First I’ve heard this: Ron Paul says he “signed legally binding agreements not [to] run third-party in 2008 if I failed to win the G.O.P. primary. That was the cost for ballot access in several states, 11 total I believe.”
Tag Archives | Democracy
The Ticket That Exploded
Because at least the campaign would produce some good soundbites ….
Olbermann in the Neutral Zone
I got a giggle out of Keith Olbermann’s claim (conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell) that he refrains from voting in order to maintain his objectivity and neutrality – as though Olbermann’s relentless attacks (70% laudable and on target, 30% barking mad) on the Republicans haven’t provided far more help to the Democrats than his periodically marking a box or pulling a lever could possibly do. What is this mystique about the magical power of the ballot – which is actually one of the least effective forms of political action for an individual?
One reason I don’t embrace the agorist/voluntaryist anti-voting position (though I like its arguments a lot better than the pro-voting arguments) is that both the anti-voters and the pro-voters strike me as making the same mistake of vastly exaggerating the significance of voting. Whatever contribution it makes to the good result of getting the less bad doofus in power, and whatever contribution it makes to the bad result of helping to sanction and prop up the system, are both minuscule. (Mind you, I think minuscule contributions can be morally relevant. But public advocacy still has a heck of a lot bigger impact than either voting or not voting.)
A Heap of Slavery
Nozick’s Tale of the Slave is online. You should go read it (it’s short) before continuing this post.
Okay, welcome back. Although the story ends with a question I think it’s clear that the intended answer is “none of them,” and that the sequence of cases is meant to be a kind of argument for that conclusion.
It’s important to see, then, that Nozick’s argument is not merely a Sorites argument.
A Sorites argument has the structure “A isn’t different enough from B to belong to a different category; B isn’t different enough from C to belong to a different category … and so on … so all the instances A through Z must belong to the same category.” Thus a pile of three pebbles isn’t a heap; a pile of four pebbles isn’t different enough from a pile of three pebbles to be categorised differently – so no number of pebbles can ever be large enough to count as a heap.
Although there’s philosophical disagreement as to how to describe exactly what’s gone wrong, that kind of argument is clearly fallacious; so if that’s all that Nozick’s argument were doing it wouldn’t be very impressive. But I think there’s a more charitable way of understanding the argument – namely that in each transition from one case to the next we are meant to recognise that the essence of slavery has not been affected – that slavery isn’t at all about how kindly or cruelly one is treated, for example. In a Sorites, each stage is a bit more heaplike than the next, whether it gets all the way to heaphood or not; but – Nozick wants us to see – each stage of his story is not any more freedomlike.
Class Struggle, Libertarian Style
Here at last (in PDF format – HTML versions to follow in futuro) are two broadly left-libertarian articles I wrote in the 90s that I’ve been promising for some time to post here. (The second one is broken into two parts because I can’t upload files greater than 5 MB.)
1. Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent
2. Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class, Parts One and Two
[Originally published in Social Philosophy & Policy 12.2 (Summer 1995) and 15.1 (Summer 1998), respectively; © 1995 and 1998, Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation; posted by permission of the Foundation.]
The first article critiques mainstream liberalism for privileging indirect and hypothetical forms of consent over direct, actual consent; the second explores the relation between big government and big business and argues that the malign power of the latter depends mostly though not entirely on that of the former. Both articles attempt to overcome the dichotomy between “capitalist” and “socialist” versions of antistatist radicalism.
Obama Beats Ruwart, Barr, and NOTA! Oh Yeah, and That McCain Guy Too
I’m more pleased than not with the results of yesterday’s election (meaning pleased that Obama won out over McCain, not pleased that we got ourselves yet another president). Sure, Obama is a corporate liberal whose policies are not really any less fascistic or imperialistic than McCain’s, but a) he at least seems less trigger-happy than McCain; b) culturally, his election is a satisfying slap in the face to racism and parochialism (it’s great to see a black person at last in the nation’s highest-profile and most influential job – I just wish the nation’s highest-profile and most influential job weren’t the goddamn presidency); and c) hell, if I have to listen to some guy’s speeches for the next four to eight years, just from an aesthetic standpoint it’ll be a relief to have them coming from someone who’s charismatic and articulate rather than from an irritating doofus. (Mind you, the argument could be made that from an anarchist standpoint it’s better to have an irritating doofus in the White House rather than someone charismatic and articulate – but I’m skeptical; we’ve had plenty of irritating doofuses in the White House over the last two centuries without any noticeable positive effect.)
To be sure, I also favour Obama’s immediate impeachment – but that’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
I did my civic doody and voted yesterday; I wrote in Ruwart for the top slot (the first time in 20 years that I haven’t voted for the LP nominee) and “none of the above” for all the other offices. (There was a Boston Tea Party write-in candidate for Senate in Alabama, but his platform did not persuade me.) I also voted against an amendment authorising the Alabama state government to dig itself deeper into its current financial mess by borrowing more rather than cutting spending. (It passed anyway.)
It looks like Barr ended up with about 485,000 votes. That’s better than any LP candidate has done recently – but it’s not way better, and it’s about the same as what Browne got in 1996 with less name recognition and a far more radical campaign. So although they’ll probably try to spin it as a vindication, the reformists’ adapt-to-win policy looks like a failure – and deservedly so. Sell your soul, get a crackerjack prize.