Polycentric Order

What the Tea Party Needs to Hear

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hayes) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:19:00 +0000

The Tea- Party has finally come to Comanche County. And so I suppose this is my cue to finally get involved. But before I do I would like to address a few things.

In the first place its important to recognize that not all of the “founding fathers” were patriots. There was quite a large contingency of men during those formative years that were not in favor of liberty for mankind, nor for low taxation, nor for a limited government. Ben Franklin at one point put fourth the idea of doing away with the states entirely and having a single central government to rule the entire country. Hamilton envisioned an American empire based off the British Empire. And George Washington after Fighting a war over taxes on tea, was ready to fight a war against his own people who were rebelling over his unjust tax on whiskey. On the other side there were principled men, who were of the opinion that what London was doing wasn’t right, and it wouldn’t be right even if it were our government that did it. George Mason, and Patrick Henry, chief among them, campaigned against the Ratification of the Constitution in Virginia, and were instrumental in the drafting of the Bill of Rights, without which, the constitution would be clearly seen for what it is, the Charter of a centralized, overbearing, intrusive and unjust centralized government.

The Constitution is not holy, it was not written by the finger of God on stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sini by Washington! the men who voted for it, were not founding fathers, but traitors to the revolution. Its justification, the very excuse for a stronger centralized government was to beat the british and gain our independence, they said the Articles were not strong enough. And if we lived in Ray Bradbury’s novel, we might accept this as truth, but the fact is that the King signed a peace treaty with the 13 colonies and Vermont four years before the constitution was ratified. Turns out the constitution was entirely unnecessary. Yet there was a silver lining, in that dark our. The Anti Federalist, those against a strong centralized government gave us the bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the constitution.

They were not the founding fathers, that is they had very little to do with establishing the government that we know today, instead I like to call them Revolutionaries. The Washington’s and the Hamilton’s wanted freedom from the british only to Found their own British system here in America, The Revolutionaries, wanted a real Revolution, to get out from under the yoke of the centralized government of England and to live free, not to “found” anything!

Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots would be shocked to know that millions of school children across this land pledge allegiance to the federal government. His idea of our republic was one of men, not of government. Imagine, that in those days, even eighty years later, a fellow living in a relatively rural area such as ours would likely live his entire life without seeing a federal employee except the USPS worker who brought his mail. (the USPS owes its origins to Franklin who again wanted the british system transplanted into America, the British established a government post office for the sole task of reading private letters of its subjects in order to sniff out sedition.) What has the federal government got to do with me?

The federal government is the servant of the states and of the people, thus it seems backwards, even Orwellian that the servant should demand allegiance from its master! How is it conceivable that a sovereign should pledge allegiance to his servant? It was only in the warped and twisted mind of a socialist named Francis Bellemy that this would be the case. He Authored the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. His cousin wrote a socialist utopia novel entitled Looking backwards, assuming that shortly after 1888 America became socialists and imagining what the world would look like in the year 2000. Of course he and his cousin knew that socialism could never be realized until the State were supreme, and to that end Francis wrote the Pledge in order to reinforce that idea, that the central government demanded our allegiance over all other things and in all areas of life, the phrase liberty and justice was either meant as in “social liberty and justice” or just as ploy to make it more palatable to the masses.

I’ve seen on t.v., not on my own mind you, since I don’t have enough loose money to spend on FCC filtered media, that the United States flag is waved at Tea Party rallies across America. I promise you this, I will never be seen doing so. I am told that that is my flag and that I should love it. I can not muster this love. That is the flag flown outside the IRS building, where they count my hard earned money I’ve worked for. That is the flag flown outside of the FCC building where they do everything they can to filter the information that I am able to take in. That is the flag flown outside the Human Services building where they redistribute our money to those unwilling to work, and in the case where the individual is unable to work, they usurp one of the roles of the Church and the community. The flag flown outside the Social Security Administration building that takes your money for old age, but that you will most likely not see. It is the flag that is flown outside the Federal Education Department that tries to teach our children that the states are mere provinces of the federal government and that Lincoln saved the country.

He did not save the country, he saved the federal government, the country is the church houses, neighbors, businesses, friends and family, and even the landscape that you see everyday. The government is the monopoly apparatus of compulsion and violence that rules over the country. Thus I elect to fly the Gadsden Flag, the true American Flag, not the United States Government flag.

But let me touch more on Lincoln. You were taught in school that he saved the country, as I mentioned what he really did was save the American Empire. He a hero not just to the likes of George W. Bush and Obama, but was first the hero of Bismarck, Hitler, Karl Marx, and Stalin. Why? Because he did everything in his power, and even things outside of his power to retain control over people who wished to have their own government, be self ruling, and be left alone. He instituted a central bank, which created money out of thin air, the forerunner to the Federal Reserve today. It was under him that the income tax was first levied on Americans, a tax so vile it would make Patrick Henry cry out for british rule again, if not lead him to suicide. When a man named Vandingham in Ohio, a former congressman, at a rally spoke out against the income tax, Lincoln had him arrested without a warrant and deported to the South. Upon hearing this Chief Justice Tanney wrote the president a letter, rebuking him, Lincoln’s response was to issue an arrest warrant for Tanney himself (no one executed the warrant). He shutdown hundreds of newspapers in New York City and across the North. He forcibly kept the Maryland state legislature from convening. He did nothing to reign in his generals who stole from southerners, even those who wanted nothing to do with the war one way or another, or when they burned civilian homes and businesses, even churches across the South. Prior to lincoln the states had on occasion instituted drafts, but Lincoln was the first to successfully institute a national draft. denying men of their liberty, and in many cases ultimately their lives in order to deny other men their freedom. And while we are on the topic of freedom, the most famous and least read document must be the Emancipation Proclamation. The government schools teach us that Lincoln freed the slaves, in fact it freed not a one. The document only had effect, or only claimed to have effect, where the federal government had no control. Whole states were exempted, those that remained loyal to the federal government, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, the capitol city itself, Delaware along with the 67 counties of Virginia that later became West Virginia. Even the places where the federal army had taken control of like parts of Tennessee were purposefully omitted from the Emancipation Proclamation. It was nothing more than a cheap political trick, the document was sent out across Europe in the hopes of casting the war as one over slavery in order to keep European powers from intervening on the side of self determination.

I mention this history to bring to light whats real, what is true. If we were a football team playing a game perhaps we could afford to aspire to a fictional hero. But the stakes are far to high here. Know your history. He who controls the past controls the present, and right now the past and the present is controlled by those who see the government not as the servant of the people, but the other way around.

And now we are left with three topics that, were it not for Lincoln, we might not have to discuss, taxation, the military, and the federal reserve.

If prostitution is the oldest profession known to the world, taxation is without a doubt the second oldest. Taxation is the extortion of money through the threat, or actual use of violence. when it is done by a gang, or by a common criminal, it is known as theft, or extortion, but when it is done by the most powerful gang in the land, and the strongest criminals it is called taxation. Go. Read Common Sense by Thomas Paine. He articulates far better than I ever could how the King traces his lineage not to some saint appointed by God, but to William the Bastard, a Norman leading a band of criminals onto the British Isle to subjugate the Anglo-Saxons to his own rule, to kill their men, ravage their women, enslave their children, and deprive their remaining descendants of their land, and their money. But for the Thomas Paines of today, there is no king, instead, we have democracy. where there is not one man, that might be poisoned beheaded or overthrown, but where there are 150 million men and women who subject the other half to their rule. I implore you, love liberty, and do not let your loyalty to liberty be subdued because it is a whole population that taxes you rather than a solitary king. Hold the democracy to the same standard that you would apply to the monarchy. If we were under a king today with the laws and regulations and restrictions, not to mention taxes that are imposed on us, there would be revolution. but because it is a democracy and not a king, this humble gathering reflects all of the outrage present in Comanche County! Taxation is theft. This is what Henry Lightfoot Lee referred to when he said “Government is a necessary evil.” he said that it was evil. evil is the chief adjective in the sentence, necessary only modifies evil. And let me add that he said necessary because he did not have sufficient faith in the free market to leave necessary out. But I will save this topic for another time. my complaint is not that we are taxed to Heavily by D.C., but that we are taxed at all! Let me digress back to the founders and the revolutionaries once again, Ben Franklin suggested that, since we were being taxed without representation, that we send representatives to London, to the house of Commons that we would be represented. Had his advice been followed we would never have gained our independence, nor thrown off England’s oppressive taxes. But the taxes weren’t only oppressive they were unjust, and even if we had sent men to London, they would have remained unjust, for what the Revolutionaries meant when they cried out against “taxation without representation” was not that we should be represented in the central government thousands of miles away, but that the assembly in Massachusetts had not approved the taxes that were levied on them. That the house of Burgesses had not approved the tax. The revolutionaries saw their own local body as their representatives, not some would be out of touch politician sent to the capital of the central government, as likely as not to get caught up in all kinds of scandals and self gratifying political deals. Now you may ask, without taxes how would we fund the government? This we can save for another time, but for now let me just ask just how much government exactly do you want to have? The fact is, if we were to eliminate the entire tax code, and to only allow our tariffs to stay in force, we would still be able to fund a government of the size that we had when Clinton left office. And even then, for those of you who remember, wasn’t the government then to big to bear?

Again let me turn back to history, we know why the patriots resorted to arms, over taxation, but what was it that sparked the taxation of the American colonies in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s? What caused the British government to resort to the Townsend Acts, the Stamp Act, the Navigation Acts? It was nothing else but the expenses incurred by the British Military and the recent war with the French. Understand I am not unsympathetic to those who have loved ones in the military, or those who have made sacrifices for what they thought was liberty. But the same case then is before us now. The British started a war, and sent soldiers to North America in order to “protect us from the French and the” allegedly “savage indians.” But did we need protecting? it seems that we had been doing quite well on our own for the previous century. but they started a war again for our defense and then want us to pay for it. The patriots knew it was nonsense, We didn’t need defending from the central government, we could defend ourselves just fine. In fact the war was quite unnecessary and caused great hardships the the families and the commerce of the colonies. To add insult to injury, they decided to tax us for it. Things are not so different today. The federal government has instigated revolutions, helped to put down other revolutions, and performed coups all over the world until finally someone attacked us, they use this to start a war, and then tax us in order to pay for it. We spend more on our military today than the next 25 countries combined. Now where does this money come from except from taxes? Any one who is truly against large government must also be against a large standing army. Remember that the Military is also part of the government and a very expensive branch of it.

Continuing on the military thread I have 2 points to make one historical, the other economical. For those interested in history, in Roman history in particular, no question draws more debate than that of “When did Rome begin to fall?” Some say with the Rise of Caesar, I say that was the end. I say the beginning came in 396 B.C. during an otherwise forgotten battle only 12 miles from Rome. The Siege of Veii was taking longer than expected, and the men were anxious to go back home to their farms, their jobs, and their families. They could not afford to fight through the harvest and into winter. So the Senate decided to pay the soldiers. From that point on, Roman men no longer fought solely for their home, or for “The Gory of Rome” as flawed as that cause was, but also for a paycheck. Finally the time came when the soldiers didn’t fight at all for Rome, but only for a paycheck. This should bother you. And my response to the question, how then will the soldiers be provided for, I say, that if you require a paycheck to defend your home and your family, you are not a man! Of course fighting on another continent isn’t exactly defending your family, and so I suppose we wouldn’t be in the wars we are in today.

On to the economic aspect. We currently view welfare as a person getting a check to buy food and pay the rent while he sits at home with the A/C running and watches Jerry Springer. This is certainly welfare, but it would be no less welfare if we gave him a check for digging a hole on the odd days of the month and filling it back in on the even days. A job is not just something to do, but something that needs to be done. Whether or not it is something that needs to be done is determined by the free will of people as reflected in the free market. Clearly no one will pay any amount of money to have a hole dug one day only to have it filled back in the next, and so this is welfare. The truth of the matter is, unless a job is done, and the wages for that job are agreed upon in the open and free market, it is nothing short of welfare. Given that the military is not hired on the free market, it must be concluded then that those in the military, and indeed all government employees are welfare recipients. Now you know how much of a drain on the economy and on your own pockets the welfare system is, but the same is true of our military system. instead of holding jobs that contribute to the betterment of the lives of others, we have over a million men and women receiving checks to fight wars and stir up even more trouble for ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan, or at best sitting in motor pools smoking cigarettes in over 50 other countries around the world. How much richer would we be, how much better off would we be, how much freeer would we be if those million men and women were working at jobs contributing to the economy rather than being paid out of stolen money? Jefferson said that A standing army was one of the greatest threats to a free people. most people take that to mean that the army would come under the control of some tyrant like Caesar or Lincoln, but even without this occurring our liberty is put in peril by its economic implications.

Finally we come to the central bank, or the Federal Reserve as it is known today. You see if taxes were the sole means in which to pay for the military, everyone here, infact everyone across the country would be as opposed to the government military as Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were. but the Federal Government came up with a trick, they would create a central bank that could just print money out of thin air. This way taxes could stay low (relative to what they would be if taxes were the only way to pay for things) which is good for getting votes, but they could still fund the military, and whatever projects, schools, roads, bridges, everything from NASA to the Navy, and Welfare to Warfare. But of course printing money is in fact a tax, it is a hidden tax. You all have heard of supply and demand, when there is a greater supply of a commodity then the price for it goes down, from cars to cereal this is the case. But few stop to ponder its validity when its applied to money itself. Turns out it still holds. the more dollars their are, the less purchasing power each dollar has. Economists on t.v. talk as if rising prices are inflation, but the fact is that inflation refers to the inflation of the money supply. Meaning that more dollars have been printed. This, as I’ve said leads to prices going up. Many complain that we are taxed when we earn money, and taxed when we spend it, but because of the Federal Reserve, we are also taxed if we save it! Because for every dollar printed, the dollars you have in the bank, and even the ones under your mattress loose in value. you will be able to afford less, to buy less with a dollar 5 years from now as you can today. Democrats respond to this problem with minimum wage laws, and Republicans ignore it. but the fact is that rising prices are only a symptom of a greater problem. The Fed! Were we to be on a gold standard, if gold were money today, You wouldn’t have to hire a wall street genius to invest your money. Instead of money loosing its value because its constantly being printed, your money would gain value, because the amount of gold in circulation would rise, due to mining, but only marginally so, since mining cost much more than a printing press, and relative to the population and increase in both capital and consumable goods it would actually decline. Supply and demand, the supply increasing slightly while demand increasing significantly over time, would cause the purchasing price of your money to increase over time, you would only need to have a secure safe in your own home to have a reliable retirement account. And even those getting paid the minimum wage, wouldn’t need a real raise, since the dollar as defined (today as 1/1250th of an ounce of gold) would increase in value slowly over time. giving the person at $7.25 an hour a slight real raise gradually over time.

This concludes every topic I wish to cover insofar as an outline of my core goals and values are concerned. Now let me turn to the area of strategy. Its said that Socialists concern themselves 90% with how to implement their programs and only 10% with how their ideas will actually work. While Libertarians spend 90% of their time thinking of how a libertarian society would work and what is wrong with the state, and only 10% of their time thinking about how to implement their programs. If there were a 12 step program on how to implement Libertarian policies, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what steps 2 through 12 would be. but I can tell you what step one would be. To work on Theory. What do we stand for? (if I haven’t said it explicitly yet, Life, Liberty, and Property. What does and what does not warrant violence? For this movement to be successful, we must be well read. and be educated. We had a revolution here, and it was successful, I attribute that success to the level of education and the ideological purity of the revolutionaries. Shortly thereafter, the French had a revolution, it started off strong, and it looked like it would be successful. but the French were just upset with the king. they had not read John Locke, nor John Trenchard, nor Thomas Gordon, nor John Wilkes, nor John Lillburne. And at the end of the day the French Revolution failed. They ended up with blood running in the street, starvation, conscription, the reign of terror, and an Emperor even worse than the king they had killed.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the vanguard, the elite, the best of the best when it comes to resisting governmental tyranny. It is primarily an economic institution, which I can not over emphasize the importance of understanding economics. As easy as it is for you and I to understand the depravation of Liberty under Socialism, many will only understand the unfeasibility of Socialism as an economic system. Ludwig von Mises, Systematically refuted Socialism as a system of production in 1927 in a time when everyone thought it was the wave of the future. The institute is named in his honor. His best student Murray N. Rothbard was the founder, he was also the founder of the Cato Institute, but it of course what hijacked out from under him. Rothbard wrote many books, What has the Government Done to Our Money? and The Case against the Fed are both must reads dealing with... Money. He also wrote Conceived in Liberty a history of the colonies from their planting until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. and the single work that needs to be read by everyone here before you read anything else. The Ethics of Liberty. the first 4 or 5 chapters being crucial to establishing a solid basis for a philosophy of Liberty.

The Mises institute, online at www.mises.org has over 6 TBs of data dedicated to accurate history, sound economics, and Liberty available for free. They have hundreds of books for sale, and dozens for free in PDF, .epub, and on audio that you can download for free either on their site or on itunes, under mises university along with plenty of speeches, covering everything from anti trust laws, to intellectual property laws, and the history of Rome, to the history of WWII.

Being in the moment, it is to soon to tell, but I can tell this much, unless we dedicate ourselves to liberty, and to being educated, this movement will at best fizzle, and at worst end up like the French Revolution.
Thank you for your time.

Why the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is "Centrist"

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:17:00 +0000

I was recently cited as claiming that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a "centrist" organization. This can be portrayed as either a good or bad thing depending on the context. I don't recall any particular writing in which I explicitly said this, but I have made statements to this effect before. Well, I stand by such a statement and would like to explain what I mean by it. This requires me to unpack what the term "centrist" brings to mind for me.

The term "centrist" has the following possible connotations for me:

1. Fusionism. By fusionism I refer to eclectic philosophies that engage in a synthesis of a variety of elements, some of which may be commonly thought of as being in opposition to each other. Fusionism is ideological integration. Various people within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left definitely have certain fusionist tendencies, which involves attempts at reconciling advocacy for free markets with the concerns often associated with social anarchism. In short, the fusionism within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is a matter of reconciliation between the ideas of "market anarchism" and "libertarian socialism". Relative to hardcore adherants of either side of that divide, such reconciliation is "somewhere in between".

2. Pluralism. By pluralism I refer to a certain sense of tolerance or inclusiveness towards a wide scope of different flavors and models. While fusionism is a deliberate mixing of different elements into one thing, pluralism is simply an open attitude towards the co-existence of different elements. Pluralism may be thought of as anti-monistic, I.E. opposed to the idea of a singular system. Certain people within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left seem to have pluralist tendencies. This may involve envisioning different libertarian ideologies on a spectrum of preferences that are all capable of co-existing in a broad framework of freedom.

3. Opportunism. Centrism also can have certain associations with opportunism. In the cliche context of electoral politics, this may be manifested as politicians who "blow in the wind" with no real consistency, changing positions whenever it benefits them the most or happens to be what is popular at the moment. It can also take the form of the exploitation of semantic ambiguity for the purpose of selling certain ideas in a more favorable way to people. While I definitely would not attack the Alliance of the Libertarian Left as being dishonest, there are certain people or at least some things that certain people have written that come off as oppurtunistic to me. This may involve trying to sell anarcho-capitalism with leftist rhetoric.

When the matter is put in these terms, I definitely think that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left tends to be "centrist", although this means that it is diverse precisely because of the more pluralist and fusionist tendencies. It cannot be pinned down to any particular libertarian or anarchist philosophy. It contains people who have positions that could be considered ambiguous or eclectic relative to the "partisan" options usually presented and people who are open to a fairly wide variety of views. Other than a website with a statement that lists off a variety of sub-categories and amounts to the advocacy of opposition to cultural authoritarianism, it really has no official platform.

Relative to the standards of your typical social anarchist, especially anarcho-communists, many of the people in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left are not likely to be viewed as "hard left", and this is probably because of its overlap with free market libertarian philosophy. And when it comes to contentions over things like property, it seems to be split or at least have a multitude of positions on the matter. There are some people in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left who, in my view, are largely still clinging to the ideas of the libertarian right or at least are still in what could be considered a transitory stage in which they are exploring the anarchist left. Hence, by certain standards, at least certain elements within the ALLiance could be considered kind of "soft" or lacking much leftist substance.

On the other hand, it could be said that many of the members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left are heretics from the anarcho-capitalist movement, ex-anarcho-capitalists or post-anarcho-capitalists who have moved "leftward" in some way. Also, the emphasis on "thick libertarianism" with a left-wing flavor, particularly as introduced by Charles Johnson, definitely strengthens its leftist credentials. The Alliance of the Libertarian Left is not only reconciliationist in character, but also deviationist. Many of its members are deviants from standard American libertarianism, some of whom have substantive objections to anarcho-capitalism.

I hope that this justifies my claim that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left is "centrist", both in positive and negative terms. I think that synthesis views can be a good thing and consider myself to have one, and pluralism is something that I think is a good thing when in its proper context. At the same time, I reject the attempt to obfuscate fundamental irreconcilable differences through the use of rhetoric and I have some trouble with ideilogies that may be too eclectic in some ways. In either case, this is my honest accessment of the group as one who considers myself to be a member of it.

Does Freedom Have A Social Context?

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:57:00 +0000

Is it really the case that freedom is a separable factor from the kind of social atmosphere in which people exist? I think not. The particular conditions within a society is linked with people's capacity to independently make decisions about their own lives. This includes the possibility of mobility and the structural landscape of power. A social context in which there is a significant disparity of power, including the kind of power that comes with ownership and wealth, functions as a limit on freedom in that it is more susceptible to certain consequences.

A social hierarchy is what occurs when disparities of power are institutionalized and used to limit the freedom of certain people. What this entails, in effect, is that those in positions of power have the most freedom, while those who are in a subordinate or dependant position relative to such power structures have the least freedom. While freedom might not be something that is quantifiable in the sense of mathematical exactitude, it is relative to the particular circumstances that would allow an individual to exercise their faculties and live without appeal to a command structure. When power is centralized or densely concentrated, a breeding ground for authoritarianism is in place.

When the alternative to subordination to authority requires a mobile maneuver and a sacrifice of well-being, to the point where there really is no viable alternative at all or the only alternatives are just subordination to another authority, people aren't really free in the social context. They are systematically prevented from being free by the circumstances of the environment. The possibility of full consent is precluded. At best, they acquiesce for practical reasons. And it is most definitely not simply "nature", some sort of inherent necessity at the level of a law of physics, that causes them to be unfree. The kind of environment in question is a social one having to do with the particular distribution of power.

It is true that a position of power is not absolutely or inherently authoritarian, in the sense that someone can refrain from exercising it or using it to impose an institutional monopoly. But it is also true that the circumstance opens up the possibility of this and that authoritarian consequences are ultimately more likely to occur when power is concentrated. For example, a society in which the economic structure of power is plutocratic or one in which the distribution of land is feudal, is logically compatible with and an apt atmosphere for authoritarianism. The people who exclusively hold such massive amounts of power are in a better-suited position to control other people.

This is part of why I really don't understand certain proclamations that some people make to the effect of saying that particular socio-economic and cultural circumstances are effectively irrelevant "so long as everyone is free", or worse, "so long as I'm free". This has also been expressed in the form of a "consequences be damned" mentality. But the problem is that this presumes the two to be absolutely separable. To be sure, perhaps it is possible for a society to at least nominally be free and yet have a sick culture or be stricken with poverty. But aside from the fact that there would still be a reason for opposing a sick culture and mass-poverty in and of themselves, the idea that such an atmosphere can last without internal tensions causing it to be unfree strikes me as ridiculous.

I would say that this kind of "freedom" doesn't amount to much if it ultimately just means that most people live in a horrible socio-economic atmosphere or that society ghettoizes itself into fiefdoms. Such conditions are undesirable regardless of any nominal "freedom" that comes along with them. To have no real concern about the actual condition of people's lives in the name of "freedom" seems to turn freedom into a fairly useless abstraction, while reflecting what could frankly be called psychological bankruptcy and a low moral character. I would question the character of anyone that just said "screw society, as long as I'm left alone" and meant that plainly. It seems like more of an anti-social streak than a well thought out philosophy of freedom.

Healthy social atmospheres are desirable both for their own sake and in the sense that they integrate with freedom. It could be said that freedom is a prerequisite for a healthy social atmosphere and it could also be said that a healthy social atmosphere is a prerequisite for freedom. They are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are robbed of substance without each other. This is a more holistic view. It is also a more society-based view, because I'm insisting on freedom and society as being reconcilable and mutually dependant. A philosophy that openly (although sometimes not-so-openly) says "down with society" in its one-eyed zeal to respect some narrow set of principles such as property rights is doomed from the start.

Libertarianism and Segregation

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:11:00 +0000

Recently there has been some uproar over some statements from Ron Paul's son Rand Paul (who, IMO, is a fairly wishy-washy conservative Republican that isn't as radical as his father) to the effect of a defense of segregation. This has sparked a little bit of resurging talk among libertarians about the question. I'd like to share some of my thoughts about this in general rather than specifically in reference to Rand Paul and his controversy.

For libertarians, to the extent that there is something that can be called a defense of segregation, it is generally argued for on the more "impartial" grounds of property rights. The arguement generally goes something like this: despite the fact that we may be personally opposed to segregation, it is justified insofar as it is a manifestation of the right of property owners to exclude who they want from their property. Thus, in principle, it is legally permissible for both home owners and buisiness owners to adopt a policy of segregation (whether it be racial, religious, or whatever). The alternative is "forced association", which is unlibertarian.

At least at the surface level, it appears impossible for any libertarian to disagree with this. By the very least, a libertarian qua libertarian cannot condone politically institutionalized integration in the sense of a universalized legal obligation to be inclusive towards certain groups. But I think that once one gets more specific about what we are really talking about, complications emerge. For one thing, the libertarian qua libertarian must at a minimum be equally opposed to politically institutionalized segregation, and the kind of segregation that existed en mass before the civil rights movement most certainly wasn't simply a matter of the property rights of citizens. It was a matter of state law and land.

One route in which certain claims to legitimate segregation can be questioned is from the perspective of justified property titles in the first place. We could start with the most obvious case. If one doesn't recognize the state itself as having a legitimate title, then the state can not have a right to discriminate. This delegitimizes all segregation relative to state-controlled land. We could go further than this too. To the extent that the state upholds "private" titles that aren't legitimate, then a right to discriminate is delegitimized in those cases as well. This level of analysis (justified title) by itself already begins to whittle away at the tenability of certain property-based justifications for segregation, although it does not cover all bases.

There is also some ambiguity more generally in the position supporting property rights. The home is often used as an analogy to demonstrate the normalcy of such levels of exclusion, but this feels like a false analogy when we are talking about something much more systematic or at larger scales such as an entire community. The larger the land mass that is being talked about is, and the more disconnected the property claim in question is from use, the more that this defense seems ridiculous and devolves into institutional segregation anyways. It becomes a defense of "covenants" (which, in this case, is little more than a code word for community-wide laws) that require every owner in a community to be exclusive in a particular way. In short, we end up with something rather state-like.

We could go further than this. Why is "free association" necessarily relative to something territorial? Indeed, there seems to be some tension here between the restrictions of absolutely respecting territorial boundaries and upholding people's personal freedom. In theory, territorialist notions of property rights (coupled with the expansion of territorial claims in a scarce world) can amount to a defense of excluding someone from the possibility of having any rights at all, since you effectively have to either own land or be invited on to someone else's land in order to occupy a given space and associate freely. This gets us into much more general questions, but it does relate to segregation: there is good reason for believing that a rigidly territorially segregated society is inherently unfree.

One of the last ditch efforts that some libertarians make to defend segregation is essentially to proclaim that it is the natural order for people to separate, as something that will inherently happen to a significant degree due to the innate tendencies of groups. I believe this position to be philosophically indefensible. Not only does it begin to cross over into the positive beliefs of certain types of racists, but it is based on bankrupt notion of "human nature" and a tunnel-visioned level of analysis that is only capable of seeing the matter through the lens of things like biology and biological metaphors. It is essentially "innatism" applied to a particular segment of human experience and then extrapolated to the level of a general natural law.

There is more that I can say about this, but this functions as a rough outline of some of the reasons I have for thinking that libertarians should be anti-segregation, not just as an optional personal preference on the side but as a logically connected part of a libertarian social philosophy.

The Usefulness of a Left/Right Distinction

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:48:00 +0000

I'd like to defend the proposition that a left/right distinction is useful even for libertarians, although the proposition does have some qualifications.

There is a sense in which it may make sense to say that libertarians transcend the left/right dichotomy at least in the more mainstream and common way that it is presented, in terms of the over simplistic choice between contemporary liberalism and conservatism. Libertarians do not fall neatly into such boxes. Libertarianism could be presented as either synthesizing elements that are typically associated with both or as falling outside of the paradigm because it represents two sides of the same statist coin that libertarians oppose. When the dichotomy is presented in such terms, then perhaps libertarians can claim to be unique.

But it may also be the case that reducing everything to a new dichotomy of statist vs. non-statist or anti-statist can obfuscate the details of political ideologies. One reason for this is that precisely what counts as statist and non-statist may be defined in a way that is contingent on certain norms that are in dispute. Precisely what norms are sufficient for a stateless society to arise and sustainably function is debatable at least on consequentialist grounds. Libertarians sometimes draw different conclusions about what common principles imply. Simply saying that it's about aggression, while doing this in a way that presumes ones own particular take on things, doesn't seem to take the multitude of positions at play into account.

It also isn't clear by any means that all libertarians have completely done away with baggage that can be traced back to the more common left/right dichotomy. People come into libertarianism from different angles, and this may influence what libertarianism means to them. Libertarians do not exist in a vacuum with respect to historical context and contemporary political ideologies. There are distinctions as to how various libertarians align themselves relative to other political groups and what they distinguish as being compatible and incompatible with the core philosophy. This alone is part of precisely why there is inter-libertarian factionalism.

Once one digs into the meat of political philosophy at a broader level, a vast multitude of particular positions on multiple spectrums can emerge. This includes views on social authority, property, the distribution of resources, organizational structure, cultural norms, and so on. In light of more detailed questions such as this, the simple and perhaps vague reduction of political philosophy to "aggression" and "government" doesn't seem to tell us very much by itself, especially when one takes into account the ways in which these different spectrums may overlap or be integrated by people. I suspect that a "plumbline", in the sense of a political philosophy that is genuinely consistently "thin", simply doesn't exist.

A left/right distinction, although things obviously get much more specific than these two terms, is useful insofar as the integrated social philosophies of particular libertarians are inevitably colored by different values or norms in a way that forms distinct views that simply cannot be reduced to a vaguely defined opposition to aggression or the state. Once one begins to disambiguate that, "thickness" of some sort is already at least implicitly entering the picture. The moment that one forms a libertarian philosophy that excludes certain norms from compatibility or defines freedom in specific terms, the alleged "neutrality" of libertarianism begins to dissolve. No libertarian sincerely maintains a neutral standpoint in practise. At best, this is a self-deception.

What a left/right distinction in a libertarian context may signify are varieties of gradiation in terms of how things like more general social views, property norms, and economic goals interlock in an overall ideological system. On a property spectrum, for example, hardcore propertarians are on the far right and communists are on the far left. On an economics spectrum, people who explicitly favor hierarchical and oligarchic structures are to the right of people who put an emphasis on a more equitable distribution of resources and flatter organizational structures. On a social spectrum, people who strongly question traditional social authority could be said to be to the left of those that are indifferent or supportive of it. These are real tendencies, and "left" and "right" are the most convenient and most-likely-to-be-understood terms for them.

The claim that these views are irrelevant seems to obfuscate the way in which "libertarianism" is effected by them. It is necessary to take such things into account if one wants to accurately consider the various ideas that float in and out of "libertarian" circles. While the desire for libertarianism to be unique is understandable at a certain level, it is not unique in a sense that is completely detached from relations with "other" ideas. Once such ideas are considered, this is the context in which a left/right distinction understandably continues to be a question for libertarians, even if some people want to avoid the terminology.

What Is Mutualism?

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:36:00 +0000

To be honest, while mutualism is a term that I've come to adopt for myself, it isn't entirely clear to me what mutualism is. What I mean by this is that it seems hard to identify an essential feature that all of the people who call themselves mutualists share in common. The positions currently being advocated under the title of mutualism seem to run the gamut from modified or modernized individualist anarchism (Kevin Carson) to a subtle neo-Proudhonian notion and "the anarchism of approximations" (Shawn Wilbur) to a more hardcore kind of libertarian socialism that thinks the other mutualists largely sound like anarcho-capitalists or make too many concessions to property (Francios Tremblay).

There certainly is a history of mutualism going back to classic thinkers such as P.J. Proudhon and W.B. Greene, but no self-proclaimed mutualist that I know of really is a strict adherent to the ideas of such people (and I don't mean to imply that one necessarily should be). The meaning attached to mutualism seems to be at least somewhat different for many people in a contemporary context, in contrast with its 19th century roots. This may partially be due to changes in economic theory. It also may be a matter of the ideological background or history of the people that have become interested in mutualism, which causes there to be market and social anarchist spins on mutualism and interpretations of Proudhon.

It is true that there are certain reoccurring themes that tend to be associated with mutualism, such as an occupation and use standard of ownership, the cost principle, reciprocity, a focus on synthesizing equality and liberty, the antinomy of the individual and society, and so on. Yet some of these themes seem to fall under the general umbrella of the libertarian left, and one would think that mutualism is more specific than that. Is mutualism "free market anti-capitalism"? Well, there seems to be a spectrum of positions among the people adopting that kind of rhetoric, some of which are more substantive than others. Is mutualism a form of libertarian socialism? Well, some of the libertarian socialists I've encountered would scoff at the more market-oriented ideas that are called mutualism.

One thing that does seem to at least vaguely be common to people that consider themselves mutualists is that they have a sort of nuanced position or even a synthesis that has the feeling of being neither anarcho-capitalism or something that would be acceptable in the more hardcore platforms of social anarchism, as a sort of middle ground that doesn't fit neatly into the boxes of various party lines or dogmas. There does appear to be certain themes of irreducible complexity and plays of apparent opposites that resolve or dissolve at some point in the play of concepts. The term mutualism itself seems to suggest synthesis, although this may be a superficial mental association on my part.

I suppose part of the confusion revolves around conflict between different interpretations. Mutualism has been portrayed as anything from fairly standard free market libertarianism with somewhat softened property norms and a different take on the implications of Austrian economics to an explicitly libertarian socialist creed with a prescriptive labor theory of value that calls for the absolute abolition of all profit, rent, and interest. This gets into tensions between descriptive and prescriptive formulations, different ideas on property, and varying degrees of emphasis on markets. With such considerations in mind, it should be no wonder that mutualism doesn't necessarily have a completely clear identity.

When I advocate my own ideas, I generally do not express them as being "the mutualist creed". They are the ideas of me as an individual, and they may or may not have anything explicitly to do with mutualism qua mutualism. But what does tend to bind me to the term, to the extent that could be said to be bound by it, is simply the extent to which I have ideas in common with other people who are called mutualists. I also adopt the term in the context of resonations with P.J. Proudhon. I have no particular problem using the term for myself, despite what seems to be the somewhat fragmented and approximate meanings that it conjures. I would just avoid reducing myself to it, which meshes with my opposition to reductionism in general.

Ultimately, I guess I would like to highlight the ambiguity that sometimes lurks behind rather obscure political labels such as "mutualism". From a certain perspective, this could be portrayed as a good thing in the sense that it stops it from hardening into a dogma. At the same time, the desire for clarity is understandable and perhaps contemporary mutualists should do a better job of hashing out exactly what it is that makes mutualism unique. Mutualism certainly seems to be unique, and that's part of the value I see in it. I'd be interested to see what various self-proclaimed mutualists have to say about this.

The Public Face of Libertarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:49:00 +0000

The public face of libertarianism, particularly in America, is essentially paleoconservatism or something along those lines. The recent phenomenon of the Tea Party Movement has apparently reinforced this, with libertarian symbolism and rhetoric being mixed and associated with what seems to dominantly be angry reactionary conservatism that occurs whenever a Democrat becomes the president, with very little libertarian sentiment beyond a rather superficial desire for less taxes and an opposition to social welfare programs.

Radical libertarians, especially libertarian anarchists, have long since noted that the libertarian movement in America has been co-opted by the conservative establishment in various ways. But at another level it could be argued that this association isn't reducible to a co-option, that it was there all along when libertarianism was given a new meaning in the 1960's and formed by people who were originally fleeing from the conservative establishment while taking some of its ideological baggage along with them. In other words, it's partly the fault of at least a notable segment of libertarians themselves, who romantisized and aligned themselves with the political right from the beginning.

Libertarianism is put foreward by many libertarians as being "neither left or right", but it is often hard for them to maintain this claim when the ideological baggage comes out. Sometimes the ideological baggage that comes out is basically American conservatism as it was during the 1st half of the 20th century, repackaged for a new generation. And due to the pet peeve issues that standard libertarians often emphasize, which largely are anti-leftist sentiments, it is no surprise that the public often percieves libertarianism as a sort of frankenstein of the right. Being "anti-government" is framed in superficial, narrow terms.

This is partially a matter of rhetoric. American libertarians have inherited the rhetoric of the old right, rhetoric that stems from a cold war mentality and a romantic conception of early America. But I do not mean to suggest that standard and mainstream libertarians should change their rhetoric in order to better sell themselves to the left while keeping their positions substantively identical. This is because some substance was also inherited along with the rhetoric, and that substance is questionable. The substantance is a ridiculous narrative of American capitalism as a glorious bastion of freedom that is being eroded by the alien forces of communism, multiculturalism, and assorted bugaboos.

It is sometimes rather revealing and disillusioning to see the kinds of issues that some libertarians choose to prioritize: complaining about the civil rights act, doing Lincoln and civil war revisionism, attacking minimum wage laws, argueing that monarchy is better than democracy, and things of this nature. This isn't to say that they are necessarily wrong about these issues (although I beg to differ with Hoppe about monarchy), but their motivations may be wrong. They give the impression that they are mainly anti-state because of its egalitarian face, out of a desire to defend some past tradition or circumstance, or because they favor some special interest or power structure. This is precisely what gives libertarians the reputation of being "wingnuts".

As a result of this, libertarians are largely the laughingstock of most political discourse, and that's unfortunate. But in spite of this libertarianism has internally spawned a revival of more coherant radicalism at its own margins, which is slowly growing and gaining a voice in opposition to the bastardized libertarianism that gets the most press and is marginalizing itself out of existence. This has the potential to change the public face of libertarianism, and I think it's important for libertarian radicals to emphasize the difference between themselves and the right-wing frankenstein that mainstream libertarianism seems to be.

Social Individualism or Nihilistic Orgies?

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:46:00 +0000

I recently read "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgable Chasm" by Murray Bookchin. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the position carved out in it. On one hand, Bookchin critisizes nihilistic and irrationalist elements that have popped up in contemporary anarchist thought that I think are definitely problematic. On the other hand, he seems to want to paint the entirety of individualist anarchism with this brush, even going so far as to attack Proudhon, while digging in to a sectarian position in favor of syndicalism and communism. He mocks the idea of personal autonomy as the subjective lashing out of blind rebellion, contrasting it with "social freedom".

To be sure, part of what Bookchin attacks is the sort of raw atomistic and nihilistic sense of individualism associated with Max Stirner, which is all about the individual ego in an asocial and amoral sense. I do think that this is not a particularly sensible view, especially if one wants to favor interpersonal goals and advance a workable strategy that requires people to meaningfully cooperate. But it seems as if Bookchin makes a non-sequitor and an overgeneralization by condemning individualist anarchism as such. He lambasts individualism in the most perjorative sense of the term without taking the social and moral elements that are at play at least within elements of individualist anarchism.

In essence, I think that Bookchin presents us with a false choice between being atomists and absolute communalists. The "unbridgable chasm" that he talks about, if anything, is precisely what most anarchists have attempted to do from the beginning, I.E. there is a conceptual balance between individualism and sociality or an attempt to make some sort of synthesis between personal freedom and society. I basically see no reason why one could not be a "social individualist" or an "individualist socialist". It also seems as if, in his zeal to oppose short-sighted whimsicality, Bookchin overlooks the particular dangers of the subordination of people to community pressures that is part of what may cause people to be attracted to individualism in the first place.

Part of what Bookchin is reacting against is the influence of existentialist and postmodern thought on contemporary anarchism. I can sympathize with this concern to a certain extent, insofar as it may function to negate any sense of unity or genuine solidary that goes along with social revolution, while celebrating contradiction or ambiguity in a way that at least appears to erode rational underpinnings of libertarian ideas. On the other hand, Bookchin may have been acting naively about the problems with enlightenment universalism. He seems to take some sort of rationalism for granted, without much of an explaination for it. While talking about philosophical positions, he mostly appears to be engaging in heated polemics.

Another target of Bookchin's criticism, which he associates with individualism, are the primitivists and the anti-civilization crowd. I must admit that I cannot particularly think of anything to say in defense of these ideas, since I essentially find them to be ridiculous. There is one perjorative sense of individualism that does accurately describe such views, which is the notion of pure individual (or extremely small-scale) "self-sufficiency" taken to the point of opposing any meaningful social structure that we could comprehend in a modern context. But it hardly seems as if primitivists particularly pose a significant threat to anyone. They are minority within a minority within a minority. Their voice within the anarchist movement is rather marginal.

It seems as if part of what Bookchin means by "lifestyle anarchism" is the fragmented proliferation of a multitude of personal causes, a cambrian explosition of identity politics inside of anarchism. This bothers him in that it rubs up against his notion of a large-scale cohesive or participatory movement that is unified towards certain universal goals. I suppose Bookchin's concern is understandable at a certain level, in terms of maintaining at least some ground norms that unify anarchism and provide a framework for something strategically significant. On the other hand, if this is taken too far it could be seen as the total elimination of pluralism or an overly narrow view that opposes the particular ways in which people want to express their freedom.

Ultimately, while I sympathize with some of the concerns that Bookchin brings up, it seems like he was being too much of a partisan in "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism". I feel like he frames the question in a way that is designed to force us to choose between blind individual self-expression and lockstep dedication to a particular universalist creed, with him trying to persuade us to "get with the program" through his polemics against certain groups. Still, some of the issues that he touches on resonate with me in terms of the problems that I see with too nihilistic of a philosophy being embraced by anarchists. The problem is that he doesn't do the best job of showing why this is a problem, and I don't fully buy into the alternative that he presents.

Propertarianism, Voluntaryism and Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:14:00 +0000

I'd like to once again clarify my own views, put in contrast to some views that I have rejected. Hopefully this may help illuminate exactly what is at stake in the conflicts that take place within libertarianism and anarchism.

Propertarianism

One of the major issues at stake is how one treats the concept of property. I use the term propertarianism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat property as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or the basis for defining everything. For example, Murray Rothbard's declaration that all rights are property rights is an example of a form of propertarianism. More generally, propertarians tends to view freedom as reducible to a question of property and have a deontological view of property rights.

I reject propertarianism. To be clear, rejecting propertarianism does not necessarily mean that one rejects property or property rights outright. In my case, what it means is that freedom is not reducible to property because life and liberty are prior concepts, and that property rights are not absolute in that they may have contextual side-constraints. I reject any framing of the question which assumes that we must either be pro-property or anti-property in some absolute sense, and I do not think that freedom and property can be absolutely equated.

There are reasons for this. There are contexts in which a default defense of property amounts to a rationalization for infringing on someone's freedom or unnecessarily taking their life. I don't think that ownership legitimately grants absolute authority, regardless of how it is acquired. I think that ownership alone may be necessary but insufficient for legitimacy. I think that freedom is more fundamentally a matter of the concrete interpersonal relations of individuals, while property is a secondary question in relation to it.

In my understanding, property in the most general and disambiguated sense is a multi-faceted concept that cannot reasonably be simplified or reduced to a particular aspect or manifestation of it. It depends on the context. In one context, property could be linked to freedom. In another context, property could be linked to aggression and tyranny. Propertarianism attempts to reduce property to its positive aspects while ignoring or denying its negative aspects, and in the process it may end up effectively legitimizing the negative aspects, even if some propertarians do not explicitly intend to rationalize or endorse infringing on anyone's freedom.

If freedom entails not unnecessarily being coerced or bossed around on the basis of other people's whims and not being physically aggressed against in a clearly non-defensive context, then propertarianism has tension with freedom to the extent that this can be justified in its framework. To take this to the institutional and territorial level, if a territorial monopoly on ultimate decision-making power and force is a state and a propertarian framework establishes a standard for legitimacy in which a qualitatively identical institution can be justified depending on nothing more than property acquisition norms, then propertarianism can logically entail and consequently lead to a state. Hence, anti-statists have a reason to be skeptical of propertarianism.

A purely deontological or absolutist conception of property rights also leads to blatant absurdities on practical grounds, particularly because it commits the propertarian to dismiss all life-boat scenarios out of hand or simply default to whatever a property owner decides as an answer. From the point of view of the person in a sticky situation, this implies that they have a moral obligation to let themselves die or at least suffer a significant amount of unecessary harm in the name of respecting property. Hence, property is effectively placed above life. This gives one consequentialist grounds for rejecting propertarianism.

At each step of the way so far, we have pointed out various ways in which property can conflict with both freedom and life. I think that it is important to emphasize that to the extent that one wants to uphold the value of freedom and life in these contexts, one has necessarily placed limits on the concept of property and its practical applications. On the flip side, to the extent that one upholds a propertarian theory one is committed to some sort of negation of freedom and life. I think that there are well-meaning propertarians who hold positions that are a bit fuzzy on these matters, so I wouldn't want to lump them in with a more extreme position. However, I think they have reason for cognitive dissonance.

These questions can invoke a lot of hostility among libertarians and anarchists. Some propertarians are absolutist to the point where the more nuanced positions that I have hinted at are considered to be diametrically opposed to everything they favor and as a total negation of property. I believe that this is false because it is based on a misleading framing of the question that smuggles in the assumption of certain absolute dichotomies. Those propertarians who think that the choice is essentially between their position and communism, or who act as if any alternative position necessarily equates to statism, are being dogmatic and making non-sequitors.

This should constitute a decent overview of the problems that I have with propertarianism. While I don't necessarily condemn property and property rights outright, I do not consider property to be the right framework to conceptualize everything in. I view these concepts as inherently being contingent and necessary but insufficient. There are great dangers to focusing so much or so narrowly on property that all common sense and decency goes out the window and the pretense of freedom begins to become suspect. It would be wise not to think in such simplistic and axiomatic terms about the question of property.

Voluntaryism

I use the term voluntaryism to refer to libertarian ideologies that tend to treat the notion of voluntary interaction as a primary value, as an absolute, or as some sort of starting point or basis for defining everything -- in a way that does not particularly disambiguate what constitutes "voluntary" and "involuntary" relations. Generally, voluntaryism is presented in a way that makes it seem more pluralistic than propertarianism, as a sort of all-inclusive umbrella "so long as it's voluntary". I am using the term voluntaryism to refer to views that tend to consider the question of interpersonal relations as being reducible to a question of voluntary-ness, beyond which point "anything goes" or is "just a preference".

To be sure, I think that some ideas going by the name of "voluntaryism" are actually hardly distinguishable from propertarianism because the concept of "voluntary" and "involuntary" are disambiguated in explicitly propertarian terms, which can make it rather misleading. But as I am using the term here, it involves at least the intent of being more pluralistic than that. Voluntaryism contrasts with propertarianism insofar as propertarians act as if their particular models are the only ones that can possibly be compatible with freedom, while voluntaryists function on the pretext that essentially all norms other than "is it voluntary or not?" are compatible with freedom.

As I have already hinted at, I think that voluntaryism suffers from ambiguity. There are a multitude of normative concepts of exactly what is and isn't voluntary, so a meta-debate is almost inevitably begged. What one voluntaryist considers voluntary may be considered involuntary by another depending on normative assumptions, so it seems hard to think that the concept of voluntaryism can be separate from such questions. I think that voluntaryism collapses into meaninglessness if it is taken at face value, divorced from any particular norm. This kind of pluralism is just nihilism by another name, a nihilism that clings to one norm: noone's views can apply to anyone else. To put it another way, it is a form of nihilism that at least puts on the front of valueing tolerance as some sort of end in and of itself.

Perhaps the closest that voluntaryist pluralism can come to providing a neutral definition of "voluntary" that isn't packaged with additional norms is a definition that effectively reduces to "agreement". But it is hard to see how this is particularly useful. The very nature of any society contains various degrees of disagreement. A stalinist, a monarchist, or a neo-nazi aren't going to agree with libertarians and anarchists, but surely libertarians and anarchists aren't inherently imposing an "involuntary" relationship by opposing those ideas and systems. A murderer may disagree with being defended against or shunned, or they may disagree with the idea that they've done something wrong, but surely their rights aren't violated by this. Something is very fishy about this.

Some voluntaryists essentially do take a meta-view that is inclusive towards all norms and systems. Monarchy, democracy, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, whatever it may be, is fine and dandy with them "so long as it's voluntary" (or contingent on these systems isolating into enclaves or tribes). The problem is that this completely collapses the notion of "voluntary" and "involuntary". At best, it means that each system is voluntary relative to other systems, but a given system inside of this framework could be internally involuntary. Indeed, one could have a totalitarian dictatorship, and it would be okay by these standards so long as it does not cross over into the nation next door.

To be fair, not all those who call themselves voluntaryists take it to this level. Rather, what they are more likely to promote is effectively what's been called "thin libertarianism", the view that freedom or libertarianism is purely reducible to something like the non-aggression principle, beyond which point everything is a matter of subjective personal preferences. That is, it's the idea that non-aggression (which is almost always defined through the lens of some kind of property norm) is sufficient to produce a free society. Thick libertarians, such as myself, disagree with this on the grounds that this is insufficient (although perhaps necessary), that additional considerations matter.

So in this sense "voluntaryism is more or less the same thing as thin libertarianism. A big part of the problem with thin libertarianism is that it seems obvious that political outcomes are in some way dependant on cultural atmospheres and that not all cultural atmospheres are equally good breeding grounds for the goals of political freedom. Hence, this sort of total cultural and moral relativism can be a dangerous attitude to attempt to start a free society with. It is arguable that certain cultural and moral norms are likely to lead to aggression and statism, while others are a healthy precondition for realizing libertarian goals. Without getting into the details of the normative debate, I don't think it should particularly be hard to see the general point being made about this.

Some voluntaryists may be tempted to engage in a non-sequitor in reaction to such objections by accusing the critic of necessarily supporting aggression or "involuntary" relations. This is based a false framing of the discussion and it also likely involves the voluntaryist having hidden or unspoken normative assumptions. The fact of the matter is that noone has a concept of non-aggression or "voluntary" that is completely detached from particular normative premises, and in this sense "thin libertarianism" is inherently misleading, I.E. it is a front of value neutrality or a hypocritically applied relativity.

This should function as a sufficient general overview of my problems with voluntaryism. While I do think that pluralism is an important value, I don't think that it is an acontextual value or some sort of absolute. There are good reasons for being concerned about people being too open-ended with their pluralism, taken to the point of rationalizing blatant contradictions and leaving the door wide open for any old authoritarian ideology and system. And it is wise not to focus so much or so narrowly on "political justice" that a good deal of the social questions that effect people in their everyday lives are dismissed as irrelevant, while being naive about the preconditions necessary for practical achievement of political goals.

Conclusion

For the most part, this was a reiteration and clarification of positions that I've already taken ad naseum elsewhere and talked about in older posts. The two ideological tendencies that I've critisized can be viewed as representive of two extremes in a more general conflict between ideas that are too closed and absolute on one hand and ideas that are too open and ambiguous on the other hand. I would suggest that the most coherant positions can be found somewhere in between such extremes. What I've said here only scratches the surface of a multitude of much more particular discussions that could be had, but I think that I've set up the general foundation for such a discussion.

The Substance of Capitalism and Libertarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:29:00 +0000

Capitalism is a particular economic model, an organizational mode or structure of production, which is not in and of itself the same thing as the comparably general meta-concept of a "free market". Further, the codification or standardization of this organizational mode at the legal level makes it a particular legal code (a legal code entrenching particular arrangements of ownership titles), which is not in and of itself the same thing as the comparably general meta-concept of "libertarian law". When certain left-libertarians say that they are opposed to capitalism in substance, they are opposing this particular organizational mode and legal code, not necessarily the meta-level of free markets and libertarian law. It is conceivable for one to oppose this without supporting proactive aggression.

This is part of the reason why Stephan Kinsella and others are not justified in dismissing substantive opponents of capitalism as necessarily being outside of the scope of libertarianism. The only way that this can be gotten away with is by conflating the general with the particular, I.E. putting forward something rather specific as if it was the essential component of a much more general concept. This presents people with a convoluted framing of the discourse in which there is a false set of choices between accepting the economic and legal organizational scheme that is "capitalism" and not being a libertarian. But that just begs the question as to whether or not these particular modes are necessarily logically implied by the meta-level concepts or even alone the one and only compatible implication of them.

Of course, the substance of the meta-level concepts and the relationship or ordering of such concepts could be in question as well. It is not exactly clear why the meta-concept of "liberty" necessarily has to be defined through the lens of ownership, rather than the other way around. It is not clear why there could not possibly be some tension between strong and absolutist notions of land ownership and the meta-concept of liberty. It isn't clear why non-aggression necessarily must be conceived of as an axoim or a categorical imperative that isn't a bit fuzzy. It isn't clear why a systematic application of non-proviso lockean property norms could not be called into question on consequentialist grounds, as not leading to the intended result of a genuinely free society. Nor is it clear why such political ideals are realizable in an inegalitarian cultural context.

These are the kind of begged questions that are glossed over or in which certain answers are taken for granted and treated as essential parts of the definition of meta-concepts. What sense does it make to act as if Murray Rothbard's particular formulation of property theory is essential to the general notion of political freedom? It isn't. It's a particular disambiguation that libertarians may or may not fully accept. If such a property theory represents "capitalism", and one has reason to be skeptical of such a property theory while also aiming at the general goal of political freedom and a stateless society, one could conceivably reject "capitalism" as a libertarian. One could believe that it devolves into a state in spite of the intentions of its proponents, or that it contains ambiguity that can be used to justify trampling on people's freedom in a certain context, and be a libertarian.

The substance of libertarianism, at a sort of meta-level, is more general than the substance of capitalism. Stephan Kinsella and his ilk will have none of this: he equates the substance of capitalism and libertarianism as constituting one and the same thing. But, once again, this is just begging the question. Why is libertarian capitalism the same thing as libertarianism in general? This seems somewhat analogous to claiming that a particular normative position is the same thing as a general meta-ethical position (such as moral realism). I don't claim that libertarian capitalism isn't libertarian, I would say that it's a form of libertarianism that I think gets it wrong. The same standard is not reciprocated, however: if I don't accept a particular form of libertarianism, I'm suddenly put outside of the general category of libertarianism.

On top of this, quite paradoxically, we are told (particularly by Walter Block and those mimicking his notion of "the plumbline") that libertarianism in general is neutral to preferences, I.E. it is sold as a sort of all-inclusive relativism. This is claimed by some of the very same people that insist on particular norms as essential to libertarianism, ruling out everything to "the left" of anarcho-capitalism in terms of property norms and economic organization. The begged question is where the line is drawn between necessary norms and open-ended preference neutrality. On one hand, one could skeptically ask, "Why aren't your property norms just preferences too?". On the other hand, one could wonder if this (at least superficially) relativist proclamation is ambiguous and misleading, and ask whether there may actually be stronger, additional, or even alternative norms necessary for a particularly workable form of libertarianism to be made (even if one simultaneously still grants the term "libertarian" to people that don't accept those norms).

As we can see, those who are trying to monopolize libertarianism on the behalf of capitalism beg a whole host of questions. It begs the questions of rights theory, property theory, the thick and thin libertarianism discussion, and so on. But what seems most fair to me, in terms of the question of "who is a libertarian?", is that it is fundamentally constituted by an attitude that seeks to obtain or maximize political freedom as a meta-concept (and yes, this is distinguishable from the umbrella of welfare-liberalism). Anything beyond that is working out the details inside of libertarianism, which inevitably leads to subdivisions. One may think that particular subdivisions have it wrong and yet still acknowledge their status as libertarians. It is hard to look at the opposite route and not see it as dogmatism.

In a sense, yes, I am openly what some might call a "left-sectarian" in the sense that I philosophically reject a notable portion of the ideas of what I consider to be the general paradigm of the libertarian right (such as the ideas of folks such as Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, Stephan Kinsella, and even Murray Rothbard) and I do not particularly buy into the claims made by some such people that they are really in a neutral zone with respect to "left" and "right" ideological trends (when the virulently anti-leftist fangs come out, "plumbline" claims are particularly misleading). At the same time, I view libertarianism in the most general sense to be an umbrella that includes these people and their ideas, and that in spite of some rather strong disagreements there still are internal libertarians relations of a sort. But the substance of ideas is more fundamental than general labels, so I'm content reciprocally considering them ideological enemies *inside of libertarianism* to the extent that we disagree on fundamental points and when I am systematically attacked on the basis of prejudice by the people in such a paradigm. Yes, I do oppose (at least part of) the substance of your position, and I oppose it precisely because I think libertarianism could be improved.

Kinsella's Closed System

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:26:00 +0000

Over at "Instead of a Blog", Roman Pearah made a response to a statement by Stephan Kinsella about left-libertarians. I'd like to add the thoughts that this invokes for me on top of this.

Firstly, it seems very obvious that Kinsella is engaging in some serious package-dealing, which I can only assume is based on misunderstanding and ideological blinders. Kinsella throws around the term "Marxian" as if it accurately applies to just about any leftist variety of libertarianism and anarchism. This betrays a severe lack of understanding of the historical and ideological distinctions between statist and libertarian socialism. It seems evident that Kinsella makes knee-jerk reactions to left-libertarian ideas simply based on reading things into terms that he has been ideologically predisposed to dislike.

The main package deal that is set up is that certain concepts and terms are deemed to be "inherently statist" a priori, without any open and honest engagement with it, while certain normative positions that are really the positions of a particular subset of libertarians (LVMI-style Rothbardians in particular) are portrayed as essential to the definition of libertarianism, to the exclusion of other positions (geo-libertarianism, mutualism, libertarian socialism, etc.) that have long-since been part of libertarian discourse. To simply say that alternative positions "aren't libertarian", aside from implying a backwards kind of linguistic essentialism, is to close the notion of "internal debate" and frame everything in strictly binary oppositional terms.

What Kinsella is effectively doing is putting libertarianism foreward as a completely closed system of thought in which a particular set of positions down to the last detail are immutable and essential, in very much the same way that ARI Objectivists treat Ayn Rand's Objectivism. But the reality of the matter is that libertarianism, in its most general sense, is constituted by a multitude of different criss-crossing positions. Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists do not have a monopoly on libertarianism, they are a subdivision of it. And while I may have disagreements with it, I don't exclude it from being "libertarian". The same cannot be said for the kind of dogmatist attitude that Kinsella is promoting.

It is entirely concievable for people to more or less agree on some basic premises and draw different conclusions from them, while still being a part of a broad ideological umbrella. It is also concievable for people to have similar conclusions while reaching them from radically different premises, while still being part of a broad ideological umbrella. But Kinsella doesn't grant such leeway for "internal debate": one must effectively accept the LVMI "platform" wholesale or one is not a libertarian. At best, the most leeway that he grants is for people who essentially accept the platform but do it on consequentialist grounds rather than on the basis of "natural rights" or deontology. But adding more to the system or tweaking it in any significant way is heresy.

The main reason for this seems to be that Kinsella has misconceptions about other points of view, having already ruled them out in the name of maintaining an "austro-libertarian" and "rothbardian" orthodoxy. He hears a more limited view of property rights and immediately jumps to the non-sequitors of mass-violence and state control. He hears the words "worker's self-management" and cries "Marxist!". He's attacking a caricature of "the left", a boogeyman that he has conjured inside of his head. Alternative ideas are dismissed through conjuring the image of the rabble-rouser, the bomb-thrower, the window smasher.

It is pain-stakingly obvious that Kinsella is militantly anti-leftist. But this anti-leftism is joined with a misleading proclaimation that one is at some sort of neutral "plumbline" in which one is "neither left or right". This is a lie: Kinsella blatantly brings along certain baggage or commitments that are ideologically "right-wing" (at least in comparison to other positions) and proclaims them to be essential to libertarianism, and proceeds to attack people who do not (at least fully) accept those commitments to be non-libertarian. He pushes certain specific normative positions (both economic and cultural) as an inherent part of libertarianism, while playing the disingenous "thin libertarian" game of putting on a front of neutrality.

Kinsella is right about one thing: the conflict over "capitalism" is not purely linguistic. My own main disagreement with folks such as Brad Spangler, while I do sympathize with their position in comparison to someone like Kinsella, is that their rejection of "capitalism" is largely confined to a semantic-historical context in which one seems to mostly be just engaging in a salesmanship strategy. Some of these people mostly are in line with fairly standard anarcho-capitalist views, but wish to drop the term "capitalism" for public relations purposes. But to the extent that this is the case (and it certainly is not entirely the case, as I will proceed to get into), Kinsella cannot denounce these people as "unlibertarian" on his own terms.

The much more explicit currents of left-libertarianism do have substantive problems with "capitalism". But this, in and of itself, does not necessarily rule them out from being libertarians or anarchists. For some, to one extent or another, most of the fundamental premises that himself Kinsella supports (which they tend to be in line with themselves) simply does not logically lead to "capitalism". Instead of knee-jerkedly reacting by labeling them Marxists and saying that they aren't libertarians, it is Kinsella's responsibility to actually address the content of their position. But what he has mostly done is continue to insist on the orthodoxy that he promotes.

Of course, things can get even more substantive than this. Some left-libertarians don't accept the fundamental premises that Kinsella considers to be essential to libertarianism, and proceed to reject "capitalism" on the grounds of rejecting such underlying premises. But I would insist that even this, in and of itself, does not constitute sufficient grounds for claiming that such people are not libertarians. It is Kinsella's responsibility to honestly engage those ideas. But he barely scratches the surface of doing this. Since they reject his foundational premises, they are branded as enemies, strawmanned, and then the "base" is rallied in the defense of "capitalism".

Based on his sweeping condemnations of the libertarian left, it is really hard to tell if Kinsella would understand the distinction between, say, a council communist and a mutualist anarchist. By Kinsella's standards, even contemporary mutualists, who to a significant extent don't even function strictly within boundaries of traditional libertarian socialism, are lumped into the nebulous category of "not libertarian" along with any old variety of state-socialism. It's as if he considers "the left" to be this amorphous body that must inherently coalesce into aggression and statism, without him having the slightest understanding of the wide variety of positions within it.

If anything, Kinsella proves the contention that paradigmatic American libertarianism (including its anarcho-capitalist subdivision) carries a notable amount of right-wing baggage. Calling it a "plumbline" that is neutral to the contemporary American senses of "left" and "right" is misleading when it blatantly converges more with the normative positions of the political right. If one wants to understand where the heck left-libertarians are coming from in an American context, it would behoove one to understand it as partially being constituted by the phenomenon of people passing through the paradigmatic libertarian right and transcending its boundaries, getting rid of the right-wing baggage that comes with it and radicalizing oneself beyond it.

For some in the libertarian left, the position held by someone like Kinsella is something they used to hold on to themselves, but they've grown past it. That may be hard for someone who currently holds to such a position to wrap their head around, but it is the case. Some of us had well-thought out reasons for rejecting it, or at least parts of it. Dismissing us as some sort of completely alien ideology coming out of nowhere, or as some sort of child of Marxism, severely misunderstands where quite a few left-libertarians are coming from (I.E. as post-ancaps or ex-ancaps). From their perspective, it's an improvement of libertarianism, not an abandonment. This may be constituted by a combination of adding things, taking some things away, and modifying things. But Kinsella seems to be largely incapable of dealing with people on their own terms.

I don't speak for all left-libertarians when I say this, but Kinsella is a paradigmatic case of most of what is wrong with "standard libertarians". It is lacking in internal criticism and room for growth. It is becoming a stagnant intellectual climate or an echo chamber. If this is what "standard libertarianism" is, then good riddance to "standard libertarianism". It needs a new standard, and it is precisely the libertarian left that has spawned developements for refining libertarianism rather than simply going along with what reduces to a dogmatic party line. Those who cannot deal with that are doomed to the dustbins of libertarian history.

In Defense of Egalitarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:37:00 +0000

Part of the baggage that tends to come along with contemporary libertarian politics is a rejection of egalitarianism. The notions of liberty and equality are conceived of as being in an antagonistic relationship, with egalitarian ideas being equated to a forced plan that attempts to circumvent "the natural order" or as a rosy description of the abilities or merits of humans as being flat. This generally functions as the background assumption for a rather convoluted discourse on the matter.

One of the common ways in which this plays out is when someone says that egalitarianism makes no sense because it is obvious that people have different levels of intelligence, different physical attributes, different abilities and specializations, and so on. In other words, egalitarians are characterized as proposing that everyone is inherently equal in such a literal sense. But, to my knowledge, no one actually claims this, and hence it is a gigantic straw man. So when egalitarianism is attacked as if it claims that there are no differences between individuals, the ideas of actual egalitarians haven't been touched.

A related route that the opponent of egalitarianism may take is to act as if egalitarianism aims at making everyone equal in such a sense, that the elimination of natural differences between individuals is its prescriptive purpose. But perhaps with some rare exceptions on the fringes, this is also a straw man. Not even communists actually propose, for example, that everyone should have the exact same quantity of wealth. Feminists don't generally advocate that we turn mankind into a unisexual species, anti-racists don't generally advocate that we morph mankind into a single "race". At best, these are bizarre exaggerations stemming from misunderstandings. At worst, it's a scare tactic.

Of course, the opponent of egalitarianism usually ends up falling back on an equation between current conditions that egalitarians seek to address and an appeal to nature or meritocracy. For example, it is just taken for granted that someone is wealthy because they earned it on the basis of their merits or hard work, and hence the egalitarian is characterized as attacking merit. On the flip side, it is taken for granted that someone is poor or in negative economic conditions because they simply didn't take advantage of their opportunities or they simply lack the merit necessary to produce and improve their condition. This is classic vulgar libertarianism, I.E. it ignores the systematic or social context in order to engage in status quo apologetics, as if the conditions in question must necessarily be a reflection of meritocratic forces.

The problem is that when we are talking about social and economic conditions in the context of systems, we are not dealing with a natural meritocracy. The conditions in question are partially determined by institutions, laws, customs, social norms, circumstances, and hence they cannot be completely reduced to a reflection of biology or some sort of inherent pecking order of virtue. Responding to a feminist by appealing to the biological categories of sex, while they are speaking of social conditions in relation to gender, doesn't address their concern. Appealing to race and I.Q. statistics to an anti-racist, while they are speaking of social conditions that are largely determined by legal and social norms, is just vulgar nonsense.

What this boils down to is that anti-egalitarians seem to think that economic, social, and political disparities can be reduced to "nature", while egalitarians are more likely to see such disparities as largely being a consequence of something much more "nurtured" or "socially constructed" rather than a simple reflection of some inherent law of nature. What the anti-egalitarian sees as "just how it is" or some sort of representation of superiority, the egalitarian sees as a "privilege" within a systematic context, whether it be legal in nature or something more general than that. What the opponents of egalitarianism tend to do is engage in a rationalization for the power relations that egalitarians question by making out-of-context appeals to nature or science.

As far as this relates to politics, what goes on is some severe package dealing. Support for liberty is package-dealed with opposition to notions of "social justice", while support for notions of "social justice" are package-dealed with opposition to political liberty or some sort of statist political ideology. But there seems to be no good reason to consider these two spheres to be diametric opposites or completely separate from each other. On one hand, political structures play a role in determining social conditions. On the other hand, social conditions play a role in determining political structures. If one takes such considerations into account, there is no reason why one cannot be a libertarian and simultaneously be a proponent of "social justice".

Insofar as the state can be shown to play a role in creating or exacerbating power disparities and the socio-economic conditions that egalitarians dislike, this creates a case for egalitarians to be anti-statist. Insofar as certain power disparities and socio-economic conditions that egalitarians dislike can be shown to lead to or fuel the power of states, this creates a case for anti-statists to be egalitarians. To put the matter in more positive terms, it may be that certain egalitarian conditions or ideas function as a healthier precondition to the attainability and sustainability of a free society, and that a free society presents the most effective long-term means for achieving egalitarian goals. This is basically a two-pronged "thick libertarian" analysis of egalitarianism.

I must admit that so far I haven't particularly defined egalitarianism, although I think some part of it can be implied from what has been said. By egalitarianism I don't simply mean equal liberty, although that can be understood to be a part of it. I mean "social justice": a respect for "the other", an opposition to extreme power disparities between social groups, generally favoring a more equitable distribution of wealth rather than the concentration of wealth in the hands of a class, and so on. By "egalitarianism" I basically mean "equity", in contrast with extreme social and economic hierarchy. This doesn't necessarily mean a purely flat structure, but a structure that minimizes extreme concentrations of power at any particular point. It signifies the goal of "fair outcomes", or at least a comparative sense of equality.

I think that the marginalization of certain social groups from the benefits of society and the concentration of economic benefits in the hands of an elite is something to oppose. I oppose the oppression of people by virtue of belonging to a particular ethnicity or gender, even if it isn't strictly a matter of physical aggression. I think that this is not simply describable as a consequence of state intervention (although it partly is), but rather it is a social problem in and of itself that requires a deeper level of analysis. Free market libertarians, when not vulgar, tend to be pretty good at the former, but I think that the latter tends to be neglected in comparison. In a sense, yes, "social justice" depends on "political justice", but I also think that "political justice" ultimately depends on "social justice" at a deeper level.

I do not think that a society with extreme social and economic hierarchy would be healthy, even if it nominally had "political justice", and I don't think that it could sustainably have "political justice" in such conditions, which is why I think that the inverse approach to "the state caused it" is just as important if not more important than looking at state intervention as a cause of problems. A society with hierarchical distributions of wealth and power seems like the perfect atmosphere for a state to arise out of, so it seems like there are strong reasons for at least favoring some sense of economic egalitarianism. And in spite of certain dogmas, there is nothing about this that presents dissonance for libertarianism. In fact, it is very consonant with libertarian tradition. In light of this, I am suggesting that libertarians reclaim their egalitarian roots.

Cutting Your Epistemic Ground Out From Under Yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:23:00 +0000

A recent trend in some market anarchist circles is to advocate abandoning explicitly normative arguments for freedom and rely strictly on an appeal to personal preferences and value-free economics instead. Generally, this view is advanced through the lense of some form of moral skepticism or moral nihilism. At the same time, such people continue to make arguments along the lines of saying that the state is violent, a territorial monopoly on force, that taxation is theft, and so on. Out of the other side of their mouths, they will say that they cannot epistemically justify the wrongness of it.

I find this to be philosophically problematic. In the context of discussion and debate using basic norms of reasoning, noone can possibly be convinced of another person's position if a person cannot actually establish the truth value of their propositions. An individual cannot claim to be justified in their belief if they don't have an epistemic grounding for it. This is analogous to saying that you don't think that the concept of a god contains any truth value and then trying to argue for the belief that a god exists anyways (and as much as I have a certain kind of respect for Kirkegaurdian style approaches to the question, it inherently puts itself outside of the realm of epistemically grounded discourse).

Repeating the meme that taxation is theft is devoid of significance if one does not believe and cannot prove that theft is actually wrong (and to make matters more complicated, what counts as "theft" to a person will depend on what their property norms are in the first place and who they think is a rightful owner). At best, within such constraints, one can appeal to other people's pre-existing beliefs that you already share in common with them and make a deduction in the attempt to show an inconsistency in their application of that belief. But if one is consistently keeping normativity outside of the realm of knowledge, such a deduction and the premises it is based on could not be said to have any truth value.

Using "value-free" economics, one can possibly show that certain means most efficiently lead to certain ends or values that people have. But if a particular individual has certain norms that one's economic analysis doesn't support, in one's role as an economist one cannot do anything to prove that their beliefs are wrong or illegitimate. In such a context, one has no means by which to show that any particular normative standard is better than another. What one wishes to oppose can only be shown to be "inefficient" relative to certain values, but if someone doesn't hold those values then it does nothing to debunk their beliefs. And in such a context economics alone cannot be used justify one's own beliefs, since it cannot do anything to epistemically validate the implicit normative values of those beliefs.

As a consequence of this, a moral nihilist market anarchist that wields the tool of economics has no epistemic ground to stand on. The moment that they advocate their political position, they are at least implicitly invoking norms, and yet their own meta-ethical position prevents them from any warranted assertability of those norms. If they are intellectually honest, they must admit that this leaves them in a perpetual stalemate when debating people with opposing political positions. They have no grounds for asserting that, say, a neo-nazi or a Stalinist is wrong. Other than simple descriptions and historical analysis, they've placed the entirety of political discourse outside of the realm of truth value.

At such a point, one may be tempted to fall back on a sort of hyper-pluralist or individual-subjectivist position that opposes the application of norms onto anyone that doesn't agree with them. Of course, this itself contains an implicit norm: don't apply your views to others. In the name of opposing every other particular norm, one has reduced everything to the norm of "don't force your views on anyone else". But if someone responds by saying "what's wrong with forcing your views on others?", if someone argues that they are justified in applying their views beyond themselves, there is nothing that the amoralist can do to argumentatively dispell this. They cannot say that they are epistemically justified in holding the belief that it is wrong to force your views on others.

There is a sense in which such a position reduces to complete atomism: each individual's beliefs apply only to them. In another sense, it could be said to make a behemoth out of the principle of "agreement". In a social context, the implication of consistently applying this would seem be that everyone in society separates into enclaves on the basis of their agreements and disagreements. However, if one wishes to still keep people with differing views in the same society, then all of the problems of individual-subjectivism arise: there are conflicts between the norms of individuals and groups, and if they exist in the same society it is impossible to keep norms purely "internal" to those that agree with them. People inevitably effect others to one degree or another. There is no such thing as a purely isolated "intersubjective consensus" that doesn't overlap with other ones.

Of course, one could propose some kind of neutral 3rd party arbitration to attempt to address conflicts between different "intersubjective consensuses". But beyond the fact that we have essentially just turned the concept of "freedom" into "whatever people do that they agree with" or a total competition between any and all norms, anyone that takes their particular norms seriously enough isn't going to have a completely open-ended tolerance for what they believe to be a violation of freedom in a social context. It isn't necessarily the case that anyone would agree to the matter being compromised. And, of course, any 3rd party arbiter is going to have to decide on the basis of *some* particular normative standard.

Then one must face the fact that power dynamics don't work purely on the basis of agreement or consensus. For one thing, there is the matter of inherited power structures: intergenerationally, what may have originally been an agreement is simply what people are born into. Any genuine consent is precluded. But even within the context of a single generation, there can be social circumstances beyond someone's control that they simply asqueiscence to, which would only be agreement in a very superficial sense. The relative positions of power that people are in can be sufficient to generate an authoritarian relation, and this is more of a threat in the context of some modes of organization than others.

All norms are not completely equal in their practical consequences, even if the people that believe in and implement such norms genuinely do not desire such consequences. This by itself is a good reason to consider certain norms over others. Certain norms have practical consequences that would not be supported by those effected by them, including those that believe in them. The result of indifference to such questions at some meta-level is simply an enabling of those consequences. One will not end up with a free society, even relative to one's own implicit norms for freedom, by having a cultural attitude or atmosphere that does not concern itself with this. It is societal suicide.

We have just watched any possibly coherant notion of "freedom" completely crumble. If one really wants to see why thick libertarianism is a vital thing to emphasize, the consequences of extremely going in the opposite direction are telling: "anarchy" in its most perjorative sense, which is basically anomie.

CATO/Reason vs. LRC/LVMI

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:48:00 +0000

For quite a number of years now, there has been an on-going ideological clash between two poles and organizational co-minglings of the modern American libertarian movement. One side of the this conflict is represented by the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine, while the other side is represented by LewRockwell.com and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. Various figures from these institutions have attacked each other back and forth, and it has made it to the level of all-out polemics against the other institution.

Generally speaking, I view both sides of this conflict as different segments of paradigmatic right-libertarianism (although there are some exceptions, such as Roderick Long, who has made some comparatively left-libertarian publications for both Cato and LVMI). By paradigmatic right-libertarianism, I refer to libertarianism as it has entered into the American conciousness since around the 1960's, which was in a historical context largely congruent with people fleeing from the conservative movement, and represented by figures such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. This historical context obviously has colored the notion of where libertarianism stands relative to other political ideas (I.E. as in relation to the political right).

The split in question roughly tends to conform to the subcategories of "paleo-libertarianism" and "neo-libertarianism". The Cato Institute and Reason has "neo-libertarian" tendencies: more likely to embrace minarchism, interventionist foreign policy, objectivism and post-objectivism, and culturally or socially liberal views. The Ludwig Von Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com has more "paleo-libertarian" tedencies: more likely to embrace anarcho-capitalism, isolationist foreign policy, Murray Rothbard's ideas, and culturally or socially conservative views. Of course, these are generalizations that don't uniformly apply to everyone associated with these institutions (for example, there are minarchists at LVMI and anti-war people at Cato), but they are distinct tendencies.

Since I tend to consider myself outside of the paradigm that these are two poles of, I don't strictly ideologically favor any particular side of the conflict. To a certain extent, I find the conflict amusing because it's a case where neither side is right on the whole and I disagree with some of the premises that they share in common and don't conflict over. Relative to my own views, however, I do have certain identifications of where I think that each side comparatively tends to have it right or wrong on particular questions.

Generally, the Cato/Reason crowd is weaker on the issue of anti-statism. The Ludwig Von Mises institute, on the other hand, may as well be called the Murray Rothbard Institute, since it's overwhelmingly dominated by anarcho-capitalists (and Mises himself was a minarchist who rejected the doctrine of natural rights that Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists favor). In the context of the Objectivist influences, Cato/Reason are more likely to have neoconservative views on war. The paleo-libertarians rightly dislike this. Their tendency to oppose the military wing of the state is a comparative virtue. They hate neoconservatism with a passion, although I think that this hatred is based partly on the wrong reasons.

Perhaps the most significant portion of the conflict between these groups, however, has primarily been based on social or cultural questions (although with some implications for politics). A look into the company that various LewRockwell and LVMI associates keep reveals that they are in bed with some of the most extreme right-wing groups out there (nationalists, racialists, neo-confederates, john birchers, theocrats, monarchists, and assorted ugliness from the paleoconservative movement that overlaps with these things). Furthermore, some of them have explicitly tried to synthesize these things with libertarianism. This has been what some people at Cato and Reason have so strongly attacked, and I think that they are justified in attacking it.

One of the issues that pops up in this context is the move towards a vehement anti-immigration/closed-borders position among certain associates of LVMI/LRC, primarily spearheaded by the work of Hans Herman Hoppe on the matter (there of course are dissenters from this view within those ranks, although some of them simultaneously engage in apologetics or whitewashing for their anti-immigration comrades). In contrast, Objectivism and people influenced by it maintain a strict open borders position, and Cato is more likely to maintain the "plumbline" position of open borders as well. The paleo-libertarian reaction to this is very telling: they attack open borders advocates as "cosmotarians". They resent the cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalism of open borders proponents, who are portrayed new age hipsters.

In fact, Cato/Reason is smeared as "PC" simply for being critical of nationalism and ethnocentrism and calling a spade a spade when it pops up in paleo-libertarian circles. In the name of being "anti-PC", paleo-libertarians tend to engage in apologetics for some of the most authoritarian segments of the political right. It doesn't occur to them that there may be rational reasons, something beyond knee-jerk political correctness, for taking a stand against racism, nationalism, and assorted bigoted reactionaries. Their reaction is a combination of denial and apologia. When Hans Hoppe wrote in plain english that "They-the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism-will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.", it seems hard to deny that there's something messed up going on right in front of everyone's faces.

In light of such considerations, it should be no surprise that I ultimately don't think that paleo-libertarians are necessarily better than neo-libertarians, even if paleo-libertarians are more likely to be anti-statist on the surface. A superficial opposition to the modern democratic state gets nullified in significance if it amounts to a rationalization for people's alternative pet authoritarianisms that are below the surface (and sometimes right out in the open for all to see). What paleo-libertarians seem to oppose is primarily modern liberal statism, set in contrast with a romantisized picture of the 19th century -- the "good old days" when there was no welfare state or affirmative action, and yet a whole slew of socially authoritarian policies and negligible freedom for those outside of particular classes or social groups.

But I shouldn't give the impression that I am sympathetic to neo-libertarians either. Afterall, they are basically a neoconservative-libertarian hybrid: neo-liberal on economics, imperialist on foreign relations, and minarchist and representative-democratic on political structure. They're still cozy with the Republican establishment and proponents of state-capitalism. While they might not be socially conservative throwbacks, they still roughly conform to modern conservatism in their political assumptions. Their anti-statism, to the extent that it exists, is a wishy-washy doctrine that keeps many of the most fundamentally objectionable aspects of the state in place. Their main merit is simply being on the more sane side of a culture war.

What both groups represent in unison, in spite of various contributions to politics that could be considered correct, is the philosophical and cultural bankrupcy of the modern American libertarian movement. It has no coherant identity beyond some vague platitudes inherited from the right's anti-government streak and an affinity with free market economics. It is an ambiguous mish-mash of contradictary ideas under the umbrella of the same label, and in this respect I'm saddened to say that Ayn Rand had a point in her criticisms of libertarianism, even though it was partially a consequence of her own errors. Good riddance to paradigmatic libertarianism.

The Nature and Scope of Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:11:00 +0000

I've developed some fairly critical views of the scope and applicability of economics. Here are the main issues that keep reoccuring to me:

1. Economics is not a totalistic description of human action. While praxeology is said to be "the science of human action", it seems to me that at best it only deals with particular aspects of human action, and Austrian economists often end up making questionable statements based on the tendency to reduce social philosophy to nothing more than an economic analysis. As far as I understand it, the study of human action in general is what "social science" is. If people claim that economics is the totality of the study of human action, then they are effectively granting economics a disciplinary monopoly on social science. This would inherently exclude disciplines such as sociology and psychology, or at least entail that economics absorbs them. But, as a general rule, I reject any particular discipline claiming totality.

The main problem arise with this tendency in the context of economics is the treatment of people as homo economicus, I.E. using the framework of utility-maximization and descriptive value subjectivism as if this explains the entire picture, as if human interaction can be reduced to rational agents making decisions on the basis of economic incentives. Hence, the economist reacts to discourse on social issues by assuming that everyone is motivated by economic utility. For example, addressing the issue of racial discrimination simply by declaring that it is not profitable in the longrun. But this seems like an evasion of actually addressing the issue. A hardcore bigot isn't going to back off from discrimination by making an economic calculation because there are psychological factors at play other than what can be accounted for by economics. The tendency to essentially cut off the "social" end of things in the name of economics is questionable.

Another example is the general idea that everyone in a voluntary exchange inherently benefits by virtue of the exchange being voluntary. But from a normative perspective, there may be plenty of reasons why a particular exchange could be viewed as non-beneficial to a particular party. In particular social circumstances, party of an exchange may engage in it essentially out of asquiescance because they have no meaningful alternatives. And a particular exchange could be normatively evaluated as a bad decision on the basis of what it is that is obtained (for example, wreckless pursuit and consumption of petty and non-essential goods). It seems silly to me to declare, by simply appealing to value subjectivism, that someone who buys a bunch of tickle-me-elmos "benefits by definition". The tendency to default to the whims of the consumer in economics seems like a basis for justifying consumerism.

More generally speaking, it seems obvious to me that economics cannot account for the myriad of factors beyond its scope that are relevant to the human condition. If we agree with Mises that economics does not evaluate ends, that it is not normative, and if we proceed to act as if economics constitutes the crux or whole of our social philosophy, then the entire field of ethics has just been done away with so long as we are forced to keep our economics caps on. But beyond this, it doesn't seem like economics totally describes human action. Can people's decisions and relations really be reduced to the categories of economics? Can people's religious, social, and political activities be described strictly in terms of utility maximization or in the language of "markets"? That seems like abusing economic language as a metaphor for everything. Human relations aren't a simple matter of market interaction. My relationship with my girlfriend, my parents, and so on, isn't a matter of market exchanges.

2. There is no such thing as a value-free science. This has implications for science in general, but in this context I am speaking about economics. I am of the view that all sciences are inherently embedded with norms, and that a scientist cannot reasonably claim to be "purely objective" in the sense of lacking any personal motivation, bias, and values in the process of their developement of theories. That would be a disinterested "view from nowhere". It seems to me that the very nature of being a human being engaging in a formal discipline, one inherently views things through the lense of values and makes use of normativity ("epistemic norms", as Putnam calls them). To be clear, I do not intend this to be an arguement trying to debunk the legitimacy of science, but it does aim to reduce the pretentiousness that some people attach to science. It does inject some humility or humbleness into science.

With this in mind, there is a sense in which I view the claim that Austrian economics is "value-free" to be somewhat misleading. Austrian economics functions within the framework of certain norms, and essentially all Austrian economists are motivated to defend and oppose particular things that are inherently value-laden. As a matter of simple fact, plenty of Austrian economists are capitalist-apologists that use the theories of Austrian economics in order to defend the things that they are biased towards in the first place. There is a certain tendency to explicitly put foreward normative positions and then shrink back into claiming value-neutrality when it is suitable to do so, as a sort of protective measure. Value-neutrality sometimes functions as a sort of pedestal from which to critisize other people's normative positions while simultaneously protecting one's own normative positions from scrutinity. This is a form of oppurtunism.

While economics may seem at face value to be a disinterested, cold analysis of phenomena, it is very hard to separate any particular school of economics from an obviously value-laden agenda. This includes Austrian economics. While austrian economists may claim to be giving a purely dry description of how things are, their analysis is tempered by normative assumptions, while being instrumental towards particular goals. Indeed, the articles at Mises.org tend to be highly ideologically driven, often functioning to defend certain cultural, ethical, and political values in the name of a value-free science of human action. The Austrian school wouldn't be necessary to single out for this criticism if it weren't for the fact that it so strongly claimed a value-free status in the first place.

3. A subjective theory of economic value has no implications outside of the scope of economics. One of the tendencies that has arisen in certain circles is to essentially make use of Austrian economics to conclude in favor of rejecting any explicitly normative discussion of politics and society, a position that essentially reduces to an absolute kind of relativism about ethics or even a hardcore form of moral nihilism. It's as if people think that the subjective theory of economic value, which is simply a descriptive theory that deals with economic value (I.E. market prices), implies normative subjectivism. I think that this is an abuse of economics outside of its proper scope that effectively dissolves libertarianism (by libertarianism I mean an explicitly normative political philosophy of freedom). In conjunction with this trend, people advance the idea that economics is all that matters, in contrast with ethics.

Aside with the problems or disingenousness of claiming to be value-free in the first place, if one takes such an approach at face value it inherently must be completely incapable of providing anything meaningful to a political philosophy seeking the goal of freedom. The goal of freedom itself becomes an uresolvable mish-mash of conflicting norms, none of which are supposed to be able to be evaluated on their merits. If economics is supposed to be non-normative, if it suppose to have nothing to do with evaluating ends, and it is thought of as a context one isn't supposed to step outside of, then there is no way to build a comprehensive social philosophy of freedom. All that one can do is say that "this works" or "this doesn't work" relative to assumed norms that cannot be discussed as valid or invalid. But if one is interested in comprehensively establishing a political theory, this is useless.

This is what caused Murray Rothbard to say that utilitarian economics is insufficient to establish libertarianism. He argued that utilitarian economists can only take the norms of a society (particularly its property norms) for granted and analize from there, which has the danger of asquiescing to the status quo and completely avoiding actually taking a normative stance that would lead to the goals of libertarianism. In terms of this general point, I think that Rothbard was right. Nothing of significance is achieved for libertarianism by simply relying on economics in a vacuum, because it tells us nothing about the question of justice. It is philosophically defenseless against any normative position that would threaten justice.

Is Panarchy A Coherant Concept?

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:02:00 +0000

I have a confession to make: I have a more totalistic and non-inclusive/non-tolerant concept of freedom than many of my peers in the libertarian anarchist movement. Actually, this really isn't a confession so much as something that should be obvious based on many of my criticisms of certain ideas within libertarianism over the past few years. What it boils down to is this: I don't think that relativism/hyper-pluralism, panarchism, or reductionistic voluntaryism (these concepts tend to run together in my mind) have anything to do with a sensible notion of human freedom.

It seems to me that there is a questionable tendency to concieve of anarchism as if it was panarchism. The notion that "everyone has a right to choose what form of government, and what particular government, to live under" is ambiguous. At face value, this may seem like a certain phrasing of the principle of consent. But when one takes into account the nature of how governments actually work, which essentially precludes the possibility of everyone living under it to explicitly consent to it, and when one considers the implications of absorbing all forms of government into libertarianism, panarchy ends up looking like a confused concept. It's as if the panarchist wants the spirit of anarchism while simultaneously wanting to preserve the state in any of its forms.

The idea, for example, of a purely "voluntary monarchy", just seems conceptually incoherent. Perhaps it is concievable that a particular individual gladly wants to be subject to it, but as a system that inherently is territorial in nature it would seem to inevitably effect people who just happen to live or be born in the area and don't explicitly consent to it. Once one takes into account how the social dynamics of political systems actually work, geographic scarcity, as well as the problems of intergenerationality and the disagreements that exist within any society, the whole thing seems like a mish-mash that amounts to little more than relativistic tolerance towards the existence of multiple states or forms of states.

The practical reality that this picture paints to me seems to be along the lines of an even greater multitude of states over smaller geographical regions, accompanied by an even greater diversity in the form that states take. But is that freedom, or just a localized re-structuring of non-freedom? This idea seems to cut the normative ground out from under freedom, and replaces it with a rather indiscriminate and self-contradicting sense of tolerance. The legal systems that it is tolerant towards are internally intolerant, in that they preclude the possibility of the mutual consent of all of those that live within their domains. So it seems like what one ends up with is tolerance between states which are themselves internally monopolistic.

Panarchism is an incoherant position if it reduces to an attempt to absorb things that are inherently incompatible with anarchism (such as monarchies and representative democracies) into anarchism. The very nature of these political systems are internally non-anarchistic, and panarchism seems to simply insist on having anarchism between states - and yet that's exactly what we already have in terms of the relations between nation-states in the absence of a global state. At best, panarchism minaturizes/localizes and diversifies this.

This is not what I think of when I invoke pluralism in a positive way. For one thing, I concieve of pluralism being a value that is in some sense contextual to and grounded by other values - it is not indiscriminate relativism. But the issue extends beyond this. The concept of pluralism that I have is one of mutual co-existence between different types of people within the same area. In other words, it's cosmopolitan pluralism. Yet the pluralism of panarchism and the libertarians I disagree with seems to be just the opposite of this: it's the rigid separatism of different types of people into their own little geographic areas and entrenched systems. Internal to each geographic area is systematic exclusion and oppression. This is just micro-authoritarianism advanced in the name of tolerance!

The direct consequence of this is that various authoritarian ideologies have been given a rationalization from libertarian circles that they can use to their advantage. It's as simple as using the concept of freedom of association to justify systems that are internally or locally unfree. On the other hand, libertarians themselves begin to be apologists for this or even explicitly propose such models under the ambiguous banner of legal pluralism. At that point, non-libertarians are entirely justified in attacking libertarians as being shallow (although this would be unfair to libertarianism as a whole). I can't say I can necessarily blame them to the extent that libertarians have refuted themselves in this way.

Just Say No to Banning Pornography

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:54:00 +0000

There is a YouTube user who goes by the name Nuclearnight. I would do a video response to her myself on this one issue simply because her argument is particularly annoying, but I have decided to take an indefinite leave from making YouTube videos. Thus, I must put my response in written form.

Nuclearnight is a marxist-feminist. By this she obviously advocates the normal feminist positions, with a certain communist twist. I had no idea who this user was until a few people I'm subscribed to started doing video responses to her. The theme of most of her videos, from what I gather, is that pornography is bad, and people who support or patronize it are morally depraved slime balls. She commonly refers to women in porn as "masturbation accessories," which is clearly meant to sound demeaning to those who would even consider using them as such. She hates porn, mainly the heterosexual variety I assume, because the women in it are exploited and some of them even get hurt in the process of making pornographic material.

I should say from the outset that I'm all for people making their fellow human beings aware of the dangers of certain industries. If people are concerned about the harm one could face while tending corn fields in Iowa (you could get run over by a combine, you see), the more power to them in their crusade to spread the word about such dangers. The same goes for the porn industry. If you are concerned about the dangers of it, by all means tell others not to engage in it; tell them not to use it as well.

The problem comes when someone wants to ban porn, either in the form of placing restrictions on watching it or keeping people from entering the industry. This is what Nuclearnight seems to advocate. She is really worried that women in the industry are being harmed, once coerced into the adult entertainment business to begin with. My point is: so what.

In order to be consistent with this viewpoint, Nuclearnight needs to examine every industry that has the potential to harm its employees, along with the possibility of said employees being economically pressured into the enterprise. Take, for instance, coal miners. Many of the people who work in coal mines grow up in towns where that's just what you do when you grow up: you mine coal. Along with being pressured into the industry, many of them are actually harmed. Coal mines can collapse and a lot of miners get black lung. If you don't like that example, look at the steel industry, where the same thing occurs, along with the autos, farming, electricians, plumbers, garbage disposal workers, window cleaners, etc. The list could go on and on.

There is a certain amount of economic pressure that goes along with any industry a person goes into. People are limited by the geographic distribution of natural resources, the tastes of the people in the geographic location, the creativity of the entrepreneurs in the past and present, etc. Along with that, every industry possess risk: that's just life and there's no way to escape it. In life people get hurt. Yes, we should all strive to minimize it, but advocating the ban of entire industries with "risk of harm" as a crucial factor is a leap in logical reasoning.

I know Nuclearnight would object to much of this as the coercion of the capitalist system itself. But my claim is that the argument I just put forth about risk and economic pressure would be true in any society man could realistically conceive, even communism. Communism would not erase the desires of men; it would only try to arrange the system of production in a fashion that is more "fair" to certain people. The need to produce would still be there, along with the need for people to produce it. Those people would still live in areas that were more relatively conducive to the production of certain commodities and services than others. The limits of geography and scarcity do not disappear with the waving of the communist magic wand: hands still have to get dirty, machine wheels still have to turn, unless, of course, one wants to see humankind return to primitivism. In short, communist paradise would not eliminate the injustice that Nuclearnight so vigorously decries.

Further, true volunteerism (true anarchism for that matter) is manifested in a society that lets people decide to make bad choices. The analogy, which is perhaps overused, of Murder Park, is relevant here. Should people be able to decide to visit Murder Park, toting a gun, expecting to kill or be killed? Of course they should! So long as all parties are aware of what they are about to engage in and voluntarily enter. This is no different than allowing people to decide to commit suicide. Those of us who are more rational and concerned with our own physical safety, would not dream of going in such a park. In fact, we would all probably counsel others against stepping inside its gates as well. But counsel and force are two different things. To forcefully stop someone from making an idiotic decision is evil, no matter how much we disagree with that choice. It is force without consent, pure and simple.

The logical result of Nuclearnights anti-porn meanderings is a total breakdown in the division of labor and the economic ruin of society as a whole. If she fails to advocate applying her misgivings about porn to other industries in general, she is simply guilty of special pleading, and no one should take her seriously in the first place.

Explaining Anti-Authoritarianism's Contrast With Anarcho-Capitalism: Response To Peak + Why I Am Not Strawmanning Anarcho-Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:03:00 +0000

The following is a re-post of what originally was a facebook note in response to a note by Alex Peak, in reaction to two recent youtube videos ("Voluntarism vs. Anti-Authoritarianism" and "Clarifying The Issue With Ancap") that I made in criticism of anarcho-capitalism.

Dear Mr. Peak,

I appriciate your response to my recent video commentary explaining one of the main reasons why I no longer consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, even of a left-rothbardian interpretation. Overall, I find your views to be more reasonable than the tendencies that I critisize.

However, I don't think that you have adequately grasped what I understand anti-authoritarianism to be about. In particular, you still are focusing solely on the issue of physical aggression. While physical aggression is inextricably linked to authoritarianism, my definition of authoritarianism extends beyond its explicit association with physical aggression. I understand authoritarianism to entail excessive or unqualified decision-making or rule-making power, even if it does not necessarily directly involve physical aggression in its enforcement. With this being said, I think one will find that it is often the case that such a claim of authority entails some degree of aggression at some point down the line.

The issue that I am addressing extends beyond objecting to shooting tresspassers and bubble-gum thiefs. What I am objecting to is the principle that a land owner has total rule-making power by virtue of having aquired land through homesteading, trade, or gift. Generally, anarcho-capitalism holds that having a property right in land grants "ultimate decision-making power", even if this is qualified by a proportionality principle with respect to punishment. The reason why I find the proportionality principle to be insufficient is because it does not really qualify the decision-making power itself other than to say that a land owner cannot randomly murder people. It seems to logically entail that a land owner can tell whoever happens to be on their land what to do - this is what I mean by "authoritarianism".

There is nothing about the proportionality principle that constrains a land owner from setting up an absurd rule such as "if you enter my land, you must give me all of your possessions, including your clothing, and you must have sexual intercourse with me". Is this, in and of itself, physically aggressive? No, it isn't. Is it authoritarian? Yes, it is. If "property rights" in land means that the owner has "ultimate decision-making power" of this sort, then "property rights" can, in principle, justify authoritarianism. Absolute property rights in land thus essentially translates to "you must obey what the owner tells you to do or leave". What, pray tell, happens if one does not leave? It seems to me that either property rights are inherently constrained in favor of human dignity, or the owner is justified in initiating force to get you to leave for not obeying their rules.

At this point, property rights have in fact justified aggression, and it seems to be quite a stretch to call it "defense". In short, there is a contradiction between the absolute nature of the property right and the limit on aggression. The propertarian thus faces a moral dillema between upholding the absolute nature of land property rights and upholding the opposition to initiating force. But, above and beyond this, the propertarian cannot object to an authoritarian rule without placing a limit on property rights. For the problem is not simply with the initiation of aggression, but with authoritarian rules. Even if, in the scenario I gave above, the visitor agreed to obey the rule, there seems to be something wrong with the picture. They likely obey the rule because of the power disparity. In other words, their "consent" becomes superficial in light of the limiting circumstances and the unlimited power of the proprietor.

What can non-aggression and proportionality principles do to counter this? Nothing. If approached reductionistically, they force the libertarian into a position of indifference: noone initiated aggression, so it's a voluntary relationship and thus legitimate. But this reveals something rather curious about libertarianism as a stand-alone social philosophy: it does not, in principle, object to exploitation. Yea, I used that buzzword: exploitation. What is exploitation? For our purposes here, I'm going to define exploitation as taking advantage of one's position of power in order to get people to do whatever you want them to, to put someone in a negative situation through the use of a power disparity. This can be manifested in anything ranging from familial relations to the workplace.

How do I relate all of this to the state? Well, above and beyond it's aggressive origins and the questionable nature of its aquisition and maintainance of land, the state is problematic because of its exploitative function. It is an authoritarian institution. Aside from the questions of land aquisition, the only thing that meaningfully differentiates it from a land owner that exploits people is a matter of scale. Even if a land owner aquires their power consistently with the anarcho-capitalist norms for property aquisition, there still is the pressing question of their power. If their power, qualatatively speaking, cannot be particularly contrasted with the type of power claimed by a state, then in my eyes the land owner is a state for all intents and purposes. If someone "voluntarily" aquires a chunk of land and goes on to claim "ultimate decision-making power" over anyone that lives or occupies that area, I have trouble seeing how this meaningfully differs from a state.

To be clear, scale is completely irrelevant to my concern here. This is an issue of quality, not quantity. The area of land in question could be as small as an estate or as large as a "nation", but the principle of the matter would be the same. A neo-lockean land owner that reduces other people to serfs is an archon, even if they do not have control over an area as large as modern nation-states. They don't even necessarily need to be perpetually initiating aggression on their subjects - modern nation-states don't even technically do that, they survive on the inertia of power and ideology in addition to aggression. States claim the legitimate power to establish whatever rules they want over everyone that inhabits a particular geographical area. For all intents and purposes, modern states are gigantic land proprietors. If a smaller scale land proprietor claims or excersizes the same or similar powers, it very well be or quickly turn into a state.

This the instability that I see with anarcho-capitalism. It objects to the modern state's monopoly over such power, but it does not seem to principally object to such power in and of itself. It has a standard of "legitimacy", viewing the current state as not having aquired power in accordance with this standard of "legitimacy", but this very standard of "legitimacy" can be turned around and used to justify more or less the same thing (perhaps in a more decentralized manner). I believe this is what some social anarchists mean when they claim that anarcho-capitalism is a just a more decentralized landscape of mini-states: it wishes to establish market competition for state-like power itself, without explicitly stating it like this. The problem with the state, from an anarcho-capitalist viewpoint, is its relative monopoly on this power. The key word, however, is "relative". "Monopoly", in this sense, is a relative term. Relative to smaller geographical areas, there still could be a "monopoly" on this kind of power. Anarcho-capitalism seeks to resolve the problem of the state by having competiting organizations wield this same power, while a more robust sense of anarchism objects to that kind of power as such.

I can see my last few statements opening me up to being strawmanned, so I should clarify that this is not an absolute rejection of all organizations. Nor does it imply that there is something wrong with, say, owning a home or a bedroom. Nor am I advocating absolute pacifism. The issue has to do with the scope of power that we can legitimately connect to a given ownership claim. Yes, you can own a home. Yes, you can protect your home from an attempted armed robbery. But no, you cannot claim by virtue of owning your home to have "ultimate decision-making power" in very much the same way that a state does. Your "power", if you could said to legitimately have any at all, is qualified contextually. The problem that I have when discussing this with many anarcho-capitalists is that they seem to view it in black and white terms: either you have absolute property rights and hence "ultimate decision-making power", or you don't own anything at all. I believe this is a false dichotomy.

In relation to the Charles Johnson quote that you bring up, a premise tied up with what I am saying is that while an "authoritarian" society could concievably be consistent with libertarianism in some sense, the practical reality of an authoritarian culture will inevitably devolve into statism for the very reasons having to do with the problems of power that I've been discussing here. Hence, I do not think that a sustainably free and flourishing society is possible without at least a reasonable degree of cultural change in an anti-authoritarian direction. On one hand, this may seem to hint at a sense of pessimism. Relative to the sentiment of "let's just push the no state button and then not care about consequences from that point onwards", it is. But it's also more realistic. It doesn't mean that I think anarchism is impossible, but that the prerequisites for it meaningfully being realized is more robust than most market anarchists seem to realize, and that they sow the seeds for a new state if they continue to limit their conception of freedom to non-aggression and ambiguous voluntaryism.

I hope that this helps clarify my position even more.

Best regaurds,
Alex Strekal

The following is a re-post of a follow-up note for the purpose of clarification and as an elaboration on what I stated in the original note.

A common reaction to my criticism of anarcho-capitalism is to claim that it is a strawman, that most anarcho-capitalists do not explicitly advocate what I critisize. I think the problem with this is that it confuses a consequentialist argument for a strawman. What I am doing is pointing out the logical implications of the theory, regaurdless of the intentions of its proponents. Yes, many anarcho-capitalists are probably not going to explicitly endorse authoritarianism (although a good look at the LVMI message boards and articles really makes one wonder). But the point is that authoritarianism can, in principle, be logically derived from their own standards. The intentions of a given anarcho-capitalist matter not one bit as far as refuting this is concerned. A particular anarcho-capitalist could, in theory, oppose some of the logical implications of their own standards, but this should put them in a state of cognitive dissonance.

As a stand-alone social philosophy, anarcho-capitalism does *not* object to exploitation (and some of its most vocal proponents cringe and balk at any usage of this word). At best, such a reductionism is forced into a position of indifference towards it by the nature of its own logic. This is not a mere fantasy that I have concocted as ammunition. By itself, anarcho-capitalism is strictly concerned with rights concepts, with these rights generally being defined in propertarian terms. As I believe I have rather methodically shown, the logical implication of treating these rights concepts as absolutes or as something to reduce the whole social philosophy to, at least as it applies to land, creates tension with some of our most basic intuitions of human dignity (and freedom!). This may very well include the intuitions of some anarcho-capitalists themselves.

In a sense, what the issue boils down to is how one concieves of rights, particularly with respect to their absolute or non-absolute nature and their overall coherance with each other in the conceptual network that they form. Compared with a "maximalist" position, a Rothbardian conception of property rights is a bit less absolutist, insofar as it puts foreward a proportionality principle. However, compared with my position, a Rothbardian conception of property rights is more absolutist. And if my own position is compared with the statements of someone like Francios Tremblay, I'm commiting a sin for even clinging to any sense of property rights whatsoever, although from my angle Tremblay is just being an absolutist in the opposite direction of the anarcho-capitalist and is playing a ridiculous semantic game with the word "property".

The reason why I am not strawmanning Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism is because I am simply pointing out what its own conception of rights, interpreted in isolation from anything else outside of that system of thought, logically commits it to. "Ultimate decision-making power" means "ultimate decision-making power". If land property rights are absolute in the sense of granting "ultimate decision-making power", within the boundary of proportionality for retaliation and punishment, then this logically commits the Rothbardian to accept whatever authority a land owner claims and wields beyond that boundary -- *unless they open the system to additional considerations*. And the problem is that beyond that boundary we can theoretically fit in any rule that a land owner wishes to impose on other people who happen to be on their land. The "legitimate authority" of the land owner as a legislator, so to speak, is conceptually unlimited beyond this point. Short of randomly murdering their "guests", there is no limit on the land owner's authority to make commands.

A related issue is that I'm objecting to viewing everything only through the lense of rights concepts in the first place. This leads to certain tendencies of creating false dichotomies in a reductionistic manner. The most common manifestation of this is that when someone questions the absolute nature of land property rights, the anarcho-capitalist responds with a strawman of their own by accusing the property-skeptic of making a formal positive rights claim (this is what Thorsmitersaw/Darrin Knode almost always does when this issue comes up). This creates a false dichotomy between absolute land property rights and a claim to legitimately be able to take and use other people's stuff at whim. But the claim that a land owner doesn't legitimately have unlimited authority over whoever happens to be on their land is not the same thing as the claim that whoever happens to be on their land has unlimited authority to require the land owner to do things for them. The property-skeptic is not necessarily claiming that the owner has a formal or legal positive obligation to obey others. Quite the contrary, the whole point is that the person on the owner's land does not necessarily have a positive obligation to obey the owner's commands.

Are the problems with a reductionism to the NAP and property rights not the whole reason for having "thick libertarianism" in the first place? From my point of view, I'm only making (or extending on) a "thick libertarian" case against Rothbard. The "extra-rothbardian" concepts that I am bringing in, to open and expand libertarianism, is a robust anti-authoritarianism as I have concieved of it. The Rothbardian position by itself (and, to a lesser extent, the left-rothbardian position, although not altogether exempt from criticism) is in tension with these "thick" considerations. And this is not based on a strawman. The response that Rothbardianism does not condone shooting tresspassers and bubble-gum thiefs is only a perpetuation of the very fixation on physical aggression that I am critisizing, which misses the point. Even with proportionality principles in place, absolute land property rights is a constraint on the freedom of other people, and because of such considerations I'm suggesting that a robust sense of personal freedom is a constraint on land property rights.

There is tension within the conceptual network; it does not fully cohere. If I may put this in terms that anarcho-capitalists may be familiar with, "self-ownership" (putting aside my problems with this concept as it is normally used by many libertarians) and "land ownership" do not always jibe well with eachother. To the extent that land ownership claims extend over into a claim over people, it becomes problematic, and this is the sense in which I want to say that land ownership must be constrained. And this is precisely one of the main senses in which land is special: it is precisely the space which contains people. Continueing the usage of typical terms here, absolute land ownership rights inherently become a claim of authority over the "self-ownership" of other people. If it didn't, it wouldn't be absolute. The only way to make the two cohere is to place limits on one or the other. The implications of placing limits on "self-ownership" would be a justification for authoritarianism. Hence the problem that I've been addressing all along. The plainly stated Rothbardian position, insofar as it wants to uphold land property rights, should logically commit the Rothbardian to authoritarianism and a re-justication for the state within the boundaries of its land property norms.

It should be rather clear that this is not a strawman of anarcho-capitalism stated in bad faith. It is the outcome of a dialectical and deconstructive process in my mind. There is an antinomy, so to speak, between our basic intuitions of personal freedom and the Rothbardian construction of property rights. I don't think that this is an antinomy that resolves. If there is a synthesis, it seems to hint at something closer to geo-anarchism.

How to Argue for Libertarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:43:00 +0000

I have long pondered on how best to defend and advocate for liberty, to persuade my fellow human beings that they, too, should hold it and advocate on behalf of it. In Murray Rothbard's book "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto," he identifies three philosophical foundations upon which the libertarian creed has been based: emotive, utilitarian, and natural rights.

I used to call myself a natural-rightist. However, I slowly moved towards the position that such a foundation was weak, simply due to scientific facts. The natural-rightist, says Rothbard, is one who advocates libertarianism on the basis of the self-ownership axiom: a person owns his or her physical body, just as one might own other tangible, material things in reality. The problem I have with this is it ignores the now obvious fact that the notion of "self" is brought about by the inter-working processes of the physical brain. Modern neuroscience has shown that human emotion is controlled by a set of brain structures called collectively the lymbic system, which is itself controlled (or regulated) by the more logic, future-projecting area of the brain: the frontal lobes. The sense of "self" has even been shown to originate predominately from a certain structure or region in the brain.

If the sense of "self" comes about by the physiological processes in the brain, how can one be said to own it in any true sense? What is owning what? Does the "self" come to own the physiological processes that bring it about as soon as it arises? This does not make sense on a fundamental level, but I won't go into the specific reasons for that here. Let me also note that I remain open to persuasion on this issue.

The main issue I have with Rothbard in his "For a New Liberty" is when he says the following:

The emotivists assert that they take liberty or nonaggression as their premise purely on subjective, emotional grounds. While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy, this can scarcely convince anyone else. By taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists thereby insure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine.

I think Rothbard overstates his own case against the emotivist's ability to convince anyone else of his doctrine. What I am fairly sure of is that morality is subjective. It is an opinion, a value. However, evolutionary psychology shows that the brain is equipped with some basic hardware that predisposes it to act morally towards certain people in a social context. In a sense, even chimpanzees are moral: they are documented to punish stealing, murder, etc., within their own social groups. The problem comes in when someone is viewed as an outsider, i.e. outside the social group one acts morally towards. This is true for humans and chimpanzees.

As an empirical matter, certain tenants of moral conduct (don't steal, don't murder, etc.) have been found present, in some form or another, in virtually every human culture on Earth. This moral predisposition is tempered, again, by the fact that it only extends so far: inside a given social group. And it may be cluttered with other unrealistic, culturally-based beliefs, like sacrificing infants to the gods to bring rain.

Given this and assuming morality is subjective, I still have an objective basis to appeal to within other members of my species: a basic moral sense that certain actions are bad within a social group. You can then argue for the expansion of the social group; that is, including more people (or even animals) within the realm of one's moral actions. You will find very few people willing to concede that they endorse aggression against innocent people without their consent. Instead, it's almost always maintained that it can't be avoided, or the people really do give some type of consent. Then the matter becomes one of showing how it can be avoided (leaving aside the notion of fiat justitia ruat caelum), or how it is not truly consent.

In short, I think emotivists do have an objective basis to appeal to in advocating liberty, and they could be very successful by appealing to peoples' basic moral intuitions alone, since such intuitions have a neurobiological basis. If large swaths of people intuitively hold the value that you should not hurt innocent people without their consent (even if it's only within the narrow range of a social group and even though it may be muddled by other predispositions), it seems very plausible that argumentation would be successful. If people want to hold a certain value, the task becomes showing how to be logically consistent; that is, how to truly hold it as a value.

"Soft" and "Hard" Arguments Against The State

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:17:00 +0000

The point that I'm about to make has been brought up before in the context of critiqueing propertarianism (or absolutist propertarianism), but I'd like to highlight it more explicitly in the context of anti-state arguments. My tone and purpose here will hopefully be less confrontational and more constructive. There is what I call the "soft" and "hard" arguments against the state, both of which I consider to be legitimate arguments. The main difference between the "soft" and "hard" arguments is that the "hard" argument goes further and more explicitly identifies what the objection to the state is. Both arguments are valid responses to the "implicit consent" and "love it or leave it" defenses of the state, but I think that the "soft" argument is necessary but insufficient as a counter to authoritarian claims.

A good example of what I'm calling the "soft" argument would be this:

"I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove – namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it – at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do – and so, the fact that I am living in "this country" means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over – but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it." -- Roderick Long, Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to 10 Objections

This is a valid argument. The person that is claiming that the state is legitimate because one implicitly consents to the rules established within its claimed territory is presupposing the legitimacy of the state's territorial claim to begin with, and this is something that they must prove. There is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of any territorial ownership claim. In the absence of a standard for the legitimacy for territorial ownership claims and in the absence of proof that a given claim meets that standard, an "implicit consent" or "love it or leave it" argument inherently fails. This inherently begs the question of what the standard is for the legitimacy of territorial ownership claims.

But this argument is "soft" for a number of reasons. For one thing, it leads to a meta-debate about the criteria for legitimate ownership, and the state can be either justified or unjustified depending on what criteria one uses. But, more importantly, I don't think that it adequately expresses what the problem with the state is. It gives the impression that if the state did meet the criteria for legitimate ownership, all of its powers would indeed be justified. In other words, it appears to unduly reduce the question of the state to one of legitimacy in land aquisition. But the problem with the state isn't simply that it doesn't legitimately own the territory that it claims power over, but extends further to the fact that there is something wrong with the arbitrary or unqualified kind of authority that it claims and exersizes in general. The "soft" argument is still functioning within a certain paradigm of "legitimacy" that is relative to "who is the owner?".

The "hard" argument against the state goes further than this: even if we do presume, for the sake of argument, that a given individual or group is a "legitimate" owner, this still would not justify the kind and scope of power of a state. There isn't only a burden of proof for the legitimacy of an ownership claim, but there is a burden of proof for the legitimacy of authority claims derived from ownership. This approach to the question inherently increases the burden of proof and implies a conceptual limit on "property rights", particularly as it relates to land, because it declares that the ownership of land in and of itself does not justify absolute, unqualified authority over other people. In constrast, the "soft" argument is open to being turned on its head as a re-legitimization of the state, dependant only on a norm for the legitimacy of property aquisition.

An analogy to a more small-scale context may drive the point home. For the sake of argument, let's presume that I legitimately own a home. Would it make sense for me to claim that by virtue of the fact that I own my home, anyone that visits must do literally whatever I tell them, and that I am justified in doing whatever I want to anyone that happens to occupy it at any given moment? Such a claim would be laughed out of court as a ridiculous propertarian justification for slavery and murder. But the state is just a large-scale embodyment of this. The members of the political class constitute the defacto "owners" of the territory that the state has jurisdiction over, and at the end of the day they have ultimate authority over the lives of everyone else within the territory. Asking "who is the legitimate owner?" isn't enough. One has to ask "what kind of authority should an owner really have?".

In short, the problem with the state is really just an application of a more general criticism of authoritarianism, and the state just happens to be a case of authoritarianism that is applied to the largest geographical area. This constitutes a certain form of "thickness" in which anti-statism is really just a part of a broader social philosophy. The burden of proof for an authority claim is higher than the "soft" anti-state argument suggests, since it is not simply relative to who is an owner. The "strong" anti-state argument proposes that it isn't a question of who has the authority, but a more general question about the rational limits of authority, and that "consent" is impossible in a context in which options are limited by the circumstances and assorted inherited power structures.

This also inherently raises the bar for what the necessary and sufficient conditions of a free society are. A free society isn't simply dependant on the right norm of property aquisition and a narrow, vague sense of "voluntaryism". "Voluntaryism" is effectively neutralized by the dominance of pre-existing authority structures and a social atmosphere that leaves little choice other than one of asqueisance. I don't think that the formula for a free society reduces to a redistribution of ownership claims while the general rubric of authoritarian norms that can be derived from ownership claims remain relatively unchallenged. An overly simplistic sense of propertarianism and voluntaryism seems to contain the seeds of its own dissolution, because it doesn't contain sufficient checks to avoid the re-justification and ultimately the re-emergence of the state from within its formula.

With this in mind, I urge libertarians to think more critically about their own arguments and be open to the prospect that there may be holes that need to be filled in order to avoid the possibility of their own concepts being used as justifications for precisely what they hopefully intend to be countering. We need a lot more ammunition than "but they didn't homestead this land!", and we should be cognizant of the dangers of certain overly zealous tendencies that exist within. There is much that can be done to strengthen our case and make us more internally consistent. I think that it's time to harden the arguments and steer clear of laying the foundation for one's own failure.

[Note: To be clear, none of this is particularly intended as an attack on Roderick Long, even though I quoted him as my example of the "soft" argument. I have a lot of respect for Roderick Long. I'm quite certain that, as exemplified in various other writtings of his, Roderick Long tends to have certain tendencies towards "thickness" that strengthen his anti-statism. However, I do think that the kind of argument that he presented in the quote is insufficient and open to valid objections by soft propertarians and anti-propertarians for the reasons gone into above.]

Social Evolution vs. "Social Darwinism"

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:34:00 +0000

"Social Darwinism" is a term that is generally used to refer to a viewpoint arising in the 19th century that characterizes social relations in terms of a hobbesian struggle, a negative sense of "competition" in which the "the strong" overpower "the weak", combined with a prescriptive stance in favor of letting "the weak" die off in the name of fostering a superior gene pool. Sprinkle this with Malthus's theories of population and a rather vulgar creed can be formed. No doubt, positions along these lines did arise and influence racialist and eugenics movements. However, mainstream discourse on such matters often tends to conflate this with social evolutionary theory in general and mischaracterize figures such as Herbert Spencer as having a more vulgar view than is actually the case.

There are a number of things that are worth clarifying about this. The term "social darwinism" itself may be somewhat misleading in the sense that the kind of view being described here is, up to a point, more of a misinterpretation of Darwin himself than a logical extension of his views. While Darwin did talk about "the survival of the fittest" and a sense of "struggle for existence", by no means did he mean to imply that cooperation and empathy is excluded from his analysis. Furthermore, Darwin himself is not necessarily the sole or even main source for social evolutionary theories. Both Lamarkian and post-darwinian ideas have influenced various social evolutionary theories. The general rubric of "social evolution" should be distinguished from "darwinism".

When I think of social evolutionary theories, the first two names that pop into my mind are Herbert Spencer and Peter Kropotkin. Despite the ill reputation that Spencer has been given as a "social darwinist", he was a Lamarkian who theorized about evolution prior to Darwin and who thought of social evolution as moving in the direction of more cooperation and "beneficience". He was a radical classical liberal that was explicitly opposed to militaristic, violent, or conflictual tendencies. Those who characterize him as a "social darwinist" either misunderstand him or simply never read his work. Kropotkin was the father of anarcho-communism, who explicitly had the purpose of highlighting tendencies towards cooperation and empathy in both human and non-human life. While he certainly can be interpreted as a Rousseauan that romantisized "primitive" and medieval societies, the entire thrust of his work "Mutual Aid" is as a counter-balance to those very views that are commonly characterized as "social darwinism".

Social evolutionary theory, in the general sense, is simply an attempt to apply evolutionary concepts in a context beyond biology to things like culture, economics, and politics. In its backward-looking sense, it is simply an indispensible aspect of historical analysis. In its foreward-looking sense, it tends to entail some general conceptions of progress with respect to social interaction and organization. In and of itself, it does not entail the negative things associated with "social darwinism". It does not do justice to the general discourse on social evolution for it to be halted or polluted by associations with eugenics, racialism, and Mr. Scrooge bugaboos, or for many of its early proponents to be conflated with the Nazis, given the fact that liberalism and anarchism are involved. It would be best for people to try to look past their linguistic and socially inherited prejudices and judge the ideas of these thinkers on their own merits, while being cognizant of the much more broad scope of ideas that fall under the general umbrella of "social evolutionary theory".

Anti-Darwinian Societies?

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:35:00 +0000

Anyone who keeps up with Richard Dawkins will have heard him mention that he thinks a society based on Darwinian principles would be vicious and contemptable. He goes further to state that Darwinian princples at the level of society would be an unhampered free market. He thinks society should be organized around anti-Darwinian principles, giving those who are destitute and impoverished a safety net in which to fall. I think this view is problematic.

The central fallacy in Dawkin's reasoning is his conflation of the free market with Darwinian principles. On this, I offer one large objection.

The law of association (also known as comparative advantage) makes clear that free trade is beneficial. It is beneficial because both parties gain during the exchange. That is, each party to the exchange values what he receives over and above what he gives up. The law of association also shows how the specialization and division of labor, with free trade as a backdrop, increases total productivity. Not only does it increase total productivity, but it even benefits the weaker party in terms of productivity. A simple example will illustrate this:

Imagine a world with two commodities: butter and bread. Amanda is best at producing bread, while David is best at producing butter. However, Amanda is absolutely better than David in producing bread and butter. In a day, Amanda can produce 20 loafs of bread if she concentrates solely on bread production, and she can produce 15 pounds of butter if she concentrates solely on butter production. David, on the other hand, can produce 15 pounds of butter if he concentrates solely on butter production, and he can produce 10 loafs of bread if he concentrates solely on bread production. On the other hand, if Amanda splits her time between bread and butter production, she can produce 10 loafs of bread and 7.5 pounds of butter, while David can produce 7.5 pounds of butter and 5 loafs of bread.

If Amanda produces that in which she is comparatively the best (bread) and David produces what he is comparatively the least disadvantaged (butter), overall production is higher than if each split their time between bread and butter. [Total production of 35 units versus 30 units.] The surplus can then be traded between the parties and each is better off. Expand this economic law across entire societies, with all of the goods and services produced therein, and the benefits of it become even more obvious.

I said all of that to point out the problem in Dawkins analysis of free markets: free markets do not impoverish the poor and inferior. As was shown, even if a person is superior in every way (at least when it comes to production), he will still be better off economically to trade with someone who is inferior in every way. In this way, the free market helps the poor and even those who may be genetically less gifted.

Thus, Dawkins contention that free markets are ruthless and have no regard for the poor is mistaken. You can be for the free market and be a champion of the least of those among us.

A Two-Sided Dillema

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:19:00 +0000

There is a two-sided dillema that pops up in conflicts over issues of freedom and domination. One side of the dillema is the problem of "involuntary liberation", while the other side of the dillema is the problem of "voluntary authoritarianism". Both of these seem like bald-faced contradictions that throw a monkey wrench into any attempt to coherantly define freedom, but they actually pop up quite frequently in conflicts between various libertarians and anarchists. The begged questions that may clarify how such contradictions arise is "voluntary in what sense?" and "liberation in what sense?".

What do I mean by "voluntary authoritarianism"? I mean a situation that is predicated on something that is voluntary in some sense or aspect, and yet is ultimately authoritarian in nature. For example, let's assume that "homesteading", "exchange", and "inheritance" or "gift" are voluntary modes of aquiring property over a given geographical area. That is, it is "voluntary" in the way that it is obtained. But as a question aside from one of how territory is obtained, those that own the geographical area exersize essentially unlimited power over those that happen to occupy the area that they have voluntarily obtained. Hence, in spite of the fact that the area was aquired "voluntarily", there is an authoritarian relationship at play in which the individual or group that "voluntarily" obtained the territory theoretically make whatever rules they want while the non-owners must obey their rules.

Let's be clear about this: the scenario just described would be a state in the Weberian definition of the term (or at least involve a state-like entity), in spite of the "voluntary" nature of territorial aquisition. It constitutes a defacto "territorial monopoly of ultimate decision-making" relative to the geographical area in question. And yet it initially came about through "voluntary" means, in terms of the way in which the geographical area was obtained. This illustrates an important point: that the qualification or criteria that a given geographical area is aquired through "voluntary" means is insufficient as a condition for freedom. The excersize of "ultimate decision-making power" over a given geographical area does not suddenly cease to threaten people's freedom simply because the area was "homesteaded" or "exchanged for".

There is also a factor of time in situations of "voluntary authoritarianism". While the prior example shows how it possible in some sense for a "state" to arise out of an initially "voluntary" mode of property aquisition, the annoying issue of "voluntary" slavery is similar, except in the latter case it has more to do with contracts than direct modes of property aquisition. It is theoretically possible for someone to sign a contract stating that they will work for and obey the orders of another individual or group, for the rest of their lives even. In terms of the simple act of signing the contract without initially being threatened with aggression, such an act would indeed be "voluntary". But as soon as the person tries to opt out of the relationship and another party proactively threatens violence to make them continue following orders into the future, what started out as a "voluntary contract" has taken on the character of any old authoritarian relationship. The contract itself is irrelevant to what explicitly is "voluntary".

The knee-jerk response at this point is for the defender of "voluntary slavery" to object that "you can't force them to be free", since that would appear to be a contradiction in terms. This is misleading because the person in the scenario actually doesn't want to obey orders anymore or continue to be a part of the relationship. The entire point is that the relationship has explicitly ceased to be "voluntary", and to perpetually enforce the contract would be pure subjection at this point. If I defend a slave that is trying to flee their master, I'm not forcing anyone to be free. It's their master that is trying to force them into not being free. If the "voluntary slavery" notion is taken to its logical conclusion, one would have to defend any sort of authoritarian relationship as long as it is traceable back to a legally binding contract.

It seems like the fundamental error of such "voluntary authoritarianism" is that property and/or contract are treated as ends in themselves that override freedom, or freedom is defined as a derivative of them. As a consequence of this, everything that one would otherwise object to in the abscence of contracts and the proper modes of property aquisition is relegitimized in the framework of property and/or contract. Hence, slavery and the state remain in substance, and differ only in the form that they take in terms of how they initially come about, which may initially be voluntary in nature. This may seem counter-intuitive, but something can start out voluntarily (or at least with its foundational qualities not involving aggression) and become involuntary or authoritarian over time. It also leads to a conclusion that may offend the average market-libertarian ear: if we want to meaningfully favor freedom, we must realize that freedom inherently limits property and contracts.

With all of this being said, there is another side of the coin here. While there are specific problems with viewpoints that end up effectively leading to the contradiction of making people "free to be subjects", there are also certain viewpoints that end up leading to a genuine contradiction of "forcing people to be free". The most explicit example of this in large-scale politics is probably the neoconservative line on foreign policy, in which proactive aggression and nation-buiding is endorsed in the name of freeing people from the control of foreign governments and "keeping the world safe for democracy". The idea is that one is doing a benevolent service to the people living in those areas by stepping in fighting the organizations that more locally control them. There is often a humanitarian veneer to it that gives it a veil of legitimacy.

Upon reflection, it may initially seem like there is an element of sensibility to this if one thinks of it in terms of helping slaves flee their masters. But that isn't really how such policies really work. For one thing, who exactly belongs to "the enemy" to be fought is often unclear, and the general population ends up being either caught in the crossfire or feeling invaded, which leads them to defend themselves. And so, to some extent, one ends up in a conflict with the very people that one is claiming to be liberating. The very nature of large-scale warfare ends up doing damage that is well beyond the limits of explicitly governmental targets. Furthermore, even to the extent that what could be considered oppressors are being fought off, it is under the pretext of imposing a new group of oppressors.

It reaches a point at which one is actually subjugating and killing people in the name of liberating them. The "liberating force" makes a power grab of their own, either directly (in the form of running the government) or indirectly (in the form of establishing a new puppet/satellite regime). Even the mere motive of freeing people comes into question, and it ends up looking like the motive of the "liberating force" is to become masters themselves or impose a new set of authorities onto the people that are supposed to be "liberated". It's analagous to slavemaster A taking out slavemaster B only as a pretext to replacing them and gaining control over the other slavemaster's subjects. The claim to be freeing people, whether it is genuinely intended or not, is illusory in substance.

A similar issue is involved with opposition to standard wage labor. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that an anarcho-communist society was achieved. Noone works for wages under an employer. But let's suppose that, for one reason or another, a particular individual decided that they wanted to work for someone else and another individual was willing to be their employer. One can protest until one is blue in the face that noone would have any reason to do that in a communist society, since there is supposed to be post-scarcity conditions, but let's assume that some people do anyways. What can the anarcho-communist really do about it? Are they really going to try to universally ban all employment contracts, and how would they possibly do this without some degree of aggression at some point down the line?

I think that this scenario bumps into a genuine "force them to be free" dillema. It seems akward and counter-intuitive to try to proactively intervene to stop someone from initially entering into an employment contract, while that person protests the whole way and genuinely wants to enter into it. It seems like the anarcho-communist more or less has no choice but to tolerate it to some extent. To claim to be "liberating" someone while they emphatically don't want you to and while they persistently object doesn't make any sense. While the "voluntary slavery" proponent doesn't take freedom of exit into proper account, anyone that favors explicit "involuntary liberation" in this way seems to not take freedom of entry into proper account. If "freedom of association" is to mean anything at all, both entry and exit must be considered.

Anarcho-Capitalism Is Not A Form Of Libertarian Socialism

noreply@blogger.com (Brainpolice) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:48:00 +0000

Brad Spangler has recently been defending anarcho-capitalism as essentially being the same thing as libertarian socialism (see here and here). While I think that one-dimensional thinking can be misleading and there is an extent to which conflict about such questions can be based on semantics, I believe that Spangler is stretching it here and going too far in his own use of semantics and obfuscating certain distinctions between norms commonly held by the groups in question. The problem, as I see it, partially revolves around how he is defining his terms relative to other people that commonly apply those same terms to themselves.

Spangler holds up Murray Rothbard as a libertarian socialist. A number things must be noted that give this claim a context: Spangler is talking about a "left-rothbardian" interpretation of Rothbard that is not shared by the vast majority of "rothbardians" (particularly those associated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute), this is only one era in Rothbard's thought that is being refered to (late 60's and early 70's), and Rothbard came to abandon that position. In fact, by the time we get to the 80's, it seems quite clear that Rothbard drifted (back?) "rightward" to a significant extent.

The early formation of agorism was partially based on a split between Rothbard and Konkin. Of course, Konkin viewed himself as "more rothbardian than rothbard", as merely taking Rothbard's premises to a more radical and logical conclusion. But even if one wants to think of it as having its roots in Rothbard's ideas, it still constitutes a deviation relative to the man's own views and the views of many of his adherants. Insofar as agorism is only thought of as a different strategic viewpoint for obtaining anarcho-capitalism, then I suppose there isn't much of a significant distinction. But insofar as it is based on a "left-rothbardian" interpretation of libertarianism, I think it must be admitted that it is a distinct system of thought from the "plumbline" of anarcho-capitalism.

With Rothbard and agorism aside, there are much more important reasons why I don't think it makes sense to pretend that the general paradigm of anarcho-capitalism is indistinguishable from libertarian socialism. Most fundamentally, they are very clearly distinguished in terms of their norms about property, and I don't think that such differences are trivial. Generally, anarcho-capitalism is based on a quite specific conception of property that essentially every libertarian socialist I've ever encountered rejects. Indeed, it is considered authoritarian. Likewise, the vast majority of anarcho-capitalists that I've encountered tend to consider the norms of libertarian socialists to inherently violate liberty.

Now, I'll be the first person to admit that sometimes these conflicts are based on mutual misunderstandings. I most certainly think that simple "pro-property" vs. "anti-property" is an oversimplification. But I do not think that it is entirely semantic in nature. I don't think that we can make such issues go away by playing with language. Libertarian socialists do not believe in non-proviso lockean property. One can come up with theories about how non-proviso lockean property can possibly include socialistic models of economic organization until one's brain explodes, but that would still be based on the overall framework of the property norm, which libertarian socialists reject.

One could say that "we all believe in non-aggression, so the distinctions are moot", but even non-aggression is going to be defined partially based on what property norm one assumes ahead of time. At the practical level, this means that it isn't even the same "non-aggression principle" being adhered to, since whether or not a given act is going to be considered offense or defense will vary. One could say that "we all oppose the state, so the distinctions are moot", but as long as one party considers the other's norms to justify or imply a state anyways, one group's "anti-statism" will be another group's "transition from one state to another" or "the establishment of a situation that is a sufficient condition for a new state forming". And that's exactly what the anarcho-capitalist's norms imply from a libertarian socialist perspective.

There are some people that could be said to occupy an ambiguous space that exists between the general paradigms of anarcho-capitalism and libertarian socialism, such as various elements within the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. But that's just the thing: the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and related tendencies are not representative of the norm in market anarchism. If anything, it has a certain heretical flavor relative to the orthodoxy of both anarcho-capitalism and social anarchism. On one hand, it can be considered reconciliationist or a mixture of ideas from both paradigms. But relative to the "hardline" of both paradigms, it very clearly is deviationist; it defies or breaks the norms.

Some market anarchists (particularly those with left-libertarian inclinations) think that if you get rid of the state, "capitalism" as we know it dissapears. To an extent, this makes sense if we understand "capitalism" to depend on state intervention in terms of property titles and an assortment of legal constructs that have had the function of restricting competition to the dominant "capitalist" models of economic organization. I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint myself. But the analysis could be taken further: if we still hold the same property norms in general(particularly with respect to land), then we haven't avoided the foundation of states. If we view the matter from another conceptual level, the dominant anarcho-capitalist position on land should logically justify if not consequentially lead to states or state-like entities.

This, I believe, cuts much deeper to the heart of what the issue of contention is all about. It isn't merely a matter of rejecting the current distribution of property titles and thinking that in the absence of a state such an arrangement could not sustain itself. It's a matter of how such an arrangement forms in the first place and the relationship between specific property norms and authority. By the very least, as long as anarcho-capitalists continue hold on to certain territorialist notions, they haven't overcome authoritarianism from a libertarian socialist perspective. The problem cannot be completely chalked up to the influence of already-existing states. It's not as if, regaurdless of norms about property, a given state falls and then everything just works itself out into libertopia.

The discussion is not merely about what one thinks the consequences of getting rid of currently existing states are, but what the consequences of various norms about property and liberty are, partially in relation to the question of state formation. It's a different level of analysis altogether. Considerations about this matter is part of why I think that "anti-statism" in the sense of calling for the abolition of currently existing states to be necessary but insufficient by itself to foster a free society. I don't believe that you automatically have a free society simply because a given state falls, I think that a free society will be contingent on a culture of freedom, and precisely what is involved in a culture of freedom (including norms about property) is up for debate.

Part of why I think that Spangler's claims are misleading is that he seems to think that if you think that the state intervenes to uphold an unjust allocation of property and that the consequences of abolishing the state naturally lead to a redistribution of property, this makes you a libertarian socialist, but that's not what libertarian socialism is defined by. It involves fairly specific notions about property at a different conceptual level, and it doesn't entail a reduction of the issue to the pre-existance of a state. This is why his statements confuse some people, both libertarian socialists and anarcho-capitalists, because we're not talking about the same thing here.

A reply to Buchanan's Article praising the Tariff on Chinese Tires.

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hayes) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:57:00 +0000

Here is Buchanan's article that was in the Lawton Constitution's opinion page last week:

http://buchanan.org/blog/globalism-vs-americanism-2192

Patrick Buchanan has come out in support of Obama’s tariff on tires, saying that its a good start. But Buchanan makes several mistakes throughout his column.

He starts off early in his article, blaming the Chinese tire industry for taking away market shares of the Cooper Tire company and causing the South Georgia tire plant to be shut down. But this isn’t at all the fault of the Chinese. It is the fault, if you could call it a fault, of the consumers. The consumers have let their preferences be known and have chosen Chinese tires over Cooper tires. Buchanan I know gives lip service to capitalism. And if it were not the Chinese, but Goodyear tires that were becoming more popular with consumers than Cooper tires, Buchanan wouldn’t bat an eye. He would rightly and logically conclude that Goodyear is producing a higher quality product at a lower price, and that the market has succeeded. But because it is not just the Lawton Goodyear plant that is producing more tires (producing about 2,000 tires a day) but also China producing more tires, Buchanan is crying foul, and throwing the concept of the free market under the bus. 2,100 men and women are out of work in Georgia, would it really help those people pay their mortgage if their job was replaced by men in Oklahoma rather than China?

Buchanan then looks at how the Chinese are able to produce a lower cost product; pointing out that workers are willing to work for much less in China, a result of the lack of labor unions, and government intervention in labor unions, since the plant he mentioned, in fact all tire plants in the United States, with the exception of the Goodyear Tire plant in Lawton, Oklahoma are union plants (though Buchanan fails to go into that), that the Chinese government does not meddle in the market by way of health and safety regulations, civil rights laws, and perhaps most damning, environmental regulations. But the problem here is not China, it is us, or more precisely our governments. To fix this the government should get out of the way and let the market operate, lift the crippling environmental regulations, and stop protecting labor unions.

But another factor is the Chinese Government, they do in fact, as Buchanan mentioned, manipulate their currency to benefit exporters and hurt importers, though this is also an example of government meddling in the market, the solution is not to have more government meddling, but for the United States to eliminate the Federal Reserve. It is quite easy for a government to manipulate its currency in regards to another fiat currency, it would be quite another thing however for China to attempt to manipulate its currency in relation to Gold, it would end in disaster for them, if they were foolish enough to try.

Buchanan goes on to blast Cooper Tires for moving plants to China. But why? does he consider Toyota as a traitor to Japan for building plants in the U.S.? (no one likes a traitor even if the traitor defects to his own side.) No, he doesn’t, It is the nature of men to act in a way that best serves their interests. Instead of spinning my own clothing or growing my own food, I turn to a cheaper alternative, the grocery store, and the mall. Labor is no different, or does Buchanan expect us to not hire the cheapest bid to cut our grass? Why shouldn’t Cooper move to China if they can get a better deal?

“ Welcome to 21st century America, where globalism has replaced patriotism as the civil religion of our corporate elites.”

But this is to confuse patriotism with nationalism. Patriotism is only the desire a man has for his country, his brethren, and himself to be free. Free from taxes, from extortion, crime, and perhaps most accurately, to be left alone. It is nationalism that insists that all consumer goods be made in his home country, that his government be powerful, that his government exert her will over other governments and people far and wide.

Yet even still I don’t know of any religion that our corporate elites hold, I can not even address this point except to say that all men, from the smallest child, to the most powerful corporate elite, act in his own self interest and in a way which, in his judgement will most benefit him.

Buchanan goes on to illustrate a lack of understanding of self sufficiency independence,

“What has this meant to the republic that was once the most self sufficient and independent in all of history?”

Being independent does not mean that I built my own house and car, that I spun my own clothing or created my own electricity for lighting, or even that I cut my own grass. Rather it is a matter of being able to produce something, or give some service in trade so others will be willing to provide those goods and services to me. if I were not self sufficient, I would not be able to supply myself with these goods, either directly or through trade. The same model that I put forward for an individual also applies to the aggregate of American individuals, i.e. to the country.

We are still independent, but Buchanan has confused political independence with economic independence. Under Buchanan’s concept, consider how utterly non self sufficient a brain surgeon must be, Who can not operate perform brain surgery on himself, and since that is his only talent, he can not change the oil on his porsche, pilot his private jet, sew his thousand dollar suits, or cut firewood to heat his 10,000 square foot home!

Addressing the “trade deficit” is the next leg of Buchanan’s article. But again one has to question the premise. What exactly is a trade deficit, perhaps more importantly, what is a trade? A trade, as it should be obvious to any 10 year old boy trading baseball cards, is exchanging what one values less for what one values more. Tom values Jim’s Nolan Ryan card more than he values his own Greg Maddox and Barry Bonds card, while Jim values the Maddox card Barry Bond’s card more than his Nolan Ryan. The two boys agree to a trade. And through my magic of deception, I have made the trade deficit disappear!
But there is no deception. That is what a trade is. Consider another example. your own “trade deficit” with your local grocery store. If you have never sold anything to your grocery store, Buchanan would say you are running a trade deficit in the amount of dollars that you spend annually at the store. But how preposterous is this? Would you really be better off eating a $100 bill each week than trading it for nourishing food? Of course not. There is no trade deficit here. The fact is that the act of trading negates a trade deficit.

As Buchanan raises the question of dependence on China again, think about your own dependence on your grocery store... Are you dependent on your grocery? No, you trade with him, but you are not dependent. If he goes out of business, or stops carrying the type of tea you prefer, you go to another store. Its that simple.

Now Buchanan gains strength towards the end, saying that we should reciprocate, that since they have tariffs on our goods, we should put tariffs on their goods. But this is probably not the way to go.

The fact is that besides hurting producers of another country, it also hurts consumers of the home country. This, more than any other issue is what lead to the war between the states. As the Confederate Constitution was ratified March 11th 1861, creating a virtual free trade zone by article one section eight of the new Constitution, in the north shortly before the Morrill tariff was passed, putting a tax of 47% on goods entering in the remaining United States. Naturally the monied elite could not stand to see a tariff of such magnitude put on them while the south would have a bare 10% tariff on goods entering the newly formed republic, and papers across the North changed their tune and called for blood.

Likewise WWI had at its root trade. and Woodrow Wilson admitted that the war was fought to prevent Germany from gaining economic supremacy.

It is admirable that Buchanan is such an outspoken opponent of unnecessary wars, yet it is sad he doesn’t realize that tariffs, and trade wars, are the leading cause of wars.

It does not help our case for China to remove its trade restrictions when we put our own on them. And the result, if we do so, is that the American consumer is the one who gets hurt.

Lastly I’ll address Buchanan’s view on taxes where he says, “ As they rebate value-added taxes on exports to us, and impose a value-added tax on our exports to them, let us reciprocate. Impose a border tax equal to a VAT on all their goods entering the United States, and use the hundreds of billions to cut corporate taxes on all manufacturing done here in the United States.”

Apparently Buchanan is not for cutting taxes, but transferring taxes from one group to another. He is right that corporate taxes should be cut, because they are passed on to the consumer, but does he fail to realize that taxes on foreign goods are also passed along to the consumer?