Leon Hadar on Obama’s Syria Decision

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , ,

President Obama, unlike his predecessor, is not promoting democracy in Syria. He is instead pretending to play the game of power balancing, hoping that neither side in the war there wins, and instead allowing both to lose.

Read the whole thing. There is not much new information in the piece, but then again hawks in the US have known about the situation in Middle East for decades and have still advocated stupid policies. Nevertheless, Hadar’s account contains some brilliant rhetoric that I think may be of use to readers and writers that fight for liberty.

Classical Liberals Who Weren’t Right About Everything

henrymoore Economics, History , , , , , , ,

Many classical liberals and their ideas have been maligned by their interpreters. We must set the record straight. Professor Ross Emmett, in “What’s Right with Malthus,” from The Freeman, champions the cause of Thomas Robert Malthus, who, contrary to what one might think after encountering Malthus’ followers and critics,

argued that private property rights, free markets, and…marriage were essential features of an advanced civilization.

Some disciples of Malthus took his erroneous population theory as evidence of the need for eugenics, population control, and environmental “regulation.” They ignored Malthus’ arguments favoring institutions more capable of (and more compassionate in) achieving their desired ends; institutions that first came about not by design, but by convention. The eugenicists Francis Galton and Julian Huxley (both related to Darwin), and eco-catastrophist Paul Ehrlich come to mind.

But there were also critics, who, preferring utopian visions of the perfectibility of mankind, denounced Malthus’ pessimistic views. Anarchists William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon are most notable in this regard. Godwin and Malthus had exchanged criticisms (noted by Emmett) in some of their essays. Malthus attacked Godwin’s utopianism. Godwin assailed Malthus’ assumption of arithmetical increase in agricultural output, as compared to geometrical increase of population. And Proudhon targeted the overzealous Malthusians of his day, citing as grievances the former’s antagonism toward the lower classes. While neither Godwin nor Proudhon did terrible injustice to Malthus himself, they unintentionally contributed to the myth that the worst variety of population catastrophists were the most orthodox.

Notice the themes that Professor Emmett brings to our attention. First, that even in their controversial and disputable contributions, great theorists illuminate the path for later philosophers. Second, that human institutions can mitigate human nature’s undesirable effects.

In light of these, consider two other social theorists whose ideas have been abused by overenthusiastic students and overreactive peers alike: Herbert Spencer (insightful Malthus adherent), and the aforementioned Mr. Proudhon (noteworthy Malthus critic).

Leading “social Darwinist” (a pejorative used to link eugenics and capitalism), Herbert Spencer (considered a conservative anarchist by Georgi Plekhanov) was, like Darwin, influenced by Malthus’ idea that the fittest tend to survive overpopulation-induced catastrophes. He is known for having coined “survival of the fittest,” a term later used by Darwin in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species (1859). Spencer originally used it to convey Darwin’s concept of natural selection, and drew parallels between biological evolution through natural selection and social evolution through market competition. But he never implied that they were identical or that marketplace competition was necessarily an outgrowth of natural selection.

If anything, it should be thought of as an alternative to natural selection. Humans, to survive as a species, might practice natural selection as a matter of biological fact. And without the ability to reason this might eventually lead to a Hobbesian jungle. But since man is rational, natural selection’s role in social evolution is significantly lessened. Society arises from the natural order of things. There is no need for the Commonwealth or the General Will to step in and provide it.

Friedrich Engels saw things differently when he wrote in the introduction to his Dialectics of Nature (1872/1883):

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind…when he showed that free competition…is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only…production and distribution…carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world…

Competition exists in both the natural world and free markets, so the connection between natural selection and marketplace competition, though spurious, seems all too obvious for critics of one or the other. They wrongfully project the cold, deterministic properties of nature onto economic freedom. But marketplace competition is an outgrowth of the ability to reason, not base survival instincts. The will to survive is certainly a factor of social progress, but taken on its own would tend toward more similarities with nature, such that the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Man has the faculties to escape the jungle, to leave the animal kingdom, to better his life without worsening others’.

Communist anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (influenced by Godwin) juxtaposed social Darwinism, evolution requiring competition, with his own take, evolution requiring cooperation, in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). In so doing, he disagreed with Engels on Darwin, by describing how natural selection depended at least as much upon cooperation as it did biological competition. But unfortunately he conformed to Engels on the false dichotomy between rational competition (free markets) and cooperation (mutual aid).

Our second subject, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a mutualist, an anarchist and a socialist. Yet some of his ideas are more in line with libertarianism than with contemporary socialism. They were often based on a fairly consistent concept of natural rights, but understood in light of fallacious economic principles, especially the labor theory of value (held by Locke, Smith, Ricardo, and Marx).

But utility-based theories are in vogue among today’s classical liberals and much of Proudhon’s economics has been rightly tossed aside. But his theory of spontaneous order and support for free markets should not be so readily discarded. Leave that to conservatives fearful of anything tainted by the socialist label, and to leftists whose only alternative would be to admit that the labor theory is passé.

Proudhon (General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 1851) was also opposed to Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s social contract theories, having his own:

What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No…The social contract is an agreement of man with man…from which must result what we call society…Commerce…the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other.

Organic institutions, neither designed nor imposed!

It seems there’s much knowledge and inspiration to be gained by examining the forgotten words of discredited intellectuals. Warts and all.

Buddhist Leaders Call on Myanmar to Expel Muslims

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Religion , , , , ,

From the New York Times:

After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a rant against what he called “the enemy” — the country’s Muslim minority.

“You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.

There is much more in the piece, including this:

[…] images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

Ashin Wirathu denies any role in the riots. But his critics say that at the very least his anti-Muslim preaching is helping to inspire the violence.

What began last year on the fringes of Burmese society has grown into a nationwide movement whose agenda now includes boycotts of Muslim-made goods. Its message is spreading through regular sermons across the country that draw thousands of people and through widely distributed DVDs of those talks. Buddhist monasteries associated with the movement are also opening community centers and a Sunday school program for 60,000 Buddhist children nationwide.

This bad news is, of course, contradictory to everything Dr Delacroix and other imperialists have written on the subject of religious extremism. Imperialists in this century like to pretend that Islam has suddenly appeared to take the place of communism as the preeminent threat to peace and prosperity in the world. They point to violence, poverty and state-sponsored oppression as examples of Islam’s inherent incompatibility with the liberal world order.

This is all anecdotal evidence. There is nothing inherently violent about Islam. All religions are equally authoritarian at their core.

I pull two things from this piece: 1) it reaffirms my commitment to secular government and 2) it reconfirms my skepticism of democracy. These two things go hand-in-hand, of course.

A government that decides to adhere to one religion is necessarily going to oppress those it does not sponsor. This is easy enough for our Western readers to understand, but it is an argument that does not have nearly enough clout in the non-Western world (you could perhaps exclude China from this list, and India has essentially been Westernized; New Delhi even has its own condescending policy towards its indigenous minorities).

The democratic aspect, too, should be familiar to Western readers. Democracy needs restraints, and lots of them. The reasons for this are practically infinite, but suffice it to say here going to war in the name of democracy is a foolish, morally horrendous thing to do. The fact that imperialists today often shroud their lust for power in terms of democracy speaks volumes about the immoral nature of their worldview. (h/t Eugene Volokh)

Tales of other cities: tweakers, hobos, some odds and ends, and Santa Rosa’s “welfare block”

muricaderp Liberty

Armistead Maupin I ain’t. Nor do I particularly wish to be. Even if every Millennial brat is working on his novel, my years around downwardly mobile bohemians in denial are too raw to fictionalize, and I find the upwardly mobile sort of San Franciscan too narrowminded and ideologically extreme to examine closely. Besides, I’d rather be the William Faulkner of Tacoma, not because there’s any taste in being such a writer, but because there isn’t any. Pierce County is a place whose dysfunction has gone surprisingly unexamined in American literature and film despite its having sheltered a mentally ill and ultimately murderous police chief (David Brame), a notorious killing spree duo (John Allen Muhammad and Boyd Lee Malvo), a disgruntled father who immolated himself and his kids in their house (Josh Powell), and an Army neurosurgeon (Dr. Dennis Geyer) who used a metal thermos to vent his road rage on the head of a man named, I kid you not, Robert Speed.

If Tacoma isn’t the anti-Seattle, it’s close. Actually, the Parkland-Spanaway-Graham corridor on the east flank of Fort Lewis is the real anti-Seattle, and a fairly awful place. My mom is right that it has too many nail salons. There are reasons why commissioned officers and those of us who associate with them often have bad things to say about the enlisted and their hangers-on, just as there are reasons why some of the common epithets for military wives (“dependent whales,” “commissary cows”) verge on being unprintable. To be clear, the dysfunction goes much deeper than limited education, intelligence, or finances. Fat women in the Nordic countries and the culturally Nordic parts of the Pacific Northwest don’t have that defiant slovenliness about them. Nor is the proliferation of jacked-up crew cab pickups with pristine paint jobs (or, as I like to call them, shlengtheners with room for the general staff) around JBLM a sign of poverty, even if the drugstore cowboys who drive them are in debt for the honor; I’d have to sell my trusty old Civic several times over to buy one, and the fuel bill on those things is obviously a bitch. These people aren’t lower-class; they’re classless. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the myriad pathologies that keep Pierce County social workers busy. One can travel in an arc from Lakewood through South Tacoma and back up the left bank of the Puyallup River to the edge of civilization without really leaving the gnarly shit. Actually, there are some pleasant agricultural districts and old villages up in the hills, such as Eatonville; there are also some picturesque but disturbing ones, such as Yelm, which features a gun shop in an old clapboard church. The northbound leg of this arc has a lot to do with generic West Coast ghetto culture, but the southbound leg, into the woods, is more readily explained by the kind of people who get dredged up for military service these days. There are exceptions, but as a rule these are not the kind of troops who incline me to support our troops, and I have backup from a family friend and Army captain who explained my disturbance about all the thugs on base quite simply: “Those, my friend, are the enlisted.”

You don’t read about these places in the tourist pamphlets. They’re a huge bummer. But as much as the Chamber of Commerce and some of our politicians would like to pretend that they don’t exist, they do. Contrary to popular (and aggressively propagandized) belief, they are not just a problem in and around big cities, either. For example, crystal methamphetamine, which tends to turn its addicts into pathetic wrecks, is largely a rural and small town problem. I lived for a time on the edge of the tweaker ghetto on the west side of Eureka, CA. One description I heard of the commercial strip a few blocks west of my apartment went like this: “If all anyone from out of town saw of Eureka was Broadway, no one would ever come back.” Most of Eureka’s residential motels are clustered along Broadway. These are exceptionally vile, dilapidated properties. Their tenants include tweakers whose five-year-olds stumble into the crank stash and get fucked up, as well as a rogue’s gallery of other gross dirtbags. It’s an accidental sort of truth in advertising, since 101 runs along Broadway and has made this skid row the main southern portal for tourists on their way to visit the quaint Victorians downtown. Only the locals know to detour through Henderson Center if they’d like to avoid the nastiness.

Many locals do not, however, have an inkling of how awful some of the city’s biggest landlords are. They don’t all have their heads in the sand; it’s just that they don’t rent or hang out with people who rent. They may live not two miles away and drive by these slumlord ratholes all the time, but the tenants aren’t doing silly walks out front with their pants on the ground, so the disorder and evil are a lot harder to notice.

I was recently told one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard about urban disorder in an unexpected place: Santa Rosa. Santa Rosans have always struck me as an exceptionally well-mannered and functional lot. It seems that I just hadn’t met the dregs because they don’t leave town.

My source for this story was a woman who described herself as a former “mental health token” in Sonoma County social services lobbying (“I was young and could string a sentence together, so they hired me”). She told me that she had several meetings with Nancy Pelosi in this capacity, and that she found Pelosi thoroughly unprincipled.

This woman does de facto social work on Santa Rosa’s “welfare block.” (The only neighborhood nickname I like more is the Pork ‘n Beans, the nickname for a housing project in Miami that is a staple on The First 48. As you see, it can be useful to watch too much TV.)  This term apparently isn’t so much an epithet used by disgruntled neighbors as a matter-of-fact name used by its residents. Asked where they live, they consistently say, “I live on the welfare block.” They don’t know their own home addresses or even the nearest intersection. Second-graders from the block can’t spell their own names. When residents invite friends over, they often tell them to go hang out on the welfare block and wait until they show up. Social life with the neighbors is largely an informal affair determined by who happens to show up on the block at the same time. Gang rivals see each other out on the block, head out for a fight, then go back home a few minutes later. The term I favor, however, is “yard,” because this is exactly the sort of thing one hears about in prisons. In no neighborhood where the usual custom is to work outside the home is the standard for social interactions among working-age adults nothing but a series of chance encounters with friends and enemies out on the street.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of escaping the welfare block. Going to prison seems to be mainly a matter of changing yards for the time being, of mixing it up with a different set of homies on a different block before returning to the original block and mixing it up again with whomever isn’t off at one of the many big houses at the moment. With luck, if one can call it that, there might even be some continuity of residents between the welfare block and prison, kind of a poor man’s version of having buddies from the neighborhood at boarding school.

The woman who told me this story said that a lot of the adult residents resent her for hanging out with their kids and supposedly being arrogant because she has her life together. These are often the same parents who are too drunk to drive their young children to school functions or medical appointments.

I met this woman on a train that I was taking to San Jose to get a copy of my birth certificate for employment purposes. It was a short-notice, short-turnaround trip. On the train back north to Salem the next night, the crowd seemed dirtier and more disreputable. My main company on the trip back north was a grizzled transient en route to Portland who was dressed like Robin Hood and prone to wax eloquent in some of the most pretentious quasiphilosophical language imaginable about unfortunate rifts in the oneness of humanity. His type is legion on the West Coast hippie circuit. They’re the losers you see hanging out on business district sidewalks in Huntington Beach, Arcata, Ashland, and Portland, usually with a guitar and a puppy, the better to establish street cred as starving artists with poor animals in their care. They are the undeserving poor. They ruin the reputation of the homeless for the majority who aren’t like that and who didn’t choose to be such lowlives, the homeless who try to be discreet, keep themselves clean, and be productive members of society against stacked odds. Some of them aren’t actually homeless, but successfully act the part as their occupation. These include the trustafarian university students who used to panhandle at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Few of these losers, however, speak in the affected English accent that my buddy on the train used. At first I suspected that he was from Continental Europe, since there was something slightly off about his accent for an Englishman, but it was much more English than any continental accent I’d ever heard, and it seemed to change into a slightly American accent from time to time. When I asked where he was from, he very matter-of-factly told me that he had been raised mainly in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast. After that, I noticed a mild, generic drawl crop up in his speech when he got animated.

Robin Hood was smart for heading to Portland at the start of summer. It may not be consistent with a belief in the oneness of humanity to milk some of America’s most guilt-ridden yuppies for walking-around money, but it’s good business, and as closely as I can tell that’s his line of work.

Про пиратство, русский менталитет и национальное самосознание

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events ,

Всем привет!

Давно ничего не писал. Лето, все дела, времени мало. Но получив вчера магический подзатыльник от Brandon Christensen (специально написал имя по-английски, чтобы переводчик случайно не перевел его неправильно), решил активизировать свою деятельность на Notes On Liberty и поделиться с вами несколькими резонансными событиями, произошедшими в России за последнее время.

Ситуация с Сирией несколько отъехала на второй план после того, как Государственная Дума приняла два очень важных для каждого русского человека закона, касающихся пиратства в Интернете. В силу менталитета и самосознания, практически каждый русский стремится получить некоторое “благо”, ничего не отдав в замен. Это касается музыки, фильмов, сериалов, каких-то нематериальных благ, будь то скидки в магазины, всякие бонусы. В принципе такую позицию можно понять: каждый человек стремится получить побольше всего, и отдать поменьше. При этом вопрос чужой выгоды вообще никого не заботит. “Я хочу слушать новый альбом любимой группы в Интернете в плохом качестве за две недели до его официального издания, чтобы потом не тратить деньги на его приобретение”. Или, например, “я хочу смотреть новинки кинематографа дома, и не покупать для этого диски в магазинах”.

Законы, которые у нас приняли, напрямую касаются интернет-пиратства. В сети началось активное удаление пиратской продукции по требованиям правообладателей: удаляется популярная музыка, попавшая в сеть незаконно, фильмы, сериалы и прочее. Я считаю, что это правильно. Нужно уважать чужой труд. Если музыкальная группа выпустила альбом – его нужно купить, а не украсть. Группа потратила силы, время и деньги на запись музыки, мастеринг, сведение, издание альбома. Организовала тур по странам. Так почеу бы не заплатить им 10 долларов за альбом? Самое интересное, что подобный вид интернет воровства российскими гражданами не считается “нарушением закона”, так как каждый глубоко верит в собственную исключительность, анонимность и непричастность.

Я знаю, что во многих странах мира вопрос с пиратством если не решен полностью – то по крайней мере находится в стадии решения. Надеюсь, что и Россия когда-нибудь по уровню культуры и самосознания сможет догнать иностранных коллег.

Critical Junctures and Path Dependency in “Why Nations Fail”: Implications for U.S. Foreign Aid Policy

Michael Adamson Books, History , ,

Greeted with wide acclaim, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, should put to bed all debate on using foreign aid to promote economic development on a national level.

Authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson effectively deploy path dependency to explain the trajectories of the political institutions that form the core of their argument: Nations with “inclusive” political institutions succeed economically whereas those saddled with extractive” political institutions fail. Citing cases from myriad times and places, the authors demonstrate the relationship between political institutions and economic development. The authors tether their argument to Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction in the marketplace: No creative destruction, no long-term development. Nations encumbered by extractive political institutions typically privilege monopoly. And so, over time, their economies atrophy.

So far, so good. In deploying path dependency to explain why institutions, once in place, tend to persist, authors add a solid piece of research to a literature that includes persuasive and important studies from Paul Krugman and Robert Higgs (and show that path dependency is an ideologically independent analytical tool). Notwithstanding their clear, concise, and compelling prose, however, the authors do less well in explaining the origins of divergent dependent paths. This is disappointing, because knowing and understanding the point of origin is crucial to understanding the dependent path. Because points of origin are often associated with cataclysmic events, however, one thing is clear: Development economics has no chance of establishing a new point of origin for nations encumbered by extractive political institutions.

Acemoglu and Robinson call their points of origin “critical junctures.” As they explain, critical junctures “are major events that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in one or many societies.” Critical junctures launch nations down their respective dependent paths. Because of small differences in initial conditions, the same critical juncture can send nations in radically different directions. But a lot is murky here in terms of understanding the historical foundation of a particular critical juncture. In many cases, I found myself accepting the facts that the authors present as the starting point and then going along for the narrative ride. Origins happen, and until another critical juncture occurs, a nation is pretty much locked in an institutional straightjacket.

What the authors do show is that we really have very little control over the initial conditions that propel nations down a particular path. And if paths are truly as dependent as the authors insist, it is extremely difficult—especially for outsiders—to get a nation to change course, that is, reform its political institutions. Whatever else they accomplish in elaborating the findings of their research, Acemoglu and Robinson bolster the argument, made by economists from P. T. Bauer to William Easterly, that foreign aid generally does nothing, and really can do nothing, to promote economic development.

Here’s my short list of the most important critical junctures in the book:

  • The Black Death
  • The French Revolution
  • The Glorious Revolution—a relatively peaceful resolution to decades of bloody civil war

If pestilence, famine, and war are requisites for institutional change, what chance do USAID, the World Bank, and the various UN agencies have to affect reform, armed only with dollars and expertise?

Less apocalyptic critical junctures described by Acemoglu and Robinson give no cause for cheer among aid advocates, either:

  • Of more than 50 African nations, only Botswana enjoys inclusive political institutions, and only because its leaders acted on their own initiative and in the face of conventional wisdom to break the institutional chains that have shackled all of the other nations on the continent.
  • Notwithstanding the arguments of the authors, the weight of the evidence suggests that America enjoys inclusive political institutions and Latin America does not above all because of climate, geology, geography topography, and differences in the demography of indigenous populations. (Score a point here for Jared Diamond.) English and Spanish colonists set out from Europe with similar intentions. In contrast to their Spanish counterparts, English colonists unhappily found no gold or silver, and in any case, encountered no large concentrations of peoples to enslave. The indentured servants that they imported in their stead proved to be a poor substitute. Paths diverged.

There is little in these stories to guide contemporary aid missionaries.

Why Nations Fail provides no justification for Washington maintaining its foreign aid apparatus. The general reader might close the book relieved to know that China, America’s greatest adversary in the international political economy, will inevitably falter because of its extractive political institutions. Policymakers and practitioners operating in the aid arena have no similar cause for relief. The authors leave some wiggle room in their conclusion, but in my reading, Why Nations Fail closes the door on using aid to foreign governments to foster economic development.

The Real IRS Problem

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

It’s heartening to see distrust and resentment of the IRS building up in the wake of the targeting of tea party groups and such. But let’s not overlook the daily predations of the IRS, small and large, which add up to a mountain of costs borne by citizens – not just monetary costs but also mental anguish and occasionally violent confrontations.

Case in point: your humble servant. This morning I received a notice demanding $8,900 in back taxes. Needless to say that ruined my day even though it took me only five minutes to realize that they made a mistake and I owe them nothing. I have high hopes that this will be resolved quickly but you never know. I mentioned my plight to a friend this morning and he chuckled. He once had a $1,400 claim which he fought for ten years until finally he got to the right person at the IRS who found their mistake in five minutes. Did he get an apology? Restitution or compensation of any kind? Of course not.

The complexity of the tax code is often cited as a significant drag on the economy, in terms of time spent gathering information and preparing returns, money paid to tax preparers and tax attorneys, etc.  But there are lots of other bad effects.  No one understands the tax code in its entirety and most IRS agents understand little of it — or worse, what they often think they understand is wrong.  Nor do taxpayers understand it.  This opens the door for errors, misunderstanding, cheating and consequent confrontations, anguish, time and money wasted, and sometimes violence.

If we have to have an income tax (which I’m unwilling to concede), let’s have a simple flat tax and do away with, if not the inherent coercion of any tax, at least the enormous expense and anguish that are part and parcel of the current insane system.

What I’ve Been Reading

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events, History , , , , , , , ,

Hello all. Apologies in advance for not posting more often since graduation. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, rather than stuff on the internet, so I haven’t had much to link to lately.

Here is a list of a few books I have been working on:

  • 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by the science journalist Charles C Mann. I know I’ve blogged about this book before, but I’ve finally got a little bit of free time to hunker down and read the whole thing. I’m about halfway through and it’s really good.
  • Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy by the Marxist political geographers John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge. This is a pretty crummy book, but it was recommended because of some good critiques of the IMF and the World Bank that it supposedly has. I’ll keep ploughing through and hope for the best.
  • The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by the historian Simon Schama. This is a very well-written book about Dutch culture (not Culture) in the seventeenth century and so far I have not been disappointed. Schama eschews the political and economic aspects of the Dutch republic in favor of examining the everyday lives of its citizens.
  • Democracy in Botswana which is edited by John D Holm and Patrick Molutsi. I picked this up for a research project I was doing last quarter and have not been able to let it go yet. It brings together a compendium of talks given at a conference held in Gaborone in 1989 to assess Botswana’s current status in the world, in sub-Saharan Africa and according to the citizens of Botswana.

Of the four books, I’d recommend 1493 to the intelligent layman, but the other three are definitely tough slogging.

Libertarian Countries and Libertarian Societies

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

by Fred Foldvary

Michael Lind in the 4 June 2012 salon.com in his article “The question libertarians just can’t answer,” asked, “Why are there no libertarian countries?”  One answer is simply that there are very few pure libertarians. But another answer is that most folks are libertarian enough that they establish libertarian societies, by which I mean not just organized clubs but also informal social gatherings and happenings.

The essential libertarian proposition is “live and let live.”  In a libertarian society, there are no restrictions on peaceful and honest human action.  Most people believe that it is morally wrong to coercively harm others, and they have been brought up to have some sympathy for others, so that they don’t want to hurt others.  Therefore most gatherings such as concerts, athletic events, and street traffic is peaceful. Thus much of the world operates in a libertarian way, without governmental direction. If you host a party in your house, you seldom need a government official there to keep the peace.

This social libertarianism has limits, as those who do not conform to cultural standards such as dress codes would encounter some intolerance.  Nevertheless, there is an almost universal agreement that assault and theft are evil, and a widespread aversion to such anti-social behavior.  When most folks are pro-social in their behavior, they demonstrate a wide and deep level of libertarianism.

Why does the US government impose restrictions such as prohibiting trade with Cuba?  Most Americans probably favor free trade with Cuba. But a minority special interest opposes trade with Cuba and has the political clout to stop it. So the basic reason why the US does not have full freedom is the inherent dysfunction of our system of selecting the chiefs of state. That system is mass democracy.  The failures of mass democracy have been documented and analyzed by the branch of economics called “public choice.”

The two basic reasons why there are no libertarian countries are:

1. Very few people understand or even know about the ethics, economics, and governance of pure liberty.  Pure freedom is not taught in schools, and it is not in the predominant culture.

2. Mass democracy enables special interests to skew policy that favors a few at the expense of the many.

However, the general concept of “freedom” and “liberty” is universally admired.  People have a genetic dislike of being controlled. But their moral views have been skewed by thinking their religious and cultural views are universal.  Ignorance is therefore the ultimate reason why libertarianism is not more widespread.

In another essay on 13 June 2013 Lind says, “Grow up, Libertarians!”  It shows that Lind does not know the meaning of the word “freedom.”  He writes that fighting evil requires limiting the “freedom of employers to buy and sell slaves.”  He has a physical definition of “freedom,” rather than the ethical meaning of there being no restrictions other than on coercive harm to others.  The ownership of a slave is not ethical freedom.

He then says that libertarians propose “the replacement of all taxes by a single regressive flat tax that would fall on low-income workers.” Anyone who advocates such as tax is not a pure libertarian. Lind confuses libertarianism with conservativism.

Michael Lind concludes with the statement, “libertarianism as a philosophy is superficial, juvenile nonsense.” Wow – perhaps he has never read freedom philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Hospers. We need a serious explanation of why the basic libertarian idea – live and let live – is superficial nonsense.

There seems to be a simple explanation for Lind’s views on libertarianism – he simply does not understand it.

I’m Done

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , ,

Whew. Finals are over. Expect a lot more from me over the next little while. Nothing tonight, of course (I’m gonna sleeeep), but more is coming.

Thanks for all of your thoughtful comments and criticisms. I’ve got a link for the evening, and it’s an old article (2001) from the Economist. An excerpt:

The affinity of totalitarianism and economic isolation was obvious in the case of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe; it is still plain today in the case of North Korea, say. But democracies are capable of oppression too. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that integration is undesirable merely because it limits the power of government, even if the government concerned is democratic. One needs to recognise that some constraints on democracy are desirable, and then to ask whether the constraints imposed by markets are too tight.

These issues are rarely, if ever, addressed by the critics of globalisation: it is simpler to deplore the notion of “profits before people”. The sceptics either insist, or regard it as too obvious even to mention, that the will of the people, democratically expressed, must always prevail. This is amazingly naive. Even the most elementary account of democracy recognises the need for checks and balances, including curbs on the majoritarian “will of the people”. Failing those, democracies are capable of tyranny over minorities.

The sceptics are terribly keen on “the people”. Yet the idea that citizens are not individuals with different goals and preferences, but an undifferentiated body with agreed common interests, defined in opposition to other monolithic interests such as “business” or “foreigners”, is not just shallow populism, it is proto-fascism. It is self-contradictory, as well. The sceptics would not hesitate to call for “the people” to be overruled if, for instance, they voted for policies that violated human rights, or speeded the extermination of endangered species, or offended against other values the sceptics regard as more fundamental than honouring the will of the majority.

Read the whole thing. I don’t agree with everything in it, but in my opinion it is a damning indictment of the anti-globalist movement. A return to the good old days of yesteryear would have catastrophic consequences for the world. See, especially, Dr Delacroix’s writings on the virtuous benefits of globalization and the self-defeating measures of protectionism.

Eye Candy

Brandon Christensen History , ,

It’s just beneath the fold…

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Snowden and Me

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Much unnecessary hoopla about Mr Snowden. Much conspiracy theorizing on conservative radio (but not on Rush Limbaugh).

I think things are pretty much the way they look. He has not worked for the Chinese or anyone. Not much that is very new has been revealed. The new things for some people on this blog is that Mr Obama is just as bad (OK, almost as bad ) as Mr Bush. N. S. !

Mr Snowden is almost certainly not guilty of spying: You have to spy for somebody or for something.

Personally, I think he is probably guilty of violating some contract or other that he signed. That’s worth a year in Club Fed with Bernie (what’s his name again?)

Personally, I did not like the blank surveillance cover and the data mining before. I still don’t. I don’t like big government and I don’t like big government doing big things. What’s so hard to understand?

There is one thing I learned again that  I already knew: College is overrated. Mr Snowden, the high-school dropout was earning $200,00 a year, in Hawaii. Of course, he was working for the Fed. Government.

Update: Booz -Allen says that no, he must be bragging, it was only $120,000. That’s before bonuses, of course.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

muricaderp Links, Politics , , , ,

1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Impeach James Clapper

muricaderp Politics , , ,

It’s very simple. The Director of National Intelligence needs to go. He lied to Congress about the NSA’s totalitarian PRISM program. That’s as serious and subversive a lie as can be told to Congress about any topic. It’s exactly the kind of official misconduct that the impeachment process was established to check and punish.

I encourage those of you who agree that Clapper should be impeached to reblog what I’ve written, either verbatim or modified as you see fit. So far, there has been a strong and encouraging grassroots response to the White House petition to pardon Edward Snowden, a fair amount of it from latent civil libertarians who have been shocked into engagement by the egregiousness of what Snowden has exposed. A campaign to impeach Clapper, whom Snowden’s leaks have exposed as a liar, would dovetail perfectly with the one to pardon Snowden. Clapper has already provoked a number of members of Congress with his lie about PRISM, so timely pressure from constituents could be what it takes either to pressure him out of office or to get him formally removed.

A couple of side notes on the official reaction to PRISM (the metadata, if you will):

1) Rudy Giuliani offered a cretinously jingoistic defense of Clapper in an interview with Greta Van Susteren last night (6/11), premised largely on Clapper’s distinguished service as a military officer, the underlying ethics being that we dasn’t criticize the troops. It’s worth noting that by that standard Edward Snowden would also be shielded from all criticism, although perhaps less fully shielded since Clapper had the patriotism not to truncate his military career by breaking both legs in a special forces training accident. It goes without saying, but shouldn’t, that one doesn’t hear this sort of defense offered on Bradley Manning’s behalf, and not just because he’s a young grunt. Nor does one hear it made in defense of Robert Bales or Nidal Hasan, except perhaps by their defense attorneys, because it would sound absolutely absurd to say such a thing about someone under court-martial for mass murder. I submit that it’s no less absurd or evil when said about a spook who has been caught lying to Congress about a totalitarian eavesdropping program.

The interview got weirder than that. When Van Susteren confronted Giuliani with a chronology of Clapper’s evasions, Giuliani suddenly changed tack and accused Clapper of being a loose cannon for not having formulaically stated that he could not answer the question or offered to answer it in closed-door session. By mayoral fiat, an esteemed officer and gentleman was turned into a blithering fool who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. This makes the notion of Giuliani as some sort of mobster at least look plausible.

2) This vile mashup of pop psychology, pop sociology, generational smears, class snobbery, and milquetoast despotism is bad even by David Brooks’ usual standards.

From the Comments: Federalism, Local and Global

Brandon Christensen Comments , , , , , ,

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

Hank,

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

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

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

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

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

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