Category Archives: Political Theory

Yeats: The Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart

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Image by K.R. Hamm via So Fake It’s Real

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
‘The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Comment

William Butler Yeats wrote “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” toward the end of his life, in a moment of insight into the limits of aesthetic pursuits. The poem speaks equally to the limits of ideology.

Edward Feser On The Weakness of Rothbard’s Philosophy

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[Added, July 4:  In response to a video of Rand on the Middle East, posted at Lew Rockwell.

Yes, Rand was wrong about that.

But that does not diminish the validity of her thinking in other areas, any more than Rothbard’s rightness on foreign policy validates everything else he wrote. Nor is the Middle East the reason the left hates Rand.  It detests her because her appeal to individualism and achievement is perennially powerful and popular.

And it also detests her because she dissected at least a part of the motivation behind much charity/altruism, to which the left insistently appeals.

Now, Rand owes her thought on that subject and other things  to Nietzsche, whom she adapted very originally and powerfully. In turn, Nietzsche, also an original and creative mind, owed his thinking to his studies of Eastern religion, especially Buddhism and Hinduism.

As is the case with Heidegger, Nietzsche, as far as I know, did not properly credit that influence.

(On the other hand, Yeats, also massively influenced by Nietzsche, did….]

In this way, intellectual chicanery/cultural fraud is at the heart of the modernist project.

Imagine if I were to study Christianity surreptitiously, and then go to some state in India where the villagers knew nothing about it and preach about such things as the resurrection of the body, judgement day, the fall, and original sin, passing off these notions as my own original thought, while denigrating the culture from which I took those ideas?

What kind of a fraud would that be?

What kind of damage would that do to the villagers’ understanding of the world at large, and to my own ability to reach valid conclusions about that world?]

Edward Feser on Murray Rothbard as a philosopher:

“I should also make it clear that my low opinion of Rothbard’s philosophical abilities has nothing to do with the particular conclusions he wants to defend. I certainly share his hostility to slavery, socialism, communism, and egalitarian liberalism. I also agree that much of what modern governments do is morally indefensible and that many of the taxes levied by modern governments (maybe even most of them) are unjust. And while I strongly disagree with his claims that government per se is evil and that all taxation is unjust, these are at least philosophically interesting claims. The problem is just that Rothbard seems incapable of giving a philosophically interesting argument for his claims. (Moreover, the claims in question were borrowed by Rothbard from 19th century anarchists like Lysander Spooner, so even where Rothbard is philosophically interesting he isn’t original.)”

Lila: He also borrowed from Rand, indeed, plagiarized her theory of volition, it is said, as well as a dissertation by a student, Barbara Branden. Which might explain why some Rothbardians feel the need to attack Ayn Rand all the time, usually without seeming to have read her very well. It is another way the modern libertarian movement panders to the left – by adopting its superficial reading of Rand, who, while flawed, is a giant next to most of her critics.

Feser goes on to deconstruct Rothbard’s arguments about self-ownership:
“Here, then, is the example. It is Rothbard’s main argument for the thesis of self-ownership, which is, as I have indicated, the very foundation of his moral and political philosophy, without which his moral case against taxation and government totally collapses.
I know of at least three places where he presents it (there may be others): in his book For a New Liberty (first published 1973, revised 1978); in his essay “Justice and Property Rights” (first published 1974, reprinted in his anthology Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2nd edition); and in his main work on moral and political philosophy, The Ethics of Liberty (1982, revised edition published in 1998). In the revised edition of For a New Liberty, the argument begins as follows:
“Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. Consider, too, the consequences of denying each man the right to own his own person. There are then only two alternatives: either (1) a certain class of people, A, have the right to own another class, B; or (2) everyone has the right to own his own equal quotal share of everyone else. The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class B is in reality subhuman and therefore deserves no such rights. But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans. Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange.” (pp. 28-29)
The rest of the argument attempts to rule out alternative (2) and has its own problems, but I won’t bother with it because the passage quoted is enough for my purposes.
I think this argument is a very bad one; indeed, I think that to anyone with any philosophical training it will be quite obvious that it is bad. And not only is it bad, but given that Rothbard says nothing more in defense of the claims made in this passage (apart from trying to rule out alternative (2)), I think it is clear that the argument fails to be even minimally respectable in the sense described above. I suspect that most readers can immediately see at least some of the problems with it. Here are the ones that occur to me:
1. Even if it were true that “each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish” and that “the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation,” it just doesn’t follow that anyone has a right to self-ownership. For all Rothbard has shown, we might also be able to think, learn, value, etc. even if we didn’t have any rights at all. (That X could get us Z doesn’t show that Y wouldn’t get it for us too.) Or we might need some rights in order to do these things, but not all the rights entailed by the principle of self-ownership. Or we might really need all the rights entailed by self-ownership, but nevertheless just not have them. After all, the fact that you need something doesn’t entail that you have it, and (as libertarians themselves never tire of pointing out), it certainly doesn’t entail that you have a right to it. For example, wild animals need food to survive, but it doesn’t follow that they have a right to it (indeed, Rothbard himself explicitly denies that animals can have any rights).
Furthermore, why should we grant in the first place that “each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish”? Children survive and flourish very well without choosing most of their means and ends. Some adults are quite happy to let others (parents, a spouse, government officials) choose at least some of their means and ends for them. Many physically or mentally ill people couldn’t possibly survive or flourish unless others chose their means and ends for them. Even a slave or serf could obviously survive and even flourish if his master or lord was of the less brutal sort. And so forth. And if surviving and flourishing are what ground our rights, how could we have a right to suicide or to do anything contrary to our flourishing, as libertarian defenders of the thesis of self-ownership say we do?
Also, why should we grant that respect for each individual’s self-ownership really would ensure every individual’s ability to choose his means and ends, etc.? A leftist might argue that respect for self-ownership would benefit some but leave a great many others destitute and bereft of any interesting range of means or ends to choose from.
Of course, there might be some way a Rothbardian could reply to these objections; I certainly don’t find all of them compelling. But the point is that they are obvious objections to make, and yet Rothbard doesn’t even consider them, much less answer them. Even a brief acknowledgement of some of these objections and a gesture in the direction of a possible reply might have been enough to make the argument minimally respectable, but Rothbard fails to provide even this.
2. The claim that there are “only two alternatives” to denying the thesis of self-ownership is just obviously false. Here are some further alternatives that Rothbard fails to consider:
(a) no one owns anyone, including himself
(b) God owns all of us
(c) one class of people has a right to only partial ownership of another class (e.g. the former class has a right to the labor of the latter class, but may not kill members of the latter class, or refuse to provide for their sustenance, or forbid them from marrying, etc.)
(d) everyone has partial and/or unequal ownership of everyone else (e.g. everyone has an absolute right to bodily integrity, but not to the fruits of his labor, which are commonly owned; or everyone has an absolute right to bodily integrity, and an absolute right only to some percentage of the fruits of his labor, with the rest being commonly owned; or everyone has a presumptive right to bodily integrity, which might be overridden in extreme cases, with a right to a percentage of the fruits of his labor; or the weak and untalented have an absolute right to bodily integrity and to a large percentage of, though not all of, the fruits of their labor while the strong and talented have an absolute right to bodily integrity and to a much smaller percentage of the fruits of their labor; or the strong and talented, unlike the weak and untalented, have only a presumptive right to bodily integrity, which might be overridden if someone desperately needs an organ transplant; and so on and so forth).
Alternative (b) was defended by Locke (for whom talk of self-ownership was really just a kind of shorthand for our stewardship of ourselves before God) and it would also have been endorsed by natural law theorists in the Thomistic tradition. Rothbard explicitly cites both Locke on self-ownership and the Thomistic natural law tradition, so this alternative should have been obvious to him, and yet he fails even to consider it.
Lila: Chesterton has an excellent essay about the uses of the word “own,” but I think anyone with common sense can understand that the meaning of ownership itself varies with the context.
That Rothbard is not reflective about language – a lack of reflection pervasive among certain kinds of libertarians –  is immediately apparent to any reader with the slightest acquaintance with modern literature, let alone semiotics or philosophy.
“Alternative (c) was the standard view taken by defenders of slavery, most of whom would not have endorsed the unqualified ownership of other people implied by Rothbard’s alternative (1). One would think that Rothbard, who fancied himself a historian of ideas, would be aware of this, and yet here again he simply ignores what should have been another obvious possible alternative.
Some version or other of alternative (d) is arguably implicit in the views of many leftists, very few of whom (if any) would really claim that all of us have equal quotal ownership of each other. At the very least, a minimally charitable reading of left-wing arguments about taxation and redistribution would acknowledge that this, rather than Rothbard’s alternative (2), might be what egalitarian leftists are committed to. But Rothbard fails even to consider the possibility. He suggests (later on in the argument, after the passage quoted above) that “communist” ownership by everyone of everyone would entail that no one could take any action whatsoever without the permission of everyone else, but while this might be true under option (2), it would not be true under the less extreme egalitarian possibilities enshrined in (d).
Alternative (a) is one that Rothbard finally did consider – almost a decade after first giving the argument and after once again ignoring this alternative when repeating the argument in “Justice and Property Rights” – in a brief footnote in The Ethics of Liberty. (He attributes it to George Mavrodes, apart from whom, apparently, Rothbard might never have seen the obvious.) Rothbard’s reply to it is to say that “since ownership signifies range of control, this [i.e. no one’s owning anyone, including himself] would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”
But the badness of this argument should also be obvious. While having ownership of something does imply having a range of control over it, having a range of control over it doesn’t imply ownership. I have a certain “range of control” over my neighbor’s flower bed – he couldn’t stop me if I walked over right now and pulled some flowers out of it – but it doesn’t follow that I own it. Animals have a range of control over their environment, but since ownership is a moral category implying the having of certain rights, and animals (by Rothbard’s own admission) have no rights, it follows that they have no ownership of anything. And of course, their lack of ownership of anything hasn’t caused animals as a whole to “vanish,” “quickly” or otherwise, which makes evident the absurdity of Rothbard’s claim that alternative (a) would entail the extinction of the human race.
3. Alternative (1) just obviously doesn’t imply that the members of class B are “subhuman.” Not all defenders of slavery have denied that slaves are fully human; their view is just that some human beings can justly be owned by other ones. Rothbard’s assertion that this “contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans” is just blatantly question-begging, since what is at issue is precisely whether there are any natural human rights that might rule out slavery.
4. Rothbard’s claim that the “parasitism” entailed by alternative (1) “violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange” is also just obviously false. Animals do not engage in “production and exchange,” certainly not in the laissez-faire economics sense intended by Rothbard, but they are obviously alive.

In this one brief passage, then, Rothbard commits a host of fallacies and fails even to acknowledge, much less answer, a number of obvious objections that might be raised against his argument. Nor is this some peripheral argument, which might be written off as an uncharacteristic lapse. It served as the foundation of his entire moral and political theory, and was repeated several ti”mes over the course of a decade virtually unaltered. And if things are this bad in the very foundations of his moral and political theory, you can imagine how bad the rest of his philosophical arguments are.”

Comment:

I would also add that  Rothbard’s weaknesses as a thinker are replicated in some of his most fervent acolytes, who substitute sound and fury for depth of reasoning and seem to think incorrect thinking becomes better the more violently it is articulated.

This is not a criticism of  libertarianism as such. A term broad enough to embrace everyone from Tolstoy to Milton Friedman can hardly be criticized as one.  “Libertarianism” cannot be considered a singular movement, however much, for political or marketing reasons, some anarcho-capitalists might try to drag someone like Tolstoy into their fold.

Tolstoy was a libertarian in the way Gandhi was. Profoundly anti-capitalistic. They both believed in voluntary poverty and simplicity and abhorred the complexity of modern life. I doubt either would relish becoming the mascot of the Mises or Bastiat Institutes. To try to ride their reputations for the sake of broadening one’s appeal is intellectually disingenuous.

So I have profound differences with  American-style libertarianism (of the LRC type or of the Reason Magazine type), while supporting LRC’s antiwar and anti-police state positions.

Another point. In things of which  I know something, I can clearly spot the flaws and limitations of Rothbard’s arguments, which makes me think that in areas in which I am uncertain, he must be flawed too.

Anyway, Feser’s points don’t need any great acquaintance with Rothbard’s economic reasoning to follow. They are points that have occurred to me on and off, as I’ve read the great (?) man.

But frankly, my increasing disinterest in Rothbard has grown from more intuitive roots.

First, there is something cocky, smug, and shallow in the writing itself….despite its superficial good humor and sense.

Then, there are the stories of plagiarism – something which intensely prejudices me against a writer. And there are his attacks on writers many would consider his superior, like Ayn Rand and Adam Smith.  I wonder how much of envy lay behind all that.

On the many people whom he knew and taught, he seems to have had a profound influence, which speaks well of him. But I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing him personally, so my judgement must be from what I read of him.

And from reading him, and reading of him,  I get the picture of a shallow, bright, abrasive man, who thought very highly of himself, yet plagiarized often, and covered up the lack of originality by attacking others, attacks that his followers continue, see here,

as well as here.

[Rand was the most famous instance of Rothbard’s plagiarism. But he also borrowed from Spooner, as Feser points out. And a commenter at this blog adds this:

“The first part of his book on the history of American banking drew on a report about the “Suffolk System” published by that bank, but since buried in the archives. After finding a bad microfilm copy at my university library, I paid the Adam Smith Institute to send me a good one. (I also bought one of their neckties.) Rothbard plagiarized heavily from the original Suffolk Banking System and, worse, projected his own anarchist opinions on the facts of history. As a criminologist, I am fully sympathetic to a free market in protection and adjudication, but the fact is that the Suffolk System was not destroyed by the evil machinations of Salmon P. Chase’s Treasury Department.”

So, if Rand has her flaws (and she does), Rothbard has his, analyzed at length in this piece by G. Stolyarov.

Meanwhile, in general power of reasoning, insight into the psychology of the modern mind, and overall influence, frankly, Rothbard cannot hold a candle to Rand, whatever powers he might have as a historian or economist.

There is a reason that the left attacks her, not him.

License Raj: Indian Plutocracy Feeds Off Middle-Class

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Developmental economist Atanu Dey asks why crony capitalism and not real capitalism has a grip on India  and comes to some saddening conclusions:

“This story has three main characters: the poor, the rich and the government. The poor are happy to receive stuff; the rich are unhappy; and the government is happy. The happiness of the latter arises from two sources: first, it is good to be powerful and make others bend to your will. It’s a natural animal instinct, and the human animal gets more out of it than do non-human animals. The second source of happiness for the government (we must remember that governments are people too) is that in the process of the redistribution, they get to keep some part of the other people’s stuff they are handling.

But wait, what about the rich? Are they not powerful? Actually, they are not powerful relative to the poor. Here’s how. Every government has to have popular support. Every. Dictators and authoritarian governments not excepted. In the government’s move to remove property rights, it has the support of the poor — which in most cases (and especially in poor countries) outnumber the rich. The poor want the wealth to be redistributed and the government is only too happy to oblige. It may be that good people were once in government who could take the long or enlightened view. But only those who are skilled in the game of promising redistribution win and in time the government is made of people who are good at it.

What are the factors that drive this redistribution game? It’s a combination of envy, greed, sloth and ignorance — all very human failings but ultimately supremely destructive at both the individual and the societal levels. I reluctantly admit that in moments of weakness, I envy the rich even though I am far from being poor. How much more the envy of the rich among the really poor I probably cannot imagine. I am not immune to greed or laziness either. My only saving grace, I boldly claim, is that I know that giving up any bit of my freedom in exchange for me to receive some free stuff is a very stupid trade.

People who support governments that steal from the rich are being myopic. The habit of stealing grows, and while the promise made is that the rich will be robbed to give to the poor, in truth the government steals from the poor with equal relish. The theft from the poor is not so visible but is equally or even more despicable and destructive. What the poor lose is not just self-respect (being on the dole cannot be very good for the soul) but also the capacity to shape their own destiny. Slavery and dependency are not very distinct concepts.

Given a choice between keeping the right to property intact and getting free stuff, if the poor choose the latter, then society ends up with a government which steals stuff and redistributes some of it. As noted earlier, the poor have to outnumber the rich, which is always so in poor countries.

Two related matters to consider now. One, why don’t the rich prevail? And second, why does the basic instinct for freedom get subverted? Let’s take the first one now.

The non-poor can be further segmented into the middle-class (which is also sometimes called the bourgeoisie or the social middle-class), and the rich upper-class. You and I belong to the bourgeois. We mostly make our daily living in middle-class occupations such as being engineers, scientists, office-workers, small-time merchants, etc.

We  get a salary. We are the people who are the haves that the government preys upon.

The upper-class rich are those who make their fortunes by being close to the government and indeed are (in most poor countries) rich because of their proximity and their intimate relationship with the government.

Governments in poor countries are heavily interventionist in the economy and have the power to make or break the fortunes of the upper-class rich. In this piece, I will focus only on the dynamics of the middle-class, the poor and the government. The filthy rich in poor countries, for the purposes of this exercise, can be considered as part of the government because their fortunes are so intimately and inextricably related.

The license-control-permit-quota raj that India is so famous for lies at the foundation of that relationship……..

This theft cannot go unnoticed. So the government faces the problem of people speaking up. It solves that problem with clamping down on the freedom of speech and expression. Another piece of the freedom edifice crumbles to dust.

The poor — uneducated for the most part — cannot fathom what the whole fuss about freedom of expression is anyway, and they are not concerned.

The government, to ensure that education is government directed, controls the education system with an iron fist. The people only get to know what the government wants them to know.

………So back to the question. Do people value freedom or not? The answer depends on many things.

One has to know what freedom is to really value it. Freedom is a terminal value but it also has an instrumental role.

Its instrumental role is that it increases material prosperity.

If one does not know that it is so valuable, it is possible that one gives it up in exchange for trinkets.

If enough number of people get into that exchange, then the outcome is predictable. The result is poverty.

At some level of analysis, the poor are themselves responsible for the poverty they suffer and endure.

The government, at that level of analysis, is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It just is a response to the underlying reality. What the government does is what any “rational……

Its main objective is to extract wealth. For this it needs the support of the poor. That means it has to pit the poor against the non-poor.

The government has to create divisions and if there are already tears in the social fabric, it has to deepen them.

The government has to make policies that ensure that the numbers of the poor increase. It has to control all aspects of the economy not just to extract as much rents as it can but also as a by-product enlarge the number of the poor.

They depend on the poor for their legitimacy and poverty is their friend — and who would willingly give up their friend!

India is a classic case of a people who have collectively, at least in the last couple of centuries, never really valued freedom.

What will it take to awaken them to the great wonders of being a free people?

Lots of people have tried and judging from the results have failed miserably. Swami Vivekananda was eloquent and forceful. Result: The people are in deep slumber.

Sri Aurobindo tried and eventually retired to his ashram.

Ultimately, the slavery preached by some continued to fascinate the masses. Gandhi, Nehru and the whole bunch of sepoys ruled over them. Freedom didn’t mean a damn thing.”

Obamacare: Bad From Every Angle

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David Lindorff at Oped News points out that people on the left should also  be upset by the Supreme Court ruling on Obama care, equating a penalty with a tax. I guess if  the government decides to make  people tattoo 666 on their foreheads, as some maybe not-so-batty-after-all people fear it might, that could be constitutional too.

Not since the commerce clause has there been a  semantic theory so convenient for overreaching executives.

“On the downside for Obama, he goes into the final four months of the election campaign saddled with a decision that says he has raised taxes on some of the nation’s poorest people –– for that is what the court said will be happening, 18 months from now, when the health insurance mandate part of the new Act takes effect, and people who have no employer-provided health plan, and no other kind of coverage, fail to buy a policy for themselves and their families.  They will be socked with a bill by the IRS, and while the Obama administration and supporters of the act in Congress were at pains to say that the payment such people would be hit with would be a fine, the Justices in the majority were adamant that it would be a tax………

..The real losers in the latest Supreme Court decision, however, are the people of the United States. Not those who will be required to go out and buy some over-priced, minimal coverage, rip-off insurance plan offered by the private insurance industry, or to pay a “tax” to the IRS for not doing so, but everyone…”

Comment:

This is just a gift to the insurance industry, probably the industry most responsible for soaring costs in every field.

And it’s a blow to young people, who can often get by with just catastrophic coverage. It also hits people who are fine with self-medicating or using cheaper alternative resources.

Finally, it’s a huge blow to small businesses, the engine of job-growth.

With the economy struggling, you’d think that would be a consideration. But it wasn’t.

People are going to think twice about hiring now.

That means fewer young people are going to find jobs…..

If I were young,  this has  to be the point where I pack my bags, get my passport stamped, and hop onto the first cheap flight out of the country.

Albert Pike: Beyond Theism And Atheism

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Correction (9/21/14):

I didn’t research the origin of this quotation when I found it, massively reproduced on the web.

Unfortunately, one blogger has done some research and the letter appears to be a long-standing hoax. Perhaps there’s more to the story, but at this point, it’s necessary to flag the quotation as suspect.

“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of  Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude,disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render itsadoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”

–     Albert Pike in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini, excerpt from William Carr’s “Pawns in The Game”

Envy Is Not The Problem, Nor Greed

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Rob Urie in an excellent piece at Counterpunch about the libertarian accusation of “envy,” which, as I blogged here, is as misplaced as the socialist accusation of “greed”..and for pretty much the same reasons. The arguments are both inaccurate and circular in reasoning:

“One of the theories of the practice of psychology encountered in college is “egoism,” the argument that all people at all times act in their own self-interest. The theory is circular in that once the premise is accepted, any argument that runs counter to it is presumed to result from self-interest.”

I an earlier post, I argued this way:

The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).

And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.

Ure writes:

“Is there a difference in the degree of envy between the person holding the number two spot and the person holding the eight-billionth spot? The necessary answer is no because if so the person holding the eight-billionth spot might only want to move one spot up. This would mean that they aren’t envious of the rich and powerful at all, but rather only of the poor schmuck whose life is only microscopically, invisibly better than theirs. In that case, the only people envious of the rich and powerful are the rich and powerful just one step below them. There are a few people who fit that description that I’ve seen at Zuccotti Park, but they seemed neither driven by envy nor are they representative of the movement.”

Of course, Ure doesn’t apply the same acute reasoning to socialist arguments about greed.  In other words, if  envy is distributed equally among everyone, rich and poor, so is greed.

Pick-Pockets On The Subway Train

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Phil Rockstroh:

“The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.”

Chomsky: Taxman For Thee, but Not For Me

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From the Hoover Institution

“One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky’s work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest 1 percent. The American tax code is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor—like 80 percent of the population—pay off the rich.”

But trusts can’t be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning,” set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

Chomsky favors the estate tax and massive income redistribution—just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.

When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: “I don’t apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren,” he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. Although he did say that the tax shelter is okay because he and his family are “trying to help suffering people.”

Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite the anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist he has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd puts it, writing critically in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those “open to being ‘commodified’—that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be.”

Chomsky’s business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at $12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.

Can’t go and hear him in person? No problem: you can go online and download clips from earlier speeches—for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about “Property Rights”; it will cost you 79 cents. You can also buy a CD with clips from previous speeches for $12.99.

But books are Chomsky’s mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales. As publicist Dana O’Hare of Pluto Press explains: “All we have to do is put Chomsky’s name on a book and it sells out immediately!”

Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: “If you look at the things I write—articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever—they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I’m kind of a parasite. I mean, I’m living off the activism of others. I’m happy to do it.”

Chomsky’s marketing efforts shortly after September 11 give new meaning to the term war profiteer. In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from $9,000 to $12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand.

He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via e-mail that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, the pushlisher had sold the foreign rights in 19 different languages. The book made the best-seller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.

Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. “When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most,” Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn’t have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, “have to do with protectionism.”

Protectionism is a bad thing—especially when it relates to other people. But when it comes to Chomsky’s own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you’d better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky website (www.chomsky.info) and the warning is clear: “Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission.” However, the website does give you the opportunity to “sublicense” the material if you are interested.

Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.

Chomsky has even gone the extra mile to protect the copyright to some of his material by transferring ownership to his children. Profits from those works will thus be taxed at his children’s lower rate. He also extends the length of time that the family is able to hold onto the copyright and protect his intellectual assets.

In October 2002, radicals gathered in Philadelphia for a benefit entitled “Noam Chomsky: Media and Democracy.” Sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Democratic Left, for a fee of $15 you could attend the speech and hear the great man ruminate on the evils of capitalism. For another $35, you could attend a post-talk reception and he would speak directly with you.

During the speech, Chomsky told the assembled crowd, “A democracy requires a free, independent, and inquiring media.” After the speech, Deborah Bolling, a writer for the lefty Philadelphia City Paper, tried to get an interview with Chomsky. She was turned away. To talk to Chomsky, she was told, this “free, independent, and inquiring” reporter needed to pay $35 to get into the private reception.

Corporate America is one of Chomsky’s demons. It’s hard to find anything positive he might say about American business. He paints an ominous vision of America suffering under the “unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations.” He has called corporations “private tyrannies” and declared that they are “just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism.” Capitalism, in his words, is a “grotesque catastrophe.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the retirement portfolio.

Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.

When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio he reverted to a “what else can I do?” defense: “Should I live in a cabin in Montana?” he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in “green” or “socially responsible” enterprises. They just don’t yield the maximum available return.

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has served as a consultant to NBC News and as a member of the Ultra Terrorism Study Group at the U.S. Government’s Sandia National Laboratory. He and his wife, Rochelle Schweizer, wrote The Bushes: Profile of a Dynasty, which theNew York Times called “the best” of the books on the Bush family. His other books include Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy and Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism.

This essay is adapted from the author’s new book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (Doubleday, 2005). Available from the Hoover Press is The Fall of the Berlin Wall, edited by Peter Schweizer. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.