Positive Liberty

One of the reasons I have been very interested in Ron Paul’s campaign is his opposition to the War in Iraq and the possible conflicts with Iran and in Pakistan. I am opposed to unprovoked, preemptive war.

Ron Paul has been saying something during his campaign that few people understand — make that very, very few people. Persuasive rhetoric — speaking in terms of concrete benefits — is not his strong suit. He’s an abstract, theoretical thinker, and so asserting that “we don’t even the declare the wars anymore,” is sufficient, to both he and his supporters. He said it. The point is made.

But every time Paul says this, he meets with smirks and giggles by his opponents. His supporters have tended to think that those smirks are due to some anti-Constitutional, pomposity. But those giggles are because, once again, he’s wasting his breath. Very few understand what is at stake.

Some have gone one step further and suggested that the wars, such as the one we presently have in Iraq, are indeed declared. Congress “authorized” them. That is, they took a vote to give the President discretion on the use of force.

But they can’t give that discretion to the President. It’s un-Constitutional (illegal). And that’s Ron Paul’s point.

It might seem like Ron Paul, and people who agree with him — such as, yours truly — are separating pepper from fly poop. Are we asking for a mere formality — that the resolution actually be called “a Declaration of War with (say) Bumstinkistan?”

This is not a question of formality. It’s a question of separation of powers.

Today, while reading part of a sermon by Fr. Earle Fox, a light bulb flicked on over my head. Here is the inspiring section: Continue Reading »

Early Modernity: I love McSweeney’s. I have the sense that I would find this hilarious, in a Foucauldean sort of way, if only I’d watched more television.

French Librarians: Is this true? “After he had published la Méditerannée, Braudel went into the Bibliothèque Nationale and applied for a library card. He was handed a short form to fill out. Under “Nom,” he wrote “BRAUDEL, Fernand”; under “Métier,” he wrote “historien.” He was turned down. He then wrote The Structures of Ordinary Life.”

Duck Churches: Here’s one, for starters, via Blingdom of God — sure to be a new favorite, I think. Of course, the few readers who go waaay back will recall a duck church of our own.

Splogs: We’ve gotten a lot of links from Splogs lately, so much so that Technorati is becoming useless for tracking genuine incoming links. They’re all random text, possibly Markov chains, possibly gleaned from the web itself. One currently running is “Worst Witch Movie.”

Which witch move would that be? I nominate Return from Witch Mountain. In fact it may be the worst movie ever made. (And yes, I’ve seen Plan 9 From Outer Space.)

Ain’t Democracy Grand? I vaguely remember seeing something like this from the last presidential election. I’m so glad that typographers only get one vote per person.

Ain’t Trial By Jury… Grand? I agree with RadGeek: I would never, never vote to convict anyone on a nonviolent drug charge. I only object to RadGeek’s implication about minarchists: We aren’t all about to send someone up for ten years on a pretend crime and then look back at it dispassionately as an “interesting” experience.

Nope, before sitting on a drug jury I’d at the very least declare my views openly. Then let them find some other stooge to do their dirty work. If the drug warriors neglected to ask me about this during voir dire, or if they somehow seated me anyway, I would make sure that the process ended in a mistrial. You can have your injustice, I suppose, but I won’t be complicit in it.

Side thought: Can we get significant number of people to pledge never to serve on a jury in a nonviolent drug case? Could we maybe make this into some kind of a mass movement? It would be one way to register very publicly our disdain for the drug war. If we didn’t publish a membership list, we’d also be able to register our disdain before the legal system itself, whenever one of us was called to serve. Just a thought…

I noted in my last post one of Jefferson’s Federalist Clergy Critics — John Mitchell Mason — termed a passage from Notes on the State of Virginia as exemplifying “the morality of devils.” Since the Liberty Fund reproduces the entire sermon, I thought I’d reproduce a larger passage from which that line was taken, to show its context: Continue Reading »

In the last couple of months, as Mike Huckabee surged to contender status, many expressed concern about his role as preacher. Would his faith result in a theocracy? Was he using his faith as a political wedge? Would his faith affect policies ostensibly related to science?

Well, Huckabee’s faith is definitely important. But perhaps not in the way his detractors feared.

In what has to be the dumbest thing uttered by any Republican candidate this season (and there have been some whoppers), Huckabee suggested to Chris Matthews that Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were probably shipped to Jordan!

As I already pointed out in my last post, I was on vacation while this happened. But miraculously I saw the Huckabee interview live — perhaps God wanted me to see it.

I say miraculously, because I watched only 45 minutes of cable news political coverage during the entire vacation. When I watched this gaffe, I just about fell out of my chair.

BTW, Congrats to Matthews for actually dealing with substance. He actually acted like a real political reporter in possession of a clue (nevertheless, Hardball Delenda Est). Where are these kinds of questions instead of the constant horse race garbage?

As it turns out, Mike Huckabee has great faith… in the conning speculation of Dick Cheney. Evidence is unnecessary when making claims about the goodness of America as she polices the world, and proof of any degree will be unimportant for the tens of thousands who will glom on to spurious claims like “Saddam drove the WMDs out of the country” and repeat the fable back to you. But in case you’re interested, let’s look at the evidence… Continue Reading »

I have just returned from a family vacation. Now, I’m in that post-vacation recovery phase. We went to Walt Disney World and hit the four main theme parks. It was great to be with my family.

But that’s not why I write this post. What do you care? I went on vacation — so what?

This wasn’t our first time at Disney. But there was something different about this trip. And I think it’s notable and important to all of us.

Let me set the stage…

If you’ve been to Disney (or even if you haven’t), you know that it’s probably the number one tourist stop in the world. And the locals are grateful for the commerce it generates. We even saw a taxi driver, pulled over at the side of the freeway with an unrolled carpet, genuflecting in the direction of the Disney campus (well, perhaps it was coincidence that Disney was in the East).

Florida has been a point of outreach by both political parties. And I think I’ve discovered the George Bush plan to win Florida. Bring tourists from all over the world!

The plan is simple, really: Gut the value of the dollar.

It’s fun and it works on several levels for the political class.

If you are this President, then . . . Continue Reading »

Sure, the War on Drugs is an abysmal failure if success is defined in terms of keeping illegal drugs out of the U.S or even seriously reducing the supply. And, yes, admittedly it’s astronomically expensive and, on any rational sort of bang-for-buck basis the single most wasteful domestic program in a vast field of wasteful government domestic programs. Okay, so it also has led to an entrenched Drug Warrior bureaucracy that thinks nothing of promulgating lies and propaganda and attempting to suppress any speech or advocacy contrary to the War. Oh, and to the creation of storm trooper like SWAT teams throughout the nation, all decked out with (federally funded) high powered firearms and body armor brandishing no-knock search warrants as they swoop into our homes in the dead of night. And admittedly they often get the wrong street address and every once in a while some citizen is stupid enough to think that maybe it isn’t the government who is breaking in and who tries to defend himself with a perfectly legal firearm and who is then shot to death or arrested and tried for assault or even murder. And we should probably acknowledge that the reason the U.S. is head and shoulders ahead of most other industrialized nations in its incarceration rates is because of the massive numbers of non violent drug criminals swelling our prisons. Okay, so maybe also it’s true that the continued illegalization of recreational drugs perpetuates criminal cartels both overseas and in the U.S., some of whom have ties to international terrorism and some of whom probably also covertly fund the Drug Warriors’ opposition to legalization. And, yeah, if forced to admit it we’d have to say that the same illegal drug market also helps to perpetuate a culture of alienation and poverty in the inner city and that, until fairly recently, drug sentencing laws were racially discriminatory in their effect if not in their intent.

On the other hand, it’s for the children.

Thanks again, CNN Election Central, for delivering the hits. Reactions to the reactions to the notorious pot vs. football post below the fold.

Continue Reading »

A fun marijuana fact:

If the risks of smoking marijuana are coldly compared to those of playing high-school football, parents should be less concerned about pot smoking. Death by marijuana overdose has never been reported, while 13 teen players died of football-related injuries in 2006 alone. And marijuana impairs driving far less than the number one drug used by teens: alcohol. Alcohol and tobacco are also more likely to beget addiction, give rise to cancer, and lead to harder drug use.

If the comparison feels absurd, it’s because judgments of risk are inseparable from value judgments. We value physical fitness and the lessons teens learn from sports, but disapprove of unearned pleasure from recreational drugs. So we’re willing to accept the higher level of risk of socially preferred activities—and we mentally magnify risks associated with activities society rejects, which leads us to do things like arresting marijuana smokers.

I’m puzzled at Sandefur’s puzzlement at this. He writes,

[Kuznicki’s post] ends with particularly confusing comments about how both Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand are dead, and therefore…? Which is strange since as a historian, he of all people should know the importance of learning from history, lest we repeat it. I would like to believe that the division between the Doughfaces and the libertarians will be lost in the past when the post-Goldwater generation really takes hold of libertarianism, but that will only be accomplished if the ideas are clarified.

Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard are dead — to name just two — and therefore it is high time that their ideas and tactics should be evaluated dispassionately. If there ever was a time for clinging to either one not out of reason, but purely out of personal loyalty, that time is long past. Personally, I don’t think that there ever is such a time for anyone, but this is easier said than lived by.

Yes, it would have been great if more people could have done that while they were alive. But if ever there were a time to sift out the good from the bad, this is that time. The factionalism that they both promoted is one of the most unpleasant things to me about being a libertarian. It’s fully possible to praise or condemn another person’s ideas — one by one, as they are meant to be considered — without it becoming yet another exercise in recursive shunning. There is, in other words, a useful Rothbard. (And boy is there ever a useless one, too.)

I hope this clears things up.

Some think open Deism was the driver behind the revolution and the Constitution; it wasn’t. Others think almost all of the Founders were orthodox Christians, and the exceptions like Jefferson were open about their Deism; that’s not right either. During America’s Founding, disbelief in the Trinity could get one in social, perhaps legal trouble with the institutional forces of orthodox Trinitarian Christianity. And being an open Deist and mocker of Christianity could ruin one’s public reputation: See Thomas Paine.

Even Jefferson was not open about what he believed (or disbelieved) in the Christian system. Rather heretics and infidels who wanted to remain in positions of social power tended to nominally belong to orthodox churches, and, for good reason, keep silent about their infidelity. Continue Reading »

The Westboro Baptist Church will protest Heath Ledger’s funeral, chiefly for his role in Brokeback Mountain.

Those of us who are entirely indifferent this morning to which Democrat Caroline Kennedy thinks is most like her daddy might consider instead this opening paragraph from the (UK) Daily Telegraph:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

First things first, a bit of Borscht Belt humor: “You’re charging $10 a pound for lamb chops?!? Across the street at Stein’s I can buy them for $8 a pound!” “So go buy them at Stein’s.” “I can’t, he’s out of lamb chops.” “So when I’m out they’ll be $8 a pound here, too!”

It isn’t that the British national health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone but that it cannot provide free care to anyone. Hidden costs are real costs nonetheless and the fact that the typical British citizen (or journalist) is unaware of the real cost he personally bears for his health care is irrelevant to the fact that it exists.

What the surveyed doctors are thus saying is that while it is not only proper but necessary for smokers, heavy drinkers the obese and the elderly to continue to contribute toward a socialized medical system, they should nonetheless be deprived of the very benefits they are most likely to need. That sounds fair, doesn’t it? I do hope you think so because it is, sadly, only a matter of a decade or so and maybe sooner before Americans find themselves the, um, beneficiaries of a similar health care system.

Be that as it may, let’s get one other point straight. One thing else the doctors are noting, a point which happens to be entirely correct, is that health care, like every other good in the world, is scarce in the technical economic sense that its supply potential demand exceeds its potential demand supply. [See comments.] Otherwise, we could have all the MRIs and liver transplants and stomach staples and cosmetic surgery and quadruple bypasses and whatnot our bloated, cholesterol clogged hearts desired.

Alas, we can’t. Oh sure, we can take some measures right now to increase, for example, the supply of livers for transplant, and according to my thanaphobic friend Ron Bailey we will someday live in a golden age of genetic medicine when cloning yourself a new liver or simply repairing your old one to its pristine condition will be as simple as microwave popcorn, but we’re not there yet. One way or another, medical treatment is going to be rationed and the only question left is whether that rationing is going to be conducted by the market or by the state.

Admittedly, deciding who gets a new liver on the basis of who can best pay for it or, worse yet, who can pay the most for it, strikes most of us as unfair. Health care, we feel, shouldn’t be like Ferraris or Picassos, available only to the wealthy, but like movies and Coca-Cola – plentifully available and affordable to all. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can both drink their Cokes out of solid gold goblets while they watch Walk Hard in the comfort of their private home theaters but the Coke won’t taste any different and the movie will still suck. And that, we feel, is how health care should work.

Well, it doesn’t. For one thing, unlike many other modern services, it remains highly labor intensive, requiring skills ranging from neurosurgery to the folks who have to mop up all your messy bodily fluids after the operation. For another, the economics of medical technology (the machines, not the medicines) is such that all the emphasis is on performance, not on greater cost savings. That is to say that if we were willing to live (and die) with 1960s level medical technology, we could save a great deal of money. But we’re not. We want those MRIs and whatever the next generation of cutting edge technology might be and damn the cost.

A post or two ago, I mentioned a Weekly Standard column claiming that “[t]he moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life.” As absurd as that column was, I would agree with that statement but for the critical fact that what dogmatic libertarianism I have encountered over the years has had absolutely zero effect on public life. It’s around, though, if you want to seek it out at, say, any Libertarian Party social function. Be that as it may, the authors made yet another claim worth quoting here: “[E]conomic libertarianism, elevated to the status of inviolable first principle, leads to moral libertarianism.”

To which I can only add, damn, I sure hope so! Moral libertarianism, if it means anything at all, must mean something like the claim that I can’t know in advance how important that medical treatment is to you, your family and friends and you can’t know in advance how important it would be to me. Not, at least, in any absolute, “let’s-make-a-rule-for-everyone” sense. And that’s exactly what the rationing of socialized medicine perforce does; makes one-size-fits-all rules.

Markets are morally imperfect because people are morally imperfect. Letting people themselves decide what medical services they want or need and making them recognize that, one way or another, they must pay for those services entails a certain sort of unfairness. The problem with socialized medicine, however, is that its solution to that problem is far, far worse.

* “… wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” — P.J. O’Rourke

Untraceable has been panned by most critics; however, Roger Ebert and Constant Viewer both liked it, so there! Hey, it is what it is, which is to say that Untraceable is an entirely formulaic action thriller of the “serial killer stalking female detective” variety. You may, of course, read that as a killer stalking the detective or vice versa. It doesn’t matter because, true to formula, both are true.

No, it’s no Silence of the Lambs and, yes, the direction could have been tighter at points. But Diane Lane gives a journeyman performance and is entirely believable as the seasoned FBI agent, the creepy killer is appropriately creepy and the denouement makes sense, at least by movie standards. As Jimmy Durante might have screamed at this point, “Dese are de conditions dat prevail!” Face it, you know when you buy your ticket you’re not going to get The Sound of Music.

But there’s one thing the prospective viewer should know in advance. The principle reason this chilling movie works as well as it does in disturbing the viewer is not because of the clichéd computer crime nonsense, but because of how it graphically and realistically depicts the killing of its victims at a level CV has not heretofore seen on the screen except in the distinct genre of slasher and blood-gushing horror films. This is not a horror movie; not, for example, the same sort of movie as any of the Saw films, but what violence there is here is of that caliber. Remove those scenes from Untraceable and, yeah, some of the other critics are right – you’re left with little more than a better than average television cop show episode. But they are a part of the movie and CV would even go so far as to say an integral part. Say what you will of Untraceable, it’s far from TV fare and CV will be fascinated to see how badly cut it will have been if and when it ever does air on television.

David Skeel at Penn Law is one of the most notable of a small number of scholars who actively pursue Christian legal scholarship. On a personal note, he was my Business Associations professor at Temple Law, regarded as one of the best professors at the law school, and that’s probably why Penn Law recruited him. I didn’t know he was a traditional orthodox Christian when teaching at Temple (he may not have been while there?).

He’s posted some interesting articles on SSRN, the contents of some of which hope for a Renaissance in Christian legal scholarship. Skeel details the long and interesting history of evangelicals and scholarship and comes to the conclusion, after Mark Noll, that Protestant evangelical scholarship is in need of much improvement. Continue Reading »

Tim Wu at Slate reports on how AT&T proposes to monitor the entire Internet for intellectual property violations. It’s a good example of how the line between “public” and “private” can often be pretty hard to follow.

Iterations, none of which I fully endorse:

1) It’s their equipment, their private property thus they may use it as they wish.
2) But intellectual property is indefensible on libertarian grounds. Increasingly, stories like this one are making me agree with that view. At the very least our intellectual property laws are vastly more inclusive than they ought to be.
3) But common carrier laws mean that even if someone commits a crime using AT&T property, the company is not responsible, so they shouldn’t really have to care about this stuff. Why are they doing it?
4) But… Who do you think lobbied for common carrier laws in the first place? And isn’t that rent seeking?
5) It may be what they want is to get the privilege of escaping common carrier laws, so that in the future they may regulate traffic however they please. This brings us back to point one. But it also raises many questions, since if AT&T is the only company able to do this, and if they carry a significant amount of net traffic, then they are being given in effect a government license to censor.

The Slate piece is definitely not from a libertarian perspective, and arguably it’s all over the map, but worth reading all the same. It seems first to argue that AT&T wanting to scan the whole Internet is totalitarian (yes, maybe it is), and then that it’s impossible to implement anyway (again, this may be true), and then that if they do, no one will ever use AT&T’s services anyway, so (maybe?) we shouldn’t worry.

What I’d worry about is that AT&T will volunteer to do it, and then lobby to make it compulsory. Rivals will either have to censor as well, or else go out of business.