StephanKinsella.com

My comment on a Mises blog post:

Epstein is brilliant, but his work is marred and limited by a deep and flawed utilitarianism. Re the utilitarianism of his IP views and how it leads him to unlibertarian conclusions, see Richard Epstein on “The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property”.

In fact Epstein’s very theory and defense of (“limited”) government, as set forth in Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, is utilitarian. It is based on the idea that government action can “increase the size of the pie” by overcoming various free-rider or public goods costs; and that from this extra wealth produced, it can fund the state actions that lead to it. (He tries to use this utilitarian pie-production metric as a filter to reject state policies that do not clearly lead to growth in the pie, and while an admirable try, it is unrigorous and can’t really limit government.)

Published: July 10, 2009 7:39 AM

As Roderick Long notes, An LP Anarchist Caucus has just formed. Its “5 key points of libertarianism”:

1. The right of day care owners to install crack cocaine vending machines.

2. The right of all sovereign individuals to the ownership of nuclear weapons.

3. The right of all individuals to secede from the oppression of fiat authority such as governments and parents.

4. Principled opposition to any and all forms of non-consensual slavery, such as taxation. Consensual slavery between sovereign individuals is perfectly enjoyable.

5. F*ck the government!

I’m sure they’ll flourish.

Just got A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present after Lew Rockwell’s endorsement — already finding great stuff in there. From pp. 74-75:

When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.”

But fellow libertarian devotees of the Declaration assure me there was no connection between the Declaration and the War and conscription. Well, four days is a long time, I guess! I’m sure the conscriptees were just in love with the Declaration.

This reminds of Shay’s Rebellion in 1786-87, which ended this way: “Several of the rebels were fined, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, but in 1788 a general amnesty was granted. Although most of the condemned men were either pardoned or had their death sentences commuted, two of the condemned men, John Bly and Charles Rose, were hanged on December 6, 1787.” Well, at least they got to see the Constitution ratified three months earlier in September! How lucky for them!

Another great Zinn passage, from the opening to Ch. 4:

Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.

Starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins.

By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, “stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites.” And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.

After 1763, with England victorious over France in the Seven Years’ War (known in America as the French and Indian War), expelling them from North America, ambitious colonial leaders were no longer threatened by the French. They now had only two rivals left: the English and the Indians. The British, wooing the Indians, had declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds to whites (the Proclamation of 1763). Perhaps once the British were out of the way, the Indians could be dealt with. Again, no conscious forethought strategy by the colonial elite, hut a growing awareness as events developed.

With the French defeated, the British government could turn its attention to tightening control over the colonies. It needed revenues to pay for the war, and looked to the colonies for that. Also, the colonial trade had become more and more important to the British economy, and more profitable: it had amounted to about 500,000 pounds in 1700 but by 1770 was worth 2,800,000 pounds.

So, the American leadership was less in need of English rule, the English more in need of the colonists’ wealth. The elements were there for conflict.

The war had brought glory for the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor. There were 25,000 people living in New York (there had been 7,000 in 1720) when the French and Indian War ended. A newspaper editor wrote about the growing “Number of Beggers and wandering Poor” in the streets of the city. Letters in the papers questioned the distribution of wealth: “How often have our Streets been covered with Thousands of Barrels of Flour for trade, while our near Neighbors can hardly procure enough to make a Dumplin to satisfy hunger?”

… We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. …

[LRC Cross-post]

In response to this post:

re: What Kind of Libertarian Are You?

Stephan, these detailed taxonomies are just sand in the eyes. There are only two kinds of libertarian, much as some would like to obscure it: Rothbardian and non-Rothbardian. But even that can be a distraction in our everyday work. As Murray noted — minarchist or anarchist, constitutionalist or monarchist — there is really only one consideration: Do you hate the state?

Re people who say they “don’t believe in labels” …. Labels are just words that correlate with concepts. So what is the person against–conceptual thinking, or being able to communicate them by language? When someone tells me he doesn’t believe in labels, I say, “So, you’re one of those non-labelers, eh?”

[Old LRC post]

Some of the best fiction I’ve read in some time, maybe ever, definitely just about the best sci-fi I’ve ever read: The Golden Age trilogy, by John C. Wright. If you liked Atlas Shrugged and like hard sci-fi (e.g., fans of Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center saga; Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels; Orson Scott Card’s Ender books; and Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon The Deep), you’ll like this. It’s sci-fi by an obvious libertarian and proponent of individualism and free-market, if not Austrian, economics (some of the mini-speeches about the necessity of money even in an advanced society a million years down the road, are very impressive), but it’s not “libertarian sci-fi” of the jokey, preachy, or humorless (no offense, Ayn Rand) type. Highly recommended.
[continue reading…]

From the Mises blog. Archived comments below.

On an email discussion list, some of us libertarians were talking about a recent incident in Ohio where a large group of black teens attacked a white family on the 4th, for apparently racially-motivated reasons. The question arose as to whether this is a “hate crime.” My response was:

The thing is there is a difference between the intentionality of an action or crime, and its motivations. The race-crimers conflate these. It is rational to classify a crime or tort by its intentionality: thus if it’s accidental, it’s mere negligence; if it’s fully intentional (you intended to murder the guy) then it IS murder. It does not matter WHY the criminal killed you for purposes of classifying what the action IS: he might have murdered you b/c he is racist, b/c he is a sadist, b/c he’s a socialist, or b/c he’s taking orders from General Washington.

That said, an understanding of the motivation of a given crime can be helpful in understanding, tracking, combatting it; and it might even factor in to the punishment phase. So if you steal b/c you are just a professional thief, or you steal a loaf of bread out of desperation to feed your children, then both are intentional crimes, both are theft. But maybe you have mercy on the latter guy and don’t punish him as much. Etc.

The problem as I see it is that a racist motivation to assault someone is not really any worse for the victim than other (evil) motivations for assault. If I assault you b/c I hate your skin color and am a racist, why is that worse for the victim than if I assault you b/c I want to make my bones or whatever? In the case of the starving bread thief vs. bank robber, the former is more pitiable and has more of an excuse. In the case of a racially-motivated crime such as murder, rape, assault, it’s not really any worse than a non-racially-motivated act of murder, rape, etc. It’s different in that the motivation is different, but I dont see that it’s worse (or better) as a crime.

And here is an older Mises.org post of mine on this issue:

Hate Crime–Intentional Action and Motivations

July 25, 2005 10:18 AM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (5)

On a private list I posted the following:

I’m looking for a couple of good libertarian articles that oppose hate-crime legislation on grounds that the motive behind a particular intentional crime do not make the particular act of crime better or worse from the victim’s point of view, or similar criticism.

I received a few private replies to my post. Let me clarify and answer them generally here.

First, my post was not an attempt to argue any point; I was just asking for an article that makes this argument, so I can use it in a footnote.

But let me mention my views briefly here on this. I am not implying that intention does not matter when assessing criminal action. Far from it. However, I do distinguish between the intentionality of the crime, and its motivation or purpose. A human action (such as a crime) is necessarily intentional, or purposeful. But it is intentional regardless of what the specific purpose is. I would view a racist attack on someone as an intentional act, with a racist purpose. A non-racist attack on someone is still intentional, and thus still a crime; it still has a purpose, but the purpose is something other than a racist one, e.g. it might be to further a robbery or sheer sadism. (For further discussion of these issues, see my article Causation and Aggression, distinguishing between mere behavior, and action, which is intentional, for purposes of identifying criminal human action; and Causation and Aggression, concerning the relevance of the intentional nature of action, and its purposes, including criminal action.)

For example, if I am playing basketball with you and my fist accidentally hits you in the face, as we are jostling; or if I have an epileptic fit and my arm strikes you; or if I am joking with you, trying to tease you, and swing at you, intending to miss, but you move unpredictably and I strike you–all these are cases of a non-intentional, at worst negligent, action. I believe mens rea, or intent, is indeed an important element of a crime. The crime has to be intentional.

To me, the motive is the reason why you (do intentionally) commit a crime. If I intend to univitedly punch you in the face, this is a crime–battery. I might intend to do so because I want to frighten you; or I get a weird pleasure out of it; or I can’t control my temper; or as part of a robbery; or because you are gay or black, say.

A rape of a woman is an intentional crime. The motive may be to punish her (say, she broke up with you) or her husband; to have sex; to commit violence; or because she is the wrong race.

I can see motive being taken into account when determining punishment, once it is established that it is an intentional crime and thus that some punishment or response is justified. For example, if I break into your house (intentional–crime) for the purpose if robbing you (motive), that might receive a harsher punishment than if I break into your house (intentional–crime) for the purpose of surviving from a freak blizzard (motive). Likewise, if I steal a loaf of bread b/c I am desperate and need to save my baby who is starving, it is still an intentional crime but the purpose or motive is to save my baby’s life. If I steal your money to buy drugs or buy a Gamestation, the motive is different.

In my view, an out and out intentional criminal act, such as battery, rape, or murder, is not made worse if it is done for racist motivations than some other vile motivations. The more PC jurors might feel otherwise, I realize.

One of my correspondents replied,

agreeing that the motive may be relevant, the issue is just whether this motive is worse than others. I think we’re on the same page here. One difference is that many motives you’ve mentioned (e.g., robbery) are for the gain of the criminal, whereas this motive is solely to harm the victim. I’m not sure that warrants a harsher sentence (but I’m also not sure it doesn’t).

I would say that in the examples I would use to warrant harsher punishment, it is because the motive or goal is to harm the victim. In other cases, the harm to the victim is more like collateral damage. But in MY view, a guy who rapes a woman because he wants to get laid; and the guy who rapes a woman because he dislikes her race, are equally bad. They are both commiting intentional crime; and both are intending to harm the victim. I do not see that the race-motived rape is any worse in any way than the non-race motivated one.

My point is you have to not only show that the motives are different, but that they are relevantly different. Stealing money to keep from starving seems more innocuous than stealing money to guy a gun to rob a bank. But murdering someone intentionally, because they are in the way of a crime; or because they are black; do not seem morally distinguishable to me. I would execute either one.

***

Side-point: this is one reason, in my view, outright intentional crimes ought to be punished more severely than “negligent” acts. I think of it this way. Libertarianism has a certain symmetry about it; we believe that punishment or responsive force may only be used in response to initiated force. So it is force, versus force. But we also believe in proportionality in response. A disproportionate response that “overpunishes” is itself, to an extent, aggressive. Now an intentional crime, such as murder (e.g., first-degree murder) is punished by, say, capital punishment. This is just because the punishment is an intentional administration of the penalty of death; this corresponds to “what the aggressor did,” namely he also intentionally caused someone’s death.

Now in the case of negligent causing of death, i.e. manslaughter, where you accidentally kill someone, the reason that this is not punishable by death is that the this would be disproportionate. Punishment is always fully (100%) intentional. Yet the action being punished may be thought of as only partially intentional–say, 5% instead of 100% (that is why it is manslaughter–negligence–instead of first-degree–intentionally–murder). Since the punishment must be fully intentional, the punishment given must be reduced to balance it out. Instead of executing the tortfeasor, you give him, say, 5% of capital punishment–maybe 5 years in jail, say, or a corresponding obligation to pay damages. For more on proportionality in punishment, see my article Punishment and Proportionality.

Archived comments:

Ashish Hanwadikar July 25, 2005 at 11:21 am

Punishing a criminal has nothing to do with compensating the victim. In case of a murder the victim is already dead and no amount of punishment meted out to the murderer will give any benefit to the victim.

What the rest of the society is interested in is to avoid further occurences of such cases. It is only for this reason that we use criminal prosecution.

Therefore, it makes sense to punish criminals based not only on their intentions but also on their purposes!

REPLY

tz July 25, 2005 at 2:54 pm

I accept that punishment deters some crime, but it tends to be of limited effect. Even with the ultrabureaucratic and tyrannical state (or sometimes because of it) there are a lot of things which are not “crimes”, but do involve force or fraud.

(I will restate this below, but if by “hate crime”, you mean any crime whose victim is on a list of “politically correct” groups (women are not a minority), it is corruption or nonsense so doesn’t merit discussion)

And many crimes are committed without thought of punishment. If one lacks the virtue of prudence to not commit a crime on principle, one usually doesn’t have a few dregs of it left to prevent committing crime because of the practical problem – you might get caught, tried, convicted, and punished.

In the case of negligence – what about someone who acts carefully or negligently based on the race of the person who may get hurt or one of the other bases whereby things become hate crimes?

There is also a proper function of quarantine. If someone hears voices (without headphones, sort of an iPod-person) and ends up doing well intended harm, we normally want to prevent his action. If someone does harm out of hate (which may be no more willed than the person with the audio hallucinations), ought they not be isolated too?

In this case the reason for the incarceration is not punishment but quarantine. The person is a threat (as opposed to willing threats). Something is broken, and until it is fixed there is a reasonable expectation of harm.

The usual problem with “hate crime” legislation is that it doesn’t try to identify hate, but tends toward saying a crime against a PC class is by definition a “hate crime” even without any evidence. Periodically, someone brings up a gang of minority members who go to attack a member of a majority specifically because they are a member of a majority – yet that is not called a “hate crime” though the motivation is specifically hatred.

Such PC laws are nonsense, but it is hard to talk about the subject as if the laws were really to be used against people who acted irrationally on hatred.

Then there’s people who have been wronged – someone’s relative is killed, and they seek revenge, which is a form of hate. If they act, is that a “hate crime”?

REPLY

Manuel Lora July 25, 2005 at 4:05 pm

Let us not forget that from a libertarian point of view, a legal system exists to impart retribution to the afflicted and not to benefit some third party (“society”). Therefore, it doesn’t matter to me if someone steals my car because that person is greedy, needy, depressed, hated my Latino mustache, or wanted to rub his cheeks against my cheap car seat fabric. The retribution should be aimed at trying to return me to my prior condition. And beyond this, the punishment should also go according to the actual crime done, not the causes (for example, Rothbard/Block would argue for two teeth for a tooth).

REPLY

Manuel Lora July 25, 2005 at 4:12 pm

“Then there’s people who have been wronged – someone’s relative is killed, and they seek revenge, which is a form of hate. If they act, is that a “hate crime”?”

I don’t think that would be a hate crime at all. Revenge is totally justified as part of punishment. If I am killed, my estate (brother, for example, or son) would be entitled to at the very least kill my killer, and even demand extra compensation, perhaps determined on a case-by-case basis or via pre-determined insurance company policies, for the legal fees and other costs.

REPLY

Yancey Ward July 26, 2005 at 4:28 pm

I suppose one could argue that enforcing a stiffer sentence for crimes that are committed with racist motivations would marginally decrease the incidence of such crimes, thus hate-crime laws would be justified for that reason. Of course, one could then argue that if stiffer sentences really did reduce crimes committed with racist motivations, then why not simply increase the sentences for all crimes with similar outcomes (murder and assault, for example), in which case there would now be no differences in the severity of the punishments. So I think I would have to come down on the side of those that think there should be no difference in the punishments for crime based on whether the crime was committed with racist motivations or simply evil intent.

Gary North’s column on Bill Marina, who passed away yesterday, mentioned Marina’s 2007 LRC article The Anti-War March on Washington: The Real Issue Is Empire. Marina’s article contains some interesting comments on the imperialist motives of George Washington at the founding of the American nation-state, which are especially apropos in light of recent posts such as ‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’, Revising the American Revolution, The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army, and Goodbye 1776, 1789, Tom. A few key excerpts, with bold emphasis, are pasted below:

“[T]he British Constitution is more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. . . . An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.” ~ John Adams, Novanglus Papers, 1775….

…
Empire has always meant, not only a collapse of the idea of Law, but an enormous centralization of power, not only in foreign and military affairs, but domestically as well, with huge unaccountable bureaucracies developed to administer the State.

An interesting question is when did America change from a Republic to an Empire? [continue reading…]

Classic post from Karen de Coster’s blog (see also David Gordon’s dissection of the Kochtopus):

Things Go Better With Koch … ?

Friday, July 11, 2008

The amazing Charles “anarchteacher” Burris whips out another analysis that’s worthy of entry into the Libertarian Blogging Hall of Fame.

It was highly amusing to read the New York Times story of billionaire David Koch’s $100 million dollar donation to the New York State Theater.

Mr. Koch, the story asserts, is the richest man in New York City, the financial capitol of America.

Next we will be reading of how this munificent multibillionaire has arranged with Parker Brothers to have his cheeky image placed on the cards of Monopoly, replacing the antiquated caricature of Wall Street mogul J. Pierpont Morgan.

Koch is chairman of the Reason Foundation, publisher of the ersatz-libertarian publication, REASON. In 1980, he was the vice presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party (back when it was known as “the Party of Principle”).

The NYT account only further dramatizes how far the once “principled” Koch brothers, David and Charles, have tragically fallen in three decades.

Once financial angels of the Libertarian Movement and the nexus of entities referred to by critics as the Kochtopus, now grandiose benefactors of the Republican Party while bailing out the New York City Opera and Ballet.

Its the same old statist song and dance.

At the pinnacle of the Kochs’ libertarian network was to be the Cato Institute.

While the Institute was initially financed by the Kochs’ largess, it was named by economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard for the celebrated libertarian essays, Cato’s Letters, by eighteenth century British authors John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which later help inspire the American Revolution.

All this is particularly bittersweet to me.

This week marks a special milestone in my life. Its the thirtieth anniversary of the Cato Institute’s first Summer Seminar on Political Economy held at Wake Forrest University in 1978.

It was the intellectual highpoint of my libertarian education.

The heavyweight faculty included Murray N. Rothbard, Arthur A. Ekirch, Walter E. Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, and Roy A. Childs.

This was before the big Cato Institute split detailed recently by David Gordon in his excellent series of articles at LewRockwell.com.

The curriculum was hardcore Rothbardian — natural rights libertarianism from The Ethics of Liberty, Austrian economics, revisionist history, libertarian class analysis, etc.

The Cato organizers gave us all a ton of excellent books (including Rothbard’s Power and Market) and photocopy reprints of classic articles, including Rothbard’s libertarian strategy memorandum which served as the guideline behind the Institute’s creation.

Rothbard later admitted that these early Seminars were organized as “best and the brightest” talent searches for Cato.

Out of that week-long event emerged future Kochtopus minions such as Tom G. Palmer, Jule R. Herbert, Tyler Cowen, and Sheldon Richman.

The celebrated Dr. Tom G. is known all too well today for his shaded infamy and catty back bitting slurrs regarding the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Gary North.

After Cato president and CEO Ed Crane stole Herbert’s wife Christina, “Jule the Tool” faded out of the picture into private legal practice in Alabama after a stint in the Reagan administration.

The precocious Tyler Cowen has gone on to be one of the most pliable instruments in the Kochtopus toolbox, especially when it comes to denigrating Austrian economics and the work of Ludwig Von Mises.

Sheldon Richman, it seems, has finally seen the light and is pursuing an independent destiny at the Foundation for Economic Education and the Future of Freedom Foundation, and has emerged as one of our finest libertarian writers.

How far the mighty Cato has fallen.

What was once the principled pinnacle of the Libertarian Movement has sunk below the Beltway waterline of the Potomac.

How pathetic and tragic.

What a waste of talent and treasure.

Lord Acton was right.

The Kochtopus lust for power did indeed corrupt.

From pinnacle to pimps in just three decades.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever read

But then, you won’t think so, if you dislike male chauvinist pig fratboy antics or don’t have a juvenile sense of humor: “The Now Infamous Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle” Story. “How Tucker became an urban legend (This is the complete, true story behind the famous email. If you aren’t familiar with this story in some way, you might want to read the others first; this one is long and gets very involved, especially if you aren’t a lawyer or never got the renowned “The Now Infamous Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle” email.)”

Also funny is Tucker Max’s just recently restored story of his dating Miss Vermont–it was taken down until her lawsuit against him was recently dropped.

The true story behind “The Now Infamous Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle” email