Sometimes the Headline Says It All
Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit
I can’t figure out how to tie this into my blog; I just liked the headline, seeing how it sums up the whole article so well. I can assure you my orgies are 100% nazi free!
But there is a tie in to sexual liberty that is not really explored in the article, which characterizes one side alleging and the other denying there was a nazi theme to the, er, activities. Supposing there was a nazi theme, but there is no evidence the man in question, Mr. Mosley, is actually a nazi or otherwise a racist outside the bedroom, does that make him wrong or unethical? Are we to assume what someone likes in the bedroom is a reflection of his or her overall character? I think that’s going a bit far. Suffice to say bedroom nazi reenactments are not my cup of tea, though if it’s done with a healthy sense of irony and amusement, I’m not sure how different it is from Springtime for Hitler. Can anyone really say, ““She needs more of ze punishment!” with a straight face?
More Satiating
Apparently the state was holding some sort of election thing yesterday and, in Boston, voter turn-out reached a 20-year low of 13.6%. (I was climbing out of bed when I heard this on the radio, so hopefully didn’t get it wrong). I try to encourage voter apathy: the fewer people vote, the less perception that the winner has any sort of mandate. There is no ballot option for “none of the above,” (much less “no one at all”), so ballot abstinence is the closest you can get to voting for no one.
Technorati Tags: libertarianism
Unintended Realization
Over the weekend I was out in some wooded country, where I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of development and road construction. Later that night, I contemplated the silliness of the government trying to protect the environment by opening an HOV lane — which required cutting down hundreds of trees to widen the road. Subsequently, I woke up, realizing I had dreamed the whole thing about an HOV lane. I guess you know you’re a libertarian when you dream about unintended consequences.
Technorati Tags: libertarianism, economics
Brazilian Anarcho-capitalism
Good link from Jesse Walker at Hit & Run showing how private militias have developed in Brazil to protect the poor, since the state has failed to deliver in this regard. Quoting:
Startling transformations like Roquete Pinto’s are increasingly visible across Rio, as for-profit “militias” made up of active and former police officers, private security guards, off-duty prison guards and firefighters evict drug gangs from slums where violence used to be out of control….
In this city of 6 million people, one of the world’s most violent, “the police provide security for the rich” and “the militias are the security of the poor,” said Marina Maggessi, a congresswoman and a former senior drug-control official. She has mixed feelings about the militias, saying they represent the “collapse of the state.”
First gaining strength in 2003 as an alternative to ineffective, often corrupt police, the illegal security forces have mushroomed since late last year and now control about 90 of Rio’s 600 “favelas,” Maggessi said. Success in slums like Roquete Pinto, meanwhile, fuels their expansion into others.
I of course do not have the “mixed feelings” Ms. Maggessi expresses.
It’s common for leftist critics of anarcho-capitalism to object the poor would be left out to dry. Yet it’s an equally common observation, perhaps by some of those same critics, that the state favors the rich and politically connected over the poor. These two points seem to contradict: if the state does such a bad job protecting the poor, why would would it be so bad to remove it from the equation? A critic could resolve the contradiction by arguing that even if the state does a bad job protecting the poor, protection would be even worse, or non-existent, under anarcho-capitalism. Yet Jesse Walker’s example shows that not only can private protection develop in the slums, it can do for profit. The market works for the poor just as it does for the rich.
Another misconception about anarcho-capitalism is that protection organizations would just go to war against each other until one emerged as ruler. Quoting from the original article:
The surprise is that the gangs aren’t fighting to hold their turf. In the few known cases where they did, militia gunfire turned them back.
Voluntary militias and defense firms do not (usually) go to war against each other because of simple economics: warfare will drive up costs and damage a firm’s reputation, making it less attractive to customers relative to its competitors. The hard problem for anarchism is the start-up problem: how to initiate a situation where such a peaceful equilibrium exists. If the market develops with too few competitors there is potential for a cartel or monopoly to form. A related and even bigger problem is how to start up when the state is still going strong — obviously the case in Brazil. It will be interesting to see how things unfold there.
Technorati Tags: crime, libertarianism
Liberty & Equality
Catallarchy » Another reason why libertarianism won’t happen
Interesting post by Patri Friedman on Catallarchy, citing experimental research suggesting people may be wired to resent inequality, and will choose to reduce incomes of the more affluent and raise incomes of the less affluent. Friedman and the commenters lament this means it will be more difficult, though hopefully not impossible, to move to a libertarian society. I see misplaced priorities at play.
Libertarians are mistaken to associate their philosophy with pure capitalism. Given the choice between state planning and laissez faire capitalism, libertarians choose laissez faire capitalism, and there are sound theoretical and empirical reasons for this choice. Yet it could be a mistake to assume that a libertarian society must be simply a copy of modern western societies, minus the welfare state, military-industrial complex and other trappings of a mixed economy. Perhaps there are non-governmental, but also non-capitalist (i.e. not for profit) institutions that would develop (or need to develop) once we delete the state.
Libertarians acknowledge there could be charities in a libertarian society, but this often seems an afterthought, with the market seen as the driving force of social organization. Perhaps, instead, we should focus more on theorizing various social, religious, or extended-family types of organizations that would spring up on a large scale to provide some level of mutual aid and assistance for the indigent or disabled, or more broadly to pool resources among like-minded people.
Perhaps we should incorporate a variant of the Potlatch feasts seen in tribal communities of the Pacific Northwest, where high status is achieved not by accumulating wealth but by giving it away. Or perhaps we can learn from the hreppur, a mutual aid organization practiced in anarchistic medieval Iceland. According to this piece by Birgir T. Runolfsson Solvason:
[...] the Hreppur was composed of a minimum of twenty farms, and had a five member commission. Among other duties, each Hreppur was responsible for seeing that orphans and the poor within its area were fed and housed. It did this by assigning these persons to member farms, which took turns in providing for them. How long each farm had to provide for the person was determined by the wealth of the farm.
The Hreppur also served as a property insurance agency. It assisted in case of destruction wrought by fire and diseases of livestock. If a farm’s kitchen burned down, the other farmers in the Hreppur would pitch in to build a new one. If both kitchen and living quarters burned, then half of each was paid for. In case of disease, if more than a quarter of the livestock died, the other farmers would assist either by contributing money or livestock.
This describes geographically-based organization (a cluster of farms), though geography is only one possible organizing principle. People who who today would be social democrats could form their own clubs, regardless of geography, to pool resources in aid of the poor.
I attribute the general irrelevance of libertarianism today in large part to our unwillingness to address egalitarianism. We may rightly oppose state-enforced egalitarianism but that doesn’t mean we have to dispense with the concept altogether. While I don’t think people, in general, are egalitarian enough to support socialism or communism, they do seem to mistrust inequality enough that they continue supporting state redistribution of wealth. Libertarians need to provide a non-coercive alternative to shed our reputation as being too “atomistic.”
Technorati Tags: libertarianism, philosophy, welfare
Natural Law & Biology
While sociobiology is hardly a new subject, I always like to see fresh, topical research supportive of the idea that rights are not arbitrary constructs of particular societies, but arise ultimately from human biology. This particular article, citing research from Frans de Waal among others, suggests that a proto-morality, similar to human empathy, is evidenced in primate societies:
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
[...]
Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
This harkens back to Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy being the basis of morality. Naturally, though, the behavior of chimps does not tell us a whole lot about what rights people have, and to suggest something is good because it happens in nature (or wrong because it doesn’t) would be committing the naturalistic fallacy.
The naturalistic fallacy, and similarly the “is-from-ought” problem, are commonly taken as reasons for doubting that we have any natural rights. I tend to see this more as a limit of the abstract, deductive reasoning that moral philosophers like to practice.
They seem not to be satisfied with anything less than proving what is right with some kind of transcendental moral certitude. But although one cannot deduce ought from is in such a way, we can have considerably more success inferring right and wrong in terms of expected consequences from the way people actually behave. For example, don’t lie, because it harms the person being deceived, and will eventually gain you a reputation as untrustworthy.
This seems to beg the question: how do you know how people ought to behave in the first place? But that objection presumes people have no reference for their behavior other than what moral philosophers (or, perhaps, politicians and jurists) prescribe for them. The sociobiological perspective suggests that people are naturally equipped to feel empathy, to construct rules based on reciprocal empathy, and seek to punish those who violate those rules.
This provides a starting point for moral reasoning. One could say, in opposition, that a black guy in 1930s Alabama ought not date a white woman, given the expected consequences when the local white community finds out about it. But the problem with such an example is, in that situation, pre-existing concepts of normative behavior (specifically violent racism towards blacks) occlude the decision making process. The people in the situation are already predisposed toward a total lack of empathy and violence, having allowed their socially constructed notions of race override their natural, intuitive moral sense.
To discern one’s true rights you have to strip away all the layers of abstraction created in society, often created by one segment of the population to dominate and repress the others. You consider every person as an autonomous, independent equal, without regard for any pre-existing concepts of privilege or authority. And you imagine what norms would allow people to live peaceably together, or as Lysander Spooner wrote, how “to live honestly, to hurt no one, to give every one his due.”
The article also has an interesting comment about religion:
There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.
That strikes me as potentially important, given the common argument that religion is the foundation of morality, and without it nothing but amorality can exist. The reality may actually be the reverse: humans evolved to have an underlying moral sensibility, which religion is built on top of and sometimes overrides, as evidenced in the hatred and violence that the more extreme religions inspire.
Something to think about, anyway.
Technorati Tags: law, natural rights, philosophy, morality
Guns & Power
From the Times:
Interpreting the Second Amendment broadly, a federal appeals court in Washington yesterday struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes.
This is certainly welcome news to me, though it is just a small step in in the right direction, still short of concealed carry. Several years ago some family members of mine were mugged on a DC street, just going out for a walk in their neighborhood, because a few outlaws with guns – imagine that! — could be pretty confident everyone they saw was disarmed and decided to take advantage of that fact.
One point I don’t see stressed very often is that we need not just gun freedom, but a more universal gun culture supportive of that freedom. It seems to me that gun culture is a fringe sub-culture in the so-called blue states, and is more closely associated with southern states and especially rural culture, with gun control being more prevalent in cities.
These cultural differences result in wide disparities in gun laws between different jurisdictions, DC and Virginia being a key example. This, in turn, results in power imbalances with people in some jurisdictions being disarmed and powerless, and others not.
Supporters of gun control often seem to accept this argument, if obliquely, blaming gun crime occurring within gun-controlled districts on the supply of guns emanating from other, pro-gun jurisdictions. The logical conclusion for their argument is that gun control must be universal, which would eliminate the external availability of guns for criminals to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, that still does not eliminate power imbalances. The major overlooked power imbalance is that between the citizens and government. A central but oft forgotten justification for the right to bear arms is that should the government become a tyranny, the citizens should be able to overturn it. That was, after all, how the US was formed.
I’ve seen this point ridiculed on the grounds that citizens armed with pistols and rifles are no match a modern military replete with tanks and bombers. Yet the insurgency in Iraq shows that a decentralized guerilla force possessing mostly small arms can make things difficult, perhaps impossible for a larger adversary. And, I should note, I favor allowing private citizens to own any of the same weapons the government can own, which might well be a much better way of making governments receptive to arms control!
Other power imbalances remain under universal gun control. Consider other weapons — knives, swords, clubs, tasers, chemical sprays, etc. If jurisdictions again vary in their treatment of these, it will again necessitate a universal ban to prevent permeation from more liberal to more restricted jurisdictions. The problem is that many everyday objects (vehicles, kitchen knives, or the good old pipe wrench) can become weapons, the regulation of which will be ever more costly, perhaps impossible to enforce, and require the state meddling in the lives of citizens in ever more authoritarian ways. This is already happening in Britain.
At the far end of the spectrum, even with no weapons anywhere, the strong can still physically dominate the weak with brute force. I’m not sure how the state could ban some from being stronger than others, though I’m sure the British will eventually tell us.
The answer is to go in the complete opposite direction, eliminating almost all restrictions on weapons. Some environments are tightly controlled by necessity, such as the entrance to a courthouse, or a commercial aircraft. There it would make sense to disarm people. Overall, however, we should strive for a universal gun culture, where the widespread disparities in gun ownership disappear, and with them the power imbalances that lead some to use their weapons for wrongful advantage.
That doesn’t mean guns are a panacea, or there are no costs to this strategy, or that everyone must be armed. But I’d like to get to the point where it is not considered unlawful, unusual, or threatening that any citizen, in any particular place, would choose to bear arms.
Less than Amazing…
Virginia Postrel is surprised at the proposed incandescent light bulb ban in California:
Grace Peng, who is probably the greenest person I know in her personal behavior, explains why even she is against the light bulb ban. It’s amazing how legislators and regulators are determined to reward and punish particular technologies rather than letting price signals work.
Here are a couple things we know: voters tend to remain rationally ignorant and won’t study economic theory (which would lead them to support market pricing over political control) because the benefits economic literacy confers don’t justify the cost (except for a few weirdos who are excessively interested in such topics). Thus we can expect elect officials to reflect that economic illiteracy.
Another thing we know is that power is a corrupting influence; it is hard for those in power to restrain themselves, and consider how their behavior may be harming others or corrosive to our liberty, because they are just doing so much good for us.
Now, I think Virginia Postrel is a lot smarter than me. But come on: wouldn’t it be vastly more surprising if politicians actually adhered to sound economic theory, and restrained their impulse the ban and control everything in deference to citizens’ free choices?
Feminism and Language
Cheryl Cline posts an interesting article by Charles Johnson and Roderick Long comparing libertarianism and feminism. The gist of it is that if libertarians applied their principles more thoroughly they would find much to agree with feminists.
I know I’ve enjoyed Long’s stuff before, but I thought this essay had lots of superficial analogies and blanket statements such that, on the whole, I thought it was very misguided. For example, it says libertarians are…
…surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say….When feminists say that gender and sexuality are socially constructed, libertarians often dismiss this as metaphysical subjectivism or nihilism. But libertarians do not call their own Friedrich Hayek a subjectivist or nihilist when he says that “the objects of economic activity,” such as “a ‘commodity’ or an ‘economic good,’ nor ‘food’ or ‘money,’” cannot be “defined in objective terms.”
This strikes me as very confused. Hayek is an economic subjectivist and libertarians would not have trouble calling him that. One should not conflate economic subjectivism and metaphysical subjectivism. There is no inconsistency in believing in objective reality and that economic value is relative to the particular desires of individuals. But it gets worse:
Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.
The first sentence, to the extent I can parse it, is wrong. The footnote in the article helps explain what the authors mean, with an example of women “consenting” to rape by dressing provocatively. Yet libertarians categorically do not approve of rape and do not make arguments suggesting women tacitly consent to sex by the way they dress. At least, if there is such a pro-rape contingent of libertarians, I have yet to come across it.
Further, libertarians think gender roles are not oppressive to the extent women are not forced to accept them; I doubt you could find any libertarians defending the (enforced) gender roles in conservative Muslim societies, on the grounds that some women there may seem to accept those roles. If women voluntarily partake in a certain type of gender role, one may argue about its pros and cons, but it is not oppression.
When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.
Yet it is too much to ask. The comparison between the feminisists’ view of rape and libertarians’ view of the state is inapt. The feminist viewpoint (at least as depicted here) seems like a considerable overstatement, in that the omnipresent threat of rape does not seem to be a part of most relationships in modern western societies. This article was published in 2005, yet seems at least 50 years out of date. Rape continues to be a problem, of course, perhaps because it is often hard to prove, hence hard to punish, but I think libertarians are right in doubting it is some overarching threat against women in general. Different cultures, and perhaps some elements within our own culture, may have a tendency to approve of rape or tacitly condone it, but this is deplorable and I certainly don’t see libertarians turning a blind eye to it.
By contrast, the violence of the state really is an overarching threat against all citizens, in that its laws and regulations are imposed by force against citizens regardless of consent. That not every government official literally uses force is simply a consequence of specialization. While again I don’t want to imply rape is less of a problem than it is, it is at least possible for women to live without the constant threat of rape; it is not possible to live without the constant threat that you must obey the government’s rules or go to jail.
Some of the article is good, but I think it generally has a mistaken conception of the intent of libertarianism, which is not as a “comprehensive” theory of human freedom. Libertarianism is primarily concerned with violence and law — when it is right to whack someone to make him do what you want, and when it isn’t.
Other matters, like gender roles, are important but should be kept separate, out of the realm of law and force. They are matters people should resolve through persuasion and voluntary action. That is not to say everything is black and white; it is just to say we have to make distinctions to the best of our ability. In trying to bundle social structures like “patriarchy” (which doesn’t even seem to be much of a factor these days) with rape and violence against women (which are actual crimes), this article tries to conflate what should be kept apart.
Kritarchy Uber Alles
It’s cold, sleeting, and I’m stressed — time to write something.
A while ago I was randomly browsing Wikipedia for names of political systems I didn’t know (e.g. a thalassocracy, an empire at sea, or, somewhat more apropos to modern times, kakistocracy).
Another I didn’t know was kritarchy, so it was a nice surprise to see that it describes my views rather well. It means a society under which the operating principle is the rule of justice. The meaning of justice is based on natural law (as opposed to statutory law, the fiat of the state) and would be expressed through customary law. The legal system would be voluntaryst and polycentric — a form of anarchy, or absence of government. This is clearly intended as an equilibrium state rather than a power vacuum.
Certainly it brings to mind anarcho-capitalism, and it appears that many, perhaps all, of those using the term are anarcho-capitalists; I’m not clear on whether it is a word anarcho-capitalists invented or if it has some independent history. Though it’s contrasted with krytocracy (the rule of judges), my Google search revealed kritarchy is often used where krytocracy is meant. (Krytocracy is damned hard to spell, that’s for sure!)
The pronunciation and meaning of the two are close enough it’s easy to see why there would be overlap. The difference between the two is that under kritarchy the law would be more of an aggregation of the most influential judges’ decisions, with no one judge having power to lay down the law, whereas under a krytocracy one judge (or a hierarchy of judges) is privileged to set the law.
Kritarchy is somewhat democratic in this respect: while judges would make decisions and create a body of case law, the ultimate authority of such law would come only from the willingness of people to adhere to it — a democracy of actions, rather than words and ballots.
So I wonder if this term would be a useful one to adopt. It has less baggage than anarchism. It’s obscure enough that you would have to explain it most of the time, giving you a fresh chance to explain your ideas. But it might prejudice people who confuse kritarchy with krytocracy.
For now, I’m just kicking it around in my head, along with lots of other stuff!
