generate crowdsourced innovative responses to today's problems.
<script src="//www.dailynerve.com/scripts/embed.js" data-bn-widget-ref-id="WVGFD3APDA" data-bn-widget-view="contest" data-bn-widget-query="K9AMWQU0DR"></script>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-42602027233060000262015-12-21T10:31:00.003-08:002016-06-29T09:01:20.087-07:00Awakening to Disappointment: Reviewing Episode VII<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Warning</b>: this is a spoiler-rich review. Proceed at your own
risk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Viewed as a stand-alone movie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Force Awakens</i> is perfectly watchable and interesting, with
decent dialogue, high production values, and a story that, if not compelling,
is at least intriguing. And, hey, it’s co-written by Lawrence Kasdan. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TFA</i> is not a stand-alone movie: it’s
Episode VII of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i> saga
and, as such, it’s a disappointment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The biggest insult to fan loyalty is, of course, the death
of Han Solo. Many people’s favorite character in Episodes IV-VI, Solo doesn’t
get enough screen time in EpVII, and his relationships with the other
characters seem developed in rather perfunctory fashion. Still, for anyone
who’s cared about the characters for decades and valued the series since its
inception, Solo matters, and killing him off is a brutal slap in the face. (Hardly surprising behavior, unfortunately, on the part of the director who annihilated Vulcan and canceled an entire time-line so he could turn <i>Star Trek</i> into an action-adventure franchise featuring photogenic young people.) This wasn't narratively necessary. I suspect that Harrison Ford could have been persuaded to do two more films with enough cash—cash that would have been more than justified by the appeal to fans of his continued presence. And if this really did prove impossible, scenes involving him could have been shot for use in Episode IX (perhaps <i>Han</i> should have been missing throughout Episodes VII and VIII).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There’s also the jettisoning of much of the narrative
carefully crafted to fill out the decades following the battle of Yavin. While
some material not in the theatre-released films is still being treated as
canonical, most is not. As I understand it, writers of the various continuation novels (and other media products) were told to work within
carefully defined parameters precisely because LucasFilm wanted to stay focused
on particular historical periods. The implication was that Episodes VII-IX, if
they were ever made, would take place in a period significantly later than the
one on which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TFA</i> focuses. So fans
were free to grow interested and invested in the narratives crafted, under
LucasFilm’s supervision, for the immediate post-Yavin period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Abandoning all of this material is an attack on fans,
it seems to me, just because fans should be free to embrace the unfolding
narrative wholeheartedly, not expecting it to be canceled. But it’s also a bad
idea because more thought seems to have gone into crafting this material than is evident in what replaces it in <i>TFA</i>. To take one
obvious example: it makes far more sense for Leia Organa to serve as President
of the Republic than for her to be a general. Everything we know about Leia
suggests that she’s a politician, not a soldier; turning her into one seems a
pointless plot device. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are random nods to the
decades of fan-endorsed narrative here; while “Ben” is, appropriately enough,
the name of Luke’s son in the novels—Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi was Luke’s all-too-brief mentor, not Han’s
or Leia’s, after all—“Ben” [rather than “Jacen”] is now the name of Han and Leia’s
dark-side-loving son. And while the novels characterized Emperor Palpatine as
bringing into being the “New Order,” the Nazi-like successor to the Empire
calls itself the “First Order.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Speaking of the Republic: the relationship between the
Republic and the Resistance as characterized in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TFA</i> is both unclear and puzzling. If the Republic is an established
entity with jurisdiction, etc., there’s something odd about the attempt to
depict its support for the Resistance as subterranean. Surely, everyone would
treat it as quite predictably and reasonably opposing the incursions of the
First Order. There would be no need for a Resistance separate from the
Republic. But, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TFA</i>, the First
Order treats the Republic’s support for the Resistance as sneaky and
traitorous—without much in the way of explanation or justification.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And, on a political note: we’re back to the uninteresting
politics of EpsIV-VI. In EpsI-III, we get a genuinely interesting political
narrative, one in which lots of well meaning people (along with some
not-so-well-meaning ones) are cleverly manipulated into fighting each other to
bring about the fall of the Republic (after some thugs are manipulated into
fighting a losing battle to create sympathy for Senator Palpatine’s candidacy
for Chancellor). There’s lots of uncertainty and ambiguity; there are lots of
illustration of the ways in which good people can become caught up
inadvertently in promoting what turn out to be evil causes. There’s lots of
suspicion of people in power, even (!) in putatively democratic institutions.
None of that sort of cleverness is in evidence here: now, we’re just fighting
the Nazis. Sigh . . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Oh, and what about the McGuffin—the map to Luke? (I can only
hope that EpVIII and EpIX will offer some explanation of how this map came into
being, how Luke’s light-saber came to be hidden, etc.) The notion that the
chunk of star-map carried by BB8 couldn’t have been contextualized, so that
Luke couldn’t have been found without the other bit conveniently carried by
R2D2, seems wildly implausible. Good pattern-matching software should have
dealt successfully with this problem, and the fact that it didn’t makes the
technology available to our heroes seem clunky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The destruction of the Republic’s central planet (it looks
like Coruscant, but apparently it’s not, since another system is named as its
location) is perfunctory in the extreme. We don’t know anything about the
Republic in its current guise; we don’t know anything about any of the people
involved. Indeed, there’s a lot more emotional engagement when, in EpIV, Leia
protests the destruction of Alderaan by the Grand Moff Tarkin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Which brings me to my final complaint: EpVII apes EpIV (and, to a lesser extent, EpV).
Repeatedly. Unoriginally. Boringly. Inexplicably. (Some generally complementary concerns noted <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/40-unforgivable-plot-holes-in-star-wars-the-force-awakens_b_8850324.html">here</a> and <a href="http://whatculture.com/film/12-reasons-star-wars-the-force-awakens-is-a-disappointment.php">here</a>).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Let’s see: we start out on a desert planet. The central
character is an orphan. Who finds a droid. That contains a hidden message.
Crucial to the war against the Dark Side. The orphan and friend flee the desert
planet in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Millennium Falcon</i>. (It’s unclear to me how, in <i>TFA</i>, the ship happens to have enough fuel to get off-planet.) They’re mentored—briefly—by an old man with memories of glory from a generation
ago. Their primary opponent is a dark Force user who wears a black helmet and
who wields a red light saber (albeit this time with those weirdly inexplicable cross pieces). He
tussles for supremacy with a military leader; both report to a holographically
present evil overlord (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">TFA</i>, one with
the absurd name “Snoke”—what’s with that? “Palpatine” is a cool name, but “Snoke” . . . ?) who wonders whether family ties will compromise the
dark Force user’s loyalty. The forces of evil employ storm troopers (curiously wearing, in <i>TFA</i>, the same uniforms as their imperial predecessors from decades ago) and deploy a planet-killing . . . planet (hey, it’s not a
planetoid this time—a helpful graphic assures us that it’s much larger than the
original Death Star). The forces of evil also use the planet-killer to wipe out
an entire planet, just to show us that the planet-killer is very dangerous and
that the forces of evil really are Evil. Courtesy of the helmeted, evil Force-user, a woman is
trapped in a room in which she’ll be subjected to robotic torture—more evidence
of Evil. Fortunately, a weakness in the planet-killing planet’s defenses has
been discovered, and a team of X-Wing fighters, with a squadron leader we like and trust, can take it out if they hit the
right spot (repeatedly, this time)—but of course someone needs to lower the
shields that protect the planet-killer from attack. Our heroes manage to sneak
in, easily enough. They succeed in lowering the shield. And then the wise old
mentor goes out alone to meet the dark-helmet-wearing villain and is killed without
putting up a fuss. Oh, and did I mention that there was (at least one) (not-too-)surprising
hidden family relationship in play? And that a triangle seems to be in the making?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now, to be clear, I have no objection at all to ironic winks
and nudges. The occasional reference to details of earlier films would have
been entirely apropos. But cinematic reference isn’t the same thing as lifting
warmed-over plot points unironically. And that’s what happens here. One of the things that really distinguished Episode IV when it first appeared was the set of elements often described as evidence of a “used future” (or, better, a used distant past). Among the obvious merits of this feature is the sense of reality it engenders, the sense that we've entered a real world with an ongoing history. In a real world with an ongoing history, the likelihood that all of these narrative elements would repeat themselves seems infinitesimal. Episodes I-III featured a variety of interesting and distinctive plot points; there's no reason Episodes VII-IX couldn't as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Will <i>The Force Awakens</i> kill the franchise? Nope: lots of people seem to love it. Could it have been better? Much better? Absolutely. Shame on J. J. Abrams and his collaborators for kicking fans in the teeth and for making unnecessary, dumb narrative choices. And shame on George Lucas for going along with it all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Perhaps Episode VIII could begin with Leia waking up next to Han, looking puzzled, and murmuring, “I've just had the strangest dream.”</span><br />
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Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-61359037452214515222015-07-22T08:11:00.000-07:002015-07-22T08:11:56.763-07:00Another DailyNerve test: Planned Parenthood and tissue salesAs we know, a great deal of attention has been focused on-line on the issue of whether Planned Parenthood locals have sold tissue from aborted fetuses. To provide another test of the DailyNerve platform:<br />
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<i>Suppose tissue sales occurred: how could Planned Parenthood most effectively defend them?</i>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-4994392335739821172015-07-22T07:53:00.001-07:002015-07-22T08:02:00.254-07:00DailyNerve Test: Responding to deBlasio on Uber<br />
<br />
I've been involved for several years in the work of BigNerve and associated companies. One of those companies, DailyNerve, focuses on "solution news." According <a href="https://www.dailynerve.com/#/about">to the site</a>: "Have you ever read a piece of news and thought, “how hard could that really be to fix?” or better yet, “I know how we could fix that!”? Well, here’s your chance to get those ideas out there. At DailyNerve you are the think tank to the news. / We have one simple goal. We want to find ingenious solutions for common problems that plague people on both a local and a global level, and we want to utilise crowd sourcing to do it. That means getting those ideas out of YOUR head, and into reality.”<br />
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DailyNerve works by inviting reader responses to question-centered contests, with reader-proposed solutions assessed through a sophisticated crowd-based technique. I'm testing the platform today with a question (framed, like all DailyNerve contest questions, in the subjunctive):<br />
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<i>How could activists seeking to expand transportation options in New York City and to undermine the medallion oligopoly respond most effectively to mayor Bill deBlasio’s attempt to limit Uber’s operations in New York?</i><br />
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<a href="https://www.dailynerve.com/#/contest/1RV207MK48">Here</a>'s the contest on DailyNerve. Please check out the site and let me know what you think.Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-5676460077245011062014-08-13T15:58:00.001-07:002014-08-13T16:02:17.321-07:00On Seth Adam Smith's Dad<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Less than a year ago, Seth Adam Smith's great blog post, "</span><a href="http://sethadamsmith.com/2013/11/02/marriage-isnt-for-you/" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Marriage Isn't For You</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">," went viral. In the post, Smith explains how, not long before his wedding, his dad dealt bluntly with his cold feet by urging him to think about giving to, rather than getting from, his bride-to-be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is, as I say, a great piece. But it raises an interesting question for me, a question somewhere at the border of normative and applied ethics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The crucial moment in Smith's story comes when his dad says:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. . . . Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It seems clear that the elder Smith isn't offering a report on what he thinks his son is doing, much less on what people in general are doing. So what <i>is</i> he claiming, then?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It might be useful to contrast what seems to be going on in Seth's dad's comments with a more straightforward account of devoted love in marriage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Such an account begins, let us suppose, with the first stage of a couple's interaction. Perhaps the lover begins by simply liking the beloved, before going on to find the beloved attractive romantically, erotically, or both. In an ongoing spiral of engagement, liking and attraction give rise to the determination to engage further, which leads to additional bonding. The lover begins to incorporate the beloved into the lover's own sense of self, sense of identity. At the same time, the lover's delight in and desire for the beloved grow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At this point, at least two complementary things may occur. (i) The beloved may find the beloved—whether simply because the beloved occupies a more central place in the lover's live and world, so that the lover is more aware of the beloved as a three-dimensional, vulnerable human with particular needs, or because particular needs and vulnerabilities on the part of the beloved present themselves to the lover—a vulnerable person whose needs evoke a desire to offer care and nurture. (ii) The lover incorporates the beloved clearly into the lover's own sense of who he or she is—a process of attachment, identification, and bonding. These developments prompt the lover to reach out, to <i>will</i>, to care for the beloved.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, delight and desire continue to play their independent roles in drawing the lover into the beloved's presence and prompting the lover to seek increased closeness with the beloved.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The lover moves toward a multi-part commitment: (1) a commitment to caring for the beloved, a commitment that prompts the desire to provide the reassurance and security that constancy can afford; (2) a commitment to achieve a "we" relationship with the beloved; (3) a commitment to the beloved to care for her or him precisely in and through the maintenance of a "we" relationship.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The initial commitments are commitments the lover makes in and to her- or himself, ratifying the felt attachment and bonding that's already been taking place. The third-stage commitment builds on these commitments, expressing them, at the right time, to the beloved. Thus, love here begins as impulse, becomes interaction-forged attachment and bond, becomes a self-chosen commitment, and is consummated as an interpersonal commitment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So on this model, which I'd like to think will be familiar in general terms to many readers, love's obligations grow out of love's bond which grows out of love's desire.<br /><br />Seth's dad seems to be saying something different. In his words, as Seth reports them, the focus seems to be on an in-built teleology. Love and marriage just are <i>for</i> particular purposes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It should be clear that this can't be a report on the purposes empirical individuals happen to have. After all, Seth's dad isn't just reminding him of a purpose he already he has—he's saying, instead, that Seth <i>should</i> have a particular purpose. What, then, is the force of the <i>should</i> here?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Clearly, Seth's dad could just mean that romantic relationships and marriages offer the opportunity to love unselfishly. But he seems to be saying more than this. He clearly implies that Seth is choosing and feeling <i>deficiently</i> because he is not immediately inclined to love openly and generously to his betrothed.<br /><br />But he is also not saying that Seth is choosing in a manner inconsistent with commitments to himself and to his betrothed. For his language seems to imply that love's imperatives <i>precede</i> these commitments. There is, on his view, a set purpose for marriage, so that if one is going to marry at all, one should embrace this purpose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The question, I think, is how Seth's dad would have responded if Seth had said, "Well, maybe you're right that 'marriage' as an institution has the character you describe, so that if I commit to marriage I am committing to behaving in this way. But what's to stop me and my beloved from entering a parallel institution, call it 'schmarriage', that lacks any expectation of devoted love but has many of the other superficial feature of marriage?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It might well be that Seth's beloved would prefer a marriage to a schmarriage, so that, if he's going to commit to her at all, he'll need to commit to marriage rather than schmarriage. And, indeed, he might prefer that she adopt in relation to <i>him</i> the attitudes involved in marriage rather than those associated with schmarriage, and be willing for this reason to offer her a commitment to marriage. But while this might be a perfectly good reason for Seth to commit to a devotedly loving marriage, it's not what's in view here, since Seth's dad, in Seth's story, criticizes Seth for <i>not wanting</i> to commit to a devotedly loving marriage, and does so because of his judgment about Seth's attitude toward his beloved. His dad seems to presuppose an imperative something like this: <i>Choose to commit to marriage in order to give to your beloved</i>. He seems to think Seth would act wrongly or deficiently if he ignored this imperative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I can think immediately of at least two ways in which one might defend Seth's dad's claim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">(1) One might understand Seth's dad as embracing, not an ethics of rules or duties or principles but rather an ethics of virtue. On this view, Seth's choices would be problematic, not as inconsistent with any categorical or self-assumed obligation (to himself or to his beloved) but rather as revelatory of a deficient character. More work would be needed here, but the idea seems plain and fairly plausible: devotion to one's beloved is a virtuous disposition worth embracing, and failing to embody this disposition (when one has a beloved to love devotedly) is a reasonably criticizable deficiency. One might ground this account of human virtue in different ways—as an embodiment of self-sacrificial divine love (cp. Ephesians, Hosea); as the expression of an attitude we just find ourselves consistently valuing (<a href="https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Mode/ModeHomi.htm">the Humean approach</a>); etc. Particularly relevant here might be the fact that devotion is a natural expression of love's own impulse, so that failing to love devotedly might be a matter of suppressing love's own inherent potential and dynamic. (Perhaps this is what Seth himself is getting at when he later says: "No, a true marriage (and true love) is never about you. It’s about the person you love—their wants, their needs, their hopes, and their dreams. Selfishness demands, “What’s in it for me?”, while Love asks, “What can I give?”) It's hard to argue against this on deontic grounds, but it might qualify as ugly, and so as a Humean vice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">(2) One might also attempt a deontic account. To make this view work, we'd need some kind of argument to the effect that romantic love and marriage necessarily entail committed devotion, and that someone opting to love romantically or to marry would act wrongly if she or he failed to commit to loving devotedly. One might try to make this case in several steps. (a) One could note that, whatever one says about marriages versus schmarriages, the formal features of marriage—shared life, shared identity, shared physical space (not necessary, but common), and sex (again, not necessary, but common and obviously expected) make for great vulnerability between the partners, and a commitment responsive to that vulnerability is appropriate even if the partners try to frame some less committed relationship (at least without a purposeful waiver on the part of one or both). (b) One could note that, by inviting one's beloved into a love relationship, one effectively deprives her or him of opportunities to enter other relationships that might offer devoted love; and, given the great value of such love, it would be unreasonable to preclude it in a context in which one's partner might ordinarily expect it. Alternatively, (c) one might see this obligation as a product of some kind of vocation (not necessarily willed or announced by God; cp. Lawrence A. Blum, <i>Moral Perception and Particularity</i>).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I think the virtue-based approach comes closer to capturing what I suspect Seth's dad is trying to say. In any case, both approaches deserve further study and reflection.</span></div>
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Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-65544601870886526152014-08-10T11:21:00.003-07:002020-09-02T06:19:26.576-07:00Does Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince Commit the Sunk-Costs Fallacy?<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Saint-Exupéry's <i>The Little Prince</i> contains a simple explanation of what seems like an important aspect of love: history. The Little Prince seeks to explain why his rose, in particular, matters to him. (It seems likely that Saint-Exupéry was trying to understand and justify his tumultuous relationship with his wife.) The Little Prince is deeply troubled by the discovery of many, many roses that seem phenomenally indistinguishable from his rose. He says to them:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. [One might just as well say, “My gardenia” or “My frangipani.”]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As such quite different philosophers as Raymond Gaita and Stephen Clark have noted repeatedly (see, <i>e.g.</i>, Stephen R. L. Clark, <i>The Mysteries of Religion: An Introduction to Philosophy through Religion</i> [Oxford: Blackwell 1986] 207-9; Stephen R. L. Clark, <i>A Parliament of Souls</i>, Limits and Renewals 2 [Oxford: Clarendon-OUP 1989] 116-35), history matters (this isn't the way Clark frames the matter). We are not simply interested in enjoying the beloved's phenomenal characteristics: we are interested in our relationship with the beloved her- or himself. To believe that my lover has been surreptitiously replaced with a phenomenally indistinguishable duplicate could easily be the first step on a path toward madness—not because the belief itself is insane (it might or might not be), but because trying to come to grips with the conflicting thoughts and emotions involved could prove devastating. When I love you, I am attached to you, not to anyone who happens to resemble you. (This is a way into one sort of quite serious problem with theories which seek to combine belief in (i) life after death understood as resurrection with (ii) a purely physicalist understanding of the human person.)<br /><br /> So, phenomenologically, we're with the Little Prince. Even apart from the issue of tender, compassionate care for the other that is a crucial part of any attitude we would recognize as loving, we value the beloved not simply because she or he can offer certain goods in the future but also because we are attached to her or him as a self extended over time. (It doesn't matter for present purposes whether the continuity is simply narrative in nature or whether it is rooted in some sort of persistent substance.) Once I have a conception of a relationship with the other as an individual with a history, rather than as a moment-by-moment source of satisfactions, then valuing that relationship will not be compatible with ongoing reevaluation of its investment potential: I value the relationship as such, and not merely for what it can produce.</span><br />
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The sunk-costs fallacy can be committed by someone who makes an inapposite judgment regarding the relevance of past expenditures to present-cum-future investment choices. Suppose I have spent $1,000,000 on a product line that has so far made me $250,000, and which can be disposed of for another $250,000, so that I am (or will be) down $1,000,000 total. I can spend another $100,000 to reinvigorate the line in some way, with some chance of boosting my profits, or I can spend $500,000 on another product line entirely, with a significant chance of substantial new income, while shutting down the first product line. What ought to matter, conventional economic reasoning suggests, is my net income on either of the two options. My past investment shouldn't figure in my decision about the future.</span><br />
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It should be clear that, as an entrepreneur evaluating investment options in a case like this one, I am not in the same position as the Little Prince.</span><br />
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As the example has been framed, I can measure investment, loss, and profit using the same currency, and my objectives can be expressed with exclusive reference to this currency, so that it is quite easy to see (allowing for the reasonable determination of probabilities) what my losses and gains can be expected to be. The Little Prince has invested time and care, but his goal is not to yield more time spent caring for the rose, so the comparison between investment and output can't be made straightforwardly in the way it can in the product-line instance.</span><br />
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Not only is the desired output incommensurable with what has been invested, at least in significant part, but the Little Prince isn't seeking an external good. What he values is precisely the ongoing relationship with his rose. His <i>goal</i> is not to maximize the æsthetic pleasure of encounters with the phenomenal features of his rose or of roses like her. He is not seeking to maximize anything external to his relationship with her. Rather, he seeks to extend and nourish <i>the relationship itself</i>. And he seeks to do this not because the relationship itself is a reliable means of generating certain satisfactions; the values the relationship yields are internal to it. As Robert Nozick (whose discussion of this topic I only read, thanks to a suggestion from David Gordon, after crafting the initial version of this post) observes crisply, “Don't commit the sunk costs fallacy”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">may be a correct rule for the maximization of monetary profit, but it is not an appropriate general principle of decision . . . . We do <i>not</i> treat out past commitments to others as of no account except insofar as they affect our future returns, as when breaking a commitment may affect others' trust in us and hence our ability to achieve other future benefits; and we do <i>not</i> treat the past efforts we have devoted to ongoing projects of work or of life as of no account (except insofar as this makes their continuance more likely to bring benefits than other freshly started projects would). Such projects help to define our sense of ourselves and of our lives.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Robert Nozick, </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">The Nature of Rationality</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1993) 22.</span><br />
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That's true now, of course, but, an objector might say, it's not true initially. Initially, the Little Prince simply values and delights in the rose and cares for her accordingly—for her own sake, so that she will persist, and for his sake, so that his relationship with her will persist. At first, this seems likely to be because of its observable features and the characteristics of its relationship with. But, over time, he comes to be attached to the rose as an individual persisting over time, caring about the rose as an other with her own point of view and valuing precisely his connection with <i>her</i>.</span><br />
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Now, it is open to the objector to say that the Little Prince <i>shouldn't</i> value the rose in this way, that he should value her only as a source of future values or satisfactions. But what would be the rationale for this normative claim? The notion that the sunk-costs fallacy <i>is</i> a fallacy depends on the idea that the investor wants value of quantity <i>X</i> but settles for some sub-unity fraction of <i>X</i> simply because of prior investment. The idea of the sunk-costs fallacy <i>as a fallacy</i> presupposes that the investment can be evaluated in virtue of its potential to produce a certain kind of output. The investor acts irrationally, on the standard view of the fallacy, when she fails to maximize the relevant output.</span><br />
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But the Little Prince has become attached to this particular rose. The objector could dismiss his continued commitment to her as irrational only if the Little Prince's <i>goal</i> were to generate some value or satisfaction and if his continued commitment could be shown to generate this value or satisfaction in a lower quantity than some alternative in which he had not previously invested. But to judge the Prince as irrational on this basis would be to misunderstood the logic of his interactions with the rose. He doesn't value the rose in the way he would need to for the objection to find any purchase. And the charge of economic, or instrumental, irrationality thus can't get off the ground: this kind of charge is a judgment about means, not ends.</span><br />
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Perhaps, however, the objector might suggest that there was something irrational about the transformation in the Little Prince's attitudes—in coming to value a relationship with a particular rose, a particular individual, rather than valuing simply what the relationship, or the individual, might be expected to yield on an ongoing basis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />There will, of course, be economic arguments against this kind of position, rooted in the idea that future yields will be greater when sought in ways that don't depend on persistent attention to future yields. Committed engagement yields better outcomes than case-by-case, moment-by-moment, assessment of probable outcomes. As recent analysts have pointed out, it will be useful to have a reputation as someone who persists. (See <a href="http://rdoody.com/SunkCostFallacyIsNotaFallacy.pdf">here</a>, for example.) And there will be <a href="http://www.suemialon.com/research/RevisedSunkCostsMatterApril2007.pdf">informational and resource constraints on pursuing alternate options</a> in ways that make it reasonable to consider sunk costs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But while this may be correct, it doesn't capture the way we actually experience relationships with valued others, personal and impersonal. Consider the loss of a farm that has been in one's family for eight generations. The point is not that one has, or that one's ancestors have, invested in the farm at a particular level: evaluating the loss of the farm isn't a matter of evaluating investments, profits, or losses at all, but of one's attachment to the property and its role in constituting one's identity. Thus, “[t]hat there must be something which compensates for a finite loss is just a dogma, one which is more familiar in the traditional version to the effect that every man has his price.” (See Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">Utilitarianism: For and Against</i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, by J. J. C. Smart and Williams [Cambridge: CUP 1973] 144-5.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I may develop a relationship with a particular object, place, rose (or gardenia, or frangipani), or person for any number of reasons. But my ongoing interaction with it creates a bond, an attachment, that gives it a special place in my motivational structure and so in my deliberation. (The bond need not be created in this way; my point is simply that it can be.) (i) My story is now a story in which interaction and involvement with this entity plays a significant part. (ii) My self-understanding is as someone defined in relation to this entity. (iii) The entity occupies a significant role vis-a-vis my priorities. (iv) Emotionally, I am attached to this entity, with the emotion reasonably understood as registering its place in my story and in my identity and in my priorities. All this is particularly true if the focus of my relationship is an entity extended through time, not appropriately understood as simply a collection of things strung along a temporal clothesline. (John Searle has argued, without elaborate metaphysical foundations, that selves can be thus understood: see John Searle, <i>Rationality in Action</i> [Cambridge, MA: MIT 2001] 75-96.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Little Prince doesn't persist in his relationship with the rose because he mistakenly supposes that doing so will yield more external goods than any alternative. He does so because he values the internal good of the relationship with the rose, a relationship with an individual extended over time, and because the rose, and his relationship with her, have come to constitute (in part) who he is.</span></div>
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Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-61903249097691859832013-12-27T08:11:00.002-08:002013-12-27T08:11:41.145-08:00Some Problems with Gun ControlThere are no guns in my home, and there never have been. But I believe there are several mutually reinforcing reasons for skepticism about proposals for gun control.<br />
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<li>Gun control measures reduce the popular capacity for armed resistance to tyranny and invasion.</li>
<li>These measures limit opportunities for self-defense against thuggery.</li>
<li>They deny people the benefits of the deterrent effect exerted by the widespread belief that most members of a given population are armed.</li>
<li>They increase people's dependence on state authorities who would otherwise be seen as irrelevant and unnecessary.</li>
<li>They leave state authorities more willing to violate people's rights with impunity.</li>
<li>The implementation of these measures increases the power of the state and provides excuses for state authorities to intrusively surveil people's nonviolent activities, thus compromising privacy and autonomy.</li>
<li>The implementation of these measures involves forcible interference with nonviolent conduct—at minimum the imposition of fines and the confiscation of property, and, if the criminal law is used, the subjection of people to criminal penalties. This is objectionable for the same reason the criminalization of nonviolent conduct generally is objectionable.</li>
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Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-58541162061574826332013-12-27T08:01:00.002-08:002013-12-27T08:01:20.820-08:00Against ReincarnationI suggest, in brief, two sets of reasons not to embrace belief in reincarnation:<br />
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1. Even if one affirms some sort of numerical duality between brain and mind—a duality that need not involve any commitment to substance dualism—it still seems simplest to suppose that the brain gives rise to mental life. At least at first blush, this is what our experience and observation suggest. But, for reincarnation to make sense, one would need to imagine that not only a mind or soul numerically other than the brain but also a personal self with memories, personality, etc., exists in distinction from the brain. It will then be necessary to explain both (a) how this personal self comes into existence in the first place, if not as an initial product of brain activity and (b) how it comes to be intimately associated with a particular brain.<br />
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2. In tandem with these metaphysical or scientific objections to belief reincarnation, there are also existential objections. Most important is the devaluation of the empirical self, which seems likely to be swallowed up in some sort of transempirical self. Most people are interested in survival research, psi phenomena, etc., because of their hopes for themselves and their loved ones. But belief in reincarnation seems to take away with one hand what it gives with the other. The reincarnationist promises life after death. But the life after death offered by or in connection with belief in reincarnation is not the persistent life of the empirical self: the history, the relationships, etc., enjoyed by the empirical self seem to recede into unimportance, since they seem to play a limited role in constituting the contents of the actual self. This means, of course, that my own particular life seems less significant—but also that any and all empirical lives ultimately don't seem to matter a great deal, since the underlying self is evidently importantly distinct from them.<br />
<br />
These objections are hardly decisive, but the first set suggests why I find belief reincarnation metaphysically baroque and the second why I find it existentially unappealing.Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-7975652738000414102013-12-23T16:58:00.003-08:002013-12-23T17:51:34.629-08:00Problems with Suicide: Necessity, Fate, Decree, TeleologyI have, as some readers might know, been reading a good deal about death and life beyond death in recent months. In light of what I've read, I've found myself thinking about a philosophical puzzle related to beliefs regarding suicide.<br />
<br />
I don't believe anyone I know well has ever committed, or attempted, suicide. But the topic remains of considerable interest (and the subject of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Jennifer-Michael-Hecht/dp/0300186088">vocal debate</a>).<br />
<br />
<b>Suicide and New Age Beliefs about Life after Death</b><br />
<br />
A number of New Age thinkers and experients report that someone who has committed suicide can be expected to run into special problems in the afterlife as they conceive it. Sometimes, this is said to be because of the various moral problems putatively attendant on suicide. I am inclined to think that suicide (at least often) <i>is</i> morally problematic, and I have no particular beef, therefore, with those who reason in this way.<br />
<br />
But I find interesting and puzzling another account of why suicides might create distinctive afterlife difficulties. On this view, a person who commits suicide runs into difficulties in the afterlife because she or he has died before her appointed time of death. I think it is quite difficult to make sense of this notion.<br />
<br />
It seems as if one's time of death might be appointed in four ways—as a product of <i>predetermination</i>, as a matter of <i>fate</i>, as a target set by divine <i>decree</i>, or as a matter of <i>natural teleology</i>. None of these provides a plausible basis for the view that suicides suffer special liabilities after death.<br />
<br />
<b>Predetermination</b><br />
<br />
When speaking of predetermination, I have nothing more mysterious in mind than what we ordinarily think of when talking about determinism. The idea would simply be that every event could be seen to have an antecedently sufficient cause. The history of the world could, in principle, once under way, take only one course. If predetermination of this sort obtains, then of course the time and manner of my death, like the time and manner of every other event, is certain, necessary.<br />
<br />
But if this is true, it is difficult to see how suicide could bring about death "before one's time." Whenever one dies will be whenever it was necessary, in a fairly strong sense, that one die. However one dies will be however it was necessary, in a fairly strong sense, that one die. The time and manner of one's death will be the <i>appointed</i> time and manner in as robust a sense as seems possible.<br />
<br />
To be sure, if one committed suicide, it is possible that one might not be as advanced, as spiritually mature, as one would have been had one lived a much longer life. But this will not be a problem unique to suicides, since all sorts of factors might lead to one's death at a young age, an age such that, had those factors not interfered, one might have lived many years beyond it. So it wouldn't make sense to single out the suicide as specially in difficulty in the afterlife.<br />
<br />
Even if it is the case that one should not seek to enter the afterlife before the appointed time and in any other than the appointed manner, one need not worry about running into special difficulties in virtue of committing suicide if one understands the relevant sort of appointment to be predetermination, since when and how one dies by suicide will be appointed. And any difficulties encountered by the suicide will be parallel to, no different from, those encountered by many different sorts of non-suicides.<br />
<br />
<b>Fate</b><br />
<br />
Fate is a slippery notion, but I take it to involve something like the idea that an outcome or process is inevitable under a certain description, but that surrounding or related circumstances need not be. It may be fated that I die on September 23, but it may be (on the relevant view) up to me whether I die in Damascus or Baghdad.<br />
<br />
We may imagine that the time of my death is fated, that the manner is fated, or that both are fated.<br />
<br />
Suppose the time is fated—I am, say, due to die on September 23. But the manner is not. As it happens, I commit suicide on this day.<br />
<br />
There may, of course, be moral problems with this decision. But it cannot be the case that I have chosen to die before my time, for I have opted to die on the relevantly fated day. So, if the date of my death is fated, there can be no obvious problem with my decision to commit suicide on that day. And, if the day is fated, then it cannot be the case that I succeed in committing suicide, or otherwise dying, on some other day. For, if I could, then my death would not be fated in the relevant sense.<br />
<br />
Similarly, the <i>manner</i> of my death, but not the date, might be fated. But either the fated manner is not suicide, in which case I will not, <i>ex hypothesi</i>, be able to commit suicide, or it is suicide, in which case it will not be blameworthy.<br />
<br />
But, the objector might reply, it might be that my death by suicide was fated, but that I have chosen to commit suicide early. However, this response seems problematic for at least two reasons. (i) The notion of fate was invoked to give content to the idea of my death's being before its appointed time. But there does not seem to be a notion of an appointed time in play here. (ii) The imagined account provides no reason to think that committing suicide early should yield <i>special</i> difficulties, even if some sense can be made of early death on this account. I might, after all, be fated to die in an automobile accident, without its being the case that the specific circumstances of the accident are fated; and it might turn out that I die in this manner at age two rather than age eight-two.<br />
<br />
So the notion of death as fated does not seem to provide a plausible basis for treating suicide as leading to special difficulties in the afterlife.<br />
<br />
<b>Decree</b><br />
<br />
Many New Age believers and adherents of similar belief-systems affirm the reality of God, though of course others do not. Those who do embrace some sort of theistic belief might seek to explain the idea of special afterlife disabilities for suicides by maintaining that God has established a time for me to die and that suicide brings about my death before this time.<br />
<br />
This view seems to run into several difficulties.<br />
<br />
(i) There is nothing about the view as stated that explains why my suicide might not bring about my death at just the time decreed as the time of my death by God. It might also take place <i>after</i> the decreed time, meaning that I am , perhaps (assuming spiritual maturation benefits from, or is not, at any rate, impeded by, more experience) even better prepared for the afterlife than I would have been had I died sooner.<br />
<br />
(ii) Supposing this is not the case (the view must presuppose some sort of free will vis-a-vis God, so that I can, indeed, choose to violate God's decree, whether knowingly or not), there is no reason to single out the suicide for special liabilities, since murder and accident might also lead to my death in advance of the decreed date.<br />
<br />
(iii) The decree as envisioned seems to be quite arbitrary. There is nothing in the position—so far, at any rate—to explain why a given time should be decreed. This is the sort of thing likely to make many New Age believers uncomfortable. And the essential arbitrariness makes it difficult, in any case, to see why any liabilities might attend on the suicide's putatively early death, since the death is early only in relation to an arbitrary divine decree. The liabilities seem likely to obtain only if they involve arbitrarily imposed postmortem divine punishments (for violating a decree of which there is every reason to think the suicide entirely ignorant).<br />
<br />
The notion that a suicide's death is early because inconsistent with an arbitrary divine command seems to have little to recommend it.<br />
<br />
<b>Natural Teleology</b><br />
<br />
A final possible explanation for special liabilities for suicides after death associated with the idea that the suicide dies before his or her time might be rooted in the idea that, objectively speaking, I need to reach a certain level of flourishing before I am ready for some sort of postmortem maturation, and that suicide preempts my progress toward this level of flourishing. However, because there is no inevitable link between personal maturation (or any other plausible conception of flourishing) and time of death, it is hard to see why this should, again, pose any particular difficulty for the suicide.<br />
<br />
<b>Doubts about Some New Age Critiques of Suicide</b><br />
<br />
In brief, the special, non-moral justifications for avoiding suicide offered by some New Age believers, justifications having to do with special postmortem difficulties for suicides, do not seem plausible. I suspect, without evidence, that some of those who defend these justifications do so because of their moral worries about suicide (worries which, as I have said, seem quite reasonable to me), in tandem with the further worry that belief in life after death in some way makes suicide less problematic. Whether it does is a matter for another post. But, if it does, that seems to me to be a consequence simply to be accepted: it is unlikely that all of our moral intuitions could or should remain untouched by our beliefs about the actual consequences of particular actions.Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-55329554103719261372013-03-12T10:02:00.002-07:002013-03-12T10:02:37.530-07:00Jason Brennan Did Not Like Gary Chartier's BookMy response to Jason Brennan's review of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Legal-Order-Politics-Stateless/dp/1107032288">Anarchy and Legal Order</a></i> is <a href="http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/03/jason-brennan-did-not-like-gary-chartiers-book/">up at BHL</a>.<br />
<br />
The title is a reference, of course, to an increasingly familiar meme (see <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/10/colin-mcginn-di.html">here</a> and <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/05/nina-strohminger-did-not-like-colin-mcginns-book.html">here</a>).Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-10269471202871447122012-09-09T15:57:00.001-07:002012-09-10T09:34:28.952-07:00Good-Bye to FEE <div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Foundation for Economic Education has an enviable
history. For over half a century, it has <a href="http://www.fee.org/office/a-tradition-of-freedom/">sought to share the conviction</a> that
society can and should be organized on the basis of peaceful, voluntary
cooperation. It has treated the key terms in its name, <i>economic</i> and <i>education</i>,
with appropriate breadth—focusing not only on the contribution of unfettered
exchange to human well being but also on the philosophy underlying a commitment
to voluntary cooperation in the economic realm and the historical, social, and
political context of the quest for freedom, while seeking to enhance
understanding of the idea of freedom in a broad range of ways.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">FEE founder Leonard Read famously summed up the Foundation’s
vision in a simple, straightforward, powerful phrase: “Anything that’s
peaceful.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Peaceful conduct may be foolish or immoral, of course. But
people have no business interfering with it <i>by
force</i>—protests, boycotts, and educational efforts are perfectly OK, of
course. Accepting a commitment to peace as the minimal requisite of decent human
interaction, so that people can be expected to cooperate on the basis of
persuasion rather than coercion, doesn’t solve any and all social problems. It
points, however, to a context within which those problems can be addressed reasonably
by free people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Read, who wondered in retrospect whether the name he’d
selected for his Foundation was unnecessarily narrow, saw that freedom was a
single piece of cloth. To understand the meaning and justification of what he
termed “the freedom philosophy” was to see that peace had to reign in all
aspects of human life. It’s arbitrary to think about freedom narrowly in the
economic realm; dedication to economic freedom makes sense in tandem with
dedication to civil liberties and to peace in the international arena (and also,
I believe, to <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/10/03/libertarianism_through/">a society marked by the absence of arbitrary authority ofwhatever sort and to solidaristic mutual aid</a>). To talk about free trade without
also talking about free immigration or the war on (some) drugs or the prison
system or unjust violations of property rights by well connected corporations
is ultimately senseless. While not an anarchist, Read embraced an extremely
limited conception of the just reach of state power and actively promoted the
cause of peace and openness to the world in the face of militarism and
nationalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Leonard Read must be spinning very rapidly in his grave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Even as it abandons the famous Irvington-on-Hudson
headquarters Read established, FEE is apparently seeking, pointlessly, to abandon
the mission Read developed, too. An organization that once fostered widespread
embrace of the freedom philosophy now intends to provide basic instruction in
economics to 16-to-24-year-olds. This means FEE won’t be delivering the summer
seminars in advanced Austrian Economics that once enabled it to connect with
graduate students. It won’t be targeting people at multiple stages of their
lives seeking greater understanding of the grounds and implications of belief
in freedom. And it can be expected to limit dramatically the content of <i>The Freeman</i>, the flagship FEE
publication once edited (before its acquisition by FEE) by Frank Chodorov,
shying away from discussions of peace, open borders, the involuntary
confinement of “mental patients,” the drug war, cultural issues, and the
history of corporatist mischief. As a result, the very 16-to-24-year-olds the
Foundation wants to serve will be ill-prepared to meet the challenges they will confront in their classrooms and in
conversations with their friends, as will ordinary working people in search of
ammunition that will help them communicate the freedom philosophy in their
homes, congregations, and workplaces.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This change in course is doubtless not a product of
mischief. It may well reflect a genuine desire to see FEE vibrant and strong.
But it is, I believe, a profound and quite unnecessary mistake. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">FEE has a unique brand. It has sought neither to be hip nor
to be reactionary; it hasn’t taken sides in freedom movement faction fights. Refusing
to accept the legitimacy of inside-the-Beltway policy debates, it hasn’t
focused on the construction of policy analyses. Declining to engage in
technical, accommodationist wonkery, it has emphasized big ideas—and their backgrounds
and applications—in ways that ordinary people of all ages could understand and appreciate,
that could simultaneously enlighten novices and stimulate old hands. FEE should
clarify and promote its distinctive brand rather than diluting or abandoning
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But—for the moment, at least—that doesn’t seem to be in the
cards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">No longer fostering noninterference with “anything that’s
peaceful” by anyone and everyone, even as it <a href="http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-gig-is-up.html">bids adieu</a> to long-time ace <i>Freeman</i> editor Sheldon Richman, the Foundation will encourage regard for
peace only within a limited range of human encounters, and do so only in a narrowed
variety of venues and vocabularies. Giving up on its currently stated commitment to articulating “<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-align: start;">the most consistent case for the ‘first principles‘ of freedom: the sanctity of private property, individual liberty, the rule of law, the free market, and the moral superiority of individual choice and responsibility over coercion,” </span>FEE will effectively ignore the links
between freedom in different aspects of our lives and the reality that it makes
the most sense to be pro-choice about economics when one is pro-choice about <i>everything</i>, across the board. I hope
those who are as saddened by this development as I am will help to foster the
growth of institutions and the organization of events that will share, as FEE
will no longer do, a comprehensive, multi-layered vision of peaceful, voluntary
cooperation as the only defensible foundation for a good society.</span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-32651363302322575472011-12-21T06:50:00.000-08:002012-02-03T14:16:01.440-08:00Left-Wing Market Anarchism and Ron Paul<div style="text-align: justify;">
If you say you're against the state these days, someone's sure to ask you how your views parallel Ron Paul's.<br />
<br />
I'm sitting out this year's electoral battles: I'm not a principled non-voter (though I'm skeptical about electoral politics), but my friend Brad Spangler has agreed to promote my book, <i><a href="http://www.fr33minds.com/product_info.php?products_id=467">The Conscience of an Anarchist</a></i>, in connection with his Vote for Nobody campaign. But that doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the election season.<br />
<br />
To begin with, anyone who's derailing proponents of the corporate-warfare-administrative-national-security state like Willard "Mitt" Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry deserves three cheers for performing a public service. Until now, the Republican field has been dominated by warmongers and corporatists outdoing themselves in their support for state thuggery.<br />
<br />
And, in case you haven't noticed, the same thing is true on the Democratic side, except that there are no alternatives there. Barack Obama clearly wants to serve George W. Bush's third term. His record of support for war, for the various abuses of the national security state—including surveillance, assassination, secrecy, and indefinite detention, and for bailouts and other forms of <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/101143.html">corporatism</a> make him largely indistinguishable from his predecessor. And his willingness to legitimate evils that could previously have been framed as GOP aberrations as the products of a bipartisan consensus is especially troubling.<br />
<br />
A Gingrich, Romney, or Perry term in the White House would be a disaster. So would another Obama term.<br />
<br />
On many of the issues that I care about most, Ron Paul stands tall. New Left icon Tom Hayden <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/politicaltheatre/2011/12/ron-paul-a-force-for-peace/">writes</a>: "Paul opposes the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He opposes the empire of military bases. He opposes Wall Street thievery, tax subsidies for oil companies, the suppression of WikiLeaks, the drug war and the criminalization of marijuana. Those positions might just save America." And Hayden is surely on to something.<br />
<br />
Politicians are most unlikely to save America. But by far <a href="http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/09/violence-wars-and-states-2/">the worst thing governments do is to make war</a>, and Paul's campaign is committed to dramatically reducing the chances that the US government's awesome power will be used in war-making.<br />
<br />
And of course he's right about his other signature issue, too: as long as there's a central bank, the state will use it to fund otherwise unsupportable wars. Ending the Fed is a crucial step toward peace.<br />
<br />
He's opposed to bailouts and other forms of corporate privilege. And he's acknowledged the legitimacy of many of the Occupy movement's concerns.<br />
<br />
But while positions like these are worth affirming, <a href="http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2008/01/ron-paul-lost-opportunity.html">that doesn't mean that Paul's candidacy is an unmixed blessing</a> for those of us on the anti-state left. For Paul is, after all, a self-proclaimed conservative.<br />
<br />
His stances regarding immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage are wrong, and he needs to be much more clearly radical where other issues, like racism, poverty, and health care, as well as IP and worker freedom, are concerned.<br />
<br />
It is unclear to me precisely what Paul actually thinks about immigration, but it seems apparent that he is open to at least some immigration restrictions (though, even here, he <a href="http://www.wral.com/news/political/story/10674612/">seems</a> to be better than his fellow Republicans and <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/22/change-you-can-believe-in-vol-iii-no-10/">President Obama</a>. Anyone who believes in the freedom to work, who regards borders as arbitrary lines drawn by politicians, and who sees immigration freedom as a key weapon in the real war on poverty should have no time for <a href="http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/raimondo-on-airtight-borders.html">nativist or nationalist stances</a> on this (or any other) issue.<br />
<br />
Paul's conservative positions on abortion and same-sex marriage aren't conservative enough for many on the religious right. But they're still mistaken.<br />
<br />
He'd like to see the legality of abortion decided at the state level—an option I fear would lead to lots of victimless crime prosecutions. And he has supported the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which has had devastating consequences for same-sex couples. (Of course all levels of government should get out of the marriage business, but turning marriage into a private contractual relationships will pose serious problems for people in same-sex relationships until relationship status stops mattering entirely to government agencies.)<br />
<br />
As a leftist, I believe in abortion rights and marriage equality. And I believe it's important to challenge not only bad laws and policies regarding these matters but also the moral convictions and cultural values that underly them.<br />
<br />
I am confident that Ron Paul is not himself a racist. But the controversy about the <a href="http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-next-for-ron-paul.html">racially inflammatory language in some of the newsletters </a>his office mailed out in decades past, and the racist and anti-immigrant flavor of some immigration materials Paul campaigners have distributed more recently, is sure to raise its head again now that his campaign is attracting more attention. Paul has sometimes reached out to unsavory, even racist allies in the past, employing a strategy I find deeply troubling and utterly unwarranted. I believe he needs to repudiate this strategy while reemphasizing his own principled opposition to racism.<br />
<br />
As an anarchist, I believe the state is unjust, unnecessary, and dangerous. So I'd certainly like to see it reduced in size rather than expanded. And Ron Paul is actually interested in making the bloated behemoth that is the United States government smaller (though he still seems mistakenly to treat it as legitimate in principle). But I think it's vital to proceed dialectically, in full awareness of the interconnections among various forms of oppression. The state is excellent at breaking people's legs and then offering them crutches (thanks to Harry Browne for the analogy). In a sane world, it would do neither; but taking away the crutches while leaving the state's leg-breaking activities in place or unremedied isn't sane, or fair, either.<br />
<br />
And if Paul were a candidate on the left, he would be very clear about this point when discussing issues like racial discrimination, poverty relief, and health care.<br />
<br />
Ending state support for segregation, the provision of <a href="http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eleven.asp">remedies for past injustice</a>, and a <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/it-just-aint-so/opposing-the-civil-rights-act-means-opposing-civil-rights/">continued program of non-violent protest</a> could have undermined entrenched white dominance in the South in the absence of the state action a gentle Paul critic like Hayden would like to promote; you <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/18/sheldon-richman/context-keeping-and-community-organizing/">don't need state action</a> to promote racial justice and inclusion. Eliminating state-secured <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/scratching-by-how-government-creates-poverty-as-we-know-it/">privilege</a> and <a href="http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.aspx">rectifying</a> the effects of <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-subsidy-of-history/">violent dispossession, subsidy, and land engrossment</a> could deal with <a href="http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/04/poverty-and-the-state/">the problem of structural poverty</a>, while <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mutual-Aid-Welfare-State-Fraternal/dp/0807848417">mutual aid networks could provide ongoing</a> economic security in the state's absence. The same sort of approach could <a href="http://littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/healthcare-an-anarchist-approach/">ensure the widespread availability of health care services</a> and make them dramatically more affordable than those on offer today.<br />
<br />
There are clearly alternatives to state action in response to these problems. A leftist anti-statism would emphasize them in a way that Paul has not.<br />
<br />
And as far as I know, Paul hasn't noted the ways in which <a href="http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm">monopolistic intellectual property privileges</a> boost corporate power at the public's expense, or the ways in which the state <a href="http://mutualist.org/id4.html">empowers employers at the expense of workers</a> or makes centralized, hierarchical corporations <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/economic-calculation-in-the-corporate-commonwealth/">more economically viable than they would be without politically secured support</a>. A leftist campaign would address these kinds of concerns head-on. And it would take a firm stand <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/68608541/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-Anarchism-Against-Bosses-Inequality-Corporate-Power-and-Structural-Poverty">for markets, but against capitalism</a>.<br />
<br />
Ron Paul is, as far as I can tell, a <a href="http://www.revolutionpac.com/2011/12/the-compassion-of-dr-ron-paul/">kind</a> and decent person who has said important things—things leftists should endorse. Anti-state leftists would do well to affirm Paul's positions on war, civil liberties, the drug war, corporatism, and the national security state, while challenging his stances on abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage and his cultural conservatism and urging him to radicalize his views of remedies for racial injustice, of poverty, of IP, of worker freedom, and of capitalism.</div>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-76044185709283357772010-12-20T15:06:00.001-08:002010-12-20T15:21:33.604-08:00Santa Claus: America’s Most Wanted Fugitive<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">WASHINGTON, DC—A joint federal-state task force intends to apprehend Santa Claus, whom it regards as a dangerous fugitive, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Chet Waldron told reporters yesterday.</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Among the factors making Claus a “person of interest,” according to Waldron:</div></span><ul><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Claus’s entry of private property makes him guilty of civil, and probably criminal, trespass.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Claus’s immigration status is in question. He has repeatedly entered the United States without a passport.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Claus appears to have purposefully avoided the inspection of the goods he has imported into the United States by customs authorities and the payment of relevant tariffs.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Self-described “pro-family” groups have asked the administration to take action because Claus’s provision of toys to children interferes with their parents’ rights to oversee the upbringing of their offspring without adequate supervision, since many popular toys may encourage attitudes and behavior of which parents disapprove or legitimize values and lifestyles parents find objectionable.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">The fact that Claus has failed to provide information about the contents of the packages he carries has raised questions about whether any of his actions violate US drug or money-transfer laws.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Claus enters and traverses US airspace using a custom-built vehicle that lacks approval by the Federal Aviation Administration. Further, FAA officials note that he does not file flight plans, lacks a pilot’s license, and flies through darkened skies guided only by a tiny bioluminescent red light, in a clear violation of traffic safety regulations.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Justice Department attorneys have raised questions about Claus’s willingness to distribute his products for free, asking whether doing so violates anti-dumping rules.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">There is no record that Claus, who clearly “conducts business” in the United States, has eever obtained a business license.</span></li><li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Some items delivered by Claus are believed to have been produced in violation of US patent and copyright laws and international treaties.</span></li></ul><span class="Apple-style-span"><div style="text-align: justify;">Clause defenders had hoped that the arrival of the Obama administration would lead to reduced emphasis on the planned Claus prosecution. But the presence of vocal Claus critics—including Secretary of State, said to regard Claus as a “persistent threat to national security,” and Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole, who has been quoted as urging the North American Air Defense Command to “shoot the old guy out of the sky”—in the upper echelons of the Obama administration suggests that Claus will continue to be a federal target.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">US Senator Joseph Lieberman (Ct.) has called on the White House to support designating Claus’s North Pole workshop a terrorist organization. “We’ll see how long people keep supporting this bastard when they realize we can seize their assets and lock them up in Guantanamo,” Lieberman enthused to a National Press Club audience. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">While the administration has yet to formally endorse Lieberman’s proposal, “We’ll keep looking,” Waldron told reporters. “Americans concerned about their safety can be sure that we’re going to put a stop to this persistent threat.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>This is an altered version of a piece originally drafted by George Getz, who deserves full credit for the idea and much of the text. I discovered the original at <a href="http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/">Independent Political Report</a>.</i></div></span>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-36456852495865267792010-11-19T11:17:00.000-08:002010-11-21T20:07:25.204-08:00Humanizing Air Travel<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">It is gratifying in the extreme to see consumers responding in increasingly vociferous fashion to the accelerating dehumanization of air travel: kudos, in particular, to the founders of <a href="http://wewontfly.com/">We Won’t Fly</a>. It would be truly exciting if ordinary people managed to persuade the USG to retreat by ending the pat-downs and pornoscanners.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">But it would be very unfortunate if, should they win this battle, passengers let up the pressure for more decent traveling conditions. Yes, <a href="http://wewontfly.com/tsa-security-not-safe-discreet-effective">the TSA has gone too far</a>; but it’s <i>never not</i> gone too far. While the latest indignities are atrocious, if we treat the air travel regime in place before they began as largely acceptable, we will provide incontrovertible evidence that, like the frog in the proverbial kettle, we’ve become far too tolerant of abuse.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">Even before 9/11, air travel was often unpleasant. There was too much screening; too much passenger time and energy were wasted on dealing with security theatre. But during the past nine years, we’ve moved from the antechamber of hell to its seventh or eighth circle. To take some obvious examples:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">Our ability to check in at the last minute has been impeded by rules that preclude checking in less than thirty minutes before take-off. (Remember Robert Hayes’s last minute pursuit of Elaine onto her flight in <i>Airplane</i>? Presumably, it wouldn’t even be possible under today’s asinine rules.)</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">More broadly, our time is wasted by tedious security screenings that simultaneously necessitate our spending far more time in airports than we once did and subject us to persistent and repeated indignities. We’re forced to remove our shoes, to permit our belongings to be searched in a far more detailed fashion than we once did, and to surrender harmless nail clippers and toothpaste tubes to thugs backed up by other thugs with guns.</span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">Perhaps most irritatingly, in order to avoid making the screening process even longer, people without tickets aren’t allowed to come to airport gates to see off or collect their friends.</span></li></ul></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">And the entire process is designed to treat everyone like a potential criminal. It’s this process, and not merely the use of this or that screening device or security technique, that has to end. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">A few tweaks here and there simply aren’t sufficient to fix the problem.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">(1) The most basic feature of any solution has to be the recognition that the TSA’s security theatre is <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/11/18/why-the-tsa-gets-to-grope-us/">a response to factors created by the USG’s foreign policy</a>. Suicide terrorism isn't a product of blood-lust or religious mania, however much those things may facilitate it: it's a (completely immoral) reaction, born of powerlessness and frustration, to imperial violence. If the USG really wants dramatically to reduce the risk of suicide terrorism, it simply needs to leave Iraq, leave Afghanistan, and close its network of military bases around the world (a move that would, conveniently, also save taxpayers [at least] <a href="http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941">hundreds of billions of dollars</a>).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">(2) </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">As long as it continues to provide or regulate air travel security, p</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">assengers must keep demanding that the USG roll back air travel security regulations, at minimum, to their pre-9/11 level.</span></div><meta charset="utf-8"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">(3) Ultimately, though, the USG needs to get out of the airport security business. Consumers themselves need to be free to decide just what kinds of risks they're willing to tolerate: they should be free to choose </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">low-risk/low-intrusiveness airlines or </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">minimally-lower-risk/high-intrusiveness airlines (the deliberately tendentious formulation reflects my conviction that the real impact on passenger safety of Gestapo tactics is limited). (One qualifier: airlines that negligently allow passengers to be harmed in virtue of the imposition of risks greater than those for which the passengers contracted, or which negligently allow third parties to be harmed by suicide terrorists’ use of planes, ought to be subject to appropriate sorts of tort liability. This would presumably affect airlines’ security policies.) Michael Chertoff can fly under whatever conditions he likes; I just don't want him and his corporate paymasters determining under what conditions I do.</span></div><meta charset="utf-8"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">Responding to an earlier version of these remarks, an acquaintance observed that airlines could use responsibility for security as an excuse for higher prices and bad service. No doubt. But it is difficult to imagine a less consumer-friendly environment than the one that obtains now. And since airlines and airports would have reason to compete on the convenience-and-dignity vs. security mix, there would, at any rate, be pressure for the treatment of consumers to improve. At present, by contrast, airlines and airports have no reason to give consumers’ concerns any weight at all.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; ">Passenger anger at airport indignities can play a crucial role in making air travel more humane. But it can do so only if passengers continue to protest until they are treated like valued customers rather than criminals and slaves—until the root causes of suicide terrorism are addressed, post-9/11 indignities are eliminated, and, ultimately, air travel security arrangements are set by mutual agreements between airlines and consumers.</span></div>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-43211526445466315342010-10-10T16:38:00.001-07:002010-10-10T16:39:17.230-07:00Cranick Fire FundTom Knapp has just alerted me to the existence of a PayPal account, CranickFireFund@Yahoo.Com, designed to help the victims of the Tennessee fire that’s received so much attention of late. I would encourage readers to consider supporting this fund.Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-82862704797371350902010-10-10T08:36:00.000-07:002010-10-10T20:56:15.600-07:00The Fulton Fire Fiasco<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The decision by a Tennessee fire agency to </span></span><a href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/tennessee-firefighters-watch-home-burn/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">deny service to a family with a burning house</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> because the family had failed to pay the agency’s subscription fee (the agency was operated by the city of Fulton but provided service to non-residents on a subscription basis) has prompted sustained discussion throughout the blogosphere, with repeated claims that the incident demonstrates inherent difficulties with the fee-based provision of fire services. Implicitly, then, statists are inclined to see the incident as supporting an argument for state provision of such services, and thus for statism more generally.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The story is complicated, as such stories always are, by the facts. The incident happened, it appears, because the homeowners’ grandson started a fire too close to their home. The decision not to provide service was evidently a long-standing city-council voted policy, and the fire-fighters’ insurance apparently wouldn’t cover them if they provided service to a non-subscriber. On the other hand, the homeowners had apparently received fire service on a previous occasion when their service subscription was similarly unpaid (they evidently paid the day after they received the service), and so might reasonably have expected that they would in this case, too. It would be easy to become engrossed in the details of this particular story; but I’d like to take a step back and think about the big-picture issues it raises.</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I don’t believe it has to be seen as offering any support for statism.</span></span></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Fire Service Is Not a “Public Good”</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Characteristically, statists maintain that the state needs to deliver a good if it is “public” or “collective”—roughly, such that, if it is provided to anyone in a given public, it is effectively available to all the members of the public, including those who opt not to pay. The standard public goods argument for the state suggests that public goods will be undersupplied on the market for this reason.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are all sorts of interesting things to say about this argument, but the important thing to notice is that it doesn’t apply here. Fire service is, in general, a private good: providing it to one person doesn’t entail providing it to everyone. So it’s not clear why it shouldn’t be provided on the market, even on the statist’s own preferred criterion.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Fire Services Should Not Be Tax-Funded</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The statist answer, in this case, seems to be that the consequences of not providing service are so devastating that it is better to de-link fee payment and service provision. For the statist, this means funding services via taxation.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are three obvious objections to the statist’s solution to the problem. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">First</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, the extraction of taxes at gunpoint by the state is itself unjust. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Second</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, even if tax extraction to fund fire service provision were legitimate, a state powerful enough to extract taxes to be used to support fire service provision would obviously be powerful enough both to extract taxes for other, less desirable, purposes and to engage in other sorts of mischief. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Third</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, if funding for fire service provision is delinked from expressed consumer demand for fire service provision and is instead set politically, funding levels are likely to be inefficient and unrelated to actual need or demand.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Why It Might Seem Reasonable to Deny Service to a Non-Subscriber</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If fire service is not funded by taxation, does that means that it needs to be funded by subscriptions? And, if so, must a subscription-funded agency deny emergency service to non-subscribers?</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16.2037px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Tom Knapp has made a very plausible case for denying service </span></span><a href="http://knappster.blogspot.com/2010/10/cranicks-folly.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><a href="http://knappster.blogspot.com/2010/10/contra-long.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. (Art Carden’s </span></span><a href="http://blogs.forbes.com/artcarden/2010/10/08/fight-my-fire-government-or-the-market/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">comment on the story</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is not altogether conclusive, but might be read as a case for something like Tom’s view.) Tom argues that subscribing to a fire service is like placing a hedged bet. If the odds are low that one will need the service, it will always be tempting not to pay one’s subscription. However, providing fire service is a capital intensive business (trucks and fire houses are expensive) and one with ongoing operating costs (firefighters need to spend long periods on-duty, even when they’re not fighting fires, so they’ll be available when fires actually occur). If people don’t subscribe to a fire agency, the agency will lack the resources it needs to function in a consistent manner on an ongoing basis. And the only realistic way to ensure that they will subscribe is consistently to deny service to non-subscribers.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Duties and Consequences</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This approach raises concerns of two kinds.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">(</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">a</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) It seems to involve support for arrangements in accordance with which firefighters will stand idly by and allow their neighbors’ homes to burn, thus violating what would generally be regarded as a moral responsibility to eschew indifference to the vulnerability of others to harm. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">By referring to this responsibility, I’m not suggesting that there is a general duty to prevent any and all harms. Rather, my claim is that, per my preferred version of the Golden Rule, I ought to prevent or end a harm to you in a given set of circumstances if I would resent your refusing to help me in similar circumstances were our roles reversed. Also, to be clear: I’m also </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">not</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> arguing that </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">force</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> may be used to <i>require</i> people to fulfill the duty of limited beneficence that follows from the Golden Rule or to punish them or secure compensation from them if they do not do so.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">(</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">b</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) It obviously leads to a terribly undesirable result: someone’s home is destroyed, even though the cost of saving it is significantly less than the value of the home itself.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It is, of course, possible to respond to (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">a</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) by noting that there is a duty on the part of firefighters in the imagined situation to <i>all</i> those in a position to benefit from the provision of fire service and willing to pay subscription fees. It might be maintained that one would be ill-serving </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">paid-up subscribers</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> if one rendered assistance in this case, since doing so would increase the odds that potential subscribers would fail to pay their subscriptions, and so limit the ability of the agency to meet its capital and operating needs and protect existing subscribers. Paid-up subscribers willing to pay subscription fees might well have reason to resent the provision of service in this case if it prevented them from receiving service when they needed it. Firefighters <i>might</i> recognize, in turn, that their reaction would be the same as that of the subscribers, and that they would therefore act unreasonably if they provided services to non-subscribers.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is not a silly argument, and I do not want to treat it dismissively. It is surely right that obligations to all subscribers might trump the responsibility to show limited beneficence to non-subscribers in danger of suffering severe fire damage. However, it is possible to imagine arrangements that would <i>not</i> require fire agency personnel to stifle their compassionate responses and to refuse to prevent immediate, proximate potential loss <i>but</i> that would <i>simultaneously</i> ensure adequate service to those willing to pay their fair share of service costs via subscription. And such arrangements are surely preferable to those that make adequate service levels possible while requiring a firefighter to suppress her or his desire to help someone else in serious danger.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Competition as a Guarantor of Emergency Service to Non-Subscribers</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Perhaps the firefighter need not be concerned, because another fire agency would step in were one agency to decline to provide service. </span></span><a href="http://aaeblog.com/2010/10/06/we-didnt-stop-the-fire/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Roderick Long</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><a href="http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2010/10/firefighters-watch-house-burn-down.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Bob Murphy</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> both see market competition as a crucial source of security here. And it surely would be as regards subscription fees, for instance. On the other hand, it seems as if a competing agency would confront the same incentives as the agency initially contacted by the fire victim: if the competitor agency operates with a subscription-based funding model, it runs the risk of discouraging the subscriptions it needs for ongoing, consistent operation if it opts to respond to a call from a non-subscriber. So it, too (if Knapp’s argument about the economic challenges faced by a solo agency is correct) might find it counter-productive to provide on-the-spot services to non-subscribers.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Imposing High On-the-Spot Charges as a Way of Ensuring Regular Subscription Payments</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">But perhaps this criticism assumes that the non-subscriber pays only the subscription fee. </span></span><a href="http://treygivens.com/?p=2368"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Trey Givens</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, </span></span><a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/bizarre_salon_a.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">David Henderson</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, </span></span><a href="http://aaeblog.com/2010/10/06/we-didnt-stop-the-fire/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Long</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, Murphy (see </span></span><a href="http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2010/10/firefighters-watch-house-burn-down.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><a href="http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2010/10/salons-misguided-attack-on-libertarianism.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">), and </span></span><a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger183.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Jacob Hornberger</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> all suggest that an economically rational fire agency would have been willing to deploy and extinguish the fire for </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">some</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> appropriately high on-the-spot service fee—one significantly in excess of the standard subscription rate. Long suggests that the victim be asked to “pay full price.” Murphy proposes “a penalty rate.” Givens suggests “a premium for on-the-spot requests” and notes that “[t]he firefighter who negotiates a decent rate for . . . [on-the-spot service] would get praised for his initiative.” Henderson endorses an approach featuring an on-the-spot charge that is “a high multiple of the annual fee.” And Hornberger maintains that “a private fire department would have the incentive to have pre-written contracts in which an owner who had failed to purchase fire protection would be asked to agree to pay, say, double the costs of putting out the fire.”</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I think it is possible to be more precise than this. If Knapp is correct, as I believe he is, that the hedged-bet analogy is appropriate, then a homeowner will be inclined to avoid paying the subscription fee as long as she estimates that it will be more efficient for her to pay the on-the-spot fee. The question, then, is: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">at what level should the on-the-spot charge be set to discourage homeowners from declining to pay the subscription fee?</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> The answer seems relatively clear: at a level such that the on-the-spot charge, </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">when discounted by the actuarially determined likelihood that a given homeowner will need fire service</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, exceeds the subscription fee. A safe estimate of this likelihood might be 0.25% (thanks to Tom Knapp for dialoguing about this and related matters). If this estimate is correct, the on-the-spot charge would need to be over $30,000. A rational consumer would judge that paying $75 on an annual basis would make more sense than paying, say, $32,000 in the event of a fire.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">(An aside: it appears that one reason the Fulton fire agency stopped providing service to non-subscribers outside the city limits was that it was difficult to get them to pay after the fact. I think Hornberger is right that “pre-written contracts” would help; and I share </span></span><a href="http://aaeblog.com/2010/10/06/we-didnt-stop-the-fire/comment-page-1/#comment-358965"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nathan Byrd’s view</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> that a contract providing the fire agency with a lien or other security interest in the property would help to ensure payment.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Claim That Letting a Home Burn Would Ensure Regular Subscription Payments More Effectively than Levying a High On-the-Spot Charge</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Knapp’s objection to this analysis is, if I understand him correctly, that the odds of losing $32,000 will seem so low in a case like this that people simply won’t pay the subscription fee. Thus, the only way to </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">ensure that subscription fees are consistently paid will be</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> refusing to protect a non-subscriber’s home </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">pour encourager les autres</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. I don’t want to deny the obvious motivational power of the image of a neighbor’s home burning. But there are at least two reasons why one might not necessarily accept this conclusion.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">First</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, recall that the suggestion is that someone would judge paying a fire-agency subscription unnecessary in view of a possible $32,000 on-the-spot charge because of her estimate of the probability of actually needing fire services. But notice that she’s going to make </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">the same estimate of the probability of a home fire </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">without</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> the possible availability of an on-the-spot alternative to a subscription. What’s going to change, of course, is her estimate of the cost of the fire. If her house is worth $320,000, the potential value of the $75 investment in fire service certainly increases. However, the potential pay-off for making that investment is still enormous even given the availability of an on-the-spot fee, and many of those not willing to make the investment in one case can thus be expected not to make it in the other.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Non-subscribers obviously fall into two groups: the lazy and forgetful on the one hand and rational calculators on the other. Someone who’s lazy and forgetful—who would have purchased a subscription but has simply neglected to do so—is not going to be affected by incentives. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Ex hypothesi</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, she’s simply not thinking about the problem. Learning that someone else lost a house by not paying a fire agency subscription might awaken her from her neglectful slumbers, but so might learning that someone else had had no choice but to pay $32,000 because of having declined to pay such a subscription. By contrast, a genuinely rational calculator would certainly make the judgment that paying $32,000 in the event of a fire is less efficient than paying a $75 annual subscription.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Second</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, setting the on-the-spot fee at the level I have envisioned would enable the agency to cover its costs even if significant numbers of people chose to avoid the subscription fee and gambled on not having to pay the on-the-spot charge. Of course, this might mean that cash-flow was not as consistent as it would be in the case of subscriptions (and it is not clear that this is so, given that subscriptions would likely be paid at different points throughout the year, and perhaps somewhat erratically). But it would be considerably easier, with substantial payments by non-subscribers in hand, for the agency to opt for debt-based financing. It could borrow against its expected income, including income from on-the-spot charges. And it could build the cost of interest payments into the on-the-spot charges (perhaps increasing them from $32,000 to $35,000).</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Alternatives to Subscription- and Debt-Based Funding for Fire Agencies</span></span></b></div><meta charset="utf-8"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The conversation to-date has operated on the assumption that subscription and debt were the only mechanisms available for an envisioned fire agency to fund its operations. The fire agency has effectively been envisioned as (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">i</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) a member-funded cooperative (a reminder that “the market” </span></span><a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/06/12/freed-market-regulation/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">need not mean</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> the realm of </span></span><a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/07/free-market-anti-capitalism-two-meanings-of-markets/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">for-profit commercial transaction</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) and (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">ii</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) a free-standing entity delivering only fire-related services. It is possible to envision at least three other options. Selecting any of them (and they could in some cases be combined) could make a fire agency that offered services to people who had not paid subscription fees more viable.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">1. The agency could explicitly incorporate a charitable component in its operations. Community members able to do so could be asked to either to (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">a</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) cover the costs of subscriptions for particular persons or to (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">b</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) contribute to a fund designed to cover the emergency provision of services to non-subscribers. (Presumably (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">a</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">) would be less subject to abuse, since it would be possible to assess genuine need on a case-by-case basis and exclude free-riders.) </span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">2. The agency could bundle services of various kinds (insurance more generally and protection against violence are obvious examples) and could obtain needed operating funds in connection with its other services. This might allow it to have larger cash reserves and, in effect, to borrow from itself rather than from an interest-charging lender, “paying itself back” from on-the-spot fire service charges. (Thanks to Kevin Carson for outlining a version of this option to me.)</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">3. The agency could operate on a for-profit basis, obtaining funds, therefore, not only from customers but also from investors. The investor-provided funds could obviously cushion the agency in cases in which subscriber payments were low.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In principle, it seems as if any of these options, or several in combination, would make it possible for a fire agency to provide on-the-spot services to non-subscribers (perhaps for less than the sort of on-the-spot charge I have discussed here) and still maintain the resources needed to cover its capital and operating costs.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Conclusion</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Private fire agencies like </span></span><a href="http://www.rmfire.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">this one</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (CHT David Henderson) operate successfully in today’s economy. But critics of the market have argued that the behavior of the Fulton fire agency, even though government-operated, is evidence that the market cannot be trusted with the provision of fire services and that these services must be entrusted to the state. There are good reasons to avoid giving the state responsibility for fire services or anything else. But anarchists must still acknowledge that statist critics are right to note the morally troubling nature of the denial of service to a fire victim who had failed to pay a fire service subscription.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are, roughly, two possible, contrasting responses anarchists can offer to the charge that the market-based provision of fire services leads to morally disturbing behavior. On the one hand, they can argue that the actions of a freed-market fire agency that behaved like the Fulton fire agency would be morally justified, even if harsh, because only by denying service to non-subscribers could the agency ensure that it received the subscription payments it needed to operate successfully. On the other, they can maintain that freed-market fire agencies would have alternatives other than denying service to non-subscribers and trying to operate with wild cash-flow fluctuations.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">While I believe that the first option could be a morally responsible one, and while the assumptions about human behavior that underlie it may be correct, I have sought here to argue that we are not required to accept it and that other alternatives may be preferable in that they might make it possible for a freed-market fire agency both to provide emergency services to non-subscribers and to maintain a satisfactory financial position. Charging sufficiently high on-the-spot emergency services fees could be sufficient to incentivize rational calculators (and at least some of the otherwise lazy and forgetful)—who might under other circumstances be inclined to gamble that they would be better off not subscribing to a fire service—to pay low annual subscription fees. Charging high on-the-spot fees would also make it possible for agencies to maintain operating reserves and would render it easier for them to cover their costs effectively with debt-based financing if they needed to do so. Delivering some services as a charity (supported by appropriate fundraising) would enable a fire agency to provide emergency on-the-spot services to non-subscribers while enhancing its reputation. Bundling fire and other services would make it easier for an agency to assist those charged high on-the-spot fees without losing needed operating funds. And adopting a for-profit business model would enable an agency to secure needed funds from investors, and so to depend less on subscriptions—rather than on-the-spot charges—for financial stability.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">
<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The behavior of a tax-funded agency operated by a monopoly government is not necessarily a particularly good guide to the likely actions of a freed-market fire service. But statists have enthusiastically pointed to the Fulton tragedy as evidence that the market cannot be allowed take responsibility for fire safety. The actions of the agency can be seen as an understandable, if imperfect, response to the need to ensure satisfactory ongoing funding. But rather than defending it on this basis, I think freed-market advocates should point to alternate business models that would enable a freed-market fire agency to thrive even if it provided emergency services to non-subscribers. High on-the-spot service charges set in light of the likelihood of needed service, debt financing, charitable fundraising, service bundling, and investor funding could all contribute to the success of such a model. Thus, it can reasonably be argued that a freed-market fire agency need not behave like the Fulton fire department, and that a key criticism of non-state methods of service provision, and so a key argument for the necessity of the state, therefore fails.</span></span></div>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-49929590653657732822010-10-06T16:06:00.002-07:002010-10-06T16:48:34.465-07:00Cultural Roots and Collective Identity in a Libertarian Society<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In general, a libertarian society would be hospitable to people’s cultural roots and collective identities.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Placing one’s life story in the context of a larger, more inclusive narrative can help to give one a sense of meaning and direction. Some of the tales we tell for this purpose are religious, some metaphysical, some scientific, some ethnic, some cultural. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Political</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> libertarianism would not deprive anyone of the sense of identity conferred by any of these stories—unless, of course, it could only be preserved by force—and would doubtless contribute to the flourishing of a significant number. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cultural</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> libertarianism might undermine some of these stories, but would certainly leave many undisturbed.</span></span></p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Varieties of Libertarianism</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Political libertarianism opposes aggression—the initiation of force—by individuals, including those acting under the color of law. Cultural libertarianism seeks peacefully to undermine hierarchies in workplaces and other social institutions; to promote individual freedom of self-development, self-definition, and self-expression; and to foster an ethos of openness, dialogue, and critical reflection on social norms. Proponents of cultural libertarianism argue plausibly that their position emerges from the same respect for the value of freedom that underlies political libertarianism; that people who are not consistently skeptical about positional authority will find it difficult to sustain a free society; that the assumptions that ground some cultural arrangements are inconsistent with those embraced by political libertarianism; and that aggression frequently makes possible the maintenance of hierarchical social arrangements, even if those arrangements are not themselves aggressive.</span></span></p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Political Libertarianism and Collective Identity</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Political libertarianism would leave people free to form whatever non-violent social arrangements they might like and to remember and celebrate whatever narrative sources of cultural identity they might opt to embrace. Do you claim the story of the Israelites following Moses through the wilderness as your own? Are the Cluniac monks your spiritual ancestors? Do you see the Boxer Rebels as your forebears? Political libertarianism leaves you free to identify with them, to celebrate what you judge to be their accomplishments, to treat them as central to your own heritage.</span></span></p> <h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Creating Space for Identity</span></span></span></i></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Indeed, it is important to emphasize that your ability to preserve and share a cultural identity you cherish would be greater in a politically libertarian society than it is in societies dominated by states. By taxing people, states claim resources their subjects could have used to preserve identity-constitutive places, objects, and traditions. But the state poses more serious problems for those who want to nourish particular cultural identities.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The state’s haphazard identity-preserving projects are funded in part by taxes paid by members of minority cultures who may have little interest in preserving the artefacts or life-ways on which the state focuses the resources it has acquired. In addition, even putatively liberal states frequently suppress or relocate cultural minorities; and state-owned media and schools can operate to erase regional dialects and other signs of sub-cultural distinctiveness. At the same time, because governments overseeing increasingly diverse societies frequently wish to treat all cultural groups inclusively, state-funded cultural projects tend often to be instances of characterless pabulum, with little or no capacity to contribute to the transmission of any particular cultural identity. Further, when the state claims the authority to safeguard a majority culture, it almost unavoidably also claims a hegemonic role as interpreter of that culture—often distorting or reconstructing it in perverse ways, or co-opting its values and symbols as sources of legitimation. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The existence of state-owned property and employment by state agencies creates endless opportunities for conflict over cultural matters in statist societies. Which religious symbols may be displayed on public land? Will officially led prayers be permitted in state schools? Which holidays will be officially recognized? Which culturally significant dress codes will teachers, soldiers, judges, or nurses be allowed to follow? Different interest-groups with the ability to influence the state can engage in repeated contests over such matters, each seeking to ensure that the state works to preserve particular identity markers. The end result is that cultural, religious, and ethnic communities come into conflict with each other, and that pressure to avoid any expression of distinctiveness increases.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The problem is only exacerbated when the state opts to use force not only to manage affairs on the property it claims for itself but also to constrain people’s freedom with respect to admittedly </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">private</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> property in the interests of preserving or suppressing particular cultural identities. The French government’s bans on the public wearing of the </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">burqa</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and on the wearing of the </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">hijab</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> in state schools are obvious examples—they prevent people from using their own property in relation to their own bodies. So are efforts in New York and elsewhere in the United States to use the state’s claimed power to regulate land use to prevent the construction of religious structures. In statist societies, people’s peaceable attempts to express their identities and nourish their traditions can be opposed by actual or threatened state violence.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In a politically libertarian society, by contrast, members of varying cultural groups would obviously be free to spend their money as they chose. They would not be required to subsidize others’ cultural preferences. They could erect monuments and houses of worship, put iconic images on display, at their own discretion on their own property. They could invest in efforts designed to preserve objects and practices and memories they cherished. They could operate schools that transmitted their beliefs and habits.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Obviously, conflicts over the proper uses of places and things with multiple cultural meanings will not go away in a politically libertarian society. However, by removing these conflicts from the realm of politics, by assigning responsibility for the contested sites or objects to particular people or organizations in accordance with outcome-independent rules, a libertarian society can in some ways localize their intensity, reducing the likelihood of spill-over clashes, and render them more manageable.</span></span></p> <h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Aggression and Culture</span></span></span></i></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In a politically libertarian society, people would be free to retain cultural roots and collective identities—and unlikely to confront many of the conflicts over cultural issues that the state unavoidably creates. Such a society would thus not only be free from state-related tensions that often prompt the suppression of cultural particularity but also provide more room for cultural expression than a statist society. At the same time, however, it would not and could not make room for any and all practices designed, even in good faith, to preserve deeply valued cultural </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">mores</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. For a society that genuinely embodied political libertarianism would be one in which a norm precluding aggression was rightly understood as a necessary prerequisite to social peace and to both individual and cultural flourishing.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In such a society, the claim that a given practice somehow supported the preservation of this or that group identity would obviously be insufficient to justify the practice if it involved aggressive attacks on persons or their justly claimed property. To take obvious examples, clitoridectomy, infibulation, and foot-binding could not be regarded simply as expressions of particular cultural preferences, to be treated with the same deference as habits of dress and efforts directed at the preservation of historically significant monuments. As instances of aggressive force, they would clearly fall beyond the pale in a politically libertarian society. (I prescind from those cases in which those who would otherwise clearly qualify as the victims of these aggressive acts indisputably render free and informed consent to them. Cultural libertarianism surely embodies a commitment to discouraging such consent and the beliefs and attitudes underlying it.) So, too, would the use of physical force to exclude people from trading relationships, prevent people of the purportedly wrong sort from living in particular neighborhoods, or keep people from destroying or altering their own property in ways likely to eliminate or distort objects of cultural significance.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Some kinds of collective identities might not survive if those who valued them could not use force to preserve them. To this, the advocate of a libertarian society will have no reasonable choice but to say: so be it. A politically libertarian society would leave room for many cultures and collective identities to flourish, but it would obviously not be equally welcoming to all. Only those which people were prepared to own without the threat of force would survive and thrive. Of course this would remove one means of preserving and transmitting collective identities. At the same time, however, it would ensure that those who shared those identities did so voluntarily and were thus more personally invested in them—and so more likely to preserve and transmit them—than might be the case in a society in which they were preserved by force.</span></span></p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Limits of Libertarian Culture</span></span></span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">While a politically libertarian society would nourish diverse collective identities, a society that was also culturally libertarian might be friendly to fewer such identities.</span></span></p> <h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Individuality and Identity</span></span></span></i></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cultural libertarianism is fundamentally individualistic, so it might be thought that a fully libertarian culture would have no room for collective identities at all. But there is surely no reason to suppose this. For the sense in which libertarianism affirms individualism need not entail any deep-seated conflict with the affirmation of a densely textured cultural identity. It is quite possible to be an individualist who cherishes a sense of place, who treasures the contribution historical predecessors have made to his or her sense of self, who recognizes the importance—indeed, the inescapability—of learning about the world and one’s place in it from one’s traditions. Cultural libertarianism need involve no commitment to a Promethean view of autonomy, an existentialist vision of self-creation, or a naïvely foundationalist rejection of tradition. One can be a cultural libertarian without aspiring to be the deracinated individual of philosophical fantasy.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cultural libertarianism is animated first and foremost by a desire, positively, to see the full range of human possibilities explored and put on display and, negatively, to avoid the suppression of dignity, freedom, creativity, and uniqueness that occurs when people are subjected to the whims of hierarchs, experts, blue-noses, busy-bodies, and paternalists. In short, cultural libertarians “don’t want to push other people around . . . and . . . don’t want to be pushed around themselves” (Murray N. Rothbard, letter to David Bergland, June 5, 1986, qtd. Justin Raimondo, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus 2000) 263-4). Seeking neither to push nor to be pushed is quite compatible with seeing oneself as part of a wider whole, with making sense of one’s own story in light of a more comprehensive narrative.</span></span></p> <h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Rejecting Illiberal Identities</span></span></span></i></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">But if support for cultural libertarianism need not mean opposition to collective identity in principle, it is still certainly the case that it </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">does</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> mean rejection of particular </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">sorts</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> of collective identities. Cultural libertarianism will certainly prompt rejection, for instance, of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">racism</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and of multiple varieties of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">nationalism</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It is quite possible to be a peaceful racist—to avoid racially motivated violence against person or property while nourishing prejudice and fostering and engaging in unwarranted discrimination. One may quite non-aggressively develop and cling to a sense of oneself defined by identification with one group of people on the basis of their race and dismissal of others on the basis of theirs.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">A narrowly political libertarianism may have nothing in particular to say about this sort of non-aggressive stance. But it seems likely to fall foul of a more broadly cultural libertarianism. Even if it is itself expressed non-violently, this kind of racism can prompt violence. Racialized distributions of wealth and social power are often rooted in past acts of violence—enslavement and dispossession are particularly clear instances. Racism features an implicit unwillingness to see people as </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">particular</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, as </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">individual</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, and a penchant for reducing them to sets of stereotypes. And the underlying sense of the moral equality of persons that grounds libertarianism’s rejection of statism is, at minimum, difficult to square with racial prejudice.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">None of this means that the cultural libertarian will judge it appropriate to use force to punish the racist for thinking bad thoughts or to prevent anyone from catering non-aggressively to racist tastes. But the cultural libertarian will be quite aware that, without statist privilege to sustain it, racism in the context of economic life will prove to be prohibitively costly over time. In addition, the libertarian—here, the purely political libertarian will have no quarrel with the cultural libertarian—will favor remedies for past acts of injustice that may often serve to reduce the aggression-based power of the racist. The cultural libertarian will also strongly favor the use of non-violent forms of social pressure—shunning, public shaming, peaceful boycotts, and peaceful protests and strikes—to challenge the racist’s behavior.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cultural libertarians will actively discourage racism. And, more fundamentally, the widespread adoption of libertarian cultural values would make it difficult for anyone to sustain a sense of self rooted in racial superiority or exclusivity.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There is no obvious incompatibility between embracing cultural libertarianism and identifying with a particular place—provided one simply values its treasures for their own sake, or prizes its contribution to making one who one is, rather judging other places to be objectively inferior. G. K. Chesterton and Bill Kauffman provide obvious and appealing models for an admirable localism. Conventional nationalism is another sort of creature altogether, however.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nationalism characteristically involves loyalty, not to a revered place as such, but rather to the nation-state. The libertarian can hardly welcome a willingness to cheer for “my country, right or wrong,” not only because to support wrong-doing is to risk moral corruption but also because “my country” really means, not people and places dear to my heart, but rather the implacable apparatus of the state.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nationalism too often finds expression in violence, especially militaristic violence—whether of an irredentist variety or in support of state expansion. Of course it need not. But the cultural libertarian will be wary of its capacity to underwrite aggression.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">He or she will also look askance at nationalism’s frequent valorization of state boundaries, which often fail to track culture or geography meaningfully. There may be little connection between the actual people and places on which one’s loyalty focuses and the borders of one’s state. Similarly: sensitive to individuality and diversity, the cultural libertarian will also recognize that the geographic territory claimed by nation-states is characteristically home to people with varied cultural identities. Loyalty to the nation often seems to mean loyalty to the majority in a particular region, or perhaps to a minority that holds the reins of state power. As a variety of collectivism, nationalism too frequently seems to involve the erasure of the particularity of those who don’t identify with the majority’s culture—including members of minority cultures, people who identify with multiple cultures, and people in some sense within the majority culture who seek in one way or another to transform it.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The territory claimed by an enormous nation-state may arguably be not only too arbitrarily demarcated but also too extensive to provide a manageable focus for personal loyalty. A genuinely local perspective may often prove more compatible with human-scale attachments. This does not mean, of course, that one can or should ignore the role of others who are not local in shaping one’s identity and experience. The Loiner may recognize London as a world quite different from his or her own while still acknowledging that Trafalgar Square memorializes events without which life in Leeds might be very different indeed. But this need not provide an opportunity to smuggle nationalism in through the proverbial back door, for we can reasonably treasure our connections with geographically dispersed people and places—ones it would never occur to anyone to link with us under the same national umbrella—that have helped to make us who we are.</span></span></p> <h2 style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Preserving Identity in a Libertarian Culture</span></span></i></span></span></h2> <!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Whatever the fate of national and racial loyalties in a libertarian society, tensions surrounding families will doubtless be unavoidable. A society that tolerated aggression against children would hardly count as libertarian, but families unavoidably shape children in innumerable peaceful ways, and there will surely be those of culturally libertarian bent who will seek to challenge what they see as illiberal indoctrination of children by parents. In a politically libertarian society, not only individuals but also families and other groups in search of mutually reinforcing support for their distinctive worldviews and life-ways could obviously craft communities, territorial or virtual, in which their critical mass could allow them to counter the effects on each other of what they saw as objectionable elements of the wider culture. At the same time, it is easy to see that a society that created space for diversity would, indeed, render it difficult for any sub-cultural group to ensure wholesale identification with its traditions by all of its members.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span"></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cultural libertarianism will tend to militate against a range of habits and practices that might be seen by some people as integral to their collective identities. Identities of some sorts—I have already instanced racism and many sorts of nationalism, but there are obviously others—will not be likely to survive in a libertarian culture. Others will persist, and perhaps even thrive, while being transformed by libertarian attitudes that undermine subordination and exclusion. And it would be unfair to deny that the loss of some cultural forms </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">is</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> a genuine loss, in the sense that it deprives people of patterns of existence and ways of understanding themselves and others that offer meaning and order to their lives. Those committed not only to political but also to cultural libertarianism will need to remind themselves and others that there are costs associated with the embrace of freedom.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">But this is hardly reason to treat cultural libertarianism as underwriting cultural decline. To repeat: no more than political libertarianism does cultural libertarianism require or promote the abandonment of all sources of collective identity. Those that respect freedom and individual particularity can thrive in a libertarian culture. To be sure, the very capacity of some life-ways to fostering meaningfulness and order may be seen as depending on their immunity to criticism and their appearance of inevitability, and they will lack both in a culture of liberty. But an awareness of possibilities for improvement and a denial of uncritical regard to previously established cultural authorities can be quite compatible with continued esteem for and identification with traditions and communities and ways of life that offer people meaning and identity.</span></span></p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Libertarianism and Identity</span></span></span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">A politically libertarian society will create space for many different kinds of identity-maintaining ways of being human—more, in general, than a society in which aggression is legitimized. Only those collective identities maintained through the use of force will be excluded from such a society, and we will be, I believe, well rid of them. A society that is not only politically but also culturally libertarian will likely be free of such sources of identity as racism and nationalism. But this kind of society can still welcome local loyalty, and any number of other identity-conferring relationships compatible with regard for individual dignity and freedom and the diverse forms of human flourishing.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>I submitted a version of this essay to the 2010 </i><a href="http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/libertarian-alliance-essay-prize-1000-to-be-won/"><i>Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize essay competition</i></a><i>. </i><a href="http://www.giffordlectures.org/Author.asp?AuthorID=42"><i>Stephen R. L. Clark</i></a><i> and </i><a href="http://mutualist.blogspot.com/"><i>Kevin Carson</i></a><i> both provided insightful comments on an earlier draft.</i></p> <!--EndFragment-->Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-17385844441194028842010-09-11T13:01:00.000-07:002010-09-12T05:54:59.824-07:00Two Cheers for Conspiracy Theories<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I don’t have much of a dog in this race. But I confess that I’m put off by blanket attempts to distance anti-authoritarian politics from “conspiracy theories.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In practical terms, whatever the literal meaning of the words, a <i>conspiracy theory</i> is an account of an event that differs significantly from the account of the event endorsed by the mainstream media and the political establishment—characteristically in a way that can be seen as injurious to the establishment’s interests, and often involving the attribution of responsibility for mischief to the establishment or its agents. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">If those C. Wright Mills called “the power elite” are essentially thugs and bandits—<a href="http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2010/09/class-struggle-republican-style.html">as a sensible class analysis suggests that they are</a>—then there is surely good reason to expect them to engage in theft and violence. If political leaders are selected for their ambition—and so their willingness to put principle to one side—and their inclination to serve the interests of the power elite, there is surely good reason to expect them, too, to engage in theft and violence. Thus, there’s an argument to be made that a story suggesting that members of the power elite or their retainers in the political class are up to no good is more likely to be true than a similar story about an ordinary member of the population.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Similarly, if the members of “the power elite” play a significant role in shaping both state policy and the stances of media companies, there is good reason to assume that the stories injurious to the interests of the power elite are less likely to receive support from the mainstream media and government officials than stories beneficial to their interests. So it is sensible to expect that true stories of misdeeds by the power elite will not be endorsed or publicized by the mainstream media.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">That the members of the power elite and the political class are more likely than ordinary people to be involved in plunder and murder and that the mainstream media are unlikely to give much attention to stories of their involvement in such activities does not, of course, show that any particular story about elite misconduct that is ridiculed in the mainstream media is correct—<i>each such story should be gauged on its own merits</i>. However, it <i>does</i> provide good reason to suspect that <i>some</i> conspiracy theories might be correct and to refuse to dismiss such theories <i>simply</i> because they are treated as silly by the mainstream media.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-43534191121226652882010-09-08T06:31:00.000-07:002011-02-13T20:28:04.034-08:00Class Struggle, Conservative Style<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.5in; ">Codevilla, Anthony. <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ruling-Class-Corrupted-America-About/dp/0825305586">The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It</a></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">.</i> New York: Beaufort 2010. Pp. xxvi, 150. Index. 978-0825305580. $12.99. Paper.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Class is a libertarian issue.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">When today’s believers in free markets hear someone mention “class struggle,” they may be tempted to think of Karl Marx. The rhetoric of class conflict has been largely Marxist during the past century. But students of libertarian history know that classical liberals Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer pioneered class analysis before Marx (he gave them credit for doing so). Class was a central feature of the work of such libertarian stalwarts as Franz Oppenheimer, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank Chodorov. Class theory formed the heart of libertarian and one-time SDS leader Carl Oglesby’s neglected classic, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Yankee and Cowboy War</i><span style="font-family:Cambria;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">.</span> An article on class theory was featured in the very first issue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Journal of Libertarian Studies</i>. And class analysis has continued to be an aspect of the work of such otherwise very different libertarian scholars as Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Roderick T. Long.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">A simple way of getting at the difference between Marxist and libertarian versions of class analysis is this: for orthodox Marxist class theory, the problem is private property; for libertarian class theory, the problem is aggression.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Orthodox Marxism has tended to see class stratification as rooted in the institution of private property. Random differences in circumstances and endowments will lead to disparities in property. The existence of property rights will enable the wealthy to consolidate their holdings, transmit their property inter-generationally, and create an entrenched ruling class, which dominates political and economic life. Thus, the only way—according to orthodox Marxists—to deal with problem of poverty and oppression that results from class stratification is to dispossess the wealthy of the capital goods they’ve been able to acquire because of the property system and to eliminate the institution of private property in capital goods entirely.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Libertarian class theory, by contrast, sees the institution of private property as a bulwark of freedom, as long as it protects property that has been justly acquired—acquired by what Oppenheimer famously termed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">the economic means</i>: characteristically, by homesteading unowned land or physical objects or receiving property through voluntary transfer from others. However, libertarian class theory maintains, from the very beginning of organized human society, some people have preferred to use force (or fraud) to obtain property—to employ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">the political means</i> of obtaining wealth. For their mutual protection, and to make extracting wealth from others easier, some of the thugs engaged in the use of the political means created governments; a combination of propaganda, memory loss, and the tendency to treat existing arrangements as beyond question covered these governments with a patina of legitimacy.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Not all the thugs occupied government positions themselves, of course. Many simply welcomed the protection the government provided for their ill-gotten gains and concentrated on making more wealth. Without directly participating in politics, they improved their economic positions by ensuring that their existing property holdings were treated as legitimate, by stealing land and other resources (in partnership with the government or with its blessing), and by extracting privileges from the government—often lubricating its machinery with their wealth—that enabled them to increase their possessions. Others joined them as beneficiaries of state privilege. Some people who might have become wealthy initially through voluntary exchange could also use their wealth to secure privileges from the state. And some people who acquired governmental power because of their skills at electioneering or bureaucratic infighting used their positions not only to do the bidding of the wealthy but also to gain wealth and enter the economic elite themselves.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">For libertarian class theory, the ruling class comprises those people who control the state and those whose wealth and social influence depend primarily on state-secured privilege (who are generally, in turn, either members of the first group or behind-the-scenes manipulators of those in the first group). Following C. Wright Mills, we can refer to those at the top of the twin political and financial pyramids as “the power elite.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">For libertarians, as Jeremy Weiland has put it, “the free market [would] eat the rich”: in a market genuinely liberated from politically secured privilege—including patents and copyrights, tariffs, land engrossment by the state, and state control of the money supply—it would be much harder for people to sediment great wealth and even harder for them to keep it. Competitive pressure would make it difficult for people to hang on to great fortunes. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Contra</i> the Marxists, the free market is the enemy, not the friend, of economic and social stratification. The rigged markets that obtain in today’s corporatist economies, by contrast, do indeed help those who already have wealth and power to retain it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The libertarian enthusiasm for revisionist history—championed especially by Murray Rothbard—is inexplicable without an understanding of the centrality of class analysis to libertarian thought. Libertarian revisionism emphasizes that civics textbook explanations of economic-cum-political events, which take politicians’ high-flown rhetoric about philosophical ideals and military necessities at face value, frequently mask the self-interested pursuit of power by economic elites. The revisionist approach possesses more explanatory power if, as libertarian class theory holds, there really are distinguishable common interests and socio-cultural characteristics that link influential people and both encourage and enable them to manipulate the political process to their benefit.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">II</span></span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Given the importance of non-Marxist class analysis for libertarians, it might seem like good news that Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla has made a contribution to the genre. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Ruling Class</i>, Codevilla argues that America has a ruling class—consisting of the people who “hold[] the commanding heights of government” (xv), those, “whether in government power directly or as officers in companies,” whose “careers and fortunes depend on government” (11). The Ruling Class is made up of “relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans” (7). That third of Americans is, roughly speaking, socio-culturally liberal and, at the same time (and not coincidentally from Codevilla’s point of view) enthusiastic about expert management. While Democrats tend to support the Ruling Class, “[t]he Republican Party” hasn’t “disparage[d] the Ruling Class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it” (5).</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The interests and concerns of the Ruling Class, Codevilla maintains, are sharply at odds with those of the rest of us. Well, about two-thirds of the rest of us—socially conservative people Codevilla calls “the Country Class” or the “Country Party.” The Country Party’s defining characteristics are its conservative attitudes regarding “marriage, children, and religious practice.” It favors civil society over the state as a means of solving problems, and prefers home schools to government schools. Politically, it “can be defined in terms of its lack of connection with government, and above all by attitudes opposite to those of the ruling class” (53). (Since the Ruling Class is said to valorize science, it is perhaps not surprising that Darwin is blamed for promoting elitism [16-7] and belief in evolution is identified as a sign of being “bitter about America” [19].)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The Country Class believes in human equality (57). And we can see what Codevilla’s getting at when he says this as a version of what Roderick Long has labeled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">equality of authority</i>: no one is by nature anyone else’s boss; and attempts by experts paternalistically to manage others’ lives are rightly causes of anger. Thus, Codevilla opposes top-down planning, and notes that the Country Class “views the way people live their lives as the result of countless private choices rather than as the consequence of someone else’s master plan.” But he simultaneously assures the reader that “[t]he Country Class is not anti-government, just non-governmental” (53). Apparently members of the Country Class can be “government officials or officers of major corporations whose decisions will have far-reaching effects” (54). It is unclear how to square this possibility with the claim that the Ruling Class consists of everyone associated with the state, as all government officials and most officers of most major corporations certainly are.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">“The Country Class,” Codevilla asserts, “thinks that individuals, and in special circumstances local elected officials—not federal or state bureaucrats—have the right to decide what kind of light bulbs a home should have, how much water should flow from a shower nozzle, what kind of toilet you should install” (56). (One might think local elected officials were officious meddlers just like federal or state politicians and bureaucrats. Perhaps they know more about local conditions. But this on its own doesn’t give them any more justified authority over other people’s lives.)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">On its face, Codevilla’s proposed division sounds very much like that of standard libertarian class analysis—especially when he argues against corporate bailouts (1-2), notes the ruling class’s penchant for non-defensive, imperial warfare (23), assails “crony capitalism” (xx, 30-1), complains about the elite’s penchant for “picking [economic] winners and losers” (33), notes that the ruling class is bipartisan (3), fingers organized medicine as a politically privileged group (39), and objects to rule by paternalistic, managerial experts. When he writes that “[t]he Country Class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever” (55), populists and left-libertarians alike can be expected to cheer.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla argues that the ruling class’s power continues to grow as people are encouraged to accept the authority of culturally sanctified experts. And his brief against managerialist paternalism will ring true not only to libertarians but to decentralists across the political spectrum: we don’t need experts to run our lives, and trust in professionals, combined with a dismissive attitude toward ordinary people’s capacity for good judgment, can easily be seen as laying the groundwork for friendly fascism.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">III</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But the fact that Rush Limbaugh is credited as the author of the book’s preface will alert even the not-too-careful reader that this is not a libertarian book. The problem is that Codevilla often seems to lose sight of the difference between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">cultural</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">political-economic</i> divisions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">For instance, the Country Class as intensely patriotic (59), despite the ease with which patriotism can be associated with just the sort of abuse of power against which members of the Country Class are supposed to—somewhat inconsistently—protest. Codevilla also seems to miss the degree to which the state is thoroughly involved in supporting the preferences of the Country Class. Contrasting the preferences of the Ruling Class and the Country Party, Codevilla maintains that, “left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs” (33). Similarly—also, presumably, when left to themselves—“Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat and other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it” (34). He seems blissfully unaware here of the impact of land-use policy, tax policy, and road construction policy on people’s living, driving, eating, and health-care consumption patterns. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The pro-family agenda he attributes to members of the Country Class challenges “emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children’s education” (72). Codevilla articulates a disconnected set of attitudes that link the members of his Country Party: opposition to “higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc.” (52). It might be thought that opposition to abortion could be implemented legally only through “expanding government” and that involving the government in reducing or eliminating abortion was precisely a matter of “subsidizing political favorites”—of enabling some people to see their preferences implemented without having to pay the full cost of doing so. Obviously, this will not be the case if one judges that abortion is murder; but Codevilla certainly offers no argument for thinking this, or even much in the way of an elaboration of the details of a worldview within which it would make sense.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla is frustrated by the evacuation of religion from the public square, and he suggests that members of the Country Class are as well. Obviously, again, it’s hard to see how this has much to do with the desire not to be bossed around that clearly animates members of the country Class. But set that to one side for a moment: I fear sometimes that people who say things like this are simply tone-deaf to the ways in which members of religious minorities—adherents of religious traditions other than Christianity, moderate and liberal Christians, and non-religious people—experience the deployment of Christian symbols and language in the public sphere. The problem is not that people should be silenced when they want to give voice to their religious identities. The problem, instead, is that the state must either be neutral in ways that many people will find exclusionary, or else it must take stands that others will find exclusionary. There is no problem with religion in the public square <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">if</i> that means on the editorial pages of newspapers, on movie screens, in vigorous conversations between neighbors. The problem arises, instead, because when people say they want religion in the public square, what they often <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">really </i>mean is that they want religious convictions and communities to shape the policies of the state—or at least to have the opportunity to do so. If the state were a purely voluntary association which its members were free to abandon, there would be no problem with the presence of religion in its decision making. But the state is not voluntary: it is coercive. It claims territory and then demands that anyone in that territory submit to its demands and fund its activities. For this kind of organization to be shaped by religious principles is to open the door to religious tyranny. The only real solution to the problem of religion in public life is to ensure that all public life is state-free, organized on the basis of fully voluntary cooperation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla bizarrely denies Ronald Reagan, an immensely successful and powerful politician with intimate connections with the wealthy and powerful, membership in the Ruling Class (75). Why? Because Codevilla asserts, without evidence, that Reagan shared the agenda of the Country Class. Since he did not in fact do much of anything to reduce state management of people’s lives, since he actually grew the federal government substantially, it seems far simpler to maintain either that Reagan deliberately deceived the members of the Country Class or that he shared their views but didn’t care much about them. To blame Ruling Class advisors for Reagan’s failure to adhere to Country Class values is as naïve as blaming establishmentarians a generation younger for keeping Barack Obama from ending war, torture, domestic surveillance, and corporate bailouts. In each case, it’s hard not to be reminded of the Russian serfs who really believed that, if the tsar actually understood what they were undergoing, he would be only too happy to liberate them—why, oh, why, they wondered, did his corrupt and wicked courtiers keep him from knowing the truth.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">IV</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">In the course of distinguishing the Ruling Class from the Country Class, Codevilla dismisses official apologies for such clusters of events as the use of nuclear weapons against noncombatants in World War II, the slave trade, and the institution of slavery (which he trivializes by writing: “some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter” [25]) as apologies offered by elites on behalf of their inferiors, from whom they implicitly distance themselves in the act of apologizing.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The temptation to self-righteous condemnation of others is real and persistent. And if Codevilla had simply observed that no one has the right to apologize on behalf of anyone else, his argument would carry more weight. Of course, to acknowledge <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">that</i> would be to acknowledge that the United States as a going concern is a fiction, that people are responsible for their own actions, and that an entity that claims to act on behalf of others without their express consent lacks legitimacy. That hardly seems like the sort of argument he wants to defend, however.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">V</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The basic problem with Codevilla’s characterization of the Country Class’s putative agenda and identity is that the various elements don’t fit well with each other. Commitments to equality of authority, appreciation for civil society, and opposition to managerialism can be shared by a wide range of people, many of whom may value abortion rights, find marriage uninteresting, and loathe Christian radio. It is easy to see why someone who shared Codevilla’s family agenda would object to progressive managerialism; but there is no particular reason why someone who opposed progressive managerialism should be inclined to share Codevilla’s family agenda. There is not much, really, that links the Country Class’s social conservatism with its opposition to managerialist authority, unless opposition to managerialism is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">defined</i> as an aspect of social conservatism. But the question would still be: what connects the various aspects of social conservatism thus defined?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I think this is because Codevilla’s work calls attention to two distinct problems, which he does not always clearly distinguish: the role of expert authority in our society and the role of the power elite in our society. It stands to reason that the power elite will employ experts to do its bidding. And experts may attempt self-aggrandizingly to increase their own social power. But it is crucial to distinguish between the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">managerial class</i> and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">ruling class</i>. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">He seems to maintain, with a straight face, that identity—embracing the values of educated, socio-cultural liberals—has more to do with membership in, and the agenda of, the ruling class than political and economic power. And this seems simply wrongheaded. The mistake is in supposing that what matters most about the Ruling Class is its members’ cultural identity or that its members’ primary goal is to force cultural change on the members of the Country Party. People often enjoy remaking others in their own images; but the principal objectives of America’s rulers seem to be much more prosaic than Codevilla’s narrative of culture war might seem to suggest: they want money and power, at home and abroad, with privileges for favored corporations, the various organs of the national security state to keep order domestically, and a global military presence to ensure access to resources and compliant cooperation with corporate interests around the world. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It may be—I offer no opinion on the matter—that a third of Americans (Codevilla’s figure) embrace generally liberal, cosmopolitan cultural values and that two-thirds are, in some important respects, more traditional in orientation. It may also be the case that many members of the power elite tend to be culturally liberal. But it obviously doesn’t follow that members of the power elite are unwilling to implement the culturally conservative preferences of “the Country Class” (they certainly seem to be when it’s politically beneficial to do so) or that no members of the power elite are culturally conservative.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla might be read as implying that statist leftists interested in the environment, for instance, were part of the ruling class; it would be more reflective of his argumentative approach, and far more consistent with a libertarian class analysis, to see environmentalists and advocates of human rights, say, as manipulated sources of rhetorical cover for corporatist politicians on the Democratic side of the political aisle, just as sincere proponents of free markets are consistently co-opted by Republicans. While there are surely exceptions, it is safe to assume that very, very little in the way of legislation or policy that doesn’t serve the interests of one segment or more of the power elite is ever adopted or implemented. In general and over the long-term, the rules aren’t made over the objections of politicians; and, in general, and over the long-term, politicians either are, or serve the interests of, members of the power elite. And it’s the economic and political manipulation engaged in by the power elite—think vast industry bailouts, subsidies disguised as consumer protection regulations, imperial warfare, the growth of the national security state, the legitimation of torture—that really ought to be troubling to coastals and heartlanders, the socio-culturally conservative and the socio-culturally liberal alike.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">A similar problem with Codevilla’s narrative is that it seems to imply that government served the interests of ordinary people at some point before the rise of Progressive-era managerialism. While the power of the state over ordinary people’s lives was certainly less in 1800 than it is in 2010, and while politicians doubtless didn’t have quite the same sense of themselves as capable of managing the minute details of other people’s affairs, politicians didn’t serve the people. The Puritan strand of American intellectual and cultural life—which ultimately helped to birth Progressivism—was certainly far from inert. And politicians served the interests of the economic elite—as its lackeys or as its members—quite as much in earlier eras of American history as they do now, given the tools the political system made available to them.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Libertarians don’t share Marxism’s view that market freedom is responsible for society-wide injustice. Indeed, for libertarians, the restrictions on market freedom imposed by ruling-class privileges are focal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">instances</i> of injustice. But libertarians do share with Marxists the recognition that the ruling class sits atop the state, enriching its members at gun-point—at the expense of everyone else. For libertarian class theory, the division between those who deploy or reap massive profits from aggressive force on the one hand and those who are the victims of that force on the other is the division that matters. Codevilla and those who read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Ruling Class</i> appreciatively should focus on that division, at which he gestures, rather than the cultural rift with which he seems sometimes to confuse it. Despite the superficial appeal of Codevilla’s analysis, libertarians, at any rate, have no reason to let themselves be drafted as conservative foot-soldiers in the culture war.</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">VI</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">It is interesting to note that there are few, if any, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">arguments</i> for the inferiority of the political, religious, and cultural positions Codevilla attributes to the Ruling Class. He seethes with resentment at many of these positions but he rarely tries to refute them; he simply assumes that Country Party readers will share his revulsion at the Ruling Class’s misbehavior. Perhaps the fifty-one pages of this 176-page book devoted to the texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are designed to provide the rationales for his positions. If so, he does not explain how. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">While he does not talk philosophy, however, he does talk strategy. The Republican Party is hopeless as a vehicle for Country Class aspirations, Codevilla acknowledges. The Democratic Party is the party of the Ruling Class. So the Country Party needs a political movement of its own. But such a movement, even if successful in ousting the Ruling Class, would face severe challenges. Most importantly: how would it avoid becoming entrenched and oppressive? As long as the penchant for entrenched power is explained simply as a product of progressive managerialism, then it might seem as if people with the right cultural values could simply turn the machinery of state around. We find much the same attitude expressed by leftists frustrated by elite dominance of the Democratic Party.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But if the problem is the state itself, there’s a more serious challenge to confront. If the people who run the state are almost unavoidably going to be members of the power elite, if the power elite can exert pressure on the state that others cannot, if the average public official is going to be more ambitious and thus less principled than the average person, then it seems as if a simple replacement of personnel won’t do the trick. A major cultural shift wouldn’t be sufficient to do so, either. Thus, we return to the basic solution to Codevilla’s problem, the one he keeps ignoring: if you want to get rid of the ruling class, you’ve got to get rid of the state. You’re got to strike the root.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla calls for cutting the size of government drastically. But he picks on such typical conservative whipping boys as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. A stateless society would not tax people to pay for the activities of entities like these, of course; but the impact not only on the public purse but also on people’s freedom and safety would be far, far greater if there were dramatic cuts in the government’s military budget. If foreign bases were closed, if the military were limited to defensive action within some reasonable range beyond US borders and its resources aligned accordingly, or if a standing army were eliminated entirely in favor of the kind of militia envisioned by the Founders, the consequences would be far more revolutionary than anything Codevilla explicitly mentions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Codevilla seems repeatedly to step close to the brink and then step back. So, for instance, he writes: “to subject the modern administrative state’s administrative agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters” (84). But it is the administrative state itself that it is a crucial aspect of the problem of disempowerment that so troubles Codevilla and the members of the Country Class. Why not eliminate the various administrative and regulatory agencies entirely, rather than asking how they might be managed differently?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Though Codevilla stresses the Country Class’s purported commitment to equality of authority (even if he doesn’t use the phrase), he does not, I think, take the implications of this kind of equality seriously enough. If he did, he would deny the authority of the local government officials as much as that of the federal and state-level ones. He would realize that the political conflicts over family and religion will prove interminable as long as there is a state apparatus for influence on which groups with different cultural agendas can contend. He would see that the real problems with the evisceration of civil society and the elimination of personal freedom can’t be solved unless the state itself is defanged.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Cultural politics serve to distract people from the fact that Mills’s Power Elite is, as Codevilla suggests, engaging in plunder on a grand scale. The managerial technocrats who do the bidding of the Ruling Class may come disproportionately from a particular cultural sub-group (though Codevilla offers no real evidence that they do). But it is the Ruling Class itself that is the problem. And Codevilla’s wrestling in his final chapter with the question of the nature of the political institutions needed to prevent the resurgence of the Ruling Class highlights the reality he seems unwilling to acknowledge: that Ruling Class plunder will persist as long as there is a state for the Ruling Class to control. The only way to eliminate the power of the Ruling Class is to eliminate the state.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i>A much shorter version of this review will appear in </i>The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty<i>.</i></p> <!--EndFragment-->Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-65705279032915308732010-07-31T06:11:00.000-07:002011-01-01T06:26:01.621-08:00Why Are So Many Market-Oriented Left-Libertarians Anarchists?<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Of the thinkers and writers commonly identified today as market-oriented </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism">left-libertarians</a> (that is, <i>leftists</i>—opposed to workplace hierarchies, cultural authoritarianism, arbitrary exclusion on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and aggressive war—who are also market-oriented <i>libertarians</i>—opposed to aggression against people’s bodies and justly acquired possessions),</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> almost all are anarchists; </span></span><a href="http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Chris Matthew Sciabarra</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> is perhaps the only relatively visible one who’s not. The question is: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">how contingent is this connection</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">It is possible, for instance, that many left-libertarians have been influenced by Murray Rothbard, and that they affirm </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">both </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">anarchism for something like Rothbard’s reasons for doing so </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">and</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> left-libertarianism on the view that it’s a logical extension of Rothbard’s views.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">But this explanation wouldn’t cover those whose links with Rothbard are, like mine, pretty tenuous. And it would really just push the fundamental question back a step, in any case, since we’d still have to ask why the relevant views could be found in Rothbard’s own work.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Obviously, the answer will depend in part on just what one thinks might make a position leftist; I suggest that one intuitively appealing answer might be that a position is leftist if it opposes </span></span><a href="http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2008/12/left-in-left-libertarian.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">subordination, exclusion, deprivation</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, and war. I think there are at least four reasons why a version of libertarianism that is leftist in this sense would likely be anarchist as well.</span></span></p><meta charset="utf-8"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The most important is the central role of libertarian class theory in left-libertarian thought. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Since libertarian class theory tends to focus on the creation of the state through conquest and the dominance of the state apparatus by those who employ it to exploit, there really is a deep-seated connection between left-libertarianism and a suspicious view of the state that certainly might tend to dispose someone toward anarchism. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Subordination and deprivation, on a typical left-libertarian analysis, are rooted in privileges secured by the state; exclusion is characteristically reinforced by such privileges; and wars are characteristically fought to create or extend such privileges and, in general, to advance the interests of the power elite who are the principal beneficiaries of these privileges. Opposing these privileges means opposing what the state is doing at present; but it also means opposing the characteristic tendency of state action for millennia. It would seem, at minimum, enormously difficult to cabin the options available to state actors in ways that would prevent them from seeking and conferring the privileges left-libertarians oppose. Thus, the simplest way to eliminate these privileges is to eliminate the state apparatus that has persistently secured them.</span></span></p><meta charset="utf-8"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A further relevant fact is that leftism of the kind I’ve sketched above is radically decentralist, in favor of grassroots institutions and opposed to top-down control. The influence of the New Left is obvious. This sort of leftism naturally militates against centralized political authority—and thus, ultimately against political authority of any sort. (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia;font-size:medium;">My sense is that when they talked about “neighborhood power” and similar ideas, New Leftists were talking first of all about reconceiving the state—as Bill Kauffman says, you can have your home town, or you can have the empire, but you can’t have both—though of course decentralizing worklife, creating “human-scale” workplaces, has also mattered enormously to both New Leftists and left-libertarians influenced by them.)</span></p><meta charset="utf-8"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Roderick Long has, I think rightly, emphasized the centrality to his way of thinking of the idea of equality of authority—the idea that no one has any inherent or natural right to govern anyone else. This idea is simultaneously a source of support for anarchism—since it undermines the claims of state actors to rights others lack—and a source of support for (what an ugly word) leftism—since, as <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/10/03/libertarianism_through/">Charles Johnson observes</a>, it would be possible but <i>weird</i> to support equality of authority while being concerned about subordination, exclusion, and deprivation only when they they result from aggressive violence while regarding it as unworthy of attention when people are pushed around nonviolently. Presuming most left-libertarians aren’t unduly given to weirdness, their commitment to equality of authority ought to be linked with a commitment to anarchism.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The basic libertarian opposition to war is also a factor. To the extent that one is opposed to state-made war (and to most violence more generally), especially if on moral rather than merely prudential grounds, it’s easy to see unavoidable state self-aggrandizement as the culprit, and so to see anarchism as a remedy for war. At the same time, obviously, while there have been lots of principled opponents of war who have been in some sense conservatives, the opposition to imperial ambition and concern for the vulnerable that mark opposition to war are often thought of as leftist positions, and a contemporary position that wasn’t pretty strongly anti-war would be hard for me to recognize as authentically leftist. Given the centrality of war-making to what the state does (and, indeed, its centrality to quasi-Hobbesian justifications for the state), it’s easy to see why opposition to war could provide considerable support for opposition to the state, since it is difficult to see how violence could be nearly as destructive absent the state’s ability to tax, conscript, misdirect research funding, and create fiat money to facilitate its war efforts.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Are other factors relevant? If so, which?</span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p> <!--EndFragment--> Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-27941802400050124532010-06-11T17:08:00.000-07:002010-06-30T07:04:35.388-07:00Does Using Force Convert a Legal Regime in a Stateless Society into a State?<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" >I. Introduction</span> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Apart from the rare exception—someone in the mold of Robert LeFevre or Leo Tolstoy—most anarchists are not pacifists. They suppose, that is, that there are occasions when it might be appropriate to use force—most commonly, to protect oneself or someone else against unjust attack or to secure compensation for such an attack. While the anarchist seeks to realize an ideal of peaceful, voluntary cooperation, she is likely to be very much aware that it may sometimes be necessary to call the people with guns. Force may sometimes be employed to settle disputes over just control over possessions—what I will call property rights without attempt to settle the question of just when someone might be thought justly to control a given possession. However, forcibly defending property rights in a stateless society is not the moral equivalent of state aggression.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">In Part II, I briefly describe different sources of legal rules that might obtain in a stateless society and note the kinds of conflicts that might arise in such a society. In Part III, I explain why I believe the forcible resolution of conflicts between participants in the same regime would not qualify as state-like aggression and offer reasons for thinking that the same would be true of the forcible resolution of conflicts between participants in different regimes that upheld the same property rules or that were parties to agreements governing conflicts involving divergent legal norms. In Part IV, I consider two problems posed by the way I’ve framed my claim that legal regimes forcibly protecting participants’ property rights need not be viewed as state-like: the fact that the interdefinability of consent and aggression requires a pre-legal definition of property rights, and the fact that, if such a definition is available, affirming it might seem to be inconsistent with embracing the notion of polycentric law. In Part V, I argue that a regime’s use of force against an outlaw need not be state-like any more than its use of force against a participant in another regime. I conclude in Part VI.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">II. Rules and Conflicts</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">We can imagine that legal rules in a stateless society might be generated by at least three different kinds of institutions (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to these sorts of institutions collectively as legal regimes and those who voluntarily agree to accept the legal rules they establish and maintain as participants):</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >territorialized consensus-based legal regime</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, in which most people in a given geographic area accept a given set of legal norms. The regime might often be maintained by mutualized institutions formerly part of a state apparatus. The difference between this sort of regime and a state would be that no one in the relevant geographic area would be treated as having accepted the regime’s authority without her actual consent.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >deterritorialized contractual legal regime</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, in which people who might not occupy geographically contiguous territory opted for the dispute resolution services of the same cooperative, for-profit, volunteer-based, or not-for-profit dispute resolution agency.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">the </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >deterritorialized communal legal regime</span><span style="font-size:100%;">, in which people who might not occupy geographically contiguous territory opted for the dispute resolution services of a religious or cultural community to which they belonged for reasons independent of its provision of dispute resolution services.</span></li></ul><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A property-related conflict (PRC) in a stateless society could occur, in theory, between</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li><span style="font-size:100%;">two participants in the same legal regime;<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">two participants in different legal regimes;</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">a participant in a legal regime an someone not affiliated with any regime (without assuming anything about whether such a person engages in violent behavior, we can refer to her conveniently as an <span style="font-style: italic;">outlaw</span>).</span><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></li></ul><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">III. Regulated Conflicts</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Conflicts between participants in the same regime, and between participants in different regimes with appropriate rules or agreements or both, would be consensual. Using force to secure compliance with a regime’s rules in order to end such conflicts need not be state-like.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A. Conflicts between Participants in the Same Regime</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">When a PRC occurs between two participants in the same legal regime, it is clear that, given that the legal regime is genuinely consensual, featuring full exit rights, the participants will either have agreed directly to the rules governing their conflict or have agreed to standards governing procedures for the determination of such rules in the awareness that such rules would, in fact, be determined. In either case, they will have voluntarily accepted the jurisdiction of the relevant legal regime—and, in the prior case, to the specific applicable norms. Using force to compel them to accept it is clearly not on all fours with using force to impose state dictates on people who have not actually consented to them.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">B. Cross-Regime Conflicts</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Different legal regimes may feature the same norms relevant to a particular conflict, or different ones. When a PRC occurs between participants in different consensual legal regimes with the same relevant norms, the participants will have voluntarily consented to the norms or to procedures used to generate them. Thus, again, using force to ensure their cooperation will be justified given their prior consent to the applicable norms.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">If different regimes feature different norms applicable to a particular kind of PRC, then it will obviously be in the best interests of each regime to establish guidelines—choice-of-law and conflict-of-law rules, primarily—for resolving cross-regime disagreements about the resolution of disputes of this kind (typically, though not necessarily, embodied in agreements with the relevant competitor regimes). If a given regime is fully consensual, then a participant in that regime will have accepted these second-order norm directly or will, again, have consented in one way or another to procedures for their determination. A participant in a legal regime will thus have consented to the employment by the regime of such second-order norms to reach a conclusion regarding the substantive principles to be applied in resolving a dispute and then to use force, if need be, to resolve the dispute. So, again, the use of force here will be legitimate.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">IV. Aggression, Consent, and Polycentricity</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">There are two further related problems here, however. Someone might object that talk about free consent only makes sense given a definition of aggression, but that aggression can only be defined by a legal regime, so that no one could be said to consent to a legal regime. I argue in Section A that a pre-legal account of property rights is at least to some extent possible, so that the objection is unsuccessful. An objector might also hold that relatively stable, uniform property norms would be incompatible with the existence of a truly polycentric legal order. In Section B, I explain why it is possible to support polycentricity and endorse the existence of pre-legal norms.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A. Defining Consent and Aggression Pre-Legally</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">The first concerns the nature of consent to the jurisdiction of a given regime. We can imagine such consent taking the form of joining a particular religious community (in principle, I suppose, someone might opt to have legal disputes resolved by a religious community to which she didn’t belong, but it seems more likely that people will opt for full-scale involvement in a community and then take advantage of its legal system as an incident of membership), contracting with a for-profit dispute resolution agency, or joining a cooperative. The problem is that whether someone’s decision to consent to a regime’s jurisdiction was voluntary depends on how her rights were defined prior to membership. For I understand a voluntary act as one in which I am not compelled to engage by aggressive force (that is, force not intended to defend against unjust attack or secure compensation for such an attack) or the threat of aggressive force. But what counts as aggression is obviously dependent on what rights someone is judged to have. Thus, for the notion of free consent to have any meaningful content, it must be possible to specify a core of relevant rights that obtain independently of the determinations of any legal regime.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">However, the notion of a polycentric legal order presupposes the existence of multiple legal regimes, specifying different legally recognized rights. It might seem as if the reasonableness of a polycentric legal order implied that all rights were legal rights, dependent on the existence and operation of some legal regime or other. If this is so, then there would be no pre-legal rights. And so, in turn, there would be no way of specifying content for the notion of voluntary consent to a legal regime. And this would suggest that the notion of a consensual legal order, fundamental to the concept of a stateless society, was unsustainable and perhaps incoherent.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">We can imagine at least four possible moral conclusions regarding the status of property rights, in particular: (i) there is one just set of property rights; (ii) there are several just sets of property rights; (iii) there are no just property rights, because it is wrong for anyone to claim to control any part of the material world; (iv) there are no just property rights because there are no true moral claims at all; or (v) there are no just property rights because, for one reason or another, while there are true moral claims about other matters, there are no true moral claims about our relationships with items in the material world apart from the determination of an organized legal system (I ignore the possibility that pre-legal social consensus might play the same role, because this option can be handled under [ii], above).</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">If (i) is correct, then there will, indeed, be an unequivocal baseline against which it will be possible to measure the freedom of consent. An act will be free just insofar as someone is not compelled to engage in it by aggression or the threat of aggression against that person’s rights, including her property rights.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">If (ii) is correct, then there will not be a single set of property rights that can serve as a baseline against which it will be possible to measure the freedom of consent. However, there will be, <i>ex hypthesi</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" >, moral constraints on what a just set of property rights can be like. So while (on this view) different social or legal norms might define property rights in different ways, the choice among just norms would not be unlimited (and might, in fact, be fairly narrow): there are some norms such that acting as if they were in place would be wrong; acting in relation to someone’s possessions in a way that was not consistent with </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>any</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > reasonable property norm would be morally wrong and would certainly count as aggression against that person. So, again, if (ii) were correct, the notion of aggression would have determinate content.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Of course, if (iii) were correct, this would indeed establish a moral equivalence between actions with respect to property claims in a stateless society and actions with respect to property claims by a state. But it would do so at the cost of rendering orderly, purposeful action in the world impossible. No reasonable person would endorse (iii).</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is certainly possible that (iv) might be correct (though the very notion of correctness here is, of course, a normative one, and it would be difficult to affirm the validity of an epistemic norm while accepting the sorts of arguments likely to lead to skepticism about moral norms). Accepting (iv) as true would mean denying any moral difference between self-defense and state coercion. But it would also deny anyone who accepted it any basis for engaging in intelligible moral criticism of the anarchist or of anyone else. In any event, generalized moral skepticism cannot simply be asserted; it has to be defended in one way or another. Until it is, we need not be overly troubled by it; and if its validity ultimately is established there will be more serious problems to resolve than the best way to talk about possessions in a stateless society.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">If (v) were correct, so that there were no moral constraints on property rules in the absence of a legal system, if a legal regime could create just any property rules, then there would, indeed, be no way to specify a contentful notion of aggression that could provide the basis for the justified claim that someone had consented freely to the regime’s jurisdiction. But I cannot see why anyone would suppose that this was true. A vast array of approaches to moral reasoning have fairly obvious implications for the moral status of possessions. The notion that there were lots of true moral claims but that none of them constrained how someone could appropriately treat someone else’s possessions is just barely conceivable. It would, however, be bizarre to suppose that an approach to morality developed, in whatever fashion, for the benefit of embodied persons in a world remotely like ours would lack implications regarding the just treatment of their possessions. I believe we can safely proceed on the assumption that no such approach to morality would be credible absent substantial counter-arguments.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">B. Right Answers and Polycentricity<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is perfectly possible to affirm that some property systems are just and some are not while still supporting the existence of a polycentric legal order featuring multiple property rules. <o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is reasonable to assume that there are constraints on when something can be justly possessed and how others may justly treat someone’s just possessions sufficient to give the notion of aggression, and so of free consent, determinate content. But it might be thought that the existence of these constraints was incompatible with the existence of a genuinely polycentric legal order. In the absence of an overarching authority ensuring the operation of a consistent set of legal norms, some of the property rules enforced by some regimes in a polycentric legal order will doubtless be unjust. Since no one can reasonably want unjust norms to obtain, the argument might run, we must all be obligated to oppose the existence of a polycentric legal order and to favor the establishment and enforcement of a uniform set of legal norms.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A stateless society could, in principle, feature such a uniform set of norms. Murray Rothbard famously called for the adoption by the members of a stateless society of a Libertarian Code. But I think it is clear that the voluntary adoption of such a code would require far more consensus than is likely to be evident in the foreseeable future. In a society without the state, there would undoubtedly be multiple, probably overlapping, sets of legal rules.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">It will certainly be possible to object to some of these rules. Different legal systems will doubtless make mistakes, perhaps sometimes very serious ones. And a stateless society’s equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade may sometimes have reason to become involved in remedying clear injustices perpetrated by some legal systems. But belief in objective constraints on property norms is quite compatible with supporting, rather than opposing, legal polycentricity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">First, that there is a fact of the matter about which property rules are just does not mean that everyone, or anyone, has infallible knowledge of those rules. Polycentricity creates room for experimentation and discovery.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Second, some just rules may be appropriate for people with particular characteristics—histories, personalities, and so forth—and communities of such people may tend to opt for those rules. It does not follow that other just rules won’t be appropriate for people with other characteristics.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Third, even if it is obvious that a given legal regime’s property rules are thoroughly wrong-headed, I can quite reasonably welcome a system that allows for the participants in that legal regime to voluntarily adopt those rules. I could only object to such a system if I believed a coercive authority with the power to impose legal norms on the unconsenting was preferable to a system that allowed for genuine diversity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is worth emphasizing that diverse property regimes could be just even if, as is surely unlikely, everyone in a given society endorsed the same underlying rules. For, since legal regimes would be fully consensual, participants would obviously be free to contract out of the baseline property rules everyone treated as society-wide defaults.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">V. Outlaws<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A regime responding to the behavior of people not affiliated with any regime need not be regarded as behaving in a state-like manner. I explain in Section A why the outlaw might be thought to pose for the clear delineation of the difference between a consensual legal regime and a state. I note in Section B that a regime can largely avoid the risk of engaging in state-like behavior by not engaging in non-contractual contact with outlaws. In Section C, I suggest that a regime responding to simple aggression by outlaws by forcibly upholding what are clearly legitimate property rights need not be seen as state-like aggression.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A. Why the Outlaw Is a Problem<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A given legal regime will have various occasions to interact with outlaws. It’s easy to envision a PRC between the outlaw and a participant in the regime—perhaps the regime is mutualist, while she favors Lockean property rules, or </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >vice versa</span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Because she’s an outlaw, she’s not a participant in any legal regime other than her own (by definition), and it’s likely that she doesn’t have any pre-existing agreement with the relevant regime about PRC (if she does, her case raises no special concerns and can be ignored). In this case, there’s no basis for saying she’s consented <i>either</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > to the substantive property rules enforced by the regime </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>or</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > to any second-order choice-of-law rules. Would the regime function like a state in relation to her?<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">B. Avoiding Non-Contractual Contact with Outlaws<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">If she sought to involve the regime in a contractual PRC between her and one of its participants who was, let us suppose, following the regime’s preferred legal norms but not her own, the regime could obviously decline to become involved. If it did, it certainly would not be engaging in the deployment of state-like force. The regime could similarly avoid being state-like if it declined to become involved when one of its participants asked it to resolve a contractual PRC with her using its preferred legal norms rather than hers. When the PRC involved a participant’s claim to property currently occupied by an outlaw, or an outlaw’s claim to property currently occupied by a participant, the regime could generally decline to become involved at all, absent the outlaw’s agreement, when preferred legal norms were different. And the outlaw would obviously have good reason to want to agree to the regime’s involvement to facilitate orderly dispute resolution. The regime could also instruct participants that, when concluding agreements with outlaws regarding matters affected by disputed property rules, they should incorporate provisions specifying that PRCs be settled by the regime.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">C. Aggressive Outlaws<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Following a policy combining preemptive contracting with a refusal in general to become involved with participants’ voluntary relationships with unconsenting outlaws would make it relatively easy for a regime to avoid state-like behavior. This does not mean, of course, that a regime would always be able to avoid using force against outlaws. Many PRCs are likely to involve good-faith disagreements about the contents of just property rules. But some outlaws may engage in what the regime regards as simple aggression against participants. In this case, it can reasonably be expected that the regime will use force to repel them and to secure compensation for the harm they have done.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">In so doing, however, it would not be acting in a state-like manner, for its use of force would not be best understood as a matter of imposing legal norms on unconsenting third parties. Given the legitimacy of its property rules, in defending participants’ property it would be doing only what they would be entitled to do in its absence. This is obviously the case if there is a single set of just property rules. People who believed that there were and that they had identified them could obviously act in good faith in forcibly repelling aggression against property rights consistent with those rules. But forcibly repelling aggression could also be legitimate if multiple sets of property rules were just: diverse property systems will preclude the same kinds of infringements, and most or all will treat people’s reasonably settled expectations as worth honoring in many or most cases.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">A regime’s decision-makers would need to consider the limits on forcible responses to what they view as aggression by outlaws, it seems to me, only when outlaws made good-faith claims to be acting on the basis of publicly defensible moral norms justifying the conduct the regime regards as aggressive. Outlaws who understand themselves simply to be using force to subdue others, who are, in effect, aggressors by their own lights, may always be repelled using proportionate force.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Even if a regime’s decision-makers were uncertain whether it was just to respond forcibly to some behavior by outlaws when it affected participants’ property, they could still in good conscience, and without behaving in a state-like manner, use force in two additional ways. (i) They could reasonably employ force to ensure that the relevant PRC be resolved through negotiation rather than through force. (ii) They could reasonably employ force to defend participants from bodily harm.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">The same kinds of considerations would obviously apply if the aggression involved were undertaken not by outlaws but by another regime that simply refused to negotiate choice-of-law agreement with the regime. Such a regime could reasonably be treated as a collection of outlaws—not in order to justify hunting and killing its participants, but to ensure that they were treated with the wary respect due dangerous and uncivil predators.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">VI. Conclusion<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Forcibly resolving disputes regarding property rights need not make a legal regime in a stateless society state-like. Consensual rules accepted by regime participants and consensual agreements within regimes can resolve most property disputes, and, because they are consensual, enforcing them need not be state-like. While there may not be a single set of just property rights, there are, at minimum, constraints on the range of possibly just schemes of rights, and the existence of such constraints makes it possible for talk about the consensuality of regime membership to be meaningful. A polycentric legal order can certainly feature multiple property rights schemes; and, even if not all of those schemes are just, there will still be good reason to support the existence of the legal order as a whole, even though it makes room for the maintenance of some undesirable regimes (this certainly does not mean that organized and disorganized individuals are not free to actively challenge unjust regimes).<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">Whatever the legal rules upheld by a just regime, the existence of outlaws need not compel it to behave like a state. In large part, it can avoid non-consensual relationships with them, and when it has no choice to engage with them, it does not act unjustly if it uses force to prevent them from engaging in conduct which would be inconsistent with any just scheme of property rights.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">There will obviously be considerable economic and social pressure on outlaws in a stateless society to affiliate with legal regimes and on regimes to standardize mechanisms for resolving cross-regime disputes. There will also be real, if less intense, pressures for regimes to adopt similar rules—though diverse cultural values, moral beliefs, and geographic circumstances may all tend to promote continued diversity. While the injustice of state-like conduct does not depend on its extent—subjecting anyone to aggressive violence is wrong—there need be relatively few pressures on a regime to engage in such conduct. It can, in any case, avoid such conduct by ensuring that its internal rules rest on the content of its participants, that it orders its relationships with other regimes consensually (and in ways that merit the consensual self-obligation of its members), by avoiding non-consensual contacts with outlaws where possible, and by using force against them only to defend unequivocally just claims.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;">This essay emerged from an extended conversation involving Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, Roderick T. Long, Thomas Knapp, and others. While none of them is to blame for its final form, it certainly reflects their insights and perhaps even on occasion their choice of language. I am grateful for and honored by the chance to have such thoughtful dialogue partners and friends.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> <!--EndFragment--> </div>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-85381577968882047862010-06-07T18:01:00.000-07:002010-06-09T12:37:02.463-07:00Any (Good) Thing the State Can Do, We Can Do Better<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The question whether people in a stateless society could respond satisfactorily to a disaster like the BP oil spill is really just a special case of the general question whether people without the state can do the things people attempt to do through the state. It seems to me that the answer is “yes.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">That’s because everything the state purportedly does is actually done by people. Sometimes they act out of fear; sometimes out of the perception that the state is legitimate; sometimes what the state commands turns out to be just what they want to do anyway; and sometimes because they believe that what the state is asking them to do is just what they are morally required to do anyway. But, for whatever reason, they do it.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This fact ought to be sufficient to make us confident that ordinary people, cooperating peacefully, can deal with environmental or other disasters in a stateless society. In what follows, I briefly discuss the purported advantages the state might be thought to possess in dealing with large-scale problems before noting some ways in which people in a stateless society could cooperate to prevent or remedy a disaster like the one currently taking place in the Gulf.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The State’s Supposed Advantages</span></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">What might be thought to give the state an advantage over the various non-state institutions of a stateless society? Statists are most likely to point to two kinds of factors: information and force. A third, concerned with a potential difficulty faced by a non-state legal system relying on tort law to deal with environmental harms, might also be highlighted by some statists.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Informational Advantages?</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Statists often think the state has information that ordinary people lack. But to the extent that this information concerns optimal production levels and distribution patterns for goods and services, we know as confidently as we know anything about economics that more information is distributed throughout a given economic environment, possessed by various actors as a matter of “local knowledge.” Polycentric processes that mobilize this local knowledge will ultimately prove more effective than top-down, hierarchical ones at aggregating relevant information.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Statists might suggest that the state had an important role to play, not so much because it possessed information relevant to consumption and production, but because it possessed access to expert information. The assumption here seems to be that experts know just what needs to be done about a given problem but, because ordinary people aren’t convinced, the options are either to let nothing be done about a serious problem or to impose the will of the experts. Clearly, there are problems here related both to the ignorance of experts and to the right of people to make mistakes.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">But here the question is how information comes to be classified as expert, and how it is used by the state. Political processes clearly affect the selection of experts and the assessment of the information they provide. Further, given both the potential abuse of expertise as a rationalization for authoritarianism, and the inherent value of personal autonomy, it does not seem as if the conclusions of particular experts ought to be imposed on people without their consent. There are, it seems, side constraints on the use of expert authority whatever its potential value. Finally, if expert claims are accurate, why can they not be winnowed by public evaluation—in the course of conversations in which other experts from outside the political process, as well as ordinary people able to employ their common sense, are free to participate?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Advantages Reflective of the State’s Monopoly of Force?</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If purported informational advantages provide no reason to think that the state is better equipped to aid us in, for instance, responding to natural disasters, what about its capacity to use force to compel people to cooperate? As I’ve already suggested, the vast majority of instances of cooperation with or under the direction of the state do not reflect any immediate threat or application of force. Instead, they reflect people’s sense of the moral or prudential appropriateness of doing as the state directs.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Sometimes, of course, people may cooperate voluntarily, but only because they believe that others will do so, too, under the background threat of compulsion by the state. But there is no reason no to think that a combination of social norms and advance agreements (cp. David Schmidtz’s discussion of “assurance contracts”) could not in many cases foster the needed cooperation in the absence of threatened force. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I’m inclined to think that there are very few, if any, pure public goods, and it’s not clear to me that any environmental good we could currently affect would count as one. But, if there are any, it seems to me both that (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">i</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">) as Schmidtz suggests, there are interesting market-based ways of providing at least some of them and (</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">ii</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">) the difficulties associated with alternatives mean that there’s no good reason to prefer coercive solutions to market-based ones. For if worthwhile cooperation is not forthcoming in some cases in which we wish it might be, we must still recall that the state is not, never has been, and never will be directed by angels, that instituting an organization with monopolistic control over the use of force in a given region opens up enormous possibilities for violence, abuse, cronyism, depredation, and dispossession. In short, while there may be failures of cooperation, the costs associated with these failures must be compared to the costs associated with failures on the part of monopolistic states.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Sometimes, of course, people will grudgingly obey the state only because of the its threats of violence. The fact that these threats would not be available in a stateless society does not seem like a particular loss. For it is almost certain that, in cases in which people only obey out of fear, they see little or not independent reason to do whatever it is the state wants them to do, and we have good reason to be glad, therefore, that they will not be forced to do similar things in the state’s absence.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Advantage of Being Able to Bypass the Need to Delineate Lines of Causal Responsibility in Dealing with Environmental Problems?</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">One final reason that might be advanced for adopting the view that the state was better positioned to deal with certain kinds of environmental problems than free people engaged in peaceful cooperation is the difficulty of identifying relevant causal connections between particular actions and environmental harms. If something like tort law is to be used to compensate victims of harms (as many anarchists suppose it should be) and if the prospect of compensation is expected to play a key role in deterring violators, but if there is no clear way of identifying the actual cause of a harm, will numerous harms go undeterred and uncompensated?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Suppose, for instance, that anthropogenic global warming is occurring and poses a serious hazard to present and future generations. Suppose, too, that we can be reasonably sure that certain classes of human actions contribute in a general way to AGW. It is hard to see how we might identify particular actors as liable for causing particular AGW-related harms, so it’s unclear how an ordinary tort regime would help here.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">There are, I think, at least three non-exclusive possibilities open to us here. First, something like an expanded class action lawsuit could be permitted exclusively in such cases, in which classes of plaintiffs could sue classes of potential perpetrators. It would still be necessary to demonstrate a causal connection between a class of actions and a class of harms, and to demonstrate the extent of the harms. Second, while a full-blown tort regime treating environmental pollution and similar phenomena as common-law nuisances, combined with specific property rights in particular regions and ecosystems now claimed en masse by the state, might not (if the first option just mentioned were ruled out as unjust) provide compensation for past harms, it could perfectly well make possible a thoroughgoing system of restraint on pollutants imposed by newly empowered property owners. Third, a thoroughgoing system of social norms could limit the activity of polluters and secure compensation for victims (especially in cases in which harm was clear but causation impossible clearly to demonstrate, but in which demonstrating causation was required for legal liability. Thus, if there was widespread agreement on the reality and causes of AGW, or any other environmental harm, people freely and peacefully cooperating could identify ways of stopping or slowing the occurrence of the relevant causes and compensating victims.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In short, any good thing the state can do, we can do better. What we do will be done more efficiently, because we can draw on bottom-up knowledge. And we will also spend our resources efficiently because the decision whether to employ them at all will be ours, not that of a group of economic and political elites who can externalize the costs of satisfying their preferences onto ordinary people.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Large-Scale Environmental Disaster in a Stateless Society</span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">How could people in a stateless society deal with challenges like those caused by the BP disaster?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Importance of Property Rights or Their Equivalent</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The first thing to do, clearly, is to assign responsibility—to assign particular places to particular people. This needn’t mean assigning those rights to individuals for commercial exploitation; it just means that something like the Gulf—a place, a region, an ecosystem—needs to be in someone’s hands. Someone might be seeking to develop the region commercially. But someone might just as well be interested in preserving it, planning to limit or entirely prohibit commercial use. Whatever the projected use, an individual, cooperate, partnership, non-profit, or business firm with ownership rights can be expected to care for the owned space.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">To be sure, there’s no guarantee that the allocation of rights to, say, the Gulf (on the basis of active homesteading or prior customary possession or something similar—certainly not on the basis of allocation by the state, which has no title to anything and is all too likely to favor its cronies) will result in its being put to the predetermined use preferred by any group, noncommercial or commercial. There is good reason to believe that, as a general rule, if people own things, they will care for those things, but their objectives may vary (though of course there may be a general consensus that can be enforced through ordinary social norm maintenance mechanisms).</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Just as groups like the Nature Conservancy buy up currently privately held property in the US, they would likely be willing to homestead unowned property in the Gulf. I’d expect a fair amount of this sort of thing, though it would obviously be important to figure out ways of preventing title from being established just by announcement while also not requiring commercial cultivation if that’s not what someone wants.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">And commercial homesteading certainly could and would occur, too. A stateless society would doubtless feature a mixture of both. But, in any case, if there were specific property owners to whom liability would be owed in the case of spills, rather than politicians often indebted precisely to the entities doing the spilling, things would surely be different to some extent, whatever the nature of the property-owners’ interests in the property.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Mechanisms for Protecting the Interests of Nonhuman Sentients</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If your goal is protecting, not geographically fixed spaces, but rather mobile organisms, say, within those spaces (sea turtles, for instance), then enabling anyone to take on a case (for, e.g., a sea turtle) and recoup salary and expenses when successful in court (thus functioning as something like what is today called a “private attorney general”) would do the trick. Whether this option would or should be available would depend, obviously, on the existence of a social consensus regarding non-humans. If most people don’t think sea turtles—individually or collectively—ought to be protected, they won’t be. If they are to be protected, though, it’s easy to envision the kinds of mechanisms a stateless society could use to protect them.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Protection of Ecosystems by Property Owners</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Whether individual owners were responsible, or whether those—for instance—along the shoreline controlled the Gulf (or any other ecosystem) as common property, or whatever, specific owners not in the pockets of oil companies would have to decide to allow drilling to take place, and they could obviously take whatever preventive measures they wanted, including prohibiting drilling, requiring performance bonds, requiring on-site inspections, etc.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Is the State a Desirable Alternative, Even Absent Optimal Protection by Private Owners?</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If particular individuals or groups didn’t control a particular ecosystem, the alternative would seem to be some sort of state-like entity. Any institution capable of forcibly implementing </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">ex ante</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> environmental regulations on unowned property or on the property of others (however property ought to be handled in this and other cases) would seem to be altogether too much like a state, and its creation and maintenance highly dangerous, and likely unjust.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Regulating Ecosystems without the State</span><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If there is a property regime in a given ecosystem, specific owners—individuals, for-profit firms, or non-profits—could preempt or regulate conduct that might be environmentally harmful as they liked (and would be liable if spills moved beyond their property to that of others). And if there is no such regime, one is likely to emerge. The alternative is a state, or something like it; we have no good reason to want that, and a regime of voluntary cooperation in which people use their individual or group property interests to protect ecosystems seems perfectly workable. Environmental challenges can be satisfactorily addressed by a combination of voluntary, peaceful cooperation and robust tort liability. Statist and quasi-statist alternatives are neither necessary nor appealing.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p> <!--EndFragment-->Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-50298168441989607562010-04-29T12:46:00.001-07:002010-04-29T21:11:10.076-07:00Raimondo on “Airtight Borders”<!--StartFragment--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.antiwar.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">AntiWar.Com</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> is arguably the libertarian movement’s single most valuable contribution to political debate around the world. I am proud to be a donor to and occasional copywriter for the site.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">And <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Raimondo">Justin Raimondo</a>’s unapologetically libertarian columns for the site are among its most obvious assets. Justin is consistently hard-hitting, well-informed, and willing to take on sacred cows with little hesitation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his books about </span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Enemy-State-Life-Murray-Rothbard/dp/1573928097/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272571474&sr=1-3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">the life and thought of Murray Rothbard</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> and, even though I’m a leftist, </span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-American-Right-Conservative-Background/dp/1933859601/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272571474&sr=1-1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">the anti-imperialist heritage of American conservatism</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> I’m a big fan of Justin and his work.</span></span></p><meta charset="utf-8"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">But I wish he hadn’t taken the position he did in his recent column, “</span></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZYPa6tI43Q"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">South of the Border</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">,” available </span></span><a href="http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/04/27/south-of-the-border/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. (Raimondo’s AntiWar.Com colleagues respond </span></span><a href="http://original.antiwar.com/anthony-gregory/2010/04/28/south-of-the-border-reconsidered-3/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">.) Addressing the problem of drug-related violence along the US-Mexico border, he fails to discuss the obvious and crucial role of drug prohibition in creating and exacerbating this violence. And he treats the state as a legitimate entity with responsibilities and rightful claims to authority. He writes: “Okay, you might ask, so what’s your solution to the problem, Mr. Smarty-pants? A logical question, with an inescapably logical answer: stop trying to protect Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and start protecting our own border with Mexico. Make the border airtight. In short, start using the resources of the federal government to carry out its one-and-only legitimate function: securing and protecting our borders.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I’m not convinced.</span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">1. In accounting for border violence, Raimondo fails to focus on the central factor—the criminalization of the drug trade. This matters, of course, because criminalization creates and sustains oligopolistic privileges for drug dealers—and for their political cronies in both Mexico and the United States. Those privileges drive up prices dramatically and so boost incentives for people to use violence to obtain drug profits. In addition, by locating the drug industry outside the law, criminalization makes it impossible for people involved in the industry to resolve intra-industry disputes using the legal system and disposes them to resort to violence to do so instead. Further, because the legal system and associated cultural norms frame participants in the industry as criminals, they will be more inclined to behave as criminals are expected to behave: while there is no necessary connection between selling drugs on the one hand and violently attacking persons or property on the other, if both are treated as criminal in nature—and, indeed, if engaging in the drug trade is treated as among the most vile of crimes—it is hardly surprising if violence by participants in the trade is viewed as normal not only outside but also inside the trade.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">It is not a lack of immigration controls that accounts for violence along the border. It is, instead, the existence and operation of violent organizations whose existence and predisposition to violence are inexplicable without the activity of the state.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Replying to a critic, Raimondo says that mafia violence persisted after the end of Prohibition, implying that it is unreasonable to think that drug legalization would end border violence. However, the end of Prohibition was not accompanied by an end to cartelizing laws and regulations that enabled organized crime to profit from involvement in industries other than alcohol production and distribution, including gambling, prostitution, and the creation and sale of non-alcoholic dugs, so the American experience with Prohibition can only provide limited insights into what would happen in the absence of the regulations responsible for birthing and nourishing the drug trade in northern Mexico.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">2. It is certainly true that organizations involved in the drug trade might seek to engage in other sorts of crime were drugs legalized. But Raimondo fails to emphasize that the fact that drug cartels are violent tells us nothing about whether ordinary people should be treated as likely participants in violence. The need to protect peaceful people from cartel-related violence does not justify the actual or threatened use of force against people who are behaving non-violently.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">3. The failure to discriminate between protecting the peaceful from criminal violence and regulating the behavior of those who are themselves peaceful reflects a more deep-seated problem with Raimondo’s column: it treats the state, an organ of institutionalized violence, as legitimate and its claims to govern the territory it claims as reasonable. There are no justifications for doing either. And it is especially odd to find Raimondo, a founder of the </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_radical_caucus"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Libertarian Radical Caucus</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, reasoning this way. An entity that violently asserts and maintains a monopoly over the use of force and the determination of legal rights is not entitled to exist and has no necessary responsibilities.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">4. There is an integral connection between opposition to war and opposition to the power of the state. So there is something odd about serving as editorial director of </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiwar.com"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">AntiWar.Com</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> while favoring state violence. I oppose the statist violence of war because of a deeper opposition to aggression—purposefully attacking their minds and bodies, or infringing on their property when I would resent their doing the same to me. But the force employed to prevent unauthorized immigrants from entering the United States is aggressive, provided their entry takes place on state property, which is properly treated as unowned or as generally accessible, or on the private property of people who are willing to receive them. And this is doubly so of such force used to prevent them from remaining or working here once they have arrived. In such cases, force is unjustly used to impede voluntary, consensual relationships between contracting partners. Opposing the unjust use of force in war is inconsistent with favoring its use to attack peaceful people seeking work or fleeing violence.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The drug trade, not peaceful migration, lies behind border violence. And state action is largely responsible for the violent quality of the drug trade. The state has no right to exist and no legitimate function. And opposition to state violence in war leads naturally to opposition to state violence more generally, including state violence used to repel or eject peaceful migrants or to penalize them for seeking work or others for providing them with work. Raimondo’s call for “airtight” border controls is both unnecessary and unjust.</span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7257263697107031621.post-9187225137192885072010-04-26T21:11:00.000-07:002010-04-27T06:48:03.133-07:00More on Machan<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Even as <a href="http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/machan-on-benefit-corporations.html">I beg to differ</a> with Tibor Machan regarding benefit corporations, I think he's done quite a fine job of responding to Ted Honderich's charge that a libertarian society would be morally abominable </span><a href="http://tibormachan.rationalreview.com/2010/04/column-on-anti-libertarian-point-refuted/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">In essence, Honderich moves much too quickly from the claim that, in a libertarian society, it would not be viewed as just for the state (or any other entity) to take responsibility for redistributing income to economically vulnerable people to the conclusion that no one would in such a society would acknowledge any moral obligation to redistribute income to economically vulnerable people. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the impermissibility of the use of force here would seem trivial and irrelevant to Honderich, an occasional </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Humanity-Inquiries-Political-Philosophy/dp/074532133X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272341734&sr=1-5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">apologist for political violence</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">. It is disappointing, however, that Honderich, a capable philosopher, can’t see the difference between “I am morally obligated to perform action action A (or one of a class of actions of which A is a member)” and “Physical force may be used to compel me to perform action A.” Machan seems to me to be correct that</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">it is quite often morally wrong for many who know of such a case [of great deprivation] to fail to provide help. (If, however, they had more vital goals to pursue, say attending to their children’s medical needs, this wouldn’t be so.) Lack of generosity, compassion, or support for those who deserve it would be morally wrong. Indeed, it could well be true of many that they ought to help anyone in such dire straits and very wrong for them not to do so.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">I would only add that responding to economic vulnerability in a stateless society is not just a matter of personal solidarity, valuable as this is, but also of ending privileges that make and keep some people poor and of effecting reparations for past acts of large-scale theft and land engrossment.</p> <!--EndFragment--> </span></div>Gary Chartierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687278491211390956noreply@blogger.com2