BUY MY BOOK OR ELSE!  Roderick T. Long

Archives: July 2006

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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.

Posted July 29th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#12
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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.

Posted July 21st, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#11
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Stop Me Before I Link Again!

What? Another post of nothing but links?

Yeah. You got a problem with that?


Posted July 18th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#10
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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?


Does it matter? Do his right to life, and his claim on our compassion, depend on which answer is correct?

In 1851, Herbert Spencer wrote:

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.
This insight instantly disposes of the sophistries of those who claim that a person’s rights to travel freely, to contact a lawyer, or not to be tortured, depend on his or her possession of American citizenship.

It also casts a stern judgment on the practice of dividing the victims of collateral damage into “worthy” and “unworthy” – into those who do, and those who do not, deserve expressions of outrage on their behalf, depending on which side of some blood-soaked political boundary they fall.

Posted July 17th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#09
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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.

Posted July 16th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#08
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Bastille Day Bulletin, Part Deux

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


Posted July 15th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#07
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Bastille Day Bulletin

More miscellaneous musings:


Posted July 14th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#06
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Soccer Logic, Time Thieves, and Anarchy

Some miscellaneous musings:


Posted July 13th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#05
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Subversive Summer Reading

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

Oh, by the way, you can now compare the new LP platform with the previous one. The changes aren’t quite as disastrous as some early reports indicated, but it’s still a long step down in my book.

Posted July 12th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#04
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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.

Posted July 11th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#03
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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.
Or in Garrison’s words: “Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.” (See also Rothbard here and Anthony Gregory here.)

Well, does it matter? If I regarded having a libertarian political party as the essential core of libertarian strategy, I would regard the Portland debacle as a major disaster. If instead I agreed with the Konkinites and Voluntaryists that political parties have no place in libertarian strategy, I would shrug my shoulders and say “what do you expect? good riddance.” But (for reasons I explain toward the end of my recent anarchism lecture) I’m actually somewhere in between: I think libertarian strategy should focus primarily on education and building alternative institutions, but I think a political party has a significant albeit secondary role to play in the process. (I guess that makes me a “Moderate Agorist” – a rara avis indeed?) So from my point of view, the reformist takeover of the LP Convention, while it isn’t the end of the world, is still an evil worth fighting.

The success of the reformists isn’t inevitable. They did a lot of hard work to push their victory through. We who prefer a consistent defense of liberty need to do a lot of hard work to roll that victory back.

The strategic question is, should reformism be fought from within the Party – or from without, by starting a new and more consistent party? At this point it’s probably too soon to say. Accordingly, I favour exploring both strategies in parallel. Specifically, I currently support and recommend both the Grassroots Libertarian Caucus and the Boston Tea Party. (About the latter see here.)

As always, Fight the Power.

Posted July 7th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#02
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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.



In other news, recordings of my Mises seminar are now all online.

Also, don’t miss two excellent recent posts about the relation between poverty and statism by Sheldon Richman and Ben Kilpatrick.

Have a surly and rebellious Fourth!!

Posted July 3rd, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm#01
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