What the attack in Paris has made clear to me is that there is a deep hatred amongst people against the west. I believe that much of this hatred stems from the same roots from which my discontents with the west had also grown – western interventionist policies with foreign nations. I also sense such discontents among the few people that I know from Pakistan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, and Serbia.
My displeasures with the west originate from the personal stories of my parents who, before they became victims of the Khmer Rouge, were also victims of American bombings of Cambodia – a fact that is not widely known. The bombardments that started in 1965 ended in 1973, and had killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. Indeed, before the Khmer Rouge took power over Cambodia in 1975 and before they sent all people to the rural areas to grow foodstuffs for ‘Angkar’ (the Organization/the State), there were already widespread famines and scores of displaced people due to the bombings. It had created a chaotic climate in which the anti-western, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist propaganda of the Khmer Rouge found their way into people’s minds – mostly into the minds of those poor rural Cambodian people that were suffering most from the secret bombings. Ben Kiernan writes in ‘Bombs over Cambodia’ (2004):
Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as antiAmerican propaganda. Chhit Do replied:
“Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched . . . . The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them. . . . Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.”
Cambodia, together with Laos, still remains one of the heaviest bombed countries in the history of the world.[1] My parents were just 7-8 years old at the advent of the secret bombings. Imagine that a drone would bomb the school of your child or the hospital in which your loved ones are, would you not feel enraged? Would you not want to take revenge on those that are responsible?
A pre-moral person looks at the consequences of the actions. He sees the attacks, he acknowledges the dead, he becomes emotional and judges firmly. A moral person withholds his judgements and attempts to comprehend the causes of the attackers’ actions. I do not want to justify the killings of the French people, but I would like to emphasize that if we were really to honor the victims, we should reflect on the question why there are people that hate the west so fiercely. Maybe our society itself is part of a larger machine that is the origin of foreign hatred against the west. We must not only realize that religious fundamentalism is a danger to the world, but that there is a more contemptible false idol which is democratic fundamentalism – the uncritical acceptance that democracy is equal to liberty, that it is always superior and that, if necessary, it should be spread with violence.
As long as we, as a society, fail to reflect on ourselves and the political system we participate in, we will never find a fundamentally peaceful solution.
This is a micro alert. Be careful, reading this might make you uncomfortable.
It’s a November afternoon, a rather nice November but November all the same. There is a wedding on the little lawn on the cliff right above Steamer Lane. (Note for my overseas friends in Germany, Turkey, and Illinois: Steamer Lane is a famous cold water surf championship spot in Santa Cruz, California. The whole area, on the Monterey Bay, is exceptionally beautiful.)
The bride is late; surprise! The groom’s buddies are milling around in their comfortable enough tuxedos.* The bridesmaids are sitting and flocking together in their bareback, bare-arms, low-cut long dresses. A cool sea breeze is blowing, of course. Anyone could have predicted it. The ladies are obviously cold, as they should be. Anyone would be. Exemplary social scientist that I am, I make it a point to pass close enough to verify that goose pimples prevail. This goes on for at least an hour. It’s true nippling weather. Maybe that’s the point and I am just missing it.
I don’t know why no one in charge of the women of the bridal party planned for this weather. I don’t know why the bridesmaids’ uniform could not have included a tasteful shawl. Frankly, I don’t know if any of them would have used a shawl in preference to shivering though. (One young woman in my entourage says, “No way!”) At any rate, it’s difficult to take seriously the claim that women are tired of being considered sex objects. Those women, and the women of every American bridal party I have ever seen are bravely and determinedly on display. It’s not an intellectual display; it’s not a talent show; it’s not an IQ contest. I would swear they are disturbed, possibly enraged at the thought of not being considered sex objects on this occasion, after so much effort. The chasm between public discourse and reality has rarely been so wide since the Victorian Age. In the long run, political correctness is sure to induce some sort of collective schizophrenia, it seems to me.
Just to be painfully clear: I am not criticizing the bridesmaids’ behavior – bless their hearts! I hear that young men are ever more reluctant to commit. And you don’t catch flies with vinegar. And there must be a reason why Mother Nature placed women’s breasts on their chests rather than on their backs. (It’s so they can watch men watching them and take it from there.) I am not deriding the women in the bridal party at all. Female exhibitionism has been an attractive part of my worldview ever since I can remember (maybe since three or four years of age). I am just not becoming used to the grossly hypocritical denial that forms today the social context of such displays. It even bothers me worse than ever.
Someone has to shout, “Bullshit!” I wish older women would do it. In their regretted absence, here I am! You can count on me.
* “How gauche,” my snobbish Parisian side is thinking. Tuxedos are evening attire; they should never see the sun.
Last weekend, November 1st 2015, a Dutch television network broadcast a splendid documentary on Bitcoin entitled ‘The Bitcoin Gospel’ (Het Bitcoin Evangelie). It started off with Roger Ver, also known as Bitcoin Jesus in the Bitcoin community for his active promotions of the cryptocurrency, who is standing in his living room in Tokyo sending Bitcoins to the value of 100 Euros into the living rooms of the Dutch. The first person who scans the QR code of the ‘private key’ gets access to a Bitcoin wallet which holds 100 Euros worth of Bitcoins. At the moment of writing, that same amount of Bitcoin has more than doubled to 217.28 Euros. It is a powerful demonstration of how easy currency flows from one side of the planet to the other. If he would have made the transaction through the traditional way, it would have taken several days and it could have cost him up to 30 Euros. Using Bitcoins, he could send the money practically costless, and almost instantly without the need of any intermediaries.
You can watch the full documentary here:
If I could point out my two most favorite scenes, it would be the beginning scene (0:00 – 2:14) in which we can see Roger Ver’s impressive demonstration of Bitcoin transactions and the ending scene (43:43 – 48:24) where the myth making of its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, is discussed and where an emotional and teary-eyed Roger Ver talks about the subversive nature of Bitcoins against political injustices.
The documentary however, also featured critics of the cryptocurrency – hence providing a balanced perspective of Bitcoins. Its main critic was Izabella Kaminska, a financial blogger at the Financial Times. She has offered several interesting critiques to which I would like to respond in this article.
1) The first critique that Kaminska offers is that Bitcoin prices are too volatile. Kaminska reminds the viewers of the turbulent swings in Bitcoin prices. Indeed, if one would take a look at the price chart one would see that Bitcoin did rise 800 percent from $129.46 to $1,165.89 in the three month period from September to November 30 in 2013. Within the next four months, the price would plumb to $344.24. The value of Bitcoin is still extremely volatile – it has ranged between $184.32 and $481.51 in the year 2015.
In my opinion however, Bitcoin’s volatility is not necessarily deplorable. Its volatility is due to its small market and the experimental phase it is still in. The total market capital of Bitcoins currently stands at $5,676,100,709. It effectively means that only a small amount of money flows into or out of the market can already have huge implications for its price movements. It is therefore only natural that its price is still volatile. Volatility also offers prospects of possible gains, hence attracting more capital from investors. Total investments into Bitcoin related projects in 2015 is already more than double that for 2014. (Coindesk, 2015) The more investments are made into Bitcoin related projects, the greater the chance that Bitcoin will be widely accepted so that eventually in the long run products and services can be denominated in Bitcoins. Hopefully, this will make Bitcoins gain the same relatively low-volatility attribute of many fiat currencies.
2) Kaminska’s second critique is that buying Bitcoins does not benefit the economy as it is not loaned out to provide entrepreneurs with investment capital.
Kaminska contends that Bitcoins are simply sitting idly in people’s wallets – it has no interest, it has no yield, and she even claims that the persons who hold them believe that they have “a right to future income flows as if they are investing.” The statement that those who hold Bitcoins think that they have a right to future income flows is quite bold. Bitcoins are like any other investments in that they are always subjected to uncertainties. No serious investor believes that he has a right to profits. The Bitcoin investor is like an entrepreneur – he knows that he can only make a profit if he anticipates future conditions correctly. The notion that one should not hoard Bitcoins or cash or gold corresponds with the false notion that
“Unspent dollars means reduced sales, and as sales decline, profits drop, layoffs increase, and the total social income decreases, making less money available for consumption. Hoarding induces more hoarding as the economy sinks into a downward spiral.” (Smith, 2009)
What this notion does not take into account is that hoarding is an expression of people’s freedom to achieve personal goals or to deal with economic uncertainties. As George Ford Smith (2009) writes in ‘The Case for Hoarding’, the increased demand for money also makes prices fall. Those who are not hoarding are therefore actually benefitting from the decline in prices.
3) Kaminska’s third critique is that Bitcoin has transferred power from the existing elite to the new 1% of the Bitcoin economy, thereby going against the ‘democratization’ effects of Bitcoins that has been preached by its prononents. In my view, it is only justified that those who have done the research into Bitcoins and who have taken the high risk to invest in new inventions also have a higher rate of return. Similarly, those who were pioneers by investing in Facebook or Microsoft during their inception period also deserve potentially higher rates of return as these companies were running higher risk of failures. If the first adopters of Bitcoins would not have had the opportunity to make enormous amounts of money, they would not have had investment incentives, it would not have got this successful and this critique of Kaminska would not even have been possible.
4) Kaminska had also argued that the Bitcoin community is extremely absolutist and driven by political ideology which is thrusted on everyone else.
She maintains that when she is paying for coffee she just wants the benefits of a working payment network and smooth transactions, not support for a certain political ideology. The idea that payment systems can be apolitical is an illusion. Governments have always had vested interests in the moneys of its citizens as its existence is entirely dependent on taxation and money creation. Any decision to meddle with the government’s schemes of taxation and manipulation of the money supply is hence always politically charged. It seems to me that she is holding an idealized view of our society if she believes that using USD does not support any political-economic system. Her statement that the Bitcoin community is thrusting their political ideology on everyone else is highly arguable as well. The government is an institution that holds the unjust power to determine which currency can serve as legal tender and which goods – including currencies – can be traded or should be outlawed. Unlike governments, the Bitcoin community does not hold the power to initiate force upon the people. It cannot thrust the adoption of the payment network on all citizens. Indeed, Bitcoin is a free market invention that allows, but not forces, anyone to join the payment network voluntarily.
Kaminska is right, when one uses Bitcoins one is supporting the libertarian political ideology. If one pays with Bitcoins, one is supporting a decentralized payment network through which transaction costs have virtually fallen to zero and through which it is much more difficult for governments and banks to track one’s financial transactions. The really relevant question however is not whether you are supporting a political ideology. The question that should be asked is: should we prefer to give our governments, and central banks the power to manipulate the value of our currency or should we prefer the separation of state and money?
Crypto-anarchism is a subversive philosophy that extends anarchism into the world of cyberspace. Crypto-anarchists attempt to protect their privacy and political freedom through the use of information technologies. Timothy May, one of the co-founders of Cypherpunk and writer of the ‘Crypto Anarchist Manifesto’, describes Crypto-anarchism as
“the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to make the economic arrangements they wish to make consensually.”
In this article I would like to post Timothy May’s ‘Crypto Anarchist Manifesto’, which was first spread among like-minded tech-anarchists in mid-1988 at the “Crypto ’88” conference. The Manifesto was also discussed at the first physical Cypherpunk meeting in 1992. Most people have never heard of Cypherpunk, but they might know their most notable member: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.
See here the full Manifesto:
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.[1]
Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
The technology for this revolution–and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution–has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies.
The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
Footnote
[1] This is clearly a wordplay on the opening sentence of Karl Marx’ and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto which reads: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”
The Argentine election was for the state president, who is head of government as well as head of state. An expected first round victory for the Peronist party (formally known as the Justicialist Party) candidate Daniel Scoli disappeared as he failed to clear 45%. He is clearly ahead of Mauricio Macri, Mayor of Buenos Aires, running on behalf of a three party centre-right alliance which contains the less statist, and populist elements of Argentine politics, but at least the hope exists of a second round triumph over the Peronists.
The third candidate is also a Peronist, showing the difficulty of overcoming that legacy and why even just turning the Presidential election into a competition between a Peronist and a non-Peronist is a victory of some kind. The sitting President Christine Kirchner pushed at the limits of the Argentine constitution, which prohibits more than two terms for any President, by alternating in power with her late husband Nestór Kirchner. If he had not died in 2010, we might now be looking forward to a fourth consecutive term in power for team Kirchner.
Peronists or the army have run Argentina almost constantly since the 1940s. The periods of army rule give a good indication of how successful Juan Perón and his widow Isabel (the third wife) were in stabilising Argentine society and political institutions. Nevertheless the Peronists have been the only party with a record of electoral success in Argentina and have improved from the chaos that Juan and Isabel instigated in more recent appearances in government.
As such a dominant party they have relatively centrist technocratic elements (most notably ex-president Carlos Menem) as well as the hard core statist populist nationalists. The Kirchner years have tended increasingly towards the more populist end, stoking nationalist sentiment over the islands in the south Atlantic known in Argentina as the Malvinas and in the UK, which has sovereignty over the islands, as the Falklands.
There has been economic growth under the Kirchners, but it has now very much slowed as policy has tended towards high inflation, currency controls, confrontation on debt owed to foreign creditors and increasing budget deficits. There has been social liberalism, most obviously, on attitudes to the LGBT communities, but in a context of nationalist sovereigntist politics. At least we can hope that if Scoli wins, he will feel obliged to shift towards genuine economic sustainability and a less populist politics.
In general, this adds to a feeling that South America has passed the peak of leftist populism which has influenced most countries outside Colombia in the last two decades. The more respectable end of that spectrum in Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which had been fairly successful economically, appears to be declining under the weight of corruption scandals, economic recession and incapacity in delivering on the more populist side. On the less respectable side, Venezuela has lost its status as model for the world’s radical left as corruption, economic decay, state brutality, election rigging and persecution of the opposition has become too extreme to ignore, particularly since the state socialist hegemony no longer has Hugo Chavez as a charismatic frontman.
Brazil and Venezuela were the models of the left, reformist and revolutionary respectively, and no longer have that status. If there is a model now it is the Evo Morales Presidency in Bolivia, which in some respects is radical left, but not consistently enough to get the kind of model status previously accorded to ‘Lula’ (now caught up in corruption scandals as his successor Dilma Rousseff) in Brazil and Chavez in Venezuela (whose successor Nicolás Maduro is a blatant and charmless neo-Stalinist thug-apparatchik). The Morales regime has received some cautious support from those inclined towards liberty on the grounds that he has pursued an overdue reduction of the power of traditional rent seeking elites in Bolivia and engaged in an economic pragmatism certainly distasteful to former Chavez admirers, and not even entirely comfortable for former admirers of Lula.
The leftist populist tide in south America has not entirely receded, but is now discussed with increasing nostalgia and an increasingly elegiac tone by left socialist observers, and as it has receded has tended to leave only embarrassments for the socialist left or reformist pragmatist examples of at least some interest to the liberty community. We are not looking at a strong shift towards liberty in all its forms in that region, but at least we see some shifts opening the possibilities of new movements towards liberty in markets, rule of law, individual rights, and social openness.
Election results I’ve seen today from weekend elections in Argentina and Poland and the more general thoughts they have inspired. Rather longer than I anticipated so posted in two parts, though not separated in time given that I am articulating immediate reactions.
The Polish parliamentary election has been bad news for those who share the perspective of Notes on Liberty in that Law and Justice, a social-national-religious sort of conservative party with strongly statist and populist inclinations, has taken over from the more open market/open society inclined Civic Platform. However, a new party, Modern (strictly speaking ‘.Modern’, but I’ll ignore that in the future as too likely to be mistaken for a typo, it is at least worth noting as suggesting a technocratic commitment to a digital age, reminiscent of the development of the e-state in post-Communist Estonia) which leans towards liberty in economic and social spheres, in comparison with most of Civic Platform and even more in comparison with Law and Justice, has entered the National Assembly, compensating for some of the votes lost by Civic Platform to the populist right.
We might at least hope that the next election in Poland produces a coalition government between Modern and Civic Platform, and hope that Law and Justice does not do too much harm during the coming years in which it will control the government and the (non-executive) presidency on its own.
The Polish political party structure has been confusingly variable since the end of Communism, with names of politicians reappearing from now extinct parties in new parties gathering a different if overlapping spectrum, and with different international partners. Modern’s leader, Ryszard Petru, is at least connected with the early phase of post-Communist politics as a disciple of Leszek Balcerowicz, who played a leading role in the transition to market capitalism and the earlier phase of liberal-centrist politics. Both Petru and Balcerowicz are ‘Europeanist’ in the sense of taking a positive attitude to the European Union, which is also the outlook of Civic Platform. Balcerowicz is even director of the College of Europe, a postgraduate institution in Bruges, Belgium, which educates many of those working in European institutions and in their general atmosphere.
This illustrates a major claim I put forward here about European politics, that is of a drift of market liberals, classical liberals and libertarians towards advocacy of the European Union, and an increasing tendency of the ‘Eurosceptic‘ right, even those with some libertarian-conservative history, to be caught up with hardcore populists even if some of the Eurosceptic right has pro-liberty inclinations. That part of the European right has always been more libertarian-conservative than libertarian-cosmopolitan.
The leading ideologue of libertarian-conservative Eurosceptics in Britain, Conservative Party Member of the European Parliament, Dan Hannan is very touchy about suggestions of backward looking nationalism and chauvinism, emphasising a cosmopolitan family background. However, despite these protestations, Hannan is a great believer in the superiority of British (and Anglosphere) ways, and in addition has always been for ‘democratic controls on immigration’, i.e. populist limitations on the market in labour and individual rights to mobility. The second leading British ideologue in that spectrum, and previously a close associate of Hannan, Douglas Carswell has joined the the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which has unmistakably populist inclinations in economic and social policy beyond restrictions on immigration. Hannan prefers to praise UKIP as ‘patriots’ rather than confront this.
Hannan engineered the formation of a eurosceptic right group in the European Parliament after David Cameron was persuaded that leaving the main centre-right group (European People’s Party) was a necessary price for keeping Tory Eurosceptics acquiescent with his leadership. Hannan’s European Conservative and Reformists Group does not include Modern or Civic Platform, but it does include Law and Justice, which gives a good idea of what part of the European political spectrum it appeals to, i.e. not those inclined to social and cosmopolitan liberty. Most disturbingly associate members include the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, i.e. the AKP of Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan associated with corruption, police brutality, politicisation of the judiciary, social media blocks, attacks on the media and all free speech, along with the demonisation of anyone not part of the more conservative parts of majority Turkish culture.
The idea that liberty can be combined with Eurosceptic discourse is declining, though it has been influential in some libertarian circles, particularly in the UK and Slovakia to be the best of my knowledge. There has been a recovery of pro-EU views (if highly qualified by the wish for reform) amongst the Greek liberty community, even after the recent Euro currency disasters. The Slovak eurosceptic libertarians seem to have collapsed. The Czech hero of European right wingers of that tendency, Vacláv Klaus, has turned out to be a harsh social conservative and Putin fellow traveler of a type obnoxious to the anyone of genuinely pro-liberty tendencies, leading to his exclusion from polite libertarian circles as seen in the loss of his Cato fellowship. A warning there surely about the perils of regarding the sovereigntist eurosceptic right as natural allies of liberty. Personally I believe the same applies to the Republican right in the US. That is of course another story, but just look at Donald Trump’s ascendancy and think about that. The German Free Democrats are making a come back after a period it seemed they might lose the most economically free market part of the electorate to AfD.
Small indications in some cases, but it all adds up to an overall and increasingly dominant picture (though course with exceptions) in which consistently pro-liberty forces support the European Union, which is very much the case in Turkey, even if desiring considerable reform. The strengthening of the populist right (Northern League in Italy, National Front in France, Swedish Democrats, Golden Dawn in Greece, Freedom Party in the Netherlands etc as well as those already mentioned) together with a populist-socialist surge has pushed those engaged with a consistent politics of individual rights and cosmopolitan openness towards a pro-EU centre.
The left populist surge has already receded in Greece where Syriza is in transition to standard social democracy while still using a more radical rhetoric, but has some energy elsewhere in Europe: Podemos in Spain, two left of social democracy parties in Portugal, Sinn Fein in Ireland, Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in Britain. The left populist surge is less strong than its right wing equivalent and despite what the socialist intelligentsia in the UK believe the socialist surge within the Labour Party does not reflect a broader shift in British public opinion. Anyway, we are in a period where pro-liberty forces are coalescing with centrist forces in defence of a continuing EU of some kind, with some limitations on national sovereignty, not completely closed to refugees, not in thrall to an enclosed defensive traditionalist, legacy Christian identity politics.
I just read this great article on ‘Anarchism and Taoism’. I find the Taoist case for anarchism extremely compelling. They sought after the harmonious nature of spontaneous order, the Tao, and internalized it into a tremendously rich personal philosophy of life. It makes me wonder: can a person ‘live’ a Libertarian life? Libertarianism is mostly regarded as a political philosophy in the west, but can it, like the Taoists believe, be regarded as a way of life that is most fulfilling on a personal level as well? These are questions that I still have to find out for myself.
After reading the article on Anarcho-Taoism, I’d like to share a small part of Chuang Tzu’s thoughts on the natural disposition of man here:
Horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water. When pleased, they rub their necks together. When angry, they turn round and kick up their heels at each other. Thus far only do their natural dispositions carry them. But bridled and bitted, with a plate of metal on their foreheads, they learn to cast vicious looks, to turn the head to bite, to resist, to get the bit out of the mouth or the bridle into it. And thus their natures become depraved.
As with horses, so it is with human beings. Left to themselves they live in natural harmony and spontaneous order. But when they are coerced and ruled, their natures become vicious. It follows that princes and rulers should not coerce their people into obeying artificial laws, but should leave them to follow their natural dispositions. To attempt to govern people with manmade laws and regulations is absurd and impossible: ‘as well try to wade through the sea, to hew a passage through a river, or make a mosquito fly away with a mountain!’. In reality, the natural conditions of our existence require no artificial aids. People left to themselves will follow peaceful and productive activities and live in harmony with each other and nature.
In an essay ‘On Letting Alone’, Chuang Tzu asserted three hundred years BC the fundamental proposition of anarchist thought:
There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind. Letting alone springs from fear lest men’s natural dispositions be perverted and their virtue left aside. But if their natural dispositions be not perverted nor their virtue laid aside, what room is there left for government?
When I hear the phrase “I experimented with drugs/diet/habit/whatever [on myself],” I tend to call bullshit. (A good exception is the author at Gwern.net who does blind, randomized trials on himself sometimes.) Without a control group you aren’t doing an experiment.
But I heard some interesting phrasing that is making me reconsider. Scott Adams was talking about experimenting with changes to his diet by isolating one thing and seeing if he can observe a change after a week. It’s clear that he understands the limitations of this approach. And that clarity makes me think that he’s really properly experimenting. He’s not going so far as running a double-blind study, he’s just taking a serious look at imperfect evidence and being epistemically honest.
Like any good scientific thinker of our time, Adams knows that the outcomes he observes can be affected by any number of variables he’s failed to account for. He knows that his estimates need an error term. He almost certainly knows that time isn’t on his side and ever so slightly affects his results. He almost certainly also knows that path-dependency plays a role. But he corrects for all that in his interpretation. It’s this considered approach to the evidence that makes me view him as operating on a scientific basis. So even if his trials do not provide powerful evidence, his interpretation and application of the evidence is what makes it science.
I suppose this would mean that an experiment can’t be considered scientific until the data is interpreted.
From the very first moment I read into Taoist philosophy, 5 years ago, I had grown extremely fond of Taoism. It also bears many similarities with the political philosophy of libertarianism. In this post I would like to trace the libertarian concept of Spontaneous Order to the Tao.
Lao Tze (~6th century BC) is regarded as the founder of Taoism. He is also the writer of the Tao Te Ching, one of the most translated books in history, which consists of 81 short chapters about leadership, modesty, and how to live in accordance with your own nature.
From the perspective of a personal philosophy of life, the Tao Te Ching teaches you to flow with life and to be in touch with your inner self so that your actions never contradict your personal being, and so that you can live a truly authentic and enriched life. This may sound too lofty to some, but reading the book one will realize how practical the philosophy actually is. To illustrate the practicality of Taoism, I have written about an interesting application of Taoism in Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do – the martial arts that Bruce Lee had developed – in this post of mine.
One can also read the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of political philosophy. Taoism proposes a society in which there is little or even no central authority (government), since the government is counterproductive and the grand source of social misery. Taoism is therefore libertarian, and stands very much in contrast with Confucianism with its multifarious laws and regulations. Mr. Libertarian, Murray Rothbard, had recognized that Lao Tze was the first libertarian intellectual who saw the government as “a vicious oppressor of the individual, and ‘more to be feared than fierce tigers’” (Rothbard, 1995, p. 23). Taoists and Libertarians believe that society functions most efficient and most just when the government does not meddle and regulate the people.
The skeptics may ask: how can there be order without a central authority? Some modern philosophers, like for example Hobbes, have referred to this anarchistic state as the ‘state of nature’; a state of “a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things” (Hobbes, 1651, p. 34). Taoists and Libertarians however, believe that this view is wrong. They believe that it is in the nature or instinct of individuals to be collectivist, because the person who lives in solitude is hardly able to survive in nature. In order to survive, human beings will naturally develop collective customs and laws to work out their disputes. The collective coordination of human beings has therefore always “depended decisively on instincts of solidarity and altruism” (Hayek, 1988, p. 12).
What, according to the Taoist and the Libertarian encourages society to become well-functioning? The Taoist calls it the ‘Tao’, and the libertarian calls it ‘Spontaneous Order’.
Tao and Spontaneous Order
The two concepts, Tao and Spontaneous Order, are similar to one another. Spontaneous Order is a spontaneous emergence of self-organized order out of seeming chaos. One can find such examples in language, the internet, the free market etc. Without any central authority we have realized language, internet, and productive orders that are so complex that not a single person would have been able to create by himself. No one can predict how the order will look like, because it is forever in flux. It can therefore only be experienced and observed. From our observation we can find that the Spontaneous Order is better than any artificial human construct.
Likewise, the Tao is an underlying natural order of the universe whose essence cannot be described in words, but which can only be experienced and observed in nature. In the first verse of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tze writes:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1).
The Tao is neither a thing nor a substance. It is a universal trend that flows in the natural world. According to the Taoist, one can be in touch with the Tao and achieve most when one does not act against the nature of things (‘wu wei’). Lao Tze therefore writes:
Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao,
Counsil him not to use force to conquer the universe.
For this would only cause resistance.
Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed.
Lean years follow in the wake of a great war. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 30)
Tao abides in non-action,
Yet nothing is left undone.
If kings and lords observed this,
The ten thousand things [world] would develop naturally. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 37)
The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 57)
Why are the people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.
Why do the people think so little of death?
Because the rulers demand too much of life.
Therefore the people take death lightly.
Having little to live on, one knows better than to value life too much. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 75)
The Taoists have this concept called ‘mutual arising’, which means that order comes into being through a harmonious interplay of different forces. This is expressed as follows by Lao Tze:
The Tao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42)
We, human beings, are incapable of understanding how these forces play out against each other. Every time we interfere with the Tao, unintended consequences will happen. Since we cannot apprehend what forces have led to the unintended consequences, we will create more unintended consequences by trying to offset the previous unintended consequences. Man can therefore fall into a state of perpetual interference with nature and become evermore unnatural. Is that not the state we are in right now; the state of unnaturalness due to our thousandfold petty laws that attempt to regulate our conduct, relationships, and ethics?
Is it realistic to have no central government and expect spontaneous orders to emerge?
It certainly is realistic. Bruce Benson has written an insightful book called The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State (2011) in which he discusses historic examples of how law and order emerged spontaneously. Many scholars are currently acknowledging that during the time of the expansion of the American frontier, those areas where people moved faster westward than the central government was not wild or lawless. It was actually more peaceful than modern day America. For an interesting read into this issue, see Anderson & Hill’s ‘An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West’ (1979).
See also this talk of Thomas Woods on the ‘not so wild, wild west’:
Bibliography
Anderson, T.L. & Hill, P.J. (1979). An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 3, 1, 9-29.
Benson, B. (2011). The Enterprise Of Law: Justice Without The State. San Francisco: Independent Institute.
Hayek, F.A. (1988). The Fatal Conceit: the errors of socialism. London: Routledge.
Hobbes, T. (1651). De Cive. (H. Warrender, Ed.) New York: Oxford University Press.
Rothbard, M.N. (1995). Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought Volume I. Retrieved from http://mises.org
Je suis vieux mais j’ai quand même un copain lycéen à Paris. Je l’ai rencontré un Quatorze Juillet justement, en Californie où je vis depuis déjà longtemps. Ugo a quinze ou seize ans. Il me dit par courriel qu’il lit Bakounine et Kropotkine. Cela me fait plaisir à deux titres. D’abord, cela signifie qu’il aéchappé à la malédiction du relent de totalitarisme collectiviste qui habite toujours de nombreux Français comme une croûte en Octobre colle encore aux lèvres des revenus de la colonie de vacances du mois d’Août.
La deuxième raison de ma réjouissance c’est que de telles lectures ne peuvent qu’allonger l’aune à laquelle Ugo mesurera la liberté. (J’allais dire la “liberté individuelle” mais, il n’y en a pas d’autre, c’est une mauvaise manie verbale.) Il me semble en effet que quand on vit dans le brouillard d’une societe étatique comme la France il doitêtre difficile seulement de reconnaitre le simple fait de liberté. Dans une telle société, on doit être menéinconsciemment à une mesure de la liberté étriquée pour la simple raison que les nombreux “droits” des autres ne peuvent que limiter naturellement, automatiquement les siens propres.
L’un de ces soi-disant droits est le droit de vivre correctement sans avoir jamais à s’efforcer, c’est-à-dire aux crochets d’Ugo et d’autres qui ne rechignent pas à travailler ou à inventer.
Mais, je souhaiterais qu’Ugo complète son éducation d’une manière spécifique. Il n’y a pas de vraie liberté là oúl’existence même dépend du bon vouloir d’un seul employeur, soit-il une grosse entreprise minière (comme dans Zola) ou l’Etat lui-même, ou encore, une entreprise formellement de statut privé mais menottée pas la réglementation.
En fin de compte, la liberté est garantiee par la possibilitéd’entrer librement dans des contrats entre égaux. Pour ce faire, il faut commencer par comprendre ce qu’est un marché. Or, mon observation des media français et mes conversations assez fréquentes avec des membres de la classe hexagonale instruite me font soupçonner qu’il est pratiquement impossible à un jeune Français d’aujourd’hui de se familiariser avec le concept de marché à travers uneéducation normale.
Je prescrirais donc bien à Ugo le grand document d’origine:La Richesse des nations, du philosophe moral Adam Smith mais je crains qu’un ouvrage publié en 1776 lui soit un peu rebuttant par son language. Je lui préconise, à la place, de lire n’importe quoi de l’économiste Autrichien et lauréat du Nobel (1976), Friedrich Hayek. .Cela pourrait etre La Route de la servitude ou presque n’importe quoi. (“La Route….” est le livre que tous les totalitarismes on hai et interdit.) Ceci,après, peut-être, une courte introduction par le Français Fréderic Bastiat (que les idéologues bêtes et méchants ont réussi à pratiquement éliminer des programmes scolaires français.)
Bien sur, j’attends qu’en retour, Ugo m’envoie ses propres conseils de lecture, qu’il contribue à m’ éviter d’être trop ringard, par exemple.
Lately, the European Union (EU) stumbles from crisis to crisis. After a long hot spring dominated by the financial crisis in Greece, we now see the collapse of the system based on the Schengen Treaty, which secures the free movement of people within most countries of the EU. The upheaval is the result of the huge numbers of refugees entering the EU, mostly from Syria, Eritrea and Sudan. It is expected that Germany alone will offer asylum to approximately 1 million people this year. With no end of the refugee wave in sight more and more countries are either closing their borders, building fences, or reintroducing border patrols. The situation in Hungary seems worst, especially in the temporary refugee camps. This weekend we saw footage of guards throwing food into the hungry crowds, just like zoo keepers do when feeding the wild beasts. An absurd lack of civilization.
Both crises have at least two factors in common, namely issues of sovereignty and property rights. Sovereignty is claimed back by European politicians, who previously made arrangements at the European level, yet are now confronted by their electorates who want to end the infringements of their property rights. In the case of Greece it was about (mostly) Northern European leaders who were pressed by public opinion to stop paying for the support of what was seen as an almost bankrupt country. Certainly in Germany and The Netherlands it was seen that Greece made a mess of things which itself needed to sort out (this was the dominant perception, I underline that I do not say this is also the right presentation of all relevant facts). In the current refugee crisis public opinion also welcomes large numbers of people who –again as it is widely perceived- are seen a poor sods fleeing from a terrible war. Yet at the same time the people understand that the refugees, no matter how well educated some of them are, also need to receive all kinds of welfare arrangements and will go through an often hard process of integration into society. This against the background of more than a decade of heated debate about immigration and integration in most (Western) EU countries.
In both questions the politicians eventually tend to back out, by reclaiming national sovereignty. Not directly, as this would be embarrassing. So Greece got its third support package, and in the refugees crisis it is underlined that ‘temporary border patrols’ and even ‘border closings’ are still within the letter of the Schengen Treaty. There is also talk of centralizing the intake of refugees at the European level, instead of the current principle of ‘first country of entry is the country where asylum should be requested. This may well be a good idea given the fact that refugees will arrive (as the US experience also makes clear). Yet it is hard to predict how the negotiations will end, because there are large objections against the European Commission spreading refugees among the EU member states at its own peril.
The bigger picture however could well reveal that both events mark the end of the movement towards ‘ever closing union’, the old purpose mentioned in the Treaty Of Rome (1957), the most important founding treaty of European integration. That is significant, because if I am right in my assessment it means we are experiencing a real turning point. There are a number of contributing factors, most of which have been identified before, but that does not make them less significant, such as a lack of European identity among the European people, and the desire to accept only a minimum amount of European policy, due to the much stronger desire to make national decisions, which are easier to correct by the electorates. This, by the way, is fully in line with classical liberal thinkers such as Hayek, Hume or Smith.
Does this mean the EU is about to collapse? Hardly likely. The economic basis is still strong and while large the current problems can be paid for and sorted out eventually. Yet if integration stops here it will also mean that the EU will never get a serious common foreign policy or a common defense policy either, both of which have been tried –and failed- over the past decades. So the EU will then only be a ‘super free trade zone’, with a common trade policy, and strong legal apparatus also spreading out over many non-economic issues. This raises many more issues, but that goes beyond the purpose of this contribution. For one thing: these are once again exciting times in Europe!
I have been a strong proponent of democracy until the Spring of 2012 when I picked up Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. Since then, I have never looked at democracy with the same warm feelings again. Now, in this post, I would like to explore why democratic political representation is an impossibility and why it deals poorly with value pluralism – the fact that society holds various fundamental values that are in conflict with each other. In addition, I would like to urge that we should look for other political possibilities and stop maintaining that democracy is the end of all forms of social organization.
What most people find attractive about democracy is its underlying idea that the electorate is an embodiment of the general will of the public as if the public has reached some kind of general agreement on public policies and legislation. It is believed that with regular elections, the rulers are in power for a limited time and they “will be compelled by the threat of dismissal to do what public opinion wants them to do” (Popper, 1963, p. 345). Gerard Casey writes in Libertarian Anarchy (2012) that “[T]he central characteristic of representation by agency is that the agent is responsible to his principal and is bound to act in the principal’s interest” (Casey, 2012, p. 125). It is however questionable to what extent the electorate can truly represent the constituency and to what extent the public voice can be considered univocal. We must also beware of attributing “to the voice of the people a kind of final authority and unlimited wisdom” (Popper, 1963, p. 347). When society holds a vox populi vox dei attitude, it can easily slip into a tyranny of the majority. A society ruled by public opinion by no means guarantees social justice.
It is important to realize that the notion of representation is highly questionable. According to public choice theory, political agents cannot possibly truly represent their constituencies when members of a society have different comprehensive doctrines, hold different values, and have different interests. Public choice theory applies economic methods in the field of political theory and provides some interesting insights that are relevant for political philosophy. It maintains that politics is ruled by clashing opinions among policy makers and clashing opinions among members of the constituency. One may for example desire to build new roads with public funds, another may want to use public funds for the modernization of the military and defense, a third may desire to spend more on social welfare, a fourth on education etc.
Given that we live in a world of value pluralism, it is difficult for policy makers to pursue and represent the ‘public interest’. Furthermore, special minority interest groups may have incentives to organize themselves in order to influence public policies through lobbying. When the expected gain of lobbying of such minority interest groups is greater than the cost of lobbying efforts, they have greater incentive to influence legislators. Large interest groups, such as taxpayers in general, have fewer incentives to campaign for particular legislations, because the benefits of their actions, if they are successful, are spread much more widely among each individual taxpayer.
When the principal believes that the cost of being politically active – keeping oneself up-to-date with political actualities and being involved with political campaigns – is not worth the benefits, the principal may become ‘rationally ignorant’ of politics. This gives representatives more incentives not to pay attention to the public interests. Rationally ignorant principals do not know who their representatives are or what they do. This consequently discourages the politicians’ feeling of accountability for their actions and it encourages the politicians to sell themselves to donors and to pursue personal agendas. Different interests, incentives, and ideologies among principals and political agents therefore result in unequal representation.
I believe that Casey is right when he asserts that there is
“no interest common to the constituency as a whole, or, if there is, it is so rare as to be practically non-existent. That being the case, there is nothing that can be represented” (Casey, 2012, p. 125).
Imagine that there is a piece of legislation that our representatives can either pass or not with 35 per cent of the public in favour of the legislation and 65 per cent who oppose it. If our representatives pass the legislation, they will represent the 35 per cent and ignore the interests of the 65 per cent. If they do not pass the legislation, they will represent the 65 per cent and cease to represent the interests of the 35 per cent.
“In this very normal political scenario, it is not that it is difficult to represent a constituency – it is rather that it is impossible” (Casey, 2012, p. 125).
A representative democracy is therefore actually quite inadequate in dealing with a pluralistic society as it cannot fulfill its promise: representing the will of the peoples. Democracy is moreover a system that is inherently violent, because it divides people along the lines of their comprehensive doctrines. People with similar political thoughts organize themselves into groups to campaign against people who hold conflicting ideas. In a democracy, these people then vote for their preferred ruler to rule over people who may have contrasting views or who may be indifferent to political issues at all. It has never happened that the turnout at elections is 100 per cent. According to Eurostat.com, the average turnout rate in Europe is around 43 per cent. Nonetheless, the 43 per cent are choosing political agents who are expected to represent the 57 per cent of the non-voting constituency. The violent nature of democracy is that with every vote the voter attempts to enforce their preferred rulers or legislation unto others. This basically makes it a system in which people lose their political autonomy to other voters.
I believe that in order to deal more adequately with value pluralism we have to look for political possibilities that lie beyond a representative democracy. Instead of considering democracy as the end of all forms of social organization, we should ask ourselves how we could discover better forms of social organization.
The last post discussed the historical role of law. This post finally delivers the promise to discuss constitutions and charters. The sovereigntist Eurosceptic position in Britain standardly includes an elevation of Magna Carta into the greatest document ever in human liberty or, in more moderate versions of this position, certainly the greatest since it was issued in 1215 and the fount of all worthwhile liberties ever since: blessing Britain and countries which might be considered off shoots, like the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the ‘Anglosphere’), with a unique appreciation of liberty and parliamentary democracy.
While Magna Carta is of course a remarkable document and the moment it was issued was a remarkable historical moment, these claims are a distortion. It was a Latin document issued under duress during civil war conditions, the duress applied to the king by barons, at a time when the the English aristocracy and monarchy was distinguished from the great body of English by use of the French language and holdings in France.
Magna Carta has nothing to do with parliamentary democracy, it refers to a council of 25 which barons might form if they found the king to be misbehaving, and does not refer to a standing representative body but rather something more like a right of insurrection against a ‘tyrannical’ monarch. This has no more to do with parliamentary democracy than a variety of councils and assemblies existing across Europe at this time, and rather less than some.
Though Magna Carta is dressed up in the language of reasserting traditional rights, this does not make it the expression of a distinctly English or British love of rights based in tradition rather than innovation as the sovereigntists standardly claim. All demands for rights across Europe were expressed in that way at that time, and for centuries before and centuries after. The French Revolution itself started as a demand for ‘restoration’ of rights. The language of restoration is of course frequently a cover for innovation, an attempt to justify innovation by denying what it is.
Magna Carta was the innovatory product of political struggle, not the writing down of the unchanging liberties of old England. The same goes for the struggles for parliamentary power in the seventeenth century which frequently took on the deceptive form of ‘restoration’ of a Magna Carta which was already supposedly a restoration. It is even more fantastical to see the US Constitution as the outcome of Magna Carta, which does not stop many Anglosphere sovereigntist Eurosceptics doing so.
The history, or histories of liberty, is the accumulation of many interacting events, charters and theories in many countries. The growth of British parliamentary power took place in that context as did the US constitution and the Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which took place during the French Revolution. Like the French Declarations, Magna Carta exists in different versions so there is no pure origin text of liberty in either place. Rival French and Anglosphere attempts to proclaim the priority of either are particularly absurd. These are documents separated by hundreds of years and many other factors.
We cannot imagine modern liberty without either source, though both sources are flawed and open to challenge. The last thing thought and politics based on liberty needs is some sacred unchallengeable text as foundation, inevitably distorting understanding of the varied contexts and sources of liberty, and inevitably distorting our understanding of how ‘sacred’ documents had a source in power politics and political economy. There is no immaculate liberty born outside of struggles over power and appropriation of wealth.
The writing down of liberties in a legal document itself, particularly one that has a special, difficult-to-overturn foundational status, places some constraint on liberty, on how some people now and even more in the future might have some different ideas about liberty and see the earlier document as constraining.
It is certainly the case that a strongly entrenched document like the US Constitution deprives later generations of the liberty to re-imagine liberty and it is certainly the case that such a Constitution conflicts with the common law tradition exalted by British sovereigntist-Eurosceptics, according to which law progresses through the way judges build gradually on earlier cases to interpret statutes and formulate principles of justice.
Clearly a strongly entrenched Constitution with a Bill of Rights added does not come from common law, though it may try to capture some of the principles supposed to be widespread in common law, and must heavily constrain common law judges. The idea of a Constitution standing above politics, constraining it according to pure justice, has at least in the United States made the membership of the Supreme Court and its decisions a matter of constant political contention.
No attempt at a system of liberty can avoid tensions between different sources and understanding of liberty. Unfortunately the Eurosceptic-sovereigntist position largely tends to overlook this, or like someone looking at the Sun, cannot have it directly in its gaze without serious damage. The elevation of common law tradition, Magna Carta, and parliamentary democracy is the elevation of different things which in some sense must always be part of liberty, thinking of the general principles of judicial independence, institutional harmony, and representative government. However, as they conflict there can be no perfect version and no reason to think English, British or Anglosphere solutions can be regarded as above all others and with nothing to learn from the law-governed democracies of mainland Europe.
I am currently working on adaptation to climate change and would appreciate a bit of feedback. I find feedback can be useful, if only to get me out of the ivory tower.
A brief background: When addressing climate change the popular idea is to reduce carbon emissions through a carbon tax, cap-and-trade or regulations. However focusing on emission reductions alone:
Ignores the political difficulties of trying to reduce emissions. Regions that rely heavily on coal use are not going to be in favor of reducing its use or paying extra to use it, see the chart. Notice that states like California or Washington, which are trying to reduce their emissions independently, don’t use much coal anyway to meet their energy needs and would be minimally harmed by a carbon tax.
Reductions today would not address the climate change that will occur even if we stopped all emissions today. Even if
We therefore need to adapt to climate change. We can adapt:
Individually by adopting technologies (e.g. air conditioning) or migrating to locations we expect to have better climates.
At the urban level by investing in the necessary infrastructure (e.g. seawalls to counter sea level rises), or by allowing cities to ‘move’ by letting old buildings deteriorate and focusing new development inland or building up near the coasts depending on local conditions.
At the (inter)national level by sharing technical information.
Economics, my home field, has plenty to say about the above three forms of adaptation. It is however lacking in discussing cultural adaptation.
For example, in Spain and other Mediterranean countries, it is customary to take a long mid-afternoon break to take a long lunch at home or take a nap. To compensate for this break work may end later than is customary elsewhere, and family-friendly social life is active well into the late evening. This custom was transplanted, to varying degrees, in Latin America; I am most familiar with the Mexican version due to family stories and personal experience. This custom helps to avoid working during the hottest time of the day and shifts activity towards the cooler part of the day. My understanding is that a similar custom exists in the warmer southeast Asian countries, but my personal knowledge is limited.
Are there any other examples of cultural adaptation to climate change that my fellow note writers can think of? Examples don’t need to be in regard to contemporary climate change and can be adaptations that took place during the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, etc etc.
US States by % of Electricity Produced from Coal.
Source: The U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2013.
Note: Rhode Island, Vermont, and D.C. excluded due to minimal coal use for electricity production.
Notes On Liberty 