Tomorrow I’m off to the Mises Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration in New York. Apart from the various talks by most of the iInstitute’s senior faculty, highlights include a bus tour of Misesian-Rothbardian landmarks; Guido signing his book; and some guy who’s running for President. I was asked to speak on the topic “Mises As Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard’s Thesis.” (For Mises’s radical side, see this piece; for his conservative side, see this one.) Später, gator!
Tag Archives | Ethics
Only Against Illegal Immigration?
Guest Blog by Jennifer McKitrick
There’s something fishy about some anti-immigration arguments.
They say “We’re not against immigration, we’re against illegal immigration.” OK, so the problem with immigrants is that they broke some laws. But are they good laws? If yes, they’re for laws designed to keep immigrants out, so they are against immigration. If no, then they should be for changing the laws. But they say changing the laws is either unacceptable “amnesty” for illegals that are already here and/or it would encourage more immigration. But the immigration that would happen then would be legal, so if they’re only against illegal immigration, they should have no problem.
So, I think I think that they are less than sincere when they say they are only against illegal immigration. Perhaps the right thing to say is that they only support the amount of immigration currently allowed by law. Which is pretty much being against immigration for the most part. But I suspect it’s really just lip service so they don’t seem so much like xenophobic racists. Of course, they want to protect American jobs, but preferring that companies pay higher wages to Americans rather than lower wages to needy non-Americans has no moral justification that I can see, and is probably based on racism as well.
Jennifer McKitrick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Vice-President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society.
Challengers of the Unknown
The Writers’ Guild of America is on the verge of a strike; here’s why. Their complaints look pretty reasonable to me. I think most of their demands don’t count as rights (except insofar as they can gain contractual assurance of them), but not all legitimate claims are rights; so I support their strike.
Defenders of intellectual property often say that without it, writers and artists would get screwed. As if they don’t get screwed already! Most of the monetary benefits from IP go to mammoth publishing/recording/filmmaking firms rather than to the creators. A better way to protect creator interests is through the kind of collective bargaining that the outfits like the Writers’ Guild (for all its flaws, and there are plenty) provide.
Right-libertarians often suggest than unions would have less power in a free market. Well, they’d certainly have a different kind of power; you wouldn’t see the phenomenon of legally-privileged-but-also-legally-regulated “business unions” co-opted as junior partners into the corporate/governmental establishment. But a freed market, by breaking the back of the cartelised and oligopsonistic corporocracy, would enhance unions’ bargaining power relative to business.
On a somewhat related subject: in the mid-1970s a short-lived but quite good Marvel comic book called Omega the Unknown (a grim and thoughtful tale about the mysterious psychic bond between a taciturn alien visitor and a hyper-analytical child, both lost in a world of baffling humans) written by Steve Gerber (of Howard the Duck fame) and Mary Skrenes, ran for ten issues before being cancelled; it ended without any of the puzzles being solved or loose ends tied up. To Gerber’s dismay, the storyline was later resolved by other writers in the pages of former Gerber comic The Defenders; the resolution was deeply inconsistent with the spirit of the original series, and few fans accepted it as canonical (any more than any fan of DC’s moody 1970s sword-and-sorcery hero Stalker were happy with his later transformation into a cardboard supervillain fighting the Justice Society of America).
Now Marvel is releasing a new limited series (more a reimagining than a continuation) of Omega the Unknown, penned by Jonathan Lethem, and Gerber is reportedly less than pleased. (The fact that a new Howard the Duck series premieres this week as well probably doesn’t help.) Gerber writes:
I am not happy about Marvel’s revival of Omega, and the writer of the book has made an enemy for life by taking the job. According to some people, he actually professes to be a fan of my work. If that’s even minimally true, what he’s done is even more unforgivable.
As a rule of thumb, if the creator of a character or series is alive and still active in the industry, another writer or artist’s ‘revamping’ of his work at a publisher’s behest constitutes an expression of contempt, not tribute – and all the more so if the original creator doesn’t even share financially in the enterprise. I am not the only writer or artist who feels this way, incidentally.
Gerber later backed off from the “enemy for life” comment, but added:
I still believe that writers and artists who claim to respect the work of creators past should demonstrate that respect by leaving the work alone – particularly if the original creator is still alive, still active in the industry, and, as is typically the case in comics, excluded from any financial participation in the use of the work.
Over the last decade or so, it’s become the trend in the industry for creators just to let these things slide. … Remaining silent, however, would implicitly condone the comic book industry’s business practices up through the early 1980s and the means by which publishers claim to have procured ownership of characters and story material in those days.
Remaining silent would also perpetuate the fiction promulgated by publishers that ‘we all knew’ what rights we were supposedly giving up by signing our paychecks. (In those days, the publishers’ favored instrument for acquiring rights to material was a one-party ‘contract’ printed or stamped on the back of a writer or artist’s paycheck. This so-called ‘agreement’ set forth terms of employment that were rarely if ever agreed to by the writer or artist prior to the start of work.) The truth is, we didn’t all know. Most of us had no idea ….
When a writer of Jonathan’s stature agrees to participate in a project like this, he also, intentionally or not, tacitly endorses the inequities of the old system. … Jonathan, if you’re reading this – rather than ask you to back out of a business commitment, rather than deprive the fans of what will probably be an excellent story, I propose that you simply retitle the story and rename the characters. ‘Omega The Unknown’ has little or no commercial cachet, so call the book something else. Call the kid something other than James-Michael Starling.
Judging from the first issue, Lethem has acquiesced to Gerber’s request to “call the kid something other than James-Michael Starling,” but the comic is still titled Omega the Unknown, and thus far the new storyline follows the original pretty closely, and even the dialogue is often identical.
My take: not believing in intellectual property, I don’t think either Marvel or Lethem has violated any of Gerber’s rights by releasing this new series. Thus I don’t need to get into the details of the contract, since a contract to transfer a nonexistent right is not valid in any case. (Full disclosure: I’ve signed my share of such fantasy contracts.) The other side of the coin, though, is that, again not believing in intellectual property, I don’t think Marvel owns the character and storyline of Omega the Unknownany more than Gerber does, so if Gerber were to continue the story on his own in some other publisher’s comic book, then by my lights Marvel would have no right to stop him; whereas in reality Marvel no doubt would move legally to stop him. So Gerber does have a rights-based beef against Marvel, though not the beef he thinks he has. (And suspending for the moment the issue of the illegitimacy of IP, I can easily believe that the contractual relationship into which he entered fell short of ideal criteria for full disclosure.)
Leaving questions of rights aside, is it really immoral, as Gerber apparently believes, to use another writer’s characters against his or her wishes? I just don’t feel the pull of that claim; it seems as alien to me as an Arab’s outrage at being shown the bottom of someone’s shoes. In my school days I wrote something like sixty issues of a science-fiction comic-book epic called Jumbo Jet. (Said “jet” was a hundred-mile-long orbiting weapons platform whose attempted takeover by an alien sorcerer accidentally triggers a nuclear holocaust, serves for the next hundred years as a battleground for hordes of spoiled brats rendered immortal by technology and chaperoned by a computerised nanny, is then sent accidentally crashing into the ocean by a robot worker rebellion, and finally, as you’d expect, gets taken over by mutated intelligent dogs from the sunken city of Atlantis.) So how would I feel if someone else started writing stories using my characters and situations? Pretty damned thrilled, actually.
But okay, suppose a lot of writers and artists do share this preference not to have their creations used by others. Collective bargaining with publishers (under an altered balance of power) might be a way to satisfy it, without either government intervention or toothless scolding.
Beat Your Swords Into Thetans
I just saw a commercial in which a girl acting in a school play suddenly breaks from the script and asks why soldiers should obey an unjust ruler’s order to go into battle, and why government should be allowed to serve only a few rather than everybody. Radical stuff, especially the former. (The latter is a pipe dream, though a well-intentioned one.)
So I went to the advertised website and discovered it’s some L. Ron Hubbard outfit. Does that mean the Scientologists are pushing military civil disobedience now? I didn’t know they swung that way.
Still, on said website one of the listed 21 Ethical Precepts is “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” which would seem to conflict with the aforementioned suggestion of endorsing civil disobedience. Of course on a Socratic-Scholastic-Spoonerite understanding of law there’s no conflict, but is that what they mean?
I suppose I could satisfy my curiosity by shelling out 18 bucks for a bundle of booklets; but the last Hubbard tract I read did not awaken within me any desire to tackle another.
Easy Rider
I’m not entirely sure what I think about this issue, but I lean toward Walter’s position – not because I agree that “libertarianism abhors a property vacuum,” but because Walter’s position seems like a natural extension of what I already believe about easements. I’ve long argued that one property owner cannot legitimately buy up all the land around another’s property and thereby either keep the latter prisoner (if she was on the property at the time) or bar the latter from her own home (if she was away) – since one cannot legitimately use one’s own property to interfere with the liberty and property of others. (And why should we count this kind of action as “interference”? Well, that’s where thick libertarianism and unity of virtue come in. And yes, I recognise the irony of invoking those sorts of considerations on Walter’s side in a debate!) And I’ve recently extended that argument to a defense of open borders, on the grounds that even if the government were the legitimate owner of the nation’s borders, it would not have the right to prevent immigrants from moving freely on to property where they are welcome.
Well, then, let A be a circular plot of land owned and resided within by you; let B be a doughnut-shaped plot of land owned by me and completely surrounding plot A; and let C be the rest of the planet, ex hypothesi unowned. I have no right to imprison you within A by denying you an easement across B allowing you to travel between A and C.
Now let the boundaries of A and B gradually expand until they surpass the circumference of the planet and begin to decrease on the other side:
The result is that, from the perspective of the other side of the globe, unowned territory C is now a small circular area surrounded by doughnut B, while A comprises most of the earth’s surface. But does this shifting of boundaries obviate the obligation of B’s owner to allow access from A to C? I can’t see why it should. Surely mere relative size is not a decisive consideration; and what counts as imprisoning has little to do with which boundary is “inside” or “outside” the other. Recall the marvelous image that opens Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed:
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. … The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
So anyway, those are my initial reactions.
Nyaya Ayn
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
My article “Ayn Rand and Indian Philosophy” appeared last year in the anthology Ayn Rand at 100 published by the Liberty Institute in Delhi, India. Unfortunately, the version of my article that was printed was filled with editorial errors – changes that affected my meaning, misattributions of quotations, and so forth. So I’ve put a corrected version online.
(For some thoughtful and judicious commentary on my article from a young Indian Randian with the unassuming name of Ergo, see here. I expect an even more incisive analysis after he actually reads it.)