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!
My 6 year old loves when I have deep conversations with him. Well the other night we got into one about heat/cold, light/dark, good/evil. I started out with the physical things to lead him into the latter conversation, which was my main goal because of something he said about good and bad when we were reading a book together.
So I pointed out for him that some people conceive of heat and cold as independent “things” and to make it hotter, you add more heat; to make it colder you add more cold. But I said that implies you could potentially make it as hot as you wanted–just add a bit more heat, and it gets hotter. There is no upper limit. And that if cold was some “thing” then you could keep getting colder forever, just add more cold. But then I asked him, what if there is just one thing, and the other is the absence of it? Which one is the real thing? So he says, “heat!” and I said, right–you can keep adding heat to make it hotter; but to make it colder you remove heat (then we digressed into a discussion of negative numbers: how you can do subtraction by adding a negative number to a positive one; and so on). That’s why, when you have removed all the heat there is, you can’t make it any colder: it’s absolute zero. (That led to a tangential discussion of the Fahrenheit, Celsius, Centigrade, and Kelvin scales.)
So he got the idea right away. Then we explored others: light/dark, etc. I tried to find examples of where this works and where it doesn’t. One that works is speed (as a scalar)–once you stop, remove all speed, you can’t slow down any more. (This led to a tangent about relativity: I explained that for speed while you can keep adding more, and go faster each time, there is an upper limit: c, the speed of light; although you approach it asymptotically so that in a sense you can always increase your speed a bit more.)
Then I went to the realm of ethics, in particular good and evil. We toyed with the idea that good is the real thing, and evil is just the absence of good. And that God, likewise (or Heaven), is the real thing, but “Hell” is just the lack of being with God. That lead to a tangential discussion of a passage in Lewis’s The Last Battle, where, during armageddon, Lewis illustrated the animals confronting Aslan (Jesus) at the gates to Aslan’s country (Heaven), and if they saw his face and smiled, they went in; if they were afraid, they became dumb animals and fled into the dark wilderness. Here is the idea that Hell is just the absence of being in God’s presence, as I was taught in Catholic school religion class. So here, too, is a case of the idea of one real thing: heaven/God/love, and you either have it, or not: there is not actual evil force or thing or substance. (This is also in a way what Rand believes as exemplified in Atlas Shrugged: the idea that evil is basically impotent.) (This Narnia excursion led us to go grab The Silver Chair and re-read my favorite passage from all of Lewis’s books, which we had read together months earlier, but which I re-read from time to time.)
Anyway, I’m getting to the point. When we were talking about this idea, that Hell is not a real place, but just means the absence-of-Heaven, of course we discussed the conventional view: good people die and go to Heaven; bad people die and go to Hell. My boy said, well, what happens? I said, well, Satan tortures them. My son says, “Why?” I said, well, Satan is bad, so he likes to torture people, I guess. My boy said, asking a question that struck me because I had never thought of it this way before: “But I don’t get it. Why would he torture people on his team?” And I have to say, he sort of stumped me.
I love the minds of children.
I’ve noted in recent posts that while some left-libertarians seem to oppose standard libertarians’ positive endorsement of “capitalism” for semantic or strategic reasons, for others they actually oppose the substance of what libertarians mean by (non-crony, non-corporatist) capitalism (see, e.g., Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism, and links in that post; see also Wirkman Virkkala’s post A capital ism?). An example of those with a more semantic or strategic concern would be Sheldon Richman, who is concerned about the “baggage” associated with the word, which will hamper our getting our pro-property rights, libertarian message out. Thus he favors using “free market” instead, but as far as I can tell this is similar to what we mean by “capitalism”–a libertarian society with a market based on respect for property rights, which of course includes private ownership of the means of production (and everything else). (See also Sheldon’s comment to Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?) Another would be Jock Coats, who notes here that while the baggage of the term “capitalism” might have turned him off had he not also seen the term “free-market anti-capitalism,” now that he understands the term he is “quite happy to be identified as an Individualist Anarchist/Mutualist and at times an Anarcho-Caplitalist,” and is “for keeping ‘capitalism’ as a word in our lexicon.”
To be clear, I think the semantical and strategic debate is one we can have, but it’s different than a substantive disagreement–and we can have that discussion too. But these are separate discussions and should not be intermingled. This leads to confusion at best and equivocation and dishonesty (on the part of leftists) at worst.
In my view there is little doubt that libertarians who have concerns about the appropriate words to use or strategic matters are of course libertarians. We just differ on the best way to convey and spread and communicate about our ideas. But those who disagree on substance may simply not be libertarians. This should not be masked by conflating the discussion with more mundane issues of semantics and strategy.
Now some of the left-libertarians more concerned about terminology and strategy deny or downplay the charge that at least some of them have much more than a mere lexical disagreement with us. So it is good that some of them are willing to explicitly admit this. Take, for instance, one Roman Pearah, who writes in Hmmm…No, Sir. I Don’t Like It.: [continue reading…]
Latest notable terms from this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest and Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page). [continue reading…]
Cato’s David Boaz in recent weeks generated controversy in the libersphere when, in his Reason article Up from Slavery, he chastised conservatives and libertarians, such as Jacob Hornberger, for failing to condemn or acknowledge slavery when they celebrate aspects of antebellum America:
I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery. … Take a more recent example, from a libertarian. Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation writes about the decline of freedom in America: …
Hornberger replied, in Up from Serfdom, acknowledging that in his article, he had “failed to except American slavery from my reference to the freedom enjoyed by early Americans,” that he “made a mistake and neglected to include the slavery exception in my article”–although he notes that in the past, he has “always made a point of mentioning that tragic exception when discussing the history of American freedom. (See, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)” Boaz replied with Up from Slavery, Continued.
Of course, as everyone knows, there was slavery, and it was horrible and unlibertarian. But in my view, it’s no great crime to fail to explicitly mention the existence of slavery every time one says something about early America, since it’s universally known, indisputed, and condemned. Likewise, it’s quite obvious to everyone that libertarians oppose slavery.
From my point of view, the main problem with glorifying the Founders, the Constitution, and so on and treating these as proto-libertarian is that they are not–because of slavery, and other reasons to boot (see 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”). It seems to me to be American chauvinism in equating early American institutions and practices with libertarianism (see my post Boaz on Libertarianism and “Government”). Be that as it may, certain aspects of early American society were undeniably more libertarian–for white males, at least–and there is no good reason to pretend otherwise. (By the way, I hereby acknowledge slavery existed and condemn it. I’m also not a neo-Confederate, in case anyone needs to know.)
Another piece by Boaz himself helps illustrate why his argument is flawed. Just a few days after Boaz’s initial piece in Reason, he posted Are Libertarians Anti-Government?, in which he wrote:
… how should we describe the libertarian position? To answer that question, we need to go back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
I don’t see the word “slavery” in this article. So Boaz seems to be “celebrat[ing] the freedom of early America, … without bothering to mention the existence of slavery.” He appears to be violating his own rule. Granted, this was a reprint of something written in 1998, but the introductory comments could have taken the time to denounce slavery. Boaz’s failure to denounce it here does not give anyone cause to think he denies there was slavery or to think he condones it. This leads me to think Boaz’s proposed rule is unwarranted.
And, in the words of Groundhog Day’s Ned Ryerson, “It’s a doosy”.
As noted previously (see Stop the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)), this treaty was being negotiated in secret and is an attempt to extend the reach of the west’s horrible and draconian IP (patent and copyright) regimes to other countries. As I noted, the
ACTA is also similar to another arcane law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which, under the guise of protecting “property rights,” snuck in provisions that criminalize even the mere possession of technology that can be used to circumvent digital protection systems (see, e.g., my post TI Uses Copyright Law to Attack TI Calculator Enthusiasts). Likewise, under the guise or protecting property rights in inventions and artistic works (patent and copyright), it “seeks to provide legal authority for the surveillance of Internet file transfers and searches of personal property”. As one group notes, “ACTA goes way, way beyond the TRIPS (the copyright/patent/trademark stuff in the World Trade Organization agreement), creating an entirely new realm of liability for people who provide services on the net”. More invasion of personal liberty and property rights in the name of false, artificial property rights.
The draft text has now been released, under pressure from the European Parliament (see Declan McCullagh’s post, ACTA treaty aims to deputize ISPs on copyrights; see aslo Michael Geist’s analysis of the draft text). As I suspected, the text (available here) reveals, as McCullagh notes, that ACTA “seek[s] to export controversial chunks of U.S. copyright law to the rest of the world,” such as the DMCA’s “‘anti-circumvention‘ section, which makes it illegal to bypass copy protection even to back up a Blu-Ray disc” (see, e.g., my post TI Uses Copyright Law to Attack TI Calculator Enthusiasts). This is a horrible US law that was snuck in the DMCA that may now become part of other countries’ laws. It prohibits not only copyright infringement but also makes it illegal to sell devices that could be used to circumvent encryption of DRM’d information.
Now, the DMCA also contained a “safe harbor” for ISPs that probably would not pass now (since it gave ISPs an exemption for liability that turned out to be broader than initially realized when the DMCA was enacted in the 1990s). I was concerned that ACTA would contain the anti-circumvention provisions but not the ISP safe-harbor rules–but some version of this does, at least, seem to be contemplated in the ACTA text (see pp. 20-21).
In any case, this horrible treaty needs to be stopped.
The scholarly libertarian journal Reason Papers, founded by Tibor Machan and currently edited by Aeon Skoble, just put its most recent issue online. (It’s hosted on the Mises Institute’s servers and I help with the online aspect.) Contents listed below:
Issue No. 31 – Fall 2009 (Full Issue)
Articles: Business Ethics Symposium
- Rival Paradigms in Business Ethics —Nicholas Capaldi
- The Need for Realism in Business Ethics —Elaine Sternberg
- The Virtue of Prudence as the Moral Basis of Commerce —Tibor R. Machan
- Hume and Smith on the Moral Psychology of Market Relations, Practical Wisdom, and the Liberal Political Order —Jonathan Jacobs
- Ethics without Profits —Douglas Den Uyl
- Is a Market for Values a Value in Markets? —Alexei Marcoux
- The Sloppiness of Business Ethics —Marianne Jennings
- The Business Ethics of Incarceration: The Moral Implications of Treating Prisons Like Businesses —Daniel D’Amico & Joseph Butt
Review Essay
Book Reviews
- Paul Bloomfield, ed.’s Morality and Self-Interest —Jonathan Jacobs
- Robert Levy and William Mellor’s The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom —Timothy Sandefur
[Mises]
A new documentary is out, Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system:
Patent Absurdity explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy. The film is based on a series of interviews conducted during the Supreme Court’s review of in re Bilski — a case that could have profound implications for the patenting of software. The Court’s decision is due soon…
With interviews from Eben Moglen, Dan Bricklin, Karen Sandler, Richard Stallman and others…
I discuss Bilski in Supreme Skepticism Toward Method Patents and The Arbitrariness of Patent Law, and Moglen and Stallman in Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement and Eben Moglen and Leftist Opposition to Intellectual Property. The film is worth watching.
But interestingly, the site for a film about patent absurdity contains this notice: “Movie copyright © 2010 Luca Lucarini.”
Consistency FAIL!
[AM]
I’ve posted recently about Net Neutrality–see Net Neutrality Developments and A Libertarian Take on Net Neutrality. There’s an interesting discussion about this and related issues on the EconTalk podcast, between host Russ Roberts and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. Benkler really knows his stuff and it comes thru in this fascinating and informative discussion. As he explains, there is a debate about whether to impose “open access” as well as “net neutrality” regulations on the Internet-related companies. Open access means the state treats the physical communications infrastructure–fiber optic cables and so forth–that carry data signals for internet, cable TV, telephone communications, as a sort of regulated utility. Thus, it forces the owners of the physical “pipes” to sell capacity to competitors at regulated rates. This means the consumer can buy internet service from companies other than the owners of the physical networks. Net neutrality means that whoever whoever sells the service (whether it’s the fiber owner or some company that the fiber owner has to allow to use its networks to offer competing service) can’t discriminate between types of data packets, and can’t impose tiered pricing.
Now, as noted, Benkler knows his stuff, but he is clearly one of these mainstream interventionist types, talking about how “we” (the state) needs to intervene in the market to optimize outcomes, etc. etc. He is in favor of imposing open access, for example. As the podcast summary notes, “Benkler argues in favor of net neutrality and government support of broadband access.” The free market host, Russ Roberts (of Keynes-Hayek rap fame), is very diplomatic but pushes back one some of Benkler’s pro-regulatory assumptions (listen around 29:06-, 30:12-, 41:20-, where he makes the free-market case and argues against the pro-regulatory assumptions), but gets Benkler to admit explicitly that he favors the state intervening and forcing companies to use their property in certain ways (around 29:55-, ). Benkler’s paternalistic, state-trusting approach even carries through when it comes to the iPad and similar “closed” or proprietary products like the iPad (47:30-). As the summary notes, “He is skeptical of the virtues of new technology (such as the iPad) fearing that they will lead to less innovation.” He worries that consumers might like the iPad because it’s got a fantastic interface etc., but that this might be at the cost of the long-term value of “a more innovative platform” (open source) (49:50-). The typical omniscient planner mentality: there is market failure, and the state is needed to fix and tweak things, when the consumers get it wrong. Russ Roberts (48:10-) rightly interjects that all these products are great; he praises the first and second generation kindles; the progress of technology; the iPad; the diversity; the competition; Apple’s products; open-source; the Sony e-readers; the dynamism of the market.
Update: Peter Klein has some insightful comments on and criticisms of some of Benkler’s views in this review.
[Mises]
On his blog, the hapless and inept Gene Quinn calls me a liar. He says that’s why he banned me from his blog. He’s lucky I believe defamation law is unlibertarian or he might be facing another lawsuit–but he’s already got his hands full defending himself from in another lawsuit from charges of making false and misleading comments on his site. Poor guy. Anyway, I explain in excruciating detail here why he is himself plainly lying in his outrageous comments about. Quinn is a very sad person: he is obviously not very bright or well educated; he writes like a fifth grader; he argues like a seventh grader. He may be competent at prosecuting patent applications, since that is not that hard to do–it’s basically like preparing technical reports explaining an invention and then corresponding with the PTO according to its esoteric set of rules. He may also be good at marketing himself, which seems to be the primary purpose of his site and his blustery logorrhea. He’s sort of the patent equivalent of those car dealership owners who put on fruit hats and speak in weird voices in local, cheap TV commercials just to sell cars. His calling me a liar, when I am not and when he knows it, is dishonest, but to be expected from a pathetic joke like he has shown himself to be.
By the way, since he’s banned me from his site, I can’t reply to him there. It would not hurt if others in the libertarian community commented there and set Quinn straight.
Recent Comments