Shawn Wilbur has some interesting remarks on the benefits and hazards of the possession/property distinction.
In related news, Demonic Possession would be a great name for an anti-Proudhonian screed.
Cartesius Aristotelicus
Descartes’s philosophical anthropology is widely thought to mark a radical break from the preceding Aristotelean tradition. But Paul Hoffman has been arguing for the past quarter-century that, despite various differences, Descartes is actually far closer to the Aristotelean conception of the embodied human being as a hylomorphic unity than to the popular textbook “Cartesian” stereotype of two separate substances interacting.
Of course Descartes differs from Aristotle over the separability of soul and body – but so did Aquinas. Hoffman’s point is that for Descartes, as for Aquinas, separability does not imply separation; so long as soul and body are united, they make up a single substance.
Hoffman identifies still further Aristotelean legacies in Descartes’s thought, such as the identity of action and passion, and the existence of the cognised in the cogniser.
Hoffman was my professor back in the 80s, and he largely convinced me of his interpretation. The passages that Hoffman relies on to make his case are not exactly unknown, but they are often dismissed (even by non-Straussians) as merely attempts on Descartes’s part to cover his ass and appear more orthodox than he really was in order to avoid persecution. Consequently, such passages have not received as much careful analysis as they deserve; but once one does analyse them, as Hoffman does, the ass-covering interpretation becomes very difficult to take seriously.
I’m happy to see that a collection of Hoffman’s Descartes essays is now finally in print.
The bad news is that it’s pricey. The good news is that many of the essays in it are online here and here. You can also read Hoffman’s own summary of his interpretation.
Serving Two Masters
According to the latest LP press release:
Elena Kagan is another bad pick for the Supreme Court. If confirmed, it is likely that she will vote on cases with the intent of advancing political policy goals.
Kagan will probably vote to advance liberal policy goals, just as some other justices vote to advance conservative policy goals. That is not the place of justices, who should be applying the Constitution, not trying to rewrite it to make society work better according to their views. …
Once upon a time, Congress felt it had a duty to legislate in accordance with the Constitution. Likewise, past presidents believed that they should veto laws that were not clearly constitutional. But in more recent years, both branches have thrown this crucial duty away. …
And so on.
So are they the Libertarian Party or are they the Constitution Party? Which is their more basic value: the nonaggression principle or the Constitution? If there is a “duty” on the part of Federal officials to set aside their own judgment in favour of the Constitution, does that mean they also had a duty to enforce the fugitive slave cause?
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IP
Intellectual property rights are a cause of disagreement between Lysander Spooner, Stephan Kinsella, and Ayn Rand.
That’s the first sentence of a paper I’m grading for my business ethics class. It seems true (grammar aside). But it strikes me that this creates a problem for my anti-IP position.
After all, it’s an established philosophical principle that nothing nonexistent can cause something real. Yet intellectual property rights are the cause of a real disagreement. Therefore, intellectual property rights must exist. Damn.
Okay, back to grading.
R.I.P. Lena Horne and Frank Frazetta
Everybody Run, Uncle Grady Has a Gun
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News. (I’ve restored my original paragraphing, which was altered seemingly at random.)
To the Editor:
Bob Sanders wonders (May 8th) why we would fear Uncle Grady the tax assessor. Surely the answer is: because Uncle Grady’s edicts are ultimately backed up by threats of violence from Uncle Sam.
Sanders favours the forcible extraction of money from innocent people (i.e. taxation) because he doesn’t see any other way to pay for, as he puts it, “roads and police and help for people who need it.”
Well, sure, we all want those things. The question is, is governmental violence the best way to get them? Monopolistic providers, since they don’t face competition, tend to provide inferior service at higher prices. Since they have a captive customer base, they also tend to abuse power. So why on earth would we want any important service to be supplied by a monopolistic government?
All the services that Sanders mentions can be, and historically have been, provided more fairly and efficiently by private competition. (Read Edward Stringham’s book Anarchy and the Law.)
The idea of government as a source of “help for people who need it” is particularly ironic. Historically, governments always get captured by concentrated interests (the wealthy) at the expense of dispersed interests (the poor). That’s why big business is so terrified of a genuinely freed market and always supports privileges and subsidies (wrapped of course in either free-market rhetoric or progressive rhetoric, depending on who’s in power).
Government policies – even, indeed especially, those touted as intended to protect the poor or to rein in big business – have had the actual (and largely intended, given who turns out to have lobbied for them) effect of destroying poor people’s livelihood and protecting the corporate elite from competition. Read, for example, Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of Conservatism, Butler Shaffer’s In Restraint of Trade, David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, and Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
As for the tax-subsidized roads that Sanders champions, their chief beneficiaries are big corporations like Wal-Mart, whose heavy trucks for long-distance shipping cause the majority of wear and tear on the highway system, but who don’t bear a proportionate share of the tax burden. Like most government policies, highway subsidies redistribute money from the less to the more affluent, not vice versa.
Sanders’ worries about Sarah Palin’s anti-government rhetoric are unfounded. Palin poses as an enemy of big government, just as Obama poses as an enemy of big business; but if one looks past the rhetoric at the actual policies favoured by each, they’re both firm supporters of the big-government/big-business partnership that so thoughtfully manages our lives.
Roderick T. Long
