Liberty and Classical Liberalism

Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset

2010-06-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.

“The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined,” reports ZDNet’s Declan McCullagh. http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-bill-gives-obama-kill-switch-to-shut-down-the-internet.html

I don't know if this is true as I haven't yet done my own primary research, but the idea is an illuminating example of tyranny (the negation of liberty) in the name of some collective good. A collective good consisting of private things, not things publicly owned. Actually, the Internet isn't a "thing" at all - the concept is a shorthand name for how a bunch of individual assets behave and are connected to each other. Like an "economy": there really is no such thing as The Internet, it's just a name for how a bunch of real things (or real people) interact. (Don't agree? Does The Internet include pieces in Britain or Russia or China? Does The Internet stop at national (or state) boundaries? No, no more than an economy stops at arbitrary political boundaries. The federal government cannot control The Internet; all it can do is control individual assets, most of them privately owned.)

During a declared war, of course, many liberties are curtailed for the duration. That is one of the reasons it is so important for Congress to formally debate and vote on a declaration of war, and not just leave it to Presidential discretion.

Sure, the internet is a national asset. Actually it is a collection of privately-owned assets cooperating with each other that, in aggregate, can be viewed as a single thing by a metaphysical sleight-of-hand. I'm sure there are some publicly-owned pieces as well.

Our trees are national assets - they provide shade, cover for troops in the field, and generate some of the oxygen we breathe. Should the federal government be permitted to control the trees in your yard because some President decides national security, or some threat (like, perhaps, Dutch Elm Disease) endangers this particular "national asset"?

Surely our automobile fleet is a national asset. And some of the cars are publicly owned. But is there really a "thing" called our automobile fleet? Isn't it just a bunch of individual things that somebody decided to arbitrarily lump together as a form of shorthand? Are cars in a junk yard part of this "asset"?

Or your kids: certainly future adult citizens are national assets. If a plague of dirty jokes threatens the mental and spiritual well being of our kids should the President be able to take control of your kids?

Is there anything positive or productive in America that is not a "national asset"? If identification of some thing as a "national asset" justifies surrendering any liberties or rights we have regarding that thing, then there is no liberty, no personal property, not even our sovereignty over ourselves.

Absent a formal declaration of war. Congress, our elected representatives must vote on and declare war. And the war is for a limited time, only. Then everything returns to normal rights and liberties.

Does this sound paranoid? Only to those people who went berserk when the Bush Administration began intercepting overseas phone calls where one of the parties was an identified terror threat. We were told that Bush was "shredding the Constitution" and that policy would lead to elimination of all phone privacy for all citizens. When a Bush does it, it's a slippery slope to tyranny. But when a member of the other party does it, well that's nothing to worry about.

What do you think? Would it be different if a Republican Senator had proposed giving Bush the power to seize a "national asset" to protect it (and us)? x Is it OK when an angel, on the side of goodness and light, seizes your liberty, but bad when a devil, on the side of darkness and evil, does the same thing?

That's Manichean, a particular religion. Religion should not guide public policy.

Biggest Spill in U.S. History my foot!

2010-06-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press, June 11, 2010:

Scientists now say the blown-out well could have been spewing as much as 2 million gallons of crude a day before a cut-and-cap maneuver started capturing some of the flow, meaning more than 100 million gallons may have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the start of the disaster in April. That is more than nine times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, previously the worst oil spill in U.S. history. (emphasis added)

Hmmm. I guess it's the worst spill in history if you don't know history.

The Lakeview Gusher started in 1910 in Kern County, California. According to Wikipedia, over 18 months it blew 9 million BARRELS - that's about 380 million gallons - all over the countryside. I'd say that's a "spill" and over 4 times the high-end estimates of the current Gulf spill.

I was in the area of the Lakeview Gusher 60 years later, and the only evidence I could find of the gusher was a bronze plaque placed by the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans). All other environmental impacts had disappeared. Imagine that.

The Gulf spill caused by British Petroleum will have to continue unabated for the rest of the year (very likely) to become the "worst" spill in U.S. history.

The BP spill is a mess now but, like the Lakeview Gusher, we can expect it to have no long-term effect on the environment.

But pointing that out doesn't help the profit-mongering news companies sell their stories.

(Not that I'm against profit-mongering; but the Associated Press and New York Times are no more noble than British Petroleum)

How we behave shows what our values really are

2010-03-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

It is my experience that human beings and human organizations act based on their values. Not Expressed Values - what they say their Values are - but what their values actually are: Operational Values. Typically, values can be determined only by an outsider who deduces them from observations of behavior. Few of us are aware of our values, though we usually know what we would like them to be.

If you want to know Expressed Values, simply ask. Corporations delight in publishing their values on their web sites. People will tell you how they value truth even as they lie, how they value loyalty even as they betray and reward betrayal, and how they value initiative as they punish those who actually take initiative.

Determining Operational (or actual) Values requires observation and experimentation. It is a scientific process of hypothesis (I think X is one of the values of this person/organization) and test by prediction (Since X is a value, in situation A the person/organization will do M.) If the prediction is incorrect, the hypothesis is disproved and must be discarded or revised. If the prediction is correct, the hypothesis is not proved, but it does remain a possibility. Every time a hypothesis passes a test it gains strength, but it can never be proven. (see The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper for more on the nature of science vs. metaphysics.)

Postings from the author will be in an order establishing a foundation and building an argument. At least initially.

This author's fundamental principles

2010-03-10T16:45:00.002-08:00

Principles are general statements, assertions if you will, or rules.

You may say you value a principle that you don’t actually value, that is your decisions don't align with the principle.

These are the principles which guide my philosophy and should underpin what I post on this Blog. Most of them are things I have discovered, usually from other authors.

A definition:
"By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers" - J.S. Mill, "On Liberty".
By liberty, I mean protection against coercion by threat of violence - from others, rulers, government, anyone.

Basic principles (that I hope correspond to my Operational Values)

When referring to “human being” or “person” I mean an adult. If the person is an adult, these principles apply. If the principles don’t apply, the person isn’t adult.

Individual living human beings are the most important things there are.

Each person owns himself, his body, his mind, and the products of his labor.

Each person is entitled to decide what is good for him or what he wants. No other person, institution, or organization is entitled to make that decision for him.

Each person is responsible for the consequences of his decisions (more specifically, for the consequences of actions he takes based on his decision).

Not holding a person responsible for the consequences of his decisions/actions amounts to not treating that person as an adult; it diminishes him and shows disrespect.

Intentions are nice. Consequences matter. (I'd rather be saved by someone trying to kill me than be killed by someone who intended to save me.)

You show disrespect when you don’t take someone at his word. If a person says he hates you and wants to kill you, believe him unless you want to dishonor him. When a toddler says “I hate my mommy” one dismisses it as childish, responding “Oh, you don’t really mean that”. When an adult, a country, or a society says “We hate you and want to destroy you”, do we show respect by responding “Oh, you don’t really mean that” as if it were a society of children?

A human being is an end in himself, never to be used as a means for the benefit of another. (from Emanuel Kant, if you want to learn more). While it is a virtue to give of oneself for another, it is immoral to require someone to give, or to take from someone, for the benefit of another. The immorality comes from denying the value and humanity of the one taken from, the one who is used

Humanity, society, the community are all abstractions; they don’t really exist. Only individual persons exist. Society doesn’t feel pain; Humanity doesn’t suffer or experience joy; the Community has no nervous system, emotions, expectations, or fears. Therefore, working for the good of society or working to improve the conditions of humanity is just cant, meaningless drivel to justify sacrificing a real person for the alleged benefit of an abstraction, a fiction.

Popular interpretation of John Donne is romantic nonsense: all men are islands. While we interact with each other and affect each other, we are born alone, we suffer alone, we experience pleasure and joy alone, and we die alone. Of course we recognize that others are like us, if we are healthy; we sympathize, we empathize, we recognize that is happening to another by projection of what we know of ourselves; if we care about another we feel Joy at when he experiences Joy, Sorrow when he suffers Pain or Sorrow, but we cannot ever share the experiences of another. We are alone, and so are those we love.

What Is Classic Liberalism? Isn't Obama a Liberal?

2010-03-10T16:45:00.001-08:00

I’ve been arguing the philosophy of liberty and human dignity since the 9th grade – over 40 years. Mostly against people who called themselves liberals. Eventually I learned that my position was called “Liberalism” until American Progressives started calling themselves “liberals” during the 1930s. Progressives are anything but liberal, so that switch was a nice bit of obfuscation: “liberal” connotes freedom and generosity and general goodness; who could oppose those things?

Progressives call themselves "liberals" but they are not. Well, they are if you accept their redefinition of "liberal" as meaning themselves.

I don't. Not any longer.

Progressivism is a form of collectivism (socialism, if you will), a benevolent soft descendant of the Rousseauean thinking that guided the French Revolution. This Progressive thinking maintains that people shouldn't be left alone to live their lives as they see fit because they are happiest when guided by an educated elite that protects them from the machinations of an evil elite. Manichaean, essentially - the belief that humanity is gripped by the struggle between good and evil. More on Manichaean thinking in another post.

For this reason, Progressivism is Aristocratic, substituting an aristocracy of education and sensibility for an aristocracy of birth or wealth.

Anyway, Progressives act on the (perhaps unconscious) belief that people can't be left at liberty because they will be manipulated by the evil elite (capitalists, nobles, bankers, militarists, the wealthy, Darth Vader, whatever) unless guided by the Progressive elite.

To be fair, not all Progressives consider their opponents as evil; to quote Kathy from the movie Spaced Invaders: "They're not evil, they're just stupid."

Progressives know better than the rest of us. Just ask them.

At various times, Progressives have advocated government control of businesses, sterilization of the mentally (or ethnically) unfit – Planned Parenthood was founded by a Progressive who wanted to discourage Blacks and other inferior races from having children (look it up, she was proud of it) – central planning, forcing parents to send their children to government schools, and taking wealth from people and distributing it according to proper Progressive principles.

Of course, Progressives also favored the availability of contraception, wanted to prohibit child labor (ostensibly for the benefit of the children but driven more by the desire to force up wages by taking people – children – out of the labor pool), establish minimum wages (they were quite frank about doing this to keep Blacks and immigrants out of the labor market - see The State Against Blacks by Dr. Walter E. Williams for more on this) and generally changing things. Some good ideas, some that only sounded good.

Progressive President Wilson changed the U.S. military, for example, segregating Blacks from Whites.

Hey, you want change? It was a change. To a lot of Progressives it was a change they could believe in.

Under his administration, Progressive President Wilson imprisoned people for saying they didn’t want to buy war bonds. An important change to the concept of free speech, for the good of society. Cool, ain’t it?

Those opposed to change are called Conservatives. Some Conservatives oppose change for the sake of preventing any change – sort of a “no change is good” policy – while moderate Conservatives wanted to stick to certain principles (or move closer to them) and resist the “any change is good” approach of the Progressives.

After Progressives became known as “Liberals”, Liberals became know as “Libertarians”. More or less.

More recently, “Liberal” has fallen into disrepute, perhaps because of constant hammering from Rush Limbaugh and the realization that some Progressive programs, such as the 40-year war to end poverty within 5 years, haven’t worked out too well.

So, Progressives are dropping the Liberal label and calling themselves “Progressive” again. Name change can be effective for shedding a reputation or escaping indictment.

President Obama calls himself a liberal, but a Classic Liberal wouldn't agree. The President is a Progressive and I haven't figured out whether he is a Right Wing Progressive or a Left Wing Progressive. I'm not sure he knows.

***************************************
This is not a Right Wing blog. Liberalism is not of the Right nor of the Left (more on Left vs. Right anon). .

This is not a Conservative blog. Liberalism is neither for change nor against change. Liberalism is for certain principles that enable individual liberty. A Liberal is for change if it moves toward core principles and against change if it moves away from them.

A Classic Liberal, that is; not a Progressive who calls himself a liberal.

Maybe it’s a Libertarian blog; I don’t know. Check out Cato.org and see what you think.

So, what is Liberalism? The notion that individuals should have liberty, that is people should not be subject to the coercive power of the state (the government). More later.

Concepts, not Labels

2010-03-10T16:44:00.000-08:00

Blast!

I’m already getting sucked into labels and arguing about what they mean.

Liberal, Progressive, Libertarian, Left Wing, Right Wing, Conservative, etc, etc.

They all are mutable concepts as well as names of movements. Arguing about what “Progressive” does or doesn’t mean is futile: the meanings change over time. Sometimes a the meaning of a term flips completely in an Orwellian manipulation. Freedom is Slavery.

The trap is arguing in favor of or against, or simply about, labels rather than fundamental concepts.

The meanings behind labels change
Take “Conservative”, for instance. Generally it means cautious. Fredrick Hayek, in his essay “Why I am not a Conservative” wrote “Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change.” Fine. What is “change”? Lenin brought change. So did Hitler. FDR, Reagan, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Wright brothers, Bill Gates, summer, winter, sunrise, sunset all bring (or brought) change.

When Boris Yeltsin restructured Soviet governance, the Conservatives included the remaining Bolsheviks. In 1917 the Bolsheviks were revolutionaries. During the 1930s, European and American liberals lionized the Bolsheviks, hoping to make their societies more like Stalin’s Russia. By 1990 the exact same political philosophy was “conservative”, at least in Moscow. Bella Abzug a conservative??? Go figure.

In 1860, the Republican party was the party of change (elimination of slavery) while the Democratic party was the party of conservatism.

Was William F. Buckley conservative in the same way as the Bolsheviks of 1990?

Progressives believe in progress (hence the name) and the benefits of continuous improvement through guided change. The “guided change” is usually based on some value-driven view of an ideal end state, not necessarily empirical pragmatism.

Change isn’t the issue: who is doing the “guiding” and where the guide is headed are what matter.

Labels can become epithets
Reactionary generally means trying to return to the past. President Obama wants to return to the New Deal. Is he a reactionary? Well, no, but only because “reactionary” has been stripped of meaning, becoming an epithet leftists (statists and communitarians) hurl at those they don’t agree with. Since President Obama is a darling of the left, he cannot be a reactionary, no matter how much he wants to turn back the clock.

Labels can become meaningless and tend to become epithets

You can apply a “New and Improved” label to the box of detergent, but if it’s the same old stuff inside the box, the label isn’t just meaningless, it’s a lie.

I want to deal with concepts, ideas, and principles, not labels. But labels can be useful shorthand. These postings will have to be careful about definitions and sticking to them.

Uncle Milton

2010-03-10T16:43:00.000-08:00

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
– Milton Friedman

What did I mean by "Manichaean"?

2010-03-10T16:42:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I mentioned Manichaeism. What is that? It’s a long-dead religion. And it’s a way of looking at social conflict that has similarities with that religion.

Why get into religious doctrine in a blog dedicated to political & economic issues? Because Manichaean thinking infests political and economic debates.

The Manichaean world view is appealing, popular, and evidently comforting. It shows up frequently in discussions and accusations regarding, for example, the bubble-collapse of 2008 and the subsequent downturn.

For example, the opening sentences of a Slate article about Mark-to-Market accounting rules exposes Manichaean thinking:

"According to a small but powerful group of America's financial decision-makers — mostly supply-siders and those in their thrall — the chief cause of the creditmarket meltdown is not folly, or reckless lending, or the demise of America's financial management. It's an accounting rule." (Slate, “The Mark-to-Market Melee”, by Daniel Gross, April 1, 2008; http://www.slate.com/id/2187880/)

It also contains 60-year-old Stalinist cant, but that’s another issue.

The religion behind the term
Manichaeism is one of several religions or world-views that see history as the conflict between forces working for the good of humanity and forces working to harm humanity. Zoroastrianism is another. These dualistic religions believe in two equally powerful, but oppositional deities (or cosmological forces): a good god (whom good people worship positively) and an evil god (whom good people abhor). The events of history are the result of these dueling deities.

According to the article in Wikipedia, “A key belief in Manichaeism is that there is no omnipotent good power.” What happens on Earth is the result of the struggle between the two oppositional powers: open goodness and secretive, destructive badness.

This is in marked contrast to the central creeds of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which believe there is only one omnipotent God, the author of all creation. If there is evil in the world it is because God allows it or because it is somehow built into the system along with free will. Why this is, God alone knows, but He has His reasons.

Christians exhibit Manichaean thinking when they see Satan as a power independent of God’s control, working against God’s plan, and somehow actually capable of winning.

Beyond the religion to a world view
A “Manichaean View” is that there is a force for creativity and good (usually “our side” ) battling with covert forces of darkness and selfishness (usually “their side”). Bad thing happen because sometimes the bad guys win a set.

This is a comforting way of looking at things. Much more satisfying than believing the world is complex and random, that the workings of society and the universe may be beyond human apprehension, that good intentions sometimes produce unfortunate results, that people I disagree with might be as full of good will as I am, and that bad things can happen because “my side” isn’t as intelligent and capable as I’d like to believe.

Listen to the political speeches: “People are poor because of the selfishness of those in power”, “The Godless are destroying America”, etc, etc, etc.

In the above quote from Slate, Daniel Gross identifies his evil entity - “[A] small but powerful group of America's financial decision-makers—mostly supply-siders and those in their thrall” - then denounces the illegitimate Manichaean argument he attributes to that evil cabal – “[according to this evil power, the ] chief cause of the credit market meltdown is [mark-to-market accounting,] not folly, or reckless lending, or the demise of America's financial management.”

A brilliant double-whammy: blame things on the bad guys and accuse them of flawed, Manichaean thinking.

Non-religious Manichaeism is arrogant
The conceit of Manichaean thinking is: “My side knows enough and understands enough to intentionally accomplish whatever we want, including an earthly Utopia." If we have trouble along the way, it's because of an evil opposition.

Dr. Thomas Sowell calls this “we know enough to create an earthly Utopia” thinking the “Unconstrained Vision”. (see A Conflict of Visions, and The Vision of the Anointed, by Dr. Sowell).

This author believes the humans and human societies are complex far beyond the limited intelligence of any elite group of people. Therefore, Utopia is beyond our capabilities.

By “Manichaean”, I mean the belief (or claim) that policies go awry, not because the policies are mistaken or the world is simply too complex for the policies to work dependably, but because some powerful and usually-hidden group of people is secretly working to thwart those policies.

The cry “we must continue to fight the powerful, selfish special interests if we are to achieve [whatever good thing we want to achieve] " is Manichaean.

Who owns your labor?

2010-03-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

One of the basic principles I put forth is:
“Each person owns himself, his body, his mind, and the products of his labor.”

Sovereignty over the products of my labor follows from sovereignty over self, body, and mind. If a person owns his body and his mind, who but the person himself owns the effort put forth by the body and the creations of the body and mind together?

If someone else wished to exchange something for the results of my labor (dig a hole for him and he’ll give me an apple) does this not mean that I now own the “something”? I’ve exchanged part of me for something that is a part of someone else. Freely traded.

This is how wealth is created: my friend is better off with a hole in the ground and no apple and I’m better off tired but with an apple. We are both wealthier.

Hence, property or other value that derives from labor belongs to him who labored.

Property ownership is a human right
Ownership of property is the same as ownership of the self, for property can only derive from the efforts of the self.

Ownership (sovereignty) includes the right to possess, use, enjoy, and alienate. Each person can trade his property for the property (or labor) of another. Or give it away. The person receiving the property from this free transaction (free of coercion, stealth, or violence – and the threat thereof) now becomes sovereign. Ownership has transferred.

The right to own property is a fundamental human right, just as fundamental as the right to life.

The rallying cry “Put human rights before property rights” is a lie. A pernicious lie based on an ambiguity of meaning. Property has no rights, only people have rights, thus the term “property rights” refers to a category of human rights. Properly, “property rights” is shorthand for “the human right to own and have sovereignty over property”

Property merely represents a man’s work, either by direct creation of the property, by free trade of work for property, or by free trade of property for other property. (Free trade means by mutual consent, absent coercion or fraud. Trade will not happen unless both parties consider themselves better off – wealthier – as a result of the trade.) Property, like labor, can be given as a gift, of course. Hence charity and inheritance.

An anecdote:

On the evening of January 12, 1865, the U.S. Secretary of War and General W.T. Sherman met with “colored ministers and church officers” in Savannah, Georgia.
The visitors selected the Rev. Garrison Frazier, age 67, as their spokesman. Rev. Frazier was born a slave and lived as a slave until, at the age of 59, he purchased his freedom for $1,000. That’s a lot of money; for $1,000, Rev. Frazier’s previous owner could pay the wages of a free agricultural laborer for 10 to 15 years.

The Secretary asked Rev. Frazier to ”State what you understand by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by the President's proclamation.”

Rev. Frazier responded, “Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation [the Emancipation Proclamation] , is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.“

Interesting. Rev. Frazier did not speak of slavery as being owned or salable; not even being without the freedom to travel. He spoke of having his work taken by irresistible power and another man receiving it.

What is different between having ones labor, or the property (money) that labor represents, taken by irresistible power and given to a master, and having that money taken by the irresistible power of government and given to another person?

About 60% of the Federal Budget involves taking money (the product of labor) from some individuals by irresistible power and giving it to other individuals. Not for the common good or common defense, but from one person and to another person.

Seems that Rev. Frazier would consider that to be slavery.

Question:
Is taking from the Rich and giving to the Poor any less immoral than taking from the Poor and giving to the Rich? Why? Under what principles?

What can people accomplish without Gov't help?

2010-03-10T16:40:00.000-08:00

“Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a process of winnowing and sifting far surpassing our vision or capacity to design. Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception.” - “Between Instinct and Reason” by F.A. Hayek, published in the book The Fatal Conceit.

The free market is an organic, self-organizing and self-regulating system that evolves without conscious design. It becomes a system of complexity and richness that exceeds human ability to comprehend.

Conservatives see a system whose interactions are only partially understood; where the effects of changes cannot be fully anticipated so change should be cautious, incremental, and quickly reversed if adverse consequences appear.

Progressives see a complex and confusing system with features they don’t like. Progressivism holds that human ingenuity can eliminate the confusion, manage the complexity, add desirable features and eliminate the undesirable ones. If adverse consequences crop up, keep plowing ahead confident that those in charge will work it all out. If things really don’t work out, bad people are to blame (Manichaeism).

The difference is design versus evolution. Also, humility versus hubris: Progressives seem to believe “if we don’t understand it, it doesn’t make sense and we can do better.” Imagine that kind of thinking being used to design a biologic ecosystem. Yet Progressives are convinced they can design a proper economic ecosystem. Our current President being one of the chief designers.

The Conservative view is that past generations were no less intelligent than we are so their discoveries and the systems they devised (usually by trial and error) ought not be changed willy-nilly just because some intellectual is convinced he has realized something nobody else ever thought of. (Most of the Progressive social and economic programs consist of redoing forgotten experiments – forgotten because the results were bad.)

An example
What can be accomplished by people without Ivy League degrees? Consider the tusk shell or dentalia. Dentalia are the hollow shells of scaphopod mollusks. Long before Columbus was born, these tusk shells were harvested from deep waters off Vancouver Island, Queen Charlotte Islands, and north along the coast to Sitka, Alaska. According to the Wikipedia entry, tusk shells were traded into the American Southwest, the Great Plains, Alaska, and Central Canada for turquoise from the Southwest, Macaw feathers from Central America, and various dies, hides, and foodstuffs.

Imagine that: illiterate savages running a free market system covering North America west of the Mississippi, from Central America to Alaska and Canada – without a government official or Harvard lawyer anywhere in sight to tell them how to do it. Not only that, the people figured out how to harvest these shells from sands beneath more than thirty feet of frigid water – without a Department of Technology Assessment or a Small Business Administration loan.

An extended order of human interaction – an elaborate system of trade complete with a currency (the dentalia) - spontaneously developed and operated organically without any educated elite to design and guide it.

Tribes who didn’t know there WAS a Pacific Ocean were trading for Pacific Ocean shells. Peoples at war with each other still managed to trade with each other. Free markets can accomplish these things without government oversight.

It’s amazing what people accomplish when given liberty. It must confound the Progressive mind.

Liberty depends on individual ownership of property

2010-03-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that before civilization corrupted mankind, there was no private property.

Numerous philosophers and political movements have declared private property to be the bane of human welfare.

Balderdash! Every society – advanced or “primitive” that I’m aware of had private property. I suspect that the existence of private property is at least as old as our species.

Try to take something from someone who doesn't believe in Private Property
What about truly Communist societies that have abolished private property? Wellll, if they don’t have any private property, then anyone ought to be able to use any asset or piece of property, right? Head over to the Democratic People’s Republic of Whatever, where Private Property has “been abolished” and try to take one of their airliners for the weekend. If you aren’t immediately shot for attempted theft, you will be told that the 747 belongs to the People of the Democratic People’s Republic of Whatever.

In other words, the airliner is private property. Private to the Democratic People’s Republic.

The nature of property
What we call "property" is nothing but the product of labor that has not yet been consumed, destroyed, or lost. If my right to the product of my labor is as fundamental as my right to my person (see previous post "Who owns you labor?"), and property is nothing other than the product of labor which can be consumed, traded, saved, or invested, then my right to my property is no less important than my right to myself, my mind, and my body.

There has been an evolution of what kind of thing has rights. Recognition that rights adhere to individuals rather than to abstractions like "groups", "tribes", or "communities", one of my basic principles, is only a few thousand years old and revolutionary in human thinking. Absent this fundamental principle, human dignity and human equality are meaningless.

The evolution of the social unit: who can own property
Hunter-gatherer troop Alpha may share tools, food, women, and shelters freely among themselves, but if an outsider tries to participate in the communal meal or make off with one of the communal weapons, he will promptly be informed that the food or weapon belongs to troop Alpha. It is private property.

That’s different, you may say, from the what private property means in 21st century America. Really? How does troop Alpha’s joint ownership of tools differ from a married couple’s joint ownership of a house or bank account?

The variations are not in whether a society has or does not have private property – they all have it – the variations rather are in the privates: what is the fundamental unit of the society.

In Communist countries, the fundamental unit of society is the State. Individuals are merely the components that make up the State. All property (and all humans) belong to the State, whether the state has a formal structure or is simply the aggregate of all the ants in the anthill.

For hunter-gatherers the fundamental unit of society is the troop, a collection of a few families combined for mutual protection and support.

In many societies, the fundamental unit is the Family. All property and all individuals belong to one family or another. Rights are held by and responsibilities adhere to the family.

In a Liberal society, the fundamental unit is the individual person. Rights are held by and responsibilities adhere to the individual. Individuals exist before the state, not for the state. The state is created by individuals to protect individual liberties. "...to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." - Jefferson et al.

Recognition that individuals have the individual, private right to control, enjoy, use, consume, or dispose of - in short, to "own" - the products of their labor - property - is a major advance in human dignity, fundamental to increasing human wealth and welfare, and central to any meaningful individual liberty.

The Causes of Darkness

2010-03-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

Is there anyone so foolish as to walk into a darkened room and hunt for the darkness generator to turn it off so he can see?

No one looks for the cause of the darkness; rather we look for something that might create light and turn it on, or find something that is blocking light (curtains or a closed shutter) and remove it.

Darkness has no causes. Darkness is the state when there are no causes, specifically nothing that effectively causes (creates) light.

The first time I watched Charlie Rose on television he was interviewing Dr. Henry Louis Gates and Dr. Cornell West, both on the Harvard faculty at the time. During the interview, the three of them fell to discussing the causes of poverty and the importance of identifying those causes and eliminating them.

That was when it dawned on me: the discussion was utter nonsense. These three educated and intelligent people acted as if homo sapiens appeared endowed with such wealth that each family had a four-bedroom home in the suburbs with central heating, electricity, plentiful food and clean water, efficient health care, two cars, a 401K, and all the other components of first-world wealth. But, somewhere along the way, something happened to cause poverty to break out and infect the greater part of humanity.

If only we can identify that “something” and reverse it, universal affluence will be restored.

If such bright people can be such fools, will we be able to solve the problems that inhibit most of humanity from creating and sharing in the wealth that is possible?

I am chagrined it took me decades of reading “causes of poverty” articles before I realized the utter foolishness of that line of thinking. Perhaps I never paid that much attention to it. Perhaps I was handicapped by my education.

Poverty is like darkness: Abject poverty is the default, normal if you will, condition of humanity. The question isn’t “why are some people poor?” but “why are some people wealthy?” International relief agencies and organizations committed to improving the lot of the poor should be studying the causes of wealth and figuring out why they aren’t working. Studying the causes of poverty is effete.

Don’t turn off the darkness switch, turn on the light switch.

Adam Smith published his analysis of how societies create wealth 230 years ago: The Wealth of Nations. Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and others have updated and elaborated on Smith’s work, but there has been nothing to refute or replace it.

Smith explained what causes wealth, but rival world views – including those put forth by the Catholic Church, Rousseau, the followers of Marx, Fascists, and Progressives don’t like the answer. Probably because Smith’s analysis shows them as inhibiting human wealth, not contributing to it.

Am I Manichaean?

2010-03-10T16:19:00.000-08:00

Good question.

For that matter, is any movement that faces an opposing movement "Manichaean"? Are Democrats Manichaean when they recognize that there are Republicans? Are Red Sox fans Manichaean because there are Yankees fans?

Not necessarily.

If Red Sox fans believed their team failed to win the Pennant because of a sinister, underhanded, secretive plot by the Yankees to contaminate the water in the BoSox dugout, that might be a weird conspiracy theory, but still not Manichaean.

Manichaeism usually invokes a vaguely-defined, semi-hidden, preternaturally-powerful enemy that selfishly works to defeat the good things you are trying to do because this enemy wants bad things to happen. Failures and bad outcomes are blamed on ill-defined machinations of the opponent, usually involving the opponent being smarter and more organized than is humanly possible.

I believe that Progressive movements are mistaken (badly mistaken) about how best to improve the lot of humans. They misunderstand how humans interact. But Progressives are not out to harm humanity for selfish purposes.

Progressive movements evidently value abstractions like "humanity" or "society" or "social justice" more than individual humans - during the 20th century various Progressive movements (Bolshevik, Nazi, Maoist) slaughtered about 100 million of their own people, but they all did it for the good of humanity. Chairman Mao's policies included the outright killing of 50-70 million Chinese, but he did it to create a workers' paradise in China, not for his own selfish purposes and not to make China a worse place to live. Hitler killed Jews because he believed human society would be better without them. How can you blame a guy with such good intentions?

(Yes, Hitler was a Progressive. Not some extreme Conservative. Nazism was closer to Bolshevism than to Barry Goldwater.)

So, no, I don't consider my philosophy Manichaean. I don't see the struggle as between the forces of good and the forces of evil selfishness. I see the struggle as between romantic wishful thinking (including the belief that human reason can achieve anything) and a humble acceptance of human limits, the complexity of life, and the adaptive inventiveness of ordinary people.

Thomas Sowell describes it as a conflict of visions: The Unconstrained Vision of Progressives and the Constrained Vision of classic Liberals. Both visions are held by people of good will.

Rational Intellect vs. Trial and Error.

2010-03-10T16:18:00.000-08:00

Look at a hillside some time. The wilder the better (by “wild” I mean unaltered by human rationality for the last couple of decades).

Think about it. At one time there was no dirt, just rock and sand, covered by ice (if you live in latitudes above 45 degrees north) and ground by the ice down to bedrock. Eventually the ice receded, leaving bare rock exposed to the sky, and exposed to billions of organisms comprising millions of species. Each organism selfishly going about its business of surviving and multiplying, consuming things (other organisms, perhaps, or minerals, CO2, and sunlight) based on genetically derived instincts, leaving waste products and their own dead bodies.

(OK, soil blew in from more southerly latitudes; but where did that soil come from? Before life, the Earth was without soil – just rock, sand, and the dust thereof).

Some genetic variations (experiments) led to thriving populations, some led to extinction. Many led to population explosions that altered the environment followed by population collapse.

Complex order without conscious design
Eventually, by trial and error, all these selfish organisms created the complex ecosystem of interdependence and mutual benefit that we see as a lush landscape with soil, roots, insects, worms, trees, mammals, birds, grasses – an incredible diversity, richness, and effectiveness created by dumb plants and animals, all of them selfish (the only altruism is that of some higher animals towards their offspring and mates, and the collectivism of the anthill and beehive), yet all of them contributing to the well being of everything else.

All without anybody designing it. Well, without any evidence that anybody designed it – surely nobody from the Department of the Interior or the local university. If you believe in Intelligent Design, you will see God as the designer-in-chief behind it all. If you consider yourself sophisticated and enlightened, you probably don’t believe in Intelligent Design, so you have to accept the reality that the complex ecosystems on Earth were created by selfish organisms acting by trial and error.

Rational positivists will be chagrined to admit, if they are honest, that they really don’t understand how it all works. Environmentalists point out that human activities guided by rational planning rather than by experience and tradition tend to cause harm to natural ecological systems, sometimes disasters.

Ponder that hillside.

Natural ecology, si; human ecology, no!
Then consider why it is so hard for some people (including almost all politicians) to believe that humans, acting selfishly and by trial and error, could create a complex extended order of trade and mutual service that creates wealth and makes everyone better off?

Free organisms, freely pursuing their own ends, create, over thousands of generations, lush ecological systems that human rationality cannot improve. What makes Progressives (dominantly rational positivists) think a handful of them can guide the economic eco-system of human society, created by the successes and failures, habits and traditions, of millions of free people acting over hundreds of generations?

Are they that arrogant? Or do they simply want to ensure their own importance?

Ecology and Free Markets

2010-03-10T16:16:00.002-08:00

Many people act as if they believe that anything produced by evolution cold have been done better by human ingenuity.

‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.’
– F. A. Hayek

One might say the same thing about the biological specialty of Ecology. We have learned how little we really know about biological systems and our utter inability to design a better wild hillside than what evolves naturally. Even our landscaping art involves utilizing traditions and learned rules-of-thumb (heuristics) to guide natural components and subsystems that are not understood.

Reason is Limited
We are humble enough to recognize how little we understand about the natural ecology, but the educated among us still believe human systems – that evolved by trial-and-error of competing traditions and heuristics – would be improved through the application of social engineering. People who cannot imagine, let alone comprehend, the complexities and power of the extended order of human cooperation convince themselves they can run things better, and that human society has become too complex to be left to advance without the guidance of human reason.

So, a well-functioning financial system – which depended on a certain amount of government-set boundary conditions (regulation, if you will; yes government is necessary for liberty) – was irresponsibly both deregulated and subjected to perverse incentives during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration followed by fiddling with currency values, artificially pushing up housing prices while increasing the pressure on banks to make foolish loans to unqualified home-buyers (including NINJAs: No Income, No Job, No Assets). When this social engineering (fiddling) results in unforeseen trouble – withdrawal of cash from the financial sector leading to the collapse of businesses that foolishly (or greedily) took perverse actions in response to the perverse incentives – one might think the wise thing to do is back up, return to the conditions that worked, stabilize, and stop the social engineering.

Theory trumps reality
But no. The Obama administration assures us that the solution to the trouble caused by earlier fiddling is to increase the amount of fiddling.

We saw this same kind of thinking by the medical community early in the 19th century when physicians, with all the confidence of learned men, told us that the solution to fever and lassitude was to bleed the patient. If the patient became weaker, more blood was taken from the patient – the fact that the patient became weaker after the first bleeding was held to be “proof” that not enough blood was taken the first time.

If the patient were lucky enough to be poor, the doctor would take some blood and leave, letting the patient recover from the blood loss before the doctor came back to continue treatment. If the patient were well-known or rich he might have several doctors, all of whom remained in attendance and all of whom insisted on taking their own portion of blood, for the benefit of the patient. In this way both George Washington and Lord Byron were bled to death when treated for minor fevers.

Modern therapeutic bloodletting
The fiddling is called “economic stimulus” and the administration assures us that earlier bleedings – excuse me, “economic stimulus” – didn’t have the desired effect because the efforts were not strong enough. “Bush failed because he bled only $700 billion from the citizens; we will succeed because we will bleed several $trillion from the citizens.

Helping all this is the mythology that the Bush years, with its pressures on financial institutions, its irresponsible fiddling with the value of our currency, and its bailouts were characterized by a cowboy free market.

In a pigs eye.

How Much Salt?

2010-03-10T16:16:00.001-08:00

"All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." - Paracelsus

That is to say, substances often considered toxic can be benign or beneficial in small doses, and conversely an ordinarily benign substance can be deadly if over-consumed. Even water can be deadly if overconsumed.
– Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus

...to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men...
There can be no liberty without government coercion to provide consistent enforcement of appropriate abstract rules. These rules may be traditions, morality, arbitrary but necessary rules (e.g., which side of the road to drive on) and the intentional adjustments of traditions enacted as laws.

Rules are abstract in that they apply to everyone and do not exist for the benefit of anyone.

Yet government poisons liberty; weakening it and eventually destroying it. Government is like salt: a little bit is necessary for life; a bit more changes the taste of things; more than a small amount, broadly applied, kills.

Not all philosophers agree, but those people who rebelled against England and set up our nation and its government certainly believed that Government makes liberty possible, but more government does not necessarily “improve” or expand liberty. More than a little bit is too much.

Political debate ought to recognize that more than some amount is bad, yet some prefer a saltier stew than others. Our politics ought to be about how much salt to put in the stew, not whether everything ought or ought not be salted down and preserved.

Instead, Progressivism sees government as that from which all blessings flow – the only questions being what form of government and who should be in charge. Like the child who, when not getting as big a piece of cake as he wants complains that he is not getting any, Progressives mock those who recognize that government is a poison, accusing them of being closet anarchists, opposing all forms of government. To be honest, few seem to recognize both how necessary government is to liberty, and how poisonous it is to liberty.

(If Progressives disagree with the philosophy of Liberty based on limited government, they ought to be honest and put it to a vote: If 2/3 of both houses and 3/4 of the states agree, the contractual foundation of our government can be changed. Because it can be amended, The Constitution is not and cannot be dead, but it can be ignored.)

The State both enables and delimits liberty
Freedom (liberty) cannot exist in the absence of restraints on others from invading ones own sphere of legitimate autonomy – either restraints on usurpation by ones neighbors or protection from general attack on the society.

F. A. Hayek wrote (and I quote extensively because I haven’t figured how to say it better):
Freedom requires that the individual be allowed to pursue his own ends: one who is free is in peacetime no longer bound by the common concrete ends of his community. Such freedom of individual decision is made possible by delimiting distinct individual rights ( the rights of property, for example) and the designating domains within which each can dispose over means known him for his own ends. That is, a recognizable free sphere is determined for each person. This is all important. For has something of one’s own, however little, is also the foundation on which a distinctive personality candy four and it just think of environment created within which particular individual aims can be pursued.

General freedom in [Bertrand Russell’s sense of ‘ absence of all obstacles to the realization of our desires’] is nevertheless impossible, for the freedom of each would founder on the unlimited freedom, i.e., the lack of restraint, of all others.

The question then is how to secure the greatest possible freedom for all. This can be secured by uniformly restricting the freedom of all by abstract rules that preclude arbitrary or discriminatory coercion by or of other people, that prevent any from invading the free sphere of any other. In short, common concrete ends are replaced by common abstract rules. Government is needed only to enforce these abstract rules, and thereby to protect the individual against coercion or invasion of his free sphere, by others.

- "The Revolt of Instinct and Reason", The Fatal Conceit, by F.A. Hayek.

Socialism is Reactionary

2010-03-10T16:13:00.000-08:00

Whaaat?

Definition:
Well, what does “reactionary” mean? The dictionary says “extremely conservative” or “extremely resistant to change or progress”.

Wikipedia offers a different meaning, one with which I was familiar: a movement to return to a real or imaginary past, particularly the way things were thought or done in the past.

It is in this sense that I use the term.

Reinstituting slavery is surely reactionary: slavery existed for most of human existence and was only recently abolished (well, theoretically abolished, at least in the Western world). Reinstituting slavery is a step backwards, a return to the past. Advocating a return to absolute monarchy certainly counts as reactionary. So would returning to aristocratic privilege, mercantile economic policies, feudalism, or tribalism.

How about abandoning agriculture and returning to hunter-gatherer economy with the corresponding social system? That sounds REALLY reactionary, stepping backward eight thousand years.

The prototype Progressive proposes we move backwards
Yet that is what Jean Jacques Rousseau advocated: throwing off the encrustations of civilization and returning to the Eden of the Primitive Savage. Somehow Rousseau or his followers managed to convince the philosophic community that this leap backwards was “progress”. Rousseau, Saint-Simon, and followers advocated returning to the “better”, more “moral” and kinder system of early humanity: Socialism.

Socialists, Leftists, Progressives, or modern liberals still think of themselves as leading the progress of humanity. Humph. Forward to social and economic systems we outgrew thousands of years ago.

Historical progress has advanced the individual
My view of human social progress is the increasing importance of ever-smaller human units – from the troop up to the tribe, up to the ethnic group (or race), up to the nation, then down to the class, down to the extended family, down to the nuclear family, and (most recently) down to the individual person with the recognition that women are people, too. Driving forces are many and, believe it or not, include the teachings of Christ.

Hence one of my guiding principles stated in an earlier post: “Individual human beings are the most important things there are.” An individual human is more important than a family, class, nation, race, community, or any similar abstraction. Any aggregate of humans is simply that: a convenient name for some number of individuals but not a thing that exists in itself.

The Progressive ideal
What did Rousseau (and Socialists) want to return to? The hunter-gatherer society. Collective identity. Subordination of the individual to the group – the group’s plans, needs, goals, desires. Communal ownership and sharing (but only within the local group). Xenophobia: people outside the immediate group were excluded from the communalism and may be deadly enemies. Each individual existing solely for the benefit of the community and expendable if that seemed for the good of the group.

I find it peculiar that Rousseau considered this utter surrender of self – almost the obliteration of the self – as “liberating”. This from the guy who abandoned his own infants to early deaths because they would be an inconvenience to his exalted person.

(Has there ever been an advocate of Socialism who thought he should be sacrificed for the good of the people?)

Twenty-two hundred years earlier, Plato and Aristotle objected to the immoral individualism of contemporary Athenian society, teaching that Greeks should return to earlier social forms Plato and Aristotle considered more moral: essentially that the individual should exist for the benefit of the State and should act, not for his own ends but should take his place for the good of the community.

Plato and Aristotle were frank reactionaries in the 4th century B.C. Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Condorcet, and the other Socialists wanted to return to a social system older than that advocated by Plato.

What can that make Socialists but dreamy reactionaries?

Three Meanings of "Believe"

2010-03-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

In current English usage, the phrase “I believe in [X]” has at least three distinct meanings.

1)The Positive meaning: “I think [X] exists”
2)The Normative meaning: “I think [X] is good”
3)The (until I find a better term) Trust meaning: “I trust [X]”.

Much can be hidden behind this ambiguity.

Sometimes context makes the intent obvious. For example, “I don’t believe in pre-marital sex.”. Since only someone completely out of touch with humanity could think it doesn’t happen, the statement is clearly normative: it isn’t good.

“I don’t believe in perpetual motion machines” is probably a positive statement – the speaker (writer, whatever) doesn’t think perpetual motion machines exist (or can exist), though there is an outside chance the speaker doesn’t like them.

If a rock climber says “I don’t believe in this rope” he can’t mean it in the positive sense – the rope obviously exists; he might mean it in the normative sense – he doesn’t think the rope is “good” for the particular use, though he may think it is fine for another use; but he probably means it in the Trust sense: he doesn’t trust it.

This last sense is close to the Latin word “credo”, “I have faith”. For example, the Christian Nicean (or Nicene) Creed begins “Credo in um Deum…”, normally translated as “I believe in one God…” but a better translation might be “I have faith in one God” or “I trust in one God”.

As usual, however, writings can be complex, so the intended Latin meaning was probably a combination of Trust and positive meaning: the Latin verb credere evidently covers both.

Consider the Milton Friedman quote in an earlier post on this blog:
‘A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. ‘

What did Friedman mean by the last sentence, particularly “lack of belief in freedom itself”.

I think he meant “belief” in the Trust sense: “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of [trust] in freedom itself.”

But some oppose free markets, or say they don’t “believe” in free markets, either in the normative sense or in the positive sense. There is the value that free markets are simply bad and immoral, and there is the point of view that free markets can’t exist – that they are impossible – in the world in which we live.

While the idea that free markets are not possible has been plainly expressed, defenders of liberty seem to have ignored or dismissed the arguments. A mistake, IMO. Future postings will address the nature of the belief that liberty and free markets are impossible and how this derives from Manichaean religious thinking.

Normative Disbelief in Liberty

2010-03-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

An ancient reason people think personal liberty (or freedom) is not a good thing is that, by their values, it leads to immorality, impiety, and vice. Holders of the normative disbelief – actually opponents of personal liberty - don’t trust people.

I said it is ancient: Plato and Aristotle opposed personal liberty. Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, advocated an imposed ethics based on Christian principles. Christianity, Islam, (I’m not sure about Judaism), and other religions have, at one time or another, actively opposed personal liberty because, left to themselves, people do things that God (or at least the religious leaders) don’t like.

Given that absolute liberty is impossible (see a previous post), those who oppose letting people have the maximum possible liberty either a) think their own judgment is superior to that of other people or b) value something (virtue, honor, piety, God, the state, social justice, the person’s immortal soul, whatever) more than they value individual living humans.

The former look at the bulk of humanity as children or pets while the latter consider humans as tools or elements of something greater. All arguments boil down to one or the other; I can think of no third alternative.

I find both repugnant.

Positive Disbelief in Liberty

2010-03-10T16:08:00.000-08:00

This one can be peculiar. The metaphysical position that all things are predestined – hence there is no such thing as “free will” – clearly involves a disbelief in the existence of personal liberty.

Another metaphysical objection to liberty is the irrationality thesis: people are not rational beings and all (or almost all) decisions are based on emotions, instincts, hungers, hormones, reflexes or anything else but rational consideration. Thus liberty, an essentially rational concept, is impossible or meaningless. How anyone who thinks this is true can consider himself, or any group of his fellows, capable of ruling others escapes me, unless the person subscribes to some unscientific theory of racial or class superiority. I guess they believe in the possibility of liberty for themselves and their friends, but not for the unwashed masses.

Related to the irrationality thesis is the Manichaean belief: people could be free, liberty could be possible, but sinister forces (capitalists, bankers, oil companies, Lord Voldemort- pick your favorite dark villain) have the power and ability to muddle human values, spread disinformation, create false consciousnesses, appeal to base motives, and generally undermine human rationality to their own evil ends.

So the good guys have to restrict liberty to defeat the bad guys; liberty just isn’t possible until the dark forces – the evil god – are defeated. Since the evil god makes liberty impossible, the good guys aren’t out of bounds when they force people to do good things and prevent them from doing bad things.

Distrust of Liberty

2010-03-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

Normative disbelief in liberty is based on values, usually the valuing of something more than individual living humans. The values can be based on religious belief.

Positive disbelief in liberty is metaphysical often religious.

Distrust of liberty, and distrust of free markets, acknowledges that these things are possible and that they might even be good, but they might also be bad. Better to apply human ingenuity and rational analysis to monitor and guide.

Possibility of Scientific Test
Unlike normative and positive disbelief, distrust of liberty is subject to scientific analysis. It can be tested, just as the climber who doesn’t believe in (trust) a rope can test the rope. The result of the test cannot make someone trust, but it can indicate whether trust is reasonable or not. No amount of scientific testing can counter an irrational distrust of (disbelief in) elevators, airplanes, vaccinations, liberty, or free markets.

How to test? First come up with an hypothesis, maybe “The amount of personal liberty enjoyed by average people is inversely proportional to their standard of living.” That is, more liberty yields greater poverty (less wealth). Then test it.

Comparisons can be tricky because there are so many variables: liberty can have many dimensions (rights to property, rights to contract, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.), cultural and technological differences both over time and in different regions.

Wouldn’t be easy, but statisticians noodle out trends from worse starting points. And there are some relatively easy “experiments” that have been performed.

Possible Experiments
For example: in 1953, North and South Korea were equally devastated, equally undeveloped, and equally impoverished. The hypothesis predicts that the North, with little personal liberty and no free markets, would progress much more rapidly than the South and would have a higher standard of living today.

Or Argentina: one of the ten countries with the highest per capita income in 1900, the hypothesis predicts that Argentina, once the statist, anti-free-market Juan Peron came to power, would surge ahead of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and other countries suffering from free markets and personal liberty.

These, and other experiments, show the prediction is wrong, hence the hypothesis is refuted.

One could propose and test an opposing hypothesis: “Free markets and personal liberty reduce poverty and increase the wealth of a nation” via the mechanisms explained by Adam Smith. (The Wealth of a Nation… that might be a good title for his book. I’ll suggest it.)

A pattern of disproof and failure to disprove (scientific theories can never be proven: see The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper) will indicate whether trust in liberty is a good idea or not. Those with open minds will follow where the evidence leads them, those with closed minds will find excuses and special explanations (long after Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated otherwise, many remained convinced the Sun and stars revolved around the Earth) and both sides will accuse the other of being closed-minded and dogmatic.

And many who claim they merely distrust liberty and free markets will reveal that their disbelief is normative: they just don’t like liberty.

There oughta be a law...

2010-03-10T16:03:00.000-08:00

Americans have a tradition of thinking “there oughtta be law” whenever we see something we want or something we don’t like. Well, maybe so. But think, what does “having a law” mean?

It means the government’s will – whatever is required or prohibited or mandated or ruled or standardized - is ultimately backed up by this:

This is a frightening picture, and it should be. But it is a picture of what we must have: government with the will to back up its laws – our laws – with the reality of deadly force.

All laws are backed by the threat of guys with guns showing up, guys whom we expect to use those guns if they are threatened or if there is no other way to gain compliance.

Agree or disagree with the rulings that led to this confrontation (yes, the picture is real, the child is Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban national and the man on the right had been, after weeks of appeals and legal filings, ordered by our legitimate legal authorities to surrender Elian to the U.S. government; he refused) this is the necessary end point of any refusal to go along with laws and government orders.

It has to be this way. We want it to be this way, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. This is what protects us and what makes the state possible – the state without which liberty would be impossible.

“But the U.S. isn’t like Nazi Germany!” you might exclaim. True, but irrelevant. The differences between the U.S. and Nazi Germany are in the kinds of laws we have, how those laws are decided, and how long it takes from the initial defiance until the guys with guns show up, not in the force that ultimately backs the authority of the state. In a totalitarian state (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union) the confrontation shown would have occurred weeks earlier, the guy with the gun would have his finger on the trigger rather than beside it, and shots might have been fired already, even if the resisters were unarmed. In a totalitarian state, this picture wouldn't exist, let alone be available on the web.

My point is, don’t be all warm and fuzzy thinking we all pay our taxes, stop at red lights, and obey court orders because we recognize they are the right things to do. Every law passed by Congress, a state legislature, or a city council, every court ruling, every executive order is ultimately backed by the reality that guys with guns, eventually, after all appeals and arguments are ended, will show up and point a loaded weapon at you if you don’t obey.

Until all men are angels, civilization depends on it.

For every law you think is a good idea, ask yourself whether this “good idea” ought to lead to a scene like the one above if there are people who think the law is a bad idea. If you don’t think guys with guns ought to enforce your “good idea”, don’t advocate or support a law.

Self-organizing systems

2010-03-10T16:02:00.002-08:00

Modern electronics depends on high-purity, low-defect silicon crystals – single crystals many feet long - sawn into thin wafers 8” to 12” in diameter.

However, human ingenuity has not figured out how to make the needed crystals.

Come on! Of course we do. We make them all the time. There is the CZ method and the FZ method.

Think about it. No one knows how to make a silicon crystal. We know how to make an automobile engine: cast, forge, shape, and smooth the parts; drill holes where needed, and bolt the thing together. All of it understandable, most of us can visualize how it is done, and many average people have done parts of it themselves.

But growing a 12”-diameter silicon crystal requires the exact placement of 10e24 atoms per second. That’s one trillion-trillion silicon atoms, positioned to within a fraction of an Angstrom onto the crystal face, every second. There is no way we know how to do that, how to position atoms that precisely, let alone at that rate.

What we do know is under what conditions the silicon atoms will spontaneously organize themselves – precisely placing themselves onto the surface of the growing crystal, a trillion-trillion times a second. Something human ingenuity cannot even visualize (we cannot even wrap our minds around a number that large), though we can pretend to explain it using vague abstractions and physical “laws” we think we understand.

But arbitrarily fiddle with it, no matter how good your theory sounds, and you likely will muck it up. If your fiddling is based on sound moral principles and good intentions, you are guaranteed to muck it up.

If silicon atoms can spontaneously organize themselves into a perfect crystal (given the right conditions), and millions of species of microbes, plants, and animals can spontaneously create the extended order of a mountain meadow - given the right general conditions – involving interactions among organisms that human ingenuity cannot fathom, do you think millions of people might be able to spontaneously create an extended order of human economic interaction, even though it is humanly impossible to understand, in detail, how the whole thing works?

Humans are more complex than silicon atoms. Extend human civilizations are far more complex than silicon crystals and more dynamic than any meadow. If ecologists tell us that human ingenuity cannot properly manage a meadow in detail, how can Progressives imagine that they know enough to properly manage human economic interactions?

If you want the healthiest meadow, protect it and leave it alone. If you want the healthiest (and wealthiest) human society…

From "Why I Am Not a Conservative" by F.A. Hayek

2010-03-10T16:02:00.001-08:00

"At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change. In matters of current politics today they generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties. But, though the position I have tried to define is also often described as "conservative," it is very different from that to which this name has been traditionally attached. There is danger in the confused condition which brings the defenders of liberty and the true conservatives together in common opposition to developments which threaten their ideals equally. It is therefore important to distinguish clearly the position taken here from that which has long been known - perhaps more appropriately - as conservatism.

"Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism. Let me say at once, however, that I do so with increasing misgivings, and I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is not only that the term "liberal" in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, but also that in Europe the predominant type of rationalistic liberalism has long been one of the pacemakers of socialism."

Political seduction by co-opting words

2010-03-10T16:01:00.000-08:00

Pick a word, ideally one that refers to a concept or condition but not a thing. The word has to evoke a strong automatic emotional response. Best if its meaning is not well understood by the general population or can have varying meanings.

“Puppy” evokes the positive emotion, but it is too concrete.

“Health”, “happiness”, and “love” are good candidates for being co-opted. “Justice” is even better, as everyone is in favor of it, yet few have a clear notion of what it means. It’s one of those “know it when you see it” abstractions that few people can put to words. Heck, Plato didn’t have a clear definition and devoted several of his works to describing what he meant by “justice” and a “just society” without arriving at a simple statement of what the terms mean.

“Fascism” is one of the best of the co-opted words. “Fascism” evokes disgust, almost universally among Americans and Western Europeans, though few know much about it – how it arose, it’s doctrines, how it is fundamentally socialist, its similarities with Bolshevism, how it was admired by FDR and, perhaps, Woodrow Wilson. This ignorance adds to its value: people who don’t know what it means aren’t going to notice that the label has been applied to things that are not fascist or are even anti-fascist.

Meaning is forgotten, only emotion remains
If enough people loudly apply the term “fascist” to something they don’t like long enough, the negativism of the term will rub off on the target. If enough college students and professors and public intellectuals call a mother’s love fascist, without anyone calling them on the lie, eventually some of the public will view a mother’s love as a bad thing.

Behold! “Fascism”, a weasel-word: a word used to create the illusion of a clear and direct meaning, used with deliberate imprecision to mislead the audience into believing things contrary to evidence or fact. Allegedly, a weasel can suck out the contents of an egg while leaving the egg looking intact. A weasel word is the result of something sucking the meaning out of a word, leaving it a hollow shell but with the emotional content intact.

(It isn’t the word that is the weasel, it is the user.)

“Freedom” and “democracy” may be the two most powerful positive weasel words for Americans. As expressed in an old Star Trek episode, these are worship words. If you can stick “freedom” and “democracy” onto something involving dictatorship and slavery, a great many Americans will reflexively favor it.

So, the enemies of liberty regularly adopt the word “freedom” as if it were their very own and claim they are promoting democracy of some sort.

Sorry, Charlie; democracy is a method of making decisions about laws, it is not synonymous with liberty, though our founders recognized that a constitutional republic based on democratic principles was the best government for preserving liberty over the long term. Those who founded the United States worked very hard to prevent it from becoming a democracy, a society in which each person was entirely ruled by everybody else. The Presidents Bush regularly used the weasel-word “democracy” in referring to the Middle East, as if a majority in Iraq wouldn’t vote to exterminate some minority. Democracy without the rule of law becomes mob despotism. Democracy without limits to the power of the democratic government becomes mob tyranny.

Democracy: Good. Fascism: Bad. Few know what either of them mean. When reading or listening, try mentally substituting “good” for “democracy” and “bad” for “fascist”.

“Freedom” has a related problem I will discuss anon.

Liberal: Another weasel word

2010-03-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

How’s that for a weird title? Given that I call myself a Classic Liberal.

Liberalism as promoting individual liberty
Near as I can figure out, Liberalism originally was opposed to the non-Liberal economic/political systems dominant in Europe (though England was more liberal). Liberals favored individual liberty, the dignity of every person, and the rights of men as delineated by Locke and Kant. If you want a primmer on Locke, read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers – they pretty much lay out the political philosophy of Classic Liberalism.

At the time, implementing the Liberal program involved substantial changes in Europe: individual rights, security of private property, the inviolability of an individual’s protected private sphere of activity, the rule of law, the state as servant of citizens (not the other way around), equality before the law, etc.

The United States, however, was founded on Liberal principles and was, to the extent practical, given the realities of the time (the strong vested interested in continuation of slavery being the biggest failing), the leading light in implementing Liberal principles. In the U.S., being a Liberal meant seeking to preserve the liberal social/political/economic system from anti-liberal encroachments and to eliminate the existing contradictions and failings – e.g., slavery, disenfranchisement of women, racial and religious disabilities.

Liberal had nothing to do with change (just as Conservative had nothing to do with liberty). In a society that already had a very high degree of personal liberty (a condition the United States had never achieved, at least not for all citizens), a Liberal would want to prevent certain changes, not promote change for the sake of change.

A new kind of liberalism
During the 19th century, communitarians, socialists, rational constructionists, reactionary back-to-nature dreamers (a la Rousseau), and other enemies of individual liberty believed they could improve human conditions by applying their ingenuity to correct (what they perceived as) the inadequacies or injustices of the spontaneous human order based on liberty and evolving traditions. These people, enemies of individual liberty because they believed liberty led to what they perceived as injustices, believed that, by limiting individual liberty, they could somehow realize a higher form of liberty – particularly a communitarian liberty. So they appropriated the label “liberal”.

Much confusion and obfuscation followed.

This new kind of liberal essentially worshipped change: existing patterns of social interaction and human rights were so far from the Utopian ideal they envisioned that pretty much everything had to change. Progressivism pushed for change (changes they considered to be progress, not realizing the changes they proposed would lead backward to the political and economic systems that existed before civilizations; progressives unwittingly sought to undo 10 thousand years of human progress) and, as “liberal” began to be identified not with liberty but with change, Progressives also adopted the liberal label.

Advocates of the expansion of personal liberty and the freeing of individuals from state control (the new liberals depended on the increased control over individuals of an active state to achieve their visions of how humans should live), the Classic Liberals, found themselves without a label of their own.

By resisting the encroachments by the state on individual liberty advocated by Progressives and others who called themselves liberal, Classic Liberals adopted an essentially conservative posture, allying themselves (and being confused with) traditional authoritarian conservatives. Some began calling their philosophy “Libertarianism”.

Today “liberal” is pretty much a weasel word: it connotes liberty and freedom and good things while the economic and political philosophies behind the label are, denotatively, anything but liberal. Those who call themselves “liberals” generally are progressives or socialists who don’t believe in liberty and the free markets that spontaneously emerge when people have liberty. (See previous posts on “Believing” in things).

In American political discourse, "liberal" refers to modern liberals, usually Democrats or the "left wing" of Republicans. Modern liberals do promote individual liberty in just about everything but property and economic activity. To the modern liberal, individuals should have privacy and be free to decide lifestyles, sexual activity, abortion, reading materials, and the whole First Amendment gamut of individual rights. But their concept of individual liberty is limited.

Modern liberals believe individual liberty is shallow or meaningless without the wherewithal to buy things (positive liberty), but that individuals should not be at liberty to buy just anything they want: SUVs, firearms, fatty fast foods, unapproved toys, cigarettes, and a long list of neo-Puritanical no-nos. Modern liberals clearly believe one does not have the right to retain the product of his own labor, but must relinquish a part of this product so that others may buy things.

The key word in the previous sentence is "must". Christ said that we should share with the less fortunate; liberals say we must.

Government coercion (backed by the threat of violence if you don't go along) to surrender your property for use by someone else is decidedly unLiberal, in the classic sense, but today is called "liberal". Weaselly.

Further Reading:
For more and better discussion, see “Why I Am Not a Conservative” by F.A. Hayek.

Socialism is Reactionary (2)

2010-03-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

For all their Ivy League education, the leading lights of Progressive thought seem to have no sense of history. They criticize Capitalism – that extended system of human interaction that spontaneously evolves whenever people are at liberty to freely exchange their labor, talents, and property – for creating poverty amid plenty (the more thoughtful may speak of allowing poverty amid plenty) and causing vastly unequal distribution of the world’s wealth. As if all of humanity was wealthy before capitalism.

One would think these free-market critics accepted Archbishop Ussher’s calculation that creation happened on the night of 26 October 4004BC and humanity sprang forth 6 days later, eventually emerging from Eden endowed with agriculture, domestic animals, metal technology, written language, an emerging civilization, and a comfortable standard of living for all. Then, they seem to think, some time later this simple and fair world was spoiled by Capitalism which took wealth from and impoverished the many, giving it to the few.

Imagine: these anti-free-market intellectuals mock Christian fundamentalists and Biblical literalists.

Abject poverty was universal before trade
Anthropology tells a slightly different story. Twenty thousand years ago, all humans were poor, poorer than all but maybe a few thousand people living today. Life for all was brutal, parasite-ridden, and short.

This was the time of the Noble Savage, whose lifestyle Rousseau so admired and extolled.

Between ten and twenty thousand years ago, people began to trade things they had (or made) in surplus for things that improved their lives but weren’t available locally. They traded for salt, flints and stone tools, antlers and horns, pottery, dies, maybe even pretty stones and feathers for decoration. Trade, for those who could participate in it, made lives easier and allowed more people to live – increasing populations.

Extended trade isn’t practical without some amount of private property. The whole tribe can’t lug a basket of flints somewhere to be traded for a basket of salt, then haul the salt back. The trade goods had to be consigned to somebody who would undertake the arduous and hazardous trade journeys. Since the trader might abandon the goods en route (by accident or because it was safer and more convenient to leave the goods and return), those providing the trade goods would want compensation before the trader left the camp. The goods became the private property of the trader – the guy who trudged over mountains and across rivers hoping to make contact with someone or some village to trade with. The guy who faced the perils of travelling alone or with only a few companions owned the goods and took the risks.

Free enterprise (free exchange of goods and labor for mutual benefit) was born.

There were, of course, other kinds of trade such as when nomadic tribes periodically gathered for mass exchanges. Perhaps this kind of trading could be communal, without individual property. But only a saint would trudge hundreds of miles to trade communal goods, and few people are saints.

Agriculture advanced individuality, liberty, and private ownership
Sometime around ten thousand years ago, people began to domesticate plants and animals. Agriculture and animal husbandry further increased the wealth – and ability to sustain larger populations – of farmers and, through trade, would have increased wealth of hunter-gatherer societies who traded with farmers. Seeds, food stuffs, and animals would become trade goods. Human population grew, civilization began.

Societies that experimented with individual ownership of land tended to become wealthier and grew faster than those still holding everything in common. How else would the novel tradition of private property emerge but from evolutionary trial-and-error by human societies?

Of course, everyone was unbelievably poor by the standards of 21st century America or Europe. Poor, in fact, by the standards of most of today’s third world. Yet, most people were better off than anyone had been ten thousand years earlier.

Individual liberty and free exchange enable creation of wealth
Fast forward another ten thousand years
Despite fits and starts and interruptions by rulers, philosophers, and religious prophets who figured they were smarter or more virtuous than everybody else (many of whom did steal from or enslave others), voluntary exchange of goods and services for mutual benefit – the free market – has increased wealth to the point where only 2/3 of humanity is poor, and even those poor are wealthier than anybody was before the extended order of mutual trade got started.

By the way, those 4 billion poor live in societies that have yet to try individual liberty, secure private property, and full participation in the extended economic order. The poor generally live in countries run by smart people educated in European collectivist thinking - an elite that knows better than others how people should live. People are poor because their social traditions or their rulers won't let them create wealth, not because of some “exploitation” a hundred years ago.

Don't believe it? The experiment has been run many times, always with the same result: liberal economies (capitalistic) reduce poverty faster than communal or planned economies. For one experiment, consider the two Koreas. Both were equally devastated in 1953. Both had wealthier sponsors to get them started. Even then, South Korea didn't really take off until it more fully liberalized its economy.

To eliminate poverty, encourage creation of wealth
In 20 thousand years, capitalism has reduced human poverty from 100% abject misery to 33% comfortable or wealthy and the rest better off than anyone was before trade and individual (private) property.

Progressives want to try something other than capitalism, usually reverting to the ancient communal social/economic systems (socialism) humanity began moving away from over 10 thousand years ago. Capitalism evidently has failed because things aren’t perfect yet: capitalism isn’t done and hasn’t yet worked for those who haven’t tried it. Better get rid of it.

That’s real bright. Sort of like disinheriting a 10-year-old child because she hasn’t yet received a bachelor’s degree.

Either that or Progressives really think, like Bishop Ussher, the world began in October 4004 BC, and everybody lived comfortably until they moved away from socialism.

Capitalism Happens

2010-03-10T15:35:00.002-08:00

While there are advocates of Socialism in its many guises, nobody ever advocated capitalism or a free market economy. The advocacy was for Liberty.

Nobody examined feudalism or mercantilism and proposed something new they called “Capitalism”, a system they thought up and designed. Nobody dreamed up private property and individualism as a replacement for primitive socialism.

Adam Smith didn’t dream up Capitalism; instead he was examining how wealth was created in the absence of an imposed system.

Nobody creates Capitalism: it just happens whenever people are given liberty. It works best in an environment with a stable currency, protection of persons and their property, enforcement of contracts, and security from invasion. In fact, as long as the State isn’t too effective at whole-sale violation of these rights, people have always spontaneously created economies that increase their wealth (and make it possible for the society to support more people) based on trade, free markets, and application of capital to increase productivity.

Fredrick Hayek calls this “the extended order” and Adam Smith explained how it worked: selfish people discover that the only ways to improve their situation (increase their wealth) are either take up thievery (and risk the punishment) or do something to improve the lives of others.

I suppose, if you don't like the extended order people spontaneously create - that which is called "free market capitalism" - you just don't like the way people behave when free. Maybe you think that enlightened and educated people, even though they don't understand the spontaneous self-ordering of human interactions (nobody can, it's too complex, perhaps the most complex thing in the Universe according to Hayek), can devise a better way.

Most tyrants have thought the same thing.

What is Capitalism?

2010-03-10T15:35:00.001-08:00

Capitalism, free enterprise, free markets: terms often used, often despised, often extolled.

Vaguely, they all mean the same thing. I tend to use them interchangeably, though there are differences.

“Free market” seems to refer to the situation where people are at liberty to trade goods and services for money or other goods and services. Or not to trade. In a free market economy, exchanges happen only when both parties anticipate being better off (wealthier) after the exchange.

“Free enterprise” seems to mean people are at liberty to enter any enterprise or start any business they wish and their operation of this enterprise or business will be free from outside coercion – by the state or otherwise.

“Capitalism” refers to an advanced state of free enterprise where capital (savings) itself becomes a commodity of exchange. When Capitalism appears, people who have saved money (capitalists) can rent their savings to others or directly employ their capital to increase the productivity of the labor of others. Under Capitalism, many people exchange their labor for money directly, using somebody else’s capital to produce things, rather than exchanging for money goods they have labored to produce using their own capital.

Strictly speaking, Capitalism can exist if the capital is owned in common or owned or controlled by the state: State Capitalism. But in common use, “Capitalism” means a free-enterprise, free-market system.

Hayek's Extended Order

2010-03-10T15:34:00.000-08:00

Fredrich Hayek wrote about the unplanned, unguided, self-organizing system of economic exchange that spontaneously springs up among people when they discover that they can improve their lives by trading with strangers. The extensive trade among the hunter-gatherer societies of western North America, using tusk shells (dentalia) as a unit of exchange (money), is an example of such a system. (See the post “What Can People Accomplish without Gov’t Help” in this blog). Other examples include the extensive trade systems that sprang up in Allied POW camps during WWII, typically using cigarettes as both trade goods and money.

Hayek calls this self-organizing system “an extended order of human interaction” or simply the “extended order”. (Not very catchy; more commonly it is called a free market economy.) Hayek considered the world-wide extended order of the late 20th century (he died in 1992) to be the most complex system in the known universe.

The result of unplanned evolution by trial and error and guided by evolving traditions, an extended order appears whenever people have sufficient liberty (i.e., personal freedom, rights to control and dispose of property, protection from coercion, the right to enter into enforceable contracts). The operation of the extended order cannot be planned nor designed by human ingenuity; it is simply too complex even to be fully understood, let alone improved by conscious intervention. (Kind of like a wild meadow: human ingenuity can modify it, muck with it, even destroy it, but cannot improve how it functions. All human ingenuity might do for a meadow is add water, and even that can ruin it.)

States are not necessary for the extended order to appear, and their only positive role is providing the minimum protection from external or internal coercion, protection of private property, enforcement of contracts, and (possibly) a stable monetary system. Other than that, state actions – however well-intended – only hinder the efficient operation of a free market economy. While the state cannot create the extended order, it can damage or restrict it.

People are stubborn and sneaky about liberty, however. Whatever sliver of liberty they can eke out is used to set up black markets, underground economies, barter systems, and other things despised by social engineers.

The extended order consists of free markets and free enterprises: people living their lives and interacting with others as they choose.

Many people think this is a bad thing. I don’t. I celebrate the extended order as the supreme, and ever evolving, accomplishment of ordinary people.

Liberty vs. Freedom (1)

2010-03-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

Time for insufferable pedantry or, if you prefer, boring attention to detail. Because clarity of communication depends on clarity and precision of the meanings of words.

In these writings I try to never use the word ‘freedom’ except when quoting another. Instead, I use ‘liberty’. The reason is that ‘liberty’ is more precise as it has fewer meanings and is not derived (in English, anyway) from an adjective with even more meanings.

Multiplicity of Meanings Can Eliminate Clarity
Any word that has multiple meanings has correspondingly many ways of being used in communication or thought; thus if context is not exactly clear, ambiguity results. Ambiguity is the enemy of precise thought and the darling of rhetorical legerdemain. (George Orwell discussed this at length in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.)

‘Freedom’ has 9 meanings and ‘free’ has 17. ‘Liberty’ has 5 meanings, one of which is the nautical term for a short leave of absence. Scientific terms, in contrast, typically have only one meaning as science depends on precise, exact communication.

‘Freedom’ is a derived word: a noun based on the adjective ‘free’. The first definition of ‘freedom’ is “1. The condition of being free of restraints.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, as found at Bartleby.com.) The first definition of ‘free’ is “1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty” (Ibid). I find myself thinking, in a vague way, that ‘freedom’ is simply the condition of being free; this vagueness seems common. This is the basis of the rhetorical legerdemain, the trickery.

This rhetorical trick consists of extolling the virtues of a concept, building enthusiasm for the concept, transferring the enthusiasm to a term for the concept, and finally transferring the enthusiasm to a different concept that uses the same term. This trick is easier with ‘freedom’ than with ‘liberty’.

An Example
“Americans love freedom!” (applause) “America is ABOUT freedom!” (cheers) “All Americans want to be free!” (more cheers) “You want to be free!” (of course, wild enthusiasm) “You want all Americans and all people to be free!” (prolonged cheers) [So far, everything conforms to the first definitions of ‘freedom’ and ‘free’. The audience has ceased thinking and is reacting to the wonderful word ‘free’.] “Freedom, liberty, not subject to the whims of tyrants, free to think, speak, and worship as you please, free from the controls of a police state, free from censorship, free from domination, free from anxiety that our children will lack the freedoms we so enjoy” (crowd goes wild). “Free from the oppression of others, free from the oppression of fear, free from the disabilities of ignorance and the chains of poverty…” [Here the speaker has performed his trick, his slight-of-hand: the speaker has subtly shifted to a different meaning of the word ‘free’: “4a. Not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance b. Not subject to a given condition” (Ibid)] “No American can be free if he or she is chained by poverty; no American is free if imprisoned by illness; no American is free if tyrannized by worry about losing a job or starving during retirement.” [The speech has now frankly shifted to definition 4, not definition 1] “That is why I am proposing that all Americans have a guaranteed income throughout their lives, unlimited access to medical care, and lots of other goodies: because these are necessary for the freedom that all Americans cherish” (more cheers) “To have these freedoms we must, of course, ask all Americans to contribute their incomes to guarantee the common freedom of all!” (Prolonged demonstration of enthusiastic support for what the speaker has just said)

Note how the speech subtly shifts a paean to liberty – absence of government coercion – into a call for complete state control of all income and wealth. Utter lack of liberty in the name of freedom.

If you pay attention, you will notice this is pretty common - from all points of the political spectrum - though not always in the same speech. Sometimes the trick is divided up into several different performances.

This one justifies tyranny as a way to make people free. Easy to do because of the many meanings of ‘free’.

A Carefully Balanced Tray

2010-03-10T15:28:00.002-08:00

Perhaps you have seen something like this; if not, most of us have been in restaurants enough to imagine it:

A busy restaurant. The wait-staff ranges among the tables balancing trays carefully loaded with meals. Each waitress knows how to load and unload the tray to maintain balance and avert meals crashing to the floor. Among themselves they call this the ‘free-tray-loading system’.

A new assistant manager shows up. This new assistant manager has no experience working in a restaurant, has no knowledge of the actual operations of a restaurant, but he has eaten in many restaurants, has a Harvard law degree, and has the power (perhaps he’s the owner’s nephew) to improve things.

This new, bright, superior assistant manger sees something he does not like in the way some trays are loaded. Because of his education and high IQ, he knows he can make an improvement, so he begins fiddling with (“improving”, he says) how the plates are arranged as the waitresses and waiters pass. This continues for several days, as waiters cope with the rebalanced loads, and the assistant manager gains confidence in his expertise.

Up to this point, there hasn’t been a tray dropped in the restaurant for many years.

One day, after the assistant manager makes an adjustment, the waitress progresses 20 feet towards her table while struggling with the unbalanced tray, then drops the entire thing. Food and dishes crash to the floor, splattered patrons upset their own tables as they jerk in surprise, and the restaurant business comes to a halt – a major crisis.

The assistant manager could respond in one of two ways:

1) “Oops! I guess I better leave things to the people who know what they are doing.”

2) “This just shows that the wait staff doesn’t know how to load and handle trays on their own. The ‘free-tray-loading system’ has failed. I must step in and manage this.”

The Parable Explained
With Congress and the previous several Administrations ever more active in fiddling with how the experts ran the mortgage markets, fiddling by the Bush administration brought trays crashing to the floor, causing a crisis in the entire financial system.

Congress and the new Administration have solemnly given response number 2.

Liberty vs. Freedom (2)

2010-03-10T15:28:00.001-08:00

I try to use the word ‘liberty’ rather than ‘freedom’ and the term ‘at liberty’ rather than ‘free.’ Not because I don’t like ‘freedom’ and ‘free’, less because I don’t like the concepts behind them, but because ‘free’ has many meanings. Use of the more precise terms eliminates potential ambiguity in what I am saying and, more important, forces me to be clear about what I am thinking.

‘Free’ can mean things antithetical to liberty. People can be made free of sin, or free of the contradictions inherent to capitalism (per Marx) only by making them decidedly unfree in other ways. To be kept free of sin, somebody must prevent the people – by force and threat of violence – from doing those things some authority considers sinful.

Liberty can be extinguished in pursuit of freedom, depending on what is meant by ‘free’.

Origin and Definition
‘Liberty’ comes to us from the Latin ‘libertas’, itself a noun based on the Latin ‘liber’ meaning free. ‘Liber’, however, has not been adopted into modern English in any form I am aware of.

The American Heritage Dictionary (online at http://www.bartleby.com/61/1/L0150100.html) defines ‘liberty’ as :

1a. The condition of being free from restriction or control. b. The right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner of one's own choosing. c. The condition of being physically and legally free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor. See synonyms at freedom. 2. Freedom from unjust or undue governmental control. 3. A right or immunity to engage in certain actions without control or interference: the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights. 4a. A breach or overstepping of propriety or social convention. Often used in the plural. b. A statement, attitude, or action not warranted by conditions or actualities: a historical novel that takes liberties with chronology. c. An unwarranted risk; a chance: took foolish liberties on the ski slopes. 5. A period, usually short, during which a sailor is authorized to go ashore.

The first three meanings refer to being unconstrained by human or state agencies. None of the definitions have anything to do with being immune to unpleasant conditions (hunger, fear), uncontaminated, available at no cost, or any of the other meanings of ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ that are not synonymous with ‘liberty’.

What I mean by ‘liberty’
Ludwig von Mises wrote:
‘This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to its own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual’s freedom is not other people’s violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production.’
– Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality p. 3

In this passage, von Mises defines the ‘liberty’ meaning of ‘freedom’. I would simply substitute ‘liberty’ for ‘freedom’ and ‘at liberty’ for ‘free’ in the above passage.

Fredrich von Hayek defined freedom, or liberty as “independence of the arbitrary will of another”.

I accept the definitions given by Mises and Hayek. In my words, ‘liberty’ is “the condition of being not subject to the will of another person or institution under the threat or actuality of violence.” A person has liberty to the extent he is immune to violence, particularly legitimate violence. Liberty means being able to ignore the will of another without suffering violence to ones person, property, nor the suffering of violence by proxy: “do what I want or I’ll hurt your friend.”

The only constraints facing an individual in his or her pursuit of desires or implementation of a life plan are the realities of the physical world (which include the scarcity of desirable things), the limitations of his or her body and mind, and the requirement not to interfere with the liberty of anyone else. (Enforcement of this last limitation is why the state, with its monopoly on legitimate violence, is necessary for the realization of human liberty.)

This is merely a restatement of the American Heritage definitions 1&2 (above). Obviously, this is synonymous with the definition of ‘freedom’ commonly used in political contexts by Americans. Similarly, being ‘at liberty’ or ‘in the condition of having liberty’ is synonymous with ‘free’ as commonly used in the same context.

I prefer ‘liberty’ and ‘at liberty’ simply because there is less room for ambiguity, not because of any disagreement with the appropriate definitions of ‘freedom’ and ‘free’

Ending Patriarchy by Exalting the State

2010-03-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

A peculiarity dawned on me this morning: Progressive women don't want to be protected, guided, or cared for by a man in their lives. A good thing, IMO.

They want the State to do it. A bad thing, IMO.

Strange. Stand up for your rights, then surrender them to the government.

Maybe it's just about men, not female autonomy.

Conflicting Moral Traditions (1)

2010-03-10T15:00:00.002-08:00

We are primates. Our branch of the Primate order, Simians, includes monkeys and apes, almost all of which live in communities commonly called “troops”. Orangutans are, I believe, the only Simians that live solitary, isolated lives.

Simians split off from other primates about 65 million years ago (about the time dinosaurs disappeared). Since almost all modern simians live communally in isolated troops, it’s a safe bet that our ancestors, all the way back until before apes split from the Old World monkeys 30-some million years ago, lived communally in troops. Being universal, communal living with the behaviors that go along with communal living must be instinctive to all apes. All apes (but the one species that evolved separatist instincts) including us.

Simians are smart. Pre-programmed robot-like behavior is inconsistent with the flexibility and wide range of behaviors exhibited by simians. Our actions can only be guided, not determined, by genetic instincts. Think about it: as humans our actions are guided primarily by our thoughts and emotions. Thoughts derive from cultural learning, but even our thoughts are intertwined with emotions. Our actions to obtain food are learned but are driven by our dislike of feeling hungry. Even our sexual drive is emotional, leading us to desire actions we can control. While the desire is instinctual, what we do about the desire, how we act, is under the control of our thoughts as well as other instinctual emotions (like the fear of being killed by her husband).

We evolved with instinctive emotions leading us to desire communal living and the behaviors necessary for the success of the community: altruism, affinity for others, loyalty to the troop, acceptance of leadership, sharing, submersion of the self to communal needs, and dedication to communal ends like finding food or shelter or protecting the troop from predators (and other troops).

Hmmm. Altruism. Affinity for others. Loyalty to the community. Submersion of the self. Acceptance of communal leadership. Sharing. Communal objectives taking precedence over personal objectives.

Sounds like… Socialism! And it is. Socialism is instinctive in humans in that our emotions favor the communitarian behaviors of Socialism over the individualistic behaviors of free-market Capitalism.

That is why I claim that Socialism is reactionary, anachronistic, a throwback to our past. But something we still, instinctively, find emotionally satisfying. Our instincts make us desire socialism.

Conflicting Moral Traditions (2)

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Modern humans evolved from earlier species that had, for millions of years, existed as roving troops of, perhaps, a half-dozen to a dozen breeding-age females, their offspring, mates, juveniles, and non-breeding elders. They lived by gathering and hunting what they needed to survive.

No individual could survive for long without belonging to a troop, and a troop’s survival depended on all members working together to keep death rates below birth rates and out-migration balanced with in-migration as young adults moved to other troops in search of mates. Every individual depended on every other individual for survival and survival was precarious with times of plenty and times of dearth and famine. Life required the sharing of bounties as well as shortages and protecting other troop members from predators, even at the risk to oneself.

For 90% of our species existence, this was how all humans lived. Groups isolated in remote jungles still live this way and are occasionally discovered.

Troops comprised of individuals whose emotions moved them to support the troop community, individual who liked helping others, enjoyed sharing, working towards common aims, and protecting others would be more successful (and more likely to produce surviving offspring) than troops of individuals lacking these desires. Indeed, individuals lacking communal emotional drives would wander off, or be driven off, and not survive. Rugged individualism was a fatal strategy.

It would be a marvel if our instinctive emotions, developed over millions of years of evolution, were not those that supported the communal life of a small band or troop, the micro-cosmos (to use Hayek's term) of human society.

Socialism and communalism are instinctively attractive to humans. The morality of Socialism appeals to us and is more emotionally satisfying than the traditions and morality of free markets and the extended order of human interaction.

Unfortunately, communalism works only among small troops of familiars living on the edge of survival. Socialism has nowhere taken human prosperity to any higher level than barely surviving – poverty almost unknown today. Human wealth and security, along with the large populations we have achieved, appeared only after the traditions and standards of the micro-cosmos became modified and ultimately replaced by evolving traditions supporting human interactions for mutual benefit throughout the world outside the small band or troop - the macro-cosmos. Individuals doing things for the good of people they do not know (or even know exist) and receiving, in exchange, benefits from the efforts of distant others.

Conflicting Moral Traditions (3)

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Morality and Traditions of the Micro Order
Hunter-gatherer societies with their communal moral traditions – altruism, submersion of the self, accepting and working toward communal aims, and acceptance of personal risk for the good of the troop – enabled modern humans to survive and our population to expand to all continents but Antarctica. These instinctive moral traditions, which can be called the behavioral traditions of the micro order (the system of interactions among members of a troop), seem to have been the sole mode of social organization for perhaps 90% of our species’ existence.

But small-group socialism has its drawbacks. Related troops familiar with each other get along as part of a larger “tribe” but an unknown group of people was any troop’s most dangerous enemy. Though an individual would be helpless, a dozen or so adults could deal with almost any predator - big cats, bears, even a pack of wolves – but an unknown troop of humans might have the wherewithal to annihilate the entire troop. Other humans would be as intelligent and as organized as the defenders.

It is likely that xenophobia is instinctive.

Consider: when Europeans finally found the Americas, there were people living at the bottom of South America, Tierra del Fuego, a miserable place to eke out a living, 15,000 miles from where people migrated across the Bering Sea. The Yaghan people evidently made the trip in about 5,000 years. Certainly they didn’t settle there because they liked the view: they moved there to escape attacks by other tribes further north.

Limited Applicability
The instinctive morality of the micro order, the socialism of the isolated troop, depend on all individuals being familiar with each other and each being assured that everyone else in the troop abides by the same morality.

Though necessary for survival in small groups of hunter-gatherers, the instinctive emotions don’t work for an extended range of interactions. We cannot be altruistic towards people we don’t know exist. We cannot unselfishly do things for the benefit of folks we’ve never met. We can’t pursue common ends with distant people without surrendering to a dictatorial power.

Successful interaction for mutual benefit with distant or unknown people (trade) depends on traditions and morality different from those of the micro order.

Trade enabled the feeding of more people. Trade moved useful items – e.g., flints, sinews for bow strings, hides and furs, foodstuffs – moved from places of abundance to people who could not find these things locally. People could spend more time gathering food rather than searching for needed items or travelling to where the items were available. A troop didn’t need to travel many miles to a quarry to get flint for tools and spear points, the flint would come to them.

Trade made fixed settlements possible and enabled the development and spread of agriculture.

Changes to the Old Instinctive Morality
To be widespread and successful, trade needs changes to the instinctive morality and traditions of small-group socialism that had served humans and our predecessors for millions of years.

Conflicting Moral Traditions (4)

2010-03-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

Morality and Traditions of the Macro-Cosmos Support Larger Populations

The First Change: Private (or Several) Property Replaces Common Property
Efficient trade depends on individual, or private, property. Long distance trade cannot be conducted by entire communities. People specialized: some traded, some gathered food or made tools, and all were made better off by trading the products of their efforts and talents.

If a troop loads up a trader with local flints to trade with the mountain people for furs they wanted assurances that the trader wouldn’t, at the first sign of a hungry wolf, ditch the flints and hustle back to the troop for communal protection and communal food. Solution: sell the flints to the trader by demanding from him things of value before he left. The flints became the trader’s property, his private property, not goods held in common. On his return with furs, his furs obtained in trade with the mountain people, the trader would trade furs for more flints: his flints, not the troops common flints.

Second Change: Individual Judgment Replaces Communal Judgment
Trade depends on individual judgment and individual knowledge, not the communal wisdom of the troop. To the extent that a trader was on his own (or with a few colleagues) it was up to the trader to decide how many flints to exchange for how many furs and, on the other end, how many furs to exchange for how many flints. The trader had to know where to locate the people with the best furs, how to communicate with them, and how to assure them he was not a threat. And not a cheat: you can’t trade with someone after you’ve cheated him.

Trade depends on the trader working towards his own ends using his own judgment, not towards communal aims based on communal judgment.

Third Change: Exchange for Mutual Benefit Replaces Altruistic Giving
Trade depends on voluntary exchange for mutual benefit, not on the altruistic sharing that cements relationships and sustains a communal group. The trader expects to make a profit on each exchange and learns that this is possible only if those he is exchanging with also make a profit – improve their circumstances.

Fourth Change: Greater Specialization
Trading enables individuals to make, find, or capture something not because the troop (or someone in the troop) needed or wanted it but because it could be traded for something the individual wanted. Trade withing the troop enabled the specialist to eat without hunting or gathering food. Other specialists would gather food, perhaps using tools made by the specialist to increase their productivity. Because not everyone had to spend most of his time looking for food, the society could support more people who could live longer lives.

Now, One Need Not Be "Good" to Provide Benefits for Others
These changes are related to, or encouraged, individualism rather than communalism. Even selfish people contributed to the well being of others as they could gain for themselves only by providing gain for others. The new morality and its supporting traditions enabled the creation of an extended order (extended beyond the local troop or those few troops nearby) of voluntary interaction of people working for the benefit of, and receiving benefits from, those distant and unknown. This extended order operating in the macro-cosmos depended on the evolution of morals and traditions quite different from the instinctive morality that guided the communalism of the micro-cosmos.

Conflicting Moral Traditions (5)

2010-03-10T14:53:00.000-08:00

Private property, Exchange for mutual benefit, Individualism, Personal aims, Personal judgment, Tolerance of those who don't fit into the unselfish band or community, Tolerance of strangers, and Specialization to the point that gathering food was no longer necessary for everyone: all are behaviors and traditions contrary to the instinctive morality of the isolated troop.

Yes, there is some specialization within the communal society of a band, but not to the degree that is common in a trading society.

The morality and traditions - the rules - supporting the extended order of the macro-cosmos had to evolve by experience as some traditions enabled prosperity while others hindered it. Bands of humans with the right traditions would thrive and their populations would expand; other bands would adopt those traditions of behavior or suffer relative declines. Knowledge, ideas, and traditions are also traded along with goods.

The new morality and traditions, the macro morality that enabled the extended order of human interaction, enabled the vast creation of human wealth ultimately leading to the prosperity of the United States in the 21st century and support of our far greater populations than are possible with the social order of hunter-gatherer societies.

Yet we remain with our instinctive motivations, our longing for the socialism of the communal micro-cosmos.

The rules are very different:

Instinctive behaviors, morals, and traditions that make the micro-cosmos function
Communalism
Group ownership of all things
Altruism
Working to group ends
Wisdom and traditions of the group
Everybody works together
Cooperation
Troop self sufficiency
Distrust of strangers
Nonconformists expelled (to die)

Culturally-evolved behaviors, morals, and traditions that make the extended order function throughout civilization
Individualism
Personal (private) property
Exchange for mutual benefit
Working to personal ends
Knowledge of the individual
Labor specialization
Competition
Interdependence with outsiders
Cautious openness to strangers
Nonconformists given specialized roles

Notice how the two are incompatible, almost opposites?

The wealth-generating extended order of voluntary human interaction cannot spontaneously develop if everyone or every group operates withing the rules of the micro-cosmos. Elements of the macro-cosmos - families, associations, individual firms, for example - may function very well with internal behaviors consistent with the rules of the micro-cosmos, but each element has to operate under the rules of the extended order when dealing with most other independent elements. Elements that apply the micro rules to dealings with outside groups will not be able to participate in the extended order nor share in the wealth that the extended order creates.

The extended web of human cooperation that extends world-wide did not begin to develop until the rules of the micro-cosmos evolved to facilitate interactions with the wider world.

On the other hand, a family, a church, or an individual firm cannot survive if its internal inter-human relations are not governed by the rules of the micro order. Another name for the rules of a successful micro-cosmos is "teamwork".

As Hayek wrote in his essay "Between Instinct and Reason":
‘If we were to apply the unmodified, un-curbed, rules of the micro-cosmos ( i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once’ (emphasis in the original)

The Instinctive Appeal of Socialism

2010-03-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

Socialism is appealing. Like puppies and babies and those of the sex other than our own, socialism resonates with deep instinctive emotions and a visceral recognition of the way things “ought to be”. The way, in fact, things were for millions of years of hominid evolution and for 90% of our species existence, the way of human social and economic organization when we struggled with grinding poverty unimaginable in European, African, Asian, and American civilizations for the last three or four thousand years.

Home Was Socialist
Small group socialism was the way of life for all apes, including ourselves, until human populations became large enough to move beyond the micro-cosmos and evolve traditions and morals that enabled widespread human interaction through trade, interaction that enabled the creation of wealth to move us out of the poverty that characterized our existence up to that point.

Socialism as we know it is the imagined result of implementing the rules of the micro-cosmos throughout the broader society. With its many manifestations - Bolshevism, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. – Socialism evidently emerged as a social philosophy when European intellectuals became aware of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies of the Caribbean, recognizing in those societies the object of their instinctive longings.

Philosophers and Preachers
Philosophers, at least since Plato and Aristotle, had objected to the evolved morality of the extended order as contrary to the essence of humanity. Plato wrote that individuals exist for the good of the state, not the other way around. Plato didn’t like what happened when people were at liberty.

Christ emphasized the micro-morality and the need for people to treat those around them as if they were members of the same troop. If one ignores the religious aspect of His teachings, Jesus preached the importance of the micro-morality to people prone to ignore it, making life miserable even amid prosperity.

Many Christian preachers and saints despised the macro-order and its morality. Much of Christianity still views the morals of the extended order as evil, even as the macro-morals contribute to the reduction of human misery.

Discovery of the hunter-gatherer troops in the New World offered hope that the age-old longing might be realized.

Rousseau believed that mankind took a wrong turn, sacrificing the instinctive emotions and morality of the isolated troop, the micro-cosmos, for the supposed benefits of civilization. Rousseau wrote of the noble savage, natural and untainted by civilization (also untainted by sufficient food, security, and the prospect of a long life) as the human ideal. The French revolution sought to make France into one big, happy troop of people acting with the harmony of those desperately clinging to existence but without the desperate clinging.

All the world knows how that turned out.

Rationalization
Condorcet, Godwin, and others caught the bug. Human nature being what it is, these intellectuals deluded themselves that their instinctive longings were the result of rational analysis of how to improve the lot of humanity. They designed Utopian castles in their heads to justify the instinctive emotions in their guts.

We all make decisions based on emotions, then use our reason to justify those decisions, typically deluding ourselves that we made the decision rationally. Think of how difficult it is to convince someone he has made a bad decision by using rational arguments.

Pro-socialist arguments inevitably are appeals to emotion, even if clothed in elaborate rationality, because we are instinctively drawn to socialism. We long for the certainty and simplicity of the small troop, our instinctive home.

Should and Must

2010-03-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

Morality tells us what we should do (or not do) and what kind of behavior works in certain situations.

Laws tell us what we must do (or not do) if we are to avert violence to ourselves. Legitimate violence, violence against which there is no recourse.

Morality has no effect on individual liberty.

Laws restrain individual liberty.

For Christians, the Gospels tell what you should do (and what is necessary to gain the Kingdom of Heaven) but not what “musts” to impose on other people by your own power or by invoking the power of the state. Christianity is about individual “shoulds”, not collective “musts”.

Although all laws, in a sense, limit individual liberty, paradoxically, individual liberty – in the sense of having sovereignty within one’s private domain – depends on certain kinds of laws that limit one person’s liberty to trespass on another person’s liberty.

Government and its laws are necessary for liberty to exist. But, beyond a minimum, laws restrict liberty. Like many substances, a light dose of government is beneficial, but more than a little is poisonous.

Slavery

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‘Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.’
– Rev. Garrison Frazier (a slave for 59 years)

By this definition, anyone who receives the work of another (or the money that comes from that work) without the consent of the one taken from, and without the one taken from being able to effectively resist, has enslaved the one taken from, to the extent of the receiving.

The rich receiving what is taken from the poor, against the will of the poor, is enslavement of the poor.

The poor receiving from the rich what is taken by irresistible power and without consent, is enslaving the rich.

If slavery is wrong, it matters not the station of the one enslaved nor the degree of enslavement (or conversely, the amount of freedom remaining).

I find it illuminating that Ref. Frazier who, at age 59, bought freedom for himself and his wife, defined slavery as the receiving, not the taking. Thus, taking by irresistible power for the common good (defense, courts of justice, law enforcement, necessary infrastructure) is not enslavement. Transfer payments – the taking from one person or several persons and giving the proceeds to another person or several persons – are slavery.

One must either reject Rev. Frazier’s definition (14 former slaves and 5 black men born free agreed with Rev. Frazier’s definition when he spoke it) or admit that roughly 2/3 of the U.S. Federal budget involves enslaving some of the population so that others may receive what is taken by irresistible force.

If words have meanings, there is no third alternative.

By the way, I care not how the decision to enslave was made. If I am unwillingly enslaved by majority vote of my fellows, whether that majority chooses to enslave themselves or not, I am still unwillingly, tyrannically, and unjustly enslaved. No one, other than myself, and no majority can determine my consent. There are some things so wrong that no majority can make them right.

Unless you believe slavery is moral and just under some circumstances.

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?

Does it make you proud?

Government Monopoly of Legitimate Violence

2010-03-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

Let’s start with some definitions, if not of terms then of concepts.

Violence: Injury to a person, physical capture or restraint of a person, destruction or confiscation of a person’s property. Destruction or confiscation can be covert – without the person’s knowledge until the violence is accomplished – or it may be overt with the person aware that it is happened but threatened with injury or death if he resists.

Legitimacy: Immune from legitimate counter-violence. Now that’s circular and it is intended to be: Violence begets counter-violence; however, legitimate violence cannot, by definition, beget legitimate counter-violence. Legitimacy means there is no circularity. Legitimacy may be determined by custom or law. Despite there being no actual law in Nazi Germany, a Gestapo agent could legitimately kill a striker because there was no agency accepted by the rulers that could legitimately use violence against that Gestapo agent. In 1070a.d., a Norman knight could legitimately beat or kill a Saxon peasant for any reason because he (the Norman) would suffer no consequent legitimate violence: no other Norman noble would use violence against him and any Saxon who was violent against a Norman would suffer legitimate counter-violence from other Norman nobles. Norman violence against Saxons was legitimate (unless it somehow harmed the interest of another Norman), Saxon violence against Normans was illegitimate. Norman violence against a Norman depended on feudal rights and responsibilities for legitimacy.

Recognize that legitimacy is not necessarily determined by who struck the blow (or fired the arrow) but who accepts responsibility for the blow. A Norman noble might use a Saxon agent to legitimately do violence against a Norman vassal, though the Saxon might not legitimately act on his own.

Thus, legitimate violence does not depend on the Rule of Law though the Rule of Law defines and circumscribes legitimate violence and who may exercise (or threaten) it and under what circumstances.

Rulers and Governments not the Same
Rulers are those who have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to achieve their ends. Those who can use (or threaten) violence without the risk of legitimate counter-violence are among the rulers in that particular situation. While a Gestapo agent could, without risk of legitimate reprisal, use violence on his own initiative against a civilian to achieve any personal or governmental goal, he could not use violence against an SS officer, except in very limited circumstances, to achieve any goal whatsoever without incurring legitimate counter-violence. The Gestapo agent is part of the ruling power in the former circumstance but not in the latter.

The Nazi and Norman-English situations are examples of hierarchical, class-based ruling systems where legitimacy depends on accepted standards and not the Rule of Law. Legitimacy depends on who is using violence and against whom as much as the goal the violence is supporting.

All societies have rulers. Some have governments.

Necessity of the Rule of Law
By my definition, a Government depends on the Rule of Law: Laws which explicitly enable and explicitly circumscribe the government’s legitimate use of violence.

Governments act, and are prevented from acting, according to laws. Non-government rulers act and utilize violence or its threat based purely on relative power and the will of the ruler. Some rulers claim to be governments, but are not.

In a civilized state, government must have a monopoly on legitimate violence. In a liberal society, the people created the government which must act according to the rule of law; the people ultimately control the government and define the laws. Further, a liberal society limits what the government may do and limits what kinds of laws the people (directly or through their government) may enact. These limits can be changed by a super-majority of the citizens, but not by a simple majority.

Rulers act to their own ends. Liberal governments act to ends determined by the citizens. A non-liberal government may act to its own ends, or to ends it (government) believes are those the people do (or should) want; but these are essentially the same: government pursuing its own ends.

(Have you heard a government official claiming that, under government guidance, American auto companies will build cars the American people want? Have you noticed that the "cars the American people want" are cars the American people have resolutely refused to buy except in small numbers? That is non-liberal governance.)

Monopoly on Legitimate Violence: A Primary Governmental Responsibility
Government must maintain its monopoly on legitimate violence by acting against non-government entities that use violence (as defined above – no hankie wringing that offering lots of money for something is somehow violence against the owner of the something.)

Many of the complaints against capitalism are really complaints that a private entity has enforced its will by violence. The failure is of government, not of capitalism: the government is supposed to act according to law to enforce its monopoly on legitimate violence and take action against the private entity using violence to achieve its ends.

Marxists assert that wealthy capitalists are in cahoots with the rulers, or are de facto part of the ruling class. Marxists acknowledge only rulers, evidently believing governments are shams. Perhaps this is because Marxists see human society as a conflicting power centers and dismiss both individuality and voluntary transactions for mutual benefit.

As mentioned in earlier posts, liberty depends on government, the rule of law, and the restraints of tradition. One of the things government must do to enable liberty is jealously enforce its monopoly on legitimate violence.

The Joys of Planning

2010-03-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

Liberty Leads to Non-Socialist Behavior
Socialism depends on centralized planning and control if only because people at liberty to make their own commercial (economic) decisions will, by their decisions, pull the system away from the socialistic ideal. Socialism and exemption from coercion are incompatible.

We know this because, without central planning (or where it lacks control), the extended order of people freely interacting for mutual benefit (the free market) always appears spontaneously, without anyone planning it, and it is not socialistic. Even in a controlled and planned economy, free markets spontaneously spring up along the margins and in the interstices left by planning. These weeds of liberty in the socialist garden are usually called “black markets” or "capitalist subversion of the will of the people".

Universal socialism is made possible only by eliminating all liberty or by eliminating (murdering) all individuals who use their liberty to do things other than what is planned. Socialism is possible only to the extent the central authority (the state) can eliminate non-socialist economic activity.

A Problem of Scale
Proper planning depends on ready access to all the relevant information. To the extent that information is lacking, not employed, or out-of-date, the planning process will be poor and results unsatisfactory.

With billions of people in a multi-national society, each person with multitudinous and changing desires, each encountering the vicissitudes of life (accidents, serendipitous opportunities, uncertain weather, etc) and making scores of decisions every day, the volume of information needed for proper planning and allocation of resources is almost unimaginable. And the conditions change daily, even hourly.

Imagine that: 16 million economic decisions per second. Each decision evaluating relative prices, ease of buying or selling, personal preferences, current bodily aches and pains and hungers and longings, personal mental states, and the environment relative to one or more of the 1.2 billion products available in the United States and Canada, plus all the services and all the products available in other countries. (Don’t imagine that the greedy capitalists created all those unnecessary products to take advantage of consumers. I’m a product manager. I know how expensive it is for a supplier to create and manage a new product; you don’t do it unless consumers want it. Profits are higher if you can get by with fewer products.)

So Many Decisions
It’s raining; do I buy an umbrella or not? Would I rather buy an umbrella or get a little wet? Do I drive today or walk to the bus stop in the cold wind? Do I accelerate quickly to save time, or drive more cautiously to save gas? Do I want fries with that? Do I buy an extra roll of toilet paper to put in the cupboard? Do I want to accept the price the customer has offered, or tell him to get lost? Do I throw in an extra doughnut with the dozen the customer asked for, and not charge for the extra? Do I put the 32-ounce Coke on sale? At what price? Every decision leads to an action (or action foregone) and every action affects inventories, demand, prices, and availability as well as affecting the conditions that every other person on the planet faces as she makes her own decisions.

Sixteen million economic actions every second about one or more of the 1.2 billion products. Each action taken with consideration of the economic conditions at the time of the decision to act (or not to act) and each changing, however slightly, the economic conditions faced by everyone else (and every decision-making entity – corporation, department, club, agency, or group) in the economy.

Rationalist intellectuals, socialist planners, and government agencies seeking power imagine that it is possible to understand all the effects of all these decisions and plan accordingly. They imagine they can rationalize, bring order to, and improve the efficiency (and justice) of this human system that has complexity defying human comprehension.

Central planning is possible only by drastically limiting human liberty by eliminating most of available products and restricting choices. You prefer Pepsi? Tough. The planning commission has decided that Coke is all that you need, and only in the 16-ounce size. And it’s always the same price and never goes on sale. And you can only buy 2 six-packs at a time because you don’t need any more. And the stores are only open 9 hours a day, so for the remaining 15 hours you won’t be taking any economic actions that might not be planned. Otherwise, you'll upset the plan.

Nice world. You like it? The Russians didn’t.

Computation by the Evolving, Spontaneously-Created Extended Order
The only computer powerful enough to process all the information and make timely allocations is the one that spontaneously evolves when people are at liberty to make their own decisions within the framework of abstract rules such as traditions and simple laws that protect liberty.

Within this vast, ever-evolving computer, are many cells or subsystems: some flexible, some rigid, some highly efficient and effective, some flawed and destined for extinction. The power of this computer is unimaginable and its operation beyond human understanding because the system it controls is the most complex thing in the universe. Socialists are socialists because they can neither imagine nor believe what this computer can do. Because a certain type of rationalist lacks imagination and doesn’t believe anything he can’t understand, he will be a socialist.

And force you to live in a world that is simple enough for him to understand.

Perhaps You Don't Think It's Possible

2010-03-10T14:44:00.001-08:00

You may think a spontaneously emerging, self-ordering system that organizes complexity is not possible, that a complex system requires a human (or superhuman) planner.

Well, that's a religious issue.

Or, perhaps, you think such a system would automatically emerge but for greedy capitalists who thwart a just and efficient system. That's Manichaean, also a religion.

If you think guidance is necessary and you think you are a rationalist and not a religious fundamentalist (that includes those fundamentalists who worship human reason), you might study evolutionary biology. Or contemplate a wild marsh wherein plants, animals, fungi, microbes, and bacteria contrive to create a well-ordered, stable-yet-dynamic system without oversight by Harvard-educated intellectuals.

There are even sciences devoted to the study of self-ordering systems: Synergetics, Autopoietics, Systems Theory, and Cybernetics.

Human reason is a limited tool. Powerful within its realm, but limited. Confronted with the complexity of an ecosystem (wild or human), human reasoning is dwarfed, utterly overwhelmed.

An Illustration of how the Extended Order Works

2010-03-10T14:37:00.001-08:00

Many years ago, I was field service manager in a large metropolitan area for a major computer company. This was before PCs and their networks; a typical customer had a central computer and a dozen to several score terminals.

One day, a downtown building was hit by lightening, several times. The building contained several of my customers. The lightening destroyed the communications cards in a hundred or so terminals, making them inoperative, and thereby halting computer operations.

My local inventory held only a half-dozen or so of the necessary spares. Normally, this was enough.

When a spare was used in a repair, the defective board was sent to California to have the failed chip replaced and a replacement spare was sent to me, arriving about a week after the defective was sent in.

Fixing all the blown terminals would take months under normal operations. Something unplanned and out of the ordinary had to be done.

How a Wise Elites Might Deal with the Situation
How would this be dealt with under a system of central planning controlled by the most experienced and wisest people in the business?

I would have my engineers fix six of the terminals while I, going through channels, notified the central planning authority of the lightening damage and requested a re-allocation of inventory to my district.

Being a central planning organization, they would be evaluating requirements and changes of requirements, worldwide, for hundreds of computer parts in a hundred or so repair districts covering thousands of customers.

Terminal problems generally were a low priority. Unless I involved an executive (probably at great cost to my career, execs not appreciating 26-year-old junior manager bothering them) or screaming customers got in contact with an exec (ending my career) it might take several meetings for the planning authority to get around to my unusual requirements.

When the planners got to the problem, they might reallocate inventory to my district, notify other districts to send me their spares, tell central stores to purchase new boards for the repair pipeline, and order the terminal division to increase production of the interface cards to cover the demand. How long do you suppose this would take? Days? Weeks? Months, perhaps?

In the meantime, I’d get six new boards every week or so, to fix six more of the hundred busted terminals.

Decentralization and Individual Responsibility
However, ours was a system of decentralized planning and decision-making. I, and everyone else, operated under general and abstract rules within which we were at liberty to make our own decisions. We were to assess our individual situations, communicate among ourselves, and even make our own deals by trading favors. The general rules included conflicts: take care of customers and keep inventory low. This was intentional, to force local managers to make conscious trade-offs.

How did our little intra-company extended order handle this?

I immediately called all the other districts in my region (which included about one-fourth of the U.S.) and asked the people I knew, managers with whom I’d traded favors in the past, if they had any terminal boards they could send me. If so, please get them on the next commercial airplane going from their city to mine. I would pay the transportation costs which would easily exceed the cost of the boards themselves. Then I told my inventory manager to place an urgent hot-line next-day-delivery order for a hundred boards, ship-to-addresses to be provided by the end of the day. Also expensive for me.

Then I drove to the building. Service engineers with my pitiful six spares were already on site, fixing what they could. From several of the customer offices, I checked with my compatriots to find out how many boards they were sending and when they would arrive. Customers overheard that replacement boards were arriving on commercial flights within the next few hours and some of my engineers would meet the flights and bring the boards for the stricken terminals. By 8pm, roughly a third of the terminals were repaired. By the end of the following day, all the terminals were repaired and most of the field inventory had been replenished in the various districts.

As if by Magic
No executive was involved, not even any mid-level managers. After the fact, my boss had some questions and the situation was explained up the line, but no big deal. I’d done nothing heroic or out of the ordinary; my peers throughout the company, world wide, regularly did pretty much the same thing. I’d sent some of them parts from my inventory on various occasions.

No committees or heroes in mask-and-cape were involved. Just ordinary clerks and low-level managers.

The really interesting part is what happened behind the scenes as individuals with liberty to act within the guidelines (traditions) responded to each other.

The central parts depot shipped the hot-line order for spares. An inventory-control clerk saw the inventory of repair parts – terminal boards – depleted and immediately placed an order with the terminal factory for more boards, some for urgent delivery and some for normal delivery. I believe that clerk, seeing the sudden jump in demand, ordered more than the 100 replacement boards because he or she determined that inventory had been too low to respond to whatever had happened.

The clerk did not know about the lightening strike; he or she did not even know from what part or parts of the world the sudden demand came. She didn’t know if the drop in stores inventory was the result of some disaster or an ordinary statistical result of field inventory being too low.

Seeing the sudden, unexpected, and urgent demand from the spares depot, the production scheduler at the terminal factory immediately increased the planned production of that particular terminal board. Working with factory inventory control and the shipping scheduler, the production scheduler arranged to pull boards out of finished terminals to meet the urgent order from the spares depot. This delayed shipment of some terminals for a few days until new boards arrived.

Nobody at the terminal factory knew about the lightening strike. Nobody at the terminal factory knew anything but that demand for a certain board had gone up and somebody was willing to pay a “higher price” to get them. (Hot-line orders were expensive as the ordering entity paid for expedited shipping and rates of hot-line orders were monitored to see who might not be properly managing inventory. A certain level was expected, but too many could be costly (career-wise) for the manager. We all were cautious using hot-line orders, but unhappy customers were even more expensive.)

Within 2 days all the terminals were fixed and all the customers happy, within 2 weeks the entire situation with its jump in demand had smoothed out with inventory returning to the normal (but slightly higher) level. No planning commission, no executives involved, not even many people knowing exactly what had happened – just individuals signaling each other by increased demand and a temporary willingness to pay a higher price (the hot-line “premium”) for a particular spare part. People who didn’t know exactly what was going on, who didn’t even know each other (and certainly didn’t know me or my customers) responded to each other’s actions by exercising their individual judgment using the liberty they had within the abstract and conflicting guidelines they were given.

And they weren’t doing this just for my customers: this happened every so often as the world-wide business grew and the organization learned how to respond to emergencies.

No central planning group, with its limited access to information and its limited brainpower (the effective intelligence of human groups acting in lock-step (committees) tends to decline as membership increases) could possibly have accomplished as much as quickly. And this was within just one sector (customer service) of one company; it happens all the time in the thousands of companies in the free market. Companies that don’t respond to customers lose business and go bankrupt. Companies that do a better-than-average job thrive and gain market share.

That’s how the extended order computes requirements and meets customer needs, automatically and without central control.

Some Clarifications

2010-03-10T14:36:00.001-08:00

Social Democracy is Socialism Lite. Some central control, some taking from one person and giving to another (slavery), some liberty, and a general sense that people exist for the good of each other and the State makes people do things for each other.

Being enslaved by majority vote is still enslavement. Having something taken by force, for the benefit of another, even if the decision to do so is made by the majority, is still theft.

Government is necessary for liberty; some limitations and some coercion is necessary for liberty. Support of government must be the responsibility of all citizens, so taxation to support expenditures for the common good (to support the minimal functions of government) is necessary. Income transfers, subsidies, welfare, forced savings, and goodies given to individuals and companies are not expenditures for the common good. They are theft by majority rule.

This blog is about Liberty. It advocates the maximum possible human liberty. It happens that, when individuals have liberty an extended order of voluntary human interaction spontaneously emerges and self-organizes. This extended order creates the wealth that reduces and gradually eliminates poverty, and enables our vast population to survive. The greater the liberty, the greater the wealth creation.

Central control is necessary for socialism. Despite the fantasies of Marx. The extended order is too complex and too dynamic to be understood, let alone planned and controlled. Thus, to implement the planning and control socialists believe is necessary, socialism eliminates the liberty that sustains the wealth-creating extended order. Despite the fantasies of socialists. Look at the data, examine history, consider results rather than intentions. A little bit of socialism eliminates a little bit of liberty and destroys a little bit of the wealth creation.

So, by advocating liberty I oppose socialism and advocate the only thing that has ever worked to reduce poverty.

Countries are poor because their governments - whether colonial or indigenous - have not given their people the liberty to create wealth.

I care deeply about my fellow man, so I advocate the liberty that will make my fellows better off. I encourage people to use their liberty to freely help others, but government-mandated charity is theft, not helping the poor.

‘You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money’
– P. J. O’Rourke

The Power of Action

2010-03-10T14:34:00.000-08:00

The beauty of "doing something" to fix a problem is you can claim that the situation would have been worse had you not "done something" and no one will be able to prove you wrong.

The patient has a high fever. The doctor must do something. The doctor withdraws a pint of blood from the patient. The patient dies (from loss of blood - as happened to George Washington and Lord Byron) and the doctor confidently declares that death would have happened sooner without his (the doctor's) ministrations.

Religion and the Conflict of Moralities

2010-03-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

Where does God fit in this conflict between the instinctive morality of the micro-cosmos (the family or small group of intimates) and the evolved traditional morality of the macro-cosmos (the extended order of human interactions world wide)? What is the role of Religion?

I am pitching neither a religion nor religion in general. However, we hear politicians as well as private individuals speaking about government doing God's or Christ's work, so the argument can be examined from their point of view - the point of view of those defending their policies with religious allusions.

I know the most about Christianity, so that is what I will address: the role of Liberty, as I am using the term, in relation to Christian teaching. I leave to others the examination of how other religions and their teachings relate to individual liberty.

Jesus preached individual responsibility and a communitarian ethic that seem contradictory but, in my opinion, are not.

A Different Kind of Relationship with the Divine
In Jesus’ time, Judaism was a collective religion: the entire Tribe of Israel would suffer or be saved together, as a tribe, based on how well all Jews followed God’s law. Other Mediterranean religions were mostly national in nature – the gods would favor the nation or punish the nation. The sins of one person harmed everyone’s relationship with the divine.

Christianity is different: individual salvation and individual responsibility, not group or tribe or national salvation with collective responsibility for the salvation of all. Individual blessings and punishments were elements of other religions, but Christianity broke completely from collectivism. Christianity teaches that divine blessings are granted or withheld, divine punishments suffered or escaped depending on how one lived his life, not what another or a group lived.

Of course, a proper Christian life depends on how one treats others. Because this injunction applies to all members of a Christian community the community, as a whole, would act in a Christian way, but it is the individuals who are commanded, not the community as a separate entity.

Jesus told each of us to be kind. He did not say to force others to be kind. Jesus said nothing about coercing others be chaste or heterosexual or tolerant of homosexuality. He said nothing about forcing others to help the poor; He told us individually to do that.

No Command to Coerce Others
Though He laid a heavy burden on His followers, the burden was individual. In the temporal world, Christianity told its followers what they SHOULD do, but not what they MUST do, that is, not what worldly laws should force them to do. Divine law set requirements for salvation, but no worldly requirement that people should be coerced into being saved. Yes, followers must do this and must not do that to be saved, but this “must” is akin to “you must put the key in the lock if you want to open the door”. The Christian “must” is a law of God (or nature, if you will), not intended to be a worldly “must” as in “you must stop at a red light.”

Temporal or worldly musts and must-nots limit human liberty; Christian musts and must-nots do not limit liberty as they are not to be enforced by mortals in this world but by God in the afterlife.

Nowhere in the Gospels, that I can find, does Jesus tell his disciples to force people to visit the sick or to gang together to force the reluctant (under threat of violence) to give to the poor.

Christianity is not Coercive
Therefore, I assert that forcing someone to give to the poor, or taking from someone under threat of violence and using the proceeds to give to the poor (or to give to anyone else) is counter to Christ’s teaching. Christians are expected to obey temporal laws serving worldly purposes but Christians are not commanded to enact temporal laws to serve divine purposes.

Yet politicians calling themselves “Christian” brag about doing Christ’s work as they encourage us to, by majority vote, tax people who don’t want to be taxed to give the money to someone else; or, by majority vote, prohibiting someone from buying liquor on Sunday, or jailing someone for having a lover of the same sex. Nowhere can I find a Christian mandate to restrict the liberty of any human being, yet right-wing and left-wing Christians pride themselves on restricting liberties to prevent others from offending Jesus.

Evident Conflict
Confusion can arise because Jesus told his followers to form a community and, essentially, for that community to operate on the micro-morality of the isolated band or troop: love of others, sharing without regard to ownership, communal action, self-surrender and self-sacrifice for the good of others.

How can Christianity be so strongly communitarian (as has long been recognized) and at the same time so fiercely individualistic, as I claim?

Jesus told his followers, individually, to join the community. He never said that the community should force anyone to join or to live by the community’s internal morality. The community is open to all, but each has the liberty to join, not join, or leave as he or she wishes. The community coerces no one inside or outside the community.

Jesus was a radical proponent of individual liberty. He also was quite clear about the consequences, to the individual, of misusing that liberty – consequences after death, not before.

Don’t Abandon the Micro-Morality
Christianity emphasizes the morality of the micro-order. Besides the religious sense of it, Christianity reminds us not to let the macro-morality crush the micro orders and emphasizes the importance of treating all individuals by the micro-morality whenever possible, and of not losing ourselves in the macro-morality.

Christians tend to reject (at least theoretically) the extended order and its macro-morality, asserting that the whole world and all human interactions should abide by the morality of the micro-cosmos.

But the extended order, the free-market, is what creates the wealth which has gradually reduced poverty, the wealth that enables over six billion of us to live here. How many people would Jesus want us to starve to death when we destroy the macro-order with its non-Christian morality, stopping the wealth-creation that feeds billions?

...and Liberty for All

2010-03-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

To have liberty, one must respect the liberty of others.

One who obtains property, position, or power by violating the liberty of other men has, by his depredations, renounced liberty, even his own. In liberty’s place he has put power, stealth, or whatever he used.

By sanctioning conquest, the conquer admits people, including himself, are legitimately subject to conquest. While gaining wealth and power, the conquer cannot enjoy liberty for he must devote much of his efforts to averting being conquered himself. Rather than being at liberty to do whatever he wishes within his own personal sphere, he must remain vigilant and prepared for defense. By his conquest, he has denied the legitimacy of any personal sphere of activity, even his own.

Similarly the thief, cheat, or fraud.

Only by recognizing the liberty of others, and being willing to help others defend their liberty (which includes their rights to own and control their property), can a man expect liberty for himself.

I wrote earlier that all men are islands, contrary to the drippy romanticism of John Donne (or rather, the drippy romanticism of how Donne is popularly interpreted). When the bell tolls, it tolls for somebody but, if I can hear the bell, not for me. I am born, live, die, saved or damned alone, never in communion with the inner life of any other human. But none of us live on an island: others surround us. Others just as primarily alone as are we, yet liberty is, fundamentally, a characteristic of how we interact with others. Liberty cannot be solitary.

Positive and Negative Liberty

2010-03-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

I’ve been using the term promiscuously, so what is ‘liberty’?

Many writers and thinkers have defined it. Some of them use the term ‘liberty’, some use ‘freedom’, and a few speak in terms of rights. Here are some definitions.

One Kind of Liberty
‘This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to its own plans. … What restricts the individual’s freedom is not other people’s violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production.’
– Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality p. 3

‘…a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes, a Liberal Government tries, so far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do what he wishes.’
- Sir William Harcourt [Harcourt wrote in the 19th Century, using ‘Liberal’ in the classical sense, not in the modern sense]

“[Freedom] meant always the possibility of a person's acting according to his own decisions and plans, in contrast to the position of one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another, who by arbitrary decision could coerce him to act or not to act in specific ways. The time-honoured phrase by which this freedom has often been described is therefore 'independence of the arbitrary will of another'.”
– F.A. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty

‘Right (or justice) is the sum total of the conditions which are necessary for everybody’s free choice to co-exist with that of everybody else, in accordance with a general law of liberty’
– Kant Theory of Right

To these men, liberty or freedom meant not being coerced by others – individuals or governments. A person with liberty makes choices for himself without being subject to the threat of man-imposed violence or suffering any harm but natural consequences of “the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production”.

Another Kind of Liberty
‘[Liberty is the] absence of obstacles to the realization of our desires’
– Bertrand Russell

[Human rights include t]he right to a useful and remunerative job… The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman… to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies…; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.
– FDR

To Russell and FDR ‘liberty’ entails possession of something (or several things). Liberty and Rights are meaningless unless one has the material ability to exercise them.

Positive and Negative
Evidently the first is called ‘negative liberty’ as it involves not having things done to you. Negative liberty is the exemption from coercion.

The second is called ‘positive liberty’ because having it depends on possessing certain things; being left alone is insufficient as something positive must happen to give a person positive liberty.

These are very different things, with very different consequences for society. When someone speaks or writes of “liberty” or “freedom” we must identify what sort of liberty is being addressed.

An important characteristic of negative liberty is that state action increasing it for one person need not decrease it for any another. In fact, social policies that increase negative liberty for one person or group are very likely to increase negative liberty for everyone else as one person’s liberty actually depends on others also being at liberty. (See the post “…and Liberty for All”)

Liberty as defined by Bertrand Russell (in the above quote) is impossible. I desire to be able to fly like a bird. Physical reality imposes an irremovable obstacle to the realization of my desire so, according to Russell, the reality of physics in our universe makes liberty impossible.

FDR refers to the idea, common among progressives, that rights and liberty are meaningless without enough wealth to do something with that liberty. Freedom of speech is meaningless to a starving man. To those born to great wealth, like FDR, or even middle-class affluence like most campus leftists, the idea of being able to do what one wants to do without having substantial material wealth (by their standards) is foreign.

Consequences
The social consequences of positive liberty are chilling: it is not possible for the state to increase one persons positive liberty without reducing the liberty, both positive and negative, of other people. Since the state has no wealth of its own, it can give wealth to one person only by taking property from others, decreasing their both their positive and negative liberty by the coercive taking.

Of course an individual can use his liberty to help another, but that is voluntary and does not involve the state. Christianity expects adherents to use their liberty thusly, as do other religions.

The most effective means of increasing positive liberty for people in general is the market system, the wealth-creating system of voluntary human interaction sometimes called the extended system. People are poor because something has prevented them from contributing to and deriving benefits from the extended system – usually that ‘something’ is their own government.

When I speak of ‘liberty’ I mean negative liberty. The idea of positive liberty is an invention of those who wish to coerce others into doing “what is right”.

A Salute to Barney Frank, D-Mass.

2010-03-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Frank Principle
‘I would let people gamble on the Internet, I would let adults smoke marijuana; I would let adults do a lot of things, if they choose. But allowing them total freedom to take on economic obligations that spill over into the broader society? The individual is not the only one impacted here, when bad decisions get made in the economic sphere, it causes problems.’
– U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) Apr 23, 2009 interview with CBSNews.com

Three cheers for Rep. Barney Frank… for being honest. He doesn’t want you to have the liberty to take on economic obligations (like mortgages, agreements to buy and pay for something, establish a savings account, lend or borrow money, etc.) because, if you made a mistake, others would be affected. Since ‘take on economic obligations’ pretty much means the same as ‘make economic decisions’, Rep. Frank is saying he wants to deny American economic liberty.

Just about everything we do has effects that spill over into the broader society. That's what it means to live among others.

We don't live on separate islands
If I check out a library book, nobody else can check it out until I return it, and the interest in the book might induce the library to buy another copy. If I buy something, my action tends to encourage the raising of the price of that thing. If I put something up for sale, that tends to lower the market price of that thing. If I grow my own corn it adds, in a tiny amount, to the world supply of corn and, because I'm not buying corn, pushes the price down, ever-so-slightly. (During the New Deal, the FDR administration declared that growing your own food is not a private activity and is subject to government regulation. I kid you not.)

All human economic activity affects all other humans participating in the extended order of voluntary human exchange – the free market – and that is exactly why the extended order works to create wealth and improve human living conditions.

Leave aside the question of who is going to supervise you in taking on economic obligations, and ignore the fact that government meddling in economic decisions caused the 1929 crash, created and sustained the subsequent Great Depression, caused the recent Housing Bubble, and brought about the crash of 2008; forget that Rep. Frank’s record of making economic decisions for the rest of us is beyond abysmal… think about the principle he is advocating: you will have liberty except when making economic decisions or taking economic actions.

(BTW: Gambling on the internet involves the taking on of economic obligations: if you lose, you've gotta pay up.)

Maybe the government won’t exert the full control the Frank Principle theoretically grants. After all, he was talking about the big financial institutions that made poor decisions, not about ordinary people. Maybe the federal income tax will never go above 5%. Maybe Social Security taxes will never be higher than 2% of earnings. Maybe taxes will never be withheld from your paycheck. All those things would never happen, according to those advocating the specified federal interventions.

Maybe the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically prohibits racial set-aside, quotas, and affirmative action, as Senator Hubert Humphrey loudly declared on the Senate floor. (Sen. Humphrey said he would "eat his hat" if anything in the Act permitted those things. It took less than 10 years for the federal government to decide the Act permitted them.)

So, what’s the big deal – you give up a little economic freedom but you have liberty in everything else? OK.

Think about your week. How much do you do that doesn’t involve working for pay, buying something, consuming something you have already purchased, deciding not to buy something, deciding not to consume something, or paying a kid to mow your lawn? All those actions are economic activity and, according to the Frank Principle, in theory subject to government direction and control. What car do you buy? Do you drive the car to work? How quickly do you accelerate up to the legal speed? What do you eat for lunch? What present do you buy for a family member? What shoes to buy (that is, what shoes you wear)?

Rep. Frank would let you smoke marijuana, but he would have the government regulate prices, quantities, packaging, and quality – because these involve economic obligations – so you would be free to smoke marijuana but no at liberty to buy it or sell it without abiding by government rules.

If it happens outside you head, it's economic
How much of your life would be your own, within your personal zone of autonomy and independent of government coercion, under the Frank Principle? You could walk to the park and sit on a bench. You could walk to the public library and read a book. You wouldn’t be able to grow your own marijuana because that is an economic activity that effects others (you are depressing the price of marijuana by adding to the supply).

Rep. Frank and his political allies may not want to run your life for you, but do you want to surrender your liberty? Are you worth so little as a human being?

The Frank Principle is not new; it's almost 200 years old. The Frank Principle was a key element of Bolshevism, Fascism, Maoism, and all the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. They all started as benign as what Rep. Frank proposed. All of them.

Raspberry for Barney Frank

2010-03-10T14:26:00.000-08:00

‘I would let people gamble on the Internet, I would let adults smoke marijuana; I would let adults do a lot of things, if they choose. But allowing them total freedom to take on economic obligations that spill over into the broader society? The individual is not the only one impacted here, when bad decisions get made in the economic sphere, it causes problems.’
– U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) Apr 23, 2009 interview with CBSNews.com

I think Rep. Frank means he wants to restrict the freedom of the powerful financial institutions to make economic decisions (“take on economic obligations”) on their own. After all, the big private financial institutions made the decisions that led to the mortgage meltdown and the current crisis. Well…I don’t think so.

The federal government’s record of making economic decisions, controlling how private firms take on economic obligations, is abysmal.

The Federal Reserve Act, and related legislation in 1913, nationalized financial markets and financial institutions, making them the most regulated sector in the American economy. The Federal Reserve Act was intended to stop the periodic recessions (sometimes called “panics” in the 19th century) that plagued the economy every dozen years or so. Promoters declared that the Federal Reserve, authorized by the Act, would end the up-and-down business cycles by implementing “rational” policies in the management of the money supply, credit, interest rates, and the value of the dollar relative to gold and other currencies.

Since the nationalizing of the currency, we have had recessions every six years, on average. Gee, that worked.

Government Failures, not Free Market Failures, Cause Recessions
The recession of 1920 was caused by decisions made by the Federal Reserve during and after WWI. The crash of October 1929 was caused by federal policies that reduced the money supply. The Crash of 29 turned into the Great Depression because of economic and monetary decisions made by the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve – most notably continuing to decrease the money supply, unpredictably changing interest rates, and arbitrary changes to the price of gold. The crash of 2008 was caused by federal monetary and credit policies.

Woa! What about the mortgage companies that made all those bad loans, and the financial traders who created all those toxic derivatives and scattered them throughout the world markets? Wasn’t it the economic decisions of those private corporations that caused the crash?

Government Policies Affect (or even control) Private Actions
Well… How do you think Government policies are implemented? By encouraging (or forcing) certain behaviors by private organizations.

As I said earlier, the financial markets are the most heavily regulated sectors of the economy. The economic behavior of private financial organizations is heavily influenced, if not controlled outright, by Barney Frank and his fellows in the government. And the policies of the President, including dumb decisions made by Pres. Bush.

Government policies can create perverse incentives and penalties that will inevitably lead to perverse behavior by those regulated.

So, after perverse government policies forced financial organizations to make perverse, dangerous, and stupid decisions, Rep. Frank wants even more control.

Coercion
Did I say forced? Yes. As in “your bank charter won’t be renewed unless you take on a certain percentage of high-risk, sub-prime mortgages.” These mortgages were then backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” – “private” institutions wholly owned by the U.S. government.

These private financial organizations took on stupid economic obligations because not doing so would have put them out of business.

This oversimplified explanation (WAY oversimplified) is not meant to pick on Rep. Frank but to point out the fallacy of a way of thinking: that the government can run things better than free market, the extended order of voluntary human cooperation. Government restrictions of liberty beyond the minimum of protecting private property, keeping the peace, enforcing contracts, and protecting from invasion are the causes of economic problems, not the solution.

Nothing is Usually a Good Thing to Do
Oh, remember I mentioned the crash or recession of 1920? It was about as bad as the crash of 1929. But the economy worked its way out of the recession by the middle of 1922. What did the government do to fix the problem? NOTHING. Well, taxes and spending were reduced. But other than that NOTHING.

The crash of October 1929 turned into the Great Depression because, unlike President Harding, President Hoover actively tried to fix the problem. Then President Roosevelt continued and expanded Hoover’s policies (while mendaciously claiming Hoover did nothing).

Government management of the economy is a great idea as long as you ignore its uninterrupted string of failures.

‘Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good.’
– Walter E. Williams

Fascism and the Frank Principle

2010-03-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

‘I would let people gamble on the Internet, I would let adults smoke marijuana; I would let adults do a lot of things, if they choose. But allowing them total freedom to take on economic obligations that spill over into the broader society? The individual is not the only one impacted here, when bad decisions get made in the economic sphere, it causes problems.’
– U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) Apr 23, 2009 interview with CBSNews.com

In principle, this means that no private citizen has total freedom to take economic actions because all private economic acts have consequences that spill over into the broader society to some tiny extent. BUT, since we don’t live on individual islands, other than thinking, ALL of our actions, good and bad, are made in the economic sphere and spill over into the broader society, even the decisions to smoke marijuana (which we have to buy, thereby affecting the price, and we have to exhale, thereby affecting air quality and CO2 concentrations) and gambling on the internet (essentially taking out loans, thereby affecting interest rates and the availability of capital).

So, under the Frank Principle, we really have no liberties, no unalienable rights as human beings.

Supremacy of Government (Because We Care)
The Frank Principle means that liberty is something the government grants, giving you as much as it – the government (and Barney Frank) – thinks you should have and reducing or eliminating liberty as it – the government – sees fit. Your liberty is not your own, your rights are not inherent to your humanity, rather they are granted by the government. Since the government grants or restricts rights, no longer are “governments instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to protect inalienable human rights. The Frank Principle reverses the relationship humans have with their government: no longer do people create governments to protect their rights; instead government exists to GIVE people rights. Government is primary, individuals are secondary. No longer “Individual living human beings are the most important things there are” as a rights-granting government is necessarily more important.

The Frank Principle need not lead to common, or government, ownership of the means of production. The means of production – capital, factories, tools, inventories, raw materials, and the organizations that produce things – can remain in private hands. But their economic decisions, because the results of bad economic decisions spill over into the broader society, must be controlled (or at least regulated) by the political system – the government. This system of private-ownership-under-public-control, where firms that are too big to fail are saved or purchased by the government, is a public/private partnership where government takes the lead, specifies who will profit and who will lose and ensures that everything is orderly, sensible, and under rational control.

Nothing New
This way of organizing and managing production and the economy has enormous appeal – guaranteed profits for businesses that no longer have to compete in the free-market jungle, guaranteed importance (and opportunities to extort “gifts”) for government officials, and general reduction of uncertainty, mystery, incomprehensibility, and risk for everyone. It is sometimes called “Corporatism”.

The traditional term is “fascism,” in the original meaning of the term. The meaning that was applauded by FDR, the leading lights of the New Deal, American Progressive intellectuals, and Lenin himself.

Unlike Progressives, I don't call something “fascist” because I don’t like it. While for most Progressives words have only emotional content and little or no meaning, for me words have meanings: they convey thoughts and ideas, not just emotions.

“Fascism” was the name Mussolini gave to the corporatist socialist political/economic system he implemented in Italy during the 1920s. It was Mussolini’s version of socialism. I call the system I described above “fascist” because that is what it is, although “corporatist” doesn’t pack the emotional baggage while meaning essentially the same thing. Look it up. Read what Mussolini had to say about the system, learn how it worked. The racism and militarism and violence were artifacts of German and (to a lesser extent) Italian cultural history, ancillary to the core political-economic system. Corporatism need not be ugly in the way of Nazi Germany, or Italy after it allied itself with Hitler.

Is Barney Frank a fascist? I expect the notion would offend him. Besides, he probably doesn’t know enough about fascism to form an accurate opinion. Is President Obama a fascist? Again, his ignorance of history would indicate he wouldn’t consider his policies fascist. Both of them, and their allies and supporters, seem to think they dreamed up this great idea, corporatism, on their own. Since they aren’t racist or militaristic or planning to take over other countries they would be offended to be called “fascist” because that is all they know about fascism.

But in relation to economics and individual liberty, the ideas and policies they promote are straight out of Mussolini’s handbook. And antithetical to individual liberty.

P.S. Lest anyone think this is a partisan screed, I fully recognize that the corporatist policies began under the Bush Administration with the financial bailouts of failed companies. I don't care who violates our liberties, I will criticize the violation.

Not Left Wing nor Right Wing

2010-03-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

If the extreme Left Wing of politics is Communism, and the extreme Right Wing is Fascism…

Then the line between is nothing but the spectrum of socialism. Right-wing socialism, Left-wing socialism, middle-of-the-road socialism. Socialism.

Yet most of the political-economic systems in human history don’t fall anywhere on the line. Classical Liberalism most certainly does not. That is why the point of view of this blog is neither of the Left nor of the Right.

Bolshevik Communism and Fascism/Nazism were flavors of socialism competing for control of European industrialized societies in the first few decades of the 20th century. The Bolshevik version paid more attention to Marx while the Fascists paid more attention to other socialist thinkers. Bolshevism was internationalist and Proletarian while Fascism/Nazism was nationalist and not class specific. But both were communitarian, state supremacist, rationalist (so they claimed), scientific (so they claimed) systems based on core socialist principles.

They even were allies, or mutual admirers, early on. But like brothers competing for the hand of the same maiden, they became bitter enemies, blaming each other for all their difficulties and failures. The Bolsheviks continued to blame Fascists and Nazis for their failures decades after Fascism and Nazism ceased to exist outside of caves and South American enclaves.

Stalin is the one who declared Nazism to be the polar opposite of Bolshevik Communism. American Progressives who took their marching orders from Moscow repeated the Party line. And repeat it to this day.

Any time you hear a Conservative or Classical Liberal referred to as a Nazi, a bell should go off in your head: Stalinism! The speaker/writer is repeating Stalinist propaganda! After eighty years! Probably without knowing it. Progressives aren’t particularly interested in history.

If you haven’t already, read Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg means “liberal” in its modern sense of Progressivism, and not in the same sense as Classical Liberal or “liberal” as used by Mises and other champions of individual liberty.

Myth of Corporate Power

2010-03-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

Much has been written about corporate power and the need of a strong and active government to counter it. Gailbraith was big on the idea. Blogs continue to have rantings about corporate power.

What power could a corporation – a business, large or small – possibly have? Just the powers a society’s constitution and laws permit any person or group of persons to exert by spending their own money. In a properly-ordered free society where individuals have liberty over their persons and possessions this power is in no way coercive.

If it is coercive, that is a government failure, not a failure of the market or business. In any group of people, there are some who would bully others to get their own way. The first and most important role of government is to protect individuals from coercion by others. Don’t blame the bully if the government doesn’t do its job, or if the government extracts bribes from the bully to overlook the bullying.

Money confers power of a kind: the power to acquire goods, services, and fixed assets through voluntary exchange with others – other corporations or individuals. This power, however, is possessed by anyone with even the smallest amount of money and doesn’t give the power to coerce anyone. Money merely provides the ability to acquire things by giving people more money than the things are worth to the sellers.

What’s wrong with that? Or is the problem that the sellers are making decisions the one doing the objecting does not like? Is the one complaining about corporate power really complaining about the power of the myriad sellers? Perhaps the complainer believes neither should have the power liberty grants them. Usually the complainer doesn’t believe in liberty, believing instead that people (other than themselves) are easily duped and defrauded into accepting money to do the rich man’s bidding; or the complainers don’t think people (other than themselves) ought to be at liberty because free people don’t make “the right” decisions.

What Power?
Surely the first goal of power is to ensure survival. How much power can someone or something have if it can’t even use that power to survive? Can the power of money ensure the corporation survives? Hardly. Digital Equipment, LTV, Gulf and Western, Braniff, Getty Oil, American Motors, General Motors, Chrysler: all billion-dollar companies; all have failed. For decades, General Motors was the largest corporation on the planet! Today the government has taken over to forestall bankruptcy. Of the 100 largest American corporations listed by Fortune in 1980, only 24 were among the top 100 just 25 years later. The other 76 were acquired, dropped below the top 100, or simply went out of business.

No. Corporate power cannot ensure survival. Not even for the extremely big.

Interference in Legislation (lobbying)
Ah, but a big corporation can have power over government through its use of money or by influencing the votes of the many corporate workers. OK. But no one can influence or bribe the government to do something the government is not permitted to do. DUH.

That’s one of the reasons why the U.S. Constitution was written (and ratified): to limit the powers and permitted acts of the federal government and legislature.

Government limitations of liberty and attempts to guide or correct or “rationalize” the extended order of human cooperation (that spontaneously emerging, self-organizing thing often called “the free market”) invite, no – actively encourage – misuse of wealth to gain government protection, reduce government limitations to the liberty of the wealthy, or encourage government to hinder competitors.

Were the government to do its proper job and quit meddling with business and wealth, business and wealth would cease involvement in the government’s coercive decisions.

When government has, and exercises, the power to protect, promote, punish, or save any entity or group of entities, those entities will do what they can to get the government to protect them from competition or the consequences of their own folly.

Politicians Get Rich off of Bribes from Businesses
‘When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.’
– P.J. O’Rourke Parliament of Whores

Is it any wonder that, when Congress attempts to limit the power of money in politics and government, the result is more money flowing to influence legislation and elections? Congressmen are as greedy as anyone else: if permitted, they will use their power to enrich and sustain themselves at the expense of their competitors. Congress passing limits to lobbying expenditures and financing of elections is like foxes designing security for the hen house.

The best (and perhaps only) way to stop corporations and the wealthy from exerting power by buying legislators is to eliminate government power over business, commerce, and wealth. Nobody wastes money lobbying Congress to do something Congress does not have the power to do.

Hired Thugs
Wealth can be used to hire a private armed force for enforcing a corporation’s desires, that is to coerce others. However, to meet its first responsibility – protection of individual liberty - the government must establish and maintain its monopoly on legitimate violence and punish or eliminate all illegitimate use of violence. If a Big Business is using physical coercion or the threat of violence, the problem is one of government, not of corporate power. Either the government is not doing its job, or the business has actually become government, taking on governmental powers.

When government is doing its proper job, capitalists or the wealthy or big business (or whatever your favorite hobgoblin) cannot run roughshod over anyone's liberty.

Only Adults can be Free
Money can be used to bribe or tempt people but the power of money cannot coerce free adults. In a society of children, or in a society in which individual liberty and private ownership of the means of production are not adequately protected, wealth can have pernicious powers. But that is a problem of proper government, not of corporate power.

Trial and Error vs. Control

2010-03-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

Or Evolution versus Planning.
This evolution of the extended order that lifted humans out of abject poverty and enables the survival of 6 billion people depended on individual autonomy and liberty. Experiments that made life better were copied by others; experiments that made things worse quickly ended. There was no guide, no plan, no elite guardians making sure things went well. In fact, history shows that progress halted when elites sought to control this evolving macro-cosmos.

“There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control.”
– F.A.Hayek “Why I am not a Conservative”

Control, however, is counter-evolutionary. Control means things are done because the controlling power thinks those things will work, not because they actually do work. Control exalts human ingenuity over the limitless possibilities of trial-and-error evolution.

Trade, and the wealth it brought, evolved and expanded without deliberate control, driven by the experimentation of individuals freely interacting with each other. The extended order that brings us wealth develops spontaneously among free people, and even pops up in the shadows (as black markets, smuggling, and underground economies) when people are controlled.

The Man with the Cape and Mask Doesn’t Like Not Being in Control
This has to drive the elites nuts. Especially those with the itch to tell others how to live. To them it is inconceivable (ref. Vizzini in The Princess Bride) that human prosperity might increase and poverty be eliminated without their guidance.

And to give them reasons to don their capes and masks to save us from ourselves.

Whenever the socialists, with their atavistic ideas that they imagine constitute progress, have gained power, two things happen:

1) Wealth declines. Countries that formerly exported foodstuffs face shortages and famines. This makes sense, of course: socialism is designed for small bands of people struggling to remain alive. Whenever socialism is fully implemented, the society gradually reverts to the condition where socialism actually works.

For a time socialist societies can make progress because they are an element of the macro-cosmos of the free market, they are subsidized by others, or they live off the capital accumulated before they became socialist. Isolated socialist societies, such as North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, quickly descend into poverty and misery.

2) An extended order of voluntary human interaction (also known as the “free market” or “Capitalism”) spontaneously organizes itself on the fringes and in the shadows (black markets, smuggling, etc. previously mentioned). To stamp out this individualism and maintain the purity of the communal paradise, the intellectuals running the State resorts to killing people. During the 20th Century, over 100 million people were murdered, in peace time, by their own governments trying to maintain the rules of the micro-cosmos (Socialism) throughout the larger community.

Progressive intellectuals (who think of themselves as “liberals” but are actually reactionaries trying to implement a Paleolithic social system) imagine that these things won’t happen when they are in charge and, if they do happen, it is because of evil Capitalists (see the essays on Manichaeism) conspiring to thwart the wonderful things they (the Progressives) are trying to achieve.

It never occurs to them that people like liberty and that free people spontaneously create free markets of complexity far beyond human apprehension.

Progressives also never imagine that whatever replaces the free market, the spontaneous and self-organizing system of voluntary human interaction for mutual benefit, will be unable to generate enough wealth to provide food for the current world population. The population will, over time, collapse leaving the remnant in the abject poverty we escaped when trade and the free market emerged.

But even free people feel an emotional attraction to socialism. It’s instinctive.

Reactionary Reform

2010-03-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Congress, the Administration, and pundits are, right now, all rallying about the need for reform.

Quick question:
What needs reforming?

1. Health care. Total expenditures are too high and rising too fast. And millions of Americans are uninsured, many because they cannot afford insurance.

2. Banking and Finance. Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their homes, the stock market is down, unemployment is up... all because Banking and Finance sectors of our economy are messed up and in need of reform.

A second question:
In which sectors of the American economy are most regulated by the federal government? That is, in which sectors is the federal government most heavily involved?

1. Health care. Federal regulation began with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, then increased when opiates were placed under federal controls (during the early years, most of those prosecuted under these early "drug laws" were physicians.) The economic impact of federal involvement expanded enormously during WWII when the federal government allowed (and encouraged) employers to attract workers by providing "medical insurance" (actually, it amounted to employer-paid medical care) in lieu of higher wages (which had been frozen by the government). This company-paid medical care could be deducted by the employer as a business expense - just like wages - but employees would not have to report the medical coverage as income for the purposes of income tax - unlike wages.

2. Banking and Finance. Starting with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Since then, Banking and Finance have been the most regulated (and interfered-with) sectors of the American economy.

3. Transportation: highway standards, vehicle standards, control of rates. Regulation in this sector was greatly reduced during the 1980s.

Final question:
If the sectors of our economy in the most trouble - most in need of reform - are two of the three sectors in which the federal government has had the most control, why is increased federal control considered a "reform"? The heavily-regulated sector that is not in trouble is the one whose regulation was reduced 20 years ago.

If doing something causes a problem in our lives, most of us recognize that we ought to stop doing it. Must one have a Harvard Law Degree to be so dumb as to think the solution is to do MORE?

Doing more of what caused the problems in the first place is reactionary and dumb.

Of course, the "reformers" claim the problems exist because the government wasn't given enough control in the first place. Think of the physicians who bled patients to treat fevers; if the fever worsened or the patient weakened, the physician took more blood.

Same thing.

Government Creates Illegal Businesses

2010-03-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

... which proves government interference reduces creation of wealth.

If commerce outside the law were more efficient than commerce within the law, outlaw trade would out-compete legal trade and drive the law-abiding from all markets. Yet, the only places we find outlaw commerce are where commerce within the law is either not possible or so heavily taxed or regulated that it becomes less efficient than outlaw commerce. Bootlegging of cigarettes is a problem because cigarettes are heavily taxed, so bootleg cigarettes can be offered for lower prices than legal cigarettes while the bootlegger makes a profit in spite of risks and occasional losses. Nobody bootlegs soft drinks.

The more government interferes with the legal market, the more profitable the outlaw market until government controls become so onerous the legal market disappears.

Basic Economic Truth: Low-cost solutions drive out high-cost solutions. Always, everywhere, at all times.

The explanation is simple: people try to maximize their wealth, so buyers seek low prices while sellers seek low costs and high prices. Prices are negotiated between buyer and seller; costs are controlled by the seller alone.

Costs can be difficult to characterize, however, and something what is a low-cost solution for one segment of the market may be a high-cost solution for another, so multiple solutions can exist at the same time, each serving a different market segment.

Price is similarly complex. The waiting for a low-priced item adds to the buyer’s cost: waiting reduces the time a buyer could be doing something else; time is wealth. Just as the risk of being imprisoned adds to the seller’s cost, the risk of being imprisoned adds to the price the buyer must pay.

Without government interference in the market there is no outlaw market. Illegal trade costs more than legal trade, so legal trade drives out the outlaw trade. Absent government interference.

The fact that government “management” or “guidance” or “regulation” or taxation tends to encourage the high-cost outlaw market proves that government interference adds to costs and reduces wealth. Absent government interference, the inefficient, wealth-wasting outlaw market would not exist. Government power, beyond the minimum of protecting persons and property and enforcing contracts, does not and cannot increase human wealth. The existence of thriving illegal businesses proves this.

There is an exception to that grand pronouncement: what economists call “externalities,” although government regulation of externalities can be considered part of protecting persons and property. More on that later.

Myth of the Unregulated Market

2009-05-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

Are free markets unregulated? Are there no controls on the extended order?

Essentially, economics is the study of how resources are applied and how the factors of production are managed in the struggle to create the wealth that sustains human populations.

Intellectual elites, proud of their intelligence and rationality, are unable to imagine that a self-ordering system could efficiently allocation of resources and manage production. When these elites see a functioning system they typically have two reactions:

1) It really isn’t self-ordering (because those things aren’t possible) so there must be hidden, and sinister, forces making the necessary decisions: the supposedly-free market is not free but regulated by Capitalists or the Wealthy or Jews, or some evil combination thereof. (See postings on Manichaeism)

2) A progressive intellectual elite (themselves), floating above the grubby struggle for personal gain that infests most of humanity, can, by making the decisions, improve efficiencies in production and allocation, increasing aggregate human wealth while allocating that wealth more fairly.

Even if they don’t believe in the international capitalist conspiracy, the rationalists see instabilities and confusion in the Free Market and just know they could do better by rationally regulating it. Conclusion: an openly-regulated economy would be a vast improvement over one covertly-regulated, or subject to irrationality. This conceit goes back at least to the French Enlightenment and is the subject of Fredrik Hayek’s book “The Fatal Conceit – the Errors of Socialism”.

I addressed the Manichaean myth of the hidden regulators in earlier essays – the pleasant and self-exalting idea that one is on the side of “good”, fighting against “evil”.

The free market is always regulated: by reality, by competition for scarce resources, and the fact that nobody willingly participates in any transaction unless he believes the transaction will be good for him.

Reality: only some things are possible. Everything of value has limits. Time and other resources used for one endeavor (e.g., to create one product) are unavailable for use on another. Rationalists may have glib arguments otherwise, but reality always wins. The free market operates within, and acknowledges, the realm of the real.

Competition: With all resources being limited, tradeoffs must be made in where to apply any given resource. In the most-free of markets, those who wish to have or use scarce resources must compete with others having the same desires. While perfection is impossible (see Reality), competition tends to move resources to those applications providing the greatest payoff (increase in total wealth) for society. Actions taken in a free market are regulated by the competing demands for scarce resources. Prices are how potential users indicate the value they place on each resource.

Mutual Benefit: in a society with individual liberty, every person is able to walk away from any transaction if he chooses. No one is coerced into offering for sale, buying, lending, or borrowing anything. Free markets are thus regulated by the natural requirement that any transaction must be to the benefit of all parties involved. Transactions structured for the benefit of one party at the expense of others simply don’t happen.

One of the cool things about this regulatory regime is no amount of lobbying can change these regulations, unless the free market is turned into a “not-quite-free market”, that is, the free market is destroyed. In any economic organization other than the extended order of mutual cooperation – the Free Market – regulations are subject to governmental whim and the lobbying, influence-peddling, and rent-seeking that government control always generates.

The regulation of the free market is also impersonal, universal, and timeless. They are laws of nature and laws of human nature. The regulations come about from the decisions of free people, not the intellectual constructs of those who see themselves as smarter and wiser than the rest of humanity.

If you read or hear someone mention the “unregulated free market” they are either ignorant or lying. Probably the former.

Corporatism

2009-04-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

…Corporatism, the notion that elite groups of individuals molded together into committees or public-private boards can guide society and coordinate the economy from the top town and manage change by evolution, not revolution. It is a turn-of-the 20th century philosophy, updated for the dawn of the 21st century, which positions itself as an antidote to the kind of messy capitalism that has transformed the Fortune 500 and every corner of our economy in the last half century. To do so corporatism seeks to substitute the wisdom of the few for the hundreds of millions of individual actions and transactions of the many that set the direction of the economy from the bottom up. – “Obama and the Reawakening of Corporatism”, Steven Malanga

Corporatism (Italian: corporativismo) is a political culture in which adherents believe that the basic unit of the society is some corporate group, rather than the individual.[citation needed] Political cultures which hold the individual as the basic unit are called individualistic cultures. The basic unit of the society is what people in the culture consider to be the proper concern of the government. – Wikipedia

Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby a state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through corporations. This usage is particularly common in the area of East Asian studies, and is sometimes also referred to as state corporatism. – Wikipedia

1932 Doctrine of Fascism:
[The state] is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual... Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State... Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers. – Wikipedia

Corporatism
Noun
organization of a state on the lines of a business enterprise, with substantial government management of the economy – The Free Dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/corporatism

‘…state capitalism "has introduced massive inefficiencies into global markets and injected populist politics into economic decision-making," that "deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth," and that politicians tend to develop stimulus packages with their constituencies, not economic efficiencies, in mind. Therefore, he says, the state must eventually retreat. He probably is wrong because he underestimates the pleasure politicians derive from using their nation's wealth as a slush fund for purchasing political advantage.’ From George Will’s column 10 May 2009

‘In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated people being governed by "an immense, tutelary power" determined to take "sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate." It would be a power "absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle," aiming for our happiness but wanting "to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness." It would, Tocqueville said, provide people security, anticipate their needs, direct their industries and divide their inheritances. It would envelop society in "a network of petty regulations — complicated, minute and uniform." But softly: "It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them" until people resemble "a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."’ – ibid.

Conclusion:
Are you a cog in the greater machine, existing and struggling and suffering and dieing for the benefit of the nation (or humanity as a collective), or are you a sovereign individual with a unique soul, feeling your own pain and experiencing your own joy, owning your own body and your own efforts?

The Fascists and Communists have one opinion about this. What is yours? Listen to political speeches and decide for yourself where the speaker stands on this.

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