Libertarianism, slave to the unspeakable scourge MARIJUANA!

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter was recently having a debate with libertarian John Stossel. (Hat tip to Reason magazine's blog, Hit and Run.) In it, she upbraided libertarians for what she regards as their disproportionate interest in that most effeminate of causes, legalizing marijuana:

"Libertarians and pot! This is why people think libertarians are pussies. We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist. The government is taking 60 percent of your money. They're taking care of your health care, of your pensions, they're telling you who you can hire, what the regulations are gonna be...and you want to suck to your little liberal friends and say, 'Oh, we want to legalize pot."

This is the sort of accusation most seasoned libertarians have encountered before. It's one side of the conservative "Why must you libertarians carry on about drugs so much" criticism, counterpart to the more common argument made by other conservatives that libertarians are wild-eyed madmen whose advocacy of drug legalization makes us too scary for the general public, rather than too bland and inoffensive. Together, they fill in the rare downtimes when we're not being told we're crypto-conservatives who care about nothing except money.

Now, it would be easy- and accurate, and satisfying- to  point out that during the 2012 presidential campaign Ann Coulter not only supported a man who voted in favor of the bank bailouts and instituted the beta release of Obamacare in his home state when the actual Obama's presidency was only a glint in the Chicago Machine's eye, she called him "one of the best presidential candidates the Republicans have ever fielded." And that this makes Coulter's disdain for libertarians' supposedly insufficient concern about economic statism somewhat hard to credit.

It wouldn't be very interesting, though. Since this claim about the supposed libertarian obsession with drugs and/or being palatable to liberals is made so much, I thought it was past time to try actually testing it. My assumption is simple: If Coulter's claim is correct, we should see at least some reflection of it in the top articles and stories at the Internet's big libertarian sites, which I will proceed to examine. This is not the most methodologically rigorous means of probing this question, admittedly, but I think it still has something to recommend it over the standard "pulling stuff out of my ass" protocol usually favored on the subject. I'm writing this in bits and pieces, with each website sampled as I get to it; there's been no cherrypicking.

Because I'm a sporting man, I'm going to exclude the Mises Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education from consideration; using the content of sites for two organizations specifically about economics might seem a little unfair. On the other hand, some might argue that the fact that I felt the need to exclude two prominent libertarian groups from our sample because one is named after an economist and the other is named after the science of economics itself tells against Coulter's claim that libertarians don't talk about the subject much.

April 10th, 1947: Ludwig von Mises addresses the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society

Let's start with the Cato Institute, undoubtedly the best known libertarian think tank in America and probably the world. They once published something- about drug laws, no less- written by Glenn Greenwald, who is not only a liberal but actually has many of the opinions on foreign policy and civil liberties that many conservatives ascribe to liberals in general. (If you want a reminder of what's more typical of actual American liberalism, Google searching "Glenn Greenwald Cato," without quotes, provides a nice crash course.) That certainly raises suspicions. Topping the front page of the Cato Institute on March 5th at 4:32 PM Central Time, we find:

Poor Immigrants Use Public Benefits at a Lower Rate than Poor Native-Born Citizens
The Constitutional Case for Marriage Equality
The Fairy Tale on Spending Cuts
The Challenges of Negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
License to Drill: The Case for Modernizing America’s Crude Oil and Natural Gas Export Licensing Systems
Spending Beyond Our Means: How We Are Bankrupting Future Generations
The Flimsy Case for Stimulus Spending


So, six of the latest seven articles are about spending and/or economic regulation. None about marijuana, unless "natural gas" is some sort of drug lingo the kids are using nowadays. Cato does offer a wealth of material against drug prohibition, but it can hardly be accused of lacking interest in governmental involvement in the economy.

Well, maybe the Cato Institute is a bit too staid and stuffy and for the sort of thing Coulter is talking about. Let's try the popular libertarian site LewRockwell.com, where they take a rather more rough-and-tumble approach and have been known to harbor questionable left-libertarian types like Roderick Long.

For the Wednesday, February 27th edition of the site (that being the day I ran into the original Coulter quote they have) counting both linked and on-site articles posted for the day: an interview with Ron Paul, two anti-gun control articles, one pro-homeschooling article, one  on government spending cuts or the lack thereof, one advocating repudiation of the federal debt, one against the minimum-wage, one about about a police officer facing no punishment except a few traffic citations for killing an innocent person with his off-duty reckless driving, and one each about gold ownership, home security, and nutrition. (Click the screnshot for full size.)

So... nothing, again. Lewrockwell.com certainly has had material condemning the drug war, but, as with the Cato Institute, it doesn't seem to have stopped them from vigorously going after government spending and economic regulation, and there seems to be little evidence of a trying to pander to liberals, much less a fear of offending them.

The subject matter of the article about police misconduct has some liberal appeal, but the content is very much libertarian in a way that most liberals would find uncongenial. The antiwar article might be the sort of thing you'd put up to appeal to liberals, provided you live in an alternate universe where President John McCain took office after defeating Democratic nominee Dennis Kucinich, but on Earth-One's Lewrockwell.com it probably isn't.

Let's try Advocates for Self-Government. They're largely about introducing people to libertarianism and, in contrast to the austerely scholarly Cato Institute or pugilistic Lewrockwell.com, have been known for presenting libertarian ideas in a touchy-feely sort of style that would no doubt have Ann Coulter smelling pussy from miles away. Their front page is full of links to general information about libertarian activism rather than specific issues, so let's swing by their blog for more topical material. It's most recent entries (excluding some tributes to recently passed away libertarians) are:

Repeal the Income Tax! Part 4
Repeal the Income Tax! Parts 1, 2, and 3
Guns: Reframing the Debate
Share Some Facts About Thanksgiving and Big Government
Word Choices: Try Re-Legalization

Success! Drug legalization content! And it's immediately preceded by two other posts about drug legalization, too. Now we're getting somewhere.

On the other hand, if the Advocates were trying to "suck up to their little liberal friends," surrounding said sucking up with stuff condemning income taxes and gun control seems like a questionable way to do so.

OK, how about Reason Magazine? It's known for a strong interest in personal and lifestyle freedoms. It's in bad odor among some paleolibertarians for what they regard as advocacy of libertinism and/or an unseemly drive to fit in with liberals at the expense of libertarian principles. The  people  who were trying to make "liberaltarianism" a thing a few years ago (both of them) get on well with them and have contributed there. As the website for a popular monthly magazine rather than a think tank or academic institution, it is naturally less inclined towards the sort of policy wonkish beancountery that might bias it towards economic topics. Topping their blog at 5:26, March 5th are the following:

Hugo Chavez is Dead
Mike Riggs on the National Drug Intelligence Center and the Trick to Trimming the Federal Budget
Former National Labor Relations Board Chairman: “Time to Pull Plug on National Labor Relations Board”
Most Americans Believe U.S. in Recession, LA Votes for New Mayor, Soviet Veteran Found Living in Afghanistan: P.M. Links
Catch J.D. Tuccille Discussing the NYPD's Pre-Crime Youth Tracking on RT at 5:24 pm ET 
Eric Holder: Yes, Your Government Can Drone You to Death on U.S. Soil
Yet More Evidence That ObamaCare's Cost Reforms Won't Work
My Kid Learns More When He's Home Sick Than at School

We do have one that's implicitly hostile to the drug war, though it's also about government spending. There's one link with strong potential liberal appeal, concerning police misconduct. There's an item on drones that some principled liberals would approve of, though it's also critical of the current administration. And there are three with overtly liberal-unfriendly subjects- criticism of Obamacare, government schools, and federal labor regulatory bodies.

So, a rather weak showing for Coulter's claim, all in all. This is no surprise, of course; the deade and a half I've spent as a libertarian doesn't offer much evidence to support it, either. The nature of her dubious claim is not surprising either, since it fits a larger pattern I've noticed in criticisms of libertarians: A lot of it seems to be from people trying to hide or ignore the fact that libertarians are better at an important part of their own faction's supposed principles than that faction is.

Conservatives talk a great deal about their devotion to reducing the size and scope of government, reducing taxes, reducing regulations and other government intrusions into the private sector, but in actual practice most of them do precious little to show that these supposed principles are actually important to them. Liberals talk about how much they care about civil liberties, personal autonomy, stopping plutocracy, and the well-being and dignity of the underprivileged, and then go on to demonstrate that they don't mean it, either. Meanwhile, conservatives accuse libertarians of being single-mindedly focused on legalizing or outright endorsing "vice" and "license" and ignoring the things conservatives claim to care about, and liberals accuse libertarians of being single-mindedly focused on money and the interests of well-off white guys and ignoring the things liberals claim to care about.

(Probably the most vicious and hysterical attacks on libertarians from left of center in recent years- not that there hasn't been plenty of stiff competition were those reacting to libertarian opposition to intrusive airport search procedures. The fact that this was an unusually prominent example of libertarians actually caring about supposed liberal values like privacy, civil liberties, and individual freedom to choose who is and  who isn't allowed to touch your genitals was not, I think, a coincidence.)

As I've said before, a great deal of political rhetoric involves attacking one's opponents for traits they clearly don't have. With mainstream political groups, though, the nonsense being spewed at least resembles- albeit in a caricatured, negatively spun fashion- what its targets would often like to believe is true. Many conservatives claim to be and, at least among the rank-and-file, genuinely like to think of themselves as the die-hard supporters of free markets liberals falsely paint them as, and many liberals would like to think of themselves as the ultra-tolerant, peace-loving scourges of established wealth and privilege that conservatives imagine they are.

Meanwhile, libertarians don't even get to enjoy that small consolation. It just ain't fair.

Thoughts on Daniel Klein's studies of economic literacy

A little while back economist Daniel Klein, a professor at George Mason University and editor of Econ Journal Watch, and Zeljka Buturovic, a researcher at Zogby International, published an article entitled "Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables" which presented data from a survey about how people of different ideological stances view economic questions that, Klein argued, inidcated that people who identify as politically left-wing showed less undertsanding of basic economics than those identifying as libertarians or conservatives. He's now calling his own prior claims "partially vitiated" in a new article by  Buturovic and himself, "Economic Enlightenment Revisited," based on the results of another survey which he believes shows that people of different ideologies are in fact about equally likely to believe falsehoods about economics, depending on how comfortably the answer to a particular question fits with their other beliefs. He attributes his prior results to a survey that was biased by including too many questions on issues the Left tends to be bad on and his own eagerness to believe something that supported his own assumptions. (Klein is himself a libertarian.)

I greatly admire Klein's willingness to publicly state that he believes himself to have been mistaken on a matter that he had been quite outspoken about. However, after reading his new article, I don't think he actually was wrong; at any rate, I don't think the additional data he presents tells against his own prior conclusion in the way he believes.

In each study, Klein gave the test subjects a list of statements about economics, such as "free trade causes unemployment." The survey subjects, all of whom were American adults, would then write an answer stating that they (strongly or somewhat ) agreed or disagreed with it, or weren't sure. Klein then compiled the figures for how often respondents of different political persuasions agreed with false statements or disagreed with true ones to get a sense of how well people of different beliefs understood economic issues. Conservatives and libertarians did better than liberals on the first survey. Concerned about the possibility that this result might be caused by an ideological slant to the survey items (cherry-picking subject matter so that most or all of the statements concerned areas people on the Left were especially likely to get wrong, for instance) rather than an actual difference in knowledge, he did a second survey, this time with questions intentionally designed to poke at potential conservative or libertarian blind spots. This time the results were reversed, with conservatives and libertarians scoring much lower than on the first survey.

I agree that the first survey is imperfect. In particular, the survey item "Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited" is problematic because, depending on how one interprets the word “exploited, ” agreement can be either a sign of economic ignorance (i.e. you believe that the workers would benefit economically if they had to fall back on whatever second-best option they had themselves judged inferior to the sweatshop) or an answer to a question- in this case, a moral one- other than the one the survey meant to ask and is intended to assess. (Though if you changed it to something more economics-specific, such as whether sweatshop make their workers worse off than they would be in their absence, I imagine the percentage of wrong answers would still be pretty high.) I also like the fact that the second survey includes an item about the economic effects of immigrant workers, an important and heated subject that was absent the first time around.

However, the first and second sets of questions differ in some important ways that are likely to make the first set more genuinely revealing than the second, because there were serious problems with the second set that make it questionable whether it measures what it is supposed to be measuring.

The first issue is that with the exception of the statement about sweatshops noted above the first survey consists of fairly clear, unambiguous statements like "Rent-control laws lead to housing shortages." This isn't the case with several statements on the second survey, and the result is that several statements on the second survey can't be trusted to measure what they're supposed to.

If some of my points here seem like semantic hair-splitting, it's because such hair-splitting is incredibly important in order to make sure that a survey is actually measuring what it's supposed to. Klein and Buturovic's interpretation of the new data hinges on certain quite specific assumptions about how survey takers interpreted the survey statements. If some of the survey statements are worded in a way that allows for multiple plausible interpretations of what's being asked, some of which could entail a different answer from the one treated as correct by the survey for reasons unrelated to economic ignorance, then responses to that statement on the survey can't be presumed to measure what it's trying to measure, especially if members of some of the the different groups being assessed are especially likely to take a particular interpretation. This is, I believe, the case on at least three of the survey items. One could argue about whether the word meanings I think were most likely being used by the typical respondent are the best way of using those words or not, but like the interpretation of “exploit” in the first survey that's not a question of economics.

Two statements to which the majority of libertarians gave what was judged to be a wrong response response were "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and "Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns." The survey treats these statements as false, since prohibition makes the prohibited item more costly, so agreeing with them is counted as an incorrect answer in the respondent's score is.

But is it false? It depends on what "reducing access" means.

It could mean increasing the overall cost of getting drugs or guns, which is presumably the intended interpretation- but it could also be taken to mean, and in typical language is probably more likely to be taken to mean, eliminating the ability to acquire something at all or at least making it so insurmountably difficult that it is effectively impossible. Klein and Buturovic do acknowledge this problem, somewhat, but argue in defense of their interpretation of the responses that “it is reasonable to include price effects as a dimension of 'access'.”

It is reasonable, but it's also quite reasonable not to and instead treat access as basically binary, and I think it very likely that this is what most respondents- of all ideological types- were doing. In typical usage the latter meaning is probably more common- it would sound odd to most people if I said that an increase in the price of a particular class of products that I had previously been able to buy had lowered my “access” to them, unless the increase was so large that paying it was now completely out of reach. Gun and drug laws in the United States have done no such thing. Some illegal guns can be bought for less than $100, sometimes significantly less, and even people who literally own nothing but the clothes on their backs can and frequently do support illegal drug habits. The non-monetary cost of is high, due to prohibition- you have to be willing to break the law and possibly associate with dangerous characters- but it's also one that anybody can pay if they choose.

Klein and Buturovic also state they believe that their interpretation would be sound even if one doesn't interpret “access” in the way they had in mind. They don't specify what they mean by this. My assumption is that they're referring to the marginal gun owner or dug user in the absence of legal restrictions- even if “access” is treated as purely binary the total number of people with access in that sense would be decreased by prohibition because there would be some people for whom drugs or guns are now completely inaccessible who would have had access if the laws were less restrictive. Again, this is a perfectly valid way of interpreting the statement, but it's not the only valid way or the typical way. In contexts like this the word “people” is almost always means, and will be taken to mean, people in general or on average or the great majority of people- almost no one will interpret “reducing people's access” to mean depriving a few extreme outliers of access or slightly lowering the total sum total of people who have it.

Guns are readily accessible even in jurisdictions that forbid them, some of them at prices so low that anyone who can't afford one now likely couldn't have afforded one even in the total absence of gun control, and illegal drugs are so ubiquitous that the government can't even keep them out of its own prisons. In everyday English the statements "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and “Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns” are true, even if there are other valid ways of interpreting the statement under which it would be false. In the absence of any indication that the respondents were assuming the definition the creators of the survey had in mind, there's no reason to assume that choosing “agree” indicates economic ignorance.

Another statement on which the study indicates libertarians were more likely than liberals or progressives to give the wrong answer was "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person,” which the study treats as true.

If we take this to be basically a statement about the declining marginal utility of money, then this is true, but in that case it would be better to phrase such a question in terms of a single person at different levels of wealth rather than two different people. As is, the statement entangles declining marginal utility, a pretty fundamental concept that can rightly be considered a matter of basic economic understanding with the more complicated and contested subject of the validity of interpersonal utility comparisons. People who would choose “disagree” because the question uses two different men and they don't think such comparisons are possible or meaningful may or may not be correct, but even if they're mistaken being on the wrong side of a complex philosophical dispute is quite a different thing from not understanding basic economic concepts.

The other and probably bigger problem is, again, one of ambiguity: There are common uses of “means more” that do not entail that the statement is true. To say that "a dollar means more" to person A than to person B can just as easily be taken to mean that A is more frugal than B, or drives a harder bargain, or is more miserly, or makes wealth a greater priority in his life, none of which necessarily suggest that A has less money. My suspicion is that the differences in answers between people of different political persuasions boils down to philosophical differences, with libertarians being more likely to think of people in terms of their actions and liberals/progressives more likely to think of them in terms of their needs. In any case, agreement and disagreement are both defensible answers to the question as written.

Aside from ambiguous language, there's another problem with comparing some of the statements from the first survey with the second one. The statements about economics in the first survey were, with the exception already noted, quite straightforward claims on the effects of economic policies, and "agree" and "disagree" each represented distinct , dichotomous positions. You believe that minimum wages or free trade cause unemployment, or that they do not, for instance, and disagreeing with a statement from the first survey is a pretty clear statement of what you do believe. Thus, disagreeing with a wrong statement is a pretty solid indication that your beliefs on the subject are in fact correct, while agreeing with a wrong statement means that you are solidly wrong, as opposed to largely but not entirely correct, and that those who disagreed are closer to the truth than you are. This is not the case with some of the second survey.

After the gun control and drug prohibition questions, the statement which the greatest number of libertarians gave a response counted as wrong to was “When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off.” This is something that had no analog of the first survey- it is an incorrect statement designed to closely mimic a correct one. All voluntary transactions take place because both participants believe they will come away better off from it, and- since they have direct knowledge of their own preferences, usually know more about their own situation than anyone else, and have more incentive to figure out whether the transaction is a good idea or not than anyone else- they are usually correct. The great majority of voluntary exchanges do benefit the participants- but not all, since sometimes people do things that, with the benefit of hindsight, were not a good idea even according to their own preferences and values at the time. Agreeing with the statement from the survey is thus pushing things too far.

Disagreeing with the statement, on the other hand, can mean believing anything from "They almost always come away better off" to "they never come away better off." We have no reason to believe that the typical person who correctly chose "disagree" did so because their own beliefs about the benefits of voluntary exchange are more accurate than people who chose "agree." Indeed, I would be surprised if this were the case. The claim that all voluntary exchanges turn out to be mutually beneficial is too strong, but it comes much closer to the truth than the belief common among statists, particularly of a leftist bent, that people frequently or routinely enter into voluntary agreements that cause them harm.

To a lesser extent I would make the same criticism of another item, "When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction." This is false, but there's no way to tell whether a person who answered "disagree' and got marked as correct was merely thinking "No, transactions can have externalities," or believes that externalities not only exist but are so common and so large that most or all seemingly private agreements are actually a public/government concern,, or chose "agree" because they believe that they or society as a whole is harmed in some moral or spiritual sense if voluntary interactions they don't like are allowed to occur.

The fact that at least one of the questions on the second survey was, by design, a "trap" set for people of a particular ideological bent in a way none of the first survey's items were is a serious problem. This is especially the case when the format is a essentially a series of true/false questions where a correct answer of "false" encompasses a broad spectrum of widely held possible answers, a great many of which are even less accurate than the false statement in the survey. Such a survey item is worse than useless for assessing how knowledgeable different groups are, because the best way for a particular group of people to be rated as highly enlightened on the subject by getting the correct answer is abject ignorance- it's only when you're in the ballpark of being right that you're at risk of agreeing with the not-quite-right claim and being marked as wrong in the survey results. It's like a test of scientific knowledge where respondents have to agree or disagree with the statement “The Earth is 5 billion years old,” which overstates the Earth's age a bit- giving the wrong answer requires knowing that the Earth is several billion years old, while someone who believes that the entire universe is only a few thousand years old will give the correct answer by disagreeing.

I think Klein and Buturovic's concern about possible bias against people on the political Left in the original survey led them to overcompensate in the second survey, resulting in the problems described. If anything, the fact that Klein and Buturovic's attempts to balance against possible bias against people left of center required them to downplay the first survey's focus on straightforward claims about the effects of economic policy in favor of more abstract and/or ambiguously worded questions and come up with questions that were specifically designed as traps for other ideologies only seems to underscore the results of the original survey; at any rate, it doesn't make Klein's original conclusion that people on the Left knew less about economics seem less plausible.

So I think Klein is wrong now about being wrong before. He attributes what he believes to be his error to confirmation bias, pouncing too eagerly and uncritically on data that seemed to reinforce his existing beliefs. Based on the two survey articles, my own impression is just the opposite. Klein goes so far to guard against his own possible bias against liberals and progressives that he ends up biasing things in their favor and against his own (at the time) interpretation of the first survey. Given Klein's demonstrated willingness to scrutinize his own position and even publicly criticize his own past conclusions, this is unsurprising. Monitoring yourself for bias in your own favor involves the same trade-off as detecting other things: the more vigilant you are to ensure that nothing gets past you and the more sensitive you are to possible signs of your quarry, the greater the chance of a false positive. The direction in which I believe Klein has actually erred is just the sort you'd want in a person involved with a publication like Econ Journal Watch- would that more people's mistakes were the result of going too far to be fair to their opponents!- but in this case his desire to ensure a level playing field has backfired.

Compassion grows out of the the barrel of a gun

Via Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek, I came upon this Washington Post editorial by Eugene Robinson, "Where are the compassionate conservatives?", that nicely illustrates the core assumption of so much of American politics. Discussing the recent Republican debate, Robinson says:

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. “This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody. . . .”

Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

...Paul, a physician, went on to say that, no, the hypothetical comatose man should not be allowed to die. But in Paul’s vision of America, “our neighbors, our friends, our churches” would choose to assume the man’s care — with government bearing no responsibility and playing no role.

Robinson, needless to say, considers this monstrous, lamenting its lack of "Christian kindness."  A bit later, after criticizing Michelle Bachmann (who is hardly a libertarian, but who also has shown an unseemly interest in people helping others without the government's sanctifying threat of violent compulsion) for her opposition to Obama's health care policy, he contrasts what he imagines the philosophy of Paul and Bachmann (and the other candidates, but its Paul and Bachmann who get the spotlight) to be with his own:

Government is more than a machine for collecting and spending money, more than an instrument of war, a book of laws or a shield to guarantee and protect individual rights. Government is also an expression of our collective values and aspirations. There’s a reason the Constitution begins “We the people . . .” rather than “We the unconnected individuals who couldn’t care less about one another. . . ”

And later:

I believe that writing off whole classes of citizens — the long-term unemployed whose skills are becoming out of date, thousands of former offenders who have paid their debt to society, millions of low-income youth ill-served by inadequate schools — is unconscionable.

The depressing thing is that Robinson probably honestly believes that he's provided an accurate, reasonable characterization of the views of people who don't share his vision of government. If nothing else, a man who was willfully trying to trick people into believing nonsense would not write an article in which he himself provides explicit reputations of his own falsehoods mere paragraphs away from them.

Note that Robinson is making a very different criticism from the- still wrong, but not outright nonsensical-  idea that the government's involvement in these matters is indispensable because noncoercive mechanisms would fail and leave the streets choked with the corpses of the cast of Oliver. That would be a purely practical criticism that would have nothing to do with anyone's supposed lack of "Christian kindness" or support for a society of "unconnected individuals who couldn't care less about one another." Such a criticism would directly contradict the one Robinson makes here, since arguing for the inadequacy of voluntary efforts would put Robinson in the position of claiming that Ron Paul's belief in the power and importance of people's concern for one another in our society was too strong, rather than too weak.

Robinson characterizes the philosophy of Paul and Bachmann as one of a country composed of "unconnected individuals who couldn’t care less about one another." He says this in response to Paul's statement that assisting people in need should be done by "our neighbors, our friends, our churches" rather than the government. He describes the idea of helping people through non-coercive means as "writing off" those people.

If Paul had said that he was opposed to compelling people to serve in government breeding camps, I suppose Robinson would be rebuking him for his desire to doom the human race to extinction with this generation.

Now, it's common enough for liberals to fail to grasp the difference between rejecting a particular means for achieving a goal and rejecting the goal. (It's typical of ideologies that focus on whether a proposed response to a problem displays the proper emotions and mindset rather than on whether the proposed solution is likely to actually work. A similar phenomenon can be seen among many drug war supporters, or in the focus on "will" or "resolve" among "War on Terror" hawks.) But the disconnect between Robinson's description of Paul's position and the stated position of Ron Paul that Robinson himself just quoted- and Robinson gives no suggestion that he thinks Paul doesn't mean what he said- is still quite striking. I smoke cigars, but don't smoke cigarettes, so it follows that I never smoke tobacco products of any kind..

But it makes perfect sense once you've accepted one of the central but unstated premises of modern American liberalism: government action is the only thing that has or is capable of having moral value, because there is no alternate means of accomplishing anything worthwhile. It's a vision of society and human life is so state-centric that adherents honestly can't tell the difference between "X should be done, but not by the state" and "X should not be done." (Think of all the dribbling idiocy about the "nihilism" of Obama's critics in the past few years. See also my own previous post.) Without that assumption underlying his arguments Robinson's description of Paul and Bachman is not merely unconvincing but incoherent, built around claims that Robinson himself repeatedly and explicitly demonstrates to be false.

Fortunately, most people who adhere to beliefs like this in politics compartmentalize it pretty well. Just as very few people go around abducting young men to use as slave labor or forcing people whose productivity is lower than the value of a "living wage" to quit their jobs or stealing wallets so they can send the money to Goldman Sachs, even when their political philosophy endorses those things,  most people with this sort of mindset usually understand the value of benevolence towards others in private, nonpolitical life while they're in the process of actually living it.

Robinson himself demonstrates this when he acknowledges that Michelle Bachmann and her husband have cared for a number of foster children over the years- mere paragraphs before describing her as someone who supports a society where no one cares about or connects with anyone else. Michelle Bachmann is uncaring because she went to extensive personal efforts to help vulnerable people in need but is not trying to force other people to do so; this constitutes an endorsement of "writing off" disadvantaged youths. Actions that were recognized as good and meaningful when Robinson briefly discussed Bachmann's non-political life abruptly become meaningless because they were done willingly by people acting on their own initiative and not by government command. Again, the assumption that only state action matters is fundamental- the article makes perfect sense with it and reads like something written by multiple, mutually hostile authors without it.

So, it's no surprise that Paul's remarks would inspire such revulsion. Ron Paul advocated a society where the needy are aided by the voluntary actions of others, and not by the government- but if you've bought into the idea that a country's "values and aspirations" are expressed not by what its people choose to do but by what their rulers force them to do, "aided by the voluntary actions of others" is just so much meaningless noise.

Richard Garner, RIP

I just learned that Richard Garner, a writer for the Libertarian Alliance whose work I quite liked, has passed away. I urge you to stop and read Sean Gabb's tribute to him at the Libertarian Alliance blog.

You can find many of Garner's writings at the Libertarian Alliance website. He also had his own blog; it stopped updating about a year ago, but you can read several years worth of archives. They're well-worth your time. I'm grateful to have had the chance to get to know him a little bit, even if it was just through his work.

Rest in peace.

The current front-runner for my favorite Reddit post title of the year is now...

"The reason I switched from being a republican to a democrat was because I didn't agree with the Bush Doctrine, and the reason I switched from being a democrat to a libertarian was because I didn't agree with the Bush Doctrine."

Alan Bock, RIP

I was saddened to learn late last night that libertarian author Alan Bock has just passed away at the age of 67. He was the author of several books, including Ambush at Ruby Ridge and Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana, and a regular columnist at the Orange County Register and Antiwar.com. There's a very nice article about him at the Register that you can read here. It's been at least a decade since I first started reading his work, and when I was a young man starting to delve deeper into libertarianism he was an enormously positive influence - it feels hard to imagine him being gone.

Thank you for everything. Rest in peace.

Opiate of the Red States

A few weeks back, the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom denounced Congressman Ron Paul and expelled him from their National Advisory Board, on which he had served for twenty years. This, despite the fact that Paul was the recipient of the group's greatest honor, the Guardian of Freedom award, and despite the fact that Paul is by far the most thoroughgoing opponent of big government and supporter of free enterprise in Congress country and has done an enormous amount to popularize those ideas- ideas that are ostensibly among the YAF's core principles. (Young American's for Freedom should not be confused with the Young Americans for Liberty, another student-based group. You can tell them apart by the fact that YAL's leaders don't don't snicker when they say the last word of their group's name.)

This, in microcosm, is an excellent reenactment of the story of the American conservative movement since the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

The reason for his expulsion action was simple- Paul is anti-war. He thinks that “limited government” is incompatible with spending hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year to perpetually garrison the entire planet and billions more for armed social engineering projects on the other side of the world. He's argued that foreigners become upset when their friends, relatives, countrymen, or coreligionists are maimed or killed, and that this displeasure has more to do with why some of them are willing to hurl themselves to certain death for a chance to kill Americans than hatred of push-up bras or BLTs or the works of Montesquieu does.  His preferred response to terrorism does not involve unending “nation-building” military occupations or the unprovoked flattening of whatever foreign country he happens to be annoyed with at the time.

Let's take a look at YAF's core statement of principles, the Sharon Statement. The Sharon Statement endorses strict constitutionalism and federalism limiting the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers, the free  market, the view that the proper role of government is to preserve individual freedom through law enforcement and national defense, that national sovereignty must not be ceded to foreign or international bodies, and that the standard by which a foreign policy should be judged is “the just interests of the United States.”

Not bad. If anyone within spitting distance of importance in mainstream American right-of-center politics had actually demonstrated principles like these within my lifetime, I'd hold modern conservatism in much higher esteem. Remove the now-outdated references to international communism (the statement was written in 1960) and it sounds like something Ron Paul could easily have written himself- and, unlike most Republican who hold public office or enjoy any media prominence, actually believe. Even if you accept the claim that Paul's non-interventionism does not “serve the just interests of the United States,”  Ron Paul is still by far the national political figure who best exemplifies the ideals of what is supposed to be YAF's creed.

And yet Paul is still utterly beyond the pale in the eyes of YAF's leadership ; not merely unfit for participation in their organization, but a moral monster. The YAF's leadership didn't merely say that they thought Paul was too far out of step with the YAF's ideals for them to continue working with him. In the statement issued about Paul's expulsion, YAF Senior National Director Jordan Marks said that Paul's actions “border on treason.” (Emphasis added.)

YAF is just one group, and there's clearly a strong element of opportunism here. The official statement against Paul- who has long been quite vocal about his foreign policy views- says they're only taking action against him now because he's started leading "left-wing subversives" into the movement. If we give Mr. Marks the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would not publicly state that someone is on the border of being guilty of something that is punishable by death under the laws of the United States and has traditionally been considered to be among the most despicable of all crimes unless he actually meant it, it would follow that YAF has been willingly associating itself with a known borderline-traitor for years. Apparently, YAF's leadership cannot abide an influx of young anti-interventionists inspired by Paul's example, but is "big tent" enough to accept years of behavior that borders on “levying war” against the United States and/or “adhering to their Enemies.” That seems sort of odd for a group that expresses so much concern about defending America, though perhaps the various left-wing anti-Americans I was exposed to in my formative years have clouded my judgment.

Nevertheless, its example is depressingly illustrative; either Marks et al. sincerely believe what the say about Paul, or they're playing to an audience that they expect to be well-disposed towards what they said. In either case, once YAF's leaders decided to abandon their convenient hypocrisy (or emerged from cryogenic hibernation, or whatever was stopping them from driving History's Greatest Monster from their ranks before now), their condemnation and excommunication of Paul had a well-established template to follow.

Support for militarism and foreign adventurism is not merely the dominant or most strongly held position in post 9/11 mainstream conservatism, but its defining principle as a political movement. This level of condemnation comes in different degrees but the fundamental principle is pretty consistent: being conspicuously antiwar is qualitatively worse than deviating from other principles conservatives claim to hold dear. Almost unlimited disdain for supposed conservative principles like free markets, limited government, constitutionalism, and federalism is excusable as long as you're pro-war enough, and no amount of support for them matters if you aren't.

(Mainstream liberalism follows a similar principle in regards to abridging civil liberties, giving giant piles of government money to the rich and privileged, compelling members of the middle and working classes to give piles of their own money and/or their homes to same, blasting hapless foreigners to pulp in ill-conceived military ventures, powerful white guys doing horrendous things to vulnerable females, and the like.)

It's possible to be pro-war and yet so unacceptably deviant in others ways that you're consigned to the outer darkness with folks like Paul, but it's damned hard. Being a vehemently anti-religious Marxist isn't enough. Instituting a state-level prototype of Obamacare while serving as a governor isn't enough. Being a Democratic Party candidate for the vice-presidency with F ratings from the National Taxpayers Union and the National Rifle Association isn't enough. This phenomenon isn't new, of course, since mainstream Cold War conservatism spurned vocal antimilitarists like Murray Rothbard and John T. Flynn but was glad to embrace New Dealers and social democrats who were sufficiently interventionist, but it's more rigid and far more hysterical.

Now, this is not universal, though the intense hostility many conservatives display towards conservative dissenters (such as paleoconservatives) on this issue only serves to emphasize the general rule. The popularity of Ron Paul in the last few years further shows that there are people who identify as conservative who don't share these priorities, and my hope is that things like the Tea Party movement will spur some conservatives to take a more serious interest in the idea of limiting government power that won't fade into oblivion once the Democrats are out of the White House. The resurgence of antistatist-sounding rhetoric among so many politicians and other prominent figures on the Right is to a great extent a pose, to be sure, but part of the reason the pose is so useful is because it brings in people who actually do take ideas like that seriously, at least some of the time, but have enough blind spots or gaps in their understanding and awareness to be taken in by Republican lip service to them.

(The other principal reason the pose is useful is that there is a significant- probably more significant- strain within modern conservatism that places great value and emphasis on the word "freedom", but has little or no regard for the freedom of individuals in even a limited or confused sense. It's not that they're lying- except to themselves, I suppose- it's just that they have a conception of freedom devoid of actual content. “Freedom” in this context simply means what America is and does, regardless of what America is and does; You could swap in “goodness” or “American” or “fahrvergnugen“ with little or no loss of meaning. They're the exemplars of the “shut up and enjoy your freedom of speech” philosophy.)

A political movement mimicking the rhetoric of ideals its biggest players and many of the rank-and-file don't actually respect very much- either as a deliberate deception or due to self-delusion-  is playing a dangerous game. The people who aren't in on the joke may eventually notice the disparity between your words and deeds, or realize that what you claim to believe has implications- perhaps radical implications- you haven't acknowledged. That's why the all-consuming primacy of the “War on Terror,”or some other foreign menace, is so helpful: it eternally excuses conservatism's failure to be what it claims to be.

It allows you to assert hostility  to “big government” as a general principle while supporting so many deviations from it- because the war on terrorism is so important, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, etc.- that the exceptions devour the supposed rule. It means that someone like Ron Paul should be rejected in favor of people who make professed Republican hostility to domestic big government, collectivism, welfare statism, and meddling Washington bureaucrats and political elites seem like an obscene joke, because the War on Terror is so important that all other principles are secondary. But hang in there, and someday we'll have the luxury of making an effort to act on the ideals we're always talking about. Just not today, or the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

American conservatism is remarkably similar to communism in this respect, now that I think about it.

Letting the mask slip

Sheldon Richman's article The Anti-anti-authoritarians is the best summary and analysis of Tea Party-related events and commentary that I've read. I first read it some time ago, but the combination of the recent elections and the subject of my last post brought it back to mind. As Richman puts it:

It’s easy to point out flaws in the Tea Party. What is getting old quickly is the political elite’s criticism, which exhibits an intolerance and bad faith that it often attributes to the Tea Partiers. You don’t have to read too much of this criticism to see that the powers that be and their fawning admirers in the media and intelligentsia dislike one thing in particular: the movement’s apparent anti-authoritarianism. To be sure, at best it’s an imperfect anti-authoritarianism...

But let that go for now. What’s noteworthy is that the movement’s anti-authoritarian tone has establishment statists so upset. They seem really worried that this thing could get out of control. Any legitimate criticism they may make of the Tea Party movement is undermined by their abhorrence with anti- authoritarianism per se. They are anti-anti-authoritarian.

Richman then goes on to cite some choice examples that nicely demonstrate the traits that have characterized establishment response to the Tea Party phenomenon: the authoritarianism, the sneering elitism, and the baffled, almost panicky inability to comprehend the idea of actually wanting to reduce state power. Towards the end, he sums it up perfectly:

Here, apparently, is the Tea Party’s greatest offense: it resents the elites who presume to run their lives. How dare these know-nothings resist our good intentions and earnest efforts?

As I’ve said, the folks who identify with the Tea Party are far from consistent about this. Some of the contradictions are stunning. Still, it’s revealing that their critics are so concerned that through the Tea Party, anti-authoritarianism, anti-elitism, and anti-corporatism appear to be on the rise.

I would describe my own attitude towards the Tea Party movement as positive but not strongly so, due to the mixture of good and bad traits Richman describes in the article, and due to my memories of the Clinton years. I've seen these bursts of anti-statism on the Right rise and then fizzle out before, so I remain skeptical.

Still, they are vastly more attractive then their typical opponent in politics or the media. If nothing else, they've provided a valuable lesson by getting the mainline Left to drop the "Dissent is patriotic" pretense of the Bush era and show its fascistic true colors again. The snarling contempt and berserk, hysterical rage and hatred with which so much of the political and media establishment has responded to virtually any serious opposition or defiance, the relentless smearing, vilification, dehumanization, and demonization of dissenters, and the open calls for censorship and prosecution of Obama critics have been most instructive.
The Right in America did not cover itself in glory with the way it approached political disagreement in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to put it mildly. However, I'll say this in their defense: when conservatives started responding to anyone who disagreed with them by shrieking like the Daleks on Dr. Who, it was in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that utterly destroyed two of the most prominent buildings in America's largest city, blasted a gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon, and killed nearly 3,000 people. Liberals are doing it with equal or greater intensity because citizens are holding peaceful rallies against deficit spending, health care nationalization, and corporate welfare, there's a cable news channel where people say unpleasant things about Dear Leader, and an ultimately unsuccessful minority in Congress caused sweeping legislation desired by the Democrats to take slightly longer to get through Congress by having the outrageous temerity to actually not vote in favor of it.

On a related note, there have been good recent posts at The Agitator (Progressives for State-Sanctioned Corporate Monopoly) and Coyote Blog (Fiat Garbage), both talking about the relationship between progressives and wealthy, privileged business interests. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog sums it up pretty well:

If you can understand why progressives attack any corporation that they voluntarily do business with for having too much power, but defend any corporation backed by government authority, you will start to figure out exactly what progressives are really after.

What they say in their posts about the present day is also true historically: progressivism/left-liberalism/moderate statist leftism has never been nearly as hostile to Big Business, socioeconomic privilege, concentrations of wealth, or powerful megacorporations as the popular image suggests. All of those things are fully compatible with an ideology based on elite management of society- what isn't is an economy overrun with independent, competing enterprises that arise, change, grow, shrink, and die according to voluntary consumer choices that the ruling elite can't control or predict. Speaking of which, at the Center for a Stateless Society's site Kevin Carson has a relatively recent paper, "The Thermidor of the Progressives" (PDF file), that is very interesting reading on this and related subjects. Probably my favorite quote:

Concurrent with the conventional liberal model of industrial organization there is, in every aspect of life, a managerial-professional priesthood controlling the range of services available and reducing the average person to client status. Mainstream liberalism extends beyond a Schumpeterian affinity for large organizations to an affinity for the professionalization of every aspect of life even in the realm of individual exchange and social relations. As with large-scale organization, the affinity seems to a considerable extent to be aesthetic: regulation and licensing—any regulation, any form of licensing, as such—is “progressive,” and any opposition to it is “right-wing.”

I've said it before, and I'm sure I will again- statism and control is not progressivism's means to some other end. It is progressivism's end. If it conflicts with the supposed goal of aiding and defending the poor and underprivileged, it's the latter who are expendable. Few of the rank-and-file would be on board with this if they really understood it, I'm sure- but no successful statist ideology is short of people good at making sure it isn't understood.

David Nolan, 1943-2010

I learned only a few minutes ago that David F. Nolan has passed away. Nolan was one of the founders of the Libertarian Party of the United States and creator of the popular Nolan chart.

When I was growing up, discovering the Libertarian Party helped put me in touch with a world of ideas beyond mainstream politics. Beyond that, it was a great benefit, as I realized that neither end of the standard political spectrum reflected what I thought was right, to know that I wasn't all alone. It's not easy to express how valuable that can be. Rest in peace, and thank you.

A (comparatively) cheerful post, for once: Naomi Wolf and the Tea Parties

My feelings towards the Tea Party movement, and the public protests against the current administration's policies in general, have generally been favorable but pessimistic: It's nice to see a popular movement opposing the galloping statism of the bailouts, the stimulus, and health care "reforms," but my expectation has been that the movement would be taken over and neutered by establishment conservatives or simply fade away once Obama was out of office. I remember the Right during the Clinton years, and there was a lot of simmering antistatist anger that I still think might have remained a significant force were it not for the fact that the growth of government and outrages like Waco and Ruby Ridge became too identified with the Democratic Party and especially with a specific person, Bill Clinton, rather than with statism as such.

The hostility to the Tea Party movement shown by the media and liberal political establishment has been more ferocious than anything I can remember in American politics in my lifetime. It should never be forgotten that, beneath the cheery blather about "dialogue" and "conversation," the romantic rhetoric about average Americans making themselves heard, and the sticky spots on the backs of their cars where their "Dissent is Patriotic" bumper stickers used to be, mainstream American liberals/progressives are every bit as intolerant, hysterical, and fascistic as any neocon.

So, here's some news that I find heartening: Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, The End of America, etc.), who has been a vociferous critic of the Bush administration, has been saying some favorable things about the Tea Party movement. Wolf has already demonstrated more principle than a lot of the Left, in that she actually thinks that things that were wrong when Bush did them remain wrong enough to speak out about even when the president is not a Republican. Wolf has shown some sympathies with libertarianism before- she actually had a podcast discussion with Lew Rockwell where the two got on remarkably well. (The fact that she was able to actually conceive the possibility of someone opposing the current administration for reasons other than racism, greed, corporate brainwashing, or sheer wickedness and took the unorthodox step of actually talking and interacting with a number of Tea Party supporters and trying to understand why they would think and feel the way they do also helped, I'm sure.)

She's commented on the movement in this article and in an interview at Truthout, and I was favorably impressed. She points out some essential issues that are usually ignored in commentary on the Tea Parties, such as the tension between the movement's libertarian-leaning members and establishment conservatives. She also points out the fact that the Tea Parties began not because of the health care debate, but from opposition to the hundreds of billions spent by both parties on bailouts and government "stimulus"- an orgy of cronyism and corporate welfare that makes the Democratic Party's condemnations of greedy "special interests" seem like a bad joke. She even has good things to say about the Tea Partiers' support for property rights and the right to bear arms.

As usual, the reality of Obama's administration- as opposed to the rhetoric- has no shortage of things people on the Left who are genuinely anti-plutocracy (as opposed to merely pro-state) ought to abhor as much as any libertarian. It could be quite valuable to have them as part of popular opposition to Obama's polices, as a counterweight to conservative attempts to turn the movement into an appendage of the Republican Party.

If nothing else, it's nice to be reminded that there are, in fact, people on the Left who consider a government that continues to gut civil liberties and due process, hand out billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to rich crony capitalists, and rain death on innocent people in senseless wars more objectionable than peasants with the temerity to say mean things to their rulers.

Roderick Long could use your help

Roderick Long of Austro-Athenian Empire and the Mises Institute has fallen into financial crisis as the result of some sort of credit card company billing screw-up (See here and here), and has requested emergency help in the form of either donations or loans. Long has been a significant influence on my own thinking and ideas, so if you like what you read here please consider chipping in something to help him out. And if you haven't before, check out his essential essay "Equality: The Unknown Ideal."

Seeds of Libertarianism on the Left, Part II

We now come to the follow-up to my previous post on libertarians reaching out to the Left, and why the far Left offers better prospects than mainstream left-liberals. Last time, I talked about the idea of spontaneous order in voluntary social action. This time, I’d like to go into differences in attitudes towards the existing system.

The foundational belief of mainstream left-liberalism in America is that the modern American interventionist state is an essentially benevolent and positive institution. Without it, we would be Hobbesian savages or the wretched serfs of top-hatted plutocrats. The system is enormously beneficial and generally works well, and when it fails to work well it is because some malevolent outside force has harmed or interfered with it. (E.g. “Special interests, “market fundamentalists,” and so on, who are given much the same role as Trotskyite “wreckers” under Stalin or the Devil in many Christian sects.) Thus, the answer to any problem is to have the right people in control. If they are and yet some area of the government is still not working as advertised, that means the government does not currently have enough money and power, and should be expanded so that the right people will have the resources they need to do good.

Left-liberalism is thus antithetical to libertarianism; they are not, as it is sometimes claimed, sibling ideologies who disagree on details. Fundamental to libertarianism is the idea that the problems of statism are systemic, and improving the situation is not a matter of giving the machinery a tune-up or trying to find a better operator or removing a wad of gum that some malicious person has stuck into the gears. The state will never have the knowledge or the incentives or the coordinating power that the free market brings to bear.

Furthermore, not only does state action fail to perform as advertised, it is usually not meant to perform as advertised. Seemingly idealistic actions by the government almost invariably have some politically connected person or group profiting in the background. If the interventionist state’s justifications are taken at face value, much of its past and present behavior is inexplicable, and predictions of its behavior based on this assumption have a very poor track record. If the state is viewed primarily as a means by which the powerful can enrich, glorify, and emotionally gratify themselves at the expense of others, however, the actions of those in the government are both comprehensible and much more predictable.

Concentrated interest will always have stronger incentives than dispersed interests, and the powerful and privileged will always be better-equipped to control the state than the weak and oppressed. The problem is not that our government is malfunctioning, or has been hijacked or corrupted. The problem is that the government is working just as it is meant to work.

(Minarchist libertarians believe that some minimal night watchman state that actually works as advertised is possible, but like anarchist libertarians they agree that the interventionist state is bad by nature and not merely because the wrong people run it.)

This is not a revelation to the seasoned libertarian, but I think it’s worth spelling out in detail to make the contrast clear. This way of thinking is quite alien to most people. I think some 90’s conservatives came pretty close to it, but unfortunately that movement’s growing focus on the personal vileness of Bill Clinton led many of them astray by drawing fire away from the state itself. American liberals never even showed that much potential; even when many liberals were warning of an imminent descent into fascism and/or theocracy, there was little or no suggestion that the problem with the government went any deeper than Bush and his clique, who were somehow uniquely evil, their actions without precedent.

Liberal love for the state is unconditional. They treat the state the way an idealized mother treats her hooligan son: she might criticize the bad crowd Junior has started hanging out with, or insist that he tuck in his shirt in at church, but ultimately she always stands up for Junior, always insists no matter what he does that he’s a good boy at heart, and if he does something horrible it’s because someone else must have put him up to it.

Here, some areas of the far Left have much more to recommend them. Anti-market leftists misunderstand the market economy, and many of them (including a lot of ostensible anarchists) believe that the state could be the friend of the average working person with a suitable overhaul, but they have this going for them: they usually don't believe it's our friend now.

They are much more likely than mainstream liberals to see the government actions they rightly object to- corporate welfare, for instance- as part of a systemic problem, and not as merely an unfortunate and unintended glitch in a system that is for the most part benevolent. There is far more understanding that setting things right is not merely a matter of putting the right people in charge. Most importantly, they are far more likely to realize that the problem is that the state is working just as it is meant to. The government acts as an engine of exploitation and oppression because that’s what it’s for. That is its nature.

Left-anarchists usually grasp this; even statists like the Greens often have some idea. Their misunderstandings of market economies leads them into serious errors, such as regarding economic freedom as a form of government aid to plutocrats lumping it in with its opposite, government privilege. Nevertheless, in this important respect they have a much deeper understanding than most people.

This is by no means universal, to be sure, since a lot of avowed left-wing “anarchists” are little more than big-government liberals or full-blown authoritarian state socialists with a more bellicose and pseudo-radical rhetorical style, and I don’t take their supposed hostility to statism any more seriously than I do the Republican Party’s. Nevertheless, there are still plenty who do possess this important libertarian insight.

That alone isn’t enough, of course. Communists, Nazis, and the Taliban would all probably agree that the current system is fundamentally flawed too, after all. However, the reasons at least some of the antimarket Left condemns the current system overlap with libertarianism to a much greater extent than other ideologies, and the Left has other libertarianism-friendly traits, as discussed in my last post on the subject, and hopefully in a follow-up to this one.

The importance of this commonality is considerable. The progressive/good-government viewpoint is the bedrock of mainstream politics, accepted by both parties. It is the overwhelmingly dominant doctrine taught in the public schools, the news media, popular entertainment, and the churches. Whatever grave problems there are with the radical Left’s thought, they have at least partially rejected one of the central legitimating myths of modern statism, and that’s a rare thing.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my pejorated name

Kevin Carson has an interesting article at the Center for a Stateless Society about the assorted meanings of the term “socialism,” which at one point was self-applied not only by statists but by individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker. Among the left-libertarians, there has been some effort to reclaim the term and use it in this sense.

I sympathize with this desire. I’m still bitter about the loss of the term “liberal”; my frequent practice of referring to the American mainstream Left as “left-liberalism” instead of just “liberalism” probably has as much to do with spite as it does with terminological precision. That said, rehabilitating the word “socialist” seems like an even greater lost cause than “liberal,” which still has at least some pro-freedom connotations in everyday English.

It’s too bad since, as Carson points out, “socialism” would be a pretty good term for libertarianism were it not already taken. Instead, perversely, the defining trait of people who are today called “socialists” is the desire to minimize or destroy the power of people in communities willingly working together for mutual benefit and replace it with a system of control and compulsion through the threat of force. When people speak of “socializing” an industry, they mean removing it from the control of society and giving it to an elite.

Once you cease to identify the society and the state, it really is quite bizarre. Such an ideology deserves the name socialism only if your idea of “society” is something along the lines of a prison farm.

It’s frustrating that many of the terms that have been used for libertarianism- liberalism, capitalism, individualism, anarchism- are so thoroughly poisoned by widespread association with ideas hostile or antithetical to it. “Libertarian” itself may suffer this fate, given the continuing abuse and distortion of the term by opponents of the free market. When I consider the fact that the machinery of public opinion is largely controlled by people whose ideology depends on confusing terminology and distorting the difference between economic freedom and economic statism, I suspect it may be unavoidable in the long run.

Fr33 Agents

Not long ago, as I mentioned here, I got a position as one of the bloggers for Bureaucrash. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter there was a change in leadership and, it appears, in the direction of the organization. As a result, I've departed from my blogging post there. As the old saying goes, God never closes a door without opening a window, and then quickly slamming the window shut again on your fingers as you try to climb through. Or something like that. I'd like to give a big "Thank you" to former Crasher-in-Chief Peter Eyre for giving me a shot there.

Happily, there is good news. Thanks to the efforts of some former Bureaucrashers, a new group called Fr33 Agents is up and running in order to create a new network for libertarian activists. It's just getting underway, but the site looks pretty nice already and I encourage everybody to give it a shot. And if you feel you don't currently have enough contacts in the all-important White Male Alienated Loners Ages 25-40 demographic, swing by my profile and add me as a friend.

Motorhome Diaries crew arrested in Mississippi

Learned via Facebook: The Motorhome Diaries crew- Jason Talley, Pete Eyre, and Adam Mueller- were arrested in Jones County, Mississippi for filming a police officer who had stopped them. Talley was apparently choked and pepper sprayed. Eyre was charged with possession of beer in a dry county, Mueller with disorderly conduct and disobeying an officer, and Talley with disorderly conduct, disobeying an officer, and resisting arrest. They are currently out on bail.

Hopefully the attention this has been getting online will do some good. For more info, check out Free Keene and Fr33 Agents. In addition, Talley, Eyre, and Mueller will be on Free Talk Live tonight at 7 PM Eastern time to talk about what happened.

“Disorderly conduct,” disobeying an officer,” and “resisting arrest” are all-purpose charges for anyone the police are pissed off at, and generally mean whatever the hell the police want them to mean. Please help spread the word on this if you can. You can not only help prevent an injustice from being done, but help drag the way law American enforcement all-too-frequently acts into the light of day.