Wow. This is astonishing–Lew’s blog has huge reach.
Baby Got Backlinks
Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 6, 2009 03:08 PM
Thanks to NoTreason.com for this nice post about a classic anarcho-Kinsellan article and LRC’s reach.
Lew, you are so right, and here is more evidence: Judge Says Blogs Not Legitimate News Source; No Shield Protections.
[LRC cross-post]
This report quotes Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole on what policies TSA ought to adopt:
among large and midsize airports, only Omaha and Colorado Springs, Colo., still use swabbing machines as the only means of screening checked baggage for explosives.
“I didn’t realize that any of the airports in that size category were still doing trace detection,” said Robert Poole, a transportation expert with the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit free-market policy group based in Los Angeles. “It’s long overdue for an airport the size of Omaha” to have scanning machines.
… Poole said Omaha should temporarily place the luggage scanning equipment in the lobby, sacrificing customer space in order to use superior security technology sooner.Scanning equipment, he said, can reveal timing devices or other suspicious details, while swabbing is meant only to detect explosive materials.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to help!
[LRC crosspost]
An interesting, fiery comment by Bob Kaercher to my post Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!:
Bob Kaercher
I would never propose rejoining the Brits nor would I ever favor a monarchy, but I think I can appreciate what’s illustrated by the comparison being made here, which is that the vote-for-your-favorite-dictator democracy celebrated every 4th of July was hardly an improvement. As much as that may rankle the feathers of some American libertarians who have still not quite totally detoxed from the years of brainwashing by the media, popular culture, hearing family and neighbors spouting widely held assumptions with no or little basis in fact, and/or government schooling, the founding of the United States is hardly an historical event to be cheered by libertarians. Something good may be said for the secession from the British Empire, sure, but we should ask ourselves: To what did we secede?
“The revolution was betrayed!” This seems to be the view of the American War for Independence held by a lot of American libertarians. But on closer examination I think it’s more accurate to conclude that the rotten fruits we’re choking on today—endless war on bureaucratically defined vices at home and whatever country Uncle Sam feels like targeting abroad, increasing debt and taxation, the trampling of individual freedom, etc., etc., etc.—are what any libertarian should fully expect to have evolved out of the political arrangement established by the sacrosanct and hallowed founders.
The whole thing was corrupt from the get-go. As Stephan mentioned, really think about what’s written in the Declaration of Independence. Okay, there’s some great language about equality, which I take to mean equality of individual rights, not material or physical “equality,” i.e., no person may treat any other as their own personal property. Ah, but this did not apply to the slaves–no, no, no, no! A horrible compromise was made with southern slaveholding interests to strike Jefferson’s original language that was critical of slavery for the sake of unity. Remember, these new States with a capital S must be United with a capital U. Unity trumps principle! And we know what happened to a lot of Indians who weren’t exactly thrilled with going along with Uncle Sam’s Program.
So, okay, then as you proceed through the document there’s some great stuff about King George’s abuses of power. But then you get to the founders’ answer to this tyranny: A different brand of tyranny, one that’s homegrown! Those passages smack of collectivism through and through! There’s all this “We” being the “Representatives” of “the People” of the Colonies, and acting on the “Authority” of “the People” these purported “Representatives” declare that these Colonies are now independent of the King, sure, but as STATES that are UNITED. Lysander Spooner was right about the BS of such language. It’s the language of power.
Why not declare secession from the King as free and sovereign individuals with each person being free to secede (or maybe even not to secede for those colonists who didn’t mind staying under the King’s rule) by their own lights, entering into various associations by purely voluntary choice? Why did they have to secede as “United States”? Because that was the only way that the political elites who spearheaded that “American Revolution” could maintain any power.
So considering that this political unit called the “United States of America” was founded on the ideas of unity trumping principle and freedom, on the ideas of collectivism, we probably should conclude that it wasn’t that the founders’ principles were admirable but imperfectly implemented, or just a little flawed here and there, or were simply misinterpreted or misunderstood by succeeding generations, but that their principles were far less than libertarian to begin with and we are now tragically stuck with the bitter consequences of such principles.
Update: Hurrah for King George!, by John Attarian.
[LRC crosspost]
(From an old LRC post)
What’s So Bad About Slavery?
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on January 23, 2004 02:53 PM
A thought: nothing is wrong with slavery per se–a criminal who is imprisoned as a result of a crime is in essence enslaved. The problem with slavery–e.g., of Africans in the antebellum US–is that the slave is enslaved not as punishment for a crime but because of some other irrelevant action or status (e.g., being black). But this is the same problem with all positive laws that outlaw peaceful behavior, e.g. tax laws, drug laws, and so on.
Yet most opponents of African slavery do not oppose all victimless crime laws. That is, they are not against slavery. They are happy with actual criminals (aggressors) being enslaved (as are we libertarians); and they have no problem with enslaving other non-aggressors, who happen to violate whatever arbitrary positive laws are on the books. They are not anti-slavery at all. They simply seem to oppose one narrow ground for slavery–that is, they are against enslaving people based on the blackness of skin, but don’t seem to have a problem with other arbitrary and unfair “grounds”.
Lucy Lovejoy, Gospel Clown
(From an old LRC post.)
On the one hand, I love this. On the other hand, it frightens and confuses me. First saw this a couple years ago–a friend saw a flyer stuck on the wall of a Chinese restaurant. Ever since it’s been on the ledge of the whiteboard in my office. Every day… Lucy stares at me.
“Statism In Libertarian Thinking,” by the moronic Sarah Fitz-Claridge, attacks my anti-war/anti-state views.
Also, recent discussion of anarchy on the Reason blog, and related LewRockwell.com blog post about it. Comments by Robert Bidinotto, yours truly, et al., pasted below:
My friend Michael Barnett made this observation recently:
I hate this argument that slavery would have ended naturally without the Civil War because slavery is economically unproductive. No, it’s not. It is very productive which is why it’s had to be outlawed one way or another in every place which has forbidden it.
Great point. He put into words something I’ve thought before too. The argument against slavery has to be a moral one.
From the Mises blog, July 5, 2009.
Archived comments below.
Mises and Argumentation Ethics
My buddy Vijay Boyapati mused in an email whether Mises had anticipated the eventual development of argumentation ethics. “Here he has a little discussion here which really reminds me a lot of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics:”
Any kind of human cooperation and social mutuality is essentially an order of peace and conciliatory settlement of disputes. In the domestic relations of any societal unit, be it a contractual or a hegemonic bond, there must be peace. Where there are violent conflicts and as far as there are such conflicts, there is neither cooperation nor societal bonds. Those political parties which in their eagerness to substitute the hegemonic system for the contractual system point at the rottenness of peace and of bourgeois security, extol the moral nobility of violence and bloodshed and praise war and revolution as the eminently natural methods of interhuman relations, contradict themselves. For their own utopias are designed as realms of peace.
As Vijay observed, “In a way it feels like a ‘macro’ version of Hoppe’s more ‘micro’ argumentation ethics.” (See my post Revisiting Argumentation Ethics.)
July 5, 2009 at 7:04 pm-
If there is one thing sillier than hermeneutics, it has to be argumentation ethics.
Mises was an Austrian economist. Nothing more; nothing less.
July 5, 2009 at 7:48 pm-
Not every use of the word “contradiction” is a sign of the influence or development of arg ethics.
July 5, 2009 at 7:58 pm-
I have to second Josh’s comment. I doubt Mises would have approved of this vain search for a supposed objective system of ethics.
July 5, 2009 at 8:29 pm-
Divine Economy Consulting
Sunday, July 05, 2009Free Market Economics Is Not “Individualism.”
People benefit from the mutually advantageous cooperation that is a part of the market process. Here is what Ludwig von Mises said about it:
“The greater productivity of work under the division of labour is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.” Socialism by Ludwig von Mises, p. 261
July 5, 2009 at 8:47 pm-
This extract certainly looks like a first step toward Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. Thanks for pointing it out. Silly or not, that is another question.
July 5, 2009 at 8:48 pm-
So are we reduced to, “Hey, sure, you want to be a thug and get your way through violence. That’s just your thing, though. It’s not cool with me. Plus, it’s super inconvenient for everyone if you keep murdering people”?
July 5, 2009 at 9:01 pm-
This similarity reflects the tradition of German language philosophy shared by both Mises and Habermas (originator of argumentation ethics). They both explicitly acknowledge enormous debts to Kant.
July 5, 2009 at 10:51 pm-
Libertarians don’t initiate violence, but once violence has been initiated against a Libertarian, you can be sure that the Libertarian will respond in kind and “payback” the agressor capital and insterest.
Libertarians are not wimps and if someone is violently attacked then he should defend violently.
- July 5, 2009 at 10:52 pm
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Libertarians don’t initiate violence, but once violence has been initiated against a Libertarian, you can be sure that the Libertarian will respond in kind and “payback” the agressor capital and insterest.
Libertarians are not wimps and if someone is violently attacked then he should defend violently.
July 6, 2009 at 4:48 am-
Tom Woods wrote:
“So are we reduced to, “Hey, sure, you want to be a thug and get your way through violence. That’s just your thing, though. It’s not cool with me. Plus, it’s super inconvenient for everyone if you keep murdering people”?”
Tom,
Your post is a curious one. I’m in what I think is a rather well-populated camp among libertarians: a group which defends natural rights but which, at the end of the day, isn’t itself sure the logic behind natural rights holds up. The reasoning in your post takes the ambivalence of myself and others and makes it positively nefarious (or at least grossly illogical). Essentially what you seem to be saying is: “How could you reject arg. ethics or nat. rights — if you do, we’re left with nothing of substance.” That may be so, but the potential repercussions of their rejection should not be grounds for us to cling to them for dear life. If they hold up under scrutiny, then excellent. If they don’t, we shall have to make recourse to other lines of argument. But for the sake of logic we should not let hope and fear be the foundation of our beliefs.
July 6, 2009 at 6:59 am-
MA state motto 1775: ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem
Mises is pointing out the inherent hypocrisy here by restating the following principle: non facias malum ut inde fiat bonum
If argumentation ethics is essentially the logical deconstruction of complex hypocrisy, this can properly be seen as such.
July 6, 2009 at 8:54 am-
“My buddy Vijay Boyapati mused in an email whether Mises had anticipated the eventual development of argumentation ethics.”
Yes, and it made him split his sides laughing.
July 6, 2009 at 11:12 am-
“Where there are violent conflicts and as far as there are such conflicts, there is neither cooperation nor societal bonds.”
This sounds more like Thomas Hobbes than argumentation ethics to me.
July 6, 2009 at 3:51 pm-
Matt_R.L. wrote:
“”How could you reject arg. ethics or nat. rights — if you do, we’re left with nothing of substance.” That may be so, but the potential repercussions of their rejection should not be grounds for us to cling to them for dear life.”
Exactly. What if libertarianism is founded on argumentation ethics and natural rights? What then happens if somebody comes along with the idea that arguing with someone doesn’t necessarily presuppose they have rights, or rediscovers the naturalistic fallacy? Then your bases are demolished, and the structure on top of the foundation comes crashing down, too.
- July 6, 2009 at 5:27 pm
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What if libertarianism is founded on argumentation ethics and natural rights?
It’s not. It’s founded on the personal preferences of liberals (in the classical sense), which are best satisfied by a truly free market.
- July 6, 2009 at 9:42 pm
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@RWW:
I didn’t mean that libertarianism (or liberalism in the classical sense) can truly be objectively based on either argumentation ethics or natural rights theory. I simply meant that, if we tried to base liberalism on either foundation, and those foundations were undermined (which I believe they can be), our opponents could then say that liberalism has been intellectually demolished and should be thrown on the scrap heap of history.
In other words, I agree with you, for the most part.
July 7, 2009 at 6:38 am-
I’ve taken to carrying around a hammer, and whenever anybody tells me they don’t believe they have such a thing as “rights”, I hit them on the head with it.
(Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer…)
- July 7, 2009 at 9:52 am
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What a typical non-sequitur, Peter. If I defend myself, it shows that I have personal values, not objective rights.
March 15, 2010 at 10:37 pm-
If their exists only personal preference and not universal preference, than isn’t that a universally true (or false) statement about preferences? And if we deny that their exists universal preferences, or universally preferably behavior, (or norms, or ethics or whatever), then isn’t that itself either a personal or universal preference? and it being a statement wanting to be valid universally, admit that their must be a universally valid ethic? “Universally preferable behavior does not exist” is either a true or false statement about universally preferable behavior is it not? Then in stating ethics do not exist, one is affirming the existence of ethics. By saying there are no valid and objective norms, you are making a valid statement about objective norms. (making your statement about the non-existence of valid norms, invalid) On the other hand, if your statement about objective norms is not an objectively true statement, or that of personal preference, or subjective experience, than it does not invalidate any objective norm, or carry weight. Actually I myself am skeptical of ethics, thanks to robert murphy, but Id appreciate a response.
Murray Rothbard wrote that “There have been only two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just”: “the American Revolution, and the War for Southern Independence.” Now these wars may be just under “just war” theory, but in my view they were all unjust by libertarian standards. The use of conscription and taxation alone–by the US in the former, and the CSA in the latter–is enough to condemn the actions of these states as criminal.
Libertarians are not usually reluctant to condemn state crime and war, but for some reason if you make similar observations about the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War (either Lincoln’s, or the CSA’s, criminal actions), libertarians become apoplectic. Case in point: the reaction to my post Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day! “Proud Patriot” in the comments says that I “blame the freedom-loving patriots of the American Revolution for the mass murdering tyrants of the twentieth century”.
Well, some libertarians may want to overlook the typical crimes committed by states anytime there is war, but I don’t. The Declaration of Independence of course led to all the standard evils of war and raising an army-as Hummel noted, “unfunded government debt, paper money, skyrocketing inflation, price controls, legal tender laws, direct impressment of supplies and wide-spread conscription.”
Casual googling leads to all kinds of information on this. E.g.: as noted here:
The absence of a strong, central, colonial government resulted in a vast shortage of funding and human resources. Paper money and bills of credit financed the war, and while the paper money became almost valueless, inflation rocketed. Profiteers took advantage of these conditions to make money while workers held strikes for higher wages. Soldiers were also in short supply, with state militias sometimes competing against the Continental Army for them. Soldiers were generally ill fed, poorly clothed, and lacked weapons.
Around 5,000 blacks served in the colonial army. At first only free blacks were accepted, but the shortage in soldiers led to the conscription of slaves. Blacks fought with whites in unsegregated units. Americans Indians, threatened by colonial expansion, most often fought for the British, and after the revolt ended their claims to land and self-rule were largely ignored.
And here:
As the war dragged on, it became more difficult to find soldiers. States increased bounties, shortened terms, and reluctantly forced men to serve. But conscription was such a distasteful and dangerous exercise of state power that legislatures would use it only in extreme circumstances. More frequently, legislatures tried to reinforce the army with men drawn by incentive or compulsion from the militia for only a few months of summer service. The army’s composition thus reflected a bewildering variety of enlistment terms. After 1779, for example, a Connecticut company might have eight or ten privates serving for three years or the war, and twice or three times that number enlisted only for the summer. Washington’s complaints to Congress have obscured his genius in building an effective army out of the limited service most Americans were willing to undertake.
Here:
During the Revolutionary War, state governments assumed the colonies’ authority to raise their short?term militias through drafts if necessary. They sometimes extended this to state units in the Continental Army, but they denied Gen. George Washington’s request that the central government be empowered to conscript. As the initial volunteering slackened, states boosted enlistment bounties and held occasional drafts, producing more hired substitutes than actual draftees.
Here:
Even with their powerful new ally, the Americans remained in dire straits. Enlistments were down and conscription, while utilized, was unpopular.
This book mentions the execution of soldiers during the Revolutionary War for desertion and other things — “For examples of soldiers executed without recourse to a trial by courts-martial, see Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States ..”
As my friend Manuel Lora wrote me: “In order to be free we shall establish a state, inflate the money supply, control trade and enslave people to work the fields and the killing fields. … Happy 4th of July.”
Update: ¿Feliz día de la Independencia? by Albert Esplugas: an excerpt: “I am not convinced that [July 4th] should be celebrated in America either”
A good comment on Don Boudreaux’s post The Founders Would Be Appalled:
Ray Gardner,
I agree with you when you wrote that “the form of government that was laid down by these men set the stage for the most dynamic, and freest civilization the world has ever known.”
But I passionately hate this romantic notion regarding the founders of this country, purported by many libertarians and conservatives, as somehow being noble and good, and different from modern politicians, when in fact, many of them were hypocritical slaveholders.
To debunk this nonsense about these people as somehow being outstanding American citizens, I will emphasize my last post for the other readers to be perfectly clear:
“…these men knew what they were doing was not only morally reprehensible, but entirely against everything which they were fighting for, and yet they still held these people as slaves!
To be clear, they were hypocrites who talked a big game about liberty and justice, but were abject failures because they lacked the courage to follow their passionate convictions. They were pure cowards, and nothing better.”
That’s my beef…….that so many libertarians and conservatives look up to these cowards as somehow superior and worthy of emulation, when they failed at following up on even the most basic tenets of their writings and speeches.
In fact, had they not enslaved people, then yes, I probably would be exalting the things they wrote about too, but unlike many other libertarians, I see them for the complete cowards they were.
I mean, how can a man think, write, speak and fight for liberty and justice all day from the comforts of his home while looking out the window as the people he “owns”, his slaves, are being forced to work against their will.
Really, let’s stop this foolishness about the “founders” being so great and “better” than today’s politicians, and get a proper perspective of history here.
–Pingry
And from Trevor Bothwell:
Celebrating Evil
Today I will be celebrating friendships at the Fourth of July party I’ll be attending. Unlike the vast majority of people, however, I will not be celebrating my country’s decision to shed one criminal enterprise for the formation of another, nor will I delude myself into thinking that the United States is in any capacity a free country in terms of libertarian values.
We live in a state that sanctions the theft, assault, and murder of innocent citizens on a daily basis. That, my friends, is nothing to raise a glass to.
And in Los padres fundadores, con perspectiva histórica, Albert Esplugas discusses this post.
Update: Hurrah for King George!, by John Attarian.
[LewRockwell.com Cross-post]
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