The Discovery Doctrine of Land Ownership

Fred Foldvary Economics, History, Religion , , , , , ,

The legal basis for land ownership in the Americas is “Christian Discovery.” This land doctrine derives from the 15th century theology of the Catholic Church. The moral origin of the Vatican’s land doctrine is its old claim of the supremacy of Christianity over all other religions. The “Christian discovery” doctrine is not in the US Constitution, yet it has been adopted by the US government and upheld by the courts.

“Bully’s Justice” by George Zebrowsky, an eye-opening article on Christian Discovery, was published in the June/July 2014 issues of Free Inquiry. Under Christian Discovery, the first Christians to “discover” land previously unknown to the Christian chiefs of state, and held by non-Christians, have a legally legitimate claim to that land. The indigenous and current dwellers have no legal property rights.

A court case in 2005 showed that the Christian Discovery doctrine is still in force. The Onondaga Indian (native American) nation in the State of New York sought federal-court recognition to title of ancestral lands. Also in 2005 the Oneida and Cayuga Indian nations had their land claims dismissed by the US Supreme Court. The Onondaga claim was dismissed in 2010 based on the 2005 Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court stated that “Under the doctrine of discovery,” the ownership of “lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign, first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States.”

There are three moral justifications of land ownership. First is natural moral law, the universal ethic that is inherent in human nature and is a moral imperative for humanity. Second is tradition. Third is force. Natural moral law invalidates both tradition and force as moral rationales.

The laws of the United States derive from English common law, the US Constitution, natural moral law, and the Vatican’s doctrine of land discovery. The US Constitution recognizes the supremacy of natural moral law in its Ninth Amendment, and it also recognizes common law. The US Constitution does not recognize the legality of tradition, force, or the Christian Discovery doctrine, yet the US Supreme Court continues to adhere to Christian Discovery.

As stated in “Bully’s Justice” (p. 28), this Doctrine of Discovery is “one of the rare principles of American law that came not from English common law or from the pen of some Enlightenment philosopher but rather from the Vatican.” The US Supreme Court recognized the doctrine in Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823 under Chief Justice John Marshall.

The doctrine of Christian Discovery originated in 1455 when Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Romanus Pontifex. Without any Biblical justification, this declaration justified the conquest of African lands by the king of Portugal. Pope Alexander VI extended the doctrine to the Spanish conquests in the Americas. The doctrine of Christian Discovery authorized European Christian explorers and their monarchs the rationale to claim lands not occupied by Christians. The doctrine deprived the indigenous inhabitants of any legal land rights.

As ultimate legal owner of the land, the state can then lease land to private tenants, and it can sell or transfer land titles to private persons, but such titles are always secondary to the state as senior and supreme owner, as the state can tax land, control its use, and forcibly buy back title with eminent domain.

The current Pope has expressed concern with global inequalities, but he has not gone to the core cause of inequality and poverty: privileged land tenure and the denial of labor’s self-ownership rights. The Catholic Church would have to confront its old doctrine on the conquest of land, and this is cannot do, and therefore popes must confine their concern about poverty and inequality to laments and exhortations. Now come economists such as Thomas Piketty calling for massive redistribution to treat the effects of income inequality, but refusing to acknowledge the origins and remedies in land and labor.

The Christian Discovery doctrine is based on supremacism, the belief that one’s religion, culture, and traditions are superior to those of others, justifying the use of force to maintain this supremacy. Such supremacy has been adopted by several religions, but this violates the human equality that is the basis of natural moral law and that has been recognized in declarations of human rights. Such constitutional cognitive dissonance does not seem to bother legal authorities.

If we seriously apply natural moral law to the question of land ownership, we need to confront both the false justifications of Christian Doctrine of Discovery and also the aboriginal land claims. As stated by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government, human moral equality implies that one may fully own land only so long as there is free land of that quality available to others. When such land is scarce and has a price, the analysis of Henry George kicks in, that one may have possession conditional on paying the land rent to the members of the relevant community in equal shares.

Therefore the native American Indians may not take full ownership of their former lands. The land rent belongs not to them but to all humanity, or at least to all Americans. Also, the rental value of land due to civic improvements is a return on the capital goods, not the natural spacial resource.

Justice requires the abolition of the supremacist Doctrine of Discovery and its replacement with natural moral law. Some compensation and restoration of rights of possession are due to the aboriginal inhabitants, but history cannot be erased, and the current residents, users, and title holders, having followed the current rules, also deserve some consideration.

Global Warming and Scholarly Conspiracies, etc. Part Two

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

In Part One of Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming, I drew on my own experience as a scholar to describe how the scientific enterprise can easily become corrupted for anodyne, innocent reasons, for reasons that are not especially cynical. I argued, of course, that this can especially happen in connection with such big, societal issues as climate change. I concluded that the findings of scientists do not, as a matter of principle, merit the quasi-religious status they are often granted. It follows from this that the Left’s attempt to stop any debate on the ground that science has spoken is grotesque.

I should have added in Part One that at different times in my career, I may have benefited by the kind of corruption I describe as well as having been hurt by it. Of course, one thing does not compensate for the other. Corruption is corruption; it constitutes more or less wide steps away from the truth whether I profit by it or whether it harms me. These things just add up, they don’t balance each other out.

Once you open your eyes, it’s not difficult to find gross derailments of the scientific enterprise. To be more precise, the transformation of limited scientific results into policy often gives rise to abuses. Sometimes, they are gross abuses verging on the criminal.

A recent book describes in detail how the slim results of 1950s studies that were obviously flawed both in their design and with respect to data collection were adopted by the American scientific establishment as policy. They resulted in a couple of generations of Americans being intellectually terrorized into adopting a restrictive, sad, un-enjoyable diet that may even have undermined their health. The book is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz .

For most of my adult life, I limited my own intake of meats because saturated fats were supposed to give me cardiac illness and, ultimately heart attacks. I often thought something was fishy about the American Heart Association severity concerning saturated fats because of my frequent stays in France. There, I contemplated men of all ages feasting on pork chops fried in butter followed by five different kinds of cheese also eaten with butter. Then, they would have a post-prendial cigarette or two, of course. None of the men I knew exercised beyond walking to shop for pâtés, sausages, and croissants sweating butter (of course). Every time, I checked – often – Frenchmen had a longer life expectancy than American men (right now, it’s two and half years longer.)

Yet, such was the strength of my confidence (of our confidence) in the official medical-scientific establishment that I bravely followed my stern semi-macrobiotic diet even while in France. In my fifties, I developed Type Two diabetes. None of my four siblings who lived and ate in France did. I understand well the weakness of a such anecdotal evidence. And I know I could have been the one of five who hit the wrong number in the genetic lottery. (That would have been the inheritance from my grandfather who died at 26 of a worse illness than diabetes, a German bullet, in his case.) Yet, if there are quite a few cases like mine where siblings constitute a natural control for genetic factors, it would seem worth investigating the possibility that a diet high in carbohydrates is an actual cause of what is often described as an “epidemic” of Type II diabetes. If there are many more cases than there were before the anti-fat campaign, controlling for age, something must have changed in American society. The diet low on saturated fats pretty much forced on us since the fifties could be that societal change.

I am not saying that it is. I am saying it’s worth investigating, with proper design and normal rules of data selection. I am not holding my breath. I think the scientific establishment will not turn itself around until its biggest honchos of the relevant period pass away. Teicholz’s book may turn out to have many defects because she is more a journalist than a scientist. I am awaiting with great attention the rebuttals from the scientific establishment, or – you never know – their apologies.

And then, there is the old story of how it took twenty years for the American Medical Association to change its recommendation on how to treat the common duodenum ulcer after an obscure Australian researcher showed that it was almost always caused by a bacterium. (The story was told about twenty years ago, in Atlantic Monthly, I think I remember. You look it up.)

The de facto scientific establishment is not infallible but it usually wants to pretend that it is. It’s aided in its stubbornness by the religiously inspired passivity of ordinary people who were raised with misplaced all-around reverence for science and anything that appears, rightly or wrongly, “scientific.”

The climate change lobby, wrapped in a pseudo-scientific mantle still thrives in several policy areas in spite of most Americans’ relative indifference to the issue. Two of its main assets are these: First it is well served by irresponsible repetition of a simplified form of its message that amounts to constant, uncritical amplification; second, even well-educated people usually don’t pay a lot of attention to detail, don’t read critically because they are busy.

Now, I am not going to spend any time denouncing the myriad airheads with short skirts who add their own climate change sage commentary to their presentation of ordinary weather reports. (I am a man of vast culture, I listen to the same tripe in three different languages!) As I keep saying, I don’t beat on kindergartners. Let’s take National Geographic, instead, that justifiably respected monument to good information since 1888.

The October 2013 issue presents another striking photographic documentary intended to illustrate fast climate change. One of the photographic essays in the issue concerns, predictably, the alleged abnormal melting of glaciers. The talented photographer, James Balog, contributes his own completely superfluous, judgmental written commentary:

We know the climate is changing…. I never expected to see such huge changes in such a short period of time.

The guy is a photographer, for God’s sake! He has an undergraduate degree in communications. His credentials to pronounce on long-term climate change are…? Even the National Geographic, generally so careful about its assertions, couldn’t resist, couldn’t bring itself to tell him, “This is outside your area of competence, STFU!” Why not let the janitor also give his judgment in the pages of National Geographic? This is a free country after all. Most people simply don’t have the energy to notice thousands of such violations of good scientific practice.

Now to inattention, still with the venerated National Geographic. The September 2013 issue, entitled “Rising Seas” presents a truly apocalyptic future in case global warming is not controlled. As is usually the case with N.G. the article is chock-full with facts from studies. The article is also tightly argued. N.G. is normally careful about what it asserts. To make things even clearer, it offers a graph on pp. 40 -41 purporting to demonstrate a disastrous future for the earth starting very soon.

Being a leisurely retired man endowed with an unusually contrary personality, being furthermore well schooled in elementary data handling, I did the obvious with the graph, the obvious not one educated person in 10,000 would think of doing, or care to do. I took my desk ruler to the graph itself. Here is what I discovered:

Between 1880 and 2013, there was less than a one foot rise in the oceans level according to National Geographic. Of course, those 123 years cover the period of most rapid rise in the emission of alleged greenhouse gases. Imagine if National Geographic had an article entitled:

“Less Than Foot-Rise in Ocean in Spite of More than 120 Years of Greenhouse Emissions”

Many citizens would respond by thinking that maybe, possibly there is global warming but it’s not an urgent problem. Let’s take our time looking into the phenomenon more carefully, they would say. Let’s try and eliminate alternative explanations to greenhouse gases if we find that there is indeed abnormal warming. After all, how much of a rush would I be in even if I were convinced that water rises in my basement by almost one tenth of an inch each year on the average?

This is not an absurd mental exercise. The business of science is to try to falsify and falsify again. When you get interesting results, the scientific establishment (if not the individual scientist author of the findings) is supposed to jump on them with both feet to see if they stand up. Instead in connection with global warming, scientists have allowed the policy establishment and those in their midst that influence it to do exactly the reverse: If you see anything you like in a scientific study, try hard for more of the same. If you find something that contradicts your cause, bury it if you can, ignore it otherwise. You will get plenty of help in doing either.

Scientists have become collectively a complicit in massive anti-scientific endeavor with many religious features.

I am finally proofing the print copy of my book:

I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography.

Growing Weed in Humboldt County (and the Economics of Prohibition)

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , , , , ,

And yet California, long the marijuana movement’s pacesetter, and a haven for high-capacity growers, finds itself in the perhaps-unwelcome position of losing outlaws like Ethan. Should the state follow Colorado’s and Washington’s leads in legalizing recreational use, as is expected, already-fragile economies in the north—specifically in the “Emerald Triangle” of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, home to some quarter of a million people—could be crippled. The “prohibition premium” that keeps marijuana prices, and those economies, aloft would fall, possibly so precipitously that many growers would lose their incentive and (perhaps ironically) leave for more-punitive regions. In recent years, many growers have reportedly left California for places like Wisconsin and North Carolina—markets where a pound of marijuana might fetch double what it does in the Golden State. Legalization helps keep growers out of jail, but regulation slashes their profit margins.

This is from Lee Ellis in The Believer. Read the whole thing, it’s a great piece of journalism, although I don’t link to this because I think it’ll teach readers anything new. I just like it because it reports on one of my old stomping grounds. I don’t smoke much pot anymore, but there is nothing quite like smoking weed from Humboldt County.

The Lost Sergeant Lost Again! (Updated)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law , , , , ,

If I were Sergeant Bergdahl and  if I were not a deserter, I would ask for a court-martial. Given the public airing of rumors concerning his case, I don’t see how his request could be turned down. He has been damaged by a very public discussion of his case. He is entitled to his day in court to clear his name. For a member of the military, this means a court-martial, a procedure giving good guarantees concerning the presumption of innocence.

The Army is keeping him incommunicado in a military hospital in Germany. It’s as if he had been lost a second time. Some say he has forgotten English. That’s completely absurd. It could be that the Army is merely trying to avoid the accidental spilling of military secrets. It could be that there is another, darker secret involved.

Could it be that he did not particularly wanted to be rescued? Had he cast his lot with the other side who cynically sacrificed him in return for the huge prize that Mr Obama provided?

Usually, I am quick to blame the Obama administration ineptness rather than criminal intent for its actions that look like sabotage of the USA. This time, the debacle is so huge that my judgment vacillates. Really, one lost soldier for five battle-hardened generals of armies who throw acid in school-girls’ faces? We are returning to the struggle people who were only one degree  of separation removed from 9/11?

President Obama, he of the Veterans Administration, suddenly speaks like a military patriot: We don’t leave any of our soldiers behind no matter who they are. Period! What if the Taliban barbarians had asked for a nuclear device in return for delivering Sergeant Bergdahl into our hands?

We don’t leave any of our soldiers behind. Period?

Update: It’s been one week and Sergeant Bergdhal has still  not been allowed to talk to his mother. Maybe he has forgotten how to say “Hi” in English, or “Mom,” or something.

It’s because of concerns for his health, says the administration. It has not told us what the health concern is.

I don’t much like conspiracy explanations as a rule but I can’t help notice that medical doctors are professionally obligated not to talk about their patients. And military officers usually follow orders including orders to keep their mouths shut irrespective of what they think. If this were not true, why in the world was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sent to die in a French military hospital?

Another Preposterous Attempt to Punish Evil Foreign Regimes

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics , , , , ,

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried a piece headlined “Gold from North Korea Stymies U.S. Firms.” It seems that U.S. firms that use various minerals, not just gold but also tungsten, tantalum and tin, are required by U.S. law to ask their suppliers whether any of these materials are so-called “conflict minerals.” Up to now this provision has mainly covered minerals sourced from areas of the Congo which are embroiled in warfare. Now it seems firms must also find out whether any of the gold they use in their products came from North Korea.

It’s not so simple as asking each supplier, because those suppliers may in turn have obtained their supplies from a variety of sources, all of which may have gotten mixed in together in their inventory. And of course it’s an open question as to whether suppliers can document their sources; presumably their say-so won’t suffice. They might also raise their asking prices to cover the costs of time-consuming compliance exercises.

The article says the North Korean central bank refined gold into bars that were certified by the London Bullion Market Association up until 2006. It is believed that they have continued to produce gold bars.

Gold is highly marketable. It’s uniform, nearly indestructible, and traded internationally. It’s unlikely the North Koreans would be stamp any of the bars they refine “made in the DPRK.” The North Koreans are known to be experts at counterfeiting U.S. currency, so how easy would it be for them to stamp a fake refinery mark on their gold bars?

What’s the point of this requirement? As with all political actions, this one has both an ostensible and a real (“public choice”) goal. The ostensible reason is to harm the evil North Korean regime by reducing the revenue they get from gold sales. The likely real reason is to make politicians and bureaucrats look good. None of this is to downplay the horror that is the North Korean regime. I only want to consider who will benefit and who will be hurt by this program.

All right, so who bears the costs? The requirement is an obvious expense for the firms involved. They will pass on as much of the compliance costs to customers as they can, but they will find little ability to do so if they face foreign competitors who suffer from no such regulatory burden. I won’t attempt to estimate elasticities here, just guess that costs will be borne primarily by shareholders and employees of gold-using firms and not so much by customers. These firms will become a little bit less competitive. To some extent suppliers will be burdened as well, but they probably have options like shifting to other customers or getting another intermediary in between them and their U.S. customers.

Lastly, how likely is this measure to succeed? The answer depends on which goal we’re thinking of. If it’s the political goal, politicians and bureaucrats will probably accrue a little bit of credit. If it’s the ostensible goal, hurting the North Korean regime, the answer is: no chance whatsoever. The only harm the North Koreans might endure would be busting a gut from laughing. In the unlikely event they find some of their customers have withdrawn, they can easily and with almost total anonymity dispose of their gold through international markets.

The effects of this requirement will be minor for a huge firm like Hewlett Packard. But U.S. industries are dying from a thousand cuts like this, and as they gradually lose out to foreign competitors, we wonder why.

You will notice I have not invoked any libertarian ideology in this humble piece. It’s just a matter of tracing consequences a little further and looking for public choice explanations of behavior. Hooray for the San Jose State University graduate program that helped me learn these skills.

“A foreign policy with a price”

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , ,

Re: “Obama’s empty West Point speech,” May 30 Charles Krauthammer.

So Charles Krauthammer thinks we should be providing military assistance to Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Who’s going to pay for it? Or are we just going to whip out the plastic like usual? Krauthammer says our allies are complaining, fearing their own security. What are they doing about it? Not much. Of course they are complaining; they are used to having the U.S. protect them without paying for it. I thought the Republicans were big on personal responsibility. Get your nanny-state big government out of other people’s business.

Joe Gregory, Castle Pines

This is a letter to the editors of the Denver Post (I’m hanging out with my grandparents in Denver right now) and I thought I’d pass it along. Is libertarianism truly entering the mainstream or or is this guy just a hardcore, longtime libertarian? He might just be a Democrat with above-average intelligence and knows when to point out logical discrepancies in the Republican message.

I’ll never know, but I can only hope he’s new and that writes more letters to the editors that point out the irrational nature of US foreign policy.

Economists and Environmentalists: Divergent Values?

Brandon Christensen Books, History , , , ,

Following Simon, the author of The Bet suggests that the disagreement between environmentalists and economists may be due to a divergence in values. People in Ehrlich’s camp believe that values can exist outside human minds and claim priority over human values. Although Sabin does not go there, the practical implication is that people in Ehrlich’s camp feel justified in imposing their ideal society on those who don’t share their values, which they disguise under the mantle of science. Hence the environmentalists’ inclination to boss people around.

This is from Pierre Lemieux’s new review of The Bet, a book on an infamous bet between an economist and a biologist in 1980 (the economist won).

One could easily replace ‘economist’ with ‘libertarian’ and ‘environmentalist’ with anything and could find the same debate being played out. This observation of mine, if correct, prompts a number of questions (such as “why aren’t all economists libertarians?” or “why are libertarians so pugnacious?”), but so does the loser of the bet’s reaction to his loss (you’ll have to read the review to find out!).

The Bet is by Yale historian Paul Sabin. Here is the link to his book.

A cultura e os direitos de propriedade

claudio Liberty ,

Algumas observações sobre esta relação aqui. Como não tenho tempo para um estudo muito mais aprofundado sobre as variáveis no momento, fica aí a correlação e alguns comentários sobre a mudança cultural que, espero, ocorra no Brasil devido ao suposto maior liberalismo dos jovens.

Democrat Incompetence and Mendacity, in Nine Points

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

President Obama, during his first campaign, declared forcefully and clearly that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. There was no qualifications, no “ifs” and “buts;” it was a simple straightforward and forceful declaration of intention. It’s been more six years and the prison is still operative. It holds un-indicted prisoners, several captured under such dubious circumstances that it’s possible that some are shepherds or traveling salesmen caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I had leisurely talks with five people in their late twenties about the topic of Guantanamo Bay Prison. Here are my accounts of these conversations.

One had never heard of Guantanamo Bay. She had voted for Mr Obama twice.

One had heard of Guantanamo Bay prison but he did not know whether it had been closed or not. He had voted for Mr Obama the first time and abstained the second time out of disinterest.

One knew Guantanamo Bay prison and he knew that it was still open. He had voted for Mr Obama once and deliberately abstained the second time. He now sports a bumper sticker proclaiming Obama to be a “dick.”

One had never voted for Mr Obama and she knew that the Guantanamo Bay prison was still open in spite of the president’s campaign promise.

The last person, an academically and professionally successful young woman, knew well about Guantanamo Bay prison and she knew it had not been closed. She is a forceful Obama supporter who was not able to vote for technical reasons. She argued that the president was unable to close the prison because of “Republican opposition.” She said that Republicans always stop him from doing anything good.

Now, her political position is interesting because the young woman was in good faith herself but her assertions were false. Guantanamo Bay case is an excellent test of the president’s own good faith and credibility. The President of the United States is the undisputed Commander in Chief of the armed forces, “undisputed.” A single one sentence order from him would start the process of closing the prison. Any opposition from any part of the political spectrum would be impotent to stop it. The president would have to take the political fallout of his order, of course, but that’s exactly why a politician should not make irresponsible promises.

There is a Chapter Two to the analysis of this clearly failed promise of the president. Even if he absolutely wanted political cover, he could have done it during the two years when his party had an absolute majority in Congress. And, by the more way, the president would have received considerable support from all sides had he had the courage to take the step explicitly contained in his campaign promise. There are plenty of conservatives like me who hate the idea of people detained indefinitely without charge. The legal technicality employed by Pres. Bush to put detainees in Guantanamo out of reach of American constitutional guarantees on the grounds that it’s not American soil was not his finest moment.

President Obama either lied or he spoke irresponsibly. It does not hurt him much with his followers. It seems, they like a good speech expressing generous sentiments above all. My side is not responding in a politically effective way to the reality of his appeal.

The Republican Party’s own political discourse is all over the place. It sounds like a cacophony where the only word emerging are: “Obama bad.” This lacks seriousness. Republican politicians have forgotten basic rules of good communication, rules about attention span, about clarity and about the value of repetition.

If it were my call, I would do the following:

Name three things that the president clearly promised to do and that were doable and that he did not do. (Stopping global warming isn’t tone.) That the president did not do them has to be easily verifiable. Closing Guantanamo Bay prison is a good example. Keep repeating slowly the three unkept promises.

Name three things that the president did that were done badly. The deployment of the health insurance exchange is a good example. Keep repeating them. Keep repeating that they were doable, that others would have done them well.

Name three things that he should have done and that he failed to do or did badly, irrespective of promises he might have made or not. The three things have to be actions that are within the bailiwick of every American president; they have to be part of the job. Reforming the Veterans’ Administration before he had to fire his own appointee to head it would be a good example.

Here, that’s nine things, not many but as many as my young interviewees of Memorial Day are able to understand, digest or retain durably. Maybe that’s even too many.

My communication plan deliberately stays away from foreign policy where Americans disagree strongly, especially when it comes to military intervention. It refrains deliberately from the common couplets presenting Mr Obama as the Devil himself, or even as “socialist” (a word devoid of meaning.) The plan highlights the fact that President Obama has been a very bad manager of American interests, that he did not take care of business anywhere near the level of competence and attention Americans ordinarily expect. Many independents and some liberals should come to the conclusion that Obama would be fired for simple non-performance if he were not protected by his office.

The objective is to make very difficult or impossible for a future candidate to anything to ride on the Obama wave. After a few months, there should be no Obama wave left at all. If Mrs Clinton should be the Democratic candidate for the presidency, for example, she should not be tempted and not be able to borrow Barack Obama’s likability without also putting on his cloth of gross incompetence. She should thus be forced to ride on her own likability which is very low, as everyone knows.

This is a plan to establish the fact , without unnecessary acrimony, without hysteria, that Democrats produce so-called  “leaders” who don’t do the job even minimally. It’s a constructive step toward making it difficult for the Democratic Party to saddle us with yet another non-doer, Hillary Clinton, for example. (She is a woman who has also done absolutely nothing except be loyal to a husband who deserved no loyalty.)

I am quite pessimistic. I think we are already in an advanced stage of fascism with a one-party system not far int the future. The ray of hope comes from today’s Peggy Noonan column , as it often does. She argues (WSJ 05/31/14 ) that Mr Obama inaction and bad actions are giving government a bad name. I hope she is right; I hope I am dead wrong.

Hume and Humboldt

Federico Sosa Valle History, Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

Divergent dichotomies are not unusual to be found in Hayek’s writings. Besides the essay “Two Types of Mind”, we have his 1945 lecture “Individualism: True and False” on the difference between the British Enlightenment and the Continental Rationalism. Grounded in Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Hayek traces the origin of true individualism to Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke himself. The XIX Century adds Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville to the list. On the other hand, Hayek states that Jean Jacques Rousseau exemplifies the Rationalist individualism, which postulates isolated and self-contained individuals –whereas, for the former, the individual is determined by his existence in society. The “true variant” of individualism is the notion of “subject” of Hume’s philosophy: the outcome of repetitions, expectancies and habits. Finally, Hayek concludes his lecture with the censure to the German type of individualism, rooted in Wolfgang v. Goethe and Wilhelm v. Humboldt: the individualism expressed in the original development of the personality and defended in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty.

Notwithstanding in this 1945 lecture Hayek claims that this German individualism of self-development has nothing to do with what he regards as true individualism and it is “an obstacle to the smooth working of an individualistic system,” much later, in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, he will restate his opinion on Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s legacy.

This reconsideration of the value of liberty as the development of the unique and particular character of an individual will be acknowledge not only regarding legal theory but as well in his 1976 proposal of denationalization of currency. In his late writings, Hayek will endorse the development of the originality of character as an important trait for the competition to work as a discovery process.

The key to understand his shift onto this new type of individualism is closely related to Hayek’s involvement into the ideas of cultural evolution. The “true individualism” was important to state how a society can achieve certain order. The “Humboldt’s individualism” is needed to explain the dynamic of the evolution of that order. Hume’s notion of subject is related to the ideas of integration and convergence, to how an order may emerge. Humboldt’s ideal of self-development of the unique and original character of each individual implies differentiation and divergence. These two traits are the key to the adaptation to the changes in the environment that defines the notion of blind evolution. A social and political system that assures the development of differences has keen aptitudes to survive to the changes in its environment. At the level of the “true individualism”, individuals are made of institutions, repetitions and expectancies. But at the level “Humboldt´s individualism”, successful institutions are made of differences, divergent series of facts and adaptation.

(Originally published in http://www.fgmsosavalle.blogspot.com)

Scholarly Conspiracies, Scholarly Corruption and Global Warming: Part One

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

97 % of scientists, blah, blah…. Ridiculous, pathetic.

Thus challenged, some people I actually like throw reading assignments at me. Some are assignments in scholarly journals; some, sort of. Apparently, I have to keep my mouth shut until I reach a high degree of technical competence in climate science (or something). I don’t need to do these absurd assignments. I am not blind and I am not deaf. I see what I see; I hear what I hear; it all sounds familiar. Been there, done it!

A long time ago, I accepted a good job in France in urban planning after receiving my little BA in sociology from Stanford. I was a slightly older graduate and I had no illusions that I knew much of anything then. I had some clear concepts in my mind and I had learned the basic of the logic of scientific inquiry from old Prof. Joseph Berger and from Prof. Bernard Cohen. I had also done some reading in the “excerpts” department including the trilogy of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Only a couple of weeks after I took my job, my boss sent me to a conference of urban sociologists in Paris. Having been intellectually spoiled by several years in the US and conscious of my limited knowledge of urban planning, I asked many questions, of course.

In the weeks following the meeting, I became aware of a rumor circulating that presented me as an impostor. This guy coming out of nowhere – the USA – cannot possibly have studied sociology because he does not know anything, French sociologists thought. I had to ask how the rumor started. I was aware that I knew little but, but, I did not think it was exactly “nothing.” Besides, most of my questions at the conference had not been answered in an intelligible manner so, I was not convinced that my comparison set – French sociologists working in city planning – knew much more than I did.

Soon afterward, I wrote a “white paper.” It was about the eastern region where I had been tasked to plan for the future until 2005 (the year was 1967) as part of a multidisciplinary team. The white paper gave a list of social issues city planners had to face at this point, the starting point of the planning endeavor. As young men will do, I had allowed myself short flights of speculation in the white paper, flights I would not have indulged in a few years later. My direct supervisor, an older French woman who was supposed to be sociologist, read the whole ambitious product, or said she had, and made no comments except one. She took exception to one of my speculative flights in which I made reference to the idea that much societal culture rises up from the street. It was almost an off-hand remark. Had that part been left out, the white paper would have been pretty much the same. The supervisor insisted I had to remove that comment because, she said exactly, ”Marx asserts clearly that culture comes from the ruling class.” She told me she would not allow the white paper to be presented until I extirpated the offending statement.

In summary: The woman had nothing to say about the many parts of the report that were instrumental to the endeavor that our team was supposed to complete, about that for which she and I were explicitly being paid. She had nothing to say about the likely mistakes I exhibited in the report because of my short experience. Her self-defined role was strictly to protect what she took to be Marxist orthodoxy even if it was irrelevant. There was a double irony there. First, the government that employed us was explicitly not in sympathy with any form of Marxism. The woman was engaging in petty sedition. Second, Karl Marx himself was no lover of orthodoxies. He would have abhorred here role. (Marx is said to have declared before his death, “I am not a Marxist”!)

In any event, I was soon rid of the ideological harridan and I was able to do my job after a fashion. For those who like closure: I went back to the US to attend graduate school, at Stanford again. Two years later, my old boss called me back. He had come up in the world. He was in charge of a big Paris metropolitan area urban research institute. He begged me, begged on the phone to go back to France, and take charge of the institute’s sociology cell. He said that he understood not a word of what the “sociologists” there said to him. He added that I was the only sociologist he had ever understood. I yielded to his entreaties and I promised him a single year of my life. I interrupted my graduate studies and flew to Paris. In the event, I gave the sociologists at the institute one month warning. Then, I summoned each one of them to explain to me orally how his work contributed to Paris city and regional planning. (“What will it change to the way this is currently being done?” I asked.) They did not respond to my satisfaction and I fired all six of them. I replaced them with people who could keep their Marxism under control. My boss was grateful. I could have had a great career in France. I chose to return to my studies instead.

Three years later, having completed my doctorate, I found my self at critical juncture common to all those who go that course. You have to turn your doctoral thesis into papers published in double-blind refereed journals. (Here is what this means: “What’s Peer Review and Why It Matters“)

That’s a lot like leaving kindergarten: no more cozy relationships, no more friends assuring you that your work is just wonderful; the real world hits you in the face. The review process in good journals is often downright brutal. Anyone who does not feel a little vulnerable at that point is probably also a little silly. To make matters worse, the more respected the journal, the harder it is to get in and the better your academic career. As a rule, if you have not achieved publication in a first-rate journal in the first three or four years after completing your doctorate, you will be consigned forever to second-tier universities or worse.

Be patient, I am just setting the stage for what’s coming.

Much of my early scholarly work happened to take place within a school of research dominated by “neo-Marxists.” It was not my choice. I was interested in problems of economic development that happened to be largely in the hands of those people. My choice was between abandoning my interests or buckling up and taking my chances. I buckled up, of course. My first article to be published was innovative but a little esoteric. (Delacroix, Jacques. “The permeability of information boundaries and economic growth: a cross-national study.” Studies in Comparative International Development. 12-1:3-28. 1977.) I presented to a specialized journal and therefore not one that could be called “first tier.” It happened to contain nothing that would offend the neo-Marxists. It took less than six months to have it accepted for publication.

The second published paper out of my dissertation struck at the heart of neo-Marxists convictions. It demonstrated – using their methods – that the parlous condition of the Third World – allegedly caused by capitalist exploitation – could be remedied through one aspect of ordinary good governance. I submitted it to one of the two most respected journals (the American Sociological Review). All the reviewers who had the technical skills to review my submission were also neo-Marxists or sympathetic to their doctrine. The paper reported on a study conducted according to methods that were by now common. Having the paper accepted for publication took more than three years. It also took a rare personal intervention by the journal’s editor whom I somehow managed to convince that the reviewers he had chosen were acting unreasonably. (The paper: Delacroix, Jacques. “The export of raw materials and economic growth: a cross-national study.” American Sociological Review 42:795-808. 1977.) No need to read either paper.

Am I telling you here a story of conspiracy or a story of academic corruption? Yes, I faced a conspiracy but it was not a conspiracy against me personally and it was mostly not conscious. The only people – but me- who had the skills to pass judgment on my paper were not numerous. They were a small group that shared a common understanding of the reality of the world. It was not a cold, cerebral understanding. Those people formed a community of sentiment. They believed their work would contribute to the righting of a worldwide injustice, a “global” injustice committed against the defenseless people of underdeveloped countries. Is it possible that their ethical faith influenced their judgment? To ask the question is to answer it, I think. Did their faith induce them to close their eyes when others from their own camp cut some research corners here and there? On the contrary, were their eyes wide open when they were reviewing for a journal a submission whose conclusion impaired their representation of the world? In that situation, did they overreact to an uncrossed “t” or a dotted “i,” in a paper that undermined their beliefs? Might be. Could be. Probably was. Other things being equal, they may have just thought, it would be better if these annoying Delacroix findings were not publicized in a prime journal. Delacroix could always try elsewhere anyway.

So, yes, I faced corruption. It was not conscious, above-board corruption. It was not cynical. It was a corruption of blindness, much of it deliberate blindness. The blindness was all the more sturdy because it was seldom called into question. Those who would have cared did not understand the relevant techniques. Those who knew them shared in the blindness. This is a long way from cynical, deliberate lying. It’s just as destructive though. And it’s not only destructive for the lives of the likes of me who don’t belong to the relevant tribe. It’s destructive of what ordinary people think of as the truth. That is so because – however unlikely that sounds – the productions of elite and abstruse journals usually find their way into textbooks, even if it take twenty years.

Are the all-powerful editors of important journals part of the conspiracy? Mine were not but they tended to adhere to imperfect rules of behavior that made them objective accomplices of conspiracies. Here is the proof that the editor of the particular journal tried to be impartial. Only a month after he accepted my dissenting paper, the editor assigned me to review a submission from the same neo-Marxist school of thought that trumpeted another empirical finding proving that, blah, blah…. After one reading of the paper, my intuition smelled a rat. I spent days in the basement of the university library, literally days, taking apart the empirical foundation of the paper. I found the rat deep in its bowel. To put it briefly, if you switched a little thing from one category to another, all the conclusions were reversed. There was no imperative argument to put that one thing in one category rather than in the other. The author had chosen that which put his labor of love in line with the love of his neo-Marxist cozy-buddies. If he had not done it, his pluses would have become minuses, his professional success anathema. In the event, the editor agreed with my critique and dinged the paper for good. Nothing worse happened to the author. No one could tell whether he was a cheat. Or, no one would. No one was eager to. The editor was not in appetite for a fight. He let the whole matter go.

Myself, I came out of this experience convinced that it was likely that no one else in the whole wide world had both the skills and the motivation to dive into the depth of the paper to find that rat. It’s likely that no one else would have smelled a rat. It’s possible that if I had not still been smarting from three years of rejection of my own work, I would not have smelled the rat myself. The editor had the smarts, the intuition fed by experience, I would say, that he could put to work my unique positioning, my combination of competence and contrariness. He put it to work in defense of the truth. That fact is enough to exonerate him from complicity in the conspiracy I described. To answer my own question: Do I think that powerful scientific journal editors are often part of a conspiracy of the right thinking, of an orthodox cabala? I think not. Do they sometimes or often fall for one? Yes.

For those who like closure: My interests switched later to other topics. (See vita, linked to this blog’s “About me.”) I think the neo-Marxist school of thought to which I refer above gradually sank into irrelevance.

After that experience, and several others of the same kind, do I have something better to propose? I don’t but I think the current system of scholarship publication does not deserve anything close to religious reverence. Even if there were anything close to a “consensus” of scientists on anything, that should not mean that the book is closed. Individual rationalism also matters. It matters more, in my book.

What does this story of reminiscences this have to do with global warming, climate change, climate disruption , you might ask? Everything, I would say. More on the connection in part Two. [Update: Here is part 2, as promised! – BC]

The Skyscraper Curse

Edwin van de Haar Liberty , , ,

The Skyscraper Curse

This is Thornton at his best!

My Summer of ’63: Bureaucracy, Sex and Alternating Current

Warren Gibson Liberty , , , , ,

Brandon’s comment about just finishing The Fountainhead reminded me of the summer of 1963, a pivotal time in my life. I can’t imagine why anyone but me would care about such personal stuff, but here goes.

I had the good fortune to attend a fine private engineering school, Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University). Tuition was modest by today’s standards, even if adjusted for inflation – something like $1,400 per year, but still substantial. There were no student loans and my parents were just a little too well off for scholarships. They and my grandparents provided more than half my tuition and I used my own savings and job earnings to cover the rest. I didn’t work during the school year because the engineering curriculum demanded all my time and energy.

Toward the end of my sophomore year as a civil engineering major, I began to look for a summer job. An opening advertised in the administration building seemed like it would offer good experience and good pay for the time: $295 per month. I applied and got the job, little knowing that three huge life lessons were coming my way. The value of those lessons, in the long run, overwhelmed the monetary reward.

The first benefit was to learn meticulous work. I was an assistant in the Bridge Department of the City of Cleveland. No technology of any kind, beyond dial telephones and possibly an electric typewriter (more likely manual) had penetrated the department. The engineers drew their plans in pencil on large sheets of paper mounted on drafting tables. It was my job to make archival copies of final plans.

Think about how we make copies these days. It’s pretty much a quick “save as” operation, or, in a throwback to past times, people still make photocopies. Although Xerox copiers were available by 1963 (Case had at least one), they were nowhere to be seen at City Hall. Typists made copies using carbon paper (look it up). I made copies of drawings by mounting the original on my board, placing a special sheet of linen over it, and tracing the drawing using india ink. Every line had to be duplicated at the proper width and every character of text carefully drawn by hand. Erasers? No such thing. A tiny slip could be scraped off with a knife but otherwise the only resort was to start over.

Astoundingly, a technological advance that had become universal more than seventy years previously – alternating current – was absent from City Hall. The whole building ran on direct current, a legacy of the Municipal Power authority that was launched early in the century to undercut the monopoly Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Fluorescent lights were out of the question as, I presume, were were any motor-driven devices like electric typewriters.

My second benefit was to learn some realities of bureaucratic life. There were six engineers on staff of whom three actually worked. Mr. Sevcik, who sat in front of me, had the same drawing on his table for the whole three months I was there. He appeared to put himself into a state of suspended animation. Somehow he could sit there motionless all day without falling off his stool. His wall calendar was blank except for every other Friday where he wrote “haircut.” Another fellow was constantly out of the office. Nobody seemed to know where he went or why.

One of the actual workers took me under his wing. He trained me in my job but also explained the facts of bureaucracy. All that could be done about the slackers was to keep them out of the way. They couldn’t be fired.

The third and most important benefit – actually two benefits – I got from Sam. Sam was a girl; I never did learn her real name. I say “girl” advisedly because in those days adult women in the workforce were typically, and without malice, called girls. She was a technician of some sort, not an engineer, and she was a worker. Her nickname may have reflected the fact that she was something of an intruder in this man’s world.

Slacks for women were gaining more acceptance by then but generally not in the workplace. I remember her wearing only skirts, and shorter skirts were coming into fashion then. So when Sam sat on her stool at her board, her skirt invariably rode up.  I mean, all the way up to there! Sometimes I would get to sit next to her to consult on some work issue. Needless to say I found it difficult to concentrate.

I made no attempt to hit on Sam. She was probably five years older than me and was clearly savvy about many things beyond her years. I was a nerd and unsavvy to say the least. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Sam was perfectly well aware of her effect on me and she charitably deflected my energy by taking it upon herself to educate me a bit in the ways of the world. After work we would usually walk together to the Terminal Tower to catch our trains. She would tell me about her boy friends – what attracted her to them and how she liked to be treated. She said nothing about her sex life and I didn’t ask. Open and frank talk about sex was still in the future.

One day Sam mentioned a novel she had just finished – The Fountainhead. “I think you’d like it,” she said. I don’t think I read it before leaving my summer job, but I soon did and I found it transformative. The character of Howard Roark was electrifying but it was many years before I understood Dominique. At that time I was trying to figure out who I was and what I stood for, and Rand got me started on my libertarian path. Later in the sixties I had read all her work and took tape-transcribed courses on objectivism from the Nathanial Branden Institute. Fortunately I never became groupie and in hindsight I see many shortcomings, as well as strengths, in Rand’s objectivism.

Not knowing Sam’s real name, I have no way to trace her. If she’s around, she’s well into her seventies. I hope her life has been good. She deserved it.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Political scientist Jason Sorens on the elections in Europe (best summary I’ve read; it’s short, sweet, and to the point)
  2. Examining Piketty’s data sources for US wealth inequality (Part 4 of 4)
  3. Greece the Establishment Clause: Clarence Thomas’s Church-State Originalism
  4. Strong Words and Large Letters
  5. The African Muslim Fist-Bump
  6. Why US Intervention in Nigeria is a Bad Idea

#LiberalismDay: Calling all classical liberals and libertarians

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History ,

The following is a message I got from Warren via email:

Hello again! You were recently gracious enough to endorse Liberalism Unrelinquished, a project I’ve been working on with Dan Klein.

I wonder if you’d be willing to help keep the ball rolling by participating in related initiative, #LiberalismDay. Liberalism Day is an internet event aimed at amplifying a simple message: the word “liberal” used to mean something different than it does today.

To participate, all you have to do is write a blog post, tweet, or anything else on or around June 16th that contains the hashtag #LiberalismDay. (The hashtag is what ties everything together in search engines.)

You can add as much or as little nuance as you’d like. You can link to a favorite article (e.g. Milton Friedman’s essay “Liberalism, Old Style”), make a meme, write a blog, or even just tweet about the event to your audience.

From my vantage outside of academic circles, I’d guess that maybe 1% of the population has ever learned that the word “liberal” ever meant something else. I believe if we can boost that fraction a bit, it could spread organically. Merely knowing that 19th century liberalism was more akin to modern libertarianism will help correct a lot of false narratives, e.g. that Lincoln Republicans were really modern Democrats, or that libertarian ideas are a modern invention.

Again, all you have to do to help is plug the event with the hashtag #LiberalismDay and make a comment or share a link on liberalism. Our friend Mike Munger has already chimed in on his blog, and Richard Epstein has offered to rep it on his twitter feed, too. 🙂

Feel free to let me know by email or by leaving a comment on LiberalismDay.com if you plan to participate and I will add a link to your blog or website!

Thanks!

Kevin

Aside from Dr Gibson, I know that Dr Delacroix, Adam, myself and Dr van de Haar are going to be participating in this project on this blog. Any other bloggers out there thinking of doing this? It sounds pretty cool, and if there was any way to wrestle the term ‘liberal’ away from the American Left I’d be more than willing to do it. This may make a small impact in doing just that.