Category Archives: Political Theory

Is liberty only on the left?

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So says Wally Conger in an interview with Sunny Maravillosa via Tom Ender at Endervidualism):

“Wally: It can be confusing, can’t it? [laughs] But I try to keep it simple. I’m a Hess-Konkin fundamentalist on left and right designations for the broad political landscape. Given Rothbard’s claim that our libertarian forebears were late 18th, early 19th century classical liberal “leftists”, and subscribing, as Hess and Konkin did, to the idea that politics follows a straight line, not a circle, I believe liberty lies in the leftward direction and culminates at the farthest left in statelessness, or anarchism. Likewise, as you travel rightward along the line, you move toward bureaucracy and concentrated power and wealth. That direction terminates in, well, tyranny, despotism, and repression. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and FDR were all men of the right. Fidel Castro oversees a right regime. George W. Bush, of course, falls on the extreme right, as do Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the reptilian Chuck Schumer. Whatever their rhetoric, they all believe in consolidating power into the fewest possible hands….”

Comment:

While I like Conger’s optimism, I am not sure that I follow this argument. There are too many ideas here not fully teased out. What is power, exactly? How is liberty affected by power – whichever version of power we are talking about?

As for politics being a straight line – I simply don’t buy it. Human interaction and ideological cross-pollination are so complex, many- layered and dynamic that any two-dimensional model is on its face suspect….

Ron Paul Revolution: Mr. Paul goes to Washington

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“On Tuesday, Sept 11, the anniversary of the WTC terrorist attacks, Ron Paul is giving a keynote policy address at the influential Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.His topic is “A Traditional Non-Intervention Foreign Policy.”

If you wanted to quibble, you could. Personally, I would have preferred it to read,
“A Rational Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”
Or “A Constitutional Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”

Because there are traditions and traditions. And while those of us who are intellectually of a conservative bent tend to give any tradition the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to consider non-intervention a good by virtue only of its history, when history is composted with the bones of institutions that rotted from the inside. Traditions are prone to developing hardening of the categories – as some wit noted – and if we classify non-intervention as one, then we are surely inviting some clever update of it. We are asking for the Monroe Doctrine to be turned into Manifest Destiny

— with gender neutrality and racial sensitivity thrown in to certify it kosher.

But the Constitution of America – whatever its alleged and real flaws (and it isn’t free of them) – has been a guiding light to this nation and countless others not because it is a tradition but because the principles it embodies are rational, in the highest sense of the word, and because they are worthy of emulation. The Constitution is universal in its appeal. But it is universal because its persuades by its reasonableness, not because it imposes itself over the breadth of the globe as the law of an empire.

The distinction is of some importance today.
Because there are those who demand exactly the opposite – an interventionist foreign policy – for exactly the same reason — universality. You could call them ‘liberventionists.’ They are the humanitarian bombers, like Mr. Hitchens…..

More at Lew Rockwell. 


Rothbard on the old right

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“What Rothbard shows is that the cause of peace is our heritage, and that free markets has been united with the antiwar cause from the founding fathers through the Old Right and as late as the 1950s. There is so much in this book to appreciate but especially valuable are his comments on the Left in the 1960s. There might have seemed to be some hope for some type of collaboration. They were against war and for civil liberties at a time when the right was becoming increasingly imperialist and warmongering. Rothbard explains his attempt to educate the left on economics. Alas, there was no hope. He had to go it alone and forge a completely new movement called libertarianism.”

From The Betrayal of the American Right, a new book by Murray Rothbard, published posthumously.

Walter Block on economists who bite libertarian hands….

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Walter Block in Lew Rockwell on Caplan, Bryan. 2007. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press:

“These charges that Caplan launches against the Austrians are very serious; very serious indeed. How is it then that they come accompanied by not a single solitary footnote, reference or citation? Caplan is a very careful researcher. His book contains only 276 pages, and no fewer than 56 of them are devoted to reference, citations and footnotes. Yet, he could not spare even one of them to buttress his wild-eyed accusations against the Austrians. Why is this? Our answer can only be speculative, but a plausible explanation is that Caplan is only venting his own quasi-religious views, which are similar in character to those of which he accuses the great unwashed, the ignorant prejudiced voting public. It is difficult to reject this hypothesis. As good logical positivists, we need an empirical “test” for this contention. Here is the evidence: Caplan is himself guilty of engaging in market fundamentalism himself, throughout his book. (For example, he accepts the concept of “economic truism”; this sounds like “market fundamentalism” to me.) This suggests that he is indeed guilty of harboring motivations of this sort. He is a self-hater, in other words, who benefits from condemning vices he sees in himself.

In the view of Caplan, “A person who said, ‘All the ills of markets can be cured by more markets’ would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist.” I, myself, would never make such a statement. But this is because I do not see any “ills of markets” in the first place. Did I but, then I would gladly embrace this statement. But are not markets plagued by imperfect information? Not a bit of it. Rather, this is a characteristic of the human condition, not markets. But are not markets plagued by products such as pornography, prostitution, addictive drugs, and other harmful goods and services such as French fries, tobacco, race car driving, alcohol, etc? Not at all. Rather, the existence of these goods and services are eloquent testimony to the efficacy of markets. If blame there is for such items, it must be laid at the proper door: not markets, but the choices of human beings. All “markets” consist of is the concatenation of all voluntary commercial interactions. Market “fundamentalism,” then, consists of no more than an appreciation of the fact that free trade promotes economic welfare, and is the only system compatible with economic liberty. If this be “market fundamentalism,” let opponents make the most of libertarian support for this system of “capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

According to Caplan, “Imagine if an economist dismissed complaints about the free market by snapping: ‘The free market is the worst form of economic organization, except for all the others.’ This is a fine objection to communism, but only a market fundamentalist would buy it as an argument against moderate government intervention.” Say what? What is this? “Moderate government intervention”? One wonders how Caplan squares his advocacy of “moderate government intervention” with his well-known support for anarcho-capitalism? It is also difficult to see how he can reconcile his opposition to “market fundamentalism” with this statement of his: “… like all trade, international trade is mutually beneficial…” But that is all that constitutes markets: trade between people on a voluntary basis.

A final point on this topic, and this by far the most astounding. Caplan and Stringham won a $25,000 Templeton Prize. And here is the abstract of their prize-winning paper: “The political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Frédéric Bastiat has been largely ignored even by their admirers. We argue that Mises’ and Bastiat’s views in this area were both original and insightful. While traditional public choice generally maintains that democracy fails because voters’ views are rational but ignored, the Mises-Bastiat view is that democracy fails because voters’ views are irrational but heeded. Mises and Bastiat anticipate many of the most effective criticisms of traditional public choice to emerge during the last decade and point to many avenues for future research.”

As can be seen by this admission, Caplan’s book, and the entire research program of this author on the drawbacks of democracy, owes a great self-confessed debt to that “market fundamentalist,” Ludwig von Mises. How, then, does he come to bite the (intellectual) hand that feeds him? Truly, amazing.

Welcome to the wonderful world of “market fundamentalism,” Caplan.”

Torture files: John Donne on the abomination of torture..

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From an article in Harper’s on a sermon against torture in 1625 by poet, priest, and courtier, John Donne, via A Guy in the Pew:

“Recently I asked a clerical friend whether, considering the persistence of torture as a moral issue, he had thought of giving a sermon on the subject? He looked very uncomfortable and responded saying that his congregation was bipartisan and that he would be loathe to introduce a political issue as a sermon topic. It would fragment the congregation, he thought. Really?

I reject the notion that torture is a political issue of any sort. It is a great moral issue. And when those who have a clerical vocation fail to understand it and address it in those terms, they do their flock and themselves a great disservice.

Consider this John Donne sermon of 1625. It was delivered as his Easter Sunday sermon, which is important. Then as now, the Easter service drew the biggest crowd of the year. The Easter sermon was the minister’s minute in the spotlight—the moment when he would reach his greatest audience and make his reputation. And we know from John Donne’s correspondence, he was concerned about another audience: the king, his entourage and the courts. When Donne rose to deliver this sermon, torture was a heated “political” issue in England. Under the Stuart monarchs, the use of torture was viewed as a royal prerogative (how little things change). It was administered by judges, particularly by the national security court of seventeenth century England, the so-called Court of Star Chamber. John H. Langbein’s important book, Torture and the Law of Proof gives us very clear guidance into how torture was prescribed and used.

Over a series of centuries, the genius of the English law had been steadily to restrict and limit the use of torture, until at this point, under King James, it was controlled by the king’s judges and limited in practice through a series of special writs. Which is to say, legally it was far more constrained than it is today under an Executive Order issued by King James’s understudy in allegedly Divine Right governance, George W. Bush.

Donne delivered a direct blow against this system, the use to which it was put, and the suffering it caused. He makes no equivocations. And in the end he delivers his blows against even the king’s judges who administer the system. No one viewed Donne as a “political figure.” Indeed, owing to his Catholic background and sympathies, he eschewed court politics. Nor in the end was there anything “political” about the question of torture—it was an issue of ethics and of faith.”

Ron Paul: Slander from the left of them….

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I love Bill Blum’s work, so I was sorely disappointed to find this in his latest anti-Empire report (please read it, since it also has some exquisite tidbits on the imperial mindset that pervades the current crop of jacks-in- office…)

“Libertarians: an eccentric blend of anarchy and runaway capitalism


What is it about libertarians? Their philosophy, in theory and in practice, seems to amount to little more than: “If the government is doing it, it’s oppressive and we’re against it.”

LR: Bill, that seems to be your way of looking at it. No one who has read Mises, or Rothbard, or Hayek would see it that way.

BB: Corporations, however, tend to get free passes.

LR: From Murray Rothbard onward, true libertarians have been criticizing corporate boondoggles far more than many liberals I know. And talking about income differentials. Don’t confuse some brands of libertarianism with the whole of it, or I will start tarring all socialists as Stalinists and Maoists?

BB: Perhaps the most prominent libertarian today is Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who ran as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988 and is running now for the same office as a Republican. He’s against the war in Iraq, in no uncertain terms, but if the war were officially being fought by, for, and in the name of a consortium of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, and some other giant American corporations, would he have the same attitude?

LR: Oh, this is an argument? Suppose, I said the same about the left: If the war was for “the people” — then you would be fine with mounds of dead bodies? Isn’t that putting words in your opponent’s mouth? Where has Ron Paul supported wars for corporations? In fact, right now he opposes the war, because he thinks it was fought for corporations, which use the state as their tool. That is precisely the libertarian position about the corporatocracy and the corporate state.

In fact, the antiwar position is absolutely central to libertarian thinking, because for libertarians, it is the war economy that legitimates the command economy. Anyone who doesn’t know that simply hasn’t studied any serious libertarian theorists. Or is confusing the prowar positions of some libertarian writers at magazines like Reason (others at Reason disgreed) with authentic libertarianism. I suppose I could confuse the prowar position of some journalists at the Washington Post with the left-liberal position too.

Here is Rothbard about the the 1991 Gulf War:

“Bechtel, the Rockefellers, and the Saudi royal family have long had an intimate connection. After the Saudis granted the Rockefeller-dominated Aramco oil consortium the monopoly of oil in Saudi Arabia, the Rockefellers brought their pals at Bechtel in on the construction contracts. The Bechtel Corporation, of course, has also contributed George Shultz and Cap Weinberger to high office in Republican administrations. To complete the circle, KA director Simon’s former boss Suliman Olayan was, in 1988, the largest shareholder in the Chase Manhattan Bank after David Rockefeller himself.

The pattern is clear. An old New Left slogan held that “you don’t need a weatherman to tell you how the wind is blowing.” In the same way, you don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see what’s going on here. All you have to do is be willing to use your eyes….” (Why the War? Lew Rockwell, 1991).

Here is a piece on Rothbard’s belief that right libertarians were historically, left of the current left (See, Wally Conger, “Why Not Reclaim the Left, Strike the Root, 2002).

Ron Paul has been the one voice of sanity about the Federal Reserve’s reckless creation of credit, which is the real reason for the season of mad money lending we’ve just survived and which is now on the verge of tearing apart the economic fabric. That, Mr. Blum, is not the fault of “capitalism,” any more than a gold-digging trophy wife is an indictment of marriage as an institution. It is central bank induced financialization by a transnational oligarchy.

Please. Like many on the left, Mr. Blum’s opinion about what the right thinks or doesn’t think is drawn from hearsay and innuendo, by other leftists.

BB: And one could of course argue that the war is indeed being fought for such a consortium. So is it simply the idea or the image of “a government operation” that bothers him and other libertarians?

LR: Where does Paul say that?

BB: Paul recently said: “The government is too bureaucratic, it spends too much money, they waste the money.”[9]

Does the man think that corporations are not bureaucratic? Do libertarians think that any large institution is not overbearingly bureaucratic? Is it not the nature of the beast? Who amongst us has not had the frustrating experience with a corporation trying to correct an erroneous billing or trying to get a faulty product repaired or replaced? Can not a case be made that corporations spend too much (of our) money? What do libertarians think of the exceedingly obscene salaries paid to corporate executives? Or of two dozen varieties of corporate theft and corruption? Did someone mention Enron?

LR: I did. (here’s a piece I did on Enron: “Malcolm Gladwell Checks in at the Hotel Kenneth Lay-a”).

Murray Rothbard never stopped talking about corporate bail outs. I differ from him on some of his positions, quite strongly, but nowhere does he support the use of fraud, force or war in support of enterprise.

Neither do most genuine ethical libertarians.

But no corporation can raise a standing army or tax citizens or enjoy the legitimacy of a state. And some of us (a good number of right libertarians) think that corporations would not reach the size they do, without the state granting licences and privileges.

Gabriel Kolko argues for that as well.

BB: Ron Paul and other libertarians are against social security. Do they believe that it’s better for elderly people to live in a homeless shelter than to be dependent on government “handouts”? That’s exactly what it would come down to with many senior citizens if not for their social security.

LR: This is a false alternative. The alternative to social security is not homeless shelters. Look what a low opinion of people the left really has. According to them, people are blind, deaf and dumb; they can’t save, they can’t plan…they can’t do anything without the commissariat of soviets to do it for them. Does that make sense? Don’t you think that without government interference, people could still sit down and figure out what they really needed, instead of being forced to pay for things they don’t need? Half the waste would disappear; costs of insurances would decline sharply; variety and flexibility would increase; all the various leeches and parasites on the system (many of them middle and upper class….don’t let that tired class rhetoric about the aged poor scare you) would fade away. Scaled back and scaled down, we would get back to the scale of the human.

BB:

Most libertarians I’m sure are not racists, but Paul certainly sounds like one. Here are a couple of comments from his newsletter:

“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”

“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”[10]

LR: Paul had an opinion based on some mistaken statistics being circulated then. It was a misguided opinion. A dumb over-generalization. It wasn’t fundamentally racist but crude and insensitive. And apparently, he made a sweeping statement about the opinions he thought black people hold about economics. Asians make such generalizations all the time too, about whites and blacks. ..and other Asians (or to be fair, I should say browns or yellows or yellow-browns, maybe). Bill Blum just made one about libertarians that was all wrong. So do all groups — whether they are prepared to say so in public is another thing. Nor do I want to live in a society which demonizes people for saying such things. Let him apologize and move on.
By the way, if we are going to bring it up, some of the most “racist” attitudes I encountered in this country were not from the right. But from the left – which continues to feel that its model is the only one that serves minorities and people from the third world, in general. And demonizes anyone who falls out of step. (Not, mind you, that paternalism or even feelings of superiority expressed by other groups bothers me much. My thinking is that if an ideas strikes you as right, you should adopt it, regardless of who holds it and whatever their attitude to you might be. Racism runs a good second to mass killing in my mind and does not necessarily lead to it, either, contrary to what some people seem to think.

BB: Author Ellen Willis has written that “the fundamental fallacy of right libertarianism is that the state is the only source of coercive power.” They don’t recognize “that the corporations that control most economic resources, and therefore most people’s access to the necessities of life, have far more power than government to dictate our behavior and the day-to-day terms of our existence.”

LR (sigh):

And there are no socialists who are not unreconstructed Maoists? But does that make me confuse democratic socialists in the US with the Great Leap Forward? Please.

We expect better from our socialist friends.

There ARE many libertarians who fail to apply their critical skills to corporations and fail to see that they don’t embody free enterprise. They should start to do it in no uncertain terms.

But they should do it in libertarian terms and not in the tired, dead-end rhetoric of the left-right divide.

Libertarians should attack corporations for what they criticise governments for — bureaucracy and anti-individualism. And the left should start reigning in its knee-jerk thought-police for the very thing they attack the right for — intolerance.

Like it or not, the revolution in thinking is from the right, his time. And has been so for some time. Only it got high-jacked by a bunch of neoconservatives — who were actually ex-leftists originally.

But the real right is awake at last.

So now, move over, Trotsky.

(Defend your honor, as they say, or people will think you have none…)

Libertarian Living: Angolan trade in the 19th century

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“In the late 19th century the coast of Angola was home to a flourishing export market that shipped African goods to Europe. On the one side of this market were European settlers who operated the export industry, and on the other side were African producers in the remote interior who harvested the goods required for export. Connecting these two groups were African middlemen who traveled to the interior to collect the goods and then carried them to the coast for export.In the 19th century this region was for all intents and purposes anarchic. Although Europeans had settlements with European laws and interior African communities had their own, largely informal institutions of internal governance, there was no government to oversee the interactions between members of these groups or their interactions with the middlemen. The problem this created was that middlemen tended to be substantially stronger than interior producers, posing the threat of force described above. Why pay producers for goods if middlemen could use their superior strength to simply steal them instead?

Like with the pirates, instead of throwing in the towel and either accepting that they would be routinely plundered or stopping productive activities altogether, so that there would be nothing for middlemen to steal, African producers devised an institutional solution to the problem of force that allowed them to realize the benefits of trade with these bandits.

The institution they devised for this purpose was credit. The key to understanding how credit solved the problem of force and facilitated peaceful exchange is straightforward: you can’t steal goods that aren’t yet produced, but you can trade with them.

Here’s how the credit institution worked: Producers would not produce anything today but would instead wait for middlemen to arrive in their villages looking for goods to plunder. With nothing available to steal the middlemen had two options: return to the coast empty-handed after having made a trip to the interior, or make an agreement with producers to supply the goods they required on the basis of credit. In light of the costliness of their trip to the interior, middlemen frequently chose the latter

According to their credit arrangements, middlemen advanced payment to producers and agreed to return later to collect the goods they were owed. When they returned for this purpose all that was available for taking was what they were owed, so stealing was not an option. Instead, middlemen frequently renewed the credit agreement, which initiated a subsequent round of credit-based trade, and so on.

This simple arrangement performed two critical functions in allowing producers to overcome the threat of force that middlemen presented. First, it enabled them to avoid being plundered, as though they had not produced anything at all, but also to realize the gains from trade, as though middlemen did not pose a threat of violence. Second, it transformed producers in the eyes of middlemen from targets of banditry into valuable assets they had an interest in protecting. If middlemen wanted to be repaid they needed to ensure that their debtors remained alive and well enough to produce. This meant abstaining from violence against producers and protecting producers against the predation of others.”

More by Peter Leeson at Cato Unbound via Strike the Root.

My Comment:

This fascinating scenario answers one of the most common objections to libertarianism. That there would be no way by which a weaker group could protect itself from a stronger group intent on plundering it.
It demonstrates that people are capable of ingenious solutions to disparities in power on their own, if a huge state machinery does not get in the way.

I am going to file this away along with the earlier Rothbard post on Ireland in a new section which will contain vignettes of real world example of libertarian living. A picture being worth a thousand words usually. And one from history worth ten thousand.

Update: I found an interesting response from Dani Rodrik, “The Limits of Self-Enforcing Agreeements,”also at Cato Unbound,which I am linking here. I actually reference Rodrik’s work in my new book with Bill Bonner, in chapter 3, in a rather lighthearted way in wondering how much democracy is really correlated with economic success.

“The problem with self-enforcing agreements is that they do not scale up. One of the findings from Elinor Ostrom’s extensive case studies is that self-enforcing arrangements to manage the “commons” work well only when the geographic scope of the activity is clearly delimited and membership is fixed. It is easy to understand why. Cooperation under “anarchy” is based on reciprocity, which in turn requires observability. I need to be able to observe whether you are behaving according to the rules, and if not, I have to be able to sanction you. When the size of the in-group becomes large and mobility allows opportunistic behavior to go unpunished, it becomes difficult to maintain cooperation. Imagine that the pirates numbered in the millions and they could easily jump ship to join competing groups mid-voyage; would the arrangements Leeson describes have been sustainable?

Unlike in pirate societies or pre-colonial Angola, modern economies require an elaborate and ever-evolving division of labor—among owners of firms, managers, and their employees, among producers up and down the value chain, and between producers and providers of supporting services such as finance, accounting, and legal services. The complexity, fluidity, and geographic non-specificity of these activities leave too much room for opportunistic behavior for self-enforcing arrangements to work well. They require an external backstop in the form of government-enforced rules.”

Comment:

Just off the bat, it seems there are some problems with Rodrik’s argument. The first is that there is a mechanism for the complexity of economic variables to self adjust — it’s called pricing. Secondly, the need for rules does not necessarily entail a bureaucratic central government, such as we typically find today. Possible substitutes are many — local bodies that are loosely federated, non-government lawmaking bodies, canon law (for communities so disposed)…there are lots of possibilities, once we get out of our self-created rut of thinking in terms of leviathan..

Here’s my own take on Somalia and lots of related peeves of mine…from advertising to government hacks…in a piece, “Minding the Crowd,” Dissident Voice, 2006:

“Anarchists will argue, of course, that you don’t need a government to do that. Private groups are perfectly able to provide security, defense and infrastructure. We won’t argue with them. We don’t believe we know enough of the matter one way or other. But one thing we do know is that both the anarchists and the statists are confused when they talk. They say state when they mean government, and they say government when they mean the rule of law. They confuse anarchy with chaos, and the absence of the state with the absence of law.

Somalia is stateless, but it is not entirely without laws; there is anarchy, but there is not yet complete chaos. Somalia may be an example of how spontaneous order can take root even when the state collapses.

The Law of the Somalis, written by Michael van Notten, goes to the heart of the matter. Van Notten, is a Dutch lawyer who married into a Somali clan and lived in the country for the last decade or so of his life. [9]

Van Notten points out what the BBC does not want to notice. Somalia might lack a state, but it’s not completely without government. The country still relies on traditional Somali customary law, which, he points out, would not be able to work if a central government and western style democracy were imposed on top of it. Somalia’s free market is not operating in suspended animation, or in a vacuum. It rests — in a precarious, wobbly way, it is true — on the traditional law of the Somalis. And it does have a government — even if it is only the government of the Somali clans.

Somali customary law and clan government follow natural law closely. And whatever fragments of a genuine free market operate there do so only because of the norms of behavior springing from this indigenous system.

Van Notten makes another interesting point. He suggests that the terrible problems plaguing Somalia don’t arise from the free market or the lack of central government at all. Instead they are the result of the constant attempts to impose government, albeit unsuccessfully.

“A democratic government has every power to exert dominion over people. To fend off the possibility of being dominated, each clan tries to capture the power of that government before it can become a threat.” [10]

And the fear of domination is only kept alive by incessant U.N. efforts to intervene and impose a Western style government in the country. Leave the clans alone, he says. Let foreign governments just deal with them.

The irony is, a real free market is not free at all. It is, and always has been, restricted: by laws, customs, traditions, morals, expectations. In Somalia or the West, you have to choose. It is either natural law or the law of the jungle……”

 


Libertarian Economics – Eric Bonabeau on swarm intelligence

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An interview with Eric Bonabeau on emergent swarm technologies:

“In social insects, errors and randomness are not “bugs”; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).

With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence.

This is obviously a very different mindset from the prevailing approach to software development and to managing vast amounts of information: no central control, errors are good, flexibility, robustness (or self-repair). The big issue is this: if I am letting a decentralized, self-organizing system take over, say, my computer network, how should I program the individual virtual ants so that the network behaves appropriately at the system-wide level?”

Comment:

As usual social and economic theory are way behind science and technology. But then, they don’t have the DC monolith getting in their way…

Rothbard on the real history of liberty

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In his essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Rothbard describes the “Old Order”:

The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.

And about the incestuous love of the state and mercantilism by both right and left:

”  Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6] When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients……

Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]

The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality)…..”

And in an essay on Rothbard at LRC, Ryan McMaken shows how Rothbard broke away from the convenient linear history of the state’s triumphal march upward:

“In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and “Enlightenment” intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although “the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.”

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“The critical thing about names is their plasticity and manipulability, they are mental constructs and so extremely malleable after considerations of latency and cognitive friction are taken into account.

Update: From the comments, this makes my point much clearer:

….The associated metaphysics is secondary to the potentiation of collective action. Once a flag gets carried across a tribal border, be it a tribal flag, a national flag, a religious flag or whatever in the home context, across the tribal border it’s generally a de facto tribal flag.

“I want to emphasize that this issue isn’t limited to religion & metaphysics. After all, how many communists read Das Kapital front to back? Religious or political movements need the appropriate psychological “hooks” to have mass appeal, but they also seem to gain credibility through the generation of obscure intellectual justifications….”

“In the name of a word,” by Razib at GeneExpression

Comment: Researching the witchcraft trials for a chapter in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” I ended up with the same conclusion: a symbol isn’t enough. A red rag alone won’t do to get a crowd going. You need a half-baked theory that no one actually studies but which the cognoscenti can trot out as justification…..