Manslaughter and other foibles

It's a bit late in the day to write about this, but its been fermenting in the back of my mind ever since the the news coverage of Ted Kennedy's death started. I actually expected Kennedy’s passing to be an even bigger deal than it is, given the American fascination, and a specially the American media’s fascination, with the Kennedys. Still, what we got was ridiculous enough, with days of wailing in the media and endless glorification of Kennedy’s supposed “compassion” and "service." There’s one thing that especially struck me.

It is a commonplace among libertarians that government leaders routinely do things that would cause them to be regarded as fearsome criminals if done without the halo of state power- looting people of their wealth, burning down cities, and so forth. I also find it interesting, however, to see the extent to which even actions that don't fall under the moral free pass given to "matters of state" get swept away.

One thing that always irritates me about the hagiographies that fill the media, and for that matter a lot of discussion by regular people, whenever a major politician dies is the way they deal with embarrassing aspects of the politician’s life that can’t be swept under the rug entirely: It is admitted that, though the deceased was of course a great man, he was “flawed.” This has been said a number of times about Ted Kennedy.

This is an interesting use of the word, and a nice example of how to be literally accurate and grossly misleading at the same time. My paranoia, tendency to slouch, and near-total inability to produce comprehensible human speech when I go to my neighborhood bar and the owner's daughter says hello to me are flaws. My elementary school gym teacher’s laziness was a flaw. The Trix Rabbit’s intemperate obsession with sugary cereals is a flaw.

Careening off a bridge into the water because of your drunk and reckless driving, leaving your passenger to her fate under the water, and then spending the next few hours- during some of which your passenger may still have been alive and hoping for rescue- trying to find a way to avoid telling the relevant authorities who might have saved her because you don’t want to damage your political career, and finally coming clean 9 hours later when you realize the authorities have already found the body rises several notches above the level of "flaw."

If you or I did that, the result would be the everlasting contempt of everyone who found out about it, and probably prison time. Most people would regard it as the defining moment of our lives, the act that defined our character. When a major politician does it, well, he was a complex person and we shouldn’t let one thing dominate our perception of such an important figure and great leaders often have feet of clay and hey, nobody’s perfect, right?

Bill Clinton would be another good example- office workers making dirty jokes and lewd remarks constitutes sexual harassment worthy of legal action, but the governor of a U.S. state having a female subordinate brought to his hotel room by a state trooper, propositioning her, and then responding to her rejection of his sexual advances by brandishing his genitalia does not. An extremely powerful man committing perjury while giving sworn testimony related to a female subordinate’s sexual harassment lawsuit isn’t a big deal, either.

Ted Kennedy, however, takes it to an even more impressive height (or depth): he kills an innocent woman formerly employed by his brother with his reckless, callous behavior, and when the nation’s biggest media outlets and most powerful statesmen summarize his life it is a footnote, too petty a matter to mar his glory. Ted Kennedy was a Great Man, the Lion of the Senate, a giant; Mary Jo Kopechne was an ant, as we are, and it is of no account if a few insects get trampled.

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.

Hope and desperation

I’m quite hard on American liberals, and I make no apologies for that. That said, whereas liberal pundits and politicians often make me dismayed or angry, most liberalism (or conservatism, for that matter) in the average person just makes me feel sad. That’s been amplified by the Barack Obama phenomenon.

As I’ve said before, in practice American liberalism is not about expanding government power to help the needy or combat exploitation by big business, it is about exploiting fear of big business and sympathy for the needy to build up government power, but it succeeds because so few liberals actually understand that. There’s a lot of bad ideas and deplorable motivations among liberals, but there’s good too, and it’s awful to watch as so many people’s admirable motivations- compassion for the suffering, the desire to protect the vulnerable- are twisted back on themselves by those stronger and more cunning. That's a constant feature of politics, but it's especially glaring now in the afterglow of Obama's coronation. The orgy of pork, corporate welfare, and general jobbery that the government's "stimulus" efforts will inevitably produce are no doubt just the beginning.

It will be interesting to see how public opinion evolves as reality asserts itself. Like most libertarians, I have little doubt what that reality will be. Obama will not fix the economy. He will not bring a new age of national unity and fellowship. He will not do anything positive about the drug laws, welfare statism, dysfunctional education system, or barriers to economic success that wreak such havoc on millions of black Americans. Whether or not Obama is sincere is beside the point; whenever his intentions, he will not be what people dream of him being.

I suspect that we'll be seeing a lot of denial as the disappointments mount. President Bush had millions of people who believed in him no matter how severely he violated the ideal of limited government he claimed to support. (An ideal I think many conservatives still believe in, buried though it is under a mountain of partisan loyalty, intellectual confusion, desperation, and fear. Rank-and-file conservatives and rank-and-file liberals often seem to have a pretty similar relationship to their professed principles.) And George W. Bush didn't enter office on the sort of tidal wave of desperate adulation Obama is enjoying.

Like a drowning man, people threatened with the destruction of hope will cling to anything. People will try to justify or rationalize the failures and the betrayals of promises. People will reconcile themselves to things that would have rightly appalled them if Bush had done it. (See Cheryl Cline's recent post for an example.) Some of that is just cynical partisan politicking, but I think a lot of it is sincere- the death of a beloved hope is so agonizing that people often warp or just deny their own perceptions to avoid that pain. This is a common phenomenon that we've all probably witnessed. It's not hard to find relationships and marriages where one partner is blatantly unfaithful, exploitative, or abusive, and yet the victimized partner has convinced himself or herself that things are okay, that their partner is a good person who loves them.

There is no field of life that offers and then crushes hope as extravagantly as politics. And so, millions of people will end up trying to defend and justify Obama no matter what he does, no matter how much he fails or betrays the dreams he filled people with. Their longing for the good things Obama promises will lead millions to support, against their own ideals, all the bad he causes.

Thus, we see illustrated one of the most striking features of the state and of statist ideologies, which is how effective they are at warping good motivations and sentiments into support for unjust actions and destructive results- in short, of transmuting good into evil. That so many people think of it as not only a benevolent institution, but as the primary means of doing good and expressing what is best in our society, is a terrible irony indeed.

A story for election night

I'm finally getting things up and running again. I'll have some new stuff shortly, but in in observance of the election I thought I'd repost something I wrote a while back.

Your Sacred Duty to Vote: A Parable

I was reading the paper one morning when I heard a knock on the door. I hadn't been expecting a visitor, but I quickly got up and opened the door. On my front step, to my surprise, was my next-door neighbor, holding a baseball bat in his hands.

"Uh… Can I help you?" I asked.

He nodded eagerly, and said, "I've come so we can play a game. You'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, I'll break both of your legs. If it comes up tails, I'll break your arms. I play this game with all the neighbors every few years. Sounds pretty fun, don't you think? You're lucky; in some places people don't get to play my game." He smiled, clearly quite pleased with himself.

"This is absurd!" I exclaimed. "I'm not playing your game. Get off my property!"

He sighed, looking very hurt. "Fine," he said. "I'll flip the coin." He produced a quarter from his pocket and tossed it into the air. It landed on the concrete path in front of my house, heads facing up. "Well, the coin has spoken." Before I could react, he swung the bat, hitting me in the leg. I gasped and sank to one knee. He swung again and again at my shins, leaving me sprawled on the ground.

Through the pain, I cried out, "You broke my legs!"

"Well, yes," he replied. "The coin came up heads. What are you so upset about, anyway?"

Incredulous, I yelled, "You have no right to go around beating people up!"

He seemed baffled at this. "Sure I do. You consented to this when you chose to live on the same block as me. Besides, you refused to exercise your right to flip the coin, like I offered. If you won't participate in my game, you have no right to complain about the outcome."

His reasoning seemed a bit off to me, but I was in too much pain for any deep logical analysis. "Well," he continued, "It's been a pleasure serving you, but I've got to get going. Lots of houses left to visit today. See you in two years!" With that he smiled, gave a polite nod, and was on his way.

Lèse majesté

On AOL Video, I ran into this video of actress Hayden Pannettiere in a PSA encouraging people to vote, in which Pannettiere says jokingly that she will likely not vote herself. The response was… predictable. First, there was the contingent who somehow managed to not get the rather obvious hints that the ad was a joke, and were enraged by the prospect of somehow publicly saying they’re not going to vote, with the usual nonsense about how voting is our most important right and everyone is obligated to do it.

There was another group that I found interesting, who understood that the ad was not serious but were offended by it nevertheless. Their objection was not that the joke was unfunny, but that the idea of not voting was too offensive, or the subject of the vote itself too sacrosanct, to even joke about. It was as if Pannettiere had made a wisecrack about the Holocaust or told a lewd joke involving the Virgin Mary.

Like the flag, for many people the vote seems less a political matter than a religious one. It really is remarkable how voting has become the central American right, the right that constitutes and defines “freedom.” Nothing else- the right to property, to free speech, to bear arms, to your own labor, to control your own body- has such a sacred character.

Claiming ownership

Donald Boudreaux has a great post on draft registration. In the post, he explains how he described the concept of draft registration to his young son:

It's part of the government's effort to make you think that your life ultimately belongs to it and not to you. The government wants you to believe that you're obliged even to die for it if it commands you to do so.

Boudreaux goes on to describe registration as a “degrading ritual,” which strikes me as right on the money. I remember when I registered, and I felt… I guess “cheapened” is the best word, as if I was admitting that I wasn’t worth enough to claim my life as my own.

This is a key part of why I find all the ideas for compulsory “national service” for young people, military or otherwise, so repulsive. It would be another way for the government to loudly proclaim, to each young person entering adulthood, that your life belongs to the state, not to you. Some supporters of these schemes all but admit that this is the point, with their talk of instilling a sense of “community obligation” or the like. Indeed, requiring recent high school graduates to spend their time working on government “service” projects for months or years on end would drive that message home much more dramatically than a one-time act like registering for the draft.

The state isn’t just after your money, your labor, or your obedience. It’s after your soul. Never forget that.

New article is up

I've got a new article up over at Strike the Root about the recent flag burning debate, and the quasi-religious mood that seems to surround it. Check it out. And if you're not familiar with Strike the Root, give the rest of it a good look too.