- As Bad As ObamaCare Is, Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act Was Worse
- From our own Dr Shikida in the Cato Journal: “Why Some States Fail: The Role of Culture” [pdf]
- Stop Blaming Professors: Study finds students themselves, not professors, lead some to become more radical in college
- The World Cup and “soccer” in general: Nationalism versus internationalism
- The agony of a Left-wing gun lover
- History happens all the time
internationalism
From the Comments: The four broad pillars of the market-based economy
NEO’s response to my musings on decentralization in Africa is worth highlighting:
It strikes me , Brandon, that one of the impediments here, there may be others, I’m no expert, is that the nascent US was composed mostly of literate folks with a (at least somewhat) common outlook that specified above all honesty and a “government of laws, not men”. I would also state that this is a good bit of our problem now.
This is a great observation. An anthropologist by the name of Maya Mikdashi recently wrote an article on the effects of market-based reforms in the Middle East. She essentially argued that the market-based reforms assume that only a certain type of individual can successfully participate in the market economy (stay with me here): the rational, autonomous, freedom-seeking, and legally-protected-as-an-individual type. Over the past two decades, as more states have moved towards a market-based economy, we have seen the institutional and cultural rewards being reaped from this process. Instead of people who have known only poverty and want, the market-based economy has pushed individuals to seek to become more rational, autonomous, freedom-seeking, and legally protected as an individual.
Now, stay with me. The market-based economy, capitalism, has four broad institutional pillars that it needs to thrive: private property, individualism, the rule of law, and an internationalist spirit. From these pillars come the fountains of progress that the West has come to enjoy over the past 300 years. While I doubt she realizes it, Mikdashi is simply echoing the writings of the great classical liberal theorists of the past three centuries: institutions matter, and they matter a lot. A big point both Dr. Ayittey and myself have been trying to make is that the institutions necessary for progress and capitalism are already in place in the post-colonial world; when I was in Ghana doing research one of the things I always asked farmers is where they got their property titles and they answered “the chief.” I asked them why they didn’t go through more official routes to obtain their property titles (i.e. through the state), and I’m sure you can finish the Ghanaian farmer’s answer for him.
The fact that most, if not all, citizens of the new republic desired the rule of law is one that cannot be stressed enough, and it is definitely one of the reasons why we have grown so prosperous, and answers why we are in trouble today. However: Africans don’t desire the rule of law?
From the Comments: The New Internationalism
My dear, brave friend from Iran, Siamak, takes issue with my recent musings on the state of affairs in the Middle East:
I’m completely against this. Any changes in mid-east borders could start a Religious-Ethnic Oil war that brings years of savagery and massacre. The problem of middle-east can be solved with tolerance through diplomatic acts. I can’t believe that some libertarian agoras are supporting breakaways in mid-east. As a libertarian person living in mid-east, I’m telling that this political view is so dangerous and can demolish little advances for peace in mid-east completely. Instead of trying to make a new geopolitical order in mid-east (as neo-cons) tried to do, Isn’t it better to try to recognize the mid-eastern countries and try to deal with them? You think new states will bring new nations?! No! Nowadays discussions about creating new countries in mid-east are states predicated on Ethnic differences. Some Kurds want their states! Some Azeris, Some Ashouris, Some Arabs, Some Jews, etc… I’m pretty sure that any changes in the geopolitical order of mid-east will start a big and long long war.
I thought I’d pick this apart for a couple of reasons, but the main reason would be because so many people read the words ‘decentralization’ or ‘secession’ and simply go into autopilot. Rick Searle shares his eloquent thoughts here. Moussa Cidibe shares his pertinent critiques here. Wbwise shares his criticisms here (some of Dr Delacroix’s well-informed thoughts are here, and in the same thread). Dr George Ayittey dedicated quite a bit of energy to tackling my argument (that’s two academics in a row, in case you lost count). Neenergyobserver is skeptical as well.
Each of the objections listed above look very similar to the objections raised by Siamak. I figure now is as good a time as any to go through my argument again, and I’m going to break down Siamak’s pertinent protestations to do it. First up is a concern about changing borders in the Middle East:
Any changes in mid-east borders could start a Religious-Ethnic Oil war that brings years of savagery and massacre.
This may have some merit to it, especially if one looks at the Balkans in Europe or the wars in the Horn of Africa. Yet one can also point to the velvet divorce in Czechoslovakia (and under the umbrage of the EU) or the dissolution of the Soviet Union as peaceful separatist movements. One thing that we can all agree on, I would hope, is that today the world is already witnessing years of savagery and massacre in the Middle East. Additionally, this savagery and massacre have only been dampened by American imperialism in the region, thus bringing my taxes into the picture.
If this last statement seems rather bold, think about the various balancing acts that occur in the Middle East (Iran v Iraq; Saudi Arabia v Iran; Israel v Egypt; etc., etc.) and how much more brutal these conflicts would be if the US were not pulling the strings behind them.
This observation should not be taken to imply that I support US imperialism. I do not. In fact I oppose it vigorously. Yet it goes without saying that the US arrived in the Middle East when the current borders were intact as they are, and that these current borders (created by Europeans) were recognized by some but by no means all. This struggle for legitimacy, in turn, is the major cause of political, economic and social strife in the region.
To reiterate: the Middle East is already a mess, and looking at alternatives is neither a crime nor a dangerous precedent (especially on a blog as humble as our own). I think some of these reactions to my argument for more decentralization can stem from a misreading of what has actually been written. For example, when Siamak writes:
Instead of trying to make a new geopolitical order in mid-east (as neo-cons) tried to do, Isn’t it better to try to recognize the mid-eastern countries and try to deal with them? You think new states will bring new nations?! No!
He is not grasping my argument. At all. Most of the criticisms of my argument have fallen into this camp, so Siamak the individual is not to be faulted. I think it goes back to those keywords identified earlier in this piece (decentralization and secession). Here is what I actually wrote:
the West should emphatically not go around breaking up the states of the Middle East into smaller ones, but it should recognize breakaway regions as soon as they, uh, break away. This’ll give these states a little bit of breathing room on the international scene and deter older states from trying to reclaim their old territory.
Can everybody see how this argument is very different from the one Siamak (and others) have attributed towards me? The article that I originally riffed off of argues no such thing, either. This is not to say that Siamak’s fears are unfounded. In fact, the original article argues that the Middle East needs to embrace decentralization as a way to protect itself from the West’s own plans to break up the states in the region in order to better play them off on each other. Both imperialists in the West and the anti-imperialist factions are now at a point where they recognize the states as they are in the Middle East need to be smaller to be effective.
I understand that when states break up there can be turmoil. This is why I believe it is best that states break up within free trade zones (like the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the EU, or – potentially – Scotland, Catalonia or even California doing the same). However, even without free trade zones in place, recognizing the independence of breakaway regions (away from Russia’s and China’s peripheries, of course) saves lives. Think of the amount of violence that Sudan and South Sudan have contributed to since the latter’s independence, and then think of the violence that occurred before South Sudan’s independence.
Siamak is right when he states that “the problems of Middle East can be solved with tolerance through diplomatic acts,” but is it not also true that secession and the creation of many smaller states out of a few large ones can be achieved through these very acts as well?
I’m Done
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.
Libertarian Internationalism and the Problem of World Government
Recently, I posted some musings on the writings of many libertarian intellectuals concerning world government. It is important to distinguish, really quickly and in blog form, that libertarians are internationalists, and internationalists are individualists. Indeed, the only logical conclusion of individualism is internationalism.
When libertarians speak of world government, though, we are not speaking of economic planning as has been undertaken by national governments (vigorously and largely unopposed) since the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, Hayek saw the problems we now see with supranational economic planning in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom: Continue reading
Libertarians and World Government
I’ve been doing a little bit of side reading on capitalism and charity and I came across some of Ludwig von Mises’s writings on foreign policy. I’ll have a longer post on his foreign policy arguments in the future (promise!) but for now lemme just say it falls roughly in line with many other classical liberals.
One interesting tidbit about classical liberals like Mises, Hayek, and Adam Smith is that they were actually very much in favor of some kind of world governing body that would be able to standardize laws and further erode the arbitrary borders drawn up by statesmen over the course of centuries. However, they were much more realistic about the practicality of such an endeavor, as well as suspicious of other kinds of international government being espoused by various thinkers (in Smith’s time, this was done by despots and Popes [same thing!], and in Hayek’s and Mises’s time this was done by despots and socialists [again, same thing!]).
This realism should not be confused, though, with opposition to an international governing body charged with codifying a standard, minimum set of global laws concerning trade, private property, individual rights, and, of course, peace.
Again, I’ll have a longer post explaining the foreign policy arguments of classical liberals in the near future, but for now this juicy little tidbit is all I can offer y’all. You can find Mises’s musings on foreign policy in his book Liberalism (available to read for free at mises.org).
“Isolationism” Revisited
Socialist Zach Dorfman has a great review up over at Dissent on a recent book by a historian about American foreign policy from roughly 1890 to about 1940, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age. I am really tempted to just copy and paste the whole review, but here are some juicy excerpts from Dorfman’s review (the book itself will have to wait until Christmas):
Today, isolationism is often portrayed as intellectually bankrupt, a redoubt for idealists, nationalists, xenophobes, and fools. Yet the term now used as a political epithet has deep roots in American political culture. Isolationist principles can be traced back to George Washington’s farewell address, during which he urged his countrymen to steer clear of “foreign entanglements” while actively seeking nonbinding commercial ties […] Continue reading
Native American Sovereignty
I have been a proponent of abolishing, outright, the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a long time. In its place, I would either grant the Indian tribes full-fledged sovereignty with reparations for stolen property, or would grant the reservations statehood into the union of the United States federal republic.
If you’ll notice, this proposal goes hand-in-hand with my other writings on decentralizing political power in other various parts of the world, and I think that the issue of sovereignty for Native Americans goes along nicely with this theme. Tyler Cowen recently directed me to a piece in the Economist that writes about just this topic, so I am not nearly as idealistic and young as some of you might think.
I think this decentralized process is happening for a reason, and that the reason is overwhelmingly good: the world’s markets are becoming increasingly integrated, and as a result, political power is becoming increasingly irrelevant except on a largely local or regional scale.
If we want to avoid the mistakes of the past, including slavery and horrific, large-scale wars, then we would do well to realize and affirm that decentralized governance and integrated markets are extremely beneficial to mankind. In affirming this, we would likewise do well to recognize that when people want more autonomy in governance we should grant it to them, especially in cases where post-colonial states exist. States themselves are largely illegitimate, and the post-colonial ones are the most guilty of this crime. There is no reason to pretend that we have to respect the sovereignty of post-colonial states ruled by dictators, and every reason to respect the wishes of large swathes of the people in these post-colonial states for more political autonomy. Continue reading
Bizarre Love Triangle: Towards a New Internationalism
Isolationist screeds in the United States are extremely rare these days, which, in my opinion, makes those who promote this noble doctrine to be individuals of exceptional character. I am a regular reader of the blog Eunomia (authored by Dr. Daniel Larison), which explicates isolationist critiques of current foreign policy (among other things), and I always enjoy what Dr. Larison has to say.
I also happen to find it rather odd that I am often slandered by my sparring partners on both the Left and the Right as being an isolationist, for one reason or another. I wouldn’t particularly mind being called such, except for the fact that, for reasons I hope to clarify shortly, my positions are hardly in line with those of the paleoconservative isolationists that I have grown to admire (if not disagree with more often than not).
The libertarian philosophy is one of individualism, internationalism, free trade, and the rule of law. My sparring partners often accuse of me of being an isolationist because of my opposition to wars and “nation-building” abroad, yet this opposition does not stem from a prejudice of robust international diplomacy. Rather, the war-weariness of libertarianism stems from the fact that war brings misery for the individual, it shatters international consensuses, it disrupts free trade, and it enables governments to ride roughshod over the rule of law in the name of security and of a centrally-planned war effort. Continue reading
Hillary Clinton on Somalia: More of the Same
Hillary Clinton has recently called for more effort on the part of the West in the War on Terror’s Horn of Africa region by issuing threats of sanctions and more military troops in the region recently (ht John Glaser).
The threats of sanction, which libertarians consider an act of war, have been issued to states who don’t cooperate with the West in their efforts to eradicate al Shabaab, an Islamic group linked to al Qaeda that controls much of the southern territory of Somalia and, until recently, sections of Mogadishu as well.
The underlying argument put forth by the West is that the Somali state itself, a creation of the West, needs to be upheld and maintained by an inclusive, democratic regime in order for stability, prosperity and an end to terrorist activities to take place in the Horn of Africa.
This is tactic is incredibly wrong, and instead of accomplishing the West’s stated aims, actually contributes to its continued failure. Continue reading
Notes On Liberty 