Category Archives: Political Theory

Reagan Revisionism From The Left

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The Daily Bell has a good piece by Paul Craig Roberts about the continual historical revisionism that blames everything on Reagan.

Salient points excerpted:

1. Reagan most certainly is not to blame for the financial crisis or for the neoconservative wars for American hegemony.

The Reagan administration’s interventions in Grenada and Nicaragua were not, as is sometimes claimed, precursors to Clinton’s war on Serbia and the Bush and Obama wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, with more waiting in the wings. Reagan saw his interventions in the context of the Monroe Doctrine, not as an opening bid for world hegemony.

The purpose of Reagan’s interventions was to convince the Soviets that there would be no more territorial gains for communism. The interventions were part of Reagan’s strategy of bringing the Soviets to the table to negotiate the end of the cold war.

2. When Reagan understood what the Israelis had lured him into in Lebanon, he pulled out. Reagan opposed war as an instrument of American hegemony. It is the neoconservatives who use war to achieve hegemony. Reagan was not a neoconservative.

3. The first business of the new Reagan administration was to complete the Carter administration’s plan to save autoworker jobs by imposing quotas on imports of Japanese cars. Reagan did this even though it demoralized his conservative free trade supporters. Reagan got no thanks from the left who denounced him instead for bailing out his Republican buddies in the auto business.

4. I still hear from readers hostile to Reagan that Reagan’s firing of the illegally striking air traffic controllers is proof that he was a “union buster.” One sometimes feels sorry for people who have so little grasp of politics. For a new president to let himself be rolled up by a poorly-advised, illegally-striking public sector union would have rendered Reagan impotent and without the power to achieve his ambitious agenda of changing the economic and foreign policies of the US. Even Reagan’s court historians do not realize Reagan’s extraordinary achievements in economic and foreign policy.

5. It wasn’t Reagan’s agenda that was anti-left; it was the rhetoric Reagan used in order to keep the conservative base in line. Conservatives did not understand supply-side economics any better than did the economics profession and Wall Street. Conservatives wanted a balanced budget, which is their solution to every economic problem. Reagan was talking about a 30% reduction in marginal tax rates (the rate of tax applied to increases in income) and about faster depreciation schedules for capital investments.

What this meant to conservatives was more budget deficits. Wall Street never lobbied me to repeal Glass-Steagall, but Wall Street did lobby me to water down the Reagan tax rate reductions.

[LR: exactly. The financial world is left-oriented because they benefit most from finagling money/banking and not from tax reductions aimed at the manufacturing and non-financial business sector]

5. On the cold war front, conservatives were very suspicious of negotiating with the Soviets. Some conservatives put out the story that Gorbachev was the anti-christ, that he would take Reagan to the cleaners and we would all end up living under the red flag of communism.

[LR: Well, they got that half right]

6. Reagan did not cut back government or abolish the welfare state.

7.  If all the uninformed people who ranted about “Reagan deficits” and “tax cuts for the rich” had bothered to educate themselves about the policy that they so desperately wanted to demonize, a wider understanding of the Reagan era might have created an audience among Washington policymakers for writings by myself and others who stressed, to no effect, the adverse impact of jobs offshoring on the economy. Instead, this cancer, masquerading as the benefits of free trade, has gone untreated for 20 years.

8. The Presidents Working Group on Financial Markets, created in the last year of the Reagan administration, was labeled the “plunge protection team” by the Washington Post. The Working Group consists of the Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chairman, and the financial regulators….. If speculators were indeed gaming the market at the expense of pension funds, IRAs, and long term investors, the government might have felt obliged to come up with new regulations or to use moral suasion or even direct intervention in order to protect legitimate investors from the greed of speculators. If speculators short the market and the Federal Reserve buys long, the shorts don’t pan out for the speculators.

How the Working Group has evolved since 1988 I do not know.

However, it is absurd to blame Reagan for the Federal Reserve’s different use or misuse of the Working Group twenty-four years later, if that is indeed what is occurring.

Edward Feser On The Necessity Of Burke To Libertarians

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Edward Feser:

“It is the Burkean tradition – conservative, religious, celebrating deference and restraint and contemptuous of the “dust and powder of individuality” – to which Hayek points as providing both the true philosophical foundations of market society and the only hope of its renewal. Burke, along with Locke and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, represented in Hayek’s mind a “true individualism” which emphasizes ordered liberty and what the Catholic tradition would call subsidiarity, and has no truck with the radically autonomous self of contemporary egalitarian liberalism and popular libertarianism.”

I am not sure that I fully subscribe to this, but it would be an interesting project to explore strains in Burke’s thought compatible with libertarianism, understood as minarchist or anarcho-capitalist (a position that as it stands today I think an impossibility).

Aurobindo: The Only Law That Matters, The Only Freedom That Matters

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Correction: I should say that the western elites could not co-opt Aurobindo, because he taught an evolutionary spirituality grounded in individual spiritual practice, whereas the goal of modern gnosticism (of the anti-communist variety) is a technological paradise, in which most human beings become redundant, and the few who remain possess their power, not through traditional spiritual discipline and transcendence of the senses (as Aurobindo taught), but through the defiance of traditional religious training.

ORIGINAL POST

Aurobindo, the great Hindu polymath, and freedom-fighter turned yogi, whom the Western elites could never embrace  publicly as they did Gandhi, because Gandhi was a product of Western theosophy, Illuminist misdirection, and familial psychodrama, even if he was a remarkable man nonetheless:

“But all is not Law and Process, there is also Being and Consciousness; there is not only a machinery but a Spirit in things, not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit, not only a process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural creature. If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field for a law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and not mechanical, it must be ourself, our soul that fundamentally determines its own evolution, and the law of Karma can only be one of the processes it uses for that purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be greater than its Karma. There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom. Law and Process are one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer mind, life and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of Nature. But even here their mechanical power is absolute only over body and Matter; for Law becomes more complex and less rigid, Process more plastic and less mechanical when there comes in the phenomenon of Life, and yet more is this so when Mind intervenes with its subtlety; an inner freedom already begins to intervene and, the more we go within, the soul’s power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumanta, and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a witness and concede an automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the master of its nature, Ishwara.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 22, Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality.”

Rothbard’s Leninist Attack On Gandhi And Voluntaryists

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George H. Smith in the June 1983 volume of The Voluntaryist gives one more example of  Rothbard’s penchant for manipulating (in this case, manufacturing) evidence whenever he needed it. It is an article deriding the menace of Gandhism.

Smith correctly calls it “Leninist.” ((This, by the way, is Rothbard’s own term.  By it he meant not the substance of what he wrote but the strategy and tactics he used which he admitted he borrowed from Lenin.

Ah. I knew I wasn’t mistaken.  I know the smell of sulphur as well as anyone. …

Anyway, since I’ve read quite a bit on Gandhi (including the multi-volume biography by Pyarelal, Koestler, Chaudhuri, and dozens of others, as well as Gandhi’s own writing), I feel I am on very strong grounds when I say that Rothbard could not have known much about Gandhi at all, if he thought that Gandhi’s habit  of sleeping with some young women of his circle was unknown.  It was not. It was widely known.

To be clear, there was never any sex in these arrangements and the whole thing was highly public and visible to everyone. The young women were around the ages of 18 or 19 (maybe one was 17? I’ll check)   and vied for the honor of sleeping next to him.

This happened when Gandhi was in his eighties, and it happened after the death of his wife of nearly seventy years (he’d had a child marriage, a common practice in those days).

The young women helped him walk (he called them his crutches), bathed him, and often administered the enemas that were routine in his nature cures. Gandhi wrote about all of this at length, because he saw it as part of a spiritual practice testing his celibacy. He derived this apparently from Tantra and berated himself endlessly when he felt he had been aroused subconsciously or in his dreams (!), instead of just feeling like a “mother” to the women.

I’ve written about this at Counterpunch and Dissident Voice and I believe I was among the first to describe Gandhi’s practices as both arising from repressed psychological needs as a widower and from bona-fide Tantric techniques.

I even corresponded for a while with an academic who had written a dissertation to that effect.  Gandhi was a strongly sexed man, who married in childhood (13), fathered several children, and took a vow of celibacy in his forties. There is no evidence that he ever broke his vow, although he enjoyed warm and slightly very flirtatious relationships with several female admirers.

[Correction n July 18: Sorry, I overlooked more recent research since my 2005 piece that shows Gandhi had “spiritual marriages” with a couple of his close women friends and a very close emotional relationship with a male friend.  These were very close but not physical, so far as I know.  His own words certainly show him to be a highly sexed man and reveal what many will insist is a homoerotic tendency. My own conclusions are different, but I can see some one else thinking he was “creepy” or “freaky”.]

Where Rothbard misrepresents is in claiming that this is unknown. Gandhi himself talked incessantly about his sexual feelings in his letters and even in his startlingly honest autobiography, “My Experiments With Truth,” probably the most revelatory autobiography ever written by a man in his position. Also, there is very little traditionally Hindu about Gandhi in any way. He was a Westernized eclectic, most influenced by Jesus, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and Ruskin]

He was strict (even authoritarian) but affectionate with his own wife, and most of what took place after her death was a kind of acting out of  subconscious drama that he never confronted consciously.

What he did was certainly not harmless to the young women, who must have suffered a good deal of psychological damage.

But it was not intentional, and he was no charlatan.

Even Koestler never thought so.

Anyway, whatever you think about Gandhi or mysticism or Tantra, those who met the man were largely captivated.

Except for a few like Churchill who famously dismissed him as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer,” most people were impressed by Gandhi’s patent sincerity, demanding personal discipline, and complete unwordliness with regard to money or power.

He loved India and he loved her villages and he wanted to free the masses of people from the most grinding poverty and oppression. No one can doubt that.

What is even more remarkable he never expressed hatred for the British and showed sincere affection and respect even for the officers who arrested and beat him.

When he was shot, his last words were “He Ram” (a salutation to God).

Gandhi’s  stature as a political figure and as a man  is probably a bit higher, I’d guess, than Rothbard’s, which makes R’s shoddy scholarship even stranger.

In sum,  Rothbard has no qualms about

1. Attacking major figures (Gandhi, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and others) in vicious and often personal terms.

2. Misrepresenting both what his targets said and what others have said about them.

3. Refitting the facts/history to suit his own ideological goals and individual temperament.

Why am I spending times analyzing Rothbard’s missteps?

Because for some time I have felt something terribly amiss with the Ron Paul movement.

There is more going on there than meets the eye and it is not just picking the right strategy or Rand’s tactics or alleged opportunism (or not).  My misgivings are not confined to Paul. They extend to the people who promote him, many of whom are anarcho-capitalists (if there is such a thing).

Rothbard is the central figure of this group.

That seems to be not just because of his scholarship (there are many Mises scholars) but because of his relative political success and the success of his acolyte Ron Paul.

Paul, Rothbard and Co. have become the mouthpiece of antiwar, antistate libertarianism.  What they say needs to be examined carefully.  It would be smart to give them more than uncritical support.

With all the establishment propaganda and co-optation out there, one can’t be too suspicious. And Rothbard and Paul have given any thoughtful observer plenty to worry over.

Here are some excerpts from the Smith piece.

“THE ROTHBARDIAN FLIP-FLOP

One of the first times I talked to Murray Rothbard was at the 1975 California Libertarian Party Convention. Looking for a conversational topic, and having just read Arthur Koestler’s anthology The Heel of Achilles, I mentioned to Murray one of  the essays, “Mahatma Gandhi: A Re-valuation.” Calling it “Gandhi revisionism,” I related some of Koestler’s debunking, such as Gandhi’s practice of sleeping with young girls to
test his vow of celibacy.

I vividly recall Murray’s reaction. Stating that Gandhi was a “good guy” who was “sound” on British imperialism, Murray emphasized that one’s personal life is irrelevant to one’s political beliefs and accomplishments. A simple point perhaps, but it sunk in.

Considering this background, it is surprising to see the Koestler piece re-emerge. This time, however, the article (reprinted in a recent Koestler anthology) is used by Rothbard to attack Gandhi with surprising vindict¡veness. Calling Koestler’s piece “a superb revisionist article,” Rothbard employs a Classic Comics version to argue that Gandhi was a “little Hindu charlatan.”

Something changed Rothbard’s view of Gandhi. Was it a scholarly assessment of Gandhi’s ideas and influence? The facts suggest otherwise. Rothbard displays little familiarity with Gandhian literature, primary or secondary. He seems to  think that Koestler uncovered obscure information about Gandhi, but Koestler relied on standard biographies and anthologies (as his footnotes reveal). “The time has come,” Rothbard announces, “to rip the veil of sanctity that has been  carefully wrapped around Gandhi by his numerous disciples, that has been stirred anew by the hagiographical movie, and that greatly inspired the new Voluntaryist movement.”
What “veil of sanctity”? Gandhi’s sexual theories and practices,  his dietary habits, his treatment of his children — these and other “revisionist” aspects of Gandhi’s life were extensively discussed by Gandhi himself, and they appear in many  Gandhi biographies. This may be scintillating revisionist fare for Murray Rothbard, but not for people who have read more than a solitary article. (Rothbard apparently hasn’t even seen the movie.)

Has voluntaryism been fueled by a trumped-up, sanctified Gandhi? Not one iota of evidence is given to support this claim. Not one word of voluntaryist writing is quoted to support Rothbard’s contention that we are, in effect, Gandhi disciples…”

And this:

Nonviolent resistance is not just a fallacy or mistake. True, it is “Hindu baloney,” nonsense,” and a “fad,” but it “cuts deeper than that.” It is a “menace,” “a spectre haunting the libertarian movement” which “has been picking off some of the best and most radical Libertarian Party activists [i.e., RC members], ones
which the Libertarian Party can ill afford to lose if it is to retain its thrust and its principles.” (How such a ridiculous fad appeals to the Party’s best and brightest is not explained.)

Here lies the solution to our puzzle. Here lies the difference between the 1975 Gandhi and the 1983 Gandhi: the latter is a threat to the Party, whereas the former was not. The good of the Party required some quick, if inaccurate, revisionism, so Gandhi got the axe. Rothbard assassinated a dead man for “reasons of Party.” (My own keen analyst informs me that Rothbard searched for someone else to do the dirty work; but apparently unable to locate a good hit man, he did the job himself.”

Vox Day: Free Trade Violates The Property Rights Of The Nation

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Christian libertarian Vox Day turns propertarian arguments against free-traders:

“In the comments, PG constructed an interesting and effective logical argument against free trade, which I have organized thusly:

1. Free traders insist upon the existence of property rights and the sovereign exercise of those rights as axiomatic. From this foundation, they argue that all actions concerning with whom one will trade, regardless of their location or nation, are protected by those property rights and cannot be morally infringed.

2. If a group of people happen to share the rights to a property in an ownership group, they must decide together on how those rights are exercised. No single individual can sell the property or permit its use by others without the agreement of the other rights holders. The ownership group collectively has the right to decide who and what are permitted to enter their property. It is not an infringement of any one owner’s property right if the greater part of the ownership group does not wish to sell the property or to permit entry to certain parties or items.

[Lila: Libertarians and classical liberals would argue that property rights cannot be exercised by an abstract collective entity like “the nation” and can only be exercised unjustly by any government that claims to represent the nation.]

3. A nation is a group of people who share a common property that is delineated by the national borders. This group of people must therefore decide in some consensus manner how the rights to that property are exercised. They can therefore decide who and what are permitted to enter the national property in precisely the same manner that a house-owning group decide who and what are permitted to enter their house. It is not an infringement of any one individual’s property right if the greater part of the nation does not wish to sell the land possessed by the nation or permit entry to certain parties or items.

4. To deny a nation the property right to enact tariffs or refuse permission for goods, capital, or labor to cross its borders, is tantamount to either denying a) property rights or b) the nation’s existence.

[Lila: Rather than enact laws against the property rights of companies wanting to trade under the present “managed trade” regime, it might be more conducive to freedom to undo the subsidies that currently exist, whether in the form of fixed prices, welfare, preferential tax treatment,  or any other grant by the government.  Doing so, would probably make it far less beneficial for some companies to trade, discourage some movements of labor, and generally have the same effect as a sanction or tariff, without needing to invoke group property rights.]

5. However, denying the existence of nations is not only empirically false, it creates a logical contradiction for the free trader because it requires denying the individual property-owner the right to form collective property-ownership groups from which nations are made. The free trade position depends upon the idea that individuals possess property rights, but groups of more than one individual cannot.

6. Therefore, free trade doctrine requires the denial of the very property rights upon which it is founded. As PG correctly concludes, “their whole argument is an outright logical contradiction”.

As evidence in support of PG’s logical construction, I offer the following statements concerning the existence of nations from two champions of the dogma, Mr. Gary North and our own Unger.

North: “Defenders of tariffs present themselves as defenders of the nation, when in fact the nation, from the point of view of economics, is not a collective entity. The nation, from an economic standpoint, is simply a convenient name that we give to people inside invisible judicial lines known as national borders.”

Unger: “I do not consider myself an ‘American’, except as a verbal convenience, or have any care at all for ‘America’.”

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that the mere existence of a nation does not mean that all of its members are voluntary members of it and it cannot be denied that the legitimate property rights of the nation can be abused or ignored just as they are in the case of individual property rights. But PG’s logic suffices to demonstrate that the property rights argument upon which many free traders heavily rely is far from the conclusive one that they believe it to be.”

[Lila: A version of this argument was made by David Boaz in reviewing the movie, Avatar]

On Veracity As An End In Itself…

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A libertarian-turned-royalist explains why fudging for the sake of whatever you consider “good,” will leave you on the opposite side of the field, in the enemy’s camp:

“I see this Hitler-was-a-liberal trope catching on all over the right. Of course, it is a leftist trope – in two senses. First, the tactic of tarring all political adversaries with some abstruse connection to fascism in general, and Hitler in particular, is of course a characteristic tactic of the Left. Second, the tactic of disseminating a palpable misreading of history, for political purposes – etc.

To a Carlylean, Satan is the Lord of Chaos and the Father of Lies. When you lie – intentionally or unintentionally – you sacrifice a kitten to Satan. Satan loves you for this! And, since he is not uninfluential on this earth, he does what he can for you. Which is sometimes quite a bit.

[Lila: Disbelieving in the Judeo-Christian Satan, as popularly understood, but believing very much in Saturn (Shani), I translate this as follows:

[Clarification, July 25, 2014): I don’t mean to imply that Saturn/Sani is the equivalent of Satan.  Saturn is more akin to Shiva and Rahu/Ketu (the lunar nodes or Dragon’s head and tail) to Satan.]

The limitations of time and space guarantee that a very small error (intentional or not) will end by fetching you the very opposite of your intended goal.]

The Carlylean technique accepts only absolute veracity as the basis for any political strategy.

The fact is: by sacrificing the occasional kitten or two, by twisting the truth a bit for the sake of this quarter’s sales, libertarians and other rightists get nowhere. Their enemies are (a) in power today, and (b) operating an assembly-line rhinoceros abattoir for the sole benefit of His Satanic Majesty. Surely, sir, you had not thought to out-scoundrel such a bunch of scoundrels.”

Von Mises On The State Versus Statism

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From Monopoly Politics.com:

“Liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism. The liberal understands quite clearly that without resort to compulsion, the existence of society would be endangered and that behind the rules of conduct whose observance is necessary to assure peaceful human cooperation must stand the threat of force if the whole edifice of society is not to be continually at the mercy of any one of its members. One must be in a position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce in the rules of life in society. This is the function that the liberal doctrine assigns to the state: the protection of property, liberty, and peace.

“The German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, tried to make the conception of a government limited exclusively to this sphere appear ridiculous by calling the state constituted on the basis of liberal principles the “night-watchman state.” But it is difficult to see why the night-watchman state should be any more ridiculous or worse than the state that concerns itself with the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers. In order to understand the impression that Lassalle was seeking to create with this witticism, one must keep in mind that the Germans of his time had not yet forgotten the state of the monarchical despots, with its vast multiplicity of administrative and regulatory functions, and that they were still very much under the influence of the philosophy of Hegel, which had elevated the state to the position of a divine entity. If one looked upon the state, with Hegel, as “the self-conscious moral, substance,” as the “Universal in and for itself, the rationality of the will,” then, of course, one had to view as blasphemous any attempt to limit the function of the state to that of serving as a night watchman.”

“It is only thus that one can understand how it was possible for people to go so far as to reproach liberalism for its “hostility” or enmity towards the state. If I am of the opinion that it is inexpedient to assign to the government the task of operating railroads, hotels, or mines, I am not an “enemy of the state” any more than I can be called an enemy of sulfuric acid because I am of the opinion that, useful though it may be for many purposes, it is not suitable either for drinking or for washing one’s hands.

“It is incorrect to represent the attitude of liberalism toward the state by saying that it wishes to restrict the latter’s sphere of possible activity or that it abhors, in principle, all activity on the part of the state in relation to economic life. Such an interpretation is altogether out of the question. The stand that liberalism takes in regard to the problem of the function of the state is the necessary consequence of its advocacy of private ownership of the means of production. If one is in favor of the latter, one cannot, of course, also be in favor of communal ownership of the means of production, i.e., of placing them at the disposition of the government rather than of individual owners. Thus, the advocacy of private ownership of the means of production already implies a very severe circumscription of the functions assigned to the state.

“The socialists are sometimes wont to reproach liberalism with a lack of consistency, It is, they maintain, illogical to restrict the activity of the state in the economic sphere exclusively to the protection of property. It is difficult to see why, if the state is not to remain completely neutral, its intervention has to be limited to protecting the rights of property owners.

“This reproach would be justified only if the opposition of liberalism to all governmental activity in the economic sphere going beyond the protection of property stemmed from an aversion in principle against any activity on the part of the state. But that is by no means the case. The reason why liberalism opposes a further extension of the sphere of governmental activity is precisely that this would, in effect, abolish private ownership of the means of production. And in private property the liberal sees the principle most suitable for the organization of man’s life in society.

“Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government. It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property, but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped.

“These considerations alone suffice to determine the conditions that a state must fulfill in order to correspond to the liberal ideal. It must not only be able to protect private property; it must also be so constituted that the smooth and peaceful course of its development is never interrupted by civil wars, revolutions, or insurrections.

Mises, Liberalism (In the Classical Tradition),
pp 36-39, published by Sheed Andrews, &
McMeel, Inc. 1978

*   *   *
Epilogue
by Sam Wells

“Thus, the great Austrian economist advocated and recognized the necessity of political states, laws, and governments while he was one of history’s most powerful intellectual opponents of statism.  Contrary to a common misunderstanding by some followers of the late Murray Rothbard, “statism” is not the mere existence of a political state or when a given geographical area has one government.  Statism is the doctrine or policy of subordinating the individual unconditionally to a state or government with unlimited powers. Statism includes welfare statism (modern American “liberalism”), mercantilism, fascism, and other systems of systematic positive government interventionism on up to and including full socialism. (See Mises, Bureaucracy pp. 74-76 & 78 and Omnipotent Government pp. 5, 44-78, & 285) Statism is not the same thing as the state, and the classical liberal political system of a constitutional republic and the concomitant private property order and unhampered market economy which Mises advocated fervently until his death is not a system of statism and is in contradistinction to statism.  Under a policy of laissez faire, the scope of authority of government is limited by the rule of law to the protection of the private properties and individual liberties of peaceful citizens from violence and fraud, and the government itself is proscribed from interfering with non-violent, non-fraudulent activities of production and exchange.  Under statism, in contrast, the state may do whatever it wants to an individual or his property unconditionally and without limitation.”

Anarcho-Capitalism: Dead End Libertarianism

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In The Contradiction in Anarchism Robert J. Bidinotto powerfully elaborates the central and most obvious problem with anarcho-capitalism – who will define the rules by which members of an an-cap society would abide and how competing court systems, competing police forces, and competing definitions of every term in the legal system would coordinate without degeneration into inner city gang war-fare….

[Which is of course the case already with the inter-state (international) system.]

“Today, a “legal monopoly” exists to put shady private detectives and private extortionists behind bars. It serves as a final arbiter on the use of force in society. We all agree it does a less-than-exemplary job much of the time; but it’s there. What happens when it isn’t? Or worse: when the shady detective or extortionist has replaced it, in a marketplace where profits depend on satisfying the subjective desires of emotional clients?

Anarchists say this scenario is unrealistically pessimistic: it assumes people are going to want to do the wrong thing. In fact, people “naturally” seek their rational self-interest, they declare, once government is out of the way. They would try to cooperate, work things out.

Well, if they did, why would they need any agency — governmental or private? Why wouldn’t five billion people naturally cooperate on this planet without any legal or institutional framework to resolve disputes?………

…….if the government has been constitutionally limited, the masses are typically thwarted in having their way at the expense of others.  They can’t use force to do anything they want. As private criminals, their acts are limited by the government. And government agents themselves are limited by the Constitution. Our Founders were geniuses at limiting power. It’s  taken lovers of coercion over 200 years to subvert our Founder’s system to its current state; and still, our system is far from being totalitarian.

[Lila: It is totalitarian already and became so in the last thirty years at top speed, but that’s irrelevant to his point]

In the market, by contrast, what’s to stop thugs, and by what standard? Surely no private company would deliberately handcuff itself, with separations and divisions of powers, and checks and balances. Such silly, inefficient “gridlock” and “red tape” would only make it less competitive…….

Anarchists proclaim faith that in the marketplace, all the “protection” companies would rationally work everything out. All companies in the private sector, they assert, have a vested interest in peace. Their reputations and profits, you see, rest on the need for mutual cooperation, not violence.

Oh? What about a reputation for customer satisfaction — and the profits that go with getting results? I guess anarchists have no experience in the private sector with shyster lawyers, protection rackets, software pirates and the like. Aren’t they, too, responding to market demand?

If the “demand” for peace is paramount, please explain the bloody history of the world.

Anarcho-capitalists forget their own Austrian economics. It was Von Mises who described the marketplace as the ultimate democracy, where “sovereign consumers voted with their dollars” to fulfill their desires. Not necessarily good desires, mind you: just “desires.” Whatever they happened to be. The market was itself amoral: it simply satisfied the desires of the greatest number. (That’s why Howard Stern sells better than Isaac Stern.)

[Lila: I believe that mechanisms might arise in a society of a different quality than the one we have now. That is, my disbelief in the viability of anarcho-capitalism is a practical one, resulting from my observation that people themselves lack the moral qualities and self-restraint necessary for society to function without government.  It is not a theoretical disbelief in the possibility of a functioning an-cap society, as it is with this author.]

* * *Anarchists think the “invisible hand” of the marketplace will work in the place of government. But read what Adam Smith had to say about businessmen in that famous “invisible hand” passage. Smith knew that government was a precondition of the market, and of the working of the “invisible hand.” Without government, the “invisible hand” becomes a closed fist, wielded by the most powerful gang(s) to emerge. Why? Because government prevents competing forces from defining — and enforcing — their own private “interests” subjectively and arbitrarily.

Even if 99 percent of “protection agents” behave rationally, all you’d need is one “secessionist” outlaw agency, with it’s own novel interpretation of “rights” and “justice,” tailored to appeal to some “customer base” of bigots, religious fanatics, disgruntled blue collar workers or amoral tycoons with money to burn. …..

Oops — did I say “outlaw?” Under anarchy, there is no final determiner of the law.” There would be no final standard for settling disputes, e. g., a Constitution. That would be a “monopoly legal system,” you see. That’s because anarchists support the unilateral right of any individual or group to secede from a governing framework. (After all — wrote anarchist Lysander Spooner a century ago — I didn’t sign the Constitution, did I?)

So whose laws, rules, definitions and interpretations are going to be final?

……From a practical standpoint, a “protection agency” which could not enforce retribution or restitution against a wrong-doer would be a paper tiger. Who would pay for such toothless “protection”? Who would stand to lose?

But who would stand to gain under this option? Only the thugs, who would unilaterally declare themselves immune from anyone’s arrest, prosecution or punishment. Either as individuals or in gangs, they would use force, unconstrained by the self- limitations adopted by the “good” agencies.

[Lila: That is already the case in criminal-capitalist America. The extent of judicial corruption and subversion of law by lawyers themselves, using the letter of the law to destroy its spirit, makes large parts of corporate America no more than gangland writ large.]

In short, under this option, the good would unilaterally restrain themselves, while the bad would assume the right to use force without self-limitation, and with no fear of retaliation. This option would mean de facto pacifism by the moral, in the face of the immoral.

[Lila: This is precisely what an-cap libertarians iend up advocating, whether they are aware of it or not. ]

…If you have no final arbiter, your de facto pacifism gives society’s thugs a carte blanche — which means society will be run by brute force and thugs — which is immoral.

If you do establish some final arbiter, with the power to enforce its verdicts against all “competitors,” then you have — voila! — a final “legal monopoly” on the proper use of force… which anarchists declare to be immoral.

Anarchists can’t evade this dilemma by making excursions to ancient Iceland or to science-fiction Utopias of the future. The fact that the Icelandic model didn’t last, ought to tell us something about the viability of any science-fiction model of the future.

[Lila: I have no problem with referencing ancient Icelandic or Irish or Indian societies that did not have government. In fact, I think we should be examining every possible variation of social organization we can find. But the idea that we we can eliminate government altogether when multinational corporations already operate like huge governments, as a law unto themselves, is deluded. Will these MNC’s simply restrain themselves or will their managements become more powerful, less accountable, and more likely to operate like bandits, looting from themselves as well as from their clients and rivals?  The answer is staring at us, in the form of such rapacious organizations as Goldman Sachs..]

So, who would really rule the anarcho-capitalist utopia? The same guys who rule it now. They would be elevated by the same popular constituency that now elects them. The only difference would be is that under anarcho-capitalism, there’d be no institutional limits on their behavior……

The answer to unlimited government is not the “unlimited democracy” of the Misesian marketplace. Mises knew better (read his Bureaucracy). But anarchist rationalists, like Rothbard, haven’t yet figured out that “force” is not just like any other good or service on the marketplace.

[Lila: I think Rothbard was smart enough to figure this out. I mean, this is  common sense.  No.  I figure there’s more going on with Rothbard – and the cult of Rothbard – than meets the eye.  Even David Friedman, another an-cap,  finds a certain dishonesty in the way Rothbard treats his material. And he’s not alone. I blogged a few years ago about misrepresentation of a Chinese thinker, Sima Qian, by Rothbard noted by Roderick Long. Then there is Rothbard’s treatment of Rand, and also of Adam Smith… ….]

First US State Recognizes Jury Nullification

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The freedom-loving people of New Hampshire have quietly hit one out of the ball-park for the cause of true justice. At LRC blog, Will Grigg reports on jury nullification in New Hampshire. In a dark sky, this is one bright, shining star.
“Posted by William Grigg on July 6, 2012 10:10 AM

When New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed HB 146 into law on June 18, the Granite State became the first in the nation to enact a measure explicitly recognizing and protecting the indispensable right of jury nullification.

New Hampshire’s jury nullification law reads, in relevant part: “In all criminal proceedings the court shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.”

There is nothing novel about the principle and practice of jury nullification, which dictates that citizen juries have the right and authority to rule both on the facts of a case, and the validity of a given law. This is widely recognized in judicial precedents in both American history and in Anglo-Saxon common law dating back to the Magna Carta (or earlier). At the time of the American founding it was well and widely understood that the power of citizen juries — both grand and petit — was plenary, and that their chief function was to force the government to prove its case against a defendant — and the validity of the law in question.

In contemporary America, however, trial by jury has been all but abolished in practice. Reviewing recent Supreme Court rulings, legal commentator Adam Liptak of the New York Times observes that in its just-completed term, the High Court “has turned its attention away from criminal trials, which are vanishingly rare, and toward the real world of criminal justice, in which plea bargains are the norm and harsh sentences commonplace.” (Emphasis added.)

The fact that the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, which is supposedly sacrosanct, has become all but extinct illustrates the extent to which the U.S. “justice” system has become Sovietized.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the jury system — which had been established under Czar Alexander II in 1864 — was abolished and replaced with “People’s Courts” composed of a judge and a panel of two to six Party-appointed “assessors” who heard all of the evidence and decided all questions of both fact and law. The assessors “became known as `nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” wrote federal Judge John C. Coughenour in an article published by the Seattle University Law Review. “People’s assessors virtually always agreed with judges; acquittals were virtually nonexistent…. [U]nlike our adversarial system, the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state.”

One very telling measure of the Regime’s fear of citizen juries — especially those informed of their right to nullify unjust laws — is found in the efforts expended by prosecutors to prevent cases from going to trial.

In his 1998 book (co-written with Lawrence M. Stratton) The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts points out that “the vast majority of felony cases are settled with a plea bargain….” Many, perhaps most, “felonies” today involve no offenses against persons or property, no criminal intent, and are usually a product of an opportunistic prosecutor’s malicious creativity in confecting a criminal offense.

It is common for prosecutors to multiply charges as a way of terrorizing an innocent defendant into accepting a plea. Very rarely do we see a defendant with the means to defend himself in such circumstances. For the average citizen who finds himself targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, a plea bargain usually seems like the only relatively palatable alternative to the expense of a trial and the possibility of a long time in prison. At the bargaining table, “I’m all in” for the prosecutor means that, should he lose, he would sacrifice a little prestige, with the taxpayers absorbing all of the expenses; the defendant stands to lose everything and faces the prospect of utter ruin.

This is why so many innocent people are willing to deal. For the State, the most attractive feature of such arrangements is the fact that it keeps such cases away from juries. And we’re left with a “justice” apparatus that functions, in the words of legal scholar John Langbein, like “the ancient system of judicial torture,” which relied on self-incrimination through duress, rather than conviction on the basis of sound evidence.”

A Tribute To Ayn Rand And The Spirit Of America

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A Tribute to Ayn Rand

I posted this in 2008 and I’m reposting it from PopModal today because it seems to be corrupted on my blog and the youtube version has vanished

Projwal Shreshta  compiled the quotations from “Atlas Shrugged” and the music, which is Divano, by Era.

From “Atlas Shrugged”:

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“What is morality, she asked.
Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”

“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.”

“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

“Every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor.- by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of  our own existence — and every achievement is an expression of it.

“Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.”

“Morality is judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, and integrity to stand by it at any price.”

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“I am. Therefore I’ll think.”

“The choice–the dedication to one’s highest potential–is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

“There was no meaning in motors or factories; that their only meaning is in man’s enjoyment of his life, which they served – and that my swelling admiration at the sight of achievement was for the man from which it came.”

“For the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one’s happiness was the purpose the sanction and the meaning of life.”

More quotations listed conveniently here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand