Positive Liberty

There has been a lot of discussion about the California same-sex marriage decision, including questioning whether the state belongs in marriage at all — as well as the old canard that if gays want to marry one another, we are now legally helpless against all those who are eager to marry their pets. (And if Jews are recognized as citizens, pretty soon we’ll have to recognize toads, too!)

Along the way there was also this comment, which strikes me as one of the stronger arguments against same-sex marriage:

It is wrong to equilibrate a generative relationship that provides children both a mother and a father with a NON generative (by design) relationship that provides a mother and guardian or a father and a guardian.

Children are the only reason for marriage, thus gays should not have access to the institution. I thought I’d repost this in reply, since it says everything I think needs to be said about all of these arguments: Marriage is unique to adult human beings, and cannot apply to animals. It is ideally a partnership of two. It is not, however, contingent on the possibility of children. And yes, the government does have a role to play. Here’s why…

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I’ll have to read the decision to see if I agree with the reasoning, but this was definitely the right outcome.

Via the Washington Post food section:

A lunch of found food includes sauteed morels on toast, steamed garlic mustard greens and fiddlehead ferns. Katie Letcher Lyle is a regular and enthusiastic forager in her home territory of Lexington, Va.

You find that toast in an alley somewhere, dust it off, it’s as good as new…

I’m reading some issues of Libertarian Forum from the late 70s and early 80s. In my defense, it’s work-related.

But I’m finding that it’s just sad, ugly reading — lots of infighting about issues that seem tangential or irrelevant, with little to offer an outsider about the value of having a Libertarian Party at all. Sometimes the articles don’t even explain why these people are fighting each other in the first place, leaving me rather mystified. And that’s saying quite a lot, coming from a guy who has just spent the last year of his life helping to edit the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.

I look at the great philosophy of liberty, and the promise it offers mankind. And then I look at this stuff, and I want to weep.

It occurs to me that if you’re a Democratic or a Republican political insider and you’re trying to milk the system for personal gain, the best way to do this is to work hard for electoral victory. You can expect to win fairly often, whereupon your loyalty will be rewarded by an appointment to the bureaucracy, to a legislator’s staff, or to a cushy ambassadorship (Ned L. Siegel, our ambassador to the Bahamas, was a plaintiff in George W. Bush’s lawsuit to stop the Florida recount. He also donated tens of thousands of dollars in Republican campaign money. I won’t say he’s in it only for himself, but the appeal to someone who is should be obvious).

But if you’re an insider to the Libertarian Party, and if you’re wanting to advance, you can’t look forward to many election victories, and these few won’t carry too many appointed posts for party stalwarts, either. In a minor party, the way to use politics selfishly is to take over the organization, and that’s going to mean stepping on some toes.

Thesis: Bureaucracy does a lot of bad things, but it does domesticate the insiders of the major parties. Minor parties are beset by infighting in part because the electoral stakes are so low for them, while the pre-electoral fights — against fellow party members — are the only decisive ones in terms of advancement.

Second data point: The Green party of the United States. The political principles could hardly be more removed, but the social dynamics seem about the same, no? Rojas, you’re watching the LP convention a lot more closely than I will be. What do you think?

Longtime blog friend Joshua Claybourn has a fantastic post about the Mexican-American War, one of the most unjust and unnecessary conflicts our nation has ever entered. An excerpt:

One aspect of this oft-forgotten war is that it was quite divisive in its day. Whigs, particularly those in the north, opposed the war. Yet southern Democrats, smitten with the notion of Manifest Destiny and our perceived God given right to own “sea to shining sea,” enthusiastically supported it. Such disagreements should not be glossed over. Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman, remained forcefully skeptical about Mexico’s alleged instigation of armed hostilities. Others, such as former President John Quincy Adams, felt the whole affair was simply an effort to expand slavery.

I share John Quincy Adams’ opinion on the matter. Northerners came to speak of the “Slave Power” then running the country in part because they found that the South seemed able to make decisions as massive as going to war even when the rest of the country did not agree. (Likewise with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.) The Mexican-American War was also the reason why in 1846 Henry David Thoreau declined to pay his poll tax, instead spent a night in jail, and went on to write “Civil Disobedience,” one of the great American essays of all time.

And lastly, it is a remarkable testimony to the undemocratic nature of the antebellum South that the first president who was neither from the South nor a northerner willing to concede everything that the South demanded was Abraham Lincoln, and that the South immediately left the Union upon his election.

I suppose I could just walk over to his office and tell him this, but then… it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this is a bit of a teachable moment, so… Will Wilkinson writes,

I hate [haggling]. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus.

Inefficient? Of course it is, if all you consider are the utility of the goods purchased and the sums of money involved. But I suspect that these markets still exist because people — tourists — want to haggle. It’s recreation to many of us who would otherwise shop at Wal-Mart.

Maybe knowing a little economics takes the fun out of it, since those of us in the know will realize that to one degree or another we’re getting a less than efficient price (or are we simply valuing the entertainment less, in a quest — misguided? — for sophistication?). But I don’t imagine that we’re the majority. Hagglers find it fascinating to be able to manipulate prices themselves, when usually this activity is done for them in a market. Meanwhile, the markets back home work even when most people don’t realize how or even that they are doing so.

Commenter Elliot left the following reply to this post, to which I thought I’d devote a top-level entry. His words are blockquoted, my replies are not…

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Civil asset forfeiture, meet copyright enforcement.

Because, you know, asset forfeiture just works so well in stopping illegal drugs. Here’s the text of the bill.

Yikes.

By any reasonable measure, my choice of what to eat on November 4, 2008 is going to have more of an effect on my life than my choice at the polls.

My vote will not be the decisive one for a variety of reasons: Maryland is solidly Democratic, it has few enough electoral votes that it may not matter anyway, I may vote Libertarian, and — my personal favorite reason — I suspect that even in almost totally fraud-free elections, the coveted marginal vote is often just swallowed up by the marginal frauds.

Why is it then that the one choice — the election — gets all this attention, even months in advance, and the other choice — my dinner on November 4 — does not? I should be arguing with myself about vegetables, no?

Mildred Loving has died. From the Washington Post:

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.

Farewell to a courageous and exemplary American, one who continued until the end of her life to stand up for what she believed in.

A very interesting post on undergraduate moral relativism from a philosophy professor who has no doubt seen his share (h/t: Mark Olson). I was reminded of my favorite quote from Benito Mussolini (yes, I have one):

Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition… If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity… From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.

Moral relativism does not imply toleration. It doesn’t imply anything, actually, so fascism is just as much a non sequitur as the rest. I’m inclined to accept Pruss’s second theory of why undergrads are so drawn to relativism:

Consider first a relativism about an area of life that does not expressly involve ethics, say esthetic or gustatory relativism (what is beautiful or tasty to me may not be beautiful or tasty to you, and there is no objective, mind-independent beauty or tastiness). This kind of relativism does support quite a bit of tolerance. If Century Sundae is not tasty to you in the way it is to me, I should not impose it on you, and I should be tolerant of your desire to eat the mildly repellent (to me) Chunky Monkey. Here, the relativism is sufficiently limited that it does not undercut, but instead supports, tolerance.

As a result of this, one might conclude that relativism in general supports tolerance about the praxis that is relatively evaluated. However, in the special case where the relativism is moral relativism, this does not hold. The reason that esthetic or gustatory relativism supports tolerance is because of objective moral principles concerning respect for differing preferences and views. But once the relativism becomes moral relativism, these principles are undercut, a fact one might easily miss.

…but I’d note that this approach also begs the question. Why should we be indifferent toward aesthetic or gustatory choices? Because we should practice aesthetic and gustatory relativism. We should because we should. This form of relativism therefore doesn’t explain why such things should be indifferent to us. To do that, we’d need to elaborate a theory of moral sentiments in which neither transitory sense data nor aesthetics were morally salient, and this is (I think) rather difficult to do.

This is shameful, and I am deeply disappointed to read it. Pam’s House Blend reports,

The Smith College Republicans sponsored a speaking event featuring Ryan Sorba, author of the upcoming book The Born Gay Hoax. After about twenty minutes he was forced to abandon his speech after protesters forced their way into the room and drowned him out. I’ll send videos and articles when they are available, but I thought I’d give you a heads up and ask you to please cover this action. I couldn’t be more proud to be a Smithie right now, after I saw so many amazing young feminists come together to stand up against this asshat and his hate.

I haven’t read the book, but I suspect from the clips I have seen of Mr. Sorba speaking that I probably would disagree with most of it and find the rest of it tendentious nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’m even gay, I’m pretty sure I’ve always been that way, and even that doesn’t matter. This is America, and we don’t answer bad ideas in the public square with violence. The rot in our political culture runs deep these days, and it’s hardly conservatives alone who are responsible (though they are, in part). Real Americans shouldn’t behave this way no matter what policy outcomes they favor.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Sorba was there legally. There is no hint in any of the coverage that I can find on the story that would suggest Sorba was trespassing at the university, however questionable the choice may have been to invite him. A university is a place where people come together precisely so that they may encounter many different ideas, and often highly disagreeable ones. A principled response might have included some non-disruptive demonstration of disagreement, perhaps a few very pointed questions, and maybe a counter-lecture the following day or week aimed at rebutting the claims Mr. Sorba made.

The answer to an event like this is never to shout down the speaker. Not even if it were Hitler himself: Shouting down people you disagree with is the essence of the fascist method, regardless of the message on your lips. It fits badly with civilized behavior and reflects only the protesters’ own lack of faith in their cause.

Whether Mr. Sorba is right or wrong — and privately, I think he’s very likely a loon — what the protesters did here only ended up making him look right. Kudos to Pam’s commentators, who have overwhelmingly agreed that this is not the way to go.

Here’s a fascinating exchange between Kerry Howley and Timothy Sandefur regarding the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (noted previously here and here). I should add that subsequent details about police and court procedure both before and after the raid on the FLDS compound have been very troubling to me, making me doubt my previous, uncomplicated endorsement of the state’s actions.

However, being troubled by both the state and the FLDS does not make one any less a radical for individualism. It’s perfectly conceivable that giving more control to either one means that individualism loses. Highly controlling environments like the FLDS may indeed approach the status of a government, Howley argues, and I’m certainly prepared to think of them this way. But then, there’s an actual government on the scene, too, and it’s worth worrying about that as well.

I’ve also long thought that libertarianism is the most humane way to view adults in society, but that it breaks down when applied to children. This need not be a problem with libertarianism in itself, but only an admission that all great explanatory models have their limits. One simply can’t presume that a child has the autonomy or independent decisionmaking skills necessary to act as an agent of her own self-interest. This is what libertarianism demands of adults, and I believe that virtually all adults can do it, even if many adults aren’t willing to, and even if many others are convinced that they can run other people’s lives just a little bit better. The adults who want to run things they shouldn’t are the more profound or radical challenges to libertarianism; for libertarians, deciding the status of children will always be at best a question of where to draw the borders, not a challenge to the fundamentals.

I don’t have much of a problem, then, in saying that children have a limited set of positive rights — that is, of social obligations that adults need to provide to them, for a limited time, until they reach adulthood. A newborn baby can’t feed itself, after all, and from that point forward children in some sense must have positive rights, otherwise we would simply be bringing them into the world to let them die — an absurdity.

It’s not at all ridiculous to think that children also have to be taught how to use their rationality. They must be taught to speak and to read, at the bare minimum. These things aren’t automatic, and so much less are highly abstract concepts like freedom, justice, or the rule of law.

I am well aware that there is some paradox involved in an authority figure teaching a child to value independence and even to question authority figures. But this kind of teaching is clearly not impossible. Clearly some societies have done a good job of this kind of teaching, while many others have taught near-total submission to authority. To keep the freedoms that we have, it is important that our children learn the values of liberty — among them being able to question received social conventions.

Worth noting: Much of the best children’s and young-adult literature does this very well. Consider “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Horton Hears a Who!” and (though not all) of Robert Heinlein’s young-adult fiction. This is not to say of course that the FLDS is out there teaching their kids — as I will — to think for themselves. It’s only to note that the love of liberty isn’t mystically acquired out of the ether.

Update: Howley responds, reminding readers of the other side of intensively polygynous marriage — the discarded boys. If you don’t throw them out by the dozen, the math just doesn’t add up. She quotes from this AP story:

Damned by his religion, denied by his family and left with nowhere else to go, the teenager slept in a cold tool shed just steps from a company owned by his relatives.

They went home at night to warm, cozy beds while Tom Sam Steed stole bread, cereal and nutrition bars from a gas station just to survive. He tried, several times, to kill himself, convinced that he was worth nothing.

His salvation came when he got a job cleaning carpets and finally left the control of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its leader, Warren Jeffs.

Former members describe a religion that thrives on domination. Every detail of their life was scripted—from plural marriages to what they could wear, who they could associate with and what job they could have. In the last 4 1/2 years, more than 400 teenage boys have been excommunicated, many for seemingly minor infractions such as watching a movie or talking to a girl.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but our society would never tolerate this being done to girls. And I hope this doesn’t sound like overly facile atheism, but our society likewise would never tolerate this if the agent were a business rather than a religion.

I think it would be fantastic if the federal government could be made smaller than, oh, say… this blog.

Achieving my goal would entail a massive decrease in the size of the government, a massive increase in the social resources devoted to this blog (and to compensating the authors!), or some amount of both. Obviously either would be a very good thing.

Yet Technorati says that my dream may already be a reality: In blogosphere influence, this blog is already bigger than the federal government’s blog.

Your tax dollars would like to inform you, in their small, uninfluential voice, that allergies are no fun and — oh the irony — that it sucks to have your wallet stolen. Also, don’t kill the widdle fuzzy aminuls.

Divided We Stand supports divided government. I do too — divided government slows things down, and we desperately need to slow down the pace of government encroachment into civil society.

But here’s the dilemma, and it’s not an easy one:

The libertarian swing vote, organized around the concept of divided government, was instrumental in determining the outcome of the 2006 mid-term election. If this election becomes a Democratic Party rout, then the libertarian swing vote simply will not matter, it’ll just get swamped. However, if it is a close election, it could be determinative in 2008 as it was in 2006. If - and it is a big “If” - the libertarian swing vote remains consistent and committed to divided government. While it is the right question to ask, I suggest it is too early to ask it. We need to get past the Democratic primary sideshow, find out who the candidate will be, and learn whether events in Basra will overtake the the campaigns.

MW of Divided We Stand also frames the question by quoting Todd Seavey as follows:

So, to my libertarian friends who are either indifferent to the Dem/GOP distinction or who actively root for “divided government”: Are you still happier with a Democratic rather than Republican Congress after the Dems’ torpedoing of a free trade deal with Colombia — the sort of deal that at least some of my Dem/GOP-indifferent libertarian pals have rightly pointed to as more important than tiny variations in the size of the federal budget and thus a good indicator of whether the government is moving in the right direction? And if you still prefer divided government, are you consistent enough to be eagerly rooting for McCain rather than for NAFTA-bashing Obama/Clinton? Or, if not, are you de facto supporters of the Democrats (and thus opponents of trade — and thus not clearly libertarians) when you get right down to it?”

It’s a tough question. It’s worth noting that some libertarians incline against free trade via treaties and would have us just unilaterally drop all of our own trade barriers, regardless of what other countries may do. These libertarians’ economic case is rock-solid, but their practical political sense amounts to a lot of wishful thinking. I tend to favor trade deals of the type that recently failed, because even incremental improvements still make a real difference in the well-being of actual human individuals. Trade isn’t purely a theoretical matter, and if it means helping more poor people right now, then I’m all for it. I’m likewise very disappointed at both Obama and Clinton on NAFTA, and on this issue I find myself wishing that Bill, rather than Hillary, were the one running for president.

But all this ignores an important and maybe decisive issue, regardless of what one thinks about trade — the war in Iraq. I do not think that continuing this war does much to help anyone, whether here, or in Iraq, or anywhere else, except perhaps that it helps the leadership of Iran. It may in fact be worth voting against a free-trade candidate if it ends the war sooner rather than later. This is a difficult dilemma, and saying that libertarians are anti-free trade for being anti-war is rather like remarking on the generosity of the man who hands over his wallet rather than being stabbed. Neither is an appealing alternative, but the menu of choices… is limited.

I have to say I’m very angry that the Democrats in Congress have done squat to get us out out of Iraq. On this I may also be a victim of wishful thinking (kinda goes with being a libertarian, I hear), but it’s possible that if the Dems had the White House too, we would see an end to the war during the next administration. It’s not definite, but it’s far more likely I think than with McCain as president.

So… depending on one’s priorities, a libertarian swing voter who assumes the Democrats will extend their control of Congress has two choices:

a) Divided government, with McCain as president, NAFTA likely unchallenged, no new trade treaties forthcoming (thanks, Democrats!), and the Iraq War continuing indefinitely. The Republican “security” state marches on unbowed.

b) Unified government, with Obama as the likely president, NAFTA facing a challenge of yet-to-be-determined strength, a socialized healthcare bill that will be deeply repugnant to every libertarian political principle, and the Iraq War possibly — gosh we hope — coming to its inevitable end sooner rather than later.

When you throw in McCain’s antilibertarian views on campaign finance, national greatness, and the like, the choice is (yet again) Southparkesque. (Footnote: McCain in office with a veto-proof Democratic majority may yield many of the bad effects of McCain-Bushism as well as a socialized healthcare bill, and great harms done to free trade, both passed over the president’s veto. This would be the worst of all worlds.)

Seavey adds:

I would just like occasional acknowledgment, though, of the fact that the Dems are the consciously anti-market party, not just the hypocritically-and-absent-mindedly-statist party that the GOP is becoming.

But I don’t think that the Republicans are being absent minded. And if they are being hypocritical, then we should be doubly disappointed in them, because at least they know the case for small-government well enough to fake it, and this ought to mean that they are capable of understanding it. Further, libertarians should want to punish anyone who gives their philosophy a bad name. (Would that this were applied more consistently, and to certain minor parties as well as the major ones, but there I go again with that wishful thinking stuff.)

Yet Seavey is completely right that there’s a strong divided-government case to be made for voting for McCain, a case I made some months ago about a different but also distasteful Republican.

The simple answer is that none of the candidates are appealing, that they are bad for different reasons, that to my mind McCain is the worst of the lot, but that we don’t have a Republican-controlled Congress that would make voting for a Democrat the divided-government strategy.

Now for two easy dodges. You’ll thank me for not taking either of them:

1. I live in Maryland, which goes to the Democrat no matter what I do.

2. I can’t rule out voting for (or against) the yet-to-be-determined Libertarian candidate.

And the final verdict is… I’m still undecided. Divided government is a very, very powerful incentive to vote Republican, but it may well be the only one.