Charles Johnson is both inviting participants and raising money for the Southern Nevada branch of ALL to have a presence at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair next month. This is an outreach-to-the-antistatist-left event, to complement the outreach-to-the-antistatist-right event we’ll be involved in a month later.

I wish I could go, but I’ll be in Prague. But – want to go to San Francisco and hang out with anarchists? Or want to donate for this worthy cause? Details here.

Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually pretty sucky. But the state-capitalist culture is even suckier. (I didn’t say it was a cheerful book. But it’s a very good book.)

Related whereunto, some random items:

• There’s a book of essays titled The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I haven’t read it; but apparently Le Guin liked it and contributed an essay herself.
• L. Neil Smith semi-dedicated his anarcho-capitalist novel The Probability Broach to Le Guin and The Dispossessed. (At least that’s true of the first edition; I don’t have the revised edition handy.) He also commends Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians to Le Guin’s attention in order to nudge her toward a more favourable attitude to property. (I gotta say, that’s not the book I would have picked for that purpose.)
• I’ve long suspected that Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division, with its confrontation between a flawed but functional anarcho-capitalist society and a flawed but functional anarcho-communist society, was partly inspired by Le Guin’s book.
• One of Le Guin’s last works, The Telling, deals with Taoist-inspired communities struggling under an oppressive system variously described by reviewers as a “tightly controlled capitalist government” and a “soulless form of corporate communism.” I haven’t read it yet either.

Addendum: I remembered something else I’d intended to mention: in addition to Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division being partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its theme, I’ve wondered whether MacLeod’s earlier novel The Stone Canal might be partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its narrative structure, with one storyline being told through the odd-numbered chapters while a “flashback” background story, featuring the same viewpoint character – in both cases an anarchist scholar – runs through the even-numbered chapters (though of course other writers have done such things as well).

Observations of a various, sundry, and miscellaneous character:

• Over at Take Back the LP, check out a purpose statement by Murray Rothbard and a(n) FAQ by Morey Straus.
• Libertopia has a revised speakers list up.
• Next month I’ll be going back to Prague for the PCPE. It’s being held a month earlier than usual. On the down side, that means it’ll be a bit wintrier (and the palace gardens will be closed). On the up side, that means it’ll be during my spring break, so I can spend a few more days in the area.

Addendum: I notice that the deadline for submitting a paper to the PCPE has been extended, so if you want to hang out with libertarians in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities next month, why not consider it?

a) What happens if Commissioner Gordon needs to contact Batman in the daytime? Or on a night that doesn’t have low-lying clouds? I can see why the tv version installed a Batphone.

b) If I were a Gotham City villain, I’d hole up with a rocket launcher in a building near the one with the Bat-signal. Then when the signal comes on I know Batman will soon be on the neighbouring roof. I watch, I aim, boom.

Note that the venue has changed from Bally’s to Caesar’s. I don’t know the reason, but I’m glad of it, since I’ll probably be staying at the other end of the strip, and it’ll be easier to take the bus straight down the strip to Caesar’s rather than first taking it to Caesar’s, then taking the overpass to the other side of the street, and finally taking the boom tube to Bally’s. (Plus I confess I’m fond of the Forum Shops at Caesar’s, with their fake-sky ceilings perpetually cycling between day and night – boldly straddling, like so many things in Vegas, that treacherous line between the charming and the tacky.)

In related news, I see that they have a number of 7:40 a.m. sessions. I’m grateful that ours isn’t one of them.

Here’s the idea behind the topic. There’s long been a dispute – going back to Aristotle versus his Presocratic and Platonic predecessors – as to whether ordinary objects such as tables and terriers are full realities in their own right or are instead mere constructs out of something more basic and less familiar: atomic triangles, sense-data, property clusters, four-dimensional time-slices, etc.

Most members of the Auburn department are firmly on the side of the ordinary objects – even if this image, the official icon of the conference, might suggest otherwise.

In related news (related to the topic of the conference, albeit not especially to the conference itself), check out Rupert Read’s Wittgensteinian critique of four-dimensional time-slices. (In order to understand his opening analogy, non-Brits may need to examine this photograph.)

A quick reply to Neera’s last, on the pyramid of ability: I certainly don’t doubt that “in every area of human endeavor a few people stand out above others and benefit others much more than they are benefited by them,” and I agree that it “would be odd if this were not the case in business.” If that’s all that Rand meant by the pyramid of ability, I’d have no objection.

But at least much of the time Rand seems to assume that the pyramid of ability corresponds to the hierarchy of the firm, with the best decision-makers gravitating to the top – as when she says: “The standard of living of [a] blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.”

Moreover, Rand seems to assume that this generalisation holds, not just under idealised laissez-faire but, at least approximately, in the state-hampered market we live in. And that in particular is a claim that I think we have much reason to reject, both on the basis of everyday experience of what the business world is like, and on the basis of a theoretical understanding of the likely effects of government intervention.

Rand would never suggest that the government bureaucrats regulating a particular industry are likely to be better decision-makers than the people being regulated; quite the contrary! But to the extent that the market is pervaded by governmental privilege in the ways that Kevin Carson et al. delineate, the likelihood that success within the market must be tracking superior performance likewise goes down.

While Neera grants that workers know more about their own jobs than the owners do, she insists that “the owners know more about their work than the people they regulate.” I think that, to a large extent, this is not true under conditions of actually-existing corporatist capitalism, for the same reason that it was not true of state-socialist bureaucrats regulating the economy in the Soviet Union.

In order to regulate your work, I may not need to understand it as well as you do, but there’s a certain minimum extent to which I need to understand it if my regulating is to be useful rather than counterproductive; and what I’m claiming is that under both state socialism and corporatist capitalism, there are governmentally-enabled structural mechanisms that both a) interfere with the transmission of information up the hierarchy, thus making it harder for bosses to find out about the work of those they’re regulating, and b) insulate bosses and boss-driven systems from the ordinary negative effects of lacking such information. In short, Kevin is simply applying to corporatist capitalism the same critique that Mises and Hayek applied to state socialism.

On a different point: I notice that in the comments section of a previous post here, Neera objects to my defense of the unity of virtue (where I suggested, following Alexander of Aphrodisias, that if I am cowardly then I cannot be completely just, since justice sometimes requires courage) by noting that I might conceivably be cowardly only in situations where justice is not at stake; but when it is, “it’s not necessary that my cowardice prevail; my justice might trump my cowardice.”

Here, though, Neera seems to be thinking of the unity of virtue as solely a thesis about motivation; but as I see it, it’s at least as much a thesis about the cognitive aspect of virtue (and thus a thesis about practical wisdom, to get back to another issue that Neera has rightly been stressing). (Actually, I think that, even more strongly, it’s a thesis about how the contents of the virtues are determined, in the metaphysical rather than the epistemic sense of “determined”; but I only need the cognitive point for now.)

In order for me to do the courageous thing in just those cases where justice demands it, I have to be able to identify what justice demands; but, I claim, the coward’s ability to do this is necessarily impaired, at least to some extent. As I put it in the piece I linked to:

I do not count as fully courageous unless I can be counted on to do the courageous thing in every situation, which in turn requires that I be a reliable assessor of which risks are worth taking; but which risks are worth taking might sometimes depend on the requirements of prudence, or justice, or loyalty; to the extent that I am imprudent, or unjust, or disloyal, I cannot be counted on to assess those risks properly in such possible or actual situations, and so I will not be fully just.

In other words, the problem is not just that the coward will see what justice requires but won’t be motivated to comply in cases where what’s required is risky, but that the coward’s confidence about even having identified what justice requires is to some extent ill-grounded, since cowardice itself exemplifies an inadequate responsiveness to what’s worth losing to gain what.

One more thing: I agree with Neera that Greek tragedies can offer good examples of cases where doing the right thing entails suffering for the doer, but I’m puzzled by her choice of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia as an example, since that seems like a monstrously wicked choice rather than a virtuous one. I’d offer Antigone or Philoctetes as more plausible examples.

In addition, back on the pyramid-of-ability issue again, Bryan Caplan has another response to me here; once again I reply in the talkback.

Addendum: This response by Wendell Hoenir was just pointed out to me; I’ll comment on it later. Gotta prepare for class now!