George Donnelly, whose case I’ve linked to before, is being prosecuted for, as far as I can tell, being an inconvenient witness to police brutality. More info here, here, and here.
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Archive | May 22, 2010
How Walter Williams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State
Walter Williams asks (CHT LRC):
There are close to 7 billion people on our planet. I’d like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.? … I believe most people, even my open-borders libertarian friends, would not say that everyone on the planet had a right to live in the U.S.
Well, that’s an easy one: yes, of course each individual on the planet has the right to live anywhere she chooses, so long as she violates no one’s rights.
All human beings are equal; being a u.s. citizen does not magically confer special rights on some human beings that are not enjoyed by others. Thus immigrants, as human beings, have every right to buy or lease naturally owned property wherever they find a willing transactor, and likewise a right to homestead naturally unowned property (which describes most of the land in the u.s.). Or has Williams decided to reject the concept of property rights?
Williams goes on to say:
What those conditions [for immigration] should be is one thing and whether a person has a right to ignore them is another.
Nope. Those are not two separate questions. If a “law” is unjust, then of course anyone has a right to ignore it. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. … One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” … An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. … Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
Williams himself has written elsewhere:
I have a right to travel freely. That right imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference.
If Williams means what he says, then he has just acknowledged his own right to cross the borders of other “nations.” How, then, can he deny the right of other people to cross the borders of the “nation” in which he lives?
Uncle Grady Still Has a Gun
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News; it’s a rejoinder to a recent reply to my “Uncle Grady” letter.
To the Editor:
Carol Robicheaux (May 15) accuses me of hubris, hypocrisy, and naivety for my preference for voluntary modes of social organization over coercive ones – as though personal attacks and name-calling constituted a refutation of my position. Can’t we discuss differences of opinion in a more grownup fashion?
Robicheaux seems to think that in criticizing taxation I am hypocritically attacking a system from which I benefit. But first, it would be rather cowardly for me to confine my criticisms only to institutions from which I do not benefit. And second, a market freed from plutocratic privilege would bring so much greater prosperity that universities could easily afford to pay their professors without recourse to tax funding.
Oddly, Robicheaux seems to think I need reminding that the U.S. government is better than a communist dictatorship or a theocracy.
Well, of course it is. A broken leg is likewise better than a broken neck; but that’s hardly an argument in favor of breaking people’s legs.
The reason the U.S. is both freer and more prosperous than those other regimes is that it is closer to being a voluntary social order, an anarchy.
While Robicheaux recognizes that government is “made up of people just like us,” she writes as though it is really made up instead of magical super-people, since she implies that ordinary people would be unable to perform tasks like road maintenance, food inspection, college instruction, and police protection without rulers giving orders.
As for Robicheaux’s questions about how such services would be provided, if she is sincerely interested in the large theoretical and historical literature on these subjects, the best place to start is with the Stringham and Carson books I cited in my previous letter.
Roderick T. Long
My original letter was apparently too long, so the O-A News, wonder of wonders, contacted me to ask me to reduce it, rather than cutting it themselves (though they still tinkered with it a bit more afterward). FWIW, here’s the original unedited version:
To the Editor:
Carol Robicheaux (May 15th) accuses me of “hubris,” “hypocrisy,” and “naivety” for my preference for voluntary modes of social organization over coercive ones – as though personal attacks and name-calling constituted a refutation of my position. Can’t we discuss differences of opinion in a more grownup fashion?
The charge of hubris is especially mysterious. I should think that the term would better apply to the statists, who seek to impose their will on others through governmental violence, and not to the anarchists, who oppose this.
Ms. Robicheaux seems to think that in criticizing taxation I am attacking a system from which I benefit, and that this represents hypocrisy on my part. But first, it would be rather cowardly for me to confine my criticisms only to institutions from which I do not benefit. And second, a market freed from plutocratic privilege would bring so much greater prosperity that universities like Auburn could easily afford to pay their professors without recourse to tax funding.
Oddly, Ms. Robicheaux seems to think I need reminding that the U.S. government is better than a communist dictatorship or an Iranian theocracy. Well, of course it is. A broken leg is likewise better than a broken neck; but that’s hardly an argument in favor of breaking people’s legs. The reason the U.S. is better – both freer and more prosperous – than those other regimes is that it is closer to being a voluntary social order; in other words, it’s more anarchistic. Anarchists are simply working to complete the process of liberation that the American Revolution began.
The problem with government is not that the wrong people are in it, but rather that government is a hierarchical and coercive mode of human interaction, one that involves implicitly treating other human beings as property rather than as persons.
On the one hand, Ms. Robicheaux correctly recognizes that government is “made up of people just like us,” but on the other hand she writes as though she secretly thinks that it is really made up instead of magical super-people, since she implies that ordinary people would be unable to perform tasks like road maintenance, food inspection, college instruction, and police protection without rulers giving orders.
Finally, Ms. Robicheaux asks a number of questions about how such services would be provided without government. I can scarcely address all those questions in a brief letter; but if she is sincerely interested in the large theoretical and historical literature on these subjects, the best place to start is with the Stringham and Carson books I cited in my previous letter. Information is also available online at the websites of the Molinari Institute, the Center for a Stateless Society, and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
Roderick T. Long
