History

Quick Question

Brandon Christensen Books, History , ,

I was hoping somebody out there could answer for me. Why is Ludwig von Mises such a bad ass? From the foreign policy section of Liberalism:

The right of self-determination works to the advantage only of those who comprise the majority. In order to protect minorities as well, domestic measures are required, of which we shall first consider those involving the national policy in regard to education.

In most countries today school attendance, or at least private instruction, is compulsory. Parents are obliged to send their children to school for a certain number of years or, in lieu of this public instruction at school, to have them given equivalent instruction at home. It is pointless to go into the reasons that were advanced for and against compulsory education when the matter was still a live issue. They do not have the slightest relevance to the problem as it exists today. There is only one argument that has any bearing at all on this question, viz., that continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

The inhabitants of London, Paris, and Berlin will no doubt find such a statement completely incredible. What in the world does compulsory education have to do with war and peace? One must not, however, judge this question, as one does so many others, exclusively from the point of view of the peoples of Western Europe. In London, Paris, and Berlin, the problem of compulsory education is, to be sure, easily solved. In these cities no doubt can arise as to which language is to be used in giving instruction. The population that lives in these cities and sends its children to school may be considered, by and large, of homogeneous nationality. But even the non-English-speaking people who live in London find it in the obvious interest of their children that instruction is given in English and in no other language, and things are not different in Paris and Berlin.

However, the problem of compulsory education has an entirely different significance in those extensive areas in which peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion. Here the question of which language is to be made the basis of instruction assumes crucial importance. A decision one way or the other can, over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area. The school can alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong and can be used as a means of oppressing whole nationalities. Whoever controls the schools has the power to injure other nationalities and to benefit his own.

I’m going to keep reading (you should too) and hopefully write up a little sum-sum about what I’ve learned soon.

Dr D. on Sex, Homosexuality, Language Usage

Jacques Delacroix Comments, Current Events, History , , , , , , , ,

A reader, MM, sent a comment criticizing an off-hand, snide remark I had made in my micro-essay, “Sex Advice.” I welcome the opportunity MM gives me to take him into the alley and beat him to a pulp. His full comment:

Though usually considered much of a stick-in-the-mud regarding language, and especially neologisms, I must offer a cordial disagreement regarding the word “gender” when used instead of “sex.”

Ordinarily I despise changing the language (you should see, for example, my battles with the ignorami who say “healthy” when they mean “healthful”), but when a change improves and clarifies, then I can not only accept but embrace it.

You are right that “gender” was originally intended for language references — more important in French and other furrin tongues — but since “sex” has become such an important, or at least such an ever-present, part of everyday life, having a separate word, such as “gender,” keeps the meaning clear.

I mean, I have compromised my formerly inviolate principles so that now I even use the word “gay” rather than “homosexual,” after swearing I would never degrade the language in that fashion.

But, after all, “gay” is the polite term, the one preferred by the people to whom it applies.

So, if I can change, linguistically, so can you.

MM’s justification for the widespread substitution of “gender” for “sex”makes sense. I agree that it clarifies. However, it ignores the fact that such a change rarely occurs as a result of a technical-rational process. Such changes, this one in particular, are loaded with sociological and, with political importance. To ignore them is to assent. Winning the substitution of one word for another is like winning an election forever, an election in which the winning party never even ran and the opposition never campaigned. What I am going to say about “gender” applies even better to “gay.” Continue reading →

Capital Day?

Brandon Christensen History , ,

Co-blogger Warren Gibson e-mailed me a great quickmeme earlier this afternoon. The details are beneath the fold. Continue reading →

Native American Property Rights and European Contact

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Despite the claim to rights based on discovery, British colonists often acquired land by contract. For example, almost all of Massachusetts was acquired by purchase from local tribes. The primary exceptions there, Salem and Boston, were uninhabited areas, having been depopulated earlier by the diseases the colonists unwittingly brought with them. Although the British crown claimed the sole right to negotiate transfer of land rights from the Native Americans, many colonists thought otherwise and regularly made individual arrangements with various tribes to secure land.

This is from Europe Meets America, a heavy post in the Freeman.

Property Rights: A Human Universal

Brandon Christensen History , ,

I have been reading a lot about property rights among the San (“Bushman”) in southern Africa for a little research project I am doing, so bear with me as most of my posts over the next little while will deal with property rights in the non-European world.

From the Freeman come this article by co-blogger Michael Adamson:

By any criterion, the economic and social standards of living are lower among Native Americans than among the balance of the U.S. population. Unemployment on or adjacent to reservations fluctuates around 40 per cent. Of some 750,000 Native Americans on reservations, 75 per cent earn less than the national average. Leading causes of death among Native Americans are accidents, heart disease, malignant neoplasms, and cirrhosis of the liver, all far above national averages and a significant proportion of these related to alcohol abuse. Drug abuse, mental illness, and obesity are major health problems. Tuberculosis cases are 4.5 times the national average and deaths from the illness are 9.5 times as frequent. Suicide is more than twice as likely among Native Americans. Their life expectancy is about five years below the average American’s and infant mortality rates are 25 per cent higher.

While such facts may illustrate the plight of the Native American, they do not explain why such conditions exist […]

The mission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is to act as the principal agent in carrying out (1) the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Federally-recognized Indian tribes and (2) the responsibilities of the United States as trustee for the property it holds for tribal units.

Oops. You can probably guess where this is going. Do read the whole thing.

Bureaucracy: Yet Another View

Brandon Christensen History, Links ,

When I write now about my naval period, I feel almost forced to apply a bit of organizational analysis to my memories. It’s a slightly disturbing experience because being a small cog in a bureaucratic organization, a state organization at that, unexpectedly fails to evoke bad feelings.

It’s disturbing because life and work within a bureaucracy is at the antipodes of libertarian utopian imagery. It’s disturbing, additionally, because government routinely acts as the principal agent of routine state oppression in societies with a constitutional government such as the US. This malaise is also an opportunity. I believe that people who think of themselves as libertarians, even those with a mere libertarian bent, don’t spend enough time thinking about disconfirming evidence, about experiences that run counter to their main existential choices. Here is a brief analysis, one that may speak a little to the issue of why some people are attached to bureaucracies in spite of their libertarian leanings.

Thus write Jacques Delacroix in Liberty magazine. Do read the whole thing. Liberty, by the way, is where I first came across Dr. Delacroix’s writings. I was living in Santa Cruz and I have always had a weird obsession with foreign-sounding libertarians, so when I stumbled across Liberty‘s pages, Dr. Delacroix’s writings were some of the first that I read.

You can find more of Dr. Delacroix’s writings in Liberty‘s publication by checking out the newly-renovated ‘recommendations’ section here on the blog!

Life Under Fatwa

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I did once visit Iran when I was 21 years old, during the time of the shah. It was wonderful. I had just graduated from university, and such was the world at that time, 1968, that I was able to drive with a friend from London to South Asia across the world. I mean, try driving across Iran and Afghanistan now! I remember it being a very cosmopolitan, very cultured society. And it always seemed to me that the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture — which is not to defend the shah’s regime, which was appalling. But it was one of the tragedies of history that an appalling regime was replaced by a worse one.

From Salman Rushdie.

At first I found his praise for the Obama administration to be typical of Left-wing establishment figures, but then I remembered that Rushdie is an Indian and had probably had to deal with racist legislation in one form or another while growing up. While the period of colonialism (roughly coinciding with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I) did indeed open up more places to markets, the Jim Crow-like legal barriers that European states erected no doubt helped to foster part of the suspicious climate that now pervades most globalization skeptics worldwide.

This is a shame for two reasons: Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 3

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Broken Promises

Harm to the poor on a considerable scale occurs when rich countries suddenly violate the principles of free trade they publicly support, on the main. The US government and those of other post-industrial countries will periodically make a show of vaunting the merits of free trade on stages (such as the World Trade Organization) that guarantee worldwide publicity. These actions must encourage at least some of the most enterprising poor in poor countries to produce for distant markets they are not in a position to understand.

When the governments of rich and large entities, such as the US, Japan and the European Union, suddenly inhibit the free movement of products, those enterprising poor people in poor countries suffer, and suffer disproportionately. Thus, the recent passing of new American farm subsidies legislation (in 2002) makes it difficult or impossible for small farmers in the Sahel area of Africa to compete on the world ‘s cotton markets with American growers (Thurow and Kilman, 2002)(6). The steel tariffs erected by the Bush administration – with the full complicity of Congress – must have similar effect on steelworkers in some of the Third World and Eastern European steel-producing countries.

Neither of these policies nor the broken promises they imply, can be easily defended on moral or rational grounds. Directly, it can probably be shown that the economic actors of poor countries who embraced free trade end up worse off than they would be if they had toed to a more parochial (“autarkic”) line. Indirectly, such breaches of faith by powerful rich countries contribute to the stagnation of the Third World by seeming to prove wrong those who adopted a stance leading most surely to economic development: embracers of production for worldwide markets. (In my experience, well-educated defenders of national economic ”self-sufficiency” rarely care to argue against free trade in principle; instead, they rely on evidence that there is no real free trade but a poisonous international game where the dice are loaded against the poor in poor countries. Sometimes, they have a point.)

The American Motion Pictures Industry’s Hegemony Continue reading →

Glass-Steagall and Deregulation: What Went Wrong?

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Nothing, really. Consortium members Warren Gibson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel write in the Freeman on Glass-Steagall and what its repeal in the 1990’s meant for the economic crisis that began in 2008:

The timing of the repeal of Glass-Steagall makes this deregulatory move a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis. But the crisis began with the housing collapse, a result of government encouragement of unsound lending practices. Financial firms took too much risk with mortgage-backed securities, in part because of moral hazard engendered by government guarantees and partly because bond rating firms were not as independent as was once thought. The limited liability that the investment banks gained when they became corporations may also have amplified moral hazard. There is no good reason to believe that Glass-Steagall, had it remained in effect, would have prevented any of these problems.

I highly recommend this piece. Lots of good history behind the law as well as a very clear explanation of the different types of banking services, what they do, and how they are created.

Plato, Rousseau and All That Jazz

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Rousseau maintains this ideological preference consistently throughout his economic thought. We have seen that he was distressed that the possibility and actuality of shifting occupational roles would lead to inauthenticity. Change and social mobility were so psychologically destructive in his view, that he came to praise the caste system of ancient Egypt because it forced sons to follow their fathers’ occupations.

From Bill Evers in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The title is “Specialization and the Division of Labor in the Social Thought of Plato and Rousseau.” (h/t Walter Block)

On a side note (and completely unrelated as well), this is possibly the best hip-hop album of all-time. Enjoy!

Department of Oops!

Brandon Christensen History, Law , , , , , ,

One of the most influential anthropologists to my own way of analyzing global society and how it interacts with each other is Edwin Wilmsen, whose book Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari has deeply influenced my thoughts about intercultural (“foreign”) relations (the other two most influential books on me so far have been Peace Pact… and 1491…). I am currently doing a research project and came across the following sentence, which deserves to be deeply pondered by anthropologist and layman alike:

[…] those who have been responsible for formulating and implementing policy towards [the San] have relied on a functionalist equilibrium model derived from ethnography grafted onto a residual colonial construction of a static San social condition […] A key element in this ideology [governing Botswana policy towards the San] is the mystification of [San] uniqueness, a condition that [has] been imposed on them by other, hegemonically dominant ethnic groups.  Among these hegemonically dominant groups – I urge that we not forget this point – are ethnographers, whose work serves as scientific sanction for this mystification.

Wilmsen is a Marxist, and Land Filled with Flies… was written before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but I nevertheless find his work extremely satisfying. Can anybody see why this is such a powerful critique of collectivism? Admittedly, I have depraved this post of its rich context, but I think readers here at Notes On Liberty are smart and thoughtful enough to find some gems among this deceptive-looking rock pile.

An online profile of Edwin Wilmsen.

The Good Old Days

Jacques Delacroix History , , , , , ,

Here is a story that’s more than a story.

All our food was organic and no one was overweight. We wore only natural fibers, from sheep and from the cotton fields of Africa.

Children did not get fat spending their days and nights in front of a stupid screen of one kind or another. We read instead.

No one was over-caffeinated or on pills. We rarely went to the doctor.

Kids with Attention Deficit Disorder did not disrupt any school.

We used water sparingly and washed our hair and bodies in simple, non-polluting soaps. We did not waste water or energy with long showers.

My own personal carbon footprint was close to zero, I am sure.

There were few car accidents, unlike now.  Continue reading →

Blast from the Past

Brandon Christensen History

Dr. Delacroix writes, in 1980, in the academic journal Studies in Comparative International Development, the following:

The logical possibility of distributive states which are not class-based has profound implications for our understanding of the political functioning of the world system […] First, challengers will not be able to claim a monopoly of rationality. They will not be able to present themselves as representatives of the progressive forces of history, bent on freeing production from the shackles of a mode of production that has become mired in its own contradictions. Hence, it will be difficult for them credibly to draw their inspiration from scientific socialism. Instead, they will have to find their legitimizing ideology in strictly moral considerations. Such considerations tend to find their strongest support in Golden Age myths, usually of religious origin. Revolutionary movements in distributive states will thus have strong reactionary ideological components. In their purest forms, they will be completely reactionary.

Secondly, the organizational base of challengers in a distributive state cannot be class. Therefore, other structures of social solidarity will have to be activated. Alternative structures are, by default, traditional structures. The more recently incorporated into the world economy a society, the more available are its traditional social structures. Hence, a distributive state ruling a recently incorporated society will experience a maximum of tribal, ethnic, and religious challenges.

Note that these two departures from class-based challenges are additive: the activation of archaic social structures under the banner of a  reactionary ideology does not give birth to socialist regimes but to entirely new kinds of political formations. These are not accounted for by existing conceptualizations of the state.

You can read the whole thing here (possibly gated).

McCloskey Review = Leftist Rhetoric in Tatters

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Liberty, Links , , , ,

Deirdre McCloskey has an excellent review of a new book focusing on the immorality of capitalism. An excerpt:

The poor have benefited the most from capitalism. The sheer, first-act, unanalyzed equality that Sandel advocates would have killed the modern world and kept us in the appalling poverty of the human condition down to 1800. In fact in some countries it did, such as India after 1947, under Gandhi-plus-London-School-of-Economics egalitarianism, the “License Raj” and “the Hindu rate of growth,” as the Indians themselves bitterly described their communitarian economy. When I talk to friends who think like Sandel I worry that their dispositions will kill, quite unintentionally, the only chance for the world’s poor to achieve the scope for a full human life.

[…]

Sandel worries properly that the market can crowd out the sacred. A corporate market in, say, instruction in elementary classrooms can crowd out unbiased teaching about capitalism. Yet Sandel does not tell his own classroom that state schools can crowd out unbiased teaching about, say, the environment.

Do read the whole thing. McCloskey is an expert writer and a prestigious scholar, so be sure to grab a cup of coffee before you settle in. (h/t Jason Brennan)

From the Comments: Guns and Truth

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events, History, Law , , , ,

I often think that reading through the ‘comments’ section of a post or an article online can tell me much more about an idea or an event than can the original article. Oftentimes the nitty-gritty details of an article or post can be illuminated in the ‘comments’ section if the author is kind enough to wade into the pool of hoi polloi and defend his argument. Dr. Delacroix is an expert in this regard, and I thought I’d reproduce his defense of the Second Amendment here (since he is being uncharacteristically humble out it!). A European drive-by commentator left the following comment bragging about the superiority of Europe’s gun control laws, which sparked the following brilliant response from Dr. J:

Thank you and a fairly disjuncted response because I would need several days to provide a response that would both be fairly complete and well organized.

History matters. The US was born in revolution, Unlike the case of France, for example, the American revolution was never confiscated. Many Americans, including me, believe that insurrection against a government gone rogue is a remote but possible scenario. Those who scoff at this possibility should remember that totalitarian regimes are eager to control even one-shot, small caliber shotguns. Maybe fascists know something liberal gun-control advocates don’t understand. Even, if the scenario is utterly unrealistic, it could give the American people backbone, as sacred myths often do. Continue reading →