A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, Part 3

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Now that Ron Paul’s candidacy is winding down, my debate with Walter Block over the analogy or disanalogy between Paul’s and Randy Barnett’s “deviations” no longer has much urgency (assuming it ever did), but let us proceed nonetheless.

Recap: last December I asked why Paul’s supporters downplay the importance of Paul’s deviations from libertarian purity (on, e.g., abortion and immigration – at least for those, like Walter, who agree with me that Paul’s positions on those issues are deviations) while on the other hand treating Barnett’s deviations (above all his support for the war) as a reason to deny his status as a libertarian at all. What justifies this disparity? (My own view is that both men’s deviations are sufficiently serious for me not to support either one for President [not that Barnett is running for President, but supposing he were], but that neither’s deviations disqualifies him from being considered a libertarian.)

Walter Block Walter replied, I counter-replied, and Walter has now counter-counter-replied. (There’s also lively discussion in the comments section – over 50 posts and counting.) I hereby counter-counter-counter-reply.

1. Walter’s first point is that Barnett’s deviations are more serious than Paul’s: “I see bombing innocent children and adults as a far more serious violation of liberty than aborting fetuses, or violating the rights of people to cross national borders.” This is a bit oddly worded; since Walter agrees with me on the permissibility of abortion, then of course we can agree that bombing innocent people is a more serious violation of liberty than aborting fetuses, since we don’t regard aborting fetuses as a violation of liberty at all. Presumably Walter meant that bombing innocent people is a more serious violation of liberty than preventing women from having abortions.

Now perhaps Walter is right that bombing innocent people is a worse violation of liberty than preventing women from having abortions. But that’s still consistent with thinking that preventing women from having abortions is an extremely serious violation of liberty; and I think any libertarian who holds the position that Walter and I hold on abortion is indeed committed to regarding a prohibition of abortion as an extremely serious violation of liberty, far more serious than, say, drug laws or economic regulations. For a ban on abortion then counts as unrightfully forcing women to allow their bodies to be used as incubators – the moral equivalent of mass rape and mass enslavement. Taking into account the pain and risk involved in childbirth, an abortion ban also counts as the moral equivalent of mass torture. Is mass rape/enslavement/torture a less serious violation of liberty than mass murder? Maybe so; but it certainly counts as being in the same moral ballpark.

Now it is true, of course, that Paul favours returning the abortion issue to the states rather than imposing a federal ban on abortion. That certainly makes his position less objectionable than it would otherwise be. (For my views on how to weigh the merits of decentralism against the merits of striking down local oppressive legislation, see the second half of my LRC article on Kelo.) Perhaps Walter will say that’s enough to make the difference between purgatorio for Paul and inferno for Barnett. Well, suppose we stipulate that that is so. Still, we may also note that Barnett is an anarchist while Paul is not. So Paul supports, while Barnett opposes, what Walter and I will agree is the most anti-liberty institution on earth, unreformable, unsalvageable, an inevitable source of more war and oppression so long as it exists. So why isn’t that enough to lower Paul’s score and/or raise Barnett’s?

2. Walter’s second point is that abortion and immigration are more complex issues than war, and deviation on complex issues counts less against one’s libertarian credentials than deviation on simple issues – just as getting 2 + 2 = 4 wrong counts more against one’s credentials as a mathematician than getting the Pythagorean theorem wrong, or getting the ex ante benefit of exchange wrong counts more against one’s credentials as an Austrian economist than getting the business cycle wrong.

But first of all, it’s not obvious to me that war is a less complex issue than abortion and immigration. Now maybe this is charitable bias on my part toward my own past self: I started my libertarian career as a Randian, so while I was never guilty of the anti-abortion and anti-immigration deviations, I was once hawkishly deviant on the issue of foreign policy – yet I don’t want to deny my past self the title of libertarian. But to put my position less self-servingly, I would say that, having once been a liberventionist myself, I can understand the position from the inside and see how a libertarian could sincerely adopt it. (Just combine an empirically mistaken view about whether a certain use of force is actually defensive with a morally mistaken view about the requirements for permissible violence against innocent shields, and voilà.)

Consider Barnett’s defense of his position here. Is it mistaken? Yes, I think so. Is it so obviously, grossly mistaken that no intelligent libertarian could sincerely adopt it? I can’t see that it is.

But second, even if I were to grant that the libertarian case against war is much simpler and more obvious than the libertarian case against restrictions on abortion and immigration, I can’t see how that would establish that deviation on the former does, while deviation on the latter does not, disqualify the proponent from counting as a libertarian. Greater complexity of an issue may make deviation on that issue more excusable, but I didn’t think we were arguing about who is more blameworthy for a given deviation. Whether Paul and/or Barnett reached their mistaken positions through honest error, culpable intellectual negligence, or some combination of the two is not my concern; I’m not interested in passing judgment on their souls.

The question of how complex an issue is seems to me quite different from the question of how serious a mistake about that issue is. Yes, Walter cites some cases in which the two do go together; but they need not always do so. Getting the fuel mixture wrong in the space shuttle, for example, is a more serious error than misspelling the shuttle’s name on the side, even though the latter error is less complex and so easier to avoid.

Likewise, the libertarian case against abortion laws is surely more complex than the libertarian case against taxation (since the former, unlike the latter, requires assessing the moral status of the fetus); hence it’s much easier to show that taxation is inconsistent with libertarian principles than to show that restrictions on abortion are. But it doesn’t seem to follow that libertarian deviations on abortion are less serious than libertarian deviations on taxation. On the contrary, once we grant that a ban on abortion is a rights-violation, then it must be seen as a worse rights-violation than taxation, since it invades the victim’s very body and not just her external property. And likewise for the pro-life side: if I regarded abortion itself as a rights-violation, I would again have to take it as a worse rights-violation than taxation, inasmuch as murder is worse than theft. So although abortion may be an easier issue for libertarians to get wrong than taxation is, it’s still surely worse to get abortion wrong – whichever side one thinks of as getting it wrong – than to get taxation wrong.

3. Walter thinks the case for regarding a deviation as within rather than beyond the pale of libertarianism depends on whether the deviation is endorsed by prominent libertarian authorities. The argument seems to be mainly epistemological: if so authoritative a libertarian as X holds a certain position, we should be more cautious about rejecting that position, and so accordingly more cautious about how serious a deviation we take it to be. (One might also interpret Walter as offering a paradigm-case argument: if theorist X is a paradigm case of a libertarian, then we cannot treat a deviation held by that theorist as reason to deny libertarian status to holders of that deviation. I’m not sure whether Walter intends this latter argument as well.) Given Walter’s additional premise that anti-immigrationists like Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, and Stephan Kinsella are “more deserving of the title of eminent libertarian theorist” than liberventionists like John Hospers and Randy Barnett, it follows that libertarian deviation on immigration must be more serious than libertarian deviation on war. (Walter is apparently not sure – nor am I – what Hoppe’s and Kinsella’s views on abortion are; it’s an issue that argumentation ethics doesn’t clearly address. K-dog, if you’re reading this, pray enlighten us.)

I’m not convinced. First, with regard to the epistemological argument, suppose it’s true that we should be more cautious about rejecting positions that the “big guns” of libertarianism defend; I would probably put less weight on this point than Walter would, but let’s grant it arguendo. Still I don’t follow the inference from being more cautious in labeling a position as a deviation to attributing a lesser degree of seriousness to those positions we do label as deviations. The strength or certainty with which we’re prepared to hold a position seems like a different matter from the content of the positions we hold. It’s not as though we have to hold extreme views with extreme conviction and moderate views with moderate conviction; on the contrary, we might well have grounds to hold extreme views with moderate conviction and moderate views with extreme conviction. Hence even if thinker X’s greater eminence over thinker Y gives us reason for greater caution in labeling one of X’s positions a deviation than in labeling one of Y’s positions such, if we do decide that X and Y are both guilty of deviations, I can’t see that our reasons for differential caution translate into reasons for regarding X’s deviations as less serious than Y’s.

Randy Barnett As for Walter’s claim that Barnett does not count as “eminent,” this isn’t obvious to me. If Walter means “eminent” in the descriptive sense, meaning essentially “famous,” then I think Barnett probably counts as more eminent than, say, Hoppe and Kinsella, though probably less so than Rothbard. If Walter means “eminent” in the normative sense, meaning something like “important” or “deserving to be famous,” then Barnett surely belongs in the same tier of eminence as Hoppe and Kinsella. (I also don’t think the early, pro-immigration Rothbard can be less eminent than the later, anti-immigration Rothbard.) On behalf of Barnett’s claim to normative eminence, I would point to his excellent book The Structure of Liberty and articles on, for example, restitution, contract theory, and Spoonerite jurisprudence, as well as his marvelous two-part piece (Part 1; Part 2) in defense of anarchism. How, in light of these contributions, can we avoid acknowledging Barnett’s status as an eminent libertarian theorist? (I would make such a case for Hospers as well.)

As for the paradigm-case argument (if Walter means to offer one), Mises and Rand surely count as paradigmatic cases of libertarian theorists; yet Mises supported the Cold War, and Rand, though less hawkish than her current followers, held that any free or semi-free country has the right to invade any dictatorship, and that any innocent casualties in such an invasion are to be laid at the door of the invaded dictatorship, not the semi-free invaders. And then there’s Benjamin Tucker, a paradigmatic libertarian theorist for at least some of us, who defended U.S. entry into World War I. So deviation on war seems insufficient grounds for ejection from libertarian status.

In any case, I’m not sure how much should turn on whether a given position counts as within or beyond the pale of libertarianism per se; the main questions, as I see it, are a) is the position mistaken, and b) if so, is the mistake bad enough to warrant refusal to support a candidate? How bad a mistake is and how unlibertarian a mistake is are, after all, different questions. For example, someone who held that the entire human race should be exterminated, but favoured persuasive rather than coercive measures for achieving this, would be taking a worse position than someone who, say, endorsed copyrights, even though the former position has more claim than the latter to be consistent with the letter (though not the spirit) of libertarianism. Favouring voluntary extermination of the human race I would regard as a stronger reason not to support a candidate than favouring copyrights.

4. Walter closes by suggesting that he is “operating from a sort of agnostic point of view,” that of “a newcomer to libertarianism.” Okay, but in that case I have to ask: why is he doing that? After all, he’s not an agnostic; he appears to defend his positions quite forcefully, not tentatively or with one eye over his shoulder toward the eminent libertarian authorities (hey, I’ve heard him call Hans Hoppe a “pinko”! – this is not Mr. Quaking Deference); and he’s certainly less of a newcomer to libertarianism than I am.

5. Finally, I’m curious to know Walter’s opinion of Mary Ruwart’s candidacy. Ruwart holds (what Walter and I regard as) the right libertarian positions on foreign policy and abortion and immigration; plus she’s a generally radical libertarian, a proponent of Austrian business cycle theory, and an anarchist to boot. Does Walter agree with me that Ruwart’s candidacy is more deserving of libertarian support than Ron Paul’s?

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0 Responses to A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, Part 3

  1. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 11:52 am #

    I’ve also added a reply to some of the comments on Walter’s post.

  2. Stephan Kinsella March 24, 2008 at 12:48 pm #

    Roderick, you asked for my views on abortion. I’ve not written much on this before, and my views have slowly shifted on this issue. Basically, it seems to me that a very premature embryo cannot have rights; but that a near-term fetus has rights very similar to those of an infant. There is a spectrum, and the case for saying there is a rights violation gets stronger as the fetus becomes more developed. I’ve never been quite persuaded by the Rothbard-Block “trespasser” argument since it seems to me the fetus is (usually) “invited” since it’s the natural result of a voluntary act. I would say it’s generally immoral to abort even at an early stage, but a rights violation later on. Even so, having the state outlaw it even at later stage is something I’m not comfortable with.

  3. TGGP March 24, 2008 at 3:16 pm #

    I already gave my opinion on this issue in the above-linked posts, but I’d like to add that my thoughts on abortion are here. It’s quite an extreme position that follows from radical decentralism.

    I would consider only Rothbard to be the only eminent libertarian of the bunch. I was unsure whether Barnett still considered himself an anarchist, there was disagreement earlier at the Mises blog. On the margin, Ron Paul seems just as opposed to taxation (if not moreso) than Barnett, so I don’t hold his minarchism against him (or I suppose I wouldn’t if I were not a minarchist myself).

    One criteria for judging how bad deviations are is looking at how many people they kill. The war in Iraq will kill a lot of people. Leaving abortion up to the states and restricting immigration will kill far fewer.

  4. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 3:34 pm #

    Stephan,

    Thanks for the clarification. Just wondering, though — if you base rights on argumentation ethics, how do non-arguers get rights?

    Re the “invitation” argument, I published a reply to that in Social Philosophy & Policy back in 1993, but it’s not online. I need to put it online — one of the nine million things i need to do ….

    TGGP,

    Yes, Barnett still considers himself an anarchist; see his discussion here.

  5. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 3:36 pm #

    P.S. to Stephan — what is Hans’s view on abortion, do you know?

  6. PhysicistDave March 24, 2008 at 4:41 pm #

    Stephan,

    Nice to see you jump in. I wonder if you would care to comment on two of us “taking your name in vain” in the comments section of Walter’s post on the immigration issue.

    I wrote there:
    > Similarly, I think you are factually mistaken in referring to Kinsella as an “anti-immigration libertarian.” What I have read of Stephan’s work on immigration indicates that he refuses to be either pro-immigration or anti-immigration: as an anarcho-capitalist, he rejects the idea of “immigration” as an anti-concept. The private property owner should have the right to declare that immigration is totally prohibited, completely open, or anything in between onto his own property. In a free country, it is a non-issue. And, I recall Stephan arguing, in the existing semi-socialist system under which we live, there is no right approach to “immigration”: any governmental solution will necessarily violate someone’s rights.

    Did I get your views more or less correct, or did I hopelessly muddle your views?

    Dave Miller in Sacramento

  7. PhysicistDave March 24, 2008 at 5:21 pm #

    Rod,

    I’m more than slightly bemused by focusing on, to use your words, anyone’s “status as a libertarian.”

    After all, it’s hard to see that there is any ontological reality to someone’s “status as a libertarian”!

    Surely, if and when I declare that Randy Barnett is not “really” a libertarian, I mean that I find his views so horrid that they repel me, I cannot recommend him to others as a good source of ideas, I think his actions are factually inimical to the long-term progress of liberty, I do not wish to associate with him in political action, etc.

    Isn’t this a clear case where the old hoary “meaning vs. use” distinction is relevant? “He’s not a libertarian!” is short-hand for a series of other thoughts, and it would seem better to move on to exploring those thoughts than to place more weight on a shorthand comment than it will bear.

    The truth is that no sensible libertarian (and few insensible ones!) really can give a short fifty-words-or-less criterion by which they decide which “libertarians” are acceptable or not. Far too many considerations, quite rightly, come into play. As you wrote:

    >Favouring voluntary extermination of the human race I would regard as a stronger reason not to support a candidate than favouring copyrights.

    Quite right. Anyone who favors voluntary extermination of the human race is a repulsive nut case who can only retard the progress of any movement of which he is a member. Regardless of his view on the non-aggression principle, stay away from him!

    Incidentally, my own take on Randy is simply that a sound judgment of the role of militarism and imperialism in the growth of state power and in the invasion of individual liberty is such that it is hard to see how someone who takes Randy’s position on the war is an asset in a movement that aims to advance liberty. Whether he is “really” a libertarian does not matter. I do not wish to waste my time and energy allied with someone who is, in fact (whatever his “true” intentions may be), working against the goals I am trying to advance.

    I wouldn’t hire a guy to put a new roof on my house if everyone knows that all of his roofs fall apart within a month – no matter how pure his soul may be. I take the same tack with Randy – in my best judgment, Randy is inimical to liberty, however pure a “libertarian” soul he may possess.

    This does raise also the question of the “libertarian movement.”

    I don’t think there is one.

    An interested outsider, not committed to any particular faction, might reasonably label the “paleo-libs” (perhaps now better called “Paulistas,” “Rockwellians,” or “Mises Institute folks”), your own variety of “left-libertarians,” the official (Peikoffian) Objectivists, and the “Beltway libertarians” (Cato, reason, etc.) all as “libertarians.”

    But surely this is not one single political movement!

    The Peikoffians, of course, can be formally excommunicated for associating with any of the other groups. We all know of the bad blood between the paleo-libs and the Beltway-libs. I’m still curious to see how you “left-libs” fit into this ecology – some of us paleo-libs seem cheerful enough about talking with some of you left-libs (and vice versa), even though we have significantly different perspectives.

    And, of course, we all know how to make even finer distinctions here: Kelleyites vs. Peikoffians, cosmotarians vs. liberventionists vs. Beltwaytarians (three groups which have a huge overlap but are not quite the same thing), not to mention the overarching distinction between anarcho-capitalists vs. minarchists.

    Is Randy Barnett a paleo-lib? Nope – I doubt anyone will dispute this. Is he a member of the “Movement of the Libertarian Left.” Let me know if you know the answer to that. He’s not a Peikoffian.

    Etc.

    Randy cannot be “purged” or “excommunicated” or shunned or ostracized from the “libertarian movement” because there is no such thing as “the” libertarian movement. He can be and has been rejected (or has chosen to exclude himself) from one or more of the various libertarian movements floating around this planet, in my judgment for very good reasons.

    Does Randy’s position on the war (and his accompanying actions) retard the progress of liberty in multiple ways – economic freedom, civil liberties, physical destruction of human life, etc. Yes, in my judgment, it clearly does. And my answer on that question of real substance leads me to not wish to ally myself politically with Randy Barnett.

    Isn’t that a more fruitful way of thinking than the “Is he a libertarian?” questions?

    Dave Miller in Sacramento

  8. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 6:38 pm #

    Surely, if and when I declare that Randy Barnett is not “really” a libertarian, I mean that I find his views so horrid that they repel me, I cannot recommend him to others as a good source of ideas

    Well, I wouldn’t recommend him to others as a source of good ideas on the war. But I most certainly do recommend him to others as a source of good ideas on the restitution, contract theory, Spoonerite jurisprudence, inalienable rights, the knowledge/incentive/power problems, etc. Should we toss all that valuable stuff away because he’s wrong on the war? That’s like refusing to drive a car because Henry Ford was a racist, or refusing to use syllogistic logic because Aristotle advocated slavery.

  9. PhysicistDave March 24, 2008 at 11:13 pm #

    Rod,

    I should have written more clearly. When I said “if and when I declare that Randy Barnett is not ‘really’ a libertarian” I meant to make clear that I was speaking hypothetically. I should have followed this up with “I *might* mean” this or this or…

    I was simply trying to illustrate the range of things I might mean if, hypothetically, I “accused” someone of not being a libertarian; I was not trying to go after Randy personally in that sentence.

    I do disagree strongly with Randy on the issue of the current war. However, in this discussion, Randy has become a bit of a symbolic figure for discussing broader issues (which must seem a bit strange to Randy, if he happens to read the discussion!). I don’t value Randy’s other contributions as highly as you do, but then I believe that you have followed his work much more carefully than I have.

    On the broader issue, I think you are making the same point I am trying to make: in dealing with issues like this, you need to, as the economists say, “disaggregate.” It is perfectly reasonable to say that Thomas Sowell is a “true libertarian” on some economic issues but is “no libertarian” on foreign policy: that is shorthand for saying that his economic views show not only a commitment to liberty but also an understanding of what this means in the real world in the economic realm, but that this is not so in the foreign-policy realm.

    Incidentally, Prof. Sowell illustrates the other important point: as you put it, this is not a matter of judging his soul, just his politics. I met Sowell personally decades ago: both on the basis of my brief personal interaction and on the basis of what I hear from others, he is a pleasant, decent man. But I still think he holds some foreign-policy views that are disastrously wrong.

    In the same vein, I would speak out forcefully against Randian/Peikoffian-style attempts to “excommunicate” Sowell, Barnett, or anyone else, unless, in terms of their personal behavior, they had behaved in such a way as to make interaction with them simply intolerable (e.g., if they were known pedophiles, known for fits of personal violence, etc. – which I assume is not the case).

    If you hold a conference on Spooner and you feel that Barnett is a leading scholar on the subject and would be an asset to the conference, go ahead and invite him. I certainly would not criticize you for doing that.

    (Of course, if you somehow invited him to be a guiding light in your “movement of a libertarian left,” I would criticize that, but simply because I do not see how he would properly fit that role and advance your stated goals. I do think that Randy’s conclusions on the war raise some broader questions either about the fundamental basis of his views on ethics and politics or about his ability to make fairly basic judgments, but that is a complicated issue.)

    If Walter Block is trying to somehow “excommunicate” Randy in this sense – e.g., if Walter is trying to let you know that he will never speak to you again if you interact with Randy – then I would disagree with Walter.

    But I’m pretty sure that is not what he is trying to do.

    Of course, even this judgment is complicated – there are situations where a “policy view” is so obviously and eccentrically false and so obviously revealing of someone’s underlying basic character that it does justify shunning and ostracism. For a variety of reasons, I think one should be *extraordinarily* cautious about coming to such a conclusion, and, specifically, as horrible as I think this war is, I do not think this is a situation that warrants such a conclusion.

    All the best,

    Dave

  10. TGGP March 24, 2008 at 11:30 pm #

    But, it’s also perfectly understandable that Lindbergh didn’t care about what the Germans did to Jews and Britain
    Right in that very Des Moines speech he deplores what the Germans are doing to the British and Jews, he just doesn’t think it is in the interests of America to engage in humanitarian intervention. Maybe you can claim he secretly didn’t mind what was being done to them and we can’t trust we he says, but none of us can read minds so I don’t know what else we have to go on. Lindbergh also attempted to go back to his old command to fight the Germans when we went to war with them, but Roosevelt refused to let him do that, which is why he fought in Japan as a civilian (de jure at least, when you are shooting down planes that would seem to make you a de facto combatant).

    and was glad to accept medals from Goering.
    When he accepted the medal he was there on behalf of the U.S government. Nobody cared at the time. It was only later that people demanded he give it back. I personally don’t see why his refusal to do so would even matter.

    True, but the supreme leaders put this moonbat there, to bark his lunacies. They could have stopped him if he didn’t express exactly their opinions.
    His job is not to express the opinions of the mullahs. He’s there because people in Iran have been upset about corruption and economic mismanagement so having a populist like him on stage makes people feel better. There is a broad pro-nuke consensus though.

    Strange question. Uninformed one. Syria is sponsoring terrorism in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel (at least).
    You said Iran was supporting terrorism in Syria, which would imply that there is terrorism going on in Syria.

    And Syria itself isn’t that big and rich. It is rather a front and proxy for Iran.
    Its war machine is larger. Also, see Gary Brecher on proxy armies. For estimates on how much assistance Iran gives Hezbollah, see here.

    I believe in free speach, and in calling moonbats – moonbats.
    And that saying certain things merits an eight-year long war that killed over a million people?

    I also believe in taking seriously threats, and hitting those who threaten me (a threat isn’t free speach).
    Saying “I’m going to kill you” is often a threat (though often not, as discussed in “12 Angry Men”). Saying “death to X” or “may X rot in hell” is not. The U.S has started a considerable number of wars. When was the last time Iran did that?

  11. TGGP March 24, 2008 at 11:32 pm #

    Whoops, I copy-pasted from the wrong saved comment of a blog I had trouble commenting at! I guess that’s a sign I spend too much time arguing this stuff.

    My thoughts on the “libertarian movement” are similar to those of the folks at No Treason.

    Well, I wouldn’t recommend him to others as a source of good ideas on the war.
    I wouldn’t recommend him on the link you just gave me, and while his ideas on the Iraq war are not central to it, they are certainly intertwined with it.

    That’s like refusing to drive a car because Henry Ford was a racist, or refusing to use syllogistic logic because Aristotle advocated slavery.
    Rothbard was a Leninist, at least strategically. I have little regard for syllogistic logic because it distracts from statistics and probability.

  12. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 11:42 pm #

    Dave,

    Then our disagreement may not be that great. I have no problem saying that Barnett is a libertarian on issue A and not a libertarian on issue B. I think that’s consistent with saying he’s a libertarian overall, though I don’t really attach as much importance to the question of who is a genuine lbertarian as I might seem to given these posts. My original question was not so much which deviations make someone no longer a true libertarian as which deviations make someone not consistently libertarian enough to support for president.

    On the broader question of whether I regard Barnett (or, mutatis mutandis, Hoppe) as an “ally in my cause,” I would ask: which cause? I am a proponent of a variety of causes, nested and/or intersecting. I regard both Barnett and Hoppe as allies in a broadly defined libertarian/anarchist cause. I don’t regard either of them as an ally in a more narrowly defined left-libertarian cause, though I think left-libertarians can benefit from selective aspect of each one’s thoughts. I also belong to causes that aren’t directly political at all (natural law as opposed to utilitarianism, for example), with very different constellations of allies.

  13. Administrator March 24, 2008 at 11:48 pm #

    TGGP,

    I have little regard for syllogistic logic because it distracts from statistics and probability.

    Maybe so, but you just gave an implicit syllogistic argument yourself:

    1. Things that distract from statistics and probability are deserving of little regard.
    2. Syllogistic logic distracts from statistics and probability.
    3. Therefore, syllogistic logic is deserving of little regard.

    I also don’t see the case for premise (2). Aristotle’s syllogistic explicitly made room for probabilistic premises.

  14. TGGP March 25, 2008 at 1:53 am #

    Aristotle’s syllogistic explicitly made room for probabilistic premises.
    In practice probability gets shunted to the side as people quibble over definitions. Bayesian probability can replace all other reasoning and so I would place it front and center.

  15. PhysicistDave March 25, 2008 at 4:00 am #

    TGGP wrote:

    >Rothbard was a Leninist, at least strategically.

    It needs to be emphasized that it was *only* strategically, and only for a short time out of his whole career.

    I was one of the earlier people to read the famous “cadre memo” by Murray (this was around 1980), and I remember that my immediate reaction was “Fascinating, but this is an obvious non-starter that has no chance of really working, and it is not worth arguing about” so that I never did bother to debate the matter with Murray. The organization that came closest to really trying to implement the proposed centralized “cadre” strategy was the “Kochtopus.”

    There may be a tendency to forget that Murray was initially allied with the Koch operation, and initially it really looked as if the Koch folks could take over the libertarian movement: most major libertarian publications (Libertarian Review, Insight, etc.), the leading libertarian think-tank (Cato), the most prominent libertarian youth group (Students for a Libertarian Society), and even the Libertarian Party (Ed Crane was Ed Clark’s campaign manager) seemed to be falling under Koch control. At the time, I was a grad student at Stanford and active in the campus libertarian group, and, since much of these operations were located in the San Francisco Bay Area (including Cato, initially), I had a front-row seat to the festivities.

    When Murray was still in the Koch orbit, he mentioned to me ruefully that he admired the invention of the term “Kochtopus” by his opponents as a brilliant piece of agit-prop, even though he was on Koch’s side.

    Of course, I turned out to be right: the “Leninist” strategy failed quite dramatically, as shown by the fact that most of the entities I just mentioned are either long defunct or no longer under Koch control.

    Murray himself became bitterly disillusioned with the whole Koch operation and started attacking the Kochtopus himself. I never had a chance to ask him if he felt that the experience disproved his “Leninist” organizing strategy, but I never saw him try to put the strategy into action again. His main political approach throughout his life seemed to be attempts at coalition building – with Stevensonian Democrats in the ‘50s, with the New left in the ‘60s, with minarchist libertarians in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with paleo-cons in the early ‘90s, etc.

    The “Leninist cadre strategy” was a temporary aberration.

    Watching the “Leninist” experiment convinced me personally that a polycentric libertarian movement – i.e., not really one movement, but multiple movements with different detailed views, styles, social values, personal networks, etc. – was inevitable and, actually, probably preferable. It seems to me that top-down, centralized planning is no more desirable in a political movement than in an economy.

    Why so many libertarians do not feel this way and rather insist that libertarians must “unite” continues to bemuse me. Don’t get me wrong – all libertarians should of course agree with my own version of Rothbardian/Rockwellian left-moderate-paleo-libertarianism, since I am of course always right (well, at least right now: my future self may swerve from the true faith, and my past self has suffered from many ideological errors)! But since, outside of my fantasies, there is no chance that all libertarians will come together on one set of ideas, strategies, etc. it surely makes sense to have separate and distinct “libertarian” movements rather than to pretend to a false unity.

    And, several different, competing libertarian movements are more likely to stumble upon good ideas and effective strategies than one monolithic libertarian movement, were such a movement possible at all.

    Fortunately, it’s not possible.

    Dave

  16. Administrator March 25, 2008 at 10:47 am #

    TGGP,

    Bayesian probability can replace all other reasoning and so I would place it front and center.

    Have you read Richard Miller’s critique of Bayesianism?

  17. Stephan Kinsella March 26, 2008 at 9:04 pm #

    Roderick,

    “Thanks for the clarification. Just wondering, though — if you base rights on argumentation ethics, how do non-arguers get rights?”

    Roderick–I’m not exactly sure yet. I’ve been intrigued in the past by Lomasky’s argument that quasi-humans get rights by “piggybacking” on those of normal humans… but not quite sure. I tend to think of AE as establishing the general libertarian principles… but as we’ve seen, even assuming these, libertarians still haggle about applications.

    “P.S. to Stephan — what is Hans’s view on abortion, do you know?”

    I only recall discussing it with him once, about a decade ago–he was interested in my coming up w/ an application of AE to argue in favor of pro-choice, so from that I gathered he is pro-choice.
    PhysicistDave:

    “Nice to see you jump in. I wonder if you would care to comment on two of us “taking your name in vain” in the comments section of Walter’s post on the immigration issue.

    “I wrote there:
    > Similarly, I think you are factually mistaken in referring to Kinsella as an “anti-immigration libertarian.” What I have read of Stephan’s work on immigration indicates that he refuses to be either pro-immigration or anti-immigration: as an anarcho-capitalist, he rejects the idea of “immigration” as an anti-concept. The private property owner should have the right to declare that immigration is totally prohibited, completely open, or anything in between onto his own property. In a free country, it is a non-issue. And, I recall Stephan arguing, in the existing semi-socialist system under which we live, there is no right approach to “immigration”: any governmental solution will necessarily violate someone’s rights.

    “Did I get your views more or less correct, or did I hopelessly muddle your views?”

    I don’t think that’s too far off. Moreover, if you’ll notice, I’ve never actually come out against immigration, and certainly not in favor of federal-state action to stop it. My main contribution has been to set forth “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders”–that is, I presented “an argument,” but did not necessarily *come out* this way. My main argument there was simply to show that (a) if immigrants were not permitted to use state property, then that would effecitively limit immigration; and (b) it does not violate immigrants’ rights not to be permitted to use public property, since they don’t have an ownership claim over this property. The argument did not support the right of the state to set or enforce such policies or rules (or to tax people to support its personnel), nor to enact farther-reaching immigration laws. As an anarchist, I cannot support the INS.

  18. TGGP March 26, 2008 at 11:15 pm #

    Have you read Richard Miller’s critique of Bayesianism?
    Nope. The reviewers say he judges epistemology by whether they promote Marxism vs conservatism, so I can’t say I’m likely to either. Also, it seemed to be focused on the logical positivists of the pasts rather than Bayesian probability.

  19. Administrator March 27, 2008 at 12:16 am #

    They must have been reading a different book from the one I read.

  20. smally March 27, 2008 at 7:48 am #

    TGGP, this may be a dumb question, but what kind of reasoning gets you to the conclusion that “Bayesian probability can replace all other reasoning and so I would place it front and center. “?

  21. Administrator March 27, 2008 at 10:02 am #

    Maybe non-Bayesian reasoning is a ladder you throw away after you’ve climbed up it to reach the glories of Bayesianism?

  22. Dansen March 29, 2008 at 12:18 am #

    If you believe in liberty, you’re a libertarian. It’s as simple as that. Does being a libertarian mean that has to support absolute liberty and be an anarchist? No. If an anarchist and a minarchist can both be libertarians, then abortionists and anti-abortionists can both be libertarians, and pro-foreign intervention and anti-foreign intervention can both be libertarians.

  23. Administrator April 14, 2008 at 11:40 am #

    True, I agree. But we can still ask whether some of those positions are more libertarian — meaning more consistent with libertarian principle, or with the most defensible version of libertarian principle — than others.

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