Positive Liberty

With the parties’ candidates determined, and the last two interminable months of the campaign before us, it may be time to offer some perspective on the presidency, lest anyone get their hopes too high about either candidate’s chances creating a paradise here on earth (not that such hopefuleness about the candidates seems to be endemic on this blog.

Presidential scholar Thomas Cronin wrote an excellent short piece called “The Presidency and Its Paradoxes,” (which first appeared inThe Presidency Reappraised, then expanded into a whole book). He lists 10 paradoxes, but in the interest of something vaguely resembling brevity I’ll only address a few here.  These paradoxes help explain why it is nearly impossible for a president to succeed in the job. Continue Reading »

I occasionally plug the Weekly Standard, not only for being the Neo-Conservative Publication of Record (useful in determining where we will invade next and how soon) but far more entertainingly because Andrew Ferguson writes there. Even better, I can recommend him to you on this occasion in the New York Times, explaining this year’s Republican Party platform. Enjoy.

As often happens, it’s written by Roderick Long:

Those who see government power and corporate power as being in conflict, and those who seem them as being in cahoots, each have a point. The alliance between government and the corporate elite is like the partnership between church and state in the Middle Ages: each one wants to be the dominant partner, so there’s naturally some pushing and shoving from time to time; but on the other hand the two parties have a common interest in holding down the rest of us, and so the conflict rarely goes too far.

And it gets better from there.

I want to get a tattoo of myself on my entire body, only 2″ taller. — Steven Wright

I found Isaac Asimov’s Foundation a lot less enjoyable the second time through. I’d read it I believe in 8th or 9th grade, and it was really a disappointment to come back to it. Oh well, you live and learn.

First, the plots of each of the sub-stories of this book are almost absurdly contrived. What seemed well-constructed before now seems tired and predictable. This may owe to Asimov’s great influence on later fiction, science and otherwise — Can later works ruin earlier ones? — but I still had a hard time getting hooked by them the second time around.

Second, the whole thing could have used an editor. On one page, a technological thingamajig is called a “hyperwave,” which we’ll give a pass, for the sake of argument. Science fiction gets its poetic license, and we especially extend the license to golden-age science fiction. But only a few pages later, the very same device is called an “ultrawave,” which is hard to forgive. Internal consistency and all that. Also: Is the name Anselm haut Rodric, or Anselm [H]aut Rodric? True, he’s a minor character, but the “haut” is noted, in authorial voice, as a particle of nobility, and dwelled upon as a bit of local color, so one would expect consistency here of all places.

But then, these aren’t the reasons I’m writing. Continue Reading »

Commenter Bisaal asks,

What does the statement “A person owns himself” actually mean?

This is a very good question, because the words inside the quotation marks, though often repeated, are badly phrased. They are almost certain to be misleading.

Simply put, “I own myself” threatens an infinite regress. The attributes of ownership seem to exclude those of being owned; it is hard to see how one can simultaneously be both the owned and the owner. Although I may wash myself, or dress myself, or feed myself, and at the same time unproblematically be the recipient of these services, it is much harder to see how I can both have a control or dominion over myself, and also be controlled or dominated. (By what?)

It would be far better to say “A person has a property in himself.” Indeed, this is the very phrase that Locke used, and Locke never referred to “self-ownership,” in those words, in any of his writings as far as I am aware. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but the two phrases really do mean something quite different.

To “have a property in” a thing means that others ought to be excluded from it in some sense, perhaps from managing it, or from controlling it, or from disposing of it, except insofar as the individual who has the relevant property in the thing allows them to. I have a property in my shirt, for example, because it would be wrong for someone to take it away from me, or sell it, or damage it without my consent.

In this, the shirt is no different from my physical body, my conscience, my mind, or my soul. I have a property in these things; they form part of that order of things from which I may properly exclude the access of others. As James Madison put it,

This term in its particular application means ‘that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.’ In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of particular value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

You have a property in your self, as do I in my self. To own oneself, in the newer but more imprecise phrase, means simply that others are presumed to be excluded from control. It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that all systems of intolerance ultimately presume the opposite at some point in their reasoning.

It is a cliché among many psychologists and economists that human beings behave self-interestedly. Moreover, since Adam Smith’s somewhat theological, somewhat anthropomorphic “invisible hand” metaphor, it has been almost an article of faith within the latter discipline that the collective, societal result of individual self-interested behavior is ironically salubrious.

It is a faith to which I also ascribe, although like all but the most zealous of religious fanatics I season that faith with the occasional heresy here and there. Crucially, however, it needs to be noted at the outset that not just any sort of self-interested behavior contributes to the common wealth and greater good. Specialization and trade, voluntary association, bargained-for exchanges, common rules and some sort of enforcement mechanism to address rule breaking are all necessary elements for human society to flourish economically, for the invisible hand to prove, as it were, optimally dexterous.

Most importantly, “self-interested” is not synonymous with “selfish.” Continue Reading »

I teach U.S. Presidency every other year. It’s not one of my favorite classes, as I’m not a real expert on the presidency, and don’t often read about it except when preparing for to teach it again.

But as I prepare for the class, I once again find myself looking for a president I can admire. Continue Reading »

Some random thoughts…

Purpose Driven Dialogue

Rick Warren, pastor of mega-church Saddleback and author of “The Purpose Driven Life” and “The Purpose-Driven Church,” was declared by one news outlet (I cannot recall who now) to be the new Billy Graham. Why? Is it because he preaches the gospel? Not really. It’s because he’s friends with presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle — friend of the next president. It’s also because he’s perceived as being less partisan and less divisive than the likes of the late-Jerry Falwell, the late-D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and David Barton. It’s because he seems like, and probably is a nicer guy.

I, for one, would like to see a new kind of evangelical leader — one who sees his role as “afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted.” There may actually be a couple of them. I’m aware of at least one such individual. But it’s a lot harder to climb the prestige ladder if that’s your attitude. People call you a radical, a liberal, and unpatriotic.

American Evangelicalism has become hotter and stinkier than the Gehenna dump.

Being Rick Warren gets you on all the right shows. Being James Dobson raises you an army and lots of money. Being a critic gets you neither.

Does this mean we can see Rick Warren’s purpose?

I don’t know. Actually, there are some things I like about Rick Warren. I’ll conclude this piece by mentioning one of them.

Brayton’s Reprobation

Our PL colleague over at his real big blog wrote, Continue Reading »

I recently asked PL readers why people had such inaccurate views of libertarianism. As a follow-up and as a way of more fully introducing myself to PLers, I thought it would be appropriate to explain what libertarianism means to me.

I actually began, when I first began really thinking about these issues, as a “market socialist.” At least that’s what I called it, although one of my friends derided the idea that socialism could be market-based. Continue Reading »

I have just engaged in a long and bitter debate on Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog about the power of one vote. Many Democrats are concerned about a repeat of 2000, when Ralph Nader stole enough votes from Al Gore to cost Gore Florida’s electoral votes (conveniently ignoring the other causes of Gore’s loss, such as his failure to win his own home state), and some of Ed’s readers were outraged that he plans to vote Libertarian–voting Libertarian, they fear, will take votes from Obama and allow McCain to win. Setting aside the dubious proposition that there are enough libertarians who might actually vote Democrat to make the difference in the election, the argument was stimulated by my claim that one vote can’t change the outcome of the election, and so no individual should change their vote for fear they’ll help their least-preferred candidate to win. This simple, and logically irrefutable proposition, caused a firestorm of disagreement and claims that voting Libertarian was “dishonest,” “illegitimate,” and ‘inexcusable.” Setting aside also these readers’ disturbing reluctance to grant their fellow citizens freedom of conscience at the ballot box, these arguments were all based on the continued belief that one vote can make a difference. It is fairly easy to see where this belief comes from, but it’s based on a continued confusion of two distinct levels of analysis, group-level vs. individual level, a distinction which is easily sorted out, for those willing to set aside their preconceptions and think analytically. Continue Reading »

I think I’ve finally found it. Maybe. I don’t know. There are absolutely TONS of books out there that address the “Christian Nation”/Religion of the Founders topic. I’m not even going name them. You know of many of them. I’ll simply note the best, latest one to come out is Stephen Waldman’s. My Dad is always asking me when my book is going to come out. I’ve always answered that the notion that America is not a Christian Nation/what religion did America’s Founders believe in? has been done so many times by so many more prominent folks that it would make no sense for me to write such a book until I’ve found my novel angle. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

Assorted links, in which various parties get what they deserve, below the fold. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: It’s alright, we’ve told you what to dream.

Various dreams from here and there, below the fold. Continue Reading »

My friend and former co-blogger Mona has snagged Steven Horwitz for an online chatroom discussion of F.A. Hayek this coming Wednesday from 7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. EDT at The Art Of The Possible.

When he isn’t busying himself defending the libertarian bona fides of the rock group Rush or popping in from time to time here at Positive Liberty to correct dimwitted pseudo-economists like me, Horwitz is a real-life economist of the professorial variety at St. Lawrence University, a serious student of Hayek, and from all readily available evidence a splendid fellow.

At the risk of learning something, I might just pop in there myself this Wednesday, and you should too!

I found an odd argument from Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, around pages 48-49.

Coontz begins by suggesting that in the last couple of centuries, the power of “kin, community, and state to arrange, prohibit, and interfere in marriages has waned,” which is certainly true. And this is not a shocking, unprecedented development, but rather a return to the norms that prevailed during hunter-gatherer times, when marriage wasn’t about property or dynastic succession, and when partners enjoyed much greater freedom. They could choose freely among potential mates, they worried less about infidelity, they loved even illegitimate children, and they could enter and leave marriages more easily. She writes,

Legal scholar Harry Willekins argues that in most modern industrial societies, marriages are contracted and dissolved in ways that have more in common with the habits of some egalitarian band-level societies than the elaborate rules that governed marriage in more complex societies over the past 5,000 years. In many contemporary societies, there is a growing acceptance of premarital sex, divorce, and remarriage, along with an erosion of sharp distinctions between cohabitation and marriage and between ‘legitimate’ and out-of-wedlock births.

This may seem good or bad depending on one’s own beliefs about marital norms. Yet it’s debatable whether what’s being said about past societies is even true. Most of us, I suspect, have heard neither of moieties nor of phratries, but we should all pity the person who wanted to marry against the rules that these kinship divisions entailed. The much-discussed same-sex unions among Native Americans were actually quite rare. And the reason preliterate marriage had little to do with wealth transfer is in part because there was so very little to go around.

But let’s ignore all that and grant that hunter-gatherer societies did have fluid enough marriage norms to make the comparison apt. Coontz continues,

In hunting and gathering bands and egalitarian horticultural communities, unstable marriages did not lead to the impoverishment of women or children as they often do today. Unmarried women participated in the work of the group and were entitled to a fair share, while children and other dependents were protected by strong customs that mandated sharing beyond the nuclear family.

This is not the case today, especially in societies such as the United States, where welfare provisions are less extensive than in Western Europe.

One wonders: Would today’s single mothers be better off as hunter-gatherers? Clearly this isn’t what Coontz means, so I’m searching for what this passage is supposed to get at (aside from a gratuitous swipe at the United States, and some doubtful praise for Europeans, who now seem to be better ersatz hunter-gatherers as well as everything else that they do better).

No, the absolute difference in wealth between the two types of societies is so vast that it’s hard to get too worked up about relative differences at all. Even the poorest of us does better than the richest hunter-gatherer. But perhaps what’s being said really is that when compared to single-mother hunter-gatherers, today’s single mothers are relatively worse off when each is compared to the married people in their respective societies.

Yet it’s a bit hard to believe that in hunter-gatherer societies, unstable marriage “did not lead to impoverishment of women or children.” Certainly it did. Aside from the general poverty, which was extraordinarily severe, these women and children would by far have had the worst of it.

I also think that their relative poverty would have been worse, and that losing a husband would be a bigger step down from an already very low level. Today’s labor is vastly different from the kind done in hunter-gatherer bands; it favors mental skills rather than physical ones, and here men and women have the greatest degree of natural equality. Today’s battle of the sexes is fought on considerably more even turf, which may explain why men are so uneasy lately.

Men are physically stronger, and therefore relatively more valuable to hunter-gatherer societies. By the same token they are, relative to women, less valuable today: Men are not more adept at using their minds and may even be less so on average. This makes single mothers’ labor more valuable as well.

Let’s also add the great benefits of a commercial economy: Whereas marriage in prehistoric societies might have been the only way to get the goods that men provided (meat, protection), today’s women can earn money — a new invention — and exchange it for whatever they want. It doesn’t matter whether the goods they want are produced by the father of their children or by unknown factory workers on the other side of the globe. Every working man (and woman) in the entire world is competing, potentially, to provide goods and services for her. This increases her wealth still further.

Again, this may be why men are so uneasy these days. But it also suggests that even relatively speaking, there are powerful institutions and social processes favoring women and women’s labor in the modern world, and that even by relative standards, it would be better to be a single mother today than one in a noncommercial, non-monetized society where brute force had a higher economic value relative to mental traits. Frankly, women never had it so good, single or otherwise, relatively or in absolute terms.