Year: 2014

Liberalism Unrelinquished: Some Tactical Thoughts

Warren Gibson Current Events, History, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , ,

Today is #LiberalismDay. My friend Dan Klein of George Mason University along with his colleague Kevin Frei have launched a project called “Liberalism Unrelinquished.” An impressive list of economists and others have signed their petition which declares that they “affirm the original arc of liberalism, and the intention not to relinquish the term liberal to the trends, semantic and institutional, toward the governmentalization of social affairs.”

Other bloggers will presumably rehearse the tale of how that storied term lost its original meaning, at least in the U.S., as it has been appropriated, since at least the 1930’s, by statists.  (Example: George Leef’s fine piece). I just offer a few thoughts on some tactics that may be appropriate to this battle.

  • We must stop using the word liberal to denote present-day statists. This should be easy since they themselves have largely abandoned the term in favor of “progressives.” (Note that modern progressives hate progress of the material sort more than anything. That’s an issue for another time.) I have nothing better than “progressives” to denote these folks except perhaps a qualified “so-called progressives.” I hope “governmentalists” doesn’t get started. That would be too big a mouthful.
  • Speaking of which, there must be a better term than “governmentalization,” another mouthful. Perhaps just “government takeover” which is more forceful and easier to say.
  • “Liberalism unrelinquished” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either. How about “liberalism restored?”
  • Our task will often be easier if we say “classical liberal” rather than just liberal.
  • The term libertarian has entered the mainstream of U.S. politics. We should take advantage of this progress. We can use phrases like “the libertarian position, or as I like to call it, the classical liberal position …”
  • We must understand the price we pay when we call ourselves or our positions “liberal” or “classical liberal.” The price consists in the time and energy required to make clear to our audience what we mean when we use the term. Whether the price is worth paying depends on circumstances.
  • In academic writing, speaking, or debating there is usually sufficient time to preface our arguments by explanations. Attention spans are long enough that the price paid for explaining why we say “liberal” will not be significant.
  • The last place to take this fight would be political campaigns or debates. Attention spans are minute, audiences are unsophisticated, and we will just confuse people by using the term in its classical meaning prematurely. We can, however, try to disavow the tired old “liberal-conservative” spectrum that is currently entrenched in the media. “I’m aTime permitting, we could say classical liberal, and that means I agree with conservatives on some issues and with progressives on others. All my positions are grounded in the notion of liberty.”
  • In letters to the editor where every word counts we can say “libertarian (or classical liberal)” or the other way around.

I congratulate Dan and Kevin on the response they’ve gotten so far and I hope the momentum continues.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. As Bad As ObamaCare Is, Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act Was Worse
  2. From our own Dr Shikida in the Cato Journal: “Why Some States Fail: The Role of Culture” [pdf]
  3. Stop Blaming Professors: Study finds students themselves, not professors, lead some to become more radical in college
  4. The World Cup and “soccer” in general: Nationalism versus internationalism
  5. The agony of a Left-wing gun lover
  6. History happens all the time

Iraq: Four Comments

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , ,

Another debacle with Pres. Obama snoozing at the helm.

Four comments about the debacle in Iraq:

  1. What the US built there did not pass any test except that the the Kurdish north is still peaceful and prosperous. Why this costly state- building endeavor failed is worth thinking about.
  2. There is no reason to treat the borders of Iraq as sacred. Iraq, the state, was cobbled together distractedly by the Brits on the ruins of the Turkish empire. Its dismemberment is long overdue even if it’s on sectarian lines.
  3. The existence of a jihadist, Islamist state in the center of the Mideast is not the worse possible outcome from an American standpoint. After all, in Afghanistan, our armed forces aided by the Brits toppled an Islamist government in 2001 in three months flat. A country, a nation-state makes a good target for conventional forces.
  4. If the US does not intervene militarily on the side of the more or less legitimate government of Maliki, Iran will (and the US will have again looked like a paper tiger inviting attack).

Another Liberty Canon

Barry Stocker Philosophy , , , , , , , ,

For my first post, I’ll pick up on the bio under ‘About the Notewriters’ and start to address the issue of what kind of texts I find most valuable with regard to thinking about liberty, though there are other reasons for selecting those texts, in particular I favour the kind of texts which are deeply embedded in literature, culture, and history. It is not an either/or situation with regard to whether one prefers the alternative canon here or more standard canons in introductions to liberty, and the like, but I think there are good reasons for paying more attention to the suggested texts, which apply to individual toms of  engagement, and more institutional ways in which groups promote liberty.

My own personal ‘canon’, apart from my favourites among the more obvious liberty oriented thinkers,  includes Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),  Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), and Michel Foucault (1926-1984).  If anyone is disturbed by the inclusion of any of these figures, I hope they will be less so by the end of the series of posts I am now starting on these figures.

I suppose that Montaigne is the least controversial inclusion, but nevertheless I have not seen a great deal of liberty oriented writing devoted to him. The word ‘canon’ is itself necessary when talking about what texts and writers count the most, but let us beware of any idea that there is a self-evident canon, rather than a variable canon, or canons, constructed from the shifting aggregations and interactions of the preferences of many individuals concerned with liberty.

Let us start at the beginning of the list in this post with Machiavelli, traditionally condemned to the extent of being identified with  the devil, and often seen as the arch-apologist for the cynical use and abuse of power, so as to promote state authority without regard to individual rights. A more favourable variation on this is to see the exposure of cynicism in politics as a justification for an anti-political streak of liberty oriented political thought.

On this last point, the anti-political position is really the opposite of the truth about Machiavelli, since he was very rooted in an antique republicanism for which human flourishing includes politically active citizenship, or at least living in a community where many are pursuing their rights through politics. Machiavelli was very attached in particular to the ancient Roman Republic, which he discusses in some detail in The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Livy, usually just known as The Discourses. 

Livy was the Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus,  living at the beginning of the period in which one man rule by Emperors had taken over from shared republican government. His massive History of Rome only survives in part, including those books discussed by Machiavelli, which cover the foundation of Rome, the rule of the early kings, the overthrow on monarchy, and the early republic, including its struggles between aristocratic and democratic political forces.

In his commentary, Machiavelli certainly has ‘Machiavellian’  moments in which he welcomes ruthless use of force or manipulation of religious symbols for state purposes. However, these moments are very much concerned with state foundation, changes in political regime particularly to a more liberty based regime, and wars. The reading of ‘auspices’ (pagan interpretation of avian  behaviour and the innards of sacrificed birds) is manipulated only when necessary to rouse soldiers in battle.

War is a deeply unpleasant and destructive business and we should all hope we  are moving to a world without it, but we do not live in a world free of bad governments, or proto-governments, willing to use force to extinguish liberty in other states as well as within their own. Machiavelli certainly did not and nether did Livy.  The use of some psychological manipulation to raise military morale in the heat of battle is not the last word in tyranny.  The foundation of states, including those most inclined to liberty, law and peace, and the overthrow of tyrannical regimes has largely happened by force.  This certainly applies to the foundation of the United States.

Machiavelli’s view of republics is that they are strongest, and most resistant to the return of tyranny, where the citizen body are motivated to defend their rights in the public political sphere, and that an unruly rambunctious democracy is the antidote to feudal oligarchy as well as one person tyranny.  This is surely a powerful argument against anti-politics, which risks leaving liberty advocates unable to participate in the political process in order to resist tyranny.  We can certainly find that argument in the conventional heroes of thought about liberty like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Locke. Despite his willingness to excuse extremes of force and deception in certain situations of  necessity for survival, Machiavelli is overall and overwhelmingly an advocate of the rule of law, and recommends republican government, partly on the basis that it is more favourable to the universal enforcement of law than the more personalised and arbitrary attitude to law arising from monarchy.

Sometime Machiavelli’s Discourses are divided from his most famous work, The Prince on the grounds that the latter text just is a cynical manifesto to obtain favour from the Medici rulers of Florence. However, careful reading will show many ways in which Machiavelli argues for the limitation of the power of a prince, and of the state in general. Again law is regarded with the utmost favour and respect, so that, for example, France is praised at least a couple of times for the many laws and legal institutions built up during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, in implicit contrast with Italian princely states.

Again force and deception are advocated where necessary, but only where necessary and in strictly limited terms. It is said that the prince should use  force like a lion and deception like a fox, and that to be feared is better to be loved. However, the force, deception,  and ‘fear’ is oriented towards the stabilisation of institutions of law, followed by the  regular  enforcement of laws, and Machiavelli places limits on how far the force, deception, and fear can go . The unloved prince is unloved, because he does not attempt to bribe the people with money raised through taxes on them, and does not bankrupt the state with unfunded ‘generosity’.  We can surely all agree that liberty would be better preserved if contemporary governments followed such maxims.

Machiavelli recommends that a prince should avoid contempt through showing respect for the property of subjects and the honour of women, that is the prince should not use state power to seize property, or sexually abuse women. In general the prince should be mostly concerned with the art of war, which is really a way of trying to nudge princes into accepting the de facto republics that  will arise if monarchs if they limit their powers and activities to defence of national sovereignty.

In his views on the proper limits of state power and the consequences of over extension, Machiavelli is a forerunner of public choice theory, one of the major aspects of recent liberty oriented social science, and like James Buchanan he had a strong belief in democracy, where it is concerned with laws that apply equally to all, and is to opposed the extension of state activity beyond strictly defined public goods.

I would say that Machiavelli is a great lover of liberty and though there is an increasing amount of good scholarship and commentary on his thought, the lingering associations around his name still create problems in the proper appreciation of his thought. There is a streak in the liberty community of suspicion of politics and of suspicion of  any state action even in emergency situations, outside the strictest legal supervision. There are some good impulses behind those suspicions, which I welcome, but taken to the extreme they would have prevented the formation of the United States or the Swiss Confederation, the Glorious Revolution in Britain, or any of the historical republics which explored the possibilities of liberty. Leaving aside such purism, I don’t see anything disturbing in Machiavelli beyond a taste for presenting brutal realities for what they are.  Even the most pure and fastidious of min-archists, and individualist anarchists, should at least find some value in Machiavelli’s analyses and his impulses towards liberty under law.

Update from Austin, and a Warm Welcome too

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Philosophy , , , , ,

I’m currently in the City of Austin, the capital of the great state of Texas. I’ll be here for the quite some time, so if you can visualize me in a cowboy hat instead of on a beach in California, that’d be great. Geographer Joel Kotkin has a good piece on Austin here. Among the gems:

Most of the strongest local economies combine the positive characteristics associated with blue states — educated people, tech-oriented industries, racial diversity — with largely red, pro-business administrations. This is epitomized by our top-ranked metro area, Austin, Texas, which has enjoyed double-digit growth in GDP, jobs, population and birthrate since 2007. The Texas capital has a very strong hipster reputation, attracting many of the same people who might otherwise end up in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, but it also boasts the low taxes, light regulation and reasonable housing prices that keep migrants there well past their 30s.

If that ain’t libertarian then I don’t know what is. I take advice on where to go for food and girls, too.

We’ve got a new blogger joining the team, too. I’m pleased to introduce you to Dr Barry Stocker. From his bio page:

Barry Stocker (personal website) is a British philosopher based in Istanbul, working at Istanbul Technical University. His academic interests cover political philosophy. Publications in this field include the monograph Kierkegaard on Politics (2014) and the co-edited volume Nietzsche as Political Philosopher (2014).  He is currently working on Michel Foucault and liberty. As these projects indicate, he likes to work on issue of liberty, ethics, individualism, and subjectivity, in authors a bit outside the conventional canon of liberty oriented thinkers, but does also work on more familiar names in this field, such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.

Please be sure to welcome Dr Stocker to the blog with you usual cunning wit and boorish criticisms in the ‘comments’ threads. I think Dr Stocker’s current location, his origins, and his specialized body of knowledge is going to make this project tremendously more interesting. Thanks for taking the plunge Dr Stocker!

Hayekian Environmental Policy

Fred Foldvary Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

Just as decentralized knowledge implies economic non-intervention, so too it implies environmental non-intervention.

One of the contributions to economics made by the Austrian-school economist Friedrich Hayek is the theory of scattered knowledge. In his famous article, “The use of knowledge in society,” Hayek analyzed how the knowledge needed for economic activity by consumers, producers, legislators, and bureaucrats is dispersed, tacit, and ever-changing. Sellers of goods can conduct surveys to find out what people want, but such data collection reveals only a small fraction of the subjective desires of buyers. The knowledge of how to produce goods is decentralized among the firms, each of which has its own local knowledge of the costs and the demand for its goods.

Much of the knowledge about goods is tacit, not written down. A label can list the ingredients, but it will not tell the buyer about how good it will taste, and does not reveal the full story about the nutritional benefits and harmful effects. A government bureaucrat cannot know all the details about the way a company handles its goods. The biggest and fastest computers cannot be programmed to know everything the economy is doing. The supplies and demands for goods are dynamic, always changing, like the weather, so that even when knowledge is gathered and analyzed, it soon becomes obsolete.

The Hayekian knowledge problem is one reason the Austrian school of economic thought concludes that only a truly free market can effectively apply the relevant knowledge. Government officials who try industrial policy, the promotion of some goods at the expense of others, often fail. For examples, subsidies to energy from the wind end up wasting resources, as a uniform policy cannot be applied to suit local conditions, and the full effects (such as windmills killing birds) are not known in advance, resulting in bad unintended consequences.

The natural environment, everything apart from human action, is too complex for human beings to fully understand it. As with economic knowledge, the data needed to understand human effects on the environment is both global and local. The knowledge of environmental conditions is tacit, and changing. The ecologies of the earth, like the economies, have interconnected elements with feedback loops. Kill the mountain lions, and the deer multiply, eat up the vegetation, and then the rains wash away the soils.

The Hayekian perspective on global climate change as well as local impacts is to admit that we don’t know the full effects of human activity, but we do know that interference with long-established interconnections can be deadly. The policy implication is that we should minimize unnecessary human interference with the natural environment. Any human presence displaces the natural presence, as a farm replaces meadows and forests. But it is excessive to burn down large areas of rain forests in order to have a few years of crops until the soil nutrients are depleted.

The optimal application of the knowledge issue is to understand that we can apply some general knowledge but not specific knowledge. For example, we know that emissions from power plants, factories, and vehicles have bad effects. Costs are ultimately subjective, but some costs, such as lost income and resources, can be quantified. We cannot precisely measure the social cost of pollution, but by comparing places with various amounts of pollution, and the various rates of diseases in those places, we can obtain some estimates of the ill effects. Policy can therefore require a payment for emissions that invade others’ property. To do nothing is to declare a price of zero, which is less accurate than the positive price obtained by statistical means.

The Hayekian policy for emissions is therefore a payment for the estimated damage. A pollution charge requires less knowledge than detailed regulations such as engine requirements, gasoline additives, and smog tests. The emissions charge would not be based on uncertain climate changes, but on the proposition that human interventions into the atmosphere and oceans could be catastrophic. The probabilities are uncertain, but what we do know is that a small probability times a huge cost equals a substantial present value. Because the earth’s environment is a balance of water and air temperatures, cycles of carbon emissions and absorptions, feedback loops, and substances such as the ozone layer, the probability that human interventions are harmful is much greater than the chance that they are beneficial. The mutual relationship of wolves, deer, and vegetation imply that killing off either the wolves or the deer will have bad effects.

The knowledge problem implies that policy has to confront the environmental issue rather than ignore it, because human activity is inherently environmentally interventionist. In some cases, intervention can help the environment, such as with artificial coral reefs. But large interventions such as deliberately dumping iron compounds into the ocean should be avoided.

The Austrian school of economic thought is critical of central planning due to its absence of economic calculation via market prices, and due to the knowledge problem. But the absence of pollution charges itself implies mispricing and the presumption that we know nothing about the effects of emissions. Given today’s highly regulated economy, the implication of Hayek’s thought on knowledge is to replace regulations and emissions trading schemes with the requirement to pay the estimated social costs. Firms (and their customers) can then either pay that cost or else avoid that cost by polluting less. To be most effective, pollution charges would need to be applied globally.

Some free-market economists respond to the pollution issue by stating that property rights are sufficient to solve the problem. But any negotiation or lawsuit to compensate others for negative external effects necessarily requires an objective estimate of the damages. A complete prohibition of an external effect, whether of emissions or noise or visual effects, imposes a cost on the emitter. Tort law, with transferable lawsuits, as well as arbitration and mediation, could replace governmentally enacted pollution levies when the victims can be identified, but there is no avoiding some objective estimate of costs. And where torts are not effective, an international agreement on pollution charges would be warranted.

Karl Marx versus Thomas Piketty

Brandon Christensen Economics, History, Philosophy , , , , , ,

Both [Marx and Piketty] protest economic disparities, but move in opposite directions. Piketty advances into the domain of salaries, income and wealth; he wants to temper these extremes and give us—to alter the slogan of the ill-fated Prague Spring of 1968—capitalism with a human face. Marx advances into the domain of commodities, work, and alienation; he wants to undo these relations and give us a transformed society.

This is from UCLA historian Russell Jacoby in the New Republic. The rest of the article is not that great, to be honest (I’ll bet you ten bucks that Jacoby – whom I never took during my time in Westwood – is an old man; I can safely assume this because of the praise he lavishes upon Karl Marx at the expense of Piketty and other economists), but I thought this excerpt was a good opportunity to enhance my argument that Murray Rothbard was a great Cold War scholar and a terrible role model for the world we live in today.

Rothbard’s argument – exemplified by this excerpt that Adam provided in the ‘comments’ threads a while back – devastated the Marxist notions of the world held in the 1960s and 1970s, but Rothbard’s argument simply does not grapple with Piketty’s. It’s a whole new ball game, and one that newer scholars who have built upon Rothbard’s foundations are now grappling with. It does us no good to continue parroting a line of reasoning that has long since outlived its usefulness.

How to value international law as a classical liberal

Edwin van de Haar Liberty , , , , ,

I live in the ‘City of International Peace and Justice’ according to the city marketing of the municipality of The Hague. There is some truth in it, as the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and temporary courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia are all located within the city limits. Yet the supposed relation between peace and justice is of course non-sensical. These international legal institutions may sometimes foster individual and sometimes even county-level justice, yet they have nothing to do with peace. History shows that punishing one war criminal does not prevent others to commit crimes against humanity, and settling a border dispute between two countries does not external effects elsewhere.

This is no surprise to classical liberals, as it confirms to their view on human nature, where emotions ultimately master rationality. This ensures international conflict and war are and will always be a feature in world politics. The most relevant question in international relations is not ‘how can we get rid of international violence and create a peaceful world’, but ‘how can we deal with the inevitable conflict that will be present?’. Perpetual peace is not attainable, perpetual war the norm, although luckily not of all people against all, all of the time. The value of international law is that it is one of the instruments that may channel or once in a while even prevent international conflict.

From a classical liberal perspective, international law is an expression of the common norms in the society of states, although without ultimate arbiter. Like law in domestic politics, international law must be restricted to the protection of the individual natural rights. And as in domestic politics, this has not been the case. International law has also exploded, while in many instances international law takes precedence in domestic legal order, which makes it even more important to limit its expansion.

For example, already Mises and Hayek objected to the explosion of positive international law, including the related establishment of international governmental organizations that occurred from the late nineteenth century onward. For classical liberals most international organizations, often created by governments of non-liberal persuasion, are attempts at constructivism at the international level. Mises and Hayek were also among the first to warn against the extended number of tasks of the League of Nations and both rejected the way the United Nations was set up. Hayek in particular warned against the inclusion of social and economic rights in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and was very critical of the International Labor Organization.

Consequently, classical liberals should favor the abolition of international governmental organizations with tasks that extend beyond the principles of the limited state, spontaneous order, and the protection of individual natural rights. This is not a call for isolationism as there is also common sense in some international state cooperation and sometimes even a need for an international bureaucracy. I propose as a rule of thumb: if there is no need for state interference domestically, there is no need for international state action either. The exceptions are some tasks that follow specifically from international circumstances. Without going into details, this principle may, for example, lead to classical liberal support for aforementioned International Criminal Court and the special UN war tribunals, as the best way to punish people who infringed natural rights. But it may also call for the abolition of organizations that interfere with free markets and capitalism, such as the World Bank, the ILO, and the International Monetary Fund.

In short: some international law is beneficial, but most constitutes unwanted international constructivism.

The state alone cannot be blamed for “sham Arab democracy”

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , ,

Rami Khouri has a great piece about the effects that The State has on Arab democracy in the Beirut-based the Daily Star. Khouri argues that states in the Arab world are designed for a top-down approach to governance whereas the traditional legal and political institutions of the Arab world are bottom-up (“indigenous” as well as “inclusive”) creations. The inability of Arab states to properly funnel this tension is, Khouri argues, responsible for the lack of democracy in the Arab world. Unfortunately Khouri’s piece fails to explore two complementary strands of thought.

1. The bottom-up approach to democratic governance is the only way that democracy can actually be democratic, and it took a long time to get to this point in the parts of the world that actually have democracy.

The West was able to reach this bottom-up democracy by recognizing that democracy is not an end, but rather a byproduct of a legal framework that protects individual rights and especially the property rights of individuals. Revolutionaries in Western Europe did not demand free and fair elections; they demanded liberty. Reformers in the Arab world (including Khouri) seem to treat democracy as if it were an achievable goal without having to liberalize Arab economies (domestically as well as internationally) first. Democracy is a byproduct of institutions that protect individual rights, not a catalyst that will enable states to include these rights into a post-election legal framework.

2. Like the state itself, IGOs such as the United Nations bear responsibility for the lack of democracy in the Arab world. IGOs legitimize the state as it is in the Arab world. In order to understand this argument it is useful to reach back into history a century ago and reacquaint yourself with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Sykes-Picot agreement between Great Britain and France (and, initially, czarist Russia). You can read up on the developments of these two events, but for the purpose here it is important to remember that Paris and London drew up borders that more or less followed the pattern of Istanbul, and that these borders eventually became sacrosanct internationally upon the UN’s recognition of Arab states’ sovereignty.

By recognizing the legitimacy of arbitrary states and the sanctity of their borders, the UN contributes directly to the sham elections and bloodshed that have occurred as the rival, bottom-up factions Khouri identifies seek power through gaining control of the capitals of these states.

Because these states are legitimized by the UN, the rival factions can simply seize control of a capital and automatically gain leverage over their domestic and international enemies (Muammar Gaddafi, for example, was a political nobody before his ascension to power in Tripoli). Thus Arab dictators and would-be dictators are engaged in a form of rent-seeking when they attempt to obtain power through Arab capitals. In some respects, the United Nations and other IGOs have simply served to further the imperial ends of the British and French in the Middle East after World War I.

Is everybody with me? Disparate factions in Arab states seek to control their own regional territories while simultaneously seeking to stave off the influence of the capital if their man is not in power (pretty standard fare worldwide, actually). This tension – between resisting influence and seeking to exert it through governing a capital city – is driven by the realization that capturing the rent provided by IGOs will lead to leverage over enemies. This, in turn, not only keeps nationalist sentiment in Arab states strong but also ensures that only a strong man will be capable of holding these states together.

Now the nationalism that glues these failed Arab states together is one that is largely acknowledged, but the necessity of a strong man to hold these states together gets less respect.

Just think though: Strong men can earn the rent that Arab states get from IGOs by more easily being able to eliminate or suppress factions that do not wish to go along with renting the services that IGOs provide (loans, military support, etc.).

A democracy, on the other hand, is designed to incorporate as many factions within a society as possible into the political framework of a state. Democracies are less predictable than autocracies. For IGOs – created by, and for, already established democracies – this lack of predictability is unwelcome.

It is important to note that there is no explicit animosity directed towards Arab democracy from IGOs. The inability of IGOs to incorporate fledgling Arab democracies is built in to their systems. IGOs are always at the forefront of calling for free and fair elections in Arab states, for example, but institutions like the UN were implemented for a different world. Great Britain and France had overseas colonies in 1945. There were two Germanies when the UN was chartered and no academic programs devoted to exploring “post-socialism.”

Delving into why IGOs are structurally unable to support democratic initiatives in the Arab world is far beyond the scope of this post, and I think Khouri’s focus on the failures of the state is a big step in the right direction. However, if frustrated reformers wish to better understand the plight of democracy in their societies, it will not be enough to blame the autocrats who have been smart enough and ruthless enough to game the international state system that Arab states participate in.

The Discovery Doctrine of Land Ownership

Fred Foldvary Economics, History, Religion , , , , , ,

The legal basis for land ownership in the Americas is “Christian Discovery.” This land doctrine derives from the 15th century theology of the Catholic Church. The moral origin of the Vatican’s land doctrine is its old claim of the supremacy of Christianity over all other religions. The “Christian discovery” doctrine is not in the US Constitution, yet it has been adopted by the US government and upheld by the courts.

“Bully’s Justice” by George Zebrowsky, an eye-opening article on Christian Discovery, was published in the June/July 2014 issues of Free Inquiry. Under Christian Discovery, the first Christians to “discover” land previously unknown to the Christian chiefs of state, and held by non-Christians, have a legally legitimate claim to that land. The indigenous and current dwellers have no legal property rights.

A court case in 2005 showed that the Christian Discovery doctrine is still in force. The Onondaga Indian (native American) nation in the State of New York sought federal-court recognition to title of ancestral lands. Also in 2005 the Oneida and Cayuga Indian nations had their land claims dismissed by the US Supreme Court. The Onondaga claim was dismissed in 2010 based on the 2005 Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court stated that “Under the doctrine of discovery,” the ownership of “lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign, first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States.”

There are three moral justifications of land ownership. First is natural moral law, the universal ethic that is inherent in human nature and is a moral imperative for humanity. Second is tradition. Third is force. Natural moral law invalidates both tradition and force as moral rationales.

The laws of the United States derive from English common law, the US Constitution, natural moral law, and the Vatican’s doctrine of land discovery. The US Constitution recognizes the supremacy of natural moral law in its Ninth Amendment, and it also recognizes common law. The US Constitution does not recognize the legality of tradition, force, or the Christian Discovery doctrine, yet the US Supreme Court continues to adhere to Christian Discovery.

As stated in “Bully’s Justice” (p. 28), this Doctrine of Discovery is “one of the rare principles of American law that came not from English common law or from the pen of some Enlightenment philosopher but rather from the Vatican.” The US Supreme Court recognized the doctrine in Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823 under Chief Justice John Marshall.

The doctrine of Christian Discovery originated in 1455 when Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Romanus Pontifex. Without any Biblical justification, this declaration justified the conquest of African lands by the king of Portugal. Pope Alexander VI extended the doctrine to the Spanish conquests in the Americas. The doctrine of Christian Discovery authorized European Christian explorers and their monarchs the rationale to claim lands not occupied by Christians. The doctrine deprived the indigenous inhabitants of any legal land rights.

As ultimate legal owner of the land, the state can then lease land to private tenants, and it can sell or transfer land titles to private persons, but such titles are always secondary to the state as senior and supreme owner, as the state can tax land, control its use, and forcibly buy back title with eminent domain.

The current Pope has expressed concern with global inequalities, but he has not gone to the core cause of inequality and poverty: privileged land tenure and the denial of labor’s self-ownership rights. The Catholic Church would have to confront its old doctrine on the conquest of land, and this is cannot do, and therefore popes must confine their concern about poverty and inequality to laments and exhortations. Now come economists such as Thomas Piketty calling for massive redistribution to treat the effects of income inequality, but refusing to acknowledge the origins and remedies in land and labor.

The Christian Discovery doctrine is based on supremacism, the belief that one’s religion, culture, and traditions are superior to those of others, justifying the use of force to maintain this supremacy. Such supremacy has been adopted by several religions, but this violates the human equality that is the basis of natural moral law and that has been recognized in declarations of human rights. Such constitutional cognitive dissonance does not seem to bother legal authorities.

If we seriously apply natural moral law to the question of land ownership, we need to confront both the false justifications of Christian Doctrine of Discovery and also the aboriginal land claims. As stated by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government, human moral equality implies that one may fully own land only so long as there is free land of that quality available to others. When such land is scarce and has a price, the analysis of Henry George kicks in, that one may have possession conditional on paying the land rent to the members of the relevant community in equal shares.

Therefore the native American Indians may not take full ownership of their former lands. The land rent belongs not to them but to all humanity, or at least to all Americans. Also, the rental value of land due to civic improvements is a return on the capital goods, not the natural spacial resource.

Justice requires the abolition of the supremacist Doctrine of Discovery and its replacement with natural moral law. Some compensation and restoration of rights of possession are due to the aboriginal inhabitants, but history cannot be erased, and the current residents, users, and title holders, having followed the current rules, also deserve some consideration.

Global Warming and Scholarly Conspiracies, etc. Part Two

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

In Part One of Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming, I drew on my own experience as a scholar to describe how the scientific enterprise can easily become corrupted for anodyne, innocent reasons, for reasons that are not especially cynical. I argued, of course, that this can especially happen in connection with such big, societal issues as climate change. I concluded that the findings of scientists do not, as a matter of principle, merit the quasi-religious status they are often granted. It follows from this that the Left’s attempt to stop any debate on the ground that science has spoken is grotesque.

I should have added in Part One that at different times in my career, I may have benefited by the kind of corruption I describe as well as having been hurt by it. Of course, one thing does not compensate for the other. Corruption is corruption; it constitutes more or less wide steps away from the truth whether I profit by it or whether it harms me. These things just add up, they don’t balance each other out.

Once you open your eyes, it’s not difficult to find gross derailments of the scientific enterprise. To be more precise, the transformation of limited scientific results into policy often gives rise to abuses. Sometimes, they are gross abuses verging on the criminal.

A recent book describes in detail how the slim results of 1950s studies that were obviously flawed both in their design and with respect to data collection were adopted by the American scientific establishment as policy. They resulted in a couple of generations of Americans being intellectually terrorized into adopting a restrictive, sad, un-enjoyable diet that may even have undermined their health. The book is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz .

For most of my adult life, I limited my own intake of meats because saturated fats were supposed to give me cardiac illness and, ultimately heart attacks. I often thought something was fishy about the American Heart Association severity concerning saturated fats because of my frequent stays in France. There, I contemplated men of all ages feasting on pork chops fried in butter followed by five different kinds of cheese also eaten with butter. Then, they would have a post-prendial cigarette or two, of course. None of the men I knew exercised beyond walking to shop for pâtés, sausages, and croissants sweating butter (of course). Every time, I checked – often – Frenchmen had a longer life expectancy than American men (right now, it’s two and half years longer.)

Yet, such was the strength of my confidence (of our confidence) in the official medical-scientific establishment that I bravely followed my stern semi-macrobiotic diet even while in France. In my fifties, I developed Type Two diabetes. None of my four siblings who lived and ate in France did. I understand well the weakness of a such anecdotal evidence. And I know I could have been the one of five who hit the wrong number in the genetic lottery. (That would have been the inheritance from my grandfather who died at 26 of a worse illness than diabetes, a German bullet, in his case.) Yet, if there are quite a few cases like mine where siblings constitute a natural control for genetic factors, it would seem worth investigating the possibility that a diet high in carbohydrates is an actual cause of what is often described as an “epidemic” of Type II diabetes. If there are many more cases than there were before the anti-fat campaign, controlling for age, something must have changed in American society. The diet low on saturated fats pretty much forced on us since the fifties could be that societal change.

I am not saying that it is. I am saying it’s worth investigating, with proper design and normal rules of data selection. I am not holding my breath. I think the scientific establishment will not turn itself around until its biggest honchos of the relevant period pass away. Teicholz’s book may turn out to have many defects because she is more a journalist than a scientist. I am awaiting with great attention the rebuttals from the scientific establishment, or – you never know – their apologies.

And then, there is the old story of how it took twenty years for the American Medical Association to change its recommendation on how to treat the common duodenum ulcer after an obscure Australian researcher showed that it was almost always caused by a bacterium. (The story was told about twenty years ago, in Atlantic Monthly, I think I remember. You look it up.)

The de facto scientific establishment is not infallible but it usually wants to pretend that it is. It’s aided in its stubbornness by the religiously inspired passivity of ordinary people who were raised with misplaced all-around reverence for science and anything that appears, rightly or wrongly, “scientific.”

The climate change lobby, wrapped in a pseudo-scientific mantle still thrives in several policy areas in spite of most Americans’ relative indifference to the issue. Two of its main assets are these: First it is well served by irresponsible repetition of a simplified form of its message that amounts to constant, uncritical amplification; second, even well-educated people usually don’t pay a lot of attention to detail, don’t read critically because they are busy.

Now, I am not going to spend any time denouncing the myriad airheads with short skirts who add their own climate change sage commentary to their presentation of ordinary weather reports. (I am a man of vast culture, I listen to the same tripe in three different languages!) As I keep saying, I don’t beat on kindergartners. Let’s take National Geographic, instead, that justifiably respected monument to good information since 1888.

The October 2013 issue presents another striking photographic documentary intended to illustrate fast climate change. One of the photographic essays in the issue concerns, predictably, the alleged abnormal melting of glaciers. The talented photographer, James Balog, contributes his own completely superfluous, judgmental written commentary:

We know the climate is changing…. I never expected to see such huge changes in such a short period of time.

The guy is a photographer, for God’s sake! He has an undergraduate degree in communications. His credentials to pronounce on long-term climate change are…? Even the National Geographic, generally so careful about its assertions, couldn’t resist, couldn’t bring itself to tell him, “This is outside your area of competence, STFU!” Why not let the janitor also give his judgment in the pages of National Geographic? This is a free country after all. Most people simply don’t have the energy to notice thousands of such violations of good scientific practice.

Now to inattention, still with the venerated National Geographic. The September 2013 issue, entitled “Rising Seas” presents a truly apocalyptic future in case global warming is not controlled. As is usually the case with N.G. the article is chock-full with facts from studies. The article is also tightly argued. N.G. is normally careful about what it asserts. To make things even clearer, it offers a graph on pp. 40 -41 purporting to demonstrate a disastrous future for the earth starting very soon.

Being a leisurely retired man endowed with an unusually contrary personality, being furthermore well schooled in elementary data handling, I did the obvious with the graph, the obvious not one educated person in 10,000 would think of doing, or care to do. I took my desk ruler to the graph itself. Here is what I discovered:

Between 1880 and 2013, there was less than a one foot rise in the oceans level according to National Geographic. Of course, those 123 years cover the period of most rapid rise in the emission of alleged greenhouse gases. Imagine if National Geographic had an article entitled:

“Less Than Foot-Rise in Ocean in Spite of More than 120 Years of Greenhouse Emissions”

Many citizens would respond by thinking that maybe, possibly there is global warming but it’s not an urgent problem. Let’s take our time looking into the phenomenon more carefully, they would say. Let’s try and eliminate alternative explanations to greenhouse gases if we find that there is indeed abnormal warming. After all, how much of a rush would I be in even if I were convinced that water rises in my basement by almost one tenth of an inch each year on the average?

This is not an absurd mental exercise. The business of science is to try to falsify and falsify again. When you get interesting results, the scientific establishment (if not the individual scientist author of the findings) is supposed to jump on them with both feet to see if they stand up. Instead in connection with global warming, scientists have allowed the policy establishment and those in their midst that influence it to do exactly the reverse: If you see anything you like in a scientific study, try hard for more of the same. If you find something that contradicts your cause, bury it if you can, ignore it otherwise. You will get plenty of help in doing either.

Scientists have become collectively a complicit in massive anti-scientific endeavor with many religious features.

I am finally proofing the print copy of my book:

I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography.

Growing Weed in Humboldt County (and the Economics of Prohibition)

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , , , , ,

And yet California, long the marijuana movement’s pacesetter, and a haven for high-capacity growers, finds itself in the perhaps-unwelcome position of losing outlaws like Ethan. Should the state follow Colorado’s and Washington’s leads in legalizing recreational use, as is expected, already-fragile economies in the north—specifically in the “Emerald Triangle” of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, home to some quarter of a million people—could be crippled. The “prohibition premium” that keeps marijuana prices, and those economies, aloft would fall, possibly so precipitously that many growers would lose their incentive and (perhaps ironically) leave for more-punitive regions. In recent years, many growers have reportedly left California for places like Wisconsin and North Carolina—markets where a pound of marijuana might fetch double what it does in the Golden State. Legalization helps keep growers out of jail, but regulation slashes their profit margins.

This is from Lee Ellis in The Believer. Read the whole thing, it’s a great piece of journalism, although I don’t link to this because I think it’ll teach readers anything new. I just like it because it reports on one of my old stomping grounds. I don’t smoke much pot anymore, but there is nothing quite like smoking weed from Humboldt County.

The Lost Sergeant Lost Again! (Updated)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law , , , , ,

If I were Sergeant Bergdahl and  if I were not a deserter, I would ask for a court-martial. Given the public airing of rumors concerning his case, I don’t see how his request could be turned down. He has been damaged by a very public discussion of his case. He is entitled to his day in court to clear his name. For a member of the military, this means a court-martial, a procedure giving good guarantees concerning the presumption of innocence.

The Army is keeping him incommunicado in a military hospital in Germany. It’s as if he had been lost a second time. Some say he has forgotten English. That’s completely absurd. It could be that the Army is merely trying to avoid the accidental spilling of military secrets. It could be that there is another, darker secret involved.

Could it be that he did not particularly wanted to be rescued? Had he cast his lot with the other side who cynically sacrificed him in return for the huge prize that Mr Obama provided?

Usually, I am quick to blame the Obama administration ineptness rather than criminal intent for its actions that look like sabotage of the USA. This time, the debacle is so huge that my judgment vacillates. Really, one lost soldier for five battle-hardened generals of armies who throw acid in school-girls’ faces? We are returning to the struggle people who were only one degree  of separation removed from 9/11?

President Obama, he of the Veterans Administration, suddenly speaks like a military patriot: We don’t leave any of our soldiers behind no matter who they are. Period! What if the Taliban barbarians had asked for a nuclear device in return for delivering Sergeant Bergdahl into our hands?

We don’t leave any of our soldiers behind. Period?

Update: It’s been one week and Sergeant Bergdhal has still  not been allowed to talk to his mother. Maybe he has forgotten how to say “Hi” in English, or “Mom,” or something.

It’s because of concerns for his health, says the administration. It has not told us what the health concern is.

I don’t much like conspiracy explanations as a rule but I can’t help notice that medical doctors are professionally obligated not to talk about their patients. And military officers usually follow orders including orders to keep their mouths shut irrespective of what they think. If this were not true, why in the world was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sent to die in a French military hospital?

Another Preposterous Attempt to Punish Evil Foreign Regimes

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics , , , , ,

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried a piece headlined “Gold from North Korea Stymies U.S. Firms.” It seems that U.S. firms that use various minerals, not just gold but also tungsten, tantalum and tin, are required by U.S. law to ask their suppliers whether any of these materials are so-called “conflict minerals.” Up to now this provision has mainly covered minerals sourced from areas of the Congo which are embroiled in warfare. Now it seems firms must also find out whether any of the gold they use in their products came from North Korea.

It’s not so simple as asking each supplier, because those suppliers may in turn have obtained their supplies from a variety of sources, all of which may have gotten mixed in together in their inventory. And of course it’s an open question as to whether suppliers can document their sources; presumably their say-so won’t suffice. They might also raise their asking prices to cover the costs of time-consuming compliance exercises.

The article says the North Korean central bank refined gold into bars that were certified by the London Bullion Market Association up until 2006. It is believed that they have continued to produce gold bars.

Gold is highly marketable. It’s uniform, nearly indestructible, and traded internationally. It’s unlikely the North Koreans would be stamp any of the bars they refine “made in the DPRK.” The North Koreans are known to be experts at counterfeiting U.S. currency, so how easy would it be for them to stamp a fake refinery mark on their gold bars?

What’s the point of this requirement? As with all political actions, this one has both an ostensible and a real (“public choice”) goal. The ostensible reason is to harm the evil North Korean regime by reducing the revenue they get from gold sales. The likely real reason is to make politicians and bureaucrats look good. None of this is to downplay the horror that is the North Korean regime. I only want to consider who will benefit and who will be hurt by this program.

All right, so who bears the costs? The requirement is an obvious expense for the firms involved. They will pass on as much of the compliance costs to customers as they can, but they will find little ability to do so if they face foreign competitors who suffer from no such regulatory burden. I won’t attempt to estimate elasticities here, just guess that costs will be borne primarily by shareholders and employees of gold-using firms and not so much by customers. These firms will become a little bit less competitive. To some extent suppliers will be burdened as well, but they probably have options like shifting to other customers or getting another intermediary in between them and their U.S. customers.

Lastly, how likely is this measure to succeed? The answer depends on which goal we’re thinking of. If it’s the political goal, politicians and bureaucrats will probably accrue a little bit of credit. If it’s the ostensible goal, hurting the North Korean regime, the answer is: no chance whatsoever. The only harm the North Koreans might endure would be busting a gut from laughing. In the unlikely event they find some of their customers have withdrawn, they can easily and with almost total anonymity dispose of their gold through international markets.

The effects of this requirement will be minor for a huge firm like Hewlett Packard. But U.S. industries are dying from a thousand cuts like this, and as they gradually lose out to foreign competitors, we wonder why.

You will notice I have not invoked any libertarian ideology in this humble piece. It’s just a matter of tracing consequences a little further and looking for public choice explanations of behavior. Hooray for the San Jose State University graduate program that helped me learn these skills.

“A foreign policy with a price”

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , ,

Re: “Obama’s empty West Point speech,” May 30 Charles Krauthammer.

So Charles Krauthammer thinks we should be providing military assistance to Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Who’s going to pay for it? Or are we just going to whip out the plastic like usual? Krauthammer says our allies are complaining, fearing their own security. What are they doing about it? Not much. Of course they are complaining; they are used to having the U.S. protect them without paying for it. I thought the Republicans were big on personal responsibility. Get your nanny-state big government out of other people’s business.

Joe Gregory, Castle Pines

This is a letter to the editors of the Denver Post (I’m hanging out with my grandparents in Denver right now) and I thought I’d pass it along. Is libertarianism truly entering the mainstream or or is this guy just a hardcore, longtime libertarian? He might just be a Democrat with above-average intelligence and knows when to point out logical discrepancies in the Republican message.

I’ll never know, but I can only hope he’s new and that writes more letters to the editors that point out the irrational nature of US foreign policy.