Archives: November 2004

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Goodbye and Good Riddance

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m tempted to cheer Tom Ridge’s departure. Problem is, I cheered when Janet Reno left, and they replaced her with John Ashcroft; then I cheered when Ashcroft left, and they’re replacing him with Torture Bertie. So there’s no reason to think Mr. Panic Button’s replacement is going to be any sort of improvement. Still I can say this much: I won’t miss Ridge. Not even a little bit.

When Good Texans Do Bad Things

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Don’t miss a great LRC piece by Jeff Tucker today on The Glories and Pathologies of Texocentrism.

Fiery Braille?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Do you have a “pre-9/11 mindset”? I do! For some reasons why that might not be such a bad thing, see my article on LRC today.

Thanksgiving Proclamation

How much lunacy can you pack into a single sentence?

Nope, sorry; whatever you might have come up with, Thomas Friedman has it beat with his winning entry:

I want to take time on this Thanksgiving to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own.

Mirabile Dictu

Suppose you are committed to accepting both the inviolability of physical law and the veracity of the Bible. How do you handle Biblical accounts of miracles? This is the question that my friend Bob Murphy (with whom I’ve had theological squabbles previously) addresses in two recent posts, In Defense of Christian Fundamentalists and On Miracles.

Maybe you have no interest in accounting for miracles, or for “paranormal” events of any kind. But similar problems arise in reconciling free will with physical law – and rejecting free will is not a conceptually coherent option. (See here and here.) So there’s no avoiding the problem, in some form, of fitting together physical law with aspects of human experience that seem to transcend it. Anyway, my present concern is not with whether having these joint commitments is right or wrong, but with how they might best be reconciled if, like Bob, one does have them.

For Bob, it makes no sense to hold that that “God is not bound by natural laws,” because such laws simply describe how the world actually works; any deviation from what we thought was natural law will thus show, not that a law has been violated, but that what we thought was a law was not one. (Strictly speaking, what Bob says is that “the laws of nature merely describe the relationship between the physical world at some time T1 and a later time T2.” This I think is not quite right, since it leaves out the most important feature of causal laws, namely that they support counterfactuals; but I can’t see that this point matters for present purposes.) It follows that “there is no such thing as a supernatural event,” since “it is impossible to violate the laws of nature.”

Bob concludes that the healings of Jesus depended solely on “the power of suggestion in overcoming psychosomatic maladies,” so that “if an atheist physicist or chemist were to observe, say, a blind man being healed by Jesus, they would not notice anything odd at the microscopic level.” Likewise with Jesus’ resurrection from the grave; because Jesus “walked probably hundreds of miles, certainly didn’t eat junk food, was a carpenter by trade, and had an unimaginable mental and physical discipline,” there’s nothing physically impossible in the supposition that “this man could have been nailed to a cross, buried in a cave, and some thirty to forty hours later get up.”

But Bob doesn’t take himself to be debunking the miraculous character of these events. Since God created both the laws of nature and the initial causal conditions, God was able to set things up from the start in such a way as to guarantee that Jesus would survive crucifixion, that the people Jesus tried to heal would get healed, and so forth.

I see three problems with Bob’s solution. First, as Bob acknowledges, it’s much harder to see how the really fancy miracles, like walking on water or ascending into heaven, could be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms – yet Bob is committed to accepting those stories too. (And things really get tricky if we try to handle the Old Testament miracles too, like Eve arising from Adam’s rib or Joshua stopping the sun.)

Second, since on present scientific understanding the most basic laws of physics are probabilistic, simply setting the laws and initial conditions is insufficient to determine what happens down the line. (Of course Bob thinks that God sustains the whole process rather than merely kicking it off. But since on Bob’s view God sustains it in such a way that it’s just as if he had merely kicked it off, it’s not clear that this will solve the problem.)

Third, it seems at least awkward that on Bob’s view, the fact that God exists makes no difference to what happens; everything proceeds just as it would have if the atheist were right. Not only does this seem to downgrade God’s status in a way that most theists would find unacceptable, it also makes religious belief much harder to defend, since any evidence one might offer for God’s existence would still exist even if God did not exist.

Is there any way of reconciling miracles with causal law that avoids these problems? I think there are at least three ways.

The first way is this: since causal laws generally take the form “disposition D manifests itself in circumstances C,” one could simply hold that God’s, or such-and-such a mind’s, willing something is one of those circumstances C. (Of course I don’t think it makes sense, except metaphorically, to talk of God’s willing anything, but that’s another issue.) So, for example, Jesus’ walking on the water doesn’t violate physical law if we include not only facts about weight and density but facts about God’s or Jesus’ will among the circumstances in which the disposition to float is manifested. It might seem cumbersome, or in conflict with Bob’s desire for causal simplicity, to have the fundamental laws of nature mention voluntary agents. But Bob himself presumably thinks there’s at least one fundamental law like that: namely, the law “if God wills that something be the case, then it will be the case.” It makes no sense to think of God as creating that law, since that law would already have to hold in order for God to create anything.

The second way, however, allows one to avoid having anyone’s will mentioned in the laws of physics, assuming one wants to avoid that. This way takes advantage of the aforementioned fact that the laws of physics are merely probabilistic. Hence all the Biblical miracles are already physically possible, i.e., there is a very small, but non-zero, probability that all the particles in Jesus’ body might suddenly, indeterministically, assume the trajectories needed for him to walk on water, etc. The physical laws thus make the miracles possible, but God or some other mind determines whether they actually happen, in effect selecting from the menu of possibilities provided by physical law. The advantage of this rather Kantian reading over Bob’s own somewhat similar theory is that there is no need to water down the miracles by suggesting that only psychosomatic illnesses were cured, or that while Jesus could survive crucifixion he couldn’t have survived beheading.

One might think this second way is just a variant of the first way, in that acts of will are among the conditions mentioned in physical laws. But I don’t think so. All that the physical laws determine is the probabilities of certain events, and the acts of will don’t alter those probabilities at all; the act of will doesn’t make the miraculous event more probable, it just makes the event happen. (The relevance to the free will problem is obvious.)

The third and most radical way – and the one which, whatever its intrinsic merits, seems to me to come the closest to capturing whatever it was that Jesus was trying to teach – would be the Christian Science approach, according to which only spiritual causation is real, so that so-called “miracles” represent not a departure from, but rather a demonstration of, the normal order of the universe, while apparent physical law represents spiritual law muddled or misunderstood.

The choice among these options (or the construction of a fourth) I leave to the reader.

A final point about free will: Bob suggests that “God designed the laws of nature such that our human wills have the semblance of control.” In other words, God set things up in such a way that at the exact moment when I will decide to raise my arm, my arm will be raised by purely physical causes. (Previous theologians to hold this sort of view include al-Ghazali, Malebranche, and Leibniz.) My objection to this solution is that if, as I hold, we genuinely have free will, then it is impossible for any mind, even God’s, to predict with complete certainty how we will act, because, as Aristotle showed, there is just no such thing, yet, as what we will do, so there’s nothing for God to know. Hence even God could not pre-arrange a simultaneous correlation between our free choices and their neurophysiological correlates. (Nor will placing God outside of time help, since any given moment that he considers must be, from his point of view, either settled or not settled, and if it’s already settled, he can’t intervene, while if it’s not already settled, he can’t know which intervention to make.) Rather, I would say that we determine the neurophysiological correlates of our choices by making the choices those correlates underlie. And our doing so can be reconciled with causal law in any of the three ways described above.

L&P-ers in RAE

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The latest issue of the Review of Austrian Economics is out this week; this one features an article by L&P-er Steven Horwitz on the Misesian microfoundations of Hayekian social order; Steven’s review of L&P-er Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom; and my own article offering a Wittgensteinian defense of Misesian methodology. Tolle, lege.

The Watchables

I just got back from seeing The Incredibles. The previews had not made me particularly inclined to see it, but everyone kept telling me how great it was, plus all the buzz about its Randian elements (see here and here) piqued my interest; so off I went.

Well, it was sheer delight! I won’t say too much, so as not to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the previews were quite misleading – especially that first one, none of the footage from which actually appears in the movie itself! The previews led me to expect a less subtle, less beautiful, more farcical film.

I see what people mean about the Randian aspect, but Rand didn’t exactly invent the idea in question. I was more struck by the sly references to the world of contemporary comic books – including not only the obligatory nods to X-Men (definitely comics references, not just movie references), Superman, and The Fantastic Four, but also invocations of the darker territory explored by such classics as Watchmen, Marvels, Kingdom Come, and The Dark Knight Strikes Back.

One doesn’t have to pick up on those references to enjoy the movie, however – as is evidenced by this review from Anthony Quinn (no, not that Anthony Quinn), who praises the film for avoiding the “cultural hipness” of “cute references to other movies.” That the movie might be engaging in culturally hip references to comic books obviously never occurs to Quinn, who can innocently describe one character’s “power to disappear at will and throw a protective force-field around her” as “a nice exaggeration of a shy teenager’s longing to shrink from notice,” with no apparent recognition that these two powers might have been famously combined before. Another character is an obvious nod to the Flash, yet the only comparison that comes to Quinn’s mind is the Roadrunner! But then, Quinn’s ignorance of the world of contemporary comics is so staggering that he can also describe yet another character’s “anti-democratic sentiment that aligns him with Nietzsche” as “a first for a cartoon character, I fancy.” Obviously he thinks comic books are still mindless fluff for kiddies; but should he really be reviewing a movie that’s based on a genre he knows nothing about?

Okay, this post started off as a review of The Incredibles and it’s turning into a rant against this guy Quinn, so I’ll cut it short. Go see the movie, and go read some good comics.

The Schoolhouse Door

In this past election, Alabamians had an opportunity to vote on a provision reading as follows:

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, to repeal portions of Section 256 and Amendment 111 relating to separation of schools by race and repeal portions of Amendment 111 concerning constitutional construction against the right to education, and to repeal Section 259, Amendment 90, and Amendment 109 relating to the poll tax.

To the Editor:

Mrs. F. W. Kerry writes that those who voted against Amendment 2 because they thought it would fuel a tax increase were placing greed above racial tolerance.

I don’t know whether Amendment 2 would have paved the way for a tax increase or not; but I suspect most of those who voted against it (I’m not one of them) did so because the wording on the ballot was so ambiguous that they weren’t sure what it meant, and just felt a vague suspicion that something was being put over on them.

My main quarrel with Mrs. Kerry’s letter, however, is with her assumption that anyone who votes against higher taxes is doing so out of “greed,” i.e., fear that his or her own taxes will be raised.

First, I can’t see why desiring to devote one’s income to the support of one’s own family and to the fulfillment of one’s own responsibilities, rather than having it expropriated by a wasteful and corrupt state bureaucracy, counts as “greed.”

But second, what is the basis of this rather insulting assumption that anyone who opposes higher taxes is worried solely about his or her own taxes? The best reason to oppose any tax hike is concern for all of Alabama’s working poor, who will in practice bear its chief burden, directly or indirectly.

Certainly our state services are pitifully underfunded. But do the current spending priorities of the good ol’ boys in Montgomery really merit confidence that additional tax revenue would be wisely spent?

Those who are moved by the plight of the poor and disenfranchised would be better advised to work for a radical redistribution of power from the political-corporate class to working people themselves in free association, rather than diverting further productive resources into the kleptocratic sinkpit of Montgomery.

Roderick T. Long

Better Dead Than Opiated

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

If you think the War on Drugs is a threat to freedom in the U.S., wait till you see what it means for Afghanistan.

Arrows of Desire

V is coming!

No, not that evil-lizards-from-space TV series, or the Pynchon novel either. I’m talking about V for Vendetta, the classic Alan Moore comic about a subversive masked rebel in an alternate-history fascist Britain. It looks like Moore’s haunting tale of a morally ambiguous anarchist hero (incidentally the inspiration for Alan Grant’s somewhat similar – though not quite so morally ambiguous – character Anarky) will finally be making it to the big screen.

Check out this story – and add it to the list of promised movies I’m patiently awaiting, including Atlas Shrugged, A Princess of Mars, and Babylon 5: The Memory of Shadows.

Anarchy Plus

Commenting on my recent post God and the State (and speaking whichly, don’t miss Bakunin’s original), B. K. Marcus (creator of the anarchist website BlackCrayon.com) raises some worries (see here and here) about my claim that the “oppressive power of the state [is] only one component of an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing economic and cultural elements,” so that “the struggle for liberation cannot be a narrowly political struggle, but must be an economic and cultural struggle as well.”

To the contrary (though he charmingly suggests that my dissent makes him question his position!), Marcus argues that because it’s so difficult to determine “which aspects of bourgeois and capitalist history were the result of voluntary, spontaneous order, and which aspects were artifacts of the State,” it’s “dangerous to fight candidate symptoms of statism, since our candidates are so often wrong.” Contrary to left-anarchists and conservative anarchists, who both “combine an anti-political agenda with a cultural agenda” (though they disagree as to which cultural agenda to support), Marcus endorses “liberal anarchism,” which counsels anti-statists to “remain agnostic on the cultural symptoms of statism and embrace whatever peaceful order might emerge from voluntary contracts and private property.”

Our disagreement is not an outright opposition. I agree that anarchists can often be too quick to assume that a stateless society will assume a particular shape. For example, I’m equally skeptical of the right-anarchist assumption that all/most protective associations will/should look like capitalist firms and of the left-anarchist assumption that that all/most protective associations will/should look like worker’s co-ops. Gee, I dunno; each model has its own advantages and disadvantages, and will probably attract its own clientele. Which model (if either) will dominate? Who can say?

Moreover, I strongly reject the notion that a free society requires any specific set of cultural values; on the contrary, I think it probably requires the reverse. (For the advantages to liberty of a pluralistic and multicultural context, see here and here.) While Keith Preston in this piece states the case more strongly than I would, I agree with his suspicion of the “universalist presumption adhered to by virtually all modern political thinkers, whether they be of the liberal, Marxist, conservative, neoconservative, libertarian or left-anarchist variety,” with its associated “tendency to interpret the world from the perspective of abstract ideological principles regarded as above and beyond the lived experience of real world human beings.”

But while I agree with Marcus and Preston that an anarchist society neither will nor should be economically or culturally monistic, I do think anarchy is likely to fare better in some contexts than in others, and indeed that some contexts, while not technically inconsistent with anarchism, are very likely to undermine it in practice. There is no one economic or cultural model that an anarchist society must follow, but it seems reasonable to suppose that there is some (broad, but not infinite) range within which the prevailing economic and cultural forms in a society must fall if anarchy is to survive. As I’ve written elsewhere:

A number of novels have been written about visitors from a statist society to a libertarian one. ... One feature they seem to have in common is a thoroughgoing cultural uniformity; the citizens of these libertarian utopias agree about nearly all the basic questions of morality, religion, and even art. ... This kind of uniformity is implausible. Not even collectivist societies are characterized by that much agreement. And an individualist society is especially unlikely to be so, since it will be a refuge for idiosyncratic mavericks of all varieties.

Some libertarians (particularly, but not solely, Randians) think that a libertarian society cannot survive without a very specific cultural base. If this were true, then the prospects for libertarianism would be dismal indeed, since widespread cultural uniformity is hard to maintain without government intervention.

I think this scenario is too pessimistic. Even if there is just one set of ideas that correctly identifies the reason that libertarianism is the best political system, a libertarian society can still survive if there is widespread agreement that libertarianism is best; there need not be a consensus on why it is best. (Compare: contemporary statist society survives because most people think it best, though they too do not agree on why.)

I agree, then, that a free nation will prosper only in a favorable cultural context. But such a context can be a constellation of quite diverse and even incompatible sets of ideas; it need not be a single monolithic package.

We must realize also that we are invested by Nature with two characters, as it were: one of these is universal, arising from the fact of our being all alike endowed with reason and with that superiority which lifts us above the brute. From this all morality and propriety are derived, and upon it depends the rational method of ascertaining our duty. The other character is the one that is assigned to individuals in particular. In the matter of physical endowment there are great differences: some, we see, excel in speed for the race, others in strength for wrestling; so in point of personal appearance, some have stateliness, others comeliness. ...

Everybody, however, must resolutely hold fast to his own peculiar gifts, in so far as they are peculiar only and not vicious, in order that propriety, which is the object of our inquiry, may the more easily be secured. For we must so act as not to oppose the universal laws of human nature, but, while safeguarding those, to follow the bent of our own particular nature; and even if other careers should be better and nobler, we may still regulate our own pursuits by the standard of our own nature. For it is of no avail to fight against one’s nature or to aim at what is impossible of attainment. From this fact the nature of that propriety defined above comes into still clearer light, inasmuch as nothing is proper that “goes against the grain,” as the saying is – that is, if it is in direct opposition to one’s natural genius.

If there is any such thing as propriety at all, it can be nothing more than uniform consistency in the course of our life as a whole and all its individual actions. And this uniform consistency one could not maintain by copying the personal traits of others and eliminating one’s own. …

To the two above-mentioned characters is added a third, which some chance or some circumstance imposes, and a fourth also, which we assume by our own deliberate choice. Regal powers and military commands, nobility of birth and political office, wealth and influence, and their opposites depend upon chance and are, therefore, controlled by circumstances. But what role we ourselves may choose to sustain is decided by our own free choice. And so some turn to philosophy, others to the civil law, and still others to oratory, while in case of the virtues themselves one man prefers to excel in one, another in another.

Copyrights and Contracts

On its links page, the Free Software Foundation links to my 1995 article The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights, but adds a note saying “The Free Software Movement does not endorse Libertarianism, and we do not agree entirely with that article. But it is useful for refuting one specific argument that is made in favor of proprietary software.” They also add a link to a short piece by Richard Stallman titled Comments on Roderick Long’s Article, which reads in its entirety as follows:

Free software is a matter of freedom. From our point of view, precisely which legal mechanism is used to deny software users their freedom is just an [implementation] detail. Whether it is done with copyright, with contracts, or in some other way, it is wrong to deny the public the freedoms necessary to form a community and cooperate. This is why it is inaccurate to understand the Free Software Movement as specifically a matter of opposition to copyright on software. It is both more and less than that.

However, you will often hear people of right-wing ideological persuasion argue in [a] vague way that some general moral principle of property rights compels us to cede our freedom to a system of copyright, regardless of how this affects our way of life. The right-wing Libertarian counterargument, coming as it does from a group that regards property rights as the highest moral principle, is useful as a refutation. It shows that even if you adore property rights for physical objects, you are not compelled to accept copyright.

There are other legal options available to the creators of intellectual products. For example, many software manufacturers can and do place copy-protection safeguards on their programs, or require purchasers to sign contracts agreeing not to resell the software.

The Open-Source Society and Its Enemies

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Microsoft is apparently now attempting to use patent law as a club against open-source competitors like Linux, as well as against the basic protocols of the internet itself; see the story here.

Anyone still think intellectual property laws are something other than pure evil?

Écrasez l’infâme!

A Brave New World of Philosophy?

In a recent essay that has been getting some attention online, UC Berkeley philosophy professor John R. Searle argues that developments in science over the past century have made possible a new way of doing philosophy. The thesis of Searle’s Philosophy in a New Century is that the premise on which the “modern era in philosophy, begun by Descartes, Bacon, and others in the seventeenth century, was based … has now become obsolete.”

That premise, Searle suggests, was the assumption that “the very existence of knowledge was in question and that therefore the main task of the philosopher was to cope with the problem of skepticism.” Descartes, for example, had famously started off his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy by wondering whether he could prove for certain that he wasn’t dreaming or deluded throughout his life, while David Hume raised doubts a century later, in his 1740 Treatise of Human Nature, about such matters as the existence of causation and the reliability of induction.

But in the years since then, according to Searle, “the sheer growth of certain, objective, and universal knowledge” – i.e., the progress of science – has made it “psychologically impossible for us to take Descartes’s project seriously in the way that he took it: We know too much.” Such Cartesian questions as “How do I know that I am not a brain in a vat, not deceived by an evil demon, not dreaming, hallucinating, etc?” may constitute “an interesting paradox,” but although it is “a nice exercise for philosophers to resolve the paradox,” still “no one should doubt the existence of knowledge” because of it; “the sheer weight of accumulated knowledge is now so great that we cannot take seriously arguments that attempt to prove that it doesn’t exist at all.”

Since “the possibility of knowledge is no longer a central question in philosophy,” Searle concludes, “it is now possible to do a new kind of philosophy” which “begins, not with skepticism, but with what we all know about the real world” – a body of objective knowledge including both such common-sense facts as “that we are all conscious, that we all really do have intentional mental states, that we form social groups,” etc, and also such deliverances of science as “the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.”

How should Austro-Athenians greet Searle’s pronouncement? I think the proper reaction is a mixed one. For while Searle’s rejection of Enlightenment-era skepticism is laudable, his perspective arguably shares with the thinkers he criticises a certain kind of deference to empirical science which more traditional philosophical realists, whether of an Aristotelean/Thomistic or of a Kantian bent, have reason to regard with suspicion.

This charge of scientism might seem an odd one to raise against Searle, who has devoted much of his career to criticising reductionist accounts of mind, as well as to defending the autonomous reality of sociological facts in terms intriguingly similar to those of Mises and Hayek. (On these topics see, respectively, his books The Mystery of Consciousness and The Construction of Social Reality.) For these reasons Searle deserves our admiration. But all the same, there is something, well, weird about Searle’s argument in this piece.

Certainly we have, as a result of the progress of science, better grounds for confidence in our theories about the physical microstructure of matter today than our ancestors had for confidence in theirs. But do we have better grounds than our ancestors did for believing that we are not dreaming, that a physical world exists, or that other people have minds? I don’t see how. Whether the traditional arguments for skepticism about our common-sense experience are good or bad, it’s difficult to understand how the progress of science could affect them one way or the other. After all, the scientific method presupposes the validity of our common-sense experience; we have grounds to trust what the microscope tells us only if we can assume we’re not dreaming, and we have grounds to trust reports that other scientists have replicated our experimental results only if we’re justified in taking those reports to emanate, in fact, from other scientists, and not from an omnipotent demon or our own subconscious. We cannot sensibly pay any attention to what science says, then, unless our acceptance of common-sense experience is already legitimate, prior to any scientific discoveries.

Searle seems to think that our present-day context, the modern high-tech world, has rendered skepticism especially incongruous:

There is something absurd about the post-modern thinker who buys an airplane ticket on the internet, gets on an airplane, works on his laptop computer in the course of the airplane flight, gets off of the airplane at his destination, takes a taxicab to a lecture hall, and then gives a lecture claiming that somehow or other there is no certain knowledge, that objectivity is in question, and that all claims to truth and knowledge are really only disguised power grabs.

If I say, for example, “Rembrandt was born in 1606,” that statement is epistemically objective in the sense that it can be established as true or false independently of the attitudes, feelings, opinions or prejudices of the agents investigating the question. If I say, “Rembrandt was a better painter than Rubens,” that claim is not a matter of objective knowledge, but is a matter of subjective opinion.

Tough Love at 50,000 Volts

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

We’re all a little bit safer now that cops in Miami are using Taser stun guns to protect us from children as young as six. Most recently, a twelve-year-old girl was immobilised with a 50,000-volt zap to her neck and lower back, in order to prevent her from ... um ... playing hooky from school.

Well, it’s about time these menaces to public safety got what they deserve! (I mean the kids, of course.)

So remember, kiddies, the policeman is your friend ....

God and the State

I’ve long been of the school that regards the oppressive power of the state as only one component of an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing economic and cultural elements. Hence I think the libertarian and anarchist political movements cannot afford to focus merely on attacking the state, but must recognise that state power both draws strength from and lends strength to such “private” power structures as patriarchy and corporate wealth.

If the arrow of support ran solely from the state to these other power structures, then we could afford to focus on the state alone, trusting that these other problems would wither away of their own accord once the state had been defeated. (Call this the “right-wing” temptation for libertarians.) Or if the arrow of support ran solely to the state from such power structures, then we could afford to use the state as a tool to crush the other power structures, trusting the state to become harmless on the absence of such power structures. (Call this the “left-wing” temptation for libertarians.) But if it runs both ways, as I’m convinced it does, then we must set our faces against the entire system of social control in both its state and non-state forms – in which case the struggle for liberation cannot be a narrowly political struggle, but must be an economic and cultural struggle as well. This was the dominant approach of such 19th-century libertarians as Herbert Spencer and Benjamin Tucker, and has been defended more recently by Chris Sciabarra in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.

One of the cultural factors that can work either for or against statism is religion. Today libertarians are deeply divided on the relation between religion and the state. As I’ve noted elsewhere, those of a socially conservative bent

often maintain that a strongly religious society is more apt to remain loyal to the ideals of liberty. Specifically, they claim that religion offers two advantages: that it provides a firmer foundation for moral character and personal responsibility, thus creating a citizenry more honest, self-disciplined, and self-reliant, and so less likely to be tempted to advance themselves at the expense of their neighbors through government coercion – and that it offers the authority of God as an alternative to the authority of the State, and thus serves as a check on governmental aggrandizement.

precisely the opposite view, that religion is always an enemy of liberty – that by discouraging independent thought, fostering intolerance toward non-believers, and demanding submission to authority, religion simply reinforces habits of mind that predispose citizens to become obedient slaves of the State. For such libertarians, the best guarantor of liberty is a society without religion; hence the laissez-faire utopias of libertarian fiction are frequently atheistic utopias as well ....

Screen Legends

For that video of George W. Bush cackling and flipping the bird, click here. And for the inimitable song stylings of (mercifully outgoing) Attorney General John Ashcroft as he croons about God and country, try here or here.

Not since Nero’s fiery fiddling have we known such talented and entertaining masters! Plaudite, amici.

Rednecks or Greenbacks?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power and Mises Blog]

An interesting economic demographic from Charles Johnson: contrary to much Democratic hand-wringing and Republican gloating, it appears that Kerry won the working-class vote, even in the red states; and the wealthier a voter was, the likelier she apparently was to vote for Bush. Degree of economic benefit from the existing system may thus be a better predictor of Bush support than fundamentalist religious convictions are (though I agree with Chris Sciabarra that the religious issues are relevant).

In other words: perhaps “it’s the plutocracy, stupid!” After all, it’s the economic élite who have traditionally been the chief boosters of the corporatist-imperialist state. (See, e.g., Roy Childs’ Big Business and the Rise of American Statism; Walter Grinder and John Hagel’s Toward a Theory of State Capitalism; Chris Sciabarra’s Understanding the Global Crisis; Joseph Stromberg’s Political Economy of Liberal Corporativism and The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire; and Kevin Carson’s Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital.)

Exit Strategy

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

My recent posts on secession have generated some commentary over at Mises Blog; see here, here, and here.

Anarchy Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

As a follow-up to my earlier post on the disenfranchisement of the world under American hegemony, check out this site. (Thanks to Cameron for the link.)

Telling the world “sorry” is fine, but what next? Most of the opponents of our Prince President don’t fundamentally question the electoral system itself. They’ve been taught that the only alternatives to “democracy” (and by “democracy” they mean this ritual whereby the populace gets to pick between two marginally different doofuses every four years) are various forms of dictatorship. Few of them yet recognise that there are – to put it somewhat paradoxically – forms of political order more democratic than “democracy.” As long as the “other 49%” still accept the basic legitimacy of the electoral system, their expressions of regret, however sincerely meant (and I do appreciate the “Sorry, Everybody” site – particularly as a counter to the prevailing international tendency to view the entire American populace through the lens of that blood-red electoral map), will ring objectively hollow.

Herbert Spencer argued for the citizen’s right to ignore the state. Now that “democracy” apparently means that 51% of the American electorate gets to rule the other 49%, plus the rest of the planet, what the world most urgently needs is the right to ignore the United States.

Anarquismo!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power and Mises Blog]

My Mises U. talk on objections to anarchism has been translated into Spanish by Larry Nieves and is posted over at El Liberal Venezolano. I don’t read Spanish well enough to understand the translation, but there it is.

Bold Republican Health Care Initiative

Looks like the Prince President is starting to spend some of that “capital” he’s been bragging about. The latest expenditure is in Fallujah, where U.S. troops have attacked a hospital – a terrorist war crime. Compassionate conservatism at work, I guess. See Wendy McElroy’s excellent post, as well as the ensuing commentary.

Sometimes écrasez l’infâme just isn’t sufficient….

Most Likely to Secede

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

In my previous post on secession and the red/blue divide, I forgot to include a link to Secession.net. This is a worthy outfit whose goals include the following:

Legitimatize Secession of Small Political Entities: the United Nations and human rights organizations give lip service support to autonomy and self-determination movements; we promote factual and moral arguments for the right of individuals, communities large and small, and national sub-groups to seek independence.

Promote Nonviolent, Libertarian and Decentralist Political Visions: ones that will replace centralized, authoritarian economic-political institutions and offer concrete nonviolent strategies for achieving true peace, freedom, justice and prosperity.

Influence Existing Secessionist Movements: too many movements want to replace one big, centralized authoritarian state with two or more smaller ones. Only a worldwide movement promoting the radical goals of freedom for individuals and communities can legitimatize the aspirations of hundreds of suppressed national and regional groups for freedom.

Promote New Secession Movements: billions of people are ready for radical decentralist alternatives and secessionist strategy, they just need a firmer philosophical basis and a little encouragement to begin organizing their own movements.

Network among these Movements to coordinate nonviolent secessionist strategies and tactics.

Causes Which Impel

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

As the blood-red electoral tide oozed across the map of America’s heartland, many in the blue states were starting to think about secession (see, e.g., here and here). Most such talk has been meant as a joke, but it might be worth taking more seriously. As I’ve suggested before (see here, here, and here), secession is an attractive solution to problems ranging from terrorism to anti-gay laws. The blue states certainly have the population and the economic might to make a go of it on their own; and the division in the country is so strong right now that people who ordinarily wouldn’t consider secession as a serious option might now be more willing to give it a listen. Plus, a successful secession by the blue states would make it easier for black (i.e., anarchist) and sea-green (i.e., libertarian) regions to secede from them. And even an unsuccessful secession campaign would at least give issues of consent, sovereignty, and legitimacy a much-needed airing. So in Rothbard’s words: “U. S. Out of the Bronx!” (For a general discussion of secession see David Gordon’s anthology Secession, State, and Liberty.)

Chuck Munson objects that secession advocates would be abandoning anti-Bush residents of the red states: “If we want to change minds of the folks living in Bush Country, we should support progressives, radicals, and anarchists living and agitating out here.” As a resident of an extremely red state myself, I have no eagerness to be abandoned either; but secession need not equal abandonment. Before the Civil War, many abolitionists favoured secession by the North in order to end the covenant with death and agreement with hell represented by the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. But they certainly didn’t intend thereby to abandon the slaves; on the contrary, they expected to be able to combat Southern slavery better from outside the Union than from within it. I expect that political activists in seceding blue states would likewise continue to seek influence over events in the Union, just as Europeans tried (unsuccessfully, alas) to influence this past election. (By the way, when Americans complain that Europeans have no business telling Americans how to vote, they seem to be forgetting – even leaving aside considerations of humani nihil a me alienum puto – that the United States is rapidly transforming itself into a world government, and that other countries have accordingly as good grounds for lamenting their lack of representation in American politics as American colonists in 1776 had for lamenting their lack of representation in the British Parliament.)

For those who still find talk of secession far-fetched, Charles Johnson makes a good case for a less extreme form of activism: trying to get referenda on the ballot. Charles writes:

Nearly half of the states in this country empower you and [me] to gather signatures and put laws straight on the ballot without having to lobby legislators or roll logs or hope the least-worst major candidate might consider making a speech about it sometime. … [W]hen I vote on an initiative I don’t have to worry about spoilers, parties, trade-offs between candidates, or anything of the sort. It’s a simple up or down and I can make my choices on each issue on the ballot independently – rather than trying to figure out which dude will line up with more of my choices on the whole than the other (and whether that dude can get elected or whether I should vote for someone who’s a bit worse but in a position to win, and…). … We’ve been building a vast network of interlinked volunteers with a do-it-yourself political ethic …. [H]ow about we start putting those resources to work in the 20-odd states with voter initiatives? (And while we’re at it, bringing them to bear on the state legislature in states that don’t yet have voter initiatives.)

Feed for Thought

You may notice (see above) that I’ve added an RSS feed for this site. At least I think I have; but after all I’m still a seat-of-my-pants web amateur. Let me know if it works.

Scene from a Nearby Possible World

I created the following graphic to post in the event of Bush’s defeat. Well, his defeat did not materialize, but I hate to waste a good graphic:

A Crumb of Consolation

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

One minor (well, okay, very minor) bit of solace regarding today’s election results: according to the count so far, Badnarik received only slightly fewer votes than Nader, despite having been accorded far less publicity by the media. How well might he have done otherwise?

Ubi Libertas Ibi Patria

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The latest (Dec. 2004) issue of Reason magazine has an article by Brian Doherty, “Revolt of the Porcupines!,” about the Free State Project and other attempts to establish autonomous libertarian regions. Because of my history of involvement in the free-nation movement (most notably through the Free Nation Foundation and Libertarian Nation Foundation), Doherty interviewed me some months ago for the story. Here’s the paragraph that features an excerpt from that interview. (Please note that I am not responsible for the misdescription of me as “the” brains behind LNF!)

The Free State Project is the most recent and successful face of libertarian separatism – or, as some call it, libertarian Zionism. To be sure, many involved in the search for new libertarian communities reject such terms. Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the brains behind the Libertarian Nation Foundation, a group dedicated to theorizing about the possibilities for libertarian polities, tells me he doesn’t like the term separatist because “the attraction is not that I don’t want to live near or interact with nonlibertarians. Most of my best friends are nonlibertarians. We don’t want to live by ourselves but simply want a chance to demonstrate to the world that libertarian principles actually work. We want to escape from government, not escape from ordinary decent people” who happen not to share their political philosophy.

Goodnarik Redux

My last post is generating some comment over at L&P; see here, here, and here. (And it’s early yet, so there may be more during the day.)

Also, David Boaz reminds me that Perot did run twice. Oops! Apologies – I plead brain meltdown. But he also reminds me that Perot’s charts and graphs probably had an influence on getting the budget balanced.

Kerry or Badnarik?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

FERRIS: Are you going to be as impractical as that?
REARDEN: The evaluation of an action as “practical,” Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
FERRIS: Haven’t you always placed your self-interest above all else?
REARDEN: That is what I am doing right now.

      – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

In playing chess, a sure way to lose is to spend your first few moves capturing as many of the opponent’s pieces as possible. It’s much more important to let those juicy-looking pieces go than to allow them to distract you from your main mission of building a strong presence at the center of the board.

I think the same lesson applies in politics. In crafting our strategy we need to plan several elections ahead, not just one. ... If we plan ahead only as far as the next election, then it’s absolutely true that a vote for a candidate who loses is an ineffective vote.

But if we think ahead four years, or eight years, or twelve years, then a vote can do more than just elect a candidate. A vote can help to build a vote total which, even if it is a losing vote total, can, if it’s big enough, draw more attention and support to the losing candidate and his party or cause.

This has two beneficial effects: First, it increases the good guys’ chance of winning in the future. Second, it forces the major candidates to move in our direction in order to avoid precisely that.

I believe the answer is that we should learn from our enemies; we should imitate the strategy of the Socialist party of 60 years ago. Its presidential vote never reached a million, but it may have been the most successful political party in American history. It never gained control of anything larger than the city of Milwaukee but it succeeded in enacting into law virtually every economic proposal in its 1928 platform – a list of radical proposals ranging from minimum wages to social security.

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