Did you know that by speaking in Germany as an unelected presidential candidate, Obama is undermining the institution of the presidency? So I just heard from some moving mouth on MSNBC.
I’m delighted to hear that Obama is undermining the institution of the presidency, but the mechanism remains a bit obscure.
“Well, I’m back.”
First up was FEE, in a sprawling old house that has housed the organisation since the beginning. The walls are covered with historical memorabilia, such as photos of Ludwig von Mises teaching in that very building, and letters to Henry Hazlitt and Leonard Read from such folks as Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Leon Trotsky (this last concerning an article that Hazlitt had solicited from Trotsky during Hazlitt’s years as an editor for The Nation). And down the hall there’s a cover gallery for The Freeman; it was especially cool to see the names of Charles Johnson and Kevin Carson on the wall.
Incidentally, the hotel where we stayed, while quite pretty, seems to have been designed by a rather deranged architect. Long corridors twist around going nowhere; the 1st and 2nd floors are also the 3rd and 4th floors; and you have to climb stairs to get between your room and the elevator (an eccentricity I had thought confined to European hotels).
As I noted previously, the line-up for the conference was pretty anarchistic for FEE. In fact it turned out to be an even more anarchy-intensive conference than I’d thought. For example, Bryan Caplan’s talk “Less Than Minimum” was not, as I had wrongly guessed, about the minimum wage; it was about the various ways in which most states even today fall short of exercising a complete monopoly on even those functions minarchists regard as the bare minimum. One notable statistic from Bryan was that in the U.S. private police currently outnumber government police 60% to 40%. Try asking a non-anarchist sometime, “suppose we began gradually privatising the police; what do you think would happen as soon as the private police outnumbered the government police?” I’m sure they’d think the former would quickly gang up and attack the latter, and would be surprised to learn that the feared situation already exists. (Bryan argued that this showed the fundamentally peaceful nature of market anarchism. But I wonder why it’s not evidence of market failure!)
It turns out that FEE’s program director Geoffrey Lea deliberately chose speakers who would push the envelope and disagree with each other, and in fact good-natured public debates broke out between Ed Stringham and Bryan, and between me and Walter Block. (Geoff Lea had specifically introduced my talks as ones that Walter would especially disagree with; this was true enough of my first talk, “Thick Libertarianism,” but not especially of my second, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal” (despite the title), so I deliberately revised the latter as I was giving it in order to focus on more things Walter and I disagree about.) I particularly appreciated the fact that the conference allowed us to model for the students the possibility of libertarians expressing vigorous disagreement with one another without becoming unfriendly or acting like assholes.
It was a great conference, and I’m sorry I couldn’t stay for the whole week – and especially sorry to miss Jeff Hummel’s provocatively titled talk “Why Fractional-Reserve Banking Is More Libertarian Than the Gold Standard” – but coming up next was another great conference, David Beito’s Liberty Fund symposium in Indianapolis on Zora Neale Hurston. I have some great Hurston quotes which I’ll talk about in a later post. (Incidentally, Dave sent us all a link to an audio clip of Hurston talking about zombies.) And I finally got to meet Wendy McElroy, whose work helped first introduce me, back in the 1980s, to the individualist anarchist feminists of the 19th century; she’s pretty cool. (Actually a good number of Liberty & Power bloggers were there – me, Wendy, Keith Halderman, Jonathan Bean, and my old friends Mark Brady and of course Dave B.)
I did finally get to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which was excellent. They had an extremely diverse collection, including a traveling exhibition of the original typescript scroll for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. One of my favourite pieces was a print of a white monkey by Kawabata Gyokusho (my favourite museum pieces never seem to be available as postcards, posters, or internet files!).
I’ve been to Indianapolis many times and never knew there was a canal downtown. But then in the museum I saw this painting of a canal with the Indiana state capitol (a very cool building in its own right, by the way; it looks like it belongs in Paris) directly behind it, and thus realised that there might still be a canal just a few blocks from my hotel. Indeed there was – a bit soulless and prefab-looking these days, but still a nice place to walk.
I tried to find the Superheroes Museum, but apparently it has closed. 🙁
Next week, Mises University!
This weekend I’m off to the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, to give a couple of lectures at one of their conferences for students. This will be my first visit to FEE, which is (I believe) the oldest libertarian think tank in existence.
As you can see from the schedule, it’s a fairly radical, mostly-anarchist (possibly all-anarchist) lineup of speakers: Walter Block on privatisation and reparations, Bryan Caplan on irrational voters and whatever “Less Than Minimum” is (I’m guessing it concerns minimum wage?), Jeff Hummel on the Great Depression and Anti-Federalism, Sandy Ikeda on interventionism and private neighbourhoods, Jim Otteson on global ethics and Adam Smith, Ben Powell on immigration and Somali law, and Ed Stringham on private law in general and the Dutch experience with private law in particular. My own lectures are on “Equality, the Unknown Ideal” (drawing on my discussions here and here) and “Thick Libertarianism” (see my handout here).
Unfortunately, I can’t stay for the whole week – because on the 17th I head to Indianapolis for a Liberty Fund conference (run by David Beito) on Zora Neale Hurston, focusing on both her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and on her nonfiction political essays. (In passing: I’ve probably said this before, but someone should really do a study of the possible influence of Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain on the early chapters of Rose Wilder Lane’s Discovery of Freedom.)
I’ve been to Indianapolis a number of times and I’ve never gotten to the art museum (though I’ve been to the rather creepy war monument quite often enough); this time I’ll really try to make it there.
This story reminds me of a party I went to back in my high school days. I was bored to tears, but embarrassed to leave early. “If only I were a solipsist,” I remember thinking, “I could just leave.” After thinking about that for a minute, I had a second thought: “I can still leave even if I’m not a solipsist.” So I left.
One objection I often hear raised against thick libertarianism is that bundling libertarianism together with other values and commitments is dangerous to the cause of liberty, because a) it tends to alienate potential supporters of libertarianism who don’t share the additional values, and/or b) libertarians whose support for liberty is conjoined with an equally strong support for other values face a greater risk of being tempted away from their libertarian commitments by the possibility of using state power to promote the other values.
The first thing to point out about this objection is that it is not strictly correct to call it an objection to thick libertarianism. On the contrary, this objection is itself a version of thick libertarianism (we might call it “anti-thickness thickness”). After all, its objection to bundling libertarianism with other values is that such bundling makes the achievement and/or maintenance of a libertarian society more difficult – and that is precisely a thicklib kind of concern, specifically a form of what Charles formerly called “instrumental thickness” and now calls “strategic thickness.” After all, the non-aggression principle by itself doesn’t call on anybody to promote libertarianism; so as soon as one starts arguing that libertarians qua libertarians should reject X (where X is not by itself inconsistent with the non-aggression principle) on the grounds that X makes it harder to promote libertarianism, one has moved from thin to thick libertarianism. All that one can consistently do in defense of thin libertarianism is argue that libertarians need not bundle liberty with other values; to argue, more strongly, that they should not is to turn thicklib by bundling libertarianism with a commitment to no-bundles-but-this-one.
The fact that this purported objection to thick libertarianism turns out to express thicklib concerns itself is not a decisive reply, however; for the objector can simply redescribe the objection as directed against forms of thick libertarianism other than itself. Still, the skinnylibber who brings this objection has admitted the relevance of thicklib concerns, so we have our foot in the door.
Turning to the specific objections: it’s doubtless true that thick libertarianism alienates some potential pro-liberty folks who don’t like the extra values in the bundle; but it’s equally true that thin libertarianism alienates some potential pro-liberty folks who have trouble feeling the attraction of libertarianism until they see how it integrates with their other concerns. One simply has to weigh these considerations against one another, and against other thick concerns (not just strategic but also application, grounds, and consequence), to see how it all sorts out.
As for the worry that devotees of Liberty-plus-X might be tempted to violate liberty in order to promote X, well, so they might – but a commitment to X, if it’s the right X, might well help to guard against certain sorts of temptation to sacrifice liberty. (See, e.g., Rothbard’s argument that a rejection of utilitarianism makes one’s commitment to liberty more reliable.) If a commitment to X instead undermines one’s commitment to liberty, then either one has chosen the wrong X – one that is not properly bundled with liberty (and so one that is itself condemned on thickness grounds) – or else one has misunderstood the relation between liberty and X. After all, thicklib values are supposed to be ones that have a natural fit with liberty, values that it would be unreasonable or counterproductive to pursue by nonlibertarian means.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve just posted an 1842 work by English individualist anarchist Thomas Hodgskin titled Peace, Law, and Order; Hodgskin objects to the common conjoining of these three terms, on the grounds that law is the greatest threat to peace and order, not their guarantor.
I’ve also finished posting American mutualist Dyer Lum’s 1890 Economics of Anarchy, along with a shorter work by Lum from 1887 titled On Anarchy. These works deal with many of the same issues as Tandy’s book, though Lum is a bigger fan of cooperative association than Tandy and is not quite as firmly committed to nonviolent methods.
Elsewhere in the libersphere, Shawn Wilbur has also located and posted an 1890 anti-tariff piece by battlin’ Belgian Gustave de Molinari titled “The McKinley Bill in Europe.”