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Rothbard took liberty – including liberty of association (which includes the liberty to *not* associate with someone, even for reasons others would consider “bad”) and the liberty of exit (like, um, secession) too seriously for him to ever be anything other than persona non grata among those who want to ingratiate themselves in fashionable circles and say “we’re not so bad, we like the same things you do.”

Such people will only ever advocate “freedom of association” in socially acceptable ways (i.e. Caplan’s crusade for open borders, a cause that is in with the in crowd) and will avoid like the plague being active on things that would bring down the ire of the establishment. Whether this is “useful” or not depends upon where you sit, of course: it’s certainly socially useful to be “I’m not that kind of libertarian” (or is it? I notice Salon still lumps the Reason guys – who are decent fellows – in with “the h8ers” – regardless of how much effort they make). But does it ultimately help the cause of libertarianism (advancing liberty) to fill up the society with people who…well, lets just say that Progressives are correct about where their political interests lay in changing the demographics of various nations. Which, if they are correct about where their political interests lay (and they are) means that it is self-defeating (to put it mildly) for libertarians to support their causes.

I’ll also add that there are…personal reasons…dating back to unfortunate inter-libertarian spats in the early ’80s for why the Cato & Reason (and George Mason) faction of Libertarianism made Rothbard a “unperson” in their set. You’d think that after Rothbard died they’d get over these personal grudges and inter-Libertarian spats, but, evidently not. (Tom Woods & Lou Rockwell touch on some of these from the LvMI side of it all here in a short chat.

[porphyrogenitus]

I still like Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty,” flaws and all (his flaw starts with an imprecise definition of “coercion,” and thus he allows for more interventionism than a good Rothbardian would), but in part because he seems “less extreme” and “more reasonable,” it would be a good way to get the typical person’s feet wet.

Then, once they see that, yes, initiation of force is inappropriate and there is no magical quality about the state (or about “all of us doing it together”), you can point out that while Hayek was on the right track, if you refine the principle to be more consistent than he did, and follow through with its logic, then…

To Blake’s list I’d add: Democracy, the God that Failed (by Hoppe) and The Ethics of Liberty (by Rothbard), and perhaps The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (by Hoppe).

I wish David Gordon had come out with a book compiling his philosophical defense of liberty, but he seems to have been too intellectually humble to ever undertake such a project, which I find to be too bad. Well there’s still hope; he’s still around after all. But if he ever does, I’d almost certainly recommend it.

[porphyrogenitus]

Ok; I promise to slow down quite a bit.

[porphyrogenitus]

someone might have written a book on that topic. I hear it’s pretty good.

(Note that while it’s written with Catholicism in mind, many if not most of its points are pertinent to Christians generally. At least I found them to be so).

If you’re looking for something that highlights libertarian-esque themes in the Christian intellectual tradition, then many chapters of this cover that. Plus the author has some fun with Taborites, Anabaptists, and the like.

If you want something more Biblically oriented, Gary North recently finished something like a 3272 volume economic commentary on the Bible (wait maybe it was only 31 volumes).

[porphyrogenitus]

Probably the best place to post this one is the “Austrian Economics” forum.

You might also e-mail Robert “Bob” Murphy ( rpm-at-consultingbyrpm.com ); he’s crossed swords with people on this “deflationary” stuff in the past and might have some tips.

[porphyrogenitus]

A lot of people try to be cute and answer “William Henry Harrison, because he died before he could do anything,” but IMO the question should be limited to Presidents who have a record to scrutinize (“well that would include William Henry, because he has a record of dying in office!” – you know what I mean).

A related “cute” answer is “I don’t have a favorite and neither should you, all these guys are criminals, it’s like asking who your favorite Mafia Don is” (It’s Lucky Luciano, btw). IMO if that’s your answer you can skip this question as “not relevant to your interests.”

Anyhow I’ll answer it this way: I know there’s a sort of mini-boomlet for Coolidge now, but that shouldn’t detract. IMO he’s the last fairly good Republican President, and Cleavland is the last fairly good Democratic President (see? I can be bipartisan! Yippie!); sure they did some things that one can be critical of (no one is perfect), especially from an anarcho-libertarian standpoint (whose perspective is that no decent person should aspire to such an office in the first place), but they were basically concientious constitutionalists.

Now, as for what my “cute” answer might be, another method of selecting a “favorite President” could be to pick the most brazen reprobate available, the one who most nakedly ruled contrary to the integrity of the office, who stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and openly favored his cronies and supporters, lavishing them with bounties and used his office to blatantly crush his enemies. In other words, the one who most readily serves as an illustrative example. But here there are so many contenders that it’s hard to crown just one without feeling like slighting another for whom a good case can be made.

But if I was forced at gunpoint to choose right now from that deck full of jokers, I suppose I’d pick a man admired by “left and right” alike, Teddy Roosevelt, a man who forged new paths in all of these things and got away with it, grinning that big, shit-eating grin of his. (Counterargument: “but he didn’t build his legacy of Presidential greatness atop a pyramid of bodies, blown apart in wars started during his term, howevermuch he might have seemed like he wanted to, his reign was actually relatively peaceful.” To which all I can say is: I told you it’s a hard choice…)

[porphyrogenitus]

I’m going to add a couple other recommendations. First, the part of this talk that begins around the 2 minute mark, which is great general advice.

The other tip I’d add is since your talk is so short, use it to introduce people to the argument in two to three books that you found most persuasive. The idea would be to get them to conclude “that book sounds interesting, I should check it out.” For example, you might choose Rollback, Ron Paul’s “Revolution,” and Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty” as books to touch on and make sound compelling enough for normal people to check out, without sounding so alien they dismiss them as crankish before they check it out (the biggest obstacle to the liberty movement is that its enemies, having control over the education-information system, has people well-trained to dismiss out of hand certain names/people/ideas without even looking into them. Trust me, I know. Some time maybe I’ll tell the story of how long it took before I started examining Rothbardian ideas for myself, and why).

[porphyrogenitus]

Oh ho ho; you used the word eleemosynary.

(Sorry, it just gave me an excuse to post that link).

[porphyrogenitus]

1) I think the Freakanomics guys make clever arguments. Or, rather, “clever” ones. Note this is not the same as “successful” or “good” ones, though they may seem so at first glance. IIRC David Gordon did a review of their first book. Or maybe their second. Anyhow, that sort of argument IMO is unconvincing; especially given that society, like the economy, is dynamic. In any case, to embrace his argument just is to embrace a racial argument as well.

2) on this:

Now when I consider people who follow libertarian beliefs and/or people on this site, I feel as though a libertarian society is much more likely to succeed (obviously). In considering other groups of people, however, I have doubt as to what people are capable of. . .For sake of argument lets consider that there are two types of people in regards to a libertarian society, capable and not capable.

Though I think almost all libertarians would phrase it differently, I’m not sure they would disagree. However the very point of trying to spread the message and convince people of the merits of libertarianism is to generate not only more people who support it, but more people who accept the justice of it, internalize libertarian norms, understand libertarian ethics, and thus will be capable of living in a libertarian society.

The theory goes something like this (in brief): we’re not going to get a libertarian society until enough people support libertarian principles; when we do, and are able to form a libertarian society, then the people in it will, by and large and for the most part, be people who understand and agree with the ethics of liberty and follow its norms (obviously there will be the exceptions, lawbreakers, and the like, as there are in any society, and these will be handled in the usual way, though in this case through private law).

In addition I think they also believe, especially the more Hoppean ones, that once a libertarian society is created it will only be attractive to immigrants who want to live in such a society. It will not be attractive to freeloaders or deadbeats of any race (and as for those who are legitimately needy, benevolence and mutual aid will exist for them, to help them, but since it will not be run by the state, it will be able to impose and maintain standards that actually work, instead of just making more clientela for politicians).

Anyhow this informs my own critique of “open borders libertarians” – libertarians who support open borders, or at least significantly lax immigration standards, in the current system, on the grounds I discussed before.

IMO one does not even have to get into innate biological, or deeply cultural-rooted “capabilities” of this or that group (even if one believes such exist, there would be exceptions, individuals that IMO would be more welcome in any libertarian society, regardless of the general inclinations of the “group” they are members of, than members of “groups” that are, on the whole, more inclined to libertarianism. For example, I’ll take Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell over, say, Krugman, DeLong, and, well, just about any academic progressive). But one can still understand that inviting people in under the current statist dispensation attracts people who want to live under that dispensation and benefit from it, and thus is self-defeating (indeed, suicidal) from the standpoint of advancing libertarianism. Further, every political society, to include a libertarian one, even to include an anarcho-libertarian one, by definition starts by distinguishing members and non-members, and has the prerogative of excluding anyone from joining who would seek to transform it into something else (anarcho-libertarians would do this by ostracism, thus not violating anyone’s rights. Note that in the modern state, no one has this liberty anymore. This is one reason why advocating open immigration on economic & “freedom to associate with anyone I want to” grounds fails under the current dispensation, where we do not actually have the right to associate – which includes the right not to associate).

In the 19th century even “Stated” societies could have basically open immigration, no passports, and the like; in no small part because, however bad they were, these were pre-Progressive welfare-warfare states. This is not how things are now.

[porphyrogenitus]

with such a short time I’m not sure how I would proceed but you might check out some of Ron Paul’s shorter speeches/remarks for ideas, or some of Tom Woods’s pithier remarks. Both have speeches on youtube.

[porphyrogenitus]

Minarchism, in brief, is the belief that somehow, via some means not yet devised (but perhaps the Founders were on to something, though their own plan was flawed), The State can be kept limited; it can be constructed such that it keeps to a few functions, and constructed in such a way that it performs them well, or at least not so poorly as anyone would be overly bothered by it (one can see the attraction of this even in non-minarchist, philosophical anarchists, who believe that while the state isn’t morally justified, and it is at best difficult and at worst impossible to limit government, but who nonetheless believe that it would be at least an improvement if we could move in the direction of minarchy, and thus they promote tools and means by which the behemoth of centralized statism can be rolled back).

In brief, minarchy is a government that sticks to three things: external defense against other states, internal protection against crime, and adjudication. Preferably it has divided responsibility, and not entire responsibility, over at least some of that (localization-federalism).

One possible idea for maintaining that over time is a somewhat hobbesean one of having the government feel itself secure; this is sort of Hoppe’s argument (though he is not a minarchist or a monarchist); a government that is securely in possession will want “its” lands to be prosperous, and profitable, and thus adopt better policies (less interventionism, less vote-buying, and so on). I’m not sure this works.

I do tend to agree with Randall Holcombe, despite the critiques (that I do recommend be taken into consideration). I think even on Holcombe’s own terms his article (“unecessary but inevitable”) is misnamed, because in it he argues that people will impose a government upon themselves to perform the above functions (external defense, internal security, and adjudication).

I respect Robert “Bob” Murphy but have found his arguments for private security (here and here) to not be satisfying. In part because I think it is backwards, indeed IMO many libertarians argue backwards on this: Murphy argues that the difficult thing is internal security (police functions), and once that is overcome, external defense is comparatively easy. Then he makes arguments on external security that IMO may not obtain at all (and if they do, will quite possibly result in…a government; not for Nozickian reasons, but for Rothbardian ones: cartels fail on the free market because they lack an enforcement mechanism. However, the security agencies that he posits will cooperate and obtain interoperability in confronting external threats, will not cooperate and use their armed force to impose their cartel internally. Note this is not a moral objection to anarchism; it does not argue that such a state would be justified).

Plenty of libertarians also argue that defense against external threats would be easy for a libertarian society because there is no central authority for a foe to target, it would be “hard” for an external force to impose control because they’d have to go door to door, and the like. These things are not problematic at all for an army (especially a ruthless enough one): usually in the “modern” world’s total wars when an invading army conquers an area (say, the Soviet Army moving into Berlin), the opponent’s government does break down, and the conquering army has no real difficulty imposing itself on the population and subduing them.

There is also the argument that a libertarian society will become “so rich” they will be able to outspend, and be much more efficient in doing so, any potential enemy. This has some merit but ignores the “transition point” – it is a form of static equilibrium, ignoring the fact that moving from the wealth-state of nonlibertarian society to the wealth of a libertarian society will be a process, not an event; and in the interim there will, at minimum, be a period when it is wealthy enough to be attractive to capture but not wealthy enough to be so powerful as to be immune to attack.

Another libertarian argument is that “no one will want to attack, precisely because the wealth of a libertarian society is a process, not an event, and capturing it will be useless to any attacker if it destroys that wealth;” however, this possibility has never stopped invaders from coveting wealthy areas before, or indeed benefiting from shearing the sheep on an ongoing basis once they have succeeded.

Also, the very decentralization of a libertarian society – or, rather, societies – can potentially work against them. As one successful conqueror put it “quantity has a quality all its own”; that is, the Soviet Army may have been inefficient, it may have squandered its soldier’s lives on a massive scale, but it was successful nevertheless. And this is not a unique situation; armies of economically weaker and culturally more backwards areas have not infrequently conquered superior places, including ones with more efficient armies (note they have also lost to such places, and usually do, but the point is: they do not always lose, so that indicates the problem is not so easily dispatched).

Even in internal security/private security, IMO there are things that trip up the theory. Just the other day Robert “Bob” Murphy had post suggesting that the actions – or, rather, inactions – by the Cleveland PD on the three abducted girls constituted “a point in favor of private competing police services.”

IMO, while that example did constitute an argument against state/government police forces, it did not necessarily constitute an argument in favor of private ones. After all, if a neighbor heard screams from the house, and called his PDA (Private Defense Agency), on what grounds would the defense agency act? Ariel Castro had not committed any aggression against the neighbor phoning in the tip, and the PDA would not know if anyone in the house was a client of theirs until after the fact (that is, after someone got out). For all they would know someone was engaging in consensual S&M, and the PDA would be committing an act of aggression (trespass) by going on Ariel Castro’s land to investigate the report. The three women, and/or their families would probably have contracts with a PDA, but not necessarily the same one, and again no PDA would know where their client was until after the fact of their discovery. Thus any argument to the effect that PDAs, with their profit motive, would have been more efficient in investigating the crime (while also not aggressing against anyone suspected of being an abductor) is purely hypothetical.

In closing: none of the above objections I made are dispositive against libertarian anarchism. Only a few of them potentially address the moral justification for a state (in other words: a lot of these critiques have little to do with whether a state is morally justified, and only to do with if it is possible). I myself would be happy to be proven wrong. For better or worse I do not think this will be a problem in our lifetimes, and am happy to be in the company of AnCaps working towards the same goal. I’ll stay on the bus as far as it goes and if it stops in the endpoint they desire, and that enpoint is stable, I will not be unhappy to be proven wrong.

Thus in general I do not spend too much time arguing against their moral case for anarchy (note again that in the above I point out the practical difficulties, because I do not think they have done enough work on those, and I like to pour encourager les autres).

One of my personal intellectual projects is to try to come up with a mechanism for keeping a minimal state minimal. That is the distinct problem with my position, and the anarchists can rightly say that all work done so far to devise a system that will prevent the state from growing and transgressing rights (any more than a minimal government already infringes upon them by its very existence) has failed. So we each face our technical-practical problems.

Which also makes me not much of a “salesman” for minarchy. Overall I think that all the moral arguments against the state, while not necessarily compelling (I mean this in the sense that David Gordon might, about being careful about too quick in dismissing other philosophical positions, even though he himself is a Rothbardian), have a lot of weight and I am thinking them through before concluding, myself, whether they are entirely correct that no state is justified, or if there is a flaw. (I haven’t yet found a flaw, so this is one reason why, in the above, there the central issue is not the moral justification of minarchy). I have concluded that if there is a flaw in the argument for libertarian anarchy, it is in overlooking something: that is, a consideration that is missing, rather than a step that is in error.

If I were to make a moral case for minarchy it would be Rothbardian in nature, Eudamonist: if humanity can flourish without a state, then it should do so, but if cannot, if a state (government in the conventional sense) is necessary for human flourishing, then a government (in the conventional sense) ought to exist, but involving the least possible infringement upon human liberty (all states/governments-in-the-conventional-sense, involve some infringements upon liberty; which is why libertarians conclude they are not morally justified). Experience, IMO, so far teaches us that some government is necessary (I distinguish “government” from “governance” – Rothbardian anarcho-libertarianism has governance and the rule of law, without the state). But I’m not only willing to be proven wrong, I want to be proven wrong.

In any case, we’re all on the same page when it comes to reducing it to the maximal extent possible; if that means we end up in minarchy, AnCaps will be unsatisfied, but at least feel their lot has improved compared to what it is now (a Misesian improvement in utility! – greater satisfaction than at present). If it means we end up at libertarian anarchy, great.

[porphyrogenitus]

I think there are some missing steps in that proof, some of which are epistemological and a couple of which are purely logical.

It’s not that there’s nothing to the steps in that argument if it is put the right way and the gaps in the argument filled in.

I’d recommend checking out this and/or this.

As for “already been done,” I’ll indulge in a timeless quote:

Mr. Garrison: That is very impressive, Eric. What do you intend to do with your underwater society?
Cartman: I’m gonna send a message to my people and tell ’em to develop a great machine that will shrink me down to their size, so I can live amongst them forever.
Butters: [sensing a chance to retort] Aha! Ahaha! Ahahahaha!
Cartman: What the hell is wrong with you, Butters?
Butters: They did that on the Simpsons! Ha! Treehouse of Horror! Episode 4F02! The Genesis tub. Lisa loses a tooth, and the bacteria on it start to grow, and makes a little society, and they build a statue of her thinking she’s God! Ha! Hahaha!
Cartman: [everyone is silent for a few seconds, then] …So?
Kyle: …Yeah. So?
Cartman: Dude, the Simpsons have done everything already. Who cares?
Stan: Yeah, and they’ve been on the air for like, thirteen years. Of course they’ve done everything.
Mr .Garrison: Every idea’s been done, Butters, even before the Simpsons.
Chef: Yeah. In fact, that episode was a rip-off of a Twilight Zone episode.
Butters: Really? So I shouldn’t care if I come up with an idea, and the Simpsons already did it. It… uh…doesn’t… matter. [smiles. Everything before him is back in South Park-style] Everything is back to normal, a, I think… I think I can go back to tryin’ to destroy the world again.
Chef: Good for you!
Cartman: Yeah, that’s great Butters. Now get the hell out of my room.
Butters: [heads for the door] I feel like a spring chicken. I’m ready to wreak havoc once again! [runs out of the room. Dougie stays behind]

Wise words. Wise words indeed.

[porphyrogenitus]

In that case, the argument would be that if it is low enough to not have negative economic consequences, then that also indicates it is useless (except as a feel-good sop for the advocates; much of what Progressives do is done so they can feel good about themselves, with out any reference to the actual affects – good or bad – on the targets of their attention). That is, if it is “a modest minimum wage that is of such a low amount that it does not adversely affect employment or the economy,” then that means it is so low as to be superfluous.

If it is high enough to have any effects, then some of those effects will be the same negative ones they claim they want to avoid.

[porphyrogenitus]

I think what trips people up is a conflation of chief concerns; they assume that if Tom DeLorenzo’s argument that slavery was not Lincoln’s (and the Republican’s) chief concern, then the South must have been acting in response to the things that were Lincoln’s (and the Republican’s) chief concerns.

But the future of slavery was among Lincoln’s, and certainly the electoral base of the Republican Party’s concerns, and so the Deep South states acted primarily (though not exclusively) in response to what they thought Lincoln’s election indicated.

This does not mean they weren’t also concerned with the Republican Party’s position on, say, tariffs; and certainly the Republican Party’s position on slavery had implications for state sovereignty generally; but it is extremely (extremely) unlikely they would have seceded had they not felt the ‘peculiar institution’ was directly threatened by the election of Lincoln.

In other words, Tom DiLorenzo can be correct without it at all suggesting that the Deep South’s secessions were not motivated chiefly by slavery. This is why the position of people like him and Tom Woods has always been whether it was strictly required to engage in a massively destructive war that killed over 800,000 people and destroyed Federalism in order to get rid of slavery (especially since that wasn’t necessarily the topmost concern of the people waging the war), given that it was eliminated in all other countries without such slaughter and devastation. Even an independent Confederacy would have had to eliminate it sooner or later – and who knows – it is hard to make counterfactuals – but while in such a case it is hard to imagine the freed slaves facing no discrimination after the end of slavery, perhaps there would have been no Black Codes, Jim Crow, “Separate but Equal,” and the like. Again, in few other countries were the status of freed slaves entirely equal, but their situation wasn’t as bad, and part of how bad it became can partly be attributed to counter-reaction to how the end of slavery was felt to be forced violently upon the south through the war & reconstruction. (Note to point this out is not at all to excuse it, and I’m certainly not claiming “all would have been daffodils and magnolias and the brotherhood & sisterhood of all humanity in the South, it would have become a land of egalitarian fellowship of equality under law by 1870 if it wasn’t for that darn Lincoln fellow and his Radical Republican brethren messing with the natural evolution of things”).

(Feel free to correct me if this is wrong).

[porphyrogenitus]

IMO they have to explain why they think it is a reducto ad absurdum, if their argument is (as has been made by Progressives and their “studies show”) that “raising the minimum wage doesn’t affect employment,” or even “raising the minimum wage increases demand and thus helps the economy and produces employment” (this is also their argument for things like food stamps, unemployment insurance, &tc).

That is they’re argument rests on a belief in upward sloping demand curves for labor (or, at best, flat demand curves for labor) in the first place, so in order for the counter-argument “if it is true that raising the minimum wage doesn’t reduce employment, then why not make the minimum wage $1,000,000/hour and call for a 1/hour work week and we can just vote ourselves rich?” to be a reducto ad absurdum, they have to argue why raising it by X won’t reduce employment, but raising it by N+delta would cause all the problems they claim that raising it by X would not cause.

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