- The Egyptian Coup and Political Islam: Daniel Larison takes neoconservative David Brooks to task for supporting the coup and explains why the coup will only empower Islamism. Highly recommended.
- In which countries is ‘crude libertarianism’ most and least true? Tyler Cowen dared to ask the question, but it is his ‘comments’ section (which I am extremely jealous of) that is truly worth reading through. Grab a cup of coffee.
- This is why I love Murray Rothbard.
- Lies, Slander and Corey Robin. Philosopher Kevin Vallier explains, in depth, the Leftist penchant for dishonesty. Imagine if an associate professor (a young professor without tenure) with a libertarian or a conservative bent wrote something about Rawls or Keynes that was as fact-free and fallacious as the piece Robin wrote about Hayek. Don’t condemn. Don’t get angry. Just imagine.
- I’ve been listening to a lot of Sonic Youth lately (you can Google ’em yourself!).
Author: Brandon Christensen
From the Comments: Open Borders, Immigration and the Sociology of Gradualism
Dr Delacroix takes issue with my woefully inadequate summary of his work on open borders in the Independent Review. He writes:
Small yet somewhat important correction: In our piece in the Independent Review, Nikiforov and I argue for somewhat more than a guest worker program and our reference is not a to a EU “guest worker program.” (I am not sure whether there is one.) Rather, we argue that little harm would be done and, as we see now, much harm avoided, by simply agreeing that citizens of Canada, the US and Mexico (especially Mexico) can freely move across the common borders of the three countries. including for the long term. What we have seen in the EU for now more than twenty years shows that there is no reason to attach this free movement principle to citizenship.
That you may work, open a business, pay taxes in Mexico does not logically imply that you may vote in Mexican elections. That you may not does not deprive you of any “rights.” As an immigrant into Mexico you knew what you were doing. You moved under your own power. It’s unlikely anyone even invited you. If you crashed the party, you have no moral right to complain that the food is not kosher (or hallal, you decide).
Several years later, I think that the only reason for this insistence on tying residence to citizenship is the Democratic Party’s totalitarian aspirations. Observing the drift in the Obama administration toward non-legality clarified the picture for me, personally. (I am not speaking for my co-author, here. He just spent three years in Russia; I will ask him.)
Historical precedents matter, and a preference for gradualism may make it desirable -in this country- to transition through a somewhat familiar “guest worker program” rather than directly decree open borders for the citizens of the three NAFTA countries.
I am for whatever works but we must keep concepts distinct from each other: A tomato is not really a fruit, not really.
PS I am glad Notes On Liberty publishes my essays (and even my stories) and that it links to my blog. When I grow up, I want a readership like Notes’ readership!
No Capitalism Means No Peace: Egypt Edition
I just briefly touched on this in an earlier post, but I thought I’d bring in another perspective to shore up my argument. Fraser Nelson, writing in the UK’s Telegraph, explains some of the important differences between freedom and democracy:
While the West was celebrating Egypt joining the comity of democratic nations, Egyptians themselves were sliding into an economic abyss, with terrifying shortages of fuel, food and security. Sectarian violence has been thrown into the mix, with persecution of the Coptic Christians followed by Sunni v Shia strife. The murder rate trebled. Things were falling apart, which is why the generals were welcomed back.
But the Arab Spring was a demand for freedom, not necessarily democracy – and the distinction between the two is crucial. Take, for example, the case of Mohammed Bouazizi, who started this chain of events by burning himself alive on a Tunisian street market two years ago. As his family attest, he had no interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell, and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it was to capitalism […]
The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little appetite for further explanation. But […] this was a protest for the basic freedom to own and acquire ras el mel, or capital.
Read the rest. I think it is pertinent to note that liberalism (the institutional face of capitalism) was murdered by British imperialism in its infancy (“Egyptian freedom means no more British imperialism, therefore…”).
The people of the Middle East will not get out of the rut they are in until there is a revolution of ideas in their societies. The demand for liberal ideas is certainly there, but Western imperialism provides a convenient scapegoat for authoritarians in the region. Western imperialism is different from Russian, or Persian, or Turkish, imperialism because the Arab public holds the West to a higher standard than other states. It’s time we started doing the same: remove all troops and military equipment owned and operated by the United States from the region.
This will lead to the rapid disappearance of the Islamist monarchies our government protects, and will open up the region to important dialogue. As long as the US military remains in the region, though, the Middle East will not taste freedom. Imperialism is antithetical to freedom, as both the society funding imperial projects and the society being forced to receive imperial projects are coerced in the name of central planning.
See also “Moral Markets and Immoral ‘Capitalism’” and “The Hidden Vice of Capitalism” for more in-depth arguments about the term “capitalism” and what it actually means.
The Immigration “Reform” Bill: RINOs, Labor Unions and a Libertarian Alternative
Nobody is happy with the current immigration reform package being shoved through Congress at the moment. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the bill, or even about immigration itself (except that immigrants make good drinking buddies), so I’ll just outsource some ideas and arguments I’ve read elsewhere. First up is our very own Jacques Delacroix, an immigrant from France, who writes:
The main objective of the bill is to install in this country an unbeatable Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. The intent is to turn this polity into a one-party system. Everyone assumes, of course, that the electoral benefits of the bill will redound to the Democratic Party. If you don’t believe it, conduct a simple mental experiment: Tell yourself under what circumstances the implementation of the present bill, or of one similar to it, would cause a net increase in the number of Republican voters?
At best, at the very best, the admission of ten million formerly illegal immigrants and of their dependents would have no effect on American electoral politics. There is no scenario whereas it would help the conservative cause.
New immigrants vote Democrat. Immigrants from societies with authoritarian traditions vote Left unless their societies have gone through violent purging convulsions such as happened in “communist” Eastern Europe in the nineties. The idea that the government should leave people alone is a sophisticated one. It does not grow naturally out of the experience of oppression.
Indeed. Is this analysis wrong? If so, feel free to elaborate why you think so in the ‘comments’ section. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Angelo Codevilla, an immigrant from Italy (and one of Dr Delacroix’s fellow academics), also elaborates on the bill:
Beginning in the 1960s, increasingly dandified native youths shunned agricultural and service jobs. So did the new legal immigrants. This made room for a growing number of laborers from Mexico who came and went freely and seasonally across a basically un-patrolled 2000 mile border. These were not “immigrants,” but rather mostly young men who yearned to get back to their families. They did not come to stay, much less take part in American politics. America came to rely on them to the point that, were a magic wand to eliminate them, whole industries would stop, including California agriculture.
US labor unions however, supported by the Democratic Party, pressed the US government to restrict this illegal flow. While until the 1980s, the US-Mexican border was patrolled by fewer than 1000 agents – nearly all at a handful of crossing points – that number has grown to some 25,000 in our time. As the border began to tighten, making it impossible for the Mexicans to come and go, many brought their families and stayed put in the US between work seasons […]
The controversy over illegal immigration did not touch the core of the immigration problem, namely the Immigration Act of 1965 and our burgeoning welfare system. Nor did it deal with the fact that the illegal flow of Mexicans was really about labor, not immigration, because most Mexican “illegals” had not come with the intention of staying. A well-crafted guest-worker program would give most of them what they want most [emphasis mine – bc].
Hence the “illegal immigration problem” is an artifact of the US political system: The Democratic Party wants the Mexicans as voters, the labor unions want the Mexicans as members rather than as competitors, and the Chamber of Commerce wants them for as low a wage as it can enforce.
Codevilla has much, much more here. Codevilla attributes the US immigration system to the corporate state, but I am unsure if Dr Delacroix feels the same way.
Delacroix’s piece, like Codevilla’s, also brings attention to an alternative guest worker program. Delacroix, in an article for the Independent Review, points out that the guest worker program has worked extremely well in the pre-central bank European Union (I am unsure if this is still the case).
A guest worker program would eliminate the political implications associated with “illegal immigration reform” and, as a result, enhance the economic benefits of seasonal labor flows coming from Mexico. The Cato Institute has recently come out with a policy report detailing how a guest worker program might be implemented. As I’ve stated before, the Cato Institute is one of three think tanks I actually trust (the other two being Brookings and Hoover).
Life Unplugged
Hey all,
I’ve been enjoying LA. I finished up 1493 about a week ago and can’t recommend it enough.
Chapters 8 and 9 – on the impact that Africans and Asians had on the New World – are especially fascinating . Mann essentially destroys every myth about race that has ever been devised, but does so in a way that is not condescending (Politically Correct) and not reactionary.
I’ve since been slowly working through Mastering Space, but it’s a real daisy and I think the only people who take it seriously are Marxist-oriented geographers and anthropologists.
I picked up a couple more books with graduation money (Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, Edwin Wilmsen’s Land Filled with Flies and Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West), but most of my time will be spent going through Volume 2 of Armen Alchian’s collected works (the volume on property rights and economic behavior), finishing up Said’s Orientalism (again) and studying for the GRE.
The coup in Egypt was predictable. Imperial Britain essentially strangled liberalism in Egypt just after its birth. What we have in Egypt is a large society with no political alternatives: either you can pick the Islamists (and Islamism has nothing to do with Islam, of course) or you can pick the national socialists (i.e. the fascists). Without a regime based on private property rights, individualism and free trade, Egypt will never know tolerance, prosperity or liberty. Democracy by itself can do nothing for Egyptians.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Zionism’s Colonial Roots
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.
Read the rest, it’s very good throughout.
Around the Web
- The Reality of Feel-Good Government. James Bovard on “federal service” programs
- Will Wilkinson says “I smoke pot and I like it” (there’s more to the piece than just a confession)
- Map of police officers per 100,000 people in Europe
- Filming North Korea’s Film Industry
- Stephen Walt weighs in on the Snowden affair: What, me worry?
- Sex in the Arab World. An interview with Shereen El Feki
Edward Snowden is a Commie
So says Max Boot at Commentary, a neoconservative publication that specializes in lies and slander to further the imperialist cause (there is, if you think about it, no other way to further a cause such as theirs). No, really, read it yourself.
Boot tries to pretend that the NSA was only spying on citizens of foreign states, rather than on Americans, but this is laughable on its face, especially given the recent IRS scandal (where an august body of bureaucrats charged with collecting taxes suddenly finds itself targeting conservative political groups during a close presidential election season).
I’ve read elsewhere that Snowden was inspired by Ron Paul. If this is true, then Ron Paul is even more of a bad ass than I thought. The only people on my campus who do not like Ron Paul are hardline Democrats and hardline Republicans. But just think: very few young people identify with a specific political party. The reasons for this vary, but for the most part young people are much more independent thinkers and have yet to enter the workforce. Once they enter the workforce, of course, they will begin to vote for a party line, but kids in college who already identify with a political party tend to constitute tomorrow’s fascists: they are condescending, gullible and believe that the political system is the best way to change society for the better.
American imperialism is dead. Once the Obama administration begins arming al-Qaeda, and the media begins to really throw Obama under the bus, the idea that US government can magically make the world a better place by bombing, arming and invading other countries will find its rightful place in the dunce’s corner of American politics once again. In the mean time, we need more heroes like Snowden to expose the horrific abuses of liberty that Washington has been pursuing under the guise of wars on terror, drugs and poverty over the last half century.
The Decline of the State?
From the Atlantic:
Health care for the world’s poorest and human rights for the oppressed as private-sector businesses? Where there’s money to be made, a commercial alternative will emerge. But core state enterprises are subject to increasing non-commercial competition, as well. Many in southern Lebanon willingly receive social services and other incidents of modern government from the terrorist group Hezbollah rather than from the official government. Al-Qaeda presents many Islamic radicals with an even more extreme — and arguably more effective — non-territorial alternative to the nation-state for purposes of waging war.
The whole thing is interesting throughout, though I don’t agree with the author that virtual states are somehow replacing traditional states. I don’t think we’ll see the disappearance of the state anytime soon either. What will happen, I think, is that governments will become more minarchist in nature as markets simply overwhelm the crummy services that governments essentially force on people using their own extracted money.
Around the Web
I apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I have been reading a lot of books the old-fashioned way, chasing girls down so that I can smell their hair and generally just enjoying life post-graduation.
- Will Wilkinson blogs about the drug war’s inherent racism at Democracy in America.
- Rebecca Liao writes about Democracy in China for Dissent.
- Randy Barnett on the future of federalism after the “gay marriage” SCOTUS decision.
- Uganda versus South Korea. An interesting take on development by Andrew Mwenda.
- The Economist has a great piece on the violence in Turkey.
- Fascinating ‘comments’ thread on Hayek and Pinochet. I am going to dedicate a long piece to this thread shortly. American Leftists are just classical liberals who have come to think of themselves as superior to their neighbors. Leftists in Europe and Latin America are murderous.
Leon Hadar on Obama’s Syria Decision
President Obama, unlike his predecessor, is not promoting democracy in Syria. He is instead pretending to play the game of power balancing, hoping that neither side in the war there wins, and instead allowing both to lose.
Read the whole thing. There is not much new information in the piece, but then again hawks in the US have known about the situation in Middle East for decades and have still advocated stupid policies. Nevertheless, Hadar’s account contains some brilliant rhetoric that I think may be of use to readers and writers that fight for liberty.
Buddhist Leaders Call on Myanmar to Expel Muslims
From the New York Times:
After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a rant against what he called “the enemy” — the country’s Muslim minority.
“You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.
There is much more in the piece, including this:
[…] images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.
Ashin Wirathu denies any role in the riots. But his critics say that at the very least his anti-Muslim preaching is helping to inspire the violence.
What began last year on the fringes of Burmese society has grown into a nationwide movement whose agenda now includes boycotts of Muslim-made goods. Its message is spreading through regular sermons across the country that draw thousands of people and through widely distributed DVDs of those talks. Buddhist monasteries associated with the movement are also opening community centers and a Sunday school program for 60,000 Buddhist children nationwide.
This bad news is, of course, contradictory to everything Dr Delacroix and other imperialists have written on the subject of religious extremism. Imperialists in this century like to pretend that Islam has suddenly appeared to take the place of communism as the preeminent threat to peace and prosperity in the world. They point to violence, poverty and state-sponsored oppression as examples of Islam’s inherent incompatibility with the liberal world order.
This is all anecdotal evidence. There is nothing inherently violent about Islam. All religions are equally authoritarian at their core.
I pull two things from this piece: 1) it reaffirms my commitment to secular government and 2) it reconfirms my skepticism of democracy. These two things go hand-in-hand, of course.
A government that decides to adhere to one religion is necessarily going to oppress those it does not sponsor. This is easy enough for our Western readers to understand, but it is an argument that does not have nearly enough clout in the non-Western world (you could perhaps exclude China from this list, and India has essentially been Westernized; New Delhi even has its own condescending policy towards its indigenous minorities).
The democratic aspect, too, should be familiar to Western readers. Democracy needs restraints, and lots of them. The reasons for this are practically infinite, but suffice it to say here going to war in the name of democracy is a foolish, morally horrendous thing to do. The fact that imperialists today often shroud their lust for power in terms of democracy speaks volumes about the immoral nature of their worldview. (h/t Eugene Volokh)
What I’ve Been Reading
Hello all. Apologies in advance for not posting more often since graduation. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, rather than stuff on the internet, so I haven’t had much to link to lately.
Here is a list of a few books I have been working on:
- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by the science journalist Charles C Mann. I know I’ve blogged about this book before, but I’ve finally got a little bit of free time to hunker down and read the whole thing. I’m about halfway through and it’s really good.
- Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy by the Marxist political geographers John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge. This is a pretty crummy book, but it was recommended because of some good critiques of the IMF and the World Bank that it supposedly has. I’ll keep ploughing through and hope for the best.
- The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by the historian Simon Schama. This is a very well-written book about Dutch culture (not Culture) in the seventeenth century and so far I have not been disappointed. Schama eschews the political and economic aspects of the Dutch republic in favor of examining the everyday lives of its citizens.
- Democracy in Botswana which is edited by John D Holm and Patrick Molutsi. I picked this up for a research project I was doing last quarter and have not been able to let it go yet. It brings together a compendium of talks given at a conference held in Gaborone in 1989 to assess Botswana’s current status in the world, in sub-Saharan Africa and according to the citizens of Botswana.
Of the four books, I’d recommend 1493 to the intelligent layman, but the other three are definitely tough slogging.
I’m Done
Whew. Finals are over. Expect a lot more from me over the next little while. Nothing tonight, of course (I’m gonna sleeeep), but more is coming.
Thanks for all of your thoughtful comments and criticisms. I’ve got a link for the evening, and it’s an old article (2001) from the Economist. An excerpt:
The affinity of totalitarianism and economic isolation was obvious in the case of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe; it is still plain today in the case of North Korea, say. But democracies are capable of oppression too. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that integration is undesirable merely because it limits the power of government, even if the government concerned is democratic. One needs to recognise that some constraints on democracy are desirable, and then to ask whether the constraints imposed by markets are too tight.
These issues are rarely, if ever, addressed by the critics of globalisation: it is simpler to deplore the notion of “profits before people”. The sceptics either insist, or regard it as too obvious even to mention, that the will of the people, democratically expressed, must always prevail. This is amazingly naive. Even the most elementary account of democracy recognises the need for checks and balances, including curbs on the majoritarian “will of the people”. Failing those, democracies are capable of tyranny over minorities.
The sceptics are terribly keen on “the people”. Yet the idea that citizens are not individuals with different goals and preferences, but an undifferentiated body with agreed common interests, defined in opposition to other monolithic interests such as “business” or “foreigners”, is not just shallow populism, it is proto-fascism. It is self-contradictory, as well. The sceptics would not hesitate to call for “the people” to be overruled if, for instance, they voted for policies that violated human rights, or speeded the extermination of endangered species, or offended against other values the sceptics regard as more fundamental than honouring the will of the majority.
Read the whole thing. I don’t agree with everything in it, but in my opinion it is a damning indictment of the anti-globalist movement. A return to the good old days of yesteryear would have catastrophic consequences for the world. See, especially, Dr Delacroix’s writings on the virtuous benefits of globalization and the self-defeating measures of protectionism.
Eye Candy
It’s just beneath the fold…
Notes On Liberty 