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 | 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
Bye-Bye for IP
Another blast from the past, out of the same box: I believe this letter to the Durham-based Independent Weekly was published, in some form at any rate.
3 February 1995
To the Editor:The copyright hassles of Blaise Faint (Independent Weekly 2/1/95) [2010 note: alas, I no longer recall what Blaise Faint’s copyright hassles were] illustrate how obsolete intellectual property rights have become in the electronic age, when information can be duplicated and transmitted a hundred times over in the blink of an eye.
Intellectual property rights – copyrights, patents, and the like – have always stood on dubious ground, both ethically and economically.
Don’t get me wrong. As a wild-eyed free-marketeer, I’m a fan of property rights in general – probably more so than most people. And at one time my enthusiasm for property rights extended to intellectual property as well.
But ethically, property rights of any kind have to be justified as extensions of the right of individuals to control their own lives. Thus any alleged property rights that conflict with this moral basis – like the “right” to own slaves – are invalidated. Intellectual property rights also fail to pass this test. To enforce copyright laws and the like is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. If you have acquired the information legitimately (say, by buying a book), the on what grounds can you be prevented from using it reproducing it, trading it? Is this not a violation of the freedom of speech and press?
It may be objected that the person who originated the information deserves ownership rights over it. But information is not a concrete thing an individual can control; it is a universal, existing in other people’s minds and other people’s property, and over those the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people.
As for the economic case for property rights, that case depends on scarcity, and information is not, technically speaking, a scarce resource. If A uses some material resource, that makes less of the resource for B, so we need some legal mechanism for determining who gets to use what when. But information is not like that; when A acquires information, that does not decrease B’ share, so property rights are not needed.
Some will say that such rights are needed in order to give artists and inventors the financial incentive to create. But most of the great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright laws. Indeed, sufficiently stringent copyright laws would have made their achievements impossible. Great playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare never wrote an original plot in their lives; their masterpieces are all adaptations and improvements of stories written by others. Many of our greatest composers, like Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Ives, incorporated into their work the compositions of others. Such appropriation has long been an integral part of legitimate artistic freedom. (In any case, whatever protection innovators may need can be achieved through voluntary means, such as contract or boycott; there are many successful historical examples of this kind of remedy in copyright cases.)
Though never justified, copyright laws have probably not done too much damage to society so far. But in the Computer Age they are now becoming increasingly costly shackles on human progress. Consider, for instance, Project Gutenberg, a marvelous nonprofit effort to transfer as many books as possible to electronic format and make then available over the internet for free. Unfortunately, most of the works done to date have been pre-20th century – to avoid the hassles of copyright law. Thus, copyright laws today are working to restrict the availability of information, not to promote it. More importantly, modern electronic communications are simply beginning to make copyright laws unenforceable, or at least, unenforceable by any means short of a government takeover of the internet – and such a chilling threat to the future of humankind would clearly be a cure far worse than the disease.
Intellectual property rights are a luxury we can no longer afford.
Roderick T. Long
Conan on the Beat
Going through a box of old papers, I found this letter I wrote to the Chapel Hill News back in my North Carolina days; I don’t recall whether it was published.
18 May 1994
To the Editor:The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict between two radically different visions of social order: the Celtic-Germanic system and the Imperial Roman system.
Under the Celtic-Germanic system, which dominated much of Northern Europe (especially the British Isles) during the Middle Ages, there was no distinct governmental agency known as the “police.” Instead, the responsibility for keeping the peace, enforcing the laws, and maintaining social order lay with the armed citizenry as a whole. In a sense, everybody (or at least, every free adult male) was the police, and all arrests were citizens’ arrests. Like the age-old right to judge the accused in a jury setting, the right to defend the innocent by force was a right of the people, not of government officials. (To be sure, there was some division of labor in provision of security; but this occurred within, rather than as an alteratve to, the context of an egalitarian distribution of police authority.)
More familiar to modern eyes is the Imperial Roman system. When the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire, one of Emperor Augustus’s most significant acts was to establish Rome’s first police system – the Urban Cohorts and the Vigiles. From then on, keeping the peace in Rome was the prerogative of government agents, as in modern states. Where Celtic-Germanic system police authority was bottom-up, Imperial Roman police authority was top-down.
Growing up as we have under a system like the Roman one, we tend to assume that the Roman-style system is the only one that could possibly work. But highly civilised and sophisticated peoples (e.g., medieval Ireland) lived happily and prosperously under the Celtic-Germanic system for centuries. And although the Imperial Roman system has been on the ascendancy in the west ever since the centralisation of state power during the Renaissance, the rival Celtic-Germanic system has yielded only gradually. For example, as incredible as it may seem to many today, there were no police in England before the nineteenth century; the government exercised legislative and judicial functions, but left the actual apprehsion of criminals to the armed citizenry, in the form of the “posse comitatus” or, later, “Associations for the Prosecution of Felons.”
Similar arrangements may be found in American history in the colonial “minutemen,” and later in the so-called “Wild West” – “wild” and violent according to Hollywood depictions, but surprisingly peaceful and crime-free according to current historical research. (I am not speaking of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but [2010 note: apologies for the scrambled grammar; I should have written “I am speaking not of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but of”] responsible citizens’ associations that respected the rights of the accused.) Our country’s founders still recognised the right of self-defense as the foundation and presupposition of all other rights.
On a recent ABC documentary on guns, a gun rights advocate unwittingly echoed the Celtic-Germanic paradigm when he suggested that recent tragedies like the Long Island train shooting could have been averted if the other passengers on the train had also been armed and able to take defensive action. In response, a gun prohibition advocate expressed incredulity, and exclaimed that a society in which everyone “packs heat” would collapse into “anarchy” – a viewpoint unwittingly expressive of the Roman perspective.
Indeed today’s advocates of gun prohibition are so deeply in the grip of the Imperial Roman paradigm that they literally cannot grasp or conceive of the Celtic-Germanic alternative – and thus, for example, are unable to see the Second Amendment’s “militia” as anything but a government agency, despite clear historical evidence that in the eighteenth century “militia” meant the armed citizenry.
In this country today the Imperial Roman system is poised on the brink of its final victory: the complete disarmament of the citizenry. Before we take that final step, we should ask ourselves whether our long journey away from the Celtic-Germanic system has really been a move in the right direction. Are we really safer or more secure today as a result of this transformation? The evidence suggests otherwise.
A restoration of, or at least a move back in the direction of, the Celtic-Germanic system would have at least five advantages over our current Roman-style system.
- First, it would provide greater discouragement to criminal behaviour by in effect raisig the numbers, presence, and reaction time of the “police” to a maximum.
- Second, it would more flexible, efficient, and inexpensive than a tax-funded bureaucracy.
- Third, it would reestablish neighbourhood control over law enforcement, a desperately needed measure in the light of police harassment of minorities.
- Fourth, it would more faithfully embody our democratic egalitarian heritage by making the use of defensive force a universal right rather than the privilege of an elite.
- And fifth, by diminishing the power differential between citizens and their government, it would seriously block the evident tendency of contemporary western democracies to evolve toward a police state.
Roderick T. Long
Non-Abysmal Visual
Photos from my San Francisco trip a year ago are now online. More travel photos to come, including Prague/Vienna.