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Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne. – James Russell Lowell

A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. – Ayn Rand

Facts must yield to ideas.
Peaceably and patiently if possible.
Violently if not.
– Lord Acton

DON’T PANIC!!! That brilliant post you’re looking for is archived here.

Good-bye Forever

My blog is moving to a new location! The new address is praxeology.net/blog and the new RSS feed is praxeology.net/blog/feed.

Barring unforeseen problems with the new version, this will be my last post here at the old. Old posts will continue to be archived here, but new ones will be archived at the new version. So good-bye, but only sort of.

Journalist Grows Spine!

Keith Olbermann brings it:

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable comments to the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday demand the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American. For they do not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence, indeed the loyalty, of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse still, they credit those same transient occupants – our employees – with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve. ...

That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: this is a democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count, not just his. Had he or his President perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience – about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago; about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago; about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago – we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful, recipe of fact plus ego. But to date this government has proved little besides its own arrogance and its own hubris. Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire fog of fear which continues to envelop this nation – he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have inadvertently or intentionally profited and benefited, both personally and politically. And yet he can stand up in public and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes. In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America? ... The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: the destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City so valiantly fought. ...

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism”? As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that – though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

* Olbermann, like Rumsfeld, buys into the old myth that Neville Chamberlain was naïve about Hitler’s intentions. In fact Chamberlain was perfectly aware how dangerous Hitler was – but he was also aware how poorly prepared the British military was, and so was quite sensibly unwilling to challenge Hitler until he had first built up Britain’s military power – which he directly proceeded to do. It’s been said that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggie” while looking for a rock – which is a pretty good description of what Chamberlain was doing. Churchill’s plan for immediate confrontation, by contrast, was like attacking the dog barehanded while hoping that someone else with a rock will happen along. The prospects for success of Churchill’s policy depended crucially on American entry into the war; otherwise it was suicidal. Since America did ultimately enter the war, Churchill’s policy may look sensible in hindsight, but given the antiwar sentiment in the U.S. at the time it was hardly something that could reasonably be counted on. Churchill gambled with his country’s freedom and got lucky.

Beirut Update

Today I’m pleased and relieved to learn that my friends Jeremy and Lucy Koons made it out of Lebanon safely during the recent unpleasantness.

I hope to get back to more regular blogging soon – things have just been über-hectic here of late.

Tuscaloosa Countdown

Deadlines are looming for the Alabama Philosophical Society conference:

• DATE: October 20-21.


• PLACE: Tuscaloosa, Alabama.


• Deadline for submitting a paper: August 29th if by snailmail, September 1st if by email.


• Deadline for making hotel reservations: September 19th.

Anarchy in D.C.

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The Molinari Society will be holding its third annual Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Mordor, I mean Washington DC, December 27-30, 2006. Here’s the latest schedule info:

GVIII-4. Friday, 29 December 2006, 11:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: “Anarchist Perspectives”
Virginia Suite C (Lobby Level), Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 2660 Woodley Road NW

Session 1, 11:15-12:15:
chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
speaker: Matthew MacKenzie (Muhlenberg College)
title: “Exploitation: A Dialectical Anarchist Perspective”
commentator: Charles W. Johnson (Molinari Institute)

Session 2, 12:15-1:15:
chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
speaker: Geoffrey Allan Plauché (Louisiana State University)
title: “On the Myth of the Founder-Legislator in Political Philosophy”
commentator: Charles W. Johnson (Molinari Institute)

JLS 20.2: What Lies Within?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The latest issue (20.2) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies is out. Catch the action:

Valentin Petkantchin argues that Adam Smith’s “third duty of the sovereign” is less interventionist than traditionally thought; B. K. Marcus defends the privatisation of the airwaves; Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan challenge Hans Hoppe’s argumentation ethic; Jeff Hummel criticises Tom Woods’ take on American history; Sam Bostaph praises Tom Woods’ account of the Catholic Church’s relationship to Progressivism and to Austrian economics; and Rob Bass critiques Tibor Machan’s book on Ayn Rand.

Read a fuller summary of 20.2’s contents here.

Read the articles themselves (already online) here.

Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.

Read back issues online here.

Subscribe here.

Feel the Irony

As everyone on Earth now knows, our Prince President was recently recorded saying: “See, the irony is, what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.”

But everybody’s been focusing on the wrong word. What’s objectionable in this sentence is not the word “shit” but the word “irony.” What exactly is supposed to be ironic about the situation?

Well, maybe it’s kind of like a black fly in your Chardonnay.

Victory Through Victim-Swapping

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

By most reports, Israeli bombings of Lebanon are strengthening Hezbollah’s support among Lebanese civilians, while Hezbollah bombings of Israel are strengthening the Israeli government’s support among Israeli civilians.

So here we have (what are by libertarian standards) two criminal gangs, both blasting away at innocent civilians, and the result is to increase these gangs’ popularity among the civilians being victimised! A very successful outcome for both sides.

The trick, of course, is that each gang is blasting away at civilians in the other gang’s territory. If each gang were to attack its own civilians directly, those civilians would quickly turn against the gangs in their midst. But since in fact each side’s continuation of bombings is what allows the other side to excuse, and get away with, its bombings, the situation isn’t really all that different; each side is causing its own civilians to be bombed. It’s just that by following the stratagem of attacking each other’s civilians, the two gangs manage to avoid (and indeed promote the exact opposite of) the loss of domestic power that would follow if they were to bring about the same results more directly. Think of it as the geopolitical version of Strangers on a Train.

No, I’m not suggesting that Hezbollah and the Israeli government are in cahoots. They don’t need to be. This is how the logic of statism works, this is how its incentives play out, regardless of what its agents specifically intend. The externalisation of costs is what states do best. (True, Hezbollah isn’t a state, but it aspires to be one, and its actions are played out within a framework sustained by statism.)

What would happen if the civilian populations of Israel and Lebanon were to come to see this conflict, not as Israel versus Hezbollah, or even Israeli-government-plus-Israeli-civilians versus Hezbollah-plus-Lebanese-civilians, but rather as Israeli-government-plus-Hezbollah versus ordinary-people-living-on-the-eastern-Mediterranean? Both Hezbollah and the Israeli government would quickly lose their popular support, and their ability to wage war against each other would go with it.

But by encouraging the identification of civilians with the states that rule them, statism makes it harder for civilians to find their way to such a perspective. (Of course racism and religious intolerance are part of the story too – yet another way in which such cultural values help to prop up the state apparatus.) As long as the people of the eastern Mediterranean continue to view this conflict through statist spectacles, Hezbollah and/or the Israeli government will continue to be the victors, while the civilian populace in both Israel and Lebanon will remain the vanquished and victimised.

Stop Me Before I Link Again!

What? Another post of nothing but links?

Yeah. You got a problem with that?

• Check out the current Wikipedia entry for Left-libertarianism. It distinguishes two different strands currently bearing that title, one quasi-Marxist and one actually-libertarian, and among the contemporary and/or recent proponents of the latter strand mentions Murray Rothbard, Sam Konkin, and my comrades Chris Sciabarra, Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, and Arthur Silber, as well as your humble correspondent. (Some odd omissions there ... someone should really add Karl Hess and some of the folks on the Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left.)
  
  Alas, I’m not crazy about the labels used in the article. The quasi-Marxist strand gets called “Philosophical left-libertariansm,” while the actually-libertarian strand gets called “Anti-corporate left-libertariansm.” Hey! Why don’t I get to be philosophical? Still, it’s nice to get a plug.



• Speaking of plugs, Jeremy Weiland gives the Molinari Institute and our forthcoming magazine The Industrial Radical a very nice plug on his blog Social Memory Complex. (Which reminds me, if you’re not writing for or subscribing to The Industrial Radical, how can you live with yourself?)



• I’ve previously mentioned the Boston Tea Party and the Grassroots Libertarian Caucus as worthy venues for responding to the Libertarian Party’s recent lurch toward reformism. Additionally, I’ve just learned that the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus has been revived. I see the efforts of these three groups as complementary.
  
  And on the general topic of a radical left-libertarian approach to LP strategy, see Kevin Carson’s excellent recent post Good “Big Tents” and Bad.



• I also recommend a couple of newly posted left-libertarian pieces from Sheldon Richman: Why Left-Libertarian? and The Tariff Is the Mother of Trusts. (And here are the links to the Childs, Rothbard, and Stromberg pieces that Sheldon cites in the first paragraph of the “Tariff” piece.) Sheldon also gives my Mises Philosophy Seminar a plug in Greek Not Meek.



• Incidentally, isn’t it great that Sheldon is editor of The Freeman? There was a time when I’d given up on that periodical entirely. I’m not just talking about the knee-jerk pro-corporate bias The Freeman has often had, but about the really dark creepy stuff like this 1991 rant from Carl Horowitz – a vividly memorable low point in the history of that publication:
  
  

  There is something about encountering homosexuality in its militant and pugnacious form that touches a deep, almost reflexive anger, even among most heterosexual liberals ....
  
  Male and even female opposition to persons with these traits is slowly taking a nasty turn, moving from violence of language to violence of fists. And yet, given the emerging legal climate, one discovers within oneself a disquieting empathy with the inchoate rage behind such acts. ... [T]he brazen, open display of homosexuality – as if to taunt, to tease, to maliciously sow confusion into sexual identities – is something most heterosexuals do not handle gracefully. ...
  
  Nobody in a rational state of mind would seek to emulate the exploits of “skinheads” .... Yet let readers here imagine themselves in that Madison restaurant or Seattle airport, being witness to mass displays of homosexual kissing, and feeling utterly helpless to evince the slightest disapproval. Would not such a scenario provoke an impulse, however fleeting and irrational, to do bodily harm?

  In the immortal words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, “Put your analyst on danger money, baby.”
  
  Anyway, it’s good to see that venerable periodical under the editorship, these days, of a radical and consistent left-libertarian. Not that Sheldon does, or should, impose a party line on contributors; but his presence certainly helps to influence the atmosphere. And I can’t imagine that thinly disguised apologias for physical assaults would find as friendly a berth in The Freeman now as they did in 1991.

Who Is My Neighbour?

Is this an Israeli boy wounded by Hezbollah missiles in Haifa?

Or is it a Lebanese boy wounded by Israeli missiles in Beirut?

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race. You may put men on opposite sides of a river or a chain of mountains; may else part them by a tract of salt water; may give them, if you like, distinct languages; and may even colour their skins differently; but you cannot change their fundamental relationships. Originating as these do in the facts of man’s constitution, they are unalterable by the accidents of external condition. The moral law is cosmopolite – is no respecter of nationalities: and between men who are the antipodes of each other, either in locality or anything else, there must still exist the same balance of rights as though they were next-door neighbours in all things.

Forgotten Blues

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The Alabama Philosophical Society (for which I’m the webmaster, archivist, and secretary-treasurer) will be holding its Annual Meeting on October 20-21, 2006, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Derk Pereboom will be our Keynote Speaker.

Check out the website for paper submissions, student essay contest, hotel info, and other details.

If the title of this blog post puzzles you, click here.

Bastille Day Bulletin, Part Deux

A couple of follow-ups to yesterday’s post:

• Here’s that Proudhon quote I was looking for yesterday:
  
  

  For many people it is to advance a scandalous and paradoxical proposition, filled with difficulty and disaster, to say that the Revolution of ’89, having established nothing, has freed us not at all, but only changed our sad lot .... Nevertheless, such is the evidence of facts ....
  
  In 1789 the task of the Revolution was to destroy and rebuild at the same time. It had the old rule to abolish but only by producing a new organization, of which the plan and character should be exactly the opposite of the former .... Of these the Revolution, with great difficulty, accomplished only the first; the other was entirely forgotten. ...
  
  The feudal order having been abolished ... and the principles of liberty and civil equality proclaimed, the consequence was that in future society must be organized, not for politics and war, but for work. What in fact was the feudal organization? It was one entirely military. What is work? The negation of fighting. To abolish feudalism, then, meant to commit ourselves to a perpetual peace, not only foreign but domestic. ... It was evident that the problem of the Revolution lay in erecting everywhere the reign of equality and industry, in place of the feudal order which had been abolished ....
  
  This so manifest, so inevitable conclusion ... was not understood by those who made themselves its interpreters .... All their ideas were of politics only. ... [T]he nation was again delivered into the hands of the warriors and lawyers. One might say that nobility, clergy and monarchy had disappeared, only to make way for another governing set of Anglomaniac constitutionaries, classic republicans, militaristic democrats, all infatuated with the Romans and Spartans, and above all, very much so with themselves ....
  
  To put my thought in one word ... the revolutionaries failed in their mission after the fall of the Bastille, as they have failed since the abdication of Louis Philippe, and for the same reasons: the total lack of economic ideas, their prejudice in favor of government, and the distrust of the lower classes which they harbored. ... The principle of centralization ... passed into a dogma with the Jacobins, who transmitted it to the Empire, and to the governments that followed it .... politics taking the place of industry in the minds of everybody ....
  
  To sum up: the society which the Revolution of ’89 should have created, does not yet exist. That which for sixty years we have had, is but a superficial, factitious order .... In place of liberty and industrial equality, the Revolution has left us a legacy of authority and political subordination. The State, growing more powerful every day, and endowed with prerogatives and privileges without end, has undertaken to do for our happiness what might we might have expected from a very different source. ...
  
  When the Revolution proclaimed liberty of the people, equality before the law, the sovereignty of the people, the subordination of power to the country, it set up two incompatible things, society and government; and it is this incompatibility which has been the cause or the pretext of this overwhelming, liberty-destroying concentration, called CENTRALIZATION, which the parliamentary democracy admires and praises, because it is its nature to tend toward despotism. ...
  
  The Republic had Society to establish: it thought only of establishing Government. Centralization continually fortifying itself, while Society had no institution to oppose to it ... matters reached a point where Society and Government could not live together, the condition of existence of the latter being to subordinate and subjugate the former. ... Liberty, equality, progress, with all their oratorical consequences, are written in the text of the constitutions and the laws; there is no vestige of them in the institutions. ... It was in this way that the democratic party itself, the heir of the first Revolution, came to attempting to reform Society by establishing the initiative of the State, to create institutions by the prolific virtue of Power ....
  
  As this state of affairs, of which the principle, the means and the end is WAR, is unable to answer the needs of an entirely industrial civilization, [a new] revolution is the necessary result. ... [W]e must understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms, whose forms capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy, which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of society. ...
  
  Know well that there is nothing more counter-revolutionary than the Government. Whatever liberalism it pretends, whatever name it assumes, the Revolution repudiates it: its fate is to be absorbed in the industrial organization.



• I didn’t quite complete my thoughts on global warming yesterday.
  
  I talked about people who take the sides they do primarily on the basis of scientific evidence, and about people who take the sides they do primarily on the basis of political calculation. But I don’t think either of those groups is the majority. Most people with positions on global warming don’t have sufficient scientific expertise to belong to the first group, and aren’t dishonest enough to belong to the second group.
  
  I suspect most people take whatever position they take on global warming because people are generally more likely to read, and/or to believe, whichever scientific case best fits in with their worldview. If you’re conventionally left-wing, then you’re probably accustomed to thinking of business interests as selfish and irresponsible forces that need to be reined in by public-spirited civil servants, and so you’re going to view claims that seem to support the business community with heightened suspicion. If, on the other hand, you’re conventionally right-wing, then you’re probably accustomed to thinking of business interests as decent hard-working folks who are constantly being demonized and micromanaged by rapacious regulators, and so you’re going to view claims that seem to support government regulation with heightened suspicion.
  
  Even if these respective value-judgments were correct, one should be cautious about allowing them to influence one’s view of the evidence. But I don’t think they’re even correct; one should avoid putting too much faith in either the bosses or the bureaucrats.



• Finally – well, this cover is just too unintentionally funny (for feminist reasons among others) not to share:
  
  
  

Bastille Day Bulletin

More miscellaneous musings:

• Today is Bastille Day. I’d planned to commemorate the event with a great quote I found in Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution, but I’m at work and my copy is at home. I’d intended to copy-and-paste the passage from an online version, assuming there would surely be one, but apparently there is none – either in French or in English. Go figure.



• I suspect I’m one of the few political bloggers who has no opinion about global warming. My problem is that I know too many intelligent and sincere people, with way more scientific expertise than mine, on both sides of the issue. Many on the left seem to assume that anyone who’s skeptical about the cause and/or extent of global warming must be in the pay of the corporations; and many on the right seem to assume that anyone who thinks global warming is serious and manmade is just a shill for big government. I know from personal experience that both of those assumptions are just plain false.
  
  But I suspect the stereotypes – both stereotypes – are largely true of all too many of the politicians and lobbyists involved in the debate. As I’ve written elsewhere:
  
  

  We might compare the alliance between government and big business to the alliance between church and state in the Middle Ages. Of course it’s in the interest of both parties to maintain the alliance – but all the same, each side would like to be the dominant partner, so it’s no surprise that the history of such alliances will often look like a history of conflict and antipathy, as each side struggles to get the upper hand. But this struggle must be read against a common background framework of cooperation to maintain the system of control.

  Now the main difference, insofar as there is one, between the Establishment Left and the Establishment Right in this country is that while both are the running-dog lackeys of the neofascist government-business alliance, the Establishment Left somewhat favours a shift in power toward government, while the Establishment Right somewhat favours a shift in power toward business. Playing up the threat of global warming thus serves the interests of the statocratic faction, while playing down that threat serves the interests of the plutocratic faction – and so you’d expect to see the two sides taking the sides they’re taking, regardless of what the truth actually is. But it’s just a squabble within the ruling class.
  
  In fact, of course, if global warming does turn out to be serious and manmade, that shouldn’t lead us to grant more power to the state; the more serious the problem, the more disastrous any centralised, bureaucratic solution is likely to be. And if on the other hand global warming turns out to have been overhyped, that shouldn’t lead us into complacency about the plutocracy either. Both halves of the ruling-class machine need to be dismantled, whatever the weather may bring.



• See here and here for the latest news on the Atlas Shrugged film. It looks like the plan is to give it the Lord of the Rings treatment – i.e., to do it in three films, one for each part – which is clearly the only way to do the book justice. While there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, I’m cautiously optimistic.
  
  Of course if this film trilogy does get made and is successful, the “Randian Right” will do its best to capitalise on the resulting swell of interest in Rand by pushing and recruiting for the dogmatic-militarist-corporatist version of Rand’s legacy. Those of us on what I think of as the “Randian Left” will need to ponder how we can best position ourselves to promote awareness of the alternative. But more about that later.
  
  While we’re on the subject of Atlas, check out these great paintings of Dagny and Rearden.



• It is sometimes supposed that the legal institutions of a free society can be imposed without regard to pre-existing cultural norms. Thus Kant insisted that “[t]he problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.” In similar vein, today’s neoconservative nation-builders appear to imagine that one can produce a liberal democracy in Iraq simply by giving them a liberal democratic constitution. As Chris Sciabarra has noted, this is a mistake:
  
  

  For those of us bred on Ayn Rand’s insight that politics is only a consequence of a larger philosophical and cultural cause – that culture, in effect, trumps politics – the idea that it is possible to construct a political solution in a culture that does not value procedural democracy, free institutions, or the notion of individual responsibility is a delusion.

  But it is also possible to make the opposite mistake, i.e., to conclude that a society’s level of freedom and success is simply determined by psychological and cultural factors in such a way that political institutions make little or no difference at all. Herbert Spencer seems to me to make that mistake in the following passage from Social Statics:
  
  

  The power of an apparatus primarily depends, not on the ingenuity of its design, but on the strength of its materials. Be his plan never so well devised – his arrangement of struts, and ties, and bolts, never so good – his balance of forces never so perfect – yet if our engineer has not considered whether the respective parts of his structure will bear the strain to be put upon them, we must call him a bungler. Similarly with the institution-maker. If the people with whom he has to deal are not of the requisite quality, no cleverness in his contrivance will avail anything. ...
  
  That justice can be well administered only in proportion as men become just, is a fact too generally overlooked. “If they had but trial by jury!” says some one, moralizing on the Russians. But they can’t have it. It could not exist amongst them. Even if established it would not work. They lack that substratum of honesty and truthfulness on which alone it can stand. To be of use, this, like any other institution, must be born of the popular character. It is not trial by jury that produces justice, but it is the sentiment of justice that produces trial by jury, as the organ through which it is to act; and the organ will be inert unless the sentiment is there. ...
  
  It is very certain that government can not alter the total amount of injustice committed. The absurdity is in supposing that it can – in supposing that by some ingenious artifice we may avoid the consequences of our own natures. ... It is impossible for man to create force. He can only alter the mode of its manifestation, its direction, its distribution. The power that propels his steamboats and locomotives is not of his making; it was all lying latent in the coal. ... In no case can he do anything but avail himself of dormant forces. This is as true in ethics as in physics. Moral feeling is a force – a force by which men’s actions are restrained within certain prescribed bounds; and no legislative mechanism can increase its results one iota. By how much this force is deficient, by so much must its work remain undone. In whatever degree we lack the qualities needful for our state, in the same degree must we suffer. Nature will not be cheated. Whoso should think to escape the influence of gravitation by throwing his limbs into some peculiar attitude, would not be more deceived than are those who hope to avoid the weight of their depravity by arranging themselves into this or that form of political organization. Every jot of the evil must in one way or other be borne .... No philosopher’s stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.

  As I said, this strikes me as going too far the other way. A constitution cannot operate in blissful transcendence of the people it constrains, since, as I’ve argued here and here, its very existence and continuation consists in the behaviour of those people. Hence no constitutional order is likely to work very well for a Kantian nation of demons. But on the other hand, the very same people will often act differently when confronted with different incentives, and what incentives people are confronted with is heavily influenced by the institutional arrangements they find themselves in. True, no arrangement of feathers, no matter how cleverly contrived, will make a good military fortress; but bricks and mortar may make a good or a bad military fortress, depending on how they are combined. Thus Kant was on the right track when he described the object of constitutional design this way: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.” Exaggerating Kant’s insight, of course, leads to impracticable utopianism; but underrating it leads to defeatism – as, for example, it led Spencer to suppose that the implementation of anarchism must be postponed until the human race attains moral perfection. The relationship between culture and politics is not unidirectional – in either direction. Both the Kantian error and the Spencerian error are the results of an excessively one-sided, an insufficiently dialectical approach to social theory.



• Charles Johnson has an excellent commentary on the tragic events currently unfolding in Lebanon and Palestine.



• On the lighter side, don’t miss this hilarious German film clip concerning our illustrious President. (Conical hat tip to Tom Palmer.)

Soccer Logic, Time Thieves, and Anarchy

Some miscellaneous musings:

• After “apologising” for, and characterising as “inexcusable,” the head-butt that lost his team their shot at the World Cup, soccer star Zinédine Zidane apparently took it all back by adding, “I can’t say I regret my behaviour, because regretting it would mean that he [Marco Materazzi, the recipient of the head-butt] was right to say what he said.”
  
  In other words, Zidane thinks this would be a deductively valid argument:
  
  

  1. Materazzi says p.
  2. I regret hitting Materazzi.
  3. Therefore p.

  Who knew that the difference between victory and defeat would turn on a player’s not having taken Logic 101?



• When I was in 5th or 6th grade I wrote a poem titled “Skull-Man,” that went like this:
  
  

  Skull of cave-man, eons old,
  holding legends never told –
  the tusk-boar’s squeal, the mammoth’s tread,
  all locked within that hoary head.
  
  Fire-hardened spears of bone,
  sharp flint axes, knives of stone –
  once held in hand of earthen crust,
  now forever mingled with the dust.

  (I’m vain enough to note that it won a prize in a statewide poetry competition – but honest enough to add that this was in Idaho, not exactly a poetry-intensive state.)
  
  A few years later, in high school, I added two more stanzas:
  
  

  What cruel, ironic fate here lies
  which mutes your tongue and dulls your eyes?
  What passions burned within your breast?
  What questing dreams disturbed your rest?
  
  What might you know that we know not
  who saw young stars and mountains hot?
  What bridge across the ages lay
  from warrior proud to hand-held clay?

  Ah, pretentious adolescent poesy!
  
  Well, the other day while reading Forgotten Tales of Love and Murder, a collection of lesser-known stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, I came across the following description, in a 1936 story titled “Elmer,” of a man’s thoughts upon discovering the body of a caveman preserved in ice:
  
  

  What memories were locked in that frozen brain? What sights had those frozen eyes beheld in the days when the world was young? What loves, what hates had stirred that mighty breast?
  
  He had lived in the days of the mammoth and the saber-tooth, and he had survived with only a stone spear and a stone knife until the cold of the great glacier had overtaken him.

  Clearly the similarity between my poem and this passage from Burroughs’ story is too close to be a coincidence. But although I read a lot of Burroughs in my youth, I’m certain that I never read that story before this year. Indeed, this page gives a list of all the places where “Elmer” was ever published, both in its original form and under its revised title “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw,” and I have never come across any of them. My only source of Burroughs’ works back then was the old series of Ace paperbacks with their wonderful Frazetta covers, and “Elmer” never appeared in any of those.
  
  The only explanation, then, is that Edgar Rice Burroughs must have travelled in a time machine from the 1930s to the 1970s, plagiarised my poem, and then headed back to his own era to publish his ill-gotten story.



• The Mises Institute has brought back into print two classics of 20th-century market anarchism: Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty (shocking to think it was recently out of print!) and the Tannehills’ The Market For Liberty
  
  Also now available in print is the complete run (1969-1984) of Rothbard’s periodical Libertarian Forum. Now I’m just waiting for Left & Right and Inquiry ....

Subversive Summer Reading

Still too busy to do much more than toss some more links your way:

• Sheldon Richman has two excellent recent columns, both very left-libertarian: Full Context and The Goal Is Freedom: For Equality; Against Privilege.
• Ralph Raico’s Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes, a study of the Comte-Dunoyer-Thierry strand in French liberalism, is now available.
• James Redford’s Jesus Is An Anarchist is sure to be provocative.
• I recently came across two interesting discussions of anarchism by Roger Bissell from the 1970s: Resolving the Government Issue and More on the Government Controversy.
• My Freeman piece Liberty: The Other Equality is now online.

Two From Space

Just now came across this great parable Space Aliens from Luxembourg by Stefan Molyneux, on the Iraq invasion.

NASA’s ongoing inability to solve the space shuttle’s foam problems brings to mind another great space parable, the anonymously authored How the West Wasn’t Won.

Betrayal in Portland

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Meeting in Portland over (ironically enough) Independence Day weekend, the Libertarian Party convention ended up gutting the LP Platform, removing nearly all of the more radical planks (including the antiwar one). The new watered-down platform hasn’t been made available online yet, but preliminary details, and some reactions, are available here, here, here, and here.

The outfit behind this move calls itself the Libertarian Reform Caucus. Their theory is a simple one: most voters are not libertarians, so if the Libertarian Party wants to win elections, it must stop being libertarian.

That’s not quite how the Caucus words it, of course. Instead they accuse the Platform of “sacrificing practicality and political appeal in favor of philosophical consistency”; and they call instead for a Platform that sets out “a realistic vision for the next few years, as opposed to an idealistic vision of a libertarian future.”

To this sort of thing I can make no better reply than Hayek’s in his 1949 essay The Intellectuals and Socialism:

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism ... which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. ... Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

A Thought for the Fourth

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

(I’m going to be away from my computer on the Fourth, so I’m posting my Independence Day observations a day early.)

How should we think about the American Revolution? I suggest we should think of it as an uncompleted project. The Revolution, after all, wasn’t just about separation from Britain; it was about the right of the people to “alter or abolish” any political arrangements destructive of the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” or not resting on the “consent of the governed.”

Those were the principles on which the Revolution was based. But the political system the founders established never fully embodied those principles in practice; and its present-day successor no longer respects them even in theory. (Slogans, need I add? are not theory.)

Over the years since 1776, the fortunes of American liberty, and indeed of liberty worldwide, have risen and fallen; most often some aspects have risen while others have fallen. But every increase in liberty has involved the logical carrying-out of the principles of ’76, while every decrease has involved their de facto repudiation. (And if the average American is on balance more free than his or her 18th-century counterpart, this is small reason for complacency when one views the matter counterfactually. To paraphrase my comments in an L&P discussion last year: “For me the point of comparison is not USA 2006 vs. USA 1776, but USA 2006 vs. the USA 2006 we would have had if the USA had stuck consistently to those principles.)

From an establishment perspective, the Fourth of July is a day to celebrate the existing American system. But that approach to the Fourth is, I suggest, profoundly counter-revolutionary. Far better to regard Independence Day as a day to rededicate ourselves to forwarding the ongoing Revolution whose true completion, as Voltairine de Cleyre and Rose Wilder Lane argued here and here, will be libertarian anarchy.

Aristotle, Anarchy, Action!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m back from San Diego, but once again I’m too busy to blog about it. (My backlog of things I want to blog about – my b(ack!)log? – has grown to monstrous dimensions.) But I’m not too busy to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion:

Tomorrow I start my philosophy seminar on the praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics. To quote the prospectus:

On the one hand, the subjective-value approach to economics characteristic of the Austrian school might seem inhospitable to objective theories of ethical value. Yet on the other hand, philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle, and Aquinas based their objective conceptions of ethics on something rather like a praxeological analysis of subjective valuation; indeed, subjectivist economics and natural law ethics both originated from this common tradition. Can an objective ethics in a broadly Aristotelean tradition be grounded in praxeological considerations? And if so, what shape might a radical libertarian political theory take if built on such foundations?

The first half of the seminar will deal with the praxeological foundations of ethics. Topics include: do human beings have an ultimate end? can we knowingly choose the bad? how are morality and self-interest related? why should we care about other people’s interests? ...

The second half of the seminar will explore the implications of praxeological, Aristotelean ethics for such issues as property rights, contracts, land ownership, punishment and restitution, military policy, stateless legal systems, utilitarian vs. rights-based considerations, and the cultural preconditions of liberty.

Before the Law Stands a Doorkeeper

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The more “moderate” opponents of immigration are often heard saying, “fine, let people immigrate by all means, but they should do it the legal way.”

A fair response to this bromide would be: “What legal way?” As this article shows, for most low-skilled Mexican workers there is no legal way to enter the United States. The U.S. has a quota of 5,000 green cards for low-skilled workers; that’s just one percent of the number seeking to come in. For the rest, the alternative is a temporary work permit, but getting one of those “often requires the worker to ... pay off someone in Mexico.”

In short, there are Mexicans who want to work, and there are Americans who want to employ them, but the U.S. and (despite popular impressions) the Mexican governments have conspired to prevent, at gunpoint, these peaceful and mutually beneficial transactions.

In other news, I’m off to a joint Liberty Fund / Social Philosophy and Policy Center conference (topic: ancient political thought) in San Diego / La Jolla; back next week. I lived in San Diego in the early 70s, but haven’t seen it since 1977; it’ll be nice to see it again.

Stromberg on Land Theft: Now Online

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m back from Scotland! But more about that later.

Joseph Stromberg’s excellent 1995 article “English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development,” which appeared in the first (and alas only) issue of Sam Konkin’s journal The Agorist Quarterly, has been getting some attention in the left-libertarian blogosphere lately (see, e.g., here and here). Stromberg explores the illuminating parallels between what are often thought of as very disparate events (since one is supposed to be a black mark for “capitalism” and the other for “socialism,” whatever exactly those terms mean).

I thought the article deserved a wider audience, particularly in light of the ongoing debate among libertarians concerning land reform and the “subsidy of history.” So with Stromberg’s kind permission, I’ve placed it online on the Molinari Institute site. Check it out here.

The other articles in that issue are worth reading also, so I’m going to try to get permission from the various authors to post the whole issue. Thus far I’ve gotten approval from E. Scott Royce and Jared C. Lobdell (for their articles “The Black Market Response to Rationing During World War II” and “Old Rightists and Old Writers,” respectively); waiting to hear from the others. Watch this space ....

Forth to the Firth!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’ve been planning for ages to write about my Vegas and Prague trips/conferences, as well as to add some further thoughts on the French rioters (remember them?). I’ve even got a catchy title for the post: APEE, PCPE, and CPE.

Well, I’ve been way too busy to get to it, and on Thursday I leave for Edinburgh (ah, Scotland! land of Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Duns Scotus, and most importantly Bran Mak Morn!) so it’ll have to wait a little bit longer. Back in a week!

Subjective Value, Objective Good

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

A text version of my August 2005 talk “Economics and Its Ethical Assumptions” is now online. (Thanks to B. K. Marcus for editing it to make it a bit less transcript-y.)

In it I talk about the relation between subjectivism about economic value and objectivism about ethical value, and do my usual song-and-dance about fusing the Austrian and Athenian traditions.

The talk also serves as a useful preview of the sort of thing I’ll be talking about in my upcoming week-long Mises Institute seminar.

Oh Say Can You See

I’ve previously described how to find the graves of Gustave de Molinari and Benjamin Constant in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery; see the map below on the left. I noted at that time that although I knew the grave of another great libertarian thinker, Jean-Baptiste Say, was nearby, I was unable to locate it on my last trip to Paris.

Now, between advice from Hervé de Quengo and coming across a more complete map, I can describe the location of Say’s grave more precisely. On the map below on the right, the lower green rectangle marks Constant’s grave; the upper green rectangle marks Say’s.

   

Well, go to the Constant/Molinari tombs. You then have to continue along the Chemin Masséna towards Chemin Suchet. You will find en passant the French tomb of the Maréchal Ney .... You will find yourself at a crossroads: Chemin Suchet, Chemin Jordan and Chemin Masséna.

Take the Chemin Masséna [judging from the map I think he means Chemin Suchet – RTL] and look at your left. You will first find the tomb of the Prince Murat. At 25 paces from the crossroads, you will see the huge Sépulture de Mme. D’Aumont, Duchesse de Mazarin. J.-B. Say is just behind: currently, you can see his name from the road.

Name the Mystery Feminist

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Who wrote the following passages?

1. If he loves you in the right way he’ll not stop you. You were just made for the stage, Anne, and if anyone interferes with your career now you’d never forgive him in after years – you’d always be thinking of what you might have achieved. ... Suppose you didn’t like the motion picture business and made him give up his theaters? He’d always brood about that and be unhappy. You’ll be unhappy if you can’t go ahead with your work, that you love. In either event an unhappy home will result, but if he keeps his beloved picture houses and you stay on the stage you’re both happy in your work, and that’s a longer stride toward mutual happiness than starting out on your married life with one of you harboring a regret that may easily grow into a chronic condition of discontent and unhappiness.

2. That is a question that should never arise between two people unselfishly in love with one another. The man would never make it necessary for her to choose – he would encourage her. ... After all, happiness is all that counts in life. There isn’t so much of it running around loose in the world that a man can afford to deny his wife the right to win it in any clean and decent way that she sees fit.

3. If you mean [I should stay] in the kitchen, then I can tell you that [no] woman with a nervous organization higher than a cow’s, is ever satisfied with that. Lots of us have to do it, but that does not mean that we like it and I’ll be darned if I’m going to peel potatoes and swat flies all the rest of my life when I have the brains and the chance to do something else .... I want to think for myself and use the brains the Lord gave me ... I want to rise above the mediocrity of a household drudge ....

4. You say that you love us. You say that you want homes and wives. All you love is your own selfish comforts and desires. ... Your idea of home is a breeding plant. ... Your ideas of marital happiness start and end with yourselves – and having babies. If you have what you want – everything your own way – why, then, marriage is a blessing. You want us to sit at home without an interest in the world that we can call our very own – and raise children. ... I intend to have children; but I do not intend to devote my body and soul and mind exclusively to the business of breeding.

The Net of Time

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

In the latest (June ’06) issue of Liberty, in a review of Stephen Cox’s excellent Isabel Paterson biography, Bruce Ramsey writes:

Though Paterson penned novels, some of which Cox says are good, all have been out of print for more than half a century.

To John Farrar
           With the sincere regards
           of a contributor to an
           editor and the indescribable
           sentiments of an author toward
          a possible critic
From Isabel Paterson

Sitting on the steps of the side entrance, with her chin on her hand, she discovered why she had stopped here. In the long grass of the garden, fragments of medieval sculpture reposed tranquilly. Their granite features were blunted, all but effaced. It gave them a ghostly aspect, an infinite calm. It is the material substance that is ghostly, she thought. It wears thin, dissolving with time. Something more powerful and enduring wears it out ... The soul, having stooped to embrace mortality, is caught in the net of time. It strives to break through by the keen devices of the intellect, by the intensity of passion, the persuasion of tenderness, even the violence of anger; and falls back on silence at the last. But at parting it cries out, wait, one moment more and I could have told you ... oh, wait! What we desire is communication. ... Perhaps, some other where, we achieve it, by a persistence to which even granite must yield.

Francis Tandy Rides Again

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Francis Tandy’s 1896 book Voluntary Socialism is one of the classics of market anarchism. (Don’t be misled by the title; Tandy, a disciple of Benjamin Tucker, uses the term “socialism” in the sense employed by “free-market socialists” like Tucker, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and, today, Kevin Carson.) A good many political philosophers have probably seen Tandy’s name at some point, since Robert Nozick cites him early on in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in a list of proponents of competing protection agencies; the others listed are Spooner, Tucker, Rothbard, Friedman, and the Tannehills. (Nozick appears unaware of the battlin’ Belgians Molinari and de Puydt.) Nevertheless, Tandy is far and away the most obscure name on the list, and his book is damnably hard to find; and apparently the Denver Public Library (where Tandy, a Denver resident, once worked) possesses one of the few existing copies but refuses to allow it be photocopied.

Happily, I managed to get my hands on the elusive 1979 Revisionist Press reprint version a couple of years ago, and I’ve just now posted the first five chapters on the Molinari site. (I had already posted the preface and introduction back in March ’04.)

The first four of these chapters set out the psychological, sociological, and ethical foundations of Tandy’s libertarianism. This section is rather a mixed bag from my point of view; Tandy’s theory of human action combines praxeological insight with psychologistic confusion, and his blend of Stirner and Spencer manages at times to look more like stereotypical “Social Darwinism” than does either Stirner or Spencer singly. Still, there’s plenty of good stuff here.

But what the book is best known for (well, to the extent that it’s known at all!) is its fifth chapter, which is devoted to an explanation and defense of the concept of competing protection agencies – in its day, one of the fullest discussions of the idea post-Molinari. It’s fascinating to see how many of the standard moves in market anarchist theory today are already in evidence in Tandy.

More chapters to follow! In the meantime, enjoy.

One More Atlas Post

Here are Pitt and Jolie looking their most Randian:

Who Is Brad Pitt?

Follow-up to yesterday’s post: On second look at the TOC report, I notice it says: “The film will be based on a script of the first part of the novel .... It is anticipated ‘Atlas’ will be a multi-part film.”

That’s good news too – it would be nice to see Atlas get the Lord of the Rings treatment. But it does raise a question about Pitt’s alleged casting as Galt in this first film. Galt doesn’t appear in person until the final third of the book; so if Pitt is in the first film, either he’s playing someone other than Galt (Rearden, perhaps?), or else, more likely, they’re changing the story. Oh well.

Dagny Taggart, Tomb Raider; or, Tyler Durden Shrugged

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The Atlas Shrugged film project, which has been languishing in development hell for, like, ever, seems to be making progress toward actuality once again, this time under the auspices of Lionsgate. Moreover, the Objectivist Center reports that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are “interested in parts in the film.” Contact Music insists, less cautiously, that the movie will star Jolie and Pitt as Dagny Taggart and John Galt respectively.

I’m inclined to trust the more cautious over the less cautious report, but this casting would certainly be very good news. Not because Jolie and Pitt are ideal to play the roles – they’re not (though on the other hand I can certainly envision Hollywood making much worse choices) – but because their names attached to the picture would bring investor dollars now and viewers later. Keeping my fingers crossed ....

Anarchy in Prague

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Tomorrow I leave for the Prague Conference on Political Economy. This won’t be the farthest east I’ve gone in Europe, since Vietri sul Mare, on the west coast of Italy just south of Naples, is actually further east. (One of those things you don’t believe until you look at a map – like the fact that Reno, Nevada, is west of Los Angeles.) But it’ll be the farthest inland I’ve been in Europe, as well as my first visit to a former communist country.

The topic of my presentation is “Rule-following, Praxeology, and Anarchy.” Here’s an abstract:

The aim of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “rule-following paradox” is to diagnose a seductive error that Wittgenstein sees as underlying a variety of different philosophical mistakes: the implicit assumption of the need for and/or possibility of a self-applying rule. A further implication of Wittgenstein’s diagnosis is that human action is not reducible either to purely mentalistic or to purely behavioural phenomena.

If, as I shall argue, Wittgenstein’s analysis is correct, then, I shall further argue, the rule-following paradox has important implications for two aspects of Austrian theory.

First, Wittgenstein’s argument sheds light on the relation between economic theory and economic history – i.e., between the aprioristic method of praxeology and the interpretive method of thymology, as Ludwig von Mises uses those terms in Theory and History. In particular, it shows that, just as thymological interpretation involves praxeological categories, so the possession of praxeological categories involves thymological experience – thus enabling a reconciliation of the superficially opposed insights of Mises’ Kantian approach, Murray Rothbard’s Aristotelean approach, and Don Lavoie’s hermeneutical approach to Austrian methodology.

Second, Wittgenstein’s argument provides a way of defending the stateless legal order advocated by Rothbard, Lavoie, and others. Critics of free-market anarchism often charge that a stateless society lacks, yet needs, a “final arbiter” or “ultimate authority” to resolve conflicts; but what such critics mean by a “final arbiter” turns out to be yet another version of the “self-applying rule” that Wittgenstein has shown is neither needed nor possible.

George Mason’s Feet of Clay

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

We should never let our admiration for a thinker’s virtues blind us to his flaws (or, of course, vice versa). Commenting on past U.S presidents, I recently wrote:

[I]t often seems like the better they are, the worse they are; i.e., when you look at the Presidents who did the most libertarian things, they always seem to be trying their damnedest to cancel out the merits of their pro-liberty achievements by turning around and doing the most horrifically anti-liberty things they can think of. (Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln all come to mind.)

The Red Flag of Rothbard

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

My Rothbard Memorial Lecture is now available in text, audio, and video formats. In it I try to delineate Rothbard’s legacy for the libertarian left, including a discussion of the relation between free-market anarchism and participatory democracy.

I should add a thank you to Wally Conger, Brad Spangler, and Sheldon Richman for their very generous comments (which I am too vain not to link to).

JLS 20.1: What Lies Within?
Mutualist Admiration Society, or Mutualist Assured Destruction?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m back from Vegas, but a bit under the weather; I’ll blog about the conference and other matters later. But while I was away, the latest issue (20.1) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies came out, and as is my wont I’m writing a brief plug.

Kevin Carson (check out his website and blog) is one of the most interesting thinkers on the contemporary libertarian left, and his book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy is a fascinating read. While I’m not convinced by two of Carson’s major theses – the impermissibility of absentee landownership and the superiority of (a subjectivised version of) the labour theory of value – his case for them is subtle and sophisticated, and deserves grappling with. Moreover, the book is filled with extremely valuable material – including a trenchant analysis of what Carson calls “vulgar libertarianism,” meaning the error of sliding from a defense of genuine free markets to a defense of present-day neomercantilist corporatism – that one can largely appreciate whether or not one buys into the two aforementioned theses.

Anyway, I figure Carson’s claims deserve a hearing to whatever extent they are right, and deserve a rebuttal to whatever extent they are wrong; accordingly, this symposium issue of the JLS is devoted to examining Carson’s work from an Austrian perspective (or, as it turns out, several Austrian perspectives); it includes critiques by Bob Murphy, Walter Block, George Reisman, and myself, and a reply by Carson. You can read my summary of the contents here; and the articles themselves are already online here.

For some of the discussion this issue is already generating, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.

Read back issues online here.

Subscribe here.

Happiness in Las Vegas

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Tomorrow I’m off to Las Vegas for the (unluckily monikered) APEE, where I’ll be contributing to a panel on “Happiness: Philosophical and Economic Perspectives.” (Essentially I’ll be trying to defend an Aristotelean conception of happiness on praxeological grounds.) Take a look at the participant list and you’ll see why it would be a bad thing for the libertarian movement if Vegas got nuked over the weekend.

I have more to say about the French situation, but it’ll have to wait until I get back.

In the meantime, check out Charles’ recent rebuttal of a frequent argument against worker-run industry, as well as an interesting discussion of urban vs. agrarian virtues in the comments section of his recent post on immigration.

Subversion from the Sea

I’m continuing to work my way through some of the lesser-known works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and thought I would comment on the two latest:

• Verne’s 1878 novel A Captain at Fifteen (translated as the two volumes Dick Sands: A Captain at Fifteen and Dick Sands: The Dark Continent – with neither volume, incidentally, offering any clue from the publisher that it is only one half of a longer story) is a straight adventure tale with no science fiction elements – unless a dog that can recognise its master’s written initials counts as a science-fiction element. The plot turns on an accident that deprives a ship of its captain and regular crew, leaving the ship in the hands of an amateur crew every member of which is either black, female, or underage. Of the only two adult white males left on board, one is a scatter-brained entomologist (Verne’s eccentric scientist characters are sometimes fonts of useful information and morale-boosting enthusiasm, but not this one – he’s as helpless as a child, utterly self-absorbed, and completely useless), while the other is a vicious scoundrel who seeks to betray the ship into the hands of slavers.
  
  Verne’s decision to place his fictional ship in the hands of characters from ordinarily marginalised categories is an interesting one, as is the result: the new crew quickly masters its shipboard tasks, learning intelligently and cooperating easily. All would be well in this seaborne utopia of diversity were it not for the aforementioned villain, who uses trickery to divert the ship to slaver territory – and much of the ensuing action doubles as an angry indictment of the slave trade, of which Verne writes:
  
  

  The “slave-trade” is an expression that ought never to have found its way into any human language. After being long practiced at a large profit by such European nations as had possessions beyond the seas, this abominable traffic has now for many years been ostensibly forbidden; yet even in the enlightenment of this nineteenth century, it is still carried on, especially in Central Africa, inasmuch as there are several states, professedly Christian, whose signatures have never been affixed to the deed of abolition.

  Nor is this one of those anti-slavery novels where all the heroics and initiative are reserved for the white characters. I suspect that this book influenced Hergé’s Tintin stories; but as much as I love those stories, I have to say that if this were a Tintin adventure, the plucky white teenager would be ingeniously fighting the slavers while the black slaves themselves, good-hearted but simple-minded, remained locked up in the hold, passively awaiting rescue at the hands of the kindly massa. Not so here.
  
  A Captain at Fifteen is thus surprisingly enlightened in its portrayal of race, and is useful for ridding one’s mental palate of the taste of Verne’s tiresome anti-Semitism in Hector Servadac and The Pearl of Lima.



• Wells’ 1902 novel The Sea Lady isn’t science fiction either – it’s pure, whimsical fantasy about a mermaid who comes ashore one day at a beach resort on the coast of England and invades the life of a very respectable British family, who try to steer her toward acceptable positions in politics and religion, and strenuously endeavour to ignore, cover up, and avoid all mention of the fact that she has a tail – as she subtly begins to disrupt and overturn their carefully crafted lives.
  
  The mermaid’s tail stands, of course, for sexuality, the subconscious, repressed longings, and everything that proper Victorians are expected to stifle; and the situation allows Wells to satirise turn-of-the-century British society quite amusingly. (All the human characters talk by maddening indirection, like people in a Henry James novel.) But Wells also offers some beautifully haunting and thought-provoking passages. For example, here is the mermaid’s indictment of human society:
  
  

  “But you are so limited, so tied! The little time you have, you use so poorly! You begin and you end and all the time between it is as if you were enchanted, you are afraid to do this that would be delightful to do, you must do that though you know all the time it is stupid and disagreeable. Just think of all the things – even the little things – you mustn’t do. Up there on the Leas in this hot weather all the people are sitting in stuffy ugly clothes – ever so much too much clothes – hot tight boots, you know, when they have the most lovely pink feet ... and they are all with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts of preposterous things. Why are they bound? Why are they letting life slip by them? Just as though they wouldn’t all of them presently be dead! Suppose you were to go up there in a bathing-dress and a white cotton hat –”
  
  “It wouldn’t be proper!” cried Melville. …
  
  “But anyone may see you like that on the beach!”
  
  “That’s different.”
  
  “It isn’t different. You dream it’s different. And in just the same way you dream all the other things are proper or improper or good or bad to do. ... Your life, I tell you, is a dream – a dream, and you can’t wake out of it –”
  
  “And if so, why do you tell me?” ...
  
  He heard the rustle of her movement as she bent towards him.
  
  She came warmly close to him. She spoke in gently confidential undertones, as one who imparts a secret that is not to be too lightly given. “Because,” she said, “there are better dreams.”
  
  For a moment it seemed to Melville that he had been addressed by something quite other than the pleasant lady in the bath-chair before him. ...
  
  “What dreams?” rebelled Melville. “What do you mean? What are you? What do you mean by coming into this life – you who pretend to be a woman – and whispering, whispering ... to us who are in it, to us who have no escape?”
  
  “But there is an escape,” said the Sea Lady.

  What, though, is the nature of this “escape” that the mermaid offers? Wells calls it “Something we never find in life. ... Something we are always seeking. ... something that tears at the very fabric of human life.” But is such escape a real option for finite beings like us? Is it a genuinely freer existence – or only death: “No adventure, no incident, but a going out from all that this life has to offer”?
  
  Here’s one of the human characters, stating the case (rather half-heartedly) against the “escape” offered by the mermaid:
  
  

  Why should it be finer to see beauty where it is fatal to us to see it? Why? Unless we are to believe there is no reason in things, why should this – impossibility be beautiful to anyone, anyhow? ... This dream has taken me wonderfully. And I must renounce it. After all, it is not so much – to renounce a dream. It’s no more than deciding to live. There are big things in the world for men to do. ... I’ve no doubt about my choice. I’m going to fall in – with the species; I’m going to take my place in the ranks in that battle for the future which is the meaning of life. ... This lax dalliance with dreams and desires must end. I will make a time-table for my hours and a rule for my life, I will entangle my honour in controversies, I will give myself to Service, as a man should do. Clean-handed work, struggle and performance. ... I am a man and must go a man’s way. There is Desire, the light and guide of the world, a beacon on a headland blazing out. Let it burn! ... I’ve got to live a man and die a man and carry the burthen of my class and time. ... Here, with the flame burning I renounce it. ... That is life for all of us. We have desires, only to deny them, senses that we all must starve. We can live only as a part of ourselves. Why should I be exempt?

  Wells could easily have portrayed his mermaid either as clearly a liberating force, shattering stale conventionality, or else as clearly a seductively demonic force, subverting and corrupting with malicious intent. But he doesn’t take either of those easy ways out. Perhaps echoing Freudians’ ambivalence about the benefits and hazards of repression, Wells offers some evidence for each interpretation and leaves the final verdict ambiguous – and the reader vaguely longing.

Another Loony Left-Libertarian Screed from Roderick

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

What the current protests in France are about, at least inter alia, is the French government’s proposal to allow employers to fire their workers – a right they’re currently not allowed.

It might seem clear which side a libertarian has to be on in this dispute: of course libertarians favour freedom of association, which includes the freedom of either party to exit an employment contract. Thus the new proposal apparently represents a move in the direction of a free market: the government is right, and the protestors are wrong.

But things aren’t quite so simple.

Of course in a free market there would be no legal restrictions (except those contractually agreed to) on an employer’s right to fire an employee. But from the fact that there would be no X in a free society, it doesn’t follow that absolutely any situation will be moved in the direction of freedom simply by removing X. (Compare: from the fact that a healthy person wouldn’t have a pacemaker, it doesn’t follow that the health of anyone who has a pacemaker would be improved by its removal.)

As I recently wrote elsewhere:

Whether something counts as a reduction of restrictions on liberty depends on the context. Remember when Reagan “deregulated” the Savings & Loans – such deregulation could be a good thing under many circumstances, but given that he didn’t remove federal deposit insurance, “deregulation” amounted in that context to an increase of aggression against the taxpayers, licensing the S&Ls to takes greater risks with taxpayers’ money.

So in this case: when government passes laws giving group A unjust privileges over group B, and then passes another law giving B some protection against A, then repealing the second law without repealing the first amounts to increasing A’s unjust privilege over B. Of course a free society would have neither the first nor the second law, but repealing them in the wrong order can actually decrease rather than increase liberty.

[S]ince the state’s intervention, directly or indirectly, has been in the interests of the plutocracy, it matters a great deal which functions of the state should be axed first. The first to go should be those forms of intervention in the market that subsidize economic centralization and the concentration of wealth, reduce the bargaining power of labor, and ensure monopoly returns to the owners of land and capital. The last to go should be those government functions that make the system of class exploitation marginally bearable for labor. In the words of Thomas Knapp of the Democratic Freedom Caucus, that means cutting welfare from the top down, and taxes from the bottom up.

How Victor Yarros Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State

[cross-posted at