Author: Brandon Christensen

From the Comments: Federalism, Local and Global

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From a post of mine on Native American sovereignty, and prompted by the thoughts of readers, I muse a little more:

Hank,

Thanks for the great link. My few thoughts, I am not so sure that Native Americans would choose sovereignty over membership into the federation currently in place. I lived near a reservation in northern California (and I’m sure you have the same sort of deal in Montana) and have some fairly extensive contact with Navajo Indians as well (they prefer the term ‘Indian’ to ‘Native American’, so long as they know you). These are people whose ancestors have fought for the US in all of its major wars over the past century. They are intensely patriotic.

What I think would emerge from working with the Indian tribes is a system where all of the major reservations were turned into regular states (like Montana and California) and the minor ones would just disappear. Indians would then be full-fledged American citizens but could still do what they liked culturally with their heritage, much as everybody else does.

Again, this is what I think would happen. If they wanted full-fledged sovereignty we should grant it (and include generous reparations for stolen property), but I think everybody would opt in for a spot in the federal system we have (despite its shortcomings, it’s still a very, very good system).

This leads to me to an odd-but-perhaps-pertinent musing: I am not so sure that the majority of Europeans, South Koreans and Japanese would want our troops to leave their states. Hear me out on this. Our military essentially provides for the defense of these states, and as a result their these societies are able to use resources that would otherwise go to military expenditures for welfare programs. As Americans, we can see why this is a bad thing, but the states we occupy militarily don’t necessarily think that it is such a bad thing.

As a result, I would be open to our continued occupation of these states under one condition: that traveling, working, starting a business, living, moving, etc., etc. between the US and the states whom we subsidize militarily is as easy to do as it is here in the US. So, for example, moving/etc. from Connecticut to Hesse or Nankaido would be as easy as moving/etc. from Texas to South Dakota. If this were to happen, then I could accept a continued US presence in these regions. What do you think?

Update (6/11): I was inspired to bring this up because of an old post on this subject by Dr Foldvary in the Progress Report. Do be sure to check it out.

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Just Testing…

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…the new link to our Facebook page. You guys can check it out here.

PS: How Companies Learn Your Secrets.

Cognitive Blocks and Libertarianism

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Last year Brian Gothberg, who was lecturing at a summer seminar I attended in 2009, left the following comment in response to a post about media coverage and Austrian economics:

I think there’s a perceptual or cognitive block, that simply makes it hard for many people to see government activity in the foreground of the story, as an actor which actively and (often) arbitrarily changes outcomes. It reminds of the recent Brian Greene programs on cosmology on PBS. In one, he compares the treatment of space, through most of scientific history, as simply being the unadorned theater stage, upon which the truly interesting things actually happen. It’s only later that Einstein (using Riemann’s math) described space as having positive, unambiguous characteristics. After Einstein brought space itself into the foreground, you could make statements about particular things that space did do, and other particular things that space did not do.

Another example: at a gathering of friends with children, my wife and I were observing a small boy (3-ish) who kept biting the other children. When it came to tears, parents would come in and intervene, and scold him. Later, we watched the same parents — who were baffled at the boy’s biting — laugh and giggle as the father playfully bit his son. Apparently, nobody had ever brought the father’s behavior into the foreground, for their scrutiny, as a possible influence on the son’s problem. Sometimes, the obvious does stare people in the face. I think that the way we describe the role and actions of government, in the press and schools, goes a long way to explain this cognitive block. Libertarianism is nothing like common sense; not nearly.

I was reminded of this as I read the following 2008 piece by Roger Lowenstein in the New York Times, where he documents the regulatory regime that was built by the state in the years leading up to the Great Recession. Check this out: Continue reading →

Updates and Accolades

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Hello all. I’ve been busy lately. Will hopefully have some cool stuff starting next weekend or so.

In the mean time, The American Conservative recently highlighted Notes On Liberty for being a libertarian blog that is actually worth reading.

Also, I happened to win the first ever annual monthly blog contest now being put on by the Foundation for Economic Education. This is a huge honor, and I probably would not have pursued it without your readership and, more importantly, your critiques over the last year and a half.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but RealClearHistory also gave Notes On Liberty a shout-out for some of our work on colonialism back in February.

All three organizations are well worth adding to your daily reading routine. I’ll be graduating from college next weekend. My school’s quarterly A&E magazine did a feature on me and you can check that out here.

Logical Fallacies in the Press

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Hank blogs about yet another hit job on libertarianism in the press, this time coming from some hack named Michael Lind in Salon. Unfortunately, the whole thing is based upon a logical fallacy that is buried in the seventh paragraph of the piece. Lind wonders aloud:

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?

This is a basic logical fallacy known as (in Latin) argumentum a silentio, or an argument from silence. An argument from silence is a conclusion drawn based on the absence of evidence. Logical fallacies coming from the enemies of freedom are not always to be ignored, and Hank did us all a service by trying to earnestly straighten out Lind’s fallacious reasoning, but at the same time, we know from careful research that most arguments are based off of dishonesty, plain and simple.

Here is the upside, though: as Dr Gibson points out, the fact that the press is even paying attention to libertarian arguments suggests that more savagery from the Left is coming our way. Given that the Left is morally and ideologically bankrupt, this should serve as some small comfort to those of us who yearn for a less paternalistic and condescending society.

Addendum (6/6): Will Wilkinson has more over at Democracy in America. Tom Woods chimes in as well.

Maryland v. King: Scalia’s Noble Dissent

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I’m definitely not Antonin Scalia’s biggest fan, but – as the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson writes – “if there’s ever a time when Antonin Scalia really rises to the occasion, it’s when he serves as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience.”

His dissent from the recent SCOTUS ruling on Maryland v King is, like the somewhat recent ObamaCare ruling, a glimmer of hope amidst all the despair. For those of you who are wondering, Maryland v. King is about whether or not the government has the right to extract your DNA – once you are arrested (but not booked or taken to jail) – and place it into a national search database.

And, in case you are further wondering, the distinction I drew between being arrested and being booked or taken to jail is an important one. This is because cops can arrest you without ever using handcuffs. All they have to do is utter the magic words: “you’re under arrest.” So, as an example, a cop can pull you over for having a broken taillight and if he doesn’t like your attitude he can simply arrest you. You don’t even have to get out of your car.

Here is a breakdown: Continue reading →

Capitalism: Making Lives Miserable Since at least the Late 18th Century

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Brad Plumer of The Washington Post has a great post up on 31 different charts “that will destroy your faith in humanity.” Here was one of my favorites:

After reading through the charts, come back and let me know what you think of them. For more optimistic garbage, be sure to check this out.

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Istanbul: The Protests

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A moderately Islamist government has been in power in Turkey for about 10 years now. Over the weekend it faced its first stern test. One brave Turkish blogger has decided to reach out to the rest of the world:

No newspaper, no television channel was there to report the protest. It was a complete media black out.

But the police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray.  They chased the crowds out of the park.

In the evening of May 31st the number of protesters multiplied. So did the number of police forces around the park. Meanwhile local government of Istanbul shut down all the ways leading up to Taksim square where the Gezi Park is located. The metro was shut down, ferries were cancelled, roads were blocked.

Yet more and more people made their way up to the center of the city by walking.

They came from all around Istanbul. They came from all different backgrounds, different ideologies, different religions. They all gathered to prevent the demolition of something bigger than the park:

The right to live as honorable citizens of this country.

Read the rest. Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s best media outlets, has been doing an excellent job covering events after the fact. Their English-language site is here, and I recommend reading the site on a daily basis (even after the violence is over).

Here is my two cents: the Erdogan government (the Islamist one) put one too many straws upon the camel’s back. Ankara simply took too many liberties when it came to regulating the cultural and material life of the Turkish people. Too many blasphemy laws and too many clothing restrictions, coupled with too poor an economic performance made these protests inevitable. The harsh crackdown on an otherwise free people ensured violence and larger protests.

By the way, Turkey’s first post-Ottoman government, headed by the ardent secularist and Europhile, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, also insisted on regulating the cultural and material lives of Turkish citizens, so Islam has nothing to do with this (check out our many discussions we’ve had here on the blog on this).

Rather, the “authoritarianism lite” of the Turkish state has more to do with its status as a post-colonial imperial state and a Cold War pawn than it does with any inherent cultural traits of the Turkish people or of the Islamic faith.

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Liberalization in India, and NOT Just in Markets

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Shikha Dalmia, of Reason, has a new piece up in the Wall Street Journal on India’s harassment problem:

I’ve never met an Indian woman—rich or poor, upper or lower caste, pretty or homely, young or middle-age—who hasn’t been harassed […] Unlike rape and sex-selective abortion, which represent a genuine devaluing of women, sexual harassment in India is, I believe, an expression not of the power of Indian men but of their helplessness. It’s a pathetic attempt to have a sexual encounter, no matter how meaningless and evanescent. Its real cause is free-floating male libido with no socially acceptable outlet.

India’s sexual mores and institutions are rooted in a pastoral past, when people died before 50, so marriages between minors were the norm. Families in villages would betroth their children, at birth sometimes, and have a formal ceremony after both attained puberty, when the girl went to live with her husband’s family. This arrangement, now banned, had many horrendous downsides, but it produced an organic harmony between the sexual needs of individuals and the social expectations of monogamy and chastity […]

What would work [for easing India’s harassment problem]? Nothing short of transforming India’s puritanical culture and giving men and women more freedom to forge sexually mature relationships outside of marriage.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know how much good liberalizing India’s sexual mores would be without first more liberalization in markets. I often think of the US’s own problems when it comes to the sexual revolution of the 1960s: more STDs, more unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, and more costs associated with public health. Another downside was the attempt, by certain feminists, to destroy the very libido of men that Dalmia recommends liberalizing. The attempts by these authoritarians can still be felt today, especially in American universities (see Ken Masugi’s thoughtful piece on this problem).

Clean B****oles Becoming A Rarity in Socialist Venezuela

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I know this has been making the rounds in the blogsophere, but it’s still worth highlighting: Venezuela is facing shortages for a number of basic consumer goods, including toilet paper. Naturally, the socialists who have been in power for the past 14 years have tried to pin the blame on the opposition and the United States. From Hurriyet (“Turkey’s leading English daily”):

The South American OPEC member has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has wrestled with periodic shortages of several consumer goods since price controls were imposed in 2003 under the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

“We have consistently denounced the strategy of hoarding and speculation, and the campaign of terror that has spread among the people, forcing them to buy compulsively and fearfully,” ruling party lawmaker Jose Avila said.

The government has long accused the center-right opposition and the United States of plotting to undermine Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution.

Indeed. And how does the socialist government of Venezuela plan to counter the chronic shortages that price controls have created? Why, with more government programs of course:

Venezuela’s National Assembly on Tuesday approved a $79 million credit to import toilet paper and other personal hygiene products to relieve shortages in the petroleum-rich state.

There are more damning indictments of socialism as well, though none are explicit. In other news, I always smirk whenever I hear an ardent supporter of the current thief-in-chief here in the States try to pin the bad economy on the Bush administration’s mistakes. It’s been, what, five years now?

A Possible Explanation for Greece’s Economic Woes

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And one that does not have to do with Athens’ infamous bookkeeping practices. From the New York Times:

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

Yikes. There is more here. I highly recommend it.

Forget fiscal and monetary policy, Greece needs to instate a decent property rights regime before it can become a wealthy and healthy property-owning democracy.

This should not be surprising for a couple of reasons, but only if one is somewhat familiar with the modern history of the region. The Balkans has been, until very recently, under the thumb of various empires governed from afar (Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian). Once independence from foreign despots was attained (through war) in the nineteenth century, these states then had to survive more war (World Wars), endure more occupation (through the same world wars), and then navigate their young states through the Cold War (where dictatorship was sometimes preferable to ideological considerations, and sometimes integral to ideological considerations). In addition, Balkan states have had to constantly deal with threats from each other as well.

If anything, the inclusion of these states into the European Union is probably the best thing to happen to them in a long, long, long time. It is unfortunate that bureaucrats in Brussels decided to hastily implement a single currency without first ensuring that each of the member states possessed the institutions necessary for protecting clear and well-defined property rights.

Update: On the other hand, entry into the EU was probably (correctly) seen as a way to strengthen institutions associated with protecting property rights.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

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That’s the subject of a fascinating account of life in China through the eyes of a dissident in this last week’s Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

Put another way, the conventional notion that the modern Chinese system combines political authoritarianism with economic liberalism is mistaken: A more accurate description of the recipe is dictatorship and cronyism, with the results showing up in rampant corruption, environmental degradation and wide inequalities between the politically well-connected and everyone else. “There are two major forms of hatred” in China today, Mr. Yang explains. “Hatred toward the rich; hatred toward the powerful, the officials.” As often as not they are one and the same.

There is more, too: Continue reading →