StephanKinsella.com

Last night I downloaded Magic Piano for iPad, by Smule (iTunes page; Smule page). This incredible app cost only $0.99. Several things about it startled me.

First, the sound is very good–the imitation of piano sound, and the speakers on the iPad. Second, I didn’t realize the iPad’s multitouch allowed so many simultaneous touches to be recorded–I tried all ten fingers and it seemed to detect them all.

In normal “solo” mode you can play piano in freestyle mode, or a spiral, circular, or standard-layout keyboard. You can expand or shrink the number of keys, move them around etc.

There is also an amazing “song book” mode which lets you choose one of several songs; then little note guides start gently falling, coaxing you to play the song and showing you where to put your fingers; it’s like a gentler, more beautiful version of Guitar Hero on the Wii.

What really blew me away were the Duet and World modes. If you hit “Duet” the iPad finds someone else in the world in duet mode and you can play together, with your own locations superimposed over a google-earth style globe, and the notes jumping out into little ripples over the earth. It is quite amazingly lovely. And the World mode lets you just eavesdrop over people playing on their own around the globe, or duets. Some of the duets are fun, and some of the people playing are really good. It was just astonishing. Not this app itself so much, but just the idea of all the creative things that you can do with technology and devices like this; with the Internet and connectivity.

A Tea Party-sympathetic friend sent me a link to a video, Tax Day Tea Party Racists Caught Saying N-Word!!, which mocks the people accusing the Tea Party of racism (the host can’t find anyone who will say the N word).

My 6 year old was watching over my shoulder and says, “Dad, what’s the N-word?”

I said, “It’s a bad word you don’t need to know.”

“Come on, Dad. Tell me. I won’t say it.”

So I look at him, and tell him. He says, “What’s that mean?”

I said, “It means black people.”

“But that’s not a bad thing!” he retorts, mystified why the N-word is bad if the referent is not bad. I say, “Well…. it’s hard to explain. It sort of means ‘you’re a trashy person because of your skin color.'”

From his post Against Libertarian Nostalgia (linked in Preference Falsification: A Case Study):

I’m sure that David [Boaz] would be happy to add genocide against American Indians to the list of historical crimes that libertarians ought never forget.  But I wonder whether he’d join me in condemning the American Revolution itself as yet another unjust war that yielded nationalist – not libertarian – fruit.

Caplan is right, as I noted in various posts linked in Boaz on Hornberger and Slavery, such as Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power, The Declaration and Conscription, Revising the American Revolution, The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army, Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!, Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution”.

My reply to Roman Pearah’s blogpost:

You have to refer to property rights and force to define aggression. “using someone as a means” won’t cut it. In fact it’s perfectly okay to use people as means: see my discussion in Causation and Aggression–the section “COMPLICATING THE PICTURE: CAUSATION, COOPERATION, AND HUMAN MEANS” on p. 101.

Aggression is simply the unconsented to (or uninvited) change in the physical integrity (or use, control or possession) of another person’s body or property–as Hoppe puts it, it’s aggression if someone “uninvitedly invades or changes the physical integrity of another person’s body and puts this body to a use that is not to this very person’s own liking”. I elaborate on this in What Libertarianism Is, particularly notes 9 and 11. So of course what aggression is depends on what property rights there are. So what makes libertarianism unique is our unique view of aggression, which is unique just because of our unique property assignment rules. As I wrote in the article noted above, “Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules: its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource, and how to determine this.”

And this, I submit, is the Lockean view of homesteading, more or less. This is precisely why I object when left-libertarians veer from this with either ambiguous, vague, non-rigorous standards as you are doing here with this “means” talk; or when they adopt non-Lockean rules like the mutualist occupancy rules or crankish Georgist-related rules.

Yet another thing Rand was good on. No offense quasi-mystical/collectivist types who “take pride in” belonging to ethnic, religious etc. groups like atavistic cavemen.

Racism

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. [continue reading…]

Fundamentalist Christians are often “young earthers” who believe the Bible is literally true often think the earth and human history is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old–you get this by counting enumerated generations in the bible back to Adam and Eve. This leads to ridiculous theories about dinosaurs living contemporaneously with man, skepticism of carbon-dating techniques, etc.

Well now there’s yet another in a long line of reports that the remains of Noah’s Ark has finally been found. Support for the claims? “They claim carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old — around the same time the ark was said to be afloat.” Uh oh! What’s a fundamentalist to do? Reject carbon dating, or accept it?

Update and Clarification: I now believe my title here is misleading. I am anti-INS, but I do not believe my position can be described as “open borders,” as most libertarians seem to mean when they use that term. Let me elaborate. See my recent post On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library, which fleshes out my views here. I reject the framing by “open borders” libertarians because I believe it is either from the pro-state minarchist side, or from the anarchist side based on a mistake about the status of state-owned property. Given the existence of the state and its ownership of “public property,” especially in a modern, democratic welfare state, there is really no solution. Whatever policy the state adopts will violate rights, since there is no way to use the property legally owned by the state but rightfully owned by the citizens that is objectively optimal. Rights of citizens will be violated either by forced exclusion or by forced integration and related harms.

In an ideal society there would be no state and no public property, and, as Hoppe points out, really no such thing as “immigration” since there would be no citizenship or immigration controls by a state. Instead, there would be privately owned property, and perhaps other property that is unowned since it has yet to be appropriated by anyone. In such a world, anyone is free to homestead unowned land, but for privately owned, already-appropriated land, no outsider can enter or use that land without the owner’s consent.

In today’s world, non-owners, including legal (and illegal) immigrants, have various rights to use or affect owned land because of anti-discrimination and related laws and because of public roads that make exclusion of outsiders by existing owners from their homes or businesses difficult or impossible, i.e. forced integration. In my view, ¹ the state controls two types of property: state-owned property that is rightfully owned by taxpayers and others who paid for it via taxes, and unowned property such as most of the federal public lands, including about 245 million acres of surface land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate across the U.S., administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

The state should “privatize” all of this by returning the owned property to the relevant taxpayers, and should permit anyone to homestead the unowned land (perhaps citizens would have the first right to homestead since returning owned state land to them will not fully compensate them for past harms, but this is a detail).

In the meantime, the state ought to set rules for the use of state owned resources to provide as much in-kind restitution to the citizen-taxpayers as possible. This would mean the right of citizens to use state roads, for example, and imposing normal rules for use of the roads like speed limits and so on, to make the roads actually useful to the citizens. Similar rules for other resources like state owned libraries, and so on. Because foreigners have no claim on these resources it does not violate their rights for the state to deny them access to state roads. If the state did not grant permission to every outsider to use state roads, this would not violate their rights. However, it would reduce the amount of harm done to citizens in two ways: (a) it would provide them some valuable service (transportation services) and (b) it would reduce to some extent the forced integration otherwise caused by immigration.

However, in some cases—namely, where a given resident wants to invite an outsider to his home or business, for employment, say, or to marry someone, or to have a relative or friend come live with them—a state rule banning all non-citizens from using the roads would amount to forced exclusion and thus violate the rights of some citizens (not the outsiders, though). Thus, the state ought to permit use of the roads by an outsider who has such an invitation from a citizen. This policy would increase the absolute numbers of immigration, reduce the amount of forced exclusion caused by state ownership of public property, and also reduce the amount of forced integration.

Is this likely? No. As Hoppe explains:

What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy, however, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy? The best one may hope for, even if it goes against the “nature” of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property (into their very own houses). This means following a policy of utmost discrimination: of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character, and cultural compatibility. [Hoppe, Democracy, p. 148]

Still, I would argue it would be a big improvement in a world of second-bests.

The open borders libertarians maintain state property is unowned, because it is illegitimate. This is to make the mistake of legal positivism, as I mentioned in my recent post On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library. Because they make this mistake, they think any rules the state sets on public property are illegitimate, and thus that no rules, including those that discriminate between citizens and outsiders, is legitimate. But there is no basis for this, as I explain there; and it would increase the harm already being done to citizens by reducing the amount of in-kind restitution that is provided when the state sets more reasonable rules in line with the preferences of the rightful owners.

This does not make me opposed to immigration, in my view, but the open borders guys will see it differently.

***

Update: see Open the Borders, End the Housing Glut; also my comment to Michael Barnett’s post Anti-immigration libertarians are treading in dangerous waters, where he linked to my article “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders”:

Mike, my article was to provide a simple argument against unrestricted immigration. I did not imply that I agreed with it. I was trying to emphasize a few points: that the real owners of public property in (say) the US are the taxpayers, not outsiders; that there is no way for the state to manage the property in a way that satisfies all owners, short of returning it; that if an outsider is prevented from using the public property held by the state but owned by US citizens, this does not violate the rights of the outsiders, any more than if the natural owners were to forbid them use of it. But it’s an argument about second- or third-bests, and one meant to focus on the main point: some private people (victims of the state) are the natural owners of or claimants to the property; the state is the legal owner, but should not be. Ideally it should dissolve itself and return the property to the real owners; but if it does not, the question arises as to what rules it should set if and so long as it does legally control the resource. I sought to tie in some implications of this notion to the immigration issue.

In any case, let me be clear that I completely oppose any state laws or action that restricts immigration.

Update:

An old LRC post:

More on Immigration and Open Borders

Posted by Stephan Kinsella at September 1, 2005 11:54 AM

Re my LRC column “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders,” I’ve already received many comments, most, surprisingly, positive. One thoughtful reader writes to tell me he is concerned that the argument could be used to justify all sorts of unlibertarian laws. For example, the State could say citizens can only use the roads if they agree to submit to taxation and narcotics prohibitions.

Let me quickly summarize my thesis and then reply to this. My basic idea is that the citizens are the true owners of public property, and should have some say-so over how the state uses that property. Their interests and preferences should be taken into account. This will result in a greater degree of restitution, and thus an overall smaller degree of net harm, to them. Now obviously all their preferences cannot be simultaneously satisfied, but it seems reasonable, other things being equal, for the state to try to use the property in reasonable ways (like a private owner would) so as to result in partial restitution being made the citizens, or as many of them as possible. Obviously a greater degree of restitution (a better use of the property) made to a larger number of citizens is “better” (even from a libertarian standpoint) than a smaller degree of restitution (a more wasteful use of the property) made to fewer citizens. This does not imply there is an “optimal” usage of state property (other than to privatize it) but it does imply some uses are clearly worse than others. And it also implies that not every rule that ends up reducing usage by outsiders (immigrants) is necessary or inherently unlibertarian.

And yes, I share the concerns that this can be abused and it could be used to impose illiberal regulations on us. Gray areas and slippery slopes are a problem, but that is the unavoidable problem accompanying a state-run society. Given such a society, I see no reason we have to throw up our hands and say that any (second-, third-, or fourth-best) rule of property usage is just as good as any other. I threw in a lot of ceteris paribuses in my argument.

Given public ownership of property, which is already an offense, a rights-invasion, is it not libertarian to at least prefer certain public uses (and rules) to others, namely, those rules that don’t further victimize people, and/or that return to them some benefit to partially compensate them for the damage done to them by the public system in the first place?

And is it not sensible then to ask, what would a private owner do? to determine a better public use of property? Sure, this can be limited, and can only go so far, because the state is not a private owner. For example: a private road might not discriminate against outsiders–it might allow immigrants to move on the roads to property of willing participants. But the private road would also charge a fee (which is a way of filtering out some people); and would only take people who had a destination to go to (a willing invitee); and would not be imposing affirmative action and anti-discrimination requirements on citizens, so that its trafficking immigrants would not be a costly action.

And consider this too: whose rights are violated if the state does not permit immigrants onto roads? The immigrant’s rights? How so? This is a resource collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. Whatever rule “they” adopt, I don’t see how the outsider has a right to complain. So I don’t see that it violates immigrants’ rights to not be permitted to use a U.S. public resource.

So whose rights are violated? arguably, those citizens who want to use the roads to transport immigrants to their own property. These citizens are “part owners” of the road and are unable to have it used in the way they wish. But for every citizen like this, there are 99 others who do not want the roads open to all–because that means dumping tons of immigrants onto public services and having the right to sue for discrimination and having access to everyone’s neighborhood due to the network of public roads. So if the open borders citizen has his way with the property, then 99 of his neighbors have their rights violated, because the road is being used the way 1 guy wants but not the way 99 others prefer. So there is no way to avoid violating someone’s rights, since the property is public and it has to be used one way.

It seems to me it is reasonable to use the property in this case the way 99 prefer, instead of the one prefers.

Now, as I stated in the article, if the state let only the military use the roads, that would harm the citizens by failing to let them use the roads. The state could theoretically enfore all kinds of bad “law”–taxes, drug laws–by saying to citizens: you may use the roads only if you agree to submit to taxes, drug laws. However, notice that this is just a conditional grant of usage of the property. I would not agree that is a good use of it–it’s tantamount to saying only the government can use it. Given that the citizens own it, it’s reasonable to allow the citizens to use it (with orderly rules, like speed limits) instead of to ban them from using it. If you prevent citizens from using it, that is reducing the restitution. So I would say that conditioning a citizen’s right ot use the roads to establish de facto unlibertarian laws is reducing the restitution, and increaseing the state aggression and harm, so I would oppose it. But denying an outsider the right to use the roads is not the same at all.

Bottom line: any libertarian who disagrees with me her must do so on one of two grounds: (a) there are no second-best rules; the state may not impose any rules at all; or (b) there are second-best rules but they require the state not discriminate against outsiders in the rules set on public property.

I reject (a) because it means you can’t prefer a peaceful use (a park or library) over a tyrannical one (IRS office, nuclear weapons facility); and it means you can’t prefer a reasonable use that gives some benefit back to citizens (public roads with reasonable rules and usable by citizens) rather than a wasteful use that provides no restitution (roads with no rules at all; or usable only by the military). And as for (b), the critic would need to set forth a theory of second-best usage of property. I tried to sketch some of these factors: prefer a peaceful to a criminal use; prefer a reasonable use along the lines of what a private owner would do, and taking into account the level and degree of restitution and the preferences of citizens. If someone has a better theory, let’s hear it.

Coda:

Email from a reader:

Stephan:

I’m surprised you’re surprised about all the positive comments on your recent essay. There seems to be a disconnect between people I would consider at the “top” of the libertarian community (academics, writers and political activists) and “rank-and-file” libertarians. Perhaps more people (not necessarily you) realize that the cause of liberty is hampered by the importation of millions of people with no tradition of limited government. These new arrivals (the ones here legally) owe the blessing of US residency not to the locality where they live but to the District of Columbia.

I think the libertarian arguments against immigration can be summarized as follows:

1. Mass immigration is a form of rent-seeking. Employers can increase their margins and off-load the increased infrastructure and various non-monetary costs on others.2. Government is enforcing compulsory association. “Civil rights” laws and welfare benefits mean that those who do not want immigrants around are forced to abide and pay for them.

3. Government is importing more welfare-warfare state constituents.

4. Government is deliberately changing the native culture over the wishes of its own citizens. Substantively, there is no difference between the US open borders policy and the American Indians de facto open borders policy.

5. Open borders are a tragedy of the commons.

6. Government is inflating citizenship and residency in the US, as it did with college educations. Prior purchasers of these assets now see them devalued.

Few people realize that prior to a Supreme Court ruling in the 1850’s, immigration was a matter for the individual States, where the expense of immigration is actually borne.

Keep up the good work.

1. See On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library; Hoppe and Kinsella on Immigration; “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders.” [↩]

The recent case of the lost next-generation iPhone prototype can help illustrate the absurdity of intellectual property rights. The basic idea of IP is that information can be owned–patterns, recipes, methods, designs, and so on. Even Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, makes this assumption in arguing for a type of contractual copyright:

A common objection runs as follows: all right, it would be criminal for Green to produce and sell the Brown mousetrap; but suppose that someone else, Black, who had not made a contract with Brown, happens to see Green’s mousetrap and then goes ahead and produces and sells the replica? Why should he be prosecuted? The answer is that, as in the case of our critique of negotiable instruments, no one can acquire a greater property title in something than has already been given away or sold. Green did not own the total property right in his mousetrap, in accordance with his contract with Brown—but only all rights except to sell it or a replica. But, therefore Black’s title in the mousetrap, the ownership of the ideas in Black’s head, can be no greater than Green’s, and therefore he too would be a violator of Brown’s property even though he himself had not made the actual contract.

Note how Rothbard, in order to defend a type of copyright that “contractually” ensnares third parties (which is essential if there is to be anything like IP), has to assume that ideas are separable from things they are embodied in and somehow separately ownable. I discuss this interesting and uncharastic mistake of Rothbard’s at pp. 47- of Against Intellectual Property. The “Farmer Jed” example on pp. 54- provides an illustration of the obvious absurdity of ownership of knowledge:

Farmer Jed discovers oil under his land. No one for miles around knows about the black gold. Jed plans to buy his neighbors’ property for a song; they’ll sell it cheap, too, since they don’t know about the oil. In the middle of the night, his nosy neighbor Cooter, suspicious over Jed’s recent good spirits, sneaks onto Jed’s land and discovers the truth. The next morning, at Floyd’s barbershop, Cooter spills his guts to Clem and the boys. One of them promptly runs to a pay phone and gives a tip to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal (who happens to be his nephew). Soon, it is common knowledge that there is oil in the vicinity. The neighbors now demand exorbitant prices for their land, thus spoiling Jed’s plans.

Let us grant that Cooter can be prosecuted for trespass and harms flowing therefrom. The question is, can Jed’s neighbors be prevented from acting on their knowledge? That is, may they be forced to somehow pretend that they do not know about the oil, and sell their land to Jed for what they “would have” sold it when in ignorance? Of course they may not be so forced. They own their land, and are entitled to use it as they see fit. Unlike tangible property, information is not ownable; it is not property. The possessor of a stolen watch may have to return it, but so long as the acquirer of knowledge does not obtain that knowledge illicitly or in violation of a contract, he is free to act upon it.

Note, however, that according to the reservation-of-rights view, the neighbors would not be permitted to act upon their knowledge because they obtained it ultimately from Cooter, a trespasser who had no “title” to that knowledge. Thus, they could not have obtained “greater title” to it than Cooter himself had. Note also that others, such as geological surveyors mapping oil deposits, cannot include this information in their maps. They must feign ignorance until given permission by Jed. This imposed ignorance correlates with the unnatural scarcity imposed by IP. There is clearly no warrant for the view that reserved rights can somehow prohibit third parties from using knowledge they acquire.

I was reminded of this by the recent lost iPhone story. Surely there are first-gen iPhone and iPhone 3G owners who have been planning to buy the iPhone 3GS, the current top of the line iPhone model. And surely there are some people out there who were planning to buy their first iPhone in the next few weeks or month. There can be no doubt that a number of these people will hold off on that purchase, now that they know a new iPhone model is going to come out probably in the upcoming months. They’ll wait for the new iPhone instead. This means Apple will lose sales, or at the very least that sales will be delayed.

According to IP advocates, Apple owned the lost iPhone and also its IP–the designs, the trade secrets, the very information that a new iPhone was coming out. If you take IP seriously, then the Gizmodo employees had no right to the “knowledge” they gleaned from the iPhone prototype (we can safely assume here that they were aware it was Apple’s property and that they were dissecting and using this device without Apple’s consent–a form of trespass). Gizmodo had no “title” to these ideas. And, as Rothbard argues in the case of the mousetrap, we masses who have heard about this incident have no title to these ideas either–after all, we got the ideas from Gizmodo, but it’s a well known legal maxim, as Rothbard relies on, that you cannot receive greater title than the person you receive the thing from. Thus we have no title to these ideas either. That means we have no right to use this information. If I was going to buy an iPhone 3GS next week, I must still go through with it. If I don’t, I am committing trespass against Apple by using their property (the information about the existence of the new iPhone prototype) without Apple’s consent. No, Apple is entitled to that sale. As Jeff Tucker remarked to me, in discussing this, I’d be committing “insider refraining from buying” if I acted on information I don’t own. (Note that the idea of being entitled to a sale underlies the notion of defamation law and also trademark law. If Big Burger spreads lies about Giant Burger then Giant Burger sues because it “lost business”–business it was presumably entitled to. Same thing if Big Burger uses a mark too similar to Giant Burger’s trademark.)

But no worries that I’ll buy the new iPhone and feel bad about my purchase–even doing this would be using the information, and I have no right to do this. So I must be glad about my new purchase. To fail to do so violates Apple’s proprietary rights in patterns and information.

This is all nonsense, of course. But it’s one of the many absurd results you get if you treat information as ownable. As I discuss in Intellectual Property and the Structure of Human Action, human action employs means to achieve ends. Action is guided by knowledge and information–your knowledge about what means are suitable to achieve your ends, say. To take a simple example, suppose you and I each want to bake a cake. We can both make a cake at the same time using the same recipe (ideas), but not using the same eggs (scarce means). That’s precisely why there are property rights in scarce resources and only in scarce resources. Where there is scarcity, the things have to be rationed and assigned to particular owners so that these things can be successfully employed as means in action. If eggs were in infinite abundance at the snap of a finger no one would need to take anyone else’s eggs, and if they did, it would not matter. You could conjure up eggs and make your cake, or if you take my eggs I can just conjure up more and make my cake. There’s no scarcity problem to solve. When there is scarcity, we assign property rights so that there can be peaceful and prosperous use of these things in action. But for things that are not scarce, such as information, the question of property rights does not arise, and makes no sense.

In other words, for scarce things, property rights are assigned so that these scarce things can be used. Property rights help address a limitation of things in the real world. For ideas, IP assigns property rights in something that is infinitely abundant, in a bizarre attempt to make these things scarce, or less abundant. In the case of scarce things, property rights are a response to the problem of scarcity. In IP, property rights are assigned to create a problem of scarcity that did not exist before. The goal should not be to make abundant things limited and scarce; but, if anything, to make valuable scarce things as abundant as possible.

[Mises]

See Roderick Long’s blogpost Left Cop, Right Cop. In my view, this just gives further support for the contention that we libertarians should associate ourselves with neither right nor left. Both are corrupt and statist.

I have spoken.

After all, I hate crime.

Update: This was just a rant when I was in a bad mood. In actuality I like helping people, especially friends and fellow libertarians. So take the following with a grain of salt. However I do wish more libertarians had better manners when the approach others for help. SK

***

I don’t mind giving free advice. Really. I do it a lot.

But libertarians sometimes are inept at social graces. They ask for help in a demanding, entitled way; they ask for legal advice without realizing that the attorney who does this is liable for malpractice even if he doesn’t get paid; they often are clueless about standard professional letter-writing standards. Typically I get an unsolicited email from a strange libertarian, something like this,

Hi Stephen,

See this link–it’s an interesting article about [xyz]–why does the author think [abc]?

[or: I am starting a business and need some advice. How can I tell if [xyz] is patentable? Do you think this is a good idea?]

Etc. etc. Note the many problems: mispelling my name; informally and inappropriately taking the liberty of calling my by my first name; failing to politely introduce yourself and to politely explain why you are writing and exactly what you want from me; giving me an out in case I do not have time; etc.

I mean, libertarians are often just hopeless in this regard. It’s one reason I sometimes despair about our movement, and moan “DOOMED” to myself. And it’s notorious to have libertarians who are moochers–some guy you met at a conference one time 7 years ago calls you out of the blue, “Hey, I’ll be in Houston for a few days, can I stay at your house?” I think there have been a couple of LP Presidential candidates who could not even campaign in some states because of outstanding arrest warrants … for failure to pay child support. The problem is our movement attracts a disproportionate share of losers and marginal types simply because they have less to lose from advocating our radical philosophy. Competent, smart, successful types have financial and other opportunities in the real world that tempt them to eschew marginalized radicalism. Just the way it is. Sad. What you gonna do?

I was reminded (remound?) of some of this, this morning, when I stumbled across the witty message by GTD expert Merlin Mann, who makes it clear here the of all the emails he gets, he has instructed his assistant to make sure he sees the ones from actual clients actually willing to pay him actual money (no doubt, as opposed to all the imposing freeloaders out there):

Hello, I’m Merlin Mann. That one guy from the internet. Hi. Thank you VERY much for your note and your time. These are valuable things.

I get so much great email every day. SO much. SO great. But, unfortunately, I do get way more of it than I could ever do anything responsible with—unless I got lots of help. Which I do.

Consequently, my ninja assistant, Erica, looks over all my messages-including the note you were kind enough to send just now-and, then she tells me what, if anything, I need to do about those messages.

She’s great like that. LOVE that Erica. Good people.

Work & Money: An Admission

Because I’m a selfish little homunculus of a man-happily charged with stewarding an exquisite young family as well as a career that’s increasingly difficult to either explain or manage-I have instructed Erica to dedicate an unaccountably large amount of her time to working on things that are related to my paying work as a writer, speaker, and freelance helper-of-people.

Thus, if you have written about trying to give me money in any form or fashion, please do not be squeamish about pointing this out to Erica in any subsequent correspondence; Erica and I have talked about this topic at length, and we both agree that money is very important with regard to work.

In fact, from what I can gather, “money” has, in practice, become SO heavily associated with “work” that many Americans would not actually “do” a given “job” were they not “paid” to “do so.” Just from what I can gather.

This is really charming and witty. I’m about to hire Merlin myself for a bit of inbox zero/GTD/43 folders consulting.

As for ineptness in communication, I also see this as editor of Libertarian Papers. I often get letters from authors who make all sorts of mistakes. For example, the often fail to make it clear that it’s a submission. I’ll get an email with a horribly misdescriptive subject line, such as “the fed,” with the body saying “Hi, I’m wondering if this would be suitable.” Or, “Hoping you find this of interest.” With a file attached. No mention of Libertarian Papers.  No “Dear Editor.” So I have to ask, “Is this a submission for publication in LP?” Another horrible mistake is pleading for their article’s importance. When this is done in the first email, it’s a bad sign. I can almost always predict the article will be crap. “Dear Sir: I’ve attached my paper, which I have worked on for 13 years. I believe it is an extremely important thesis that will lift the libertarian movement out of its doldrums and presage a world of liberty within 33 years!!” Even worse is when an author is rejected and then argues with me about this or demands a better justification for the rejection. When this happens, literally 100% of the time the author is a crank.

By the way, I stumbled across this delightfully practical article the other day (no offense, libertarians), How to Ask for a Reference Letter (h/t Gary Chartier), which provides excellent advice on professional, polite ways to word overtures to people when you ask them a favor. How to start the letter, how to give your target a way out of your intrusive requests, and so on.

Come on, libertarians, learn. Yes we can!