Year: 2014

More regions contemplating independence?

Adam Magoon Current Events, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , ,

The historically great city-state of Venice is contemplating independence from Italy. “Over two million residents,” nearly half of the total population, “of the Veneto region took part in the week-long survey, with 89 percent voting in favour of independence from Italy.” The  Indipendenza Veneta party believes that the centralized Italian government is unable “to stamp out corruption, protect its citizens from a damaging recession and plug waste in the poorer south.” Venice joins Catalonia and, for better or worse, Crimea this year in considering breaking away from it’s central government. Catalonia’s request for an independence referendum denied by the Spanish prime minister while we all know how long Crimean independence lasted.  All is not lost however.

These types of referendum must be celebrated by libertarians throughout the world. The further decentralization of governments is a goal that can directly lead to a freer, more libertarian society and will serve as a siphon weakening governments worldwide. To quote, as I do so often, the great Murray Rothbard:

“Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?”

Why not indeed.

Warm Welcomes Please

Brandon Christensen Current Events , ,

Hello loyal readers (all four of you). I’ve been AWOL for the last couple of weeks, but I do have some great news. We’re going to have a guest blogger, Dave Nielson, here with us for the next three or four months. Here is his profile:

Dave Nielsen was born and raised in Saint George, Utah, and currently resides in Rexburg, Idaho. Dave is a 24-year old undergraduate student of web design at Brigham Young University – Idaho, a Mormon, a member of his campus Young Americans for Liberty chapter, and a contributor to a few blogs. He feels overshadowed by the achievements of his fellow contributors, but feels privileged by their association. He describes himself as introverted; he is a thinker whose ideas get squashed by his fear of recognition. He finds fulfillment in his faith, his liberties, and his family. Passion for civil liberties and economic freedom is what drives him to fight in the liberty movement. He was brought into the realm of libertarian philosophy by his father, but became enveloped by it when he began listening to Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and by reading Bastiat’s “The Law”. He was married to someone out of his league in July 2012. His wife puts up with his political rants over dinner, and lovingly supports him in his participation in the local liberty movement where he resides.

Notes On Liberty is also getting another permanent blogger, the anthropologist Mike Reid. I first came across Mike’s work at the Mises Institute and have been following him closely since. It’s rare to come across a libertarian anthropologist so I was very excited when Mike first burst onto the scene. When I won the Freeman‘s blog contest I choose Mike’s essay “Culture in a Cage” to riff off of. Mike was kind enough to send me a congratulatory email and I figured it was now or never and asked him to blog with us here at NOL. He was gracious enough to accept my humble offer. Here is his short bio for the blog:

Mike Reid teaches anthropology at the University of Winnipeg. His writing on news, anthropology, and history has appeared in the Freeman, Whiskey and Gunpowder, Heartland’s FIRE Policy and News, the Mises Daily, and Ontario History. Mike also manages publishing projects for libertarian clients at InvisibleOrder.com.

Stay tuned readers. Things at Notes On Liberty just keep getting better and better. You’ll also notice that Kyle Dix has begun blogging here at the consortium. I’ll introduce Kyle to you guys properly as soon as he gets me a short bio of himself!

The Internet Needs a Multitude of Firm Guiding Hands Like I Need….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The Internet is an American invention depending on a specifically American vision of society. It was built with American seed money. It represents the best about the way we used to do things: Tell the folks what you want; spring a little money on them; most of it produces nothing; some of it turns out to be the very best investment of the century, perhaps even the best investment in history. Let it run itself as much as possible. Refrain from giving it a captain.

Other countries are utterly incapable of doing anything like this. How do I know? None but one even tried, France. Its government-managed (Post Office owned) Minitel was even accessible to the general public earlier than the Internet. The French closed it about two years ago. It had ceased to serve any purpose side-by-side with the Internet. That was as clear a case of competition between two ways of doing things as might be devised in a real scientific experiment.

The French Minitel (which I used) did good service for many years as an electronic phone book and address finder and it housed a prodigious amount of porn. I almost forgot: It was also a prime venue for prostitutional dates. In spite of these attractions, it was to the Internet as Wisconsin blue cheese is to real, cave-aged French Roquefort (not the stuff they put on your salad, the $26/lb stuff). The main fault in this comparison, of course, is that American cheese makers can only improve their act. Non-Americans are not going to catch up on items such as the Internet because they lack the vision thing.

Other countries claim that they have a right to co-manage the Internet because their citizens use it. That’s it! So, if I clear a path in the bushes for my own use and I let the nice guy next door use it, and also the child molester two houses down, it’s not my path anymore?

Note that this sharing in the name of the often-poisonous concept of sovereignty need not happen, even by their own argument. Other countries’ governments can always block it if they wish. They can and do occasionally deny access to their citizens and take the blow-back. In many countries, the blow-back is also indirectly a blow for freedom.

Letting other countries have a say over the management of the Internet is likely to produce no improvement that I can think of. (But I keep an open mind; please, instruct me.) It’s extremely likely to facilitate despotism in many countries. Try a mental experiment: What’s Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese Mafia masquerading as people’s party going to contribute? The tyrants simply want to do their best to close the windows that let in any fresh air at all.

In other parts of the world, the desire for partial control of the Internet is motivated by cultural jealousy. That would be the case in France, in Spain and in much of Latin America, also to an extent, in China. But governments in those countries don’t need more power over the Internet to combat their citizens’ regrettable proclivity to listen to American music and to buy primarily tickets for American movies (in spite of prodigious government subsidies for the national cinema in France and in Spain). They already have full power to put anything they want on the Internet. I mean loads of bad French movies, even erotic movies where the naked women are pointedly vaguely repulsive. (See my piece “French Movies, Sex, and the Welfare State” [and also “Can Protectionism Ever Be Respectable?” (pdf) in the Independent Review – bc]). The Spaniards are free to place on the Net four or five Spanish-made movies each year and even to try and charge admission. And the government of the so-called “People”, so called “Republic ” of China is always welcome to transmit live on its blog the full sessions of the Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party, for the pleasure of all.

There are plenty of ways with the existing Internet arrangements to combat the poison of American Cultural Imperialism. Best of luck to them. (For God’s sake, with a handful of major exceptions, even our disasters are better than theirs!)

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of countries where moderate government involvement and decentralization are understood by any significant fraction of the populace. Others don’t know how to do anything decentralized, won’t know for years or centuries.

The worst case scenario is also the most likely, I think: Following the Obama administration’s capitulation, the Internet will end up being “managed” by a UN-like international body run by faceless, brain-dead bureaucrats.

What bothers me in yet this other American retreat at the hands of the Obama administration is its sheer mindlessness, its obvious abandonment of common sense. Contrary to may other conservatives, I don’t think Mr Obama is evil. He is acting pretty much as you would expect from a man who had never accomplished anything in his life before becoming president. I said this during his first campaign in 2008 (but I am too lazy to look for the relevant link . I said it many other times since, including this one).

It’s not that President Obama is bad or even stupid; the problem is that he is ignorant and lazy, including intellectually lazy. And he and his wife sure like their vacations at public expense.

Yeah, I must be a racist: “lazy” is just another racial stereotype, after all. See if I care!

And I am a little ashamed of the dig about the presidential family vacations. I mean his wife was severely deprived for 250 years; she is only catching up. He was not that deprived himself though. His name indicates a coastal origin among the slaving tribes on his father’s side. On his mother’s side he comes from reformed and moderate hippie stock. Hippie like me.

Ideology and the Alliance for Progress: Charting the Boundaries of the Welfare State

Kyle Dix Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

This Fall I took a course on the history of the Welfare State at Penn. I also used to work “in the system,” teaching English and job skills to Spanish-speaking TANF recipients at an NPO in North Philadelphia, so it was a nice complement to that experience. Overall the course was great given the volatility of the subject and the difficulty of understanding an abstraction like “welfare.”  I thought the course fell short in contextualizing the welfare state within the broader scope of government, so I wrote a paper about how the welfare state and foreign aid interacted in Kennedy’s policy and rhetoric.

The perils of globalization and modernization have largely been attributed to “neoliberalism” and neoliberal American global hegemony, which I think has some merit. The American welfare state has historically been such a strange beast that it’s really difficult to point fingers–few nations have seen a clash between principles of general welfare/security and personal liberty on the scale of the USA. Yet today it seems that “foreign development” (generally taking place under neoconservative, globalist institutions) and “domestic” or “community development” (generally taking place from the American “left”) are at odds with one another. The consensus on foreign aid at best rests on our duty to help the global have-nots and at worst is a less-risky way to build global security in the post-911 world. But both of these reflect a Bismarckian idea of State building to me… So is there a historical link?

My paper looks for answers in JFK and his Alliance for Progress. This project was a foreign analogue of the New Frontier that got Kennedy elected and seemed to be the future of the American Welfare State until his untimely assassination. Due to resistance at home, the Alliance for Progress was much further along than any New Frontier domestic reforms, despite complementary rhetoric and Kennedy’s constant comparison of the two. The Alliance provided millions in aid to Latin America in the name of developing economy and–as many historians neglect to mention–society. It died out by the mid-70s (largely due to neoliberal push-back and underfunding, or so the story goes) but what was the ideological basis of the reform? What did Kennedy want out of the millions he was lobbying to send abroad?

Overall, the Alliance was multifaceted: It sought to strengthen perceptions of America, grow international political ties, and generally create a buffer against the Cold War Communist threat. But these aspects were presented as international extensions of domestic policy by both outward rhetoric and by internal Congressional and diplomatic correspondence. Agrarian reform (ie, away from communal landholding, especially in Mexico), income redistribution, and a more just hemispherical society were also included as benchmarks.

The program eventually aimed to directly map Tennessee Valley Authority river basin development on top of Colombian valleys, hoping to make a Tupelo or Knoxville out of Cali or Buenaventura. The founder of the TVA, David Lilienthal, won a contract to develop Colombia under the Alliance for Progress after abortive plans to similarly shape the Mekong Delta and the Nile. And while big business was the engine running the machine, rubber met road with promises of social reform, workforce development, and increased social equality for the poor, uncivilized masses susceptible to Communist dogma.

While globalization’s detractors cry capitalist overreach, authoritarian power grab, or something in between, proponents of foreign aid still need to explain why hunger, malaria, and TB are so prevalent given global wealth–and be honest about the beginnings of these international institutions. I can’t make prescriptive calls to action, but I can say that the foundation of the current international aid regime was laid by the example of domestic welfare state-building, by ideals of a strong state guiding a “free” market to achieve affirmative social outcomes

If you want to read the paper: Here’s a full (18 pp. with references) and 10-page version.

Le Contrôle des armes aux Etats-Unis ; l’essort économique français

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Economics , ,

Un membre de la legislature de l’état de Californie est accusé par le FBI de traffic d’armes massif, des fusils d’assaut militaires, pour être précis. C’est un élu de San Francisco, ville notoirement de gauche. Il est bien connu pour ses campagnes bruyantes en faveur de la restriction du port d’arme (garanti par le Second Amendement à la Constitution des Etats-Unis adopté en 1789). Il va être mis en garde à vue incessamment. Il y a des brebis galeuses partout, après tout. En tous cas, a contrario, aucun élu notoirement favorable a ce droit constitutionel n’a jamais été accusée de quoi que ce soit sur ce plan-là.

Le slogan principal de ceux qui, come moi, désirent un population armée:

“Quand les armes sont hors-la-loi, seuls les hors-la-loi sont armés.”

L’évidence même!

Economie française: Selon l’administration américaine spécialisée*, le désert campagnard francais renferme 4 milliards de mètres cube de gas de schiste. Milliards! Ils sont tous fermés à l’exploitation à cause de l’influence des écologistes (dont le parti arrive rarement à percer aux élections). Il n’y a pas de travail pour les Français; c’est donc exactement le bon moment de garder bien enfermé à clef  un outil de travail essentiel! L’élite politique française agit comme si elle vivait en 1978 avec, devant elle, des possibilités infinies d’essort économique.

Et puis, il ne faut pas chagriner Poutine!

*US Energy Information Administration

Polystate – book 3

Rick Weber Books, Law , , , , , , , , ,

This is my nth response to Polystate and covers the third and final portion of the book (for the 1st through n-1th responses see here, here, and here).

As a quick reminder, the purpose of this book is to consider a possible political structure where individuals choose their own government (“anthrostate”) and these governments operate in the same geographic area (under a “polystate”). This is in contrast to the current system of geographical monopolies on coercion (“geostates”).

Book three attempts to identify insoluble problems with the idea of a polystate. The first problem is the potential for bureaucracy explosion (no, not that kind). A greater (which is to say any) degree of customized service in our current government would surely come with increased costs. There may be technological solutions to this problem, and competition between anthrostates would surely add pressure to get around these costs. In any event, the administrative questions are actually quite interesting. I suspect that many government services would end up moving back into civil society and private markets and the result would be lower monitoring costs in the case of civil society (e.g. for social security through mutual aid societies), and greater use of specialization and innovation in the case of market goods (e.g. for safety standards).

Another big one is the importance of “sacred locations.” If we had always lived in a polystate, Jerusalem might be considered a state of mind. But in the world we live in, it’s a geographical location, and different groups want it for themselves. A market with private property allows these groups to express the importance of this location by outbidding others for its purchase, but such a system is likely not good enough for some members of the relevant groups, and it’s plausible that violence could be resorted to. At the risk of sounding like an insensitive social Darwinist… maybe that’s not the worst possible outcome?… But certainly still a bad, though the root problem is the beliefs of those people; determining which political structure (all of which have costs and benefits) is “best” is an interesting question.

I think the biggest area of potential contention (by non-libertarians) is demonstrated by the issue of gun control. One anthrostate’s gun control is meaningless if it coexists with another that doesn’t have gun control. In other words, a polystate is less polycentric confederacy and more anarchist default plus an odd contract structure for particular firms. This leads to the final problem: transition.

The epilogue discusses the “issue” that the proposal is for a minimal polystate. We can think of this as a contemplation of federalism. This is a thought experiment in radical federalism that is so far down the spectrum of possibilities that it puts the onus of governance on the individual. In many ways, discussions by libertarian political economists can be thought of more as discussions of federalism than discussions of liberty; I think it’s worth thinking about the connection between federalism and freedom, as well as different potential forms of federalism.

Here are my overall thoughts: The book presents an interesting thought experiment and the author does an excellent job of providing well thought out analysis without going overboard. There is plenty to think about, and plenty more discussion to be had (note: read this book with friends and discuss it over beers). ZW had a choice of going into more detail and making a stronger case, or going into less detail and leaving more of the thought experiment to the reader. I think he perfectly balanced these two goals.

Note: an ungated version of that last link is available here. The article is “Afraid to be free: Dependency as desideratum” by James Buchanan.

Great Adaptation of Harrison Bergeron

Adam Magoon Liberty

Youtube video Located Here.

For those of you who don’t know Harrison Bergeron is  a fantastic short story by Kurt Vonnegut, an author near and dear to most upstate New Yorkers.  How many other authors set anything in the city of Schenectady?  The general plot of the story is a description of a world where everyone has been made equal, both physically and mentally, by the “Handicapper General” of the United States.  Full text available here.

Polystate: Book 2

Rick Weber Books, Economics, Law , , , , , , , , ,

This is my third entry on Polystate and will cover book 2 (entries one and two covered book 1). This section covers a thought experiment in polystates and begins immediately with the flattering implication that macroeconomists can make speculative predictions about complex systems. This is typically where an Austrian would say “the world is too complex to make speculative predictions which is why  we need a flexible system.”

Quick reminder: a polystate is a state that contains non-geographical anthrostates. Anthrostates have rules relevant to their members, while polystates have rules relevant to the interaction of anthrostates and their members.

My first qualm with ZW’s conception of anthrostates is that there are local spillovers in governance, culture, etc. that would likely lead to enclaves. ZW addresses this now with rule number one of polystates being that no anthrostate may claim territory. My general feeling on federalism is that the higher units will have rules that are more universally accepted, so that a nation will have prohibitions on murder, while regions of states/provinces may have fairly uniform rules on abortion, drug use, etc., individual states have their own traffic laws, and cities have their own rules on neighborly conduct. Polystates are a radical form of federalism, but in order for them to work adequately, they must start with fairly uniform basic rules on property rights over land.

Rule two is that individuals choose their anthrostate annually (by birthday). The specific interval is fairly arbitrary but it seems obvious that it should be neither too long (in which case anthrostates gain monopoly power) or too short (in which case they can’t credibly commit to govern in difficult situations such as collecting taxes or enforcing punishments). The alternative to a time-based restriction would be a social-stigma based restriction which has pros and cons of its own but I’m tempted to think would be more effective (though with some very important caveats that warrant further discussion!). The birthday rule is interesting as it staggers political change leading to greater stability than having “global revolution” at each shift; we face a similar problem in today’s world of election days.

Rule three is where things get tricky: anthrostates that take territory lose their government status under the polystate order. This creates a collective action problem among other anthrostates as enforcing this rule won’t be free and won’t have uniform benefits to others. ZW recognizes this, but the problem still stands. This is essentially the same as the national defense problem. This is really the big one: are geostates unnecessary but inevitable? Essentially this book is considering a special form of anarchy and so belongs in the same category of other classic thought experiments.

It obviously isn’t statelessness, and so it isn’t quite anarchy, but I’m not so sure anarchy is quite anarchy either. Even the sort of state imagined by David Friedman has coercion, it’s just decentralized. Likewise, polystates specifically allow anthrostates to act coercively, but it subjects them to competition. In essence, the polystate proposal is to increase competition among governance structures by allowing them to be geographically diffuse.

An interesting institutional feature of polystates is that anthrostates are no longer bound to seek something like an end state. Where as the USA tries to set up a system for the median voter who is expected to be there for life, an anthrostate could specialize in particular stages of individuals’ lives. There could be a state for students and one for seniors (… I wonder what a world with AARP running an anthrostate would look like…).

ZW doesn’t mention this, but if individuals can be members of more than one anthrostate (of course, based on the rules and enforcement of those rules by the relevant anthrostates) then it is conceivable that government services not be so horizontally integrated. This raises an interesting line of inquiry: is a polycentric polystate possible?

A big problem is the “inherent goodness” of imposing rules on people who don’t want them. It’s easy for libertarians to say that drug laws are dumb (because they are), but as Ryan Murphy surely writes somewhere, where people see value/justification in imposing their views on others we run into problems. We’re pretty much all cool with prohibiting murder, but what about less clear cut issues? If I saw veganism as having the same moral weight as murder (“I don’t think humans should be treated like that.”) then I would be morally justified in striking down with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers with icky lentils. The best solution would be for me to stay the hell away from Berkeley. Again, we’ve got local spillovers in governance. We also have tribalistic barriers to the sort of integration economists want to see for the good of everyone.

In the final section on war ZW raises an interesting point regarding the possibility of war-mongers self-selecting into aggressive anthrostates. This is a troubling notion, but such behavior is expensive. North Korea is aggressive, but manageable because Kim Jong Un isn’t wealthy enough to pose a more drastic threat to NATO. With self-sorting, a North Korean anthrostate would lose many of its productive people and be even less of a threat. But ZW doesn’t raise the question of nuclear weapons…

The example of Kidnappocracy drives home the point that ultimately coercion underlies any system of governance. Rights are as rights are enforced. Political structures are created to resolve rights disputes in an amicable (sort of) fashion, and polystates will still need means of resolving these disputes. Even in a geostate, some people are willing to fight and die for their views, but the institutional change to a polystate seems somewhat orthogonal to such issues. Anthrostates will serve as focal points, and having more disparate focal points may increase the possibility for conflict. But mostly it would just be a different sort of federalism; if we don’t see violence between people from different states, and if effective institutions emerge quickly enough, this problem may be small and quickly swamped by other benefits.

Ultimately the resolution of problems between members of different anthrostates would require that 1) their disputes are matters of honest disagreement that can be resolved with arbitration, 2) interactions that may lead to such disputes are minimized by a general refusal to interact, or 3) there is a strong and near universal support for (this sort of) federalism such that people are willing to resolve differences to support the overarching system. The second seems most likely, supporting the hypothesis that geostates will typically be more successful even if they will be less prosperous.

I come away increasingly convinced that perhaps the most fundamental aspect of governance is geographical sorting. I don’t like geostates (I don’t think many people truly do), but I think geographically localized governance is effective because it reduces interaction by people with contradictory conceptions about good behavior and so reduces conflict while supporting order. I think ZW’s ideas are largely influenced by a sort of a sci-fi view (that I’m highly sympathetic to) which reflects the sort of governance we see on the Internet. 4chan is a very different place from Facebook and every subreddit has it’s own unique culture. In such a world, “geography” is a different matter; it takes a different form, but it’s still there.

Secession and libertarianism – Ukraine Edition

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

The most basic rule of schoolyard behavior is this: Don’t challenge the school bully if your knees are buckling under you. Mr Obama keeps ignoring the rule, with predictable results: One tyrant, one despot after another receives his confirmation that the USA is no dangerous, no matter what you do. Thinking the US in not dangerous is very dangerous for the world. I keep challenging the ones and the others, including mainstream libertarians, to say what will, or should replace the pax americana that has given us relative peace since 1945. No one cares to answer.

This introduction, not by way of beginning to argue that the US should have gone to war over Crimea. I don’t believe it should have; I don’t even think the US should have risked war ever so little because of Crimea. I think rather that Mr Obama should have been absent, with a pass for the nurse’s office, for example. Neither am I being pathetically “realistic,” here. Mine is a principled position. Let me explain.

Anyone who has any libertarian fiber but who maintains his criticality should be instinctively in favor of secessions. Two reasons.

First if being governed is an assault on individual liberty, being governed by those who are unlike you in some fundamental way is a doubly liberticide. Fundamental differences include, but are not limited to, language. That’s because your language largely determines the way you see the world and your sensitivities, what’s important to you as a person. Governors who have different beliefs, who operate on the basis of different assumptions, who nurture different dislikes than you are bound to commit slow rape on you every day of your life. That’s true even if they harbor zero hostile intention toward you. And that’s unless you volunteer, of course, as many immigrants like me – do.

I wish good luck to the Catalan independentists and to the Scottish autonomists. I would even if you proved to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that powerful economic interests undergirth their efforts. It’s true that Catalonia is more prosperous than the rest of Spain. It does not prevent Catalans from feelings how they do. They probably would, if they were less prosperous. I don’t know if the Scots would like to split from the UK absent North Sea oil but, if they do, they do, and that’s it. I believe, of course, that the Tibetans have had a solid claim for secession for all the time they have been under Chinese rule. (And, yes, it may well be that the objective quality of their lives has improved under Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.)

Am I saying that it’s better to be oppressed by those you think of as your kin?

Yes.

The Crimean population overwhelmingly wanted secession from Ukraine. Without the presence of Russian guns, the referendum would have been, maybe, 76 % in favor rather than 96%. The final result would have been the same. It’s not difficult to entertain this double thought: Putin is a gangster and the Crimeans would rather be Russian citizens.

Speaking of Putin: The fact that he used exactly the same arguments as Hitler in 1939 does not logically imply that he did something like dismantling and gobbling up independent Czechoslovakia. The Czechs and the Slovaks, were not volunteers the way most Crimeans are. The annexation of Crimea by Russia changes little to all this. (See below.) Crimeans did not feel Ukrainian, overall and they were tired of being very poor under the Ukraine. They would rather be moderately poor as Russians. It’s not hard to believe either.

The second reason for libertarians to favor secession instinctively is that rational people cannot treat the boundaries of nation-states as if they were sacred, the way most governments pretend to do. At best, one could argue that that fiction contributes to world stability. (I doubt it but it’s not a stupid position.) Rather, the borders of existing nation-states are often the result of centuries of sometimes successful wars (France), or of recent shameless robbery of one’s neighbors (the US), or of colonial bureaucratic insouciance (Iraq). In some cases, the tracing of boundaries looks like a joke: Take for example the long penis-like extension of Afghanistan into China in the eastern part of the former country. The mapmaker, probably a junior English officer must have chuckled with relief in his loneliness.

National boundaries may be useful or even indispensable (to control entry, of undesirables, for example) that makes them a necessity, or a necessary evil. Nothing confers on them a status above critical thinking: Sometimes, the violation of existing borders should not be countenanced; sometimes, such violation deserves only a shrug.

Note with respect to the present annexation of Crimea by Russia following this secession, I am saying nothing about the ensuing strengthening of the Russian kleptocracy. The encouragement of tyrants inherent in the Putin impunity also belongs in another essay.

The fact is that the prevention of secession has always produced tons of mischief, most of it violent, much of it an affront to basic human decency.

Hitler used the existence of a sizable German minority in a strategically important part of Czechoslovakia, of smaller Hungarians-speaking and of Ukrainian-speaking smaller minorities elsewhere to start World War II. It’s possible, even likely that Hitler would have used another excuse absent this one. But linguistic minority aspirations gave a cover of semi-legitimacy to his aggressive action. Without such legitimacy, it is quite conceivable that British and French public opinions would have demanded that Hitler be stopped while it was still possible. (The whole sorry story of Western passivity and vacillation in 1938-39 is recounted in minute, hour-by hour detail in William Shirer’ s classic: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

In more recent times, we witnessed violent and massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo , the three-year long siege of a large city one hour flight from Rome, Sarajevo, and the starvation and daily bombing of its civilian population, and the massacre of thousands of men and boys, also in Bosnia. Most of these horrors could have been avoided by finely wrought enough secessions, even at county level if necessary.

A contrario examples abound of the healthful, virtuous nature of secession as a solution to intercommunal tensions. Some come from the most unlikely places.

The dissolution of Czechoslovakia – a radical form of secession – in 1993 was so peaceful that it went almost unperceived . The resulting Czech and Slovak Republics have since continued separately on their fairly prosperous paths. They maintain sound relationships as good neighbors (as very good neighbors, more or less like the US and Canada).

Paradoxically, today’s Iraq offers a striking example of the virtuousness of secession. The world follows with a tired eye Iraqi Arabs eviscerating each other along communal lines. That is, the Sunni Muslim Arabs there and the Shiite Muslim Arabs there are slaughtering each other every day, same as when the presence of Americans was said to cause all the murderous civil strife. Many Sunnis and many Shiites consider themselves members of existentially different groups. They do so for reasons that are probably difficult for Westerners to understand (except those who remember the Wars of Religion in Europe, of course, between 1520 and 1648.) It matters not; as far as they are concerned, those are reasons worth killing and dying for. Keeping them bottled up together, forced co-habitation, is not likely to attenuate these sentiments. (Think of ill-matched college roommates.)

In the meantime, you hardly ever hear of the Northern third of the same country, bloodied Iraq. I refer to “Kurdistan,” still formally a part of the Iraqi republic. Kurdistan, which does not exist officially, is people mostly by Kurds, a group with a distinctive language unrelated to Arabic. They comprise both Sunnis and Shiites. As far as the facts on the ground are concerned, Iraqi “Kurdistan” has achieved secession from its bloodied mother country. No shot was fired in spite of the quick-trigger violence of the Middle-East. The Kurdish area is so prosperous and so peaceful that others go there on vacation. The vacationers are first of all, Arabs from other parts of Iraq seeking relief from incessant violence in their part of the country. Second, Turks are crossing their southern border in increasing numbers for the same purpose . (May of those Turkish tourists are probably themselves ethnic Kurds.)

And we should not lose track of the fact that the 25 years of Saddam tyranny over all of Iraq, accompanied by internal massacres and two wars he started deliberately found what legitimacy it possessed in the supposedly sacred duty to keep Iraq unified. (Keep in mind that the Saddamite regime utterly lacked traditional legitimacy and religious legitimacy, or the political legitimacy that comes from winning fair elections, or any other source of legitimacy.)

Had Iraq broken up earlier into a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shiite south, the world and, especially, the martyred Iraqi people, would have been spared enormous misery. It’s not too late to achieve this end.

I am speculating that many people’s unexamined attachment to the general concept of national border harks back to an earlier time, a time when they were coterminous with economic boundaries and with information boundaries. Not long ago, French citizens ate almost only French food, they wore only French-made clothing (there was even a lively traffic in illegal, smuggled blue jeans), and heard and read only news originating in France in French. All was produced almost entirely with French capital. National boundaries were then the very containers of our existence defined in the most concrete ways. None of this is true anymore for most countries. Borders are porous to most things including words (if not yet to people). Many people are thus ready to fight for a reality that disappeared quite a while ago.

A major more or less unintended effect of this pursuit of ghosts is that it easily turns to bloodshed, domestic and international. So, many Spaniard are resisting the threatened secession of Catalonia as if it would become a catastrophe of sorts for them. There is still little realization that nations that perceived themselves as homogeneous (for whatever reason) are spared major conflicts, including civil conflict. Homogeneous Denmark, with a similar level of development, is more peaceful than bi-community (linguistic communities) Belgium. Either a Walloon or a Flemish secession there would improve the lives of both Walloon and Fleming.

Secession is usually a good thing overall, for peace, and for individual liberties. Let them go and they will lose the ability to stab you in your own kitchen with your own kitchen knife. They may even become your friends, after a while.

N.B. I still have not heard anyone, or heard of anyone saying that he regretted voting for Obama. Amazing!

Recension: The Problem of Political Authority, av Michael Huemer

Jesper Ahlin Books

Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority,  Palgrave Macmillan (2013)

Michael Huemer är professor i filosofi vid University of Colorado och jobbar mest med epistemologi, etik och metaetik. Huemer har sedan sin disputation 1998 skrivit tre böcker och över 40 artiklar, och en sökning på hans namn i Philosopher’s Index ger 75 träffar (som referens ger giganten John Rawls 1863) Han är alltså ingen nybörjare, men heller ingen filosofisk tungviktare (ännu).

Huemers bok The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey är ett lättläst, underhållande och välkommet bidrag till den politisk-filosofiska libertarianismen.* Boken riktar sig till en bred krets och är absolut inte för svårläst för den intresserade lekmannen. Tvärtom. Några grundläggande moralfilosofiska doktriner avhandlas enkelt och lättsamt utan att argumenten förlorar så mycket styrka att yrkesfilosofen lägger boken åt sidan.

Michael Huemer kallar sig själv anarkist, men skriver också att ”although I am an extremist, I have always striven to be a reasonable one.” I sin bok gör han inga omotiverade starka antaganden som motsäger detta. Huemer tillerkänner sig inte den fanatiska libertarianska tradition som hävdar att individens exklusiva självägandeskap trumfar alla moraliska skyldigheter. I stället skriver han ibland, nästan som i förbifarten, att det ena eller det andra säkerligen är moraliskt påbjudet eller förbjudet. Det är just Huemers avslappande stil som gör boken läsvärd. Genom att hänvisa till ”vanligt sunt förnuft” (fritt översatt) menar Huemer att han kan visa hur anarki är ett önskvärt samhällsskick. Och vanligt sunt förnuft kräver inte det tyngsta filosofiska artilleriet.

I det inledande kapitlet skriver Huemer följande:

In my experience, most people appear to be convinced that anarchism is obvious nonsense, an idea that can be refuted within 30 seconds with minimal reflection. This was roughly my attitude before I knew anything about the theory. It is also my experience that those who harbor this attitude have no idea what anarchists actually think – how anarchists think society should function or how they respond to the 30-second objections. Anarchists face a catch-22: most people will not give anarchism a serious hearing because they are convinced that the position is crazy; they are convinced that the position is crazy because they do not understand it; and they do not understand it because they will not give it a serious hearing. I therefore ask the reader not to give up reading this book merely because of its conclusion. The author is neither stupid nor crazy nor evil; he has a reasoned account of how a stateless society might function. Whether or not you ultimately accept the account, it is very likely that you will find it to have been worth considering.

I de efterföljande kapitlen visar Huemer att det finns tyngd bakom dessa ord. Den anarkism som Huemer förespråkar är väl genomtänkt och hans resonemang slår inte dubbla volter för att hantera de moraliska positioner som är vanliga att inta gällande politisk filosofi.

The Problem of Political Authority består av två delar. I den första delen, ”The Illusion of Authority”, går Huemer igenom vanliga strategier för att filosofiskt motivera politisk auktoritet. Den andra delen, ”Society without Authority”, är mer normativ. I denna del blandas empiri med ekonomisk teori medan det rent filosofiska snarare är en underliggande ton. Det är också i denna andra del som boken är som svagast eftersom Huemer i stor utsträckning förlitar sig på tidigare teoretiker. Här finns väldigt lite ”nytt” för den som redan är insatt i libertariansk teori, medan den som inte är insatt säkerligen har följdfrågor på argumenten. Bokens allra sista kapitel, ”From Democracy to Anarchy”, är dock intressant inte bara ur ett filosofiskt perspektiv utan även ur ett realpolitiskt. Huemer visar hur många av de samhälleliga förändringar han själv förespråkar redan har påbörjats, vilket förstås också hans kritiker kan ha nytta av att uppmärksamma.

Det är i bokens första del som politisk auktoritet som sådan ligger under den filosofiska luppen. Både historiska och nutida teorier granskas och förkastas med hänvisning till ”sunt förnuft”. Den klassiska idén om att auktoritet legitimeras genom ett ”socialt kontrakt” avvisas just eftersom det inte finns något faktiskt sådant kontrakt. Något starkare bäring har den hypotetiska kontraktsteorin, och Huemer gör upp med såväl John Rawls som T.M. Scanlon. Ett hypotetiskt kontrakt, menar Huemer, är etiskt irrelevant – oavsett hur rättvist, skäligt eller opartiskt ett sådant kontrakt skulle vara medför det inte rätten att tvinga andra att acceptera det. Inte heller följer en sådan rätt av att beslutet är demokratiskt fattat. Huemer tar också den teoretiska modellen om deliberativ demokrati i beaktande och pekar bland annat på dess praktiska orimlighet som skäl att avfärda påståendet att modellen legitimerar auktoritet.

Idén att jämlikhet med rätta motiverar politisk auktoritet sägs inte kunna trumfa individens självägandeskap, och jämlikhet självt sägs strida med idén om politisk legitimitet. I detta kapitel ligger Huemer närmre den klassiska högerlibertarianismen än vad han gör i andra, men hans argument kan inte helt lätt avvisas. Huemer går vidare till konsekventialismen och ifrågasätter statens förmåga att generera faktiska förmåner, och varför en sådan förmåga skulle påverka individens skyldigheter att erkänna politisk auktoritet. Slutligen görs en psykologisk och historisk analys av attityder gentemot auktoritet, vilket Huemer sammanfattar som följer:

A review of psychological and historical evidence concerning human attitudes to authority suggests two important lessons: first, most individuals have strong pro-authority biases that render their intuitions about authority untrustworthy. Second, institutions of authority are extremely dangerous, and the undermining of trust in authority is therefore highly socially beneficial.

The Problem of Political Authority gräver inte djupare i idéerna om individens exklusiva självägandeskap, och inte heller ligger dess styrka i hur Huemer balanserar olika moraliska värderingar mot varandra. Det är tanken att de så väl underbyggda teorierna om politisk auktoritet är oförenliga med vanligt sunt förnuft som gör Michael Huemers bok intressant.

Den som är intresserad av politik borde lägga Michael Huemers bok till sin läslista. Huemer har en förmåga att få de mest extrema ståndpunkterna att låta förnuftiga, faktiskt helt vardagliga. Anarkism är helt enkelt den simpla idén om att folk inte har moralisk rätt att bestämma över varandra. Kanske borde anarki vara ett samtalsämne vid köksbordet, om så bara för att ge perspektiv på realpolitiken – om anarki är ett samhällsskick vi kan enkelt kan föreställa oss blir tanken på hur stort inflytande politiken idag har över vår vardag absurd. Eller åtminstone någonting som är värt att låta det sunda förnuftet fundera på.

* Jag använder begreppet libertarianism i dess bredaste bemärkelse som omfattar alla slags idéer om en liten eller ingen stat.

Institutions and the GDP

claudio Liberty ,

Just playing around with the MIT’s Pantheon and the Development Economics (click on it to enlarge the plot).

Well, I know correlation is not the end of the (hi)story. Maybe it’s just the starting point. The “lpib2000” is the log of the GDP in 2000 (used in several papers, I know) and the “panteon_rank” is just as it says.

So, if you think this is interesting, well, you saw it first here. ^_ ^

Quick thoughts on Mexico and trade

Brandon Christensen Current Events ,

I just got back from a crazy trip in Mexico a couple of days ago, so my presence has been limited here. I hitched a ride down with a buddy of mine (I wanted to get down to LA and thought that Mexico would be nice pit stop).

My buddy’s van broke down outside of Ensenada and it took us a while to get out of there, but not too much longer than it would here in the US. Our problem had more to do with language barriers than with getting parts or getting ripped off. When we finally got to a mechanic shop it was about four o’clock, and the shop closed at 5.

They sent a guy out with us to do work on-site (we tagged along in the company’s truck and there was no charge for gasoline) and about a half-hour to five he called it quits and towed the van (himself) to the shop, where they told us it would be ready about 1 PM the next day.

As typical gringos do, we showed up at 1 they had everything ready for us. They even repaired the leaky radiator at no extra charge.

I think this is a small, anecdotal story that shows just how incredibly beneficial economic integration has been for both the US and Mexico. Imagine that there was no NAFTA in place when my buddy’s van broke down. My story would be radically different. I may have been “stuck” in Mexico waiting two or even three weeks for the right part to be shipped to that particular shop from some parochial partsmaker in Mexico.

Instead, I got to hang out in Ensenada and enjoy the beautiful weather and wonderful people who live in that city.

I think there needs to be more integration between the two countries. Dr Delacroix has a co-authored piece on how we can do just that, although I think that there is no reason not to have a full-fledged union.

I Used to Be French:….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events

 I Used to Be French: an  Immature Autobiography

Soon for sale from my blog: factsmatter.wordpress.com

Instituições e Cultura do Capitalismo de Compadres

claudio Liberty , , , ,

Lá, em meu blog, um breve comentário sobre o novo índice da The Economist.

Диванные войска медленного реагирования

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events ,

Ситуация на Украине, какой бы драматической и “исторической” она ни была – в любом случае проще чем нам преподносят ее в новостях и по телевизору. Конечно, у России и США, как основных “противоборствующих” наций в данном принципиальном вопросе – принципиально противоположные взгляды на ситуацию и на признание легитимности тех или иных властей. Все знали заранее, что так будет, и никто не удивляется. Как бы наши руководители не жали друг другу руки и не заглядывали друг другу в глаза – где-то на подсознательном уровне, мы для вас все равно “коммунистическая зараза”, а вы для нас “империя зла”. Это сложившаяся исторически реакция двух мировых держав, которые находятся на одной планете, всегда конкурировали и длительное время пребывали в состоянии “холодной войны” – с этим ничего не поделаешь, и это не повод для ругани или взаимных обид и оскорблений. Разумеется, мир ушел далеко вперед, и я, например, не чувствую себя овцой в стаде волков, являясь единственным русским представителем сообщества, которое в большинстве своем поддерживает позицию официального Белого Дома, Пентагона, или что-вы-там-еще-поддерживаете. Я просто знаю, что умные и думающие люди не опустятся до уровня хамства и оскорблений только потому что я не по всем пунктам разделяю позицию Обамы, или потому что я из России.

Я отвлекся. Ситуация на Украине не может быть такой серьезной, как она описывается в новостях со всеми этими внезапными скандалами, интригами и расследованиями. Однако обилие информации обоих направлений в интернете, зачастую публикующихся в непроверенных источниках – это настоящее поле боя для бойцов “диванных войск”. “Диванные войска” – это шуточное название троллей и просто очень глупых и упертых людей, которые с жаром бросаются на баррикады в комментариях, призывают к противоправным действиям, разжигают межнациональную рознь, и являются специалистами во всех областях и по всем направлениям. Разумеется, такие люди очень легко вычисляются, и к ним применимо обыкновенное анти-тролль правило: “не кормите тролля”. Практически любая статья во всех российских интернет-газетах, имеющая отношение к ситуации на Украине в рекордно низкие сроки собирает по 150-500 комментариев от таких вот “солдат”, которые, тщательно скрывая свой юный возраст или какие-либо комплексы и неполноценности строят из себя специалистов по внешней и внутренней политике, ветеранов всех видов десантных войск, морских пехотинцев и геополитических комментаторов. Читать подобные записи смешно. Думаю в ваших странах сейчас похожая ситуация. Однако нередко такие комментаторы способны посеять панику среди тех, кому попался на глаза их комментарий – что и является их основной целью. Друзья, не поддавайтесь на провокации!