Clearly, in times of emergency, the internet, in order to be protected, must be destroyed.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

From Wired.com comes news of the US Army’s latest spy mobile — a high altitude, long-duration flight, combat airship, ominously nicknamed “The Unblinking Eye.” This sweet ride and its two sister blimps will cost taxpayers upwards of half a billion dollars. The 5-year contract calls for mere $517 million, and we all know military contractors never experience cost overruns.

I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:

God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .

The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.

God bless America indeed.

The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.

I’m reminded of a couple of pieces by heavy metal bands, though these work just as well for spy satellites. The first is a creepy intro, “An Eye Is Upon You,” by Powerman 5000 for their album Tonight the Stars Revolt! And the second is “Electric Eye” by one of my favorite bands, Judas Priest (their compilation album Metal Works is a good place to start).

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

It is a common mistake, made even by some libertarians and former libertarians, that libertarians reject the idea of unchosen obligations. Gene Callahan, apparently a former libertarian turned communitarian, is the latest to make this mistake. He says:

Obligation . . . is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory.¹

Well, this is just patently absurd. Libertarians, of course, do not deny that individuals can have obligations to others, including non-humans.

Fortunately, Callahan goes on to clarify what he means:

We can have obligations that we did not agree to take upon ourselves.

But this is something that not all libertarians deny, as a wide and deep enough perusal of libertarian literature will demonstrate.

At the very least, libertarians recognize the unchosen obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force against other rational beings (i.e., to refrain from what we call aggression).

Libertarians generally make two important sets of distinctions regarding obligation: that between negative and positive obligations and that between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. One can go further and recognize that obligations can have different weightings relative to one another such that one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Rights, at least as I define the term, are legally enforceable² moral claims against another’s prior obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force. The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)³ and corresponding rights⁴ are unchosen, enforceable negative obligations.

Can we have unchosen positive obligations? Libertarians need not deny this, and not all do. It should be easily recognized that unchosen, unenforceable positive obligations are strictly compatible with the NAP/rights.

What about unchosen, enforceable positive obligations? Provided they are compatible with the NAP/rights, if there are any that meet this description, then libertarians need not deny unchosen, enforceable positive obligations outright. I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to come up with possible examples of unchosen, enforceable positive obligations that are compatible with the NAP/rights. If you take the challenge, bear in mind what I wrote about how one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Suffice to say that it is a myth that libertarians (need to) deny unchosen, even positive, obligations. Callahan is attacking a straw man.

To criticize libertarians in general for denying unchosen, enforceable positive obligations, or just certain of them, would be more accurate. But to do so would be to take the position that the threat or use of initiatory physical force (i.e., aggression) is at least sometimes justified — that, for example, what is usually thought of commonsensically as theft or trespass or murder in everyday life, is not theft or trespass or murder in the ‘political’ sphere, i.e., when the state or the ‘community’ does it.⁵

I will conclude with four quotations of my own:⁶

Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better serves the name: that is virtue. But then what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?
– Alexis de Tocqueville

The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed.
–Albert Jay Nock

Simplicity and truth of character are not produced by the constraint of laws, nor by the authority of the state, and absolutely no one can be forced or legislated into a state of blessedness; the means required are faithful and brotherly admonition, sound education, and, above all, free use of the individual judgment.
– Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Question 96, Second Article

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

1. It doesn’t help interpretation that Callahan started this sentence in the title of his post.
2. The presence of the term “legally” here but not elsewhere in the post should not be taken to imply I am making a different claim here. I add it here in a definition for greater clarity.
3. It’s not an axiom.
4. Most fundamentally, the life, liberty, and property triad. Of the three, I think liberty is the most fundamental (at least at the individual level of analysis, from the perspective of moral theory; at the structural level of analysis, that of political and legal theory, the right to property may be the most fundamental; rights cannot be fully understood exclusively from either perspective, but rather must be conceived from a dialectical perspective that encompasses both as well as the cultural level (see Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism for more on these three levels of dialectical analysis, which I adapted to conceptualizing rights chapter 3 of my dissertation) ) but it cannot be exercised or properly understood without the right to private property.
5. In chapters 6 and 7 of my dissertation, I deny that this is truly the political sphere. I conceive of genuine, immanent politics as discourse and deliberation between equals in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being). By “equals” I mean “equality in authority” as in Locke’s state of nature, though I do not conceive of “nature” in Lockean, social-contract theory terms but rather in Aristotelian terms, i.e., of teleological completeness or perfection. In short, politics presupposes liberty. Hence, the term “vulgar politics” (or vicarious politics) used as a category on this site as a synonym for statist ‘politics’.
6. Yes, I know these thinkers were not libertarian. But seen in the proper light philosophically, free of the contradictory ideas held by those who wrote them, these statements present truth. Accurate textual exegesis has its place but is another matter, one we are not concerned with here.

A couple of days ago David mentioned on The Libertarian Standard that the Mises Institute providing its entire online media and literature library as a set of free torrents can be seen as part of a distributed or grassroots intellectual guerrilla resistance against the state.

This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort to be completely open source. All of the intellectual eggs of the Austro-Libertarian movement are no longer being kept in one basket. The more people who seed those torrents, the easier the burden on the Mises Institute.

But more importantly, should statist or natural disaster strike, the world won’t lose the vast wealth of information hosted by the Mises Institute. Indeed, not only will the information not be lost, but there will be no downtime in its worldwide online distribution. Should states decide to actively move against us, they’ll be in for one hell of a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. They’ll face the same problems the RIAA, Hollywood, and others are facing in their War on Piracy Copying.

Austro-Libertarianism has gone viral, folks.

All this is to set the context for another example of open source anti-state resistance that I recently discovered. WordPress is an open source website and blogging platform. It’s an easy to use, yet powerful, tool for getting our ideas online where people around the world can access them. It’s free, as in speech and beer. This site is powered by it. The Libertarian Standard is powered by it. The Mises Institute’s site is powered by it.

But some countries like China and Australia censor the internet, blocking access to unapproved sites like YouTube and Twitter, filtering or blocking or shutting down or otherwise regulating websites and blogs.

There are ways to get around this censorship, however. Here’s one: The good folks at Global Voices Advocacy, an organization defending free speech online, have heroically created a guide to mirroring a censored WordPress blog. It’s covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, just like this site and The Libertarian Standard. Get it. Share it. Even if you don’t need it yet, someday you might. Others already do.

In the spirit of the Mises Institute’s torrented online library, I’m hosting the guide here as well.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Apropos Jacob Huebert’s excellent post a few days ago on the time Before We Worshipped Presidents, our lesser rulers are getting increasingly used to their special, above-the-law status as well. Watch how Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge responds to being peacefully asked a simple question by a well-dressed student on a public street:

Congressman Etheridge thinks he can interrogate and assault someone simply for having the temerity to ask him a question in public, apparently without fear of retaliation or legal consequences, despite being recorded. He has a right to know who the student is? I don’t think so. He’s not police. I don’t think even a police officer would have cause under positive law to demand identification and assault the student simply for video recording and asking a question in public. In any case, their authority is illegitimate and what we have here clearly is assault even under current positive law.

What’s more disturbing is that this incident is indicative of just how much our petty tyrants view themselves as being above us and the law — though I suppose assaulting one person on the street is an improvement over assaulting millions through his legislative acts; if only he and his fellow control-freaks would cease the latter, the world would be a much better place and their private crime manageable.

Update: Congressman Etheridge and the establishment news media go into damage control mode.

Update II: Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com agrees that this is “a clear case of assault and battery” and that Etheridge is “obviously inebriated with an extreme sense of entitlement.” He’s not impressed with Etheridge’s public apology after being outed online. Greenwald says in an update that he expected Democrats would try to defend Etheridge’s actions, but even he was “surprised by the extent of the eagerness to defend a clearly illegal and indefensible assault based on the political ideologies of those involved.” Follow the link to read more.

Unedited video from the first camera:

Update III: Digby reminds us of other similar incidents (with video) and points out that the state’smen and/or their security detail are never prosecuted, whereas a private citizen doing the same thing generally would be.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

A common retort that libertarians, even minarchists, hear when criticizing ‘their’ government is “If you don’t like it, then just leave.”¹ Indeed, residency is perceived to be one piece of evidence (among others, like voting, paying taxes, etc.) for one’s implicit consent to the state and its rules. Just leave. As if there are better alternatives. Or, as if ‘their’ country being the least bad option somehow justifies its government. Just leave. They make it sound so simple, don’t they? If only it were. Unfortunately, states are not so keen on letting their slaves get away so easily, free and clear.

So, my wife is from India and she recently got her U.S. citizenship. She had a permanent greencard (which cost us a couple thousand dollars and much hassle over several years to acquire, by the way, even for the wife of a U.S. citizen), so why would she want U.S. citizenship? Well, for one thing, even with a permanent greencard she wouldn’t be able to leave the country for a protracted period of time, say to return to India for an extended visit, without more hassle and the risk of being barred re-entry and losing her permanent resident status. Because India has not yet passed a dual citizenship law (and doesn’t seem likely to do so anytime soon), she has to renounce her Indian citizenship. Okay, fine. She can get an oddly named OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) lifetime visa to visit India whenever she wants, however long she wants.² That doesn’t sound so bad. But India’s 1967 Passports Act doesn’t make renouncing Indian citizenship so easy.

Indians acquiring foreign citizenship are required to renounce their Indian citizenship, surrender their Indian passports, and acquire a “Surrender Certificate.” So my wife has to mail her Indian passport to the Indian Consulate in Chicago and pay $175 (plus $20 for mailing fees) for the certificate. She has 3 months from the time she acquired U.S. citizenship to do so. And she needs copied pages from her U.S. passport, which she can’t apply for until acquiring U.S. citizenship, as part of the paperwork. If she misses this 3 month deadline, additional penalties begin to accrue. Yes, I say “additional penalties” because she is already being unjustly penalized by having to pay $195 and face greater hassles entering and exiting India. I’m not sure what the additional penalties are, but suffice to say they would further increase the costs of leaving India and renouncing citizenship. There are also penalties for foreign citizens traveling to India under their Indian passport. The minimum penalty appears to be $250 for each such visit, but penalties of up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $1,250 are mentioned as well.

But, no, that’s not all. There are more fees and paperwork to apply for her OCI lifetime visa. $275 and another $275 for our American born daughter’s OCI visa, plus mailing fees of $21. She also needs five passport photos each of herself and our daughter. Passport photos run you $10 on average and, of course, you can only buy them in pairs, so we’re looking at another $60 there. Of course, I need my own visa, but mine is good for only 10 years and I can only stay for up to 6 months at a time. I forget how much it cost as I got it several years ago. The Indian Consulate in Chicago reports that for a family of four, including two children under 18, recently naturalized, this whole process (renunciation of Indian citizenship, “surrender certificate,” and OCI visa) would cost:

1. OCI fees: $1,100 ($275 x 4)
2. Surrender certificate fees: $700 ($175 X 4)
3. Mailing fees: $23

Plus the cost of all the passport photos, of course — another $120 — for a grand total of $1,943.³ Just leave, eh?

No doubt the statist will respond that when he said you should just leave, he didn’t mean you should be able to return for a visit, much less acquire effective permission for permanent residency. Even granting his point for the sake of argument, that only subtracts the temporary visa or OCI visa fees, plus photo expenses, from the penalties of renouncing Indian citizenship while increasing or adding others.

The United States doesn’t make it easy to leave either. I’m not sure about India, but it appears the U.S. State Department doesn’t like the idea of letting people go stateless (imagine that!) and will not be “reluctant” to allow (!) expatriation (renouncing citizenship or permanent residency) until you have attained citizenship or legal asylum in another country, which of course is usually an expensive and complicated process. The U.S. is notorious for being unusual among nation-states in taxing its own citizens’ (and permanent residents’) earnings abroad, so it comes as no surprise that it imposes an expatriation tax if you’re worth enough. Even more outrageous, the U.S. government taxes the earnings of expatriates and it is against the law to renounce citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. So much for one of the main reasons for “just leaving.” It is apparently possible to be granted credits and/or exclusions, but even so there are conditions that must be met and the fact that you have to file tax returns is outrageous. As the last link indicates, there are of course hefty penalties for filing expatriation and tax forms late or not at all. $10,000 for not filing expatriation Form 8854. The recent Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act signed by Bush in May 2006 is apparently a mixed bag and even applies retroactively to January 1, 2006 (isn’t that unconstitutional? naturally, the SCOTUS would side with the state itself on this one). The Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008, also under Bush, also appears to expand and increase taxes on expatriates in order to offset increased benefits to military ‘service’ members. To make matters worse, the U.S. under Obama has recently instituted capital controls hidden (naturally) in the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE; H.R. 2487).

I’m not a lawyer and am no expert on these issues — state laws, especially tax laws, can be quite complicated — so feel free to correct me or elaborate on any particulars.

What is clear is that it’s not so easy to just leave after all. Moreover, even when it’s possible, returning even for a limited time, much less an extended stay, is not so easy or cheap. There are other problems with leaving the country as well. It is not so easy to leave friends and family behind, find a job in another country, learn a new language and culture, move all your stuff, and so on. There are also U.S. tax penalties for cashing out of retirement plans early. There are probably more that I’m forgetting at the moment or have never heard of. All told, there is a hefty price to pay for leaving. Why should we have to pay such a price just because we don’t recognize the legitimacy of the state or certain of its rules?

But all this about the difficulty of “just leaving” is really neither here nor there. The difficulties undermine the statist’s position but they do not strike at the root. “If you don’t like it, then just leave” is not really an argument. “Just leave” just does not follow from “If you don’t like it.” Why should we have to leave? Why can’t we stay and complain? Seek to change things? Why should we be subject to laws, regulations, and actions to which we have not consented and that we consider to be unjust while we remain here?

“Well,” the amateur or professional social contract theorist will reply, “this land is our land. If you remain here, you are demonstrating implicit consent to the state and its laws.” Of course, this too does not follow at all. There can be many reasons why I might remain in a country other than consent to its state and its rules. Lysander Spooner long ago exploded social contract theory and the implicit consent justification of the state. There is also the fact that the alleged implicit consent is directly contradicted and trumped by explicit denial of consent.

But what I want to point out here is an even greater logical problem for this line of ‘argument’. As the theory goes, a state is justified if and to the extent that it has the consent of its people. Now, no state anywhere in history has ever had the unanimous, explicit consent of its people. So social contract theorists have had to settle for implicit consent and do not usually insist that it be unanimous. Nevermind that a majority consenting to or approving something does not in and of itself make that thing right, much less justified to impose on those who do not consent to or approve it. Social contract theorists will often make ‘reasonable man’-type arguments, putting forth conditions and propositions to which they think a ‘reasonable man’ would consent. Quite naturally there is much reasonable disagreement among even social contract theorists as to what constitutes a ‘reasonable man’.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, however, they will also often point to particular practices as evidence of implicit consent: e.g, voting, paying taxes, and our focus for this post, residency. The notion that residence demonstrates implicit consent unintentionally reveals that what we are dealing with here is actually a viciously circular argument.⁴ Behind the command “If you don’t like it, then just leave” is the hidden implication that society or the state has a prior claim to your land and property, indeed to all the land, property, and individuals in a given geographic area. The statist might respond to the obvious objection “Why should I have to leave?” with the claim that by coming or staying here you have consented to the state and its laws, but notice that this too relies upon the hidden and unargued for premise that society or the state has a prior claim to all the land, property, and individuals in a given geographic area. Why should we believe this? While common or public (i.e., jointly-held private) property is not necessarily precluded by libertarianism, it is quite a collectivist stretch to claim that ‘society as a whole’ owns (or owned prior to parceling it out) all the land in a given geographic area; here we must part company even with Locke. To say that the state owns (or owned prior to parceling it out) all the land in a given geographic area is to assume prematurely that the state is legitimate, that it could justly own anything, so it will hardly do to attempt to show that the state is justified by pointing to ‘evidence’ that presupposes that the state is justified.

Just leave? Sorry, try again.

Update: My brother-in-law, who just got his US citizenship, has informed me that the Indian Government recently decided not to charge the extra $175 for renouncing Indian citizenship, but only for people who got their US citizenship before June 1, 2010. Those lucky individuals who beat the cutoff will only be charged $20, unless they are even luckier and somehow already happen to have a “Cancelled” stamp on their Indian passport. See the text in red at the bottom of this page on the Chicago Indian Consulate’s website.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

1. Thanks to Stephan Kinsella for reminding me of the especially vulgar “AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!!!” He tells me he typically responds with “No, if you don’t like it that I get to stay here and bitch about it, then you leave.” This works in the United States, but not in every country.
2. This is one of those convoluted things governments do. The Constitution of India does not allow simultaneously holding Indian citizenship and foreign citizenship. But the Indian government decided to grant ‘overseas citizenship’ or ‘dual citizenship’ to former Indian citizens through the OCI visa anyway. Despite including the term ‘citizen’, an OCI visa does not grant full citizenship (no voting rights, etc.).
3. And what if you have more children or your children are not minors? They have to file as individual applicants and the mailing fees increase.
4. There is a distinction to be made between circularity and vicious circularity in argumentation. It is the latter that is logically problematic. For more on this, see, e.g., Douglas Rasmussen, “A Groundwork for Rights: Man’s Natural End,” Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. IV, No. 1 (Winter 1980): 65-76.

There’s a new anti-war rock/hip-hop song hitting the air waves lately. It is called White Flag Warrior, from the album Survival Story, by Flobots and featuring Tim McIlrath of the punk rock band Rise Against. It’s a catchy tune with good lyrics, melding both rock and hip hop elements. The song has a definite non-violent resistance ring to it. The oft repeated line that “we’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers” reminds me of the Socratic position that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it — truly libertarian sentiments.

Music video and lyrics below:

Lyrics

We request to negotiate
We come to you unarmed
We desire to communicate
You cannot do us harm

They want sacrifice
They hatch schemes and ask me to follow their path to the afterlife

I’ve got an appetite
For nice things and pipe dreams that my enemies could be blasted by

New metaphors
View that are better for you can’t survive if I’m your competitor

Rise together or fight separate wars
I pray I’m never forced to be a predator

Spectres spectate
We wont last
They glad to hate
When gladiators
Breathe their last
Scream en masse
When the dreams do clash
Like the swords in the wars
Let me bleed on that
But they feed on that
Say we need strong backs
Call us weak
If we don’t redeem contracts
But the feast wont last
When this beast attacks
The sons and the fathers
Will be free at last

This is love this is not treason

They see sharks in the estuary
They claim the arc’s Bartholomew’s
They say war is necessary
But we say war is child abuse

We’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers
We’d rather make our children White Flag Warriors

Core-to-core
Were the ones
We’ve been waiting for
We hold steady
Steadier than stevedores
Not tevias or matadors
On matters of what came before
Forgive the debts
To settle scores
Test the mettle
Either ore
Whats your plan got to do with me
If the bell tolls let freedom ring
And find new ways if we must be King
Instead of leading the young to our suffering

We pass testaments down scream back at heaven
For testing us like Wednesdays at eleven
Wanna recruit and train us to act evilly?
Save it for the shooting range and smack DVDs
Won’t study war no more this millennium
It’s never again to me or anyone
So think harder when you refer to us
Rather make our children martyrs than murderers

They shell dwellings to quell the shelling
They lift taboos to seduce the cowards
They say we’re too yellow-bellied
But we say we’re the new superpower

We seek waivers to not be liable
We claim to speak for a higher truth
We stand opposed to the homicidal
We tell you you’re fireproof

***

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

This is not a real Mediterranean recipe. I just made it up. I like it because it’s simple, easy to make, consists of just good meat, cheese and bread, and tastes good.

Ingredients

• 1 mini-sub roll (a small, slender 6″ sub-shaped roll; I like Asiago cheese rolls)
• deli-style, thinly-sliced smoked ham (Hillshire Farm is good)
• pizza-style pepperoni, for some spicy kick (I like Armour)
• goat cheese

Recipe

1. Slice the roll in half lengthwise. Optional: Heat the roll in the oven at 350°F for a few minutes first until the crust gets a little crispy.
2. Slather the goat cheese generously on the insides of both halves of the roll. It helps to let the goat cheese warm up a bit ahead of time as goat cheese can be really crumbly and hard to spread when cold.


(Click to enlarge.)

3. Put down an overlapping layer of pepperoni slices on the bottom half of the roll. The rolls I like are just wide enough for one row of pepperoni.
4. Pile on 2-3 layers of thin deli-style smoked ham, say 6-9 slices. Don’t lay ‘em out flat, cafeteria-style. I like to twist or fold them for greater volume and texture.
5. Put the top half of the roll on, and maybe slice the roll in half widthwise. Enjoy!

A while back I published a blogpost here about the individualist American strain of SF and the more cosmological perspective of the British strain. I just published and expanded and revised version at The Libertarian Standard, working in more explicit libertarian observations.

First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour-inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

There’s a new website and group blog in town, by a great group of radical Austro-Libertarians, including yours truly. It’s The Libertarian Standard. I’ve been pre-occupied with admin work for the site the past couple weeks, getting it set up and looking nice, but I’ll be getting around to blogging relatively soon. I’ll probably be doing a lot of cross-posting between TLS and here. Hopefully TLS will help break my blogging dry spell. In the meantime, check out the introductory post and the About page as well as all the great posts already published by my fellow TLS bloggers. We’ve also got a Twitter account (libstandard) and a Twitter list of tweeting TLS contributors as well as a Facebook fan page set up. I hope you enjoy our work!

Ingredients

• 1      6-oz can frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      6-oz can frozen pineapple juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      cup  catsup
• 4      tablespoons lemon juice
• 3      teaspoons cayenne pepper (less if you’re a pansy, more if you like)
• 4      tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
• 2      2-inch stick cinnamon
• 16    whole allspice
• 8      whole cloves
• 2      15-oz cans diced tomatoes, drained
• 3-5  medium carrots, chopped thinly into disks
• 3      pounds boneless chicken breasts, cut into small to medium-sized pieces
• Hot, cooked couscous.

Recipe

1. To make sauce, in a medium-sized bowl combine the juice concentrate, catsup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and tapioca. Pour into 3.5-4 quart slow cooker.
2. Make a spice bag by placing cinnamon, allspice and cloves in 100% cotton cheese cloth and tying the package closed with clean kitchen string. Beats having to fish the whole spices out of the finished product one by one when it’s time to serve. Put this in the slow cooker as well.
3. Peel and chop carrots. Open and drain cans of tomatoes. Add to cooker.
4. Prepare the chicken (thaw, clean, cut, etc.), then place in the cooker. Stir.
5. Cover. Cook on low-heat setting approximately 9 hours, high heat setting approximately 4.5 hours. I find this dish tastes best when cooked on low for 9 hours. The chicken browns turns brown and absorbs all the flavors. It’s mouth watering.
6. Discard spice bag. Serve over couscous. Optional substitution: Serve over basmati rice.

(Click to enlarge.)

In an undergrad philosophy class on problems in ethical theory, taught by libertarian James Stacey Taylor (who introduced me to the IHS), we were required to write 300-words-or-less summaries of each chapter of the philosophy books we were reading. It’s not easy summarizing 10-30 pages of academic philosophy into 300 words or less, and such summaries are not good vehicles for debates, but it was good exercise in learning how to identify what’s essential and what’s not as well as how to write concisely. Anyway, here is my summary from that class of Christine Korsgaard‘s entire book, The Sources of Normativity. I can’t remember what the word-count limit was for this, but the summary is only 661 words. Korsgaard is a very prominent modern Kantian. Needless to say, I don’t buy into the Kantian paradigm; but my disagreements are not on display in this summary.

Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity
PDF Version

In laying out her theory for the source of normativity, Christine Korsgaard attempts to be inclusive by integrating her own variations on voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and appeal to autonomy. Korsgaard’s theory culminates in her account of practical identity and the value of one’s humanity. The result purports to be an objective and universal theory of meta-ethics.

Korsgaard’s goal is to show that we do have moral obligations irrespective of our individual desires. As reflective beings, we must reflexively endorse a desire if it is to be considered a reason to act. Korsgaard turns inward the voluntarist formulation of legislator and citizen, positing the thinking self and acting self as our double nature. The thinking self has the power to command the acting self.

Human beings must act under the idea of free will. To be autonomous, however, one cannot merely follow one’s desires; one must have a goal and one must have a reason to reach that goal. The reason cannot be imposed by an external source. Autonomy requires self-imposed laws, which cannot be picked arbitrarily.

The Categorical Imperative tells us to act only on a maxim that can be consistently willed into a universal law. A good maxim is an intrinsically normative entity. Korsgaard avoids the trap of substantive moral realism by arguing that we have no need for recourse to intuition if we can show something’s intrinsic properties make it a final good. We can do this with a maxim, for it has the form of a law by virtue of its intrinsic properties, and it is this that makes it a final reason for action. This is still procedural realism. Values are created through our legislative wills by the procedure of making laws for ourselves.

Korsgaard distinguishes the categorial imperative from the moral law, which “tells us to act only on maxims that all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system.” The former is the law of a free will, but the traditional Kantian argument does not establish the moral law as the law of a free will. Only a law that ranges over every rational being will be a moral law. It is our practical identities that guide us in our acquisition of moral law and the actions we take based on them. These laws are constrained by the Categorical Imperative.

Our practical identities give us reasons to act in one way rather than another. It is unthinkable to act contrary to our identity. When we are acting under volitional necessity, that is, when all actions but one are unthinkable then we are most autonomous. As autonomous reflective beings that act for reasons, we must value our practical identities. “It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.” If we value our practical identities then we must also value our humanity, for it is our humanity that makes our practical identities possible. It is here, in the Self, that Korsgaard locates the source of normativity.

Like some realists, Korsgaard holds that reasons are intrinsically normative entities. However, she rejects the commonly held belief that reasons are private, and that one can derive public reasons from private reasons. Taking a cue from Wittgenstein’s public language argument, she argues that if private reasons existed then they would be incommunicable to others. A private reason would be a reason only for X, whereas public reasons are reasons for all agents relatively similar to X. Reasons are inherently public. Since human beings have only reasons that can be shared, if we value our own humanity we must recognize that we share that humanity with others and so must value the humanity of others as well. To do otherwise would constitute a failure to be consistent. Herein lies our moral obligations to others.

This is an old list but I’m aiming to add to it. It’s mostly quotes on politics and economics but I’m aiming to expand beyond that too. If you have any great quotes you think might interest me in this regard, please email me or add them in the comments section below. Please provide as much bibliographic information as you can, and if an online source is available please link to it. I might also organize this list alphabetically or by subject when I get the time.

~*~

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,
with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
– Ayn Rand

“I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I’m no Ayn Rander! She didn’t go nearly far enough!”
– The Question, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley (2002)

~*~

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word state (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995), p. 63.

“If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would do a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995), p. 63.

“The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit to it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995), p. 64.

“All that power that you didn’t like when someone else had it, you decided to keep it. Oh my God, you’re Frodo.” — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, criticizing Obama on broken promises on civil liberties.

“The destiny of man is an individualistic destiny.” — Merlyn, The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

“I am an anarchist, like any other sensible person.” — Merlyn, The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

“All forms of collectivism are mistaken, according to the human skull.” — Merlyn, The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

“Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people – it is often very dangerous to do things at all — and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people.” — Merlyn, The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Inigo Montoya

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” — Murray Rothbard

“The State is that great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.” — Frederic Bastiat

“The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.” — Frank Knight

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods” — H.L. Mencken

“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favour of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.” — H.L. Mencken

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

“No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” — Mark Twain

“I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.” — Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)

“Americans have a strange notion that the ordinary laws of economics do not apply to them. So doubtless they will think they are prosperous if the boom starts, and that deficits and indebtedness are merely signs of how prosperous they are.” — Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” — George Orwell

“Libertarianism in One Sentence: Other people are not your property.” – Roderick T. Long

“Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it’s yellow.” — Edmund Burke

“The two-party system is a bad joke on the American people; when it comes to Republicans and Democrats remember they are two sides of the same coin. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil and not an answer to our problems. A vote for a Republican or a Democrat will not fix anything and is a wasted vote.” — Aaron Russo, 2004 Libertarian Presidential Candidate

“The question isn’t who is going to let me, it is who is going to stop me.” — Ayn Rand

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.” — Adam Smith

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” — Thomas Sowell

“[W]hat economists should be able to do is to figure out a system that works without shooting people.” — Leonid Hurwicz

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is hacking at the root.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” — Robert Heinlein

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“First, what is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I’ll buy it.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“That we were slaves I had known all my life – and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren’t bought and sold – but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” — Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” — Thomas Jefferson

“He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” — George Orwell

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” — Einstein

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.” — Einstein

The hardest thing to understand is the income tax.” — Einstein

“Historical experience suggests that policy makers are dense…” — Stephen D. Krasner

“Stupidity is not a very interesting analytic category.” — Stephen D. Krasner

“Diplomacy is the art of letting the other guy have your own way.” — Unknown

“Mathematical equations cannot take into account creative human decisions based on the categories of cause and effect, before and after. What they describe is a timeless world of correlations from which causation is absent. Human intentions play no part in the model, as the model assumes all humans know everything relevant to their situation and can only accept it as a given.” — Gene Callahan

“Mathematical equations can be useful for modeling the result of people following through on previously made plans, for capturing “equilibrium-like” phases of markets. Such a model cannot capture the change of perception in the market, which is the beginning of the creation of a new plan. That is the moment of human choice, as the plan must aim for one goal while setting aside others, and choose some means to achieve that goal while rejecting others. Mathematical economics models the equilibrium-like phases of markets, when no plans are being created or revised.” — Gene Callahan

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” — W. B. Yeats, He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven

Top

That was to be the subtitle for my chapter in Open Court‘s recent addition to their Popular Culture and Philosophy series, Transformers and Philosophy: More Than Meets the Mind. Alas, no subtitles made it into the book.

I have received official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings,” on my website. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies. The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

This is from a page of notes I put together in grad school for a presentation on Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Sources: De Anima III.5, Metaphysics XII (especially 7 & 9), Physics VIII (especially 8-10).

PDF version.

Characteristics of the Prime Mover (Divine Nous)

• First principle
• First mover (logically, not temporally); itself unmoved and unmovable/unalterable
• Substance (and arguably form) without matter
• Self-thinking thought
• Eternal and in eternal possession of its object (thought); therefore always active and never passive, always actuality and never potentiality.
• Simple and one
• Final cause; that for the sake of which; moves others by love; produces movement through infinite time (not a temporal first cause)
• Necessary
• Most good
• Living, insofar as thought itself is the highest expression of life
• No magnitude (and so neither finite nor infinite)
• Without parts and indivisible

The Ordered Universe

• “[T]he universe is of the nature of a whole” (M XII.1). “[T]he world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end” (M XII.10). “There always was motion and always will be motion throughout all time” (P XIII.9), i.e., the universe is eternal; not created or generated ex nihilo. The Prime Mover is the original source of motion in the universe and is the ordering principle that makes the universe a whole. The Prime Mover, God, the Divine, “encloses the whole of nature” (end of M XII.8).

Human Nous and Divine Nous

• Men participate in the divine insofar as they contemplate the higher things (Nicomachean Ethics and M XII.7).
• Can the human soul survive death? In Metaphysics XII.3 Aristotle suggests that it can, “albeit not all soul but [only] the reason.”

Contra Plato (M XII.5-6)

• For Plato everything in the phenomenal world is a mere imperfect, particular manifestation of the Ideas or Forms. Each Idea or Form is universal in the sense of being one. In Metaphysics XII (and also in NE), Aristotle rejects universals of this sort. “The primary principles of all things are the actual primary ‘this’ and another thing which exists potentially. The universal causes, then, of which we spoke do not exist. For the individual is the source of the individuals. For while man is the cause of man universally, there is no universal man” (M XII.5). For Plato, the Agathon (the Good), at least in the Symposium and the Republic and prior to the Sophist, is beyond being. One might argue that Plato’s “mature metaphysics” expressed in the Sophist precludes this, however.
• For Aristotle it is particulars that exist and the forms are always forms of individual particulars. Aristotle’s universals are not physically separable and independently existing things but rather are aspects of the nature of particulars, which we can separate out mentally by a process of abstraction. For example, the universal ‘man’ does not exist for Aristotle except insofar as it can be located in all the individual men who have ever lived, are living, or will ever live. The same might be said of the Prime Mover; insofar as it is the first mover, the organizing principle of the universe, and encloses the whole of nature, it might be reasonable to say (although I’m not certain that Aristotle would agree) that it is the form of reality, the logical structure of reality. Arguably the Metaphysics introduces separable substances, but even so for Aristotle nothing, not even the Prime Mover, is beyond being.

~~~

Now, I’m an atheist, but I believe there is a logical structure of reality. I don’t think my views are entirely inconsistent with Aristotle’s idea of the Prime Mover. For more on this, see Roderick Long’s “Theism and Atheism Reconciled” and “The Unspeakable Logos.”