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Cordial and Sanguine, Part 40: Seen and Unseen

By on July 21, 2012 13

Whenever there’s a violent tragedy, someone immediately starts using it as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. Many on the left understand this when it comes to the Patriot Act, but not when it comes to gun control. (Conservatives have selective blindness in the opposite direction.)

In deontological terms, the right to self-defense is the foundation and presupposition of all other rights; and forbidding private citizens to own guns while allowing police and soldiers to carry them is a violation of moral equality – a reserving of weapons to the powerful while denying them to the powerless.

In consequentialist terms, gun control is a perfect example of the broken window fallacy. Deaths caused by gun use are seen, because they happen. Deaths prevented by gun use are not seen, because they don’t happen. (By “gun use” I mean not just firings but also mere brandishings.) First, preventions are underreported (since few are eager to be victimised twice – first by a freelance attacker and second by the cops), and second, when they are reported, they’re not exciting enough to get much publicity.

People who favour stronger gun control laws focus on the deaths they hope to prevent, but rarely consider the deaths their laws would cause. One useful corrective to this attitude is the Cato Institute study Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance From Citizens.

And although I’m not a fan of the NRA (which I don’t regard as an anti-gun-control organisation), they have a useful blog, The Armed Citizen, documenting lives saved by private gun use.

Cross-posted at BHL.

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 39: When Spontaneous Orders Attack, Part 2

By on July 21, 2012 2

The second installment of the C4SS Mutual Exchange on Spontaneous Order continues with my contribution, Invisible Hands and Incantations: The Mystification of State Power.

Summary: while spontaneous-order mechanisms are often invoked as a benign alternative to state power, there are reasons for thinking that state power itself depends for its maintenance on spontaneous-order mechanisms – mechanisms that function primarily to render the oppressive nature of the state invisible.

Also announced at BHL.

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology

By on July 19, 2012 5
Saruman boots up his iBall

Saruman boots up his iBall

Last night, around 2 a.m., after frustration at trying to transcribe the sometimes illegible file I’d gotten off of Google Books, I submitted an interlibrary loan request to the Auburn University library via the AU website. (They still call it interlibrary “loan” even when what’s requested is a scan or photocopy rather than a physical copy.)

Some time this morning, someone in the AU library sent a request to someone at the University of Michigan, who then went into the UM library stacks, found the 19th-century French periodical I was interested in, scanned a clean legible copy of the article I needed, and sent it as a PDF to my library – and it was waiting for me in my email by 10:21 a.m.

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 37: When Spontaneous Orders Attack

By on July 16, 2012 0

Sometime BHL guest blogger Charles Johnson’s essay “Women and the Invisible Fist” is the first round in a Mutual Exchange on Spontaneous Order over at Center for a Stateless Society. Another essay by myself, followed by commentary on both essays from philosophers Nina Brewer-Davis, Reshef Agam-Segal, and David Gordon, will follow over the next couple of weeks.

One of Charles’ main themes is that the concept of spontaneous order (à la Hayek) is used ambiguously. Sometimes it means consensual rather than coercive order; sometimes it means polycentric or participatory rather than directive order; and sometimes it means emergent rather than consciously designed order.

What does that have to do with feminism, libertarianism, patriarchy, and rape culture? Find out.

Also announced at BHL.

Less In Vegas

By on July 16, 2012 19

Here’s a fun, brief speech from Less Antman at the LP convention.

Some favourite bits:

As someone who joined the Libertarian Party more than 32 years ago, when our party and platform already was committed to marriage equality, while the rest of the country, including Democrats, were still debating gay imprisonment, I can tell you the first 27 years were the hardest.

Antiwar is the health of the antistate movement.

[Obama] holds the record for the most children killed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

(I have my doubts about the last statistic, though; remember that Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all winners as well. Admittedly most of their killings were committed before rather than after winning the prize, but Kissinger still got a good score in afterward, though admittedly as an advisor rather than a direct commander.)

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