Positive Liberty

You can tell the recent study purporting to demonstrate that religious beliefs are harmful to society because more religious societies, like the US, suffer from higher levels of social pathologies than more secular nations, like those of Western Europe, has really gotten under the skin of some religious conservatives. Daniel Lapin, an otherwise intelligent fellow, puts forth a theory that is not only falsifiable, but also demonstrably false, and obviously so. If he really believes what he writes, on the other hand, then he is one deluded fellow. Continue Reading »

Gene Healy has an excellent op-ed piece about the Padilla case (link via Jim Henley). I have to say that even while blogging is “just a hobby” for me (ie, the tip jar doesn’t get nearly the response I’d like), still, I should have been writing about this case all along.

Continue Reading »

This essay is an historical look at the origin of the doctrine of political “rights,” in particular the natural “unalienable rights” of “conscience,” which in turn gave rise to religious rights.

Earlier while discussing this issue with Matt Scofield I noted a parallel development of the rights of conscience, that this doctrine literally was a cooperative project between Protestant dissidents and Enlightenment rationalists. Continue Reading »

Okay, so we all know how Mises predicted that socialist economies would be incapable of determining prices, and that the economic calculation problem was one of the insurmountable problems of socialism. Now, I have often heard it said that the Soviet Union, or other communist countries, being unable to figure out what to charge for various items in their stores, copied those prices out of the Sears catalogues they got from western countries. Unfortunately, while this story appears to be quite common, it also has the earmarks of an urban myth (repeated by people with ideological purpose; no citation given; several different versions of the story). Does anyone know of a reliable source for this assertion? I would really appreciate leads; please email me at tmsandefur@gmail.com.

Oh, and as a favor to everyone out there, I thought I would post my Amazon wish list since, you know, we got the birthday comin’ up and all…

It’s too often that I see people use the word “whom,” or better yet, “whomever,” when they are trying to sound fancy and whatnot, with apparently no idea of when the word is properly used. Here is an explanation of when the word is appropriate. It points out a trick that I often use: “when in doubt, substitute him and see if that sounds right. If him is OK, then whom is OK. For example: ‘You talked to whom? You talked to him.’ It would be incorrect to say ‘You talked to he,’ and few native English speakers would make that mistake.” Some examples:

Whoever is nominated to the Supreme Court….
Whom do you have in mind?
Anyone who understands the commerce clause
Who understands the commerce clause?
Anyone to whom I’ve explained it.
Who explained it to you?
Who wants to know?
Well, I was going to tell someone else.
Whom?
Whomever I want to.

Everybody got that? Good.

Here’s a quote from a comment thread at Crooked Timber. I found it weirdly uplifting in light of my continued search for employment:

Anyhow, I must say that if you’re not interested in a career so much as knowledge, there are far worse ways to spend the best years of your life than graduate school. Those I know who elected to embark on the “real world” route are currently underemployed, unhappy and desperate for something meaningful to slam them in the face forthwith. I, on the other hand, have spent the past few years poor… but worrying only about money… (Not a glowing endorsement of either lifestyle, I agree… but we live in a hard world, and living a meaningful life is much more difficult than our earlier incarnations ever imagined.)

Last night Scott and I caught a sneak preview of Serenity held especially for bloggers. It raises an interesting question: Would I sell my journalistic integrity for a couple of free movie tickets?

And the answer is simple: For a movie this good, you bet I would.

Serenity is not going to please the critics, I can say that much. On the way home I couldn’t help but overhear the conversations of a couple of others who were also at the sneak preview. And they were disgusted.

“I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be serious or funny, funny or serious,” said one critic.

“I kept being surprised; I didn’t know what was going on,” said another.

Now it strikes me as odd, to say the least, that mixing the serious and the comic should be so forbidden (um… Chaucer? Shakespeare? Tarantino?) But there you have it.

And being surprised? Yeah, you’re going to be surprised, even if you did watch the unjustly cancelled series Firefly on which the film is based. In Serenity, we learn a great deal more about the Firefly universe. Some big secrets are finally revealed–and we discover that some other secrets just aren’t ever going to come out.

I’m honestly not sure how well all of this will play to those who haven’t seen Firefly, but I’m hoping for the best. Director Joss Whedon deserves it for having created one of the most evocative fantasy universes in modern popular culture–and for populating it with characters that you would actually want to know, characters you can even imagine knowing without too much difficulty. They’re vivid in a way that few film or TV characters ever are these days. They surprise you; they keep you off guard.

Indeed, being caught off guard is the very essence of Serenity, notably in the way that Whedon’s future world mixes up the genres. It’s a cowboy-space opera-orientalist-monster movie set inside a dystopian political fable. Somehow it all works, just like the rickety ship that gives the film its title–and just like Whedon’s trademark computer graphics sequences that simulate the zooming uneasiness of an earlier era of action movies. With every artistic gesture, Whedon repeats that the future is fundamentally unsteady.

But what’s it like, really? Imagine that the funny bits of Star Wars: Episode I had actually been funny, instead of all flopping about and making you wince. Imagine that all the action was still there, that the special effects were every bit as George-Lucas marvelous. And that the dialogue was about ten thousand times better. Now picture that the one great moment of sentiment in the entire picture gets stomped flat by its funniest laugh line.

Oh yes, and picture that the Empire isn’t Darth-Vader horrible. It’s not all tentacles and cruelty; instead it’s shiny and happy in a Brave-New-World sort of way. The good guys are still out there, but they’ve mostly lost, and you have to wonder at times why they keep on trying.

And yet despite all the action, and despite all the creativity that went into the backstory, the whole film centers on one simple choice, on one question of right and wrong. Don’t let the flashy set pieces distract you; beneath the surface, Serenity has one of the most tightly constructed themes of any film, ever: Everything within it, every major action of every character, centers on how the individual should live in a world that is neither as virtuous nor as free as it ought to be. In the end, our characters risk everything to do what’s right. Despite the multicultural trappings–in the future we all swear in Chinese–in the final scenes, the main characters all emerge as heroes in the grand old sense of the word.

This brings me to one other aspect of the film that pleasantly astonished me: It is, without any question in my mind, the most pro-individualist, pro-liberty film since The Shawshank Redemption. Forget Batman Begins; for the classical liberal, this will be the film to see. All the same people who hated The Shawshank Redemption are going to hate Serenity–and those who loved Shawshank are going to have the ride of their lives. Let the others sneer about Nietzscheanism or glorifying the vigilante; I am quite sure that they will. But, like a conversation overheard after the film is over, it’s not going to matter a bit.

What will those IHS folks think of next?

Like I promised, here is Dr. David Mazel’s response to some critics of his column which I reproduced on my blog over the weekend.

In her talk at the Cato Supreme Court event, ACLU President Nadine Strossen argued that religious freedom is suffering from a three-stage process of derogation, one analogous to Fourth Amendment freedoms and other parts of the Constitution.

Continue Reading »

Mark Olson has written a third response in our exchange over the issue of the limits of individual rights. I think this response makes significant progress in defining where exactly we disagree. He has better defined his position and it’s true that he is not taking the extreme anti-rights position that the government should pass any law it views as helping maintain personal morality. In fact, he admits that the government has gone too far in that direction and that some of the examples of such laws that I cite are valid examples fo what I oppose and should be repealed. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say which ones, or where the line is drawn, and that gets us to the real crux of the matter. He writes:

Before I continue, I’d like to make one other point clear. I in fact, am in agreement with Mr Brayton, that in many areas society today has too many “Green” (Ethics) laws on the books. So many of his “examples”, he uses to posit against my position are those with which I agree. However, I also think that some such laws are necessary, unlike the rest of the libertarian chorus commenting on that post.

So this is, it seems, a more reasonable position than perhaps one might have expected. But there’s still one crucial item missing here: some objective criteria by which to determine when such laws are necessary and when they are not. I have argued that the only objective place to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate law is the place that Jefferson, Madison, John Locke, Mill and others have boldly drawn it: between those actions which harm another against their will or deprive them of their equal right to self-determination, and those actions which do not. The former actions, all of these men argued, are rightly the subject of government coercion to prevent and punish; the latter actions, they argued, are within the boundaries of rightful liberty and may not be justly violated by any government. Indeed, as the Declaration argues, governments are instituted among men for the sole purpose of securing such rightful liberty and when it fails to do so the people may rightly throw off the shackles of such a government.
Continue Reading »

The notion of a “Living” Constitution is often directed as a charge against out of control “liberal” activist judges. However, some jurists embrace the term “living” as properly descriptive of constitutional interpretation — most prominently, Jack Balkin. Recently Sandefur responded to Balkin’s embrace of a “Living Constitution.”

Sandefur asked “[A]re we going to be faithful to the actual text of the Constitution, or are we going to alter the public understanding, or even manipulate that understanding, so as to accomplish ends that some people consider politically desirable?” Interestingly, although Balkin did not (as far as I know) respond to Sandefur’s criticism, Balkin has responded to another “originalist,” Akhil Amar, who like Sandefur, endorses an “original understanding” that radically differs from the originalism of thinkers like Robert Bork (the archetypical “conservative” Original Intent jurist). Continue Reading »

David Mazel is writing a weekly column for his campus’s student newspaper this semester. He has given me permission to reproduce the text of his first piece taking a critical look at the content of the Bible and orthodox religious doctrine.

Check it out here.

Tomorrow, I’ll link to Mazel’s response to some critics of the article.

On Monday I will be attending a sneak preview of the upcoming film Serenity. In return, the film’s promoters have asked me (understandably) to say a few words about their product.

Honestly, I’d have been promoting this movie even without the sneak preview, which will make Scott and I the envy of our friends for almost an entire week–The main release isn’t until the 30th.

Serenity is based on the TV series Firefly, which is to me pretty much the best television ever created. The Serenity promo team has this to say about the upcoming film:

Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.

The blurb really doesn’t do the series justice: Its challenging, thought-provoking plots recall the very best of the great novelists; if Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo wrote action-packed science fiction, the results might look something like Firefly. It’s mass media for the thinking person, which, I hate to say it, might be one reason the show got canceled–It was just far too good for the boob tube. Let’s hope it meets with the success that it deserves on the big screen.

Lastly, here’s a jpeg of the movie poster: