DISQUS

Way cool to see Malik on Free Howley. I feared he might be missed over here, more a British phenomenon, with no popular stateside publisher.

Long and Carson do not consider themselves anarcho-capitalists. Carson especially is not fond of the term "Capitalism", seeing it historically as a term to designate the merger of state and corporate power. Carson is a Mutualist, and Long a 'Market Anarchist', though Carson would probably be fine with that term too.

It comes down to whether you think it's plausible that civil society makes sense outside of a political settlement...

This is a typical argument, but even here, one would have to show that, say, the majority of what taxes actually go to work to prevent Hobbes' brutish state of nature. Since (needless to say?) Bush's foreign policy, farm subsidies and an AIG bailout hardly prevent a collapse of civil society, indeed necessary to procure a living at all, one can still justify a right to about 95% of pre-tax income based on the argument of "political settlement" as vital. And seeing as how choosing which taxes to pay is not an option, one can say "I'm keeping it all!" until further notice.

According to political scientist Diana Mutz, people tend to avoid political participation when they expect conflict. Given the non-realized Democratic persuasion of many apathetic youth on college campuses, I think drives for youth participation among poli sci students and campus Democrats comes from the fact that, yes, they don't expect any conflict. They know these non-voting youth lean their way, so all that's needed is encouragement, not a load of knowledge and rhetorical skills.

The American's committment to the free market seems weak at the abstract and operational level, when confronted with survey quesitons, etc. But at the personal level, i.e. the rich cousin or the friend who runs a business, Americans are fairly sympathetic to these "ideal types" and their perspectives, and enmeshed in a system they don't really mind when all is said and done.

Or so it seems.

Nah, stay in America and have a fling with a fellow seminar student at a classical liberal foundation function . Cheaper, and might very well be from Europe anyway.

It's hard for people abroad to "ease up on the Americanism" when the classical liberal ideas that are, in theory, supposed to having nothing to do with the organized violence that is the American state constantly appear to be coupled with it.

This makes for cynicism, not a love of Frederic Bastiat.

It seems to me the hardcore luck egalitarians are in a bind when it comes to the efficacy of actually implementing a redistributive apparatus via the state.

If there are no predictable patterns of human behavior/interaction that facilitates minimal levels of "success", then how can those in government be expected to follow through with their functions in a way that can actually accomplish a welfare state? Are we relying on coincidence and "good luck" when imagining how those in government will make the social safety net actually work out for the poor?

Sorry for the screwy italics.

Thought this was pertinent:

Members of all three branches of the federal government now act with near impunity in stretching the Constitution to suit their political objectives and personal preferences. This development is illustrated by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act; reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act; the alternative minimum tax; the REAL ID Act; presidential signing statements; warrantless domestic electronic surveillance; the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America; and Supreme Court decisions on eminent domain, the commerce clause, and the First Amendment.

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/art...>


So here Charlotte Twight documents how all three branches of our government formally changed the law, procedurally legit in most cases if not constitutionally (uh, until they change that), and yet it's hard not to notice how utterly indicative this is of a government of (wo)men, not laws.

If the community, as represented by the government, feels that it has the right to step in so as to prevent children being raised in cages, then (1) the community has some implicit wants with respect to raising children; (2) the community is imposing its own interpretation of what behaviors will reach those goals; and (3) the community is imposing coercion in order to get those behaviors.

There is no need to invoke "community" as demanding justice, just any individual or collection thereof taking action to end coercion. But they don't have a right to do this at the expense of others lives, i.e. bombing thousands at the periphery to reach thousands at the core.


Sorry, I notice I didn't quite provide a reponse to your points that actually addresses them.

When you write "the community is imposing coercion...", I don't think they are, but instead preventing it (from continuing), save for the ex post facto declaration of "Hey, I didn't want to be saved!", in which case coercion was imposed. In the hypothetical you present, however, I'd be damned surprised if this posed much of a problem though.

Dain: so if some people believe that bringing up children illiterate, blindfolded, mute and caged is a happiness maximizer, according to their own personal holy book, that's okay, and everyone should let them do that?

This makes me wonder how anyone would even know this was happening to the children, as apparently removed from the peering eyes of the community as this hypothetical would seem to make them.

Children have individual rights too, and I'd have to wonder how they'd feel about such actions being taken against them. But I'll assume you mean that these kids have grown up since day one in conditions like this, and so pose no real threat of resistance, not knowing any better.

This is akin to slavery IMO. Many, if not most, slaves grew up thinking their condition - being caged, actually owned - was simply reality, and they could expect no better. They had to be persuaded that their bondage was unjust, and to demand bodily sovereignty. But no matter how much one demands they realize this, "forcing them to be free" (to leave the plantation) is unjust. Admittedly, in the case of children unable to communicate, it would be fine by me, and a risk I'd be willing to take, if they were so forced (rescued). If they later say "What the hell were you doing, I wanted to stay!", well, they have a point. (Keep in mind this is indeed what the FLDS kids were saying, and not even "later" but rather immediately!)

If the community, as represented by the government, feels that it has the right to step in so as to prevent children being raised in cages, then (1) the community has some implicit wants with respect to raising children; (2) the community is imposing its own interpretation of what behaviors will reach those goals; and (3) the community is imposing coercion in order to get those behaviors.

There is no need to invoke "community" as demanding justice, just any individual or collection thereof taking action to end coercion. But they don't have a right to do this at the expense of others lives, i.e. bombing thousands at the periphery to reach thousands at the core.

It is even theoretically only possible for a community to be _relatively_ liberal, and to have _relative_ absence of coercion.

Of course. And no definition of coercion is rock solid. I'd refer to J.C .Lester's definition as "minimizing proactive imposition" as an alternative to an impenetrable Rothbardian natural rights edifice. In this way, reductios become less likely to cause one's head to explode.

I, for one, want to achieve that which allows people to achieve what they deem happiness-maximizing - without full knowledge of every possible lifestyle (an impossible demand which even cosmopolitans would fall short of) - without coercion; "coercion" being described in the typical classical liberal fashion.

When enforced "happiness maximization" is something apart from the aggregate of individual desires, with all of their informational and situational shortcomings, it comes dangerously close to being illiberal and authoritarian.

Literacy is crucial to the meaningful exercise of freedom in a society like ours.

True, and this can be extended to the world at large, not just American society. But this is issue is separable from the question of government force. When CLR James, the unorthodox Marxist anti-colonialist, critiqued the excuses for continued British control of various parts of Africa, he mentioned their idea of the inability of the indigenous blacks to self-govern due to mass illiteracy. Self-determination was to be denied because of a "politically mandated developmental minimum" in the eyes of the colonizers.

The British, in this case, can rightfully claim that literacy is a necessity for a "meaningful exercise of freedom" (even then, mid 20th century), can they not? Or, at least, meaningful for an exercise of freedom that a Brit would likely undertake. But the indigenous Africans of yesteryear, and the resistant young adults of FLDS, are not comfortable with an external force telling them that without their intrusion their life is not sufficiently "meaningful" from the perspective of the dominant mainstream.

Robin's argument is not necessarily "cultural rights" in orientation. Mine is not. No individual member of the FLDS should be forced to reside in rural Texas by government forces in order to "preserve" culture any more than the FLDS, collectively, should be suppressed by same forces. (And, apparently, the Texas welfare apparatus has been keeping these folks in suspended animation - isolation - for some years.)


Kind of off-handedly, I recently read a story about ex-Californians and Vegas yuppies moving to a very remote part of southwestern Utah. The area has a good number of polygamists, who exist in tension with the more mainstream Mormons. These newly arrived, relatively secular liberals are fine with the polygamists, and get along well with them. The mainstream Mormons find this upsetting. If I can only find the link somewhere...

In any case, it'd be interesting to see if a kind of polygamist attrition occurs over time, as the "secular liberal professional" population grows in rural Utah. (But if the polygamists continue to exist in a legal-welfare limbo, they can be artificially sustained.)

The Boston Globe link goes to the same GTD link further down.

Likewise, most Americans want universal health care not because it will be a handout, they fully expect to pay for it through their taxes...


You sure about that? Americans are notoriously conflicted about what they want and what they are willing to pay for.

True, I think UH would make it easier to switch jobs, but that's only because currently the law favors employee provided care.

More efficient and reliable? Don't know about that. Are all forms of nominal "streamlining" necessarily efficient? And rationing and reliability don't often go hand in hand.

We should be breaking down cartels, not solidifying them further.

How does this square with loads of survey data that show support for social security, etc?

When Herbert Gintis et al. conducted their research for the book Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (MIT, 2006), they found the kind of dislike for "pure, non-contextualized" redistribution referred to above. However, Social Security (most certainly redistribution!) was favored because it was perceived to be "helping those who help themselves". If the welfare state debate can be defined as just this, it isn't suprising that Americans would support it.

Public Opinion continues to be very elusive, but this survey notwithstanding, the public, from what I've read, is far more sympathetic to the welfare state than some libertarians let on, albeit with an undertone of "deserving" or "non-deserving" relatively absent in Europe.

I'm with Afro. (That sounds funny.)

I'd think that Obama's overheard mumbling about poor, uneducated people disliking trade is another clue to his essentially upper class (relatively trade friendly) economic inclinations.

We should assume it's as bad as the scientists say, given our collective ignorance of the subject on this comment board. Given that, taxes can be overcome - companies can choose to pay them - but caps are a mandate to reduce carbon emissions. We should favor the latter course, no?

Indeed.

My view is that CPB/NPR is as biased and self-interested as any private media company (Fox included). NPR’s donors and supporters are left-of-center and so is its viewpoint. In general, I don’t want people running the show who think that government agencies are usually objective, fair, and selflessly dedicated to the benefit of the public and are, therefore, superior to private alternatives.

This is actually something I've looked into. There is some recent research by an outfit in England that looked at altruistic behavior by both public and private actors/agencies. Altruism here is defined as going above and beyond merely professional obligations. For a libertarian, the surprising news is that public servants were more likely to be altruistic and less "self interested" (yes, there's alot going on with that term). Here is the paper: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/...

But here's the clincher. This was only compared to the for-profit sector in the private realm. The non-profit private sector showed similar amounts of altruistic behavior to that of public (state) actors.

Now of course this is America, not England, but still.

As for your statement above, I'm not sure this research speaks to whether the government is more "objective", but on the question of self interest, the cynical public choice perspective needs to be modified. In some respects, it would seem, the government is less self interested. (Theory? Altruistic types get co-opted by the state and its ability to crowd out the voluntary. Also, England is more culturally homogenous?)

Of course, even given similar amounts of altruistic behavior, the higher levels of waste and administrative costs on the part of the government favors the non-profit private sector.

(1)Protectionism is illiberal and not conducive to economic growth. The fact that countries grew was despite protectionism, not because of it. I'd agree that we do not have free trade today.

(2)NPR is superior to an independent, privately run radio station? I doubt that. The coverage on NPR is rather milquetoast compared to, say, KOOP in Austin Texas. Ah, "public" (state) radio. "With sheckles come shackles". The politicization of public radio, and the inevitable "accountablity" placed upon it has made it rather bland on the one hand and increasingly "professionalized" (read: less grassroots) on the other.

(3)The military and law enforcement are increasingly one and the same. The wanton destruction heaped upon innocents abroad by the military due to its ability to externalize costs upon hapless taxpayers is a massive strike against it as some kind of organizaiton superior to a private defense force. (It's difficult to compare, of course.) But as it stands, the wealthy and powerful can take advantage of a state military force, paid for by the citizenry, to do their bidding. The fact that it is "publicly funded" (coercively funded) makes it worse in this regard - as an auxilliary to private interests - than it would be otherwise, if these private interests had to pay for it themselves.

They love government programs and handouts.

Yep. See above.

William Graham Sumner once said that there will one day be either socialists or anarchists. It's rather amazing to think that most liberals are quite conservative in this respect.

I think it's interesting to compare your attempt to achieve fusion with liberals with someone like Kevin Carson and his goal. (Though he'd probably prefer the term "leftist", as liberal lends itself too easily to "corporate liberal" or "neoliberal".)

I've been following both you and him, and I can with all confidence say that your citing Milton Friedman very much undermines his effort to build bridges. And probably vice versa, as his vigilant anti-statism and respect for Rothbard undermines your effort to downplay Rothbard's influence. Indeed, the importance of Rothbard for some one like Carson or the more hardcore libertarian is that he was staunchly anti-imperialist and refused to yield to the big government, commie-bashing right of mid-century. It's precisely this kind of thing that potentially garners respect for libertarians from certain liberal corners (cobwebbed corners, no doubt, from those in the "real world"), and aids in the effort to achieve a different, more radical kind of fusionism.

Of course you're influential, being at Cato and all, and thinking of ways to find agreement with others of a more establishment persuasion. The kinds of liberals that you meet are not of the sort that a market anarchist might meet. It's Ezra Klein and Will Wilkinson vs. Karl Hess and Murray Bookchin.

Ok, so the point of all this is to note that the virtue of "meeting a liberal halfway" very much depends on which kind of liberal. There's another alliance going on. The one discussed here is far from the final word on the matter. (Not that you said it was, of course.)

But I suppose I've gone so far down the rabbit hole that the dominant political discourse looks almost weird to me.

For example, should we care about inequality per se? We can help answer this question by asking poor people (or finding out some other way) how much it hurts their happiness to know about all the richer people in the world. If it doesn’t matter at all to them, that is interesting! It should make us less willing to pursue equality as an end in itself. If it matters a lot, also interesting.


If "inequality" here were replaced with "immigration", the liberal reluctance to satisfy those for whom the issue is most salient would be obvious. And I'd share that reluctance.

As for Sweden vs. Somalia, I'd argue the case for Sweden lies more in its culture than its statism. Combine bad culture with bad state and you get trouble. In the case of Somalia, Peter Leeson's research suggests that it was actually better off under anarchy. Perhaps an anarchic Sweden would be ideal..