Archive | July, 2008

Flying East and West

FEE 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).

Zora Neale Hurston 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.


I Owe It All To Philosophy

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.


Thickness Unto Death

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.

skinny and fat 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.


Hodgskin, Lum, and Molinari Online

[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.”


Socialism Is Here At Last!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Socialism triumphant I’ve finally finished posting Francis Tandy’s 1896 individualist anarchist work Voluntary Socialism. Chapter 9 defends the occupancy-and-use theory of land ownership, and criticises the Georgist alternative. Chapter 10 is a critique of intellectual property. Chapter 11 criticises the assumption that workers’ cooperatives would dominate the post-capitalist economy. Chapter 12 takes on the postal monopoly. Chapter 13 defends education over electoral politics and violent revolution as a method of advancing anarchism. Chapter 12 – the most depressing for a present-day anarchist – points to signs that the cultural power of statism is waning (in 1896). Finally, an appendix offers suggestions for future reading.

I’ve also posted a contemporary review by one K. C. Felton (who seems not to have read Tandy’s book very carefully).

Coming soon: more Dyer Lum!


Nomen Omen

Most libertarian name for an insurance company:

Liberty Mutual

Least libertarian name for an insurance company:

Allstate

Perhaps State Farm should get Special Soviet Mention.


Powered by WordPress. Designed by WooThemes