Added to the Molinari Institute’s online library: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1856 Speech on Affairs in Kansas (representing Emerson at his most anarchistic).
Money quotes: “The judges give cowardly interpretations to the law, in direct opposition to the known foundation of all law, that every immoral statute is void,” and “I am glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing.”
People keep saying this.
They should stop.
Reshef Agam-Segal contributes to the C4SS spontaneous order symposium.
Nina Brewer-Davis contributes to the C4SS spontaneous order symposium.
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.
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.
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