The newest (March 2011) issue of The American Conservative features an article by Sheldon Richman titled “Libertarian Left: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.” It discusses, inter alia, the Center for a Stateless Society, the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Roy Childs, Karl Hess, Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Gabriel Kolko, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, William Gillis, and your humble correspondent. It’s a great piece to use to introduce left-libertarian ideas to the neophyte. (It’s currently available online only to subscribers, alas.)
Tag Archives | Labortarian
Lane’s Forgotten Writings on Race
Among libertarians, Rose Wilder Lane is best known as the author of the libertarian classics The Discovery of Freedom and Give Me Liberty. Outside of the libertarian movement, she is known – if at all – as the at least partial ghostwriter of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder’s popular Little House on the Prairie series of books. (See William Holtz’s Lane biography.) A chapter of Lane’s literary career that is relatively unknown to both groups, though it brought her an enormous readership at the time, is her stint as a weekly columnist, from 1942 to 1945, for the Pittsburgh Courier, the u.s.’s leading black newspaper and a prominent voice for racial equality.
David and Linda Beito’s article “Selling Laissez-faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier,” in the Fall 2010 issue of the Independent Review (pp. 279-294), seeks to draw attention to Lane’s neglected work for the Courier. I’ve been hearing about this material informally from David for years, and it’s exciting – though frustratingly tantalising – to see a bit more. (The full article won’t be going online for several months, so consider this an advance plug.)
Before her discovery of the Courier, Lane by her own admission had had a blindspot on the issue of race; she had “heard of lynchings and other racial injustice, but had assumed they were isolated incidents.” After she began reading the Courier’s documentation of the extent of racial oppression in the u.s., she declared that she had been an “utter fool” and a “traitor” to the “cause of human rights.” (p. 284) Soon she had joined the paper’s campaign against racism by becoming one of its regular writers.
Race was not the only topic of her columns; she advanced libertarian ideas across the board, often taking left-libertarian positions. For example, she defended the striking United Mine Workers for “refusing to submit to tyranny” (p. 288); praised Samuel Gompers as a proponent of an antistatist form of labour activism (for Gompers’ actual merits or otherwise, see here); championed “free mutual associations” as an alternative to the welfare state (p. 285); expressed concern about the tendency of women to subordinate their interests and identity to those of men and family (p. 286); and saw the “Big Boys” – politically connected plutocrats – as the chief enemies of the free market, declaring that “they can get themselves murdered in cellars for all I’d care.” (p. 285) (Her views on such subjects could be complicated, though. During her early flirtation with Marxism she’d even written a book praising Henry Ford as a practical implementer of Marxism.)
But her columns did frequently deal with race issues; and in the Beitos’ judgment, “[n]o libertarian has ever more creatively weaved together antiracism and laissez-faire than Lane.” (p. 283) According to the Beitos, Lane “anticipated … the strategy of the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s” by suggesting that blacks should “emulate the crusade of … women like her who had once asserted their right to smoke in restaurants.” (p. 284) She also subverted the assumptions of traditional discourse on race by talking about the need to “solve the White problem” (after all, it’s those doing the oppressing who constitute the problem) and parodying stereotypical portraits by writing:
The American White is generally a friendly fellow, good-hearted, generous, and meaning no harm to anyone. His errors, even his cruelties, come from the false beliefs instilled in him by his environment and training. He needs help to overcome them. (p. 284)
Lane rejected the concept of race as a “ridiculous, idiotic, and tragic fallacy” (p. 283) that “did not exist” (p. 291), preferring the terms “dark-skinned” and “pale-skinned”; nowadays she would be called a social constructionist about race, and like today’s social constructionists she wrestled with the problem of whether and how to make use of existing racial categories and identities. Thus, on the one hand, she called on all people, black or white, to “renounce their race” (p. 283) and even rejected “the idea of a Negro novel” as being as irrelevant as the idea of a “blond novel.” (p. 286) But on the other hand, although she “heartily approved ” of calls for the “abolition of the term Negro,” she also “conceded that doing so was not a decision for her to make,” noting that to “millions,” the term represented “pride in achievement and the fellowship in the struggle for human rights.” The strategic choice between renouncing racial identities and embracing them thus constituted a “genuine dilemma.” (p. 284)
Lane’s recognition of the tensions involved in accepting or rejecting socially constructed racial identity anticipates more recent debates over gender and sexual orientation. Judith Butler, for example, argues in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity that “the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics … simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up” (p. 187/200), and that appeal to such categories “presumes, fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate.” (p. 189/203) Yet at the same time she acknowledges that “it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims on their behalf.” (p. 181/194)
Here’s hoping that more of Lane’s Courier material gets made available.
Four Bits of Science Fiction News
There’s a new Galactica series in the works, to take place between Caprica and BSG, featuring Ensign Bill Adama in the early years of the Cylon War.
The next Star Trek movie will feature one of the following five original-series characters: Harry Mudd, Trelane, Gary Mitchell, the Talosians, or the Horta. I guess I’m hoping for and/or expecting Gary Mitchell, because: Mudd is too silly, Trelane is too much like Q, the Talosians are too entangled with a specific Christopher Pike plot thread that the last film seems to have averted, and the Horta strikes me as not having, um, legs beyond its original story. (But if Abrams does use Mitchell, it’ll be one more case of his channeling Of Gods and Men – the $150,000 libertarian fan film that featured the destruction of Vulcan and the creation of an alternate timeline stemming from the moment of Kirk’s birth, three years before Abrams’ film did all those same things.)
There might be some Star Wars sequels (CHT AICN) on the (fairly distant) horizon, but will probably “not have anything to do with the Skywalker Clan” and may take place “as far as 100 years or 1,000 years in the Star Wars universe future,” presumably to avoid conflicts with the Expanded Universe stories.
The good news is that The Hobbit will film in New Zealand after all. The bad news is that this result was achieved by government micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big corporation happy. (And no, if it’d been micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big union happy I wouldn’t have liked it either.)
How Inequality Shapes Our Lives, Part 4
I’ve finally gotten around to replying to at least some of the objections in the comments sections of my equality posts (here, here, and here) and of Bryan Caplan’s ri-postes (here and here).
I’ll reply later to Heinrich and Sorens. Sufficit diei.
How Inequality Shapes Our Lives, Part 3
Bryan Caplan has replied to my reply to his reply to my inequality post.
Others have weighed in as well; see David Heinrich, Jason Sorens, and Libérale et libertaire. I plan to address those too; but let me focus on Bryan’s latest reply for now.
In his first reply, Bryan had argued that if consumers/tenants/workers (let’s say proles for short) were “willing to pay a premium for equal treatment” in the form of higher prices/rents or lower wages, then firms would “have every reason to offer it”; hence we should conclude that proles must “prefer the existing double standard to the extra costs of equality.” I had responded that this reply in effect “focuses on the ways in which free markets would solve the problems,” which is irrelevant since in our actual nonfree market “housing and labour markets, for example, are skewed in oligopolistic and oligopsonistic directions respectively.”
Bryan now responds that while he grants that markets aren’t free, he thinks that fact is irrelevant, since oligopolistic and oligopsonistic firms (let’s call them oligo-firms for short as well, so I won’t have to keep repeating the full cumbersome phrase) still respond to incentives: “Even a government-created monopolist still has a clear incentive to cut prices when its costs fall, and raise prices when its costs go up.”
I find Bryan’s response puzzling, since I’d never denied the obvious microeconomic truth he thinks I’ve neglected. But let me take a stab at guessing what he has in mind: my guess is that he thinks our disagreement is over whether oligo-firms would offer more egalitarian contracts if the proles were willing to pay more. But I don’t necessarily disagree with Bryan about that. (I think matters are a bit more complicated than Bryan does, since I take inequality to be in many cases a consumer’s good for firm managers; but I don’t assume that their demand for it is inelastic.) Let’s assume that oligo-firms would indeed offer more egalitarian contracts if proles were willing (or able) to pay more; and let us further draw the inference that proles’ unwillingness (or inability) to pay more explains the inegalitarian character of existing contracts. How does that constitute an objection to my position?
After all, my whole point is that governmental privilege on behalf of the oligo-firms explains why the proles are faced with the unpalatable choice between inequality and monetary loss. If I would rather be punched in the face than pay you a million dollars not to punch me in the face, that may explain why I’m getting punched in the face, but only relative to the background conditions that explain why these are my only options. Ignoring those background conditions makes Bryan’s position sound all too much like the next-best-alternative defense of sweatshops.
The same point applies to Bryan’s next remark:
Firms, landlords, and employers offer skewed contracts to make it harder for customers, tenants, and workers to screw them. And most customers, tenants, and workers happily accept these contracts because they sensibly prefer lower prices, lower rents, and higher wages to formal equality.
With the exception of the word “happily,” I have no dissent to express from this doctrine. But again it seems to miss the point. Oligo-firms have an interest in not being screwed by proles, and proles likewise have an interest in not being screwed by oligo-firms. How, then, given this mutual screwage-aversion, does it come about that the contracts are skewed to reflect one side’s screwage-aversion to a far greater extent than the other’s. It’s not clear to me what Bryan’s answer is to that question; my answer, of course, is that the range of alternatives for consumers, tenants, and workers has been artificially narrowed by government regulation.
This brings me to Bryan’s third point. In his original reply he’d maintained that “existing government policy tilts market outcomes in the direction that he [= Roderick] misguidedly favors.” To this I’d replied that while “there are various regulations that purport to help the weaker party to the contract … those regulations in practice actually tend to help the stronger party instead.” Bryan’s rejoinder: “Tell me how tenant protection laws actually benefit the average landlord.”
Here Bryan wins on a technicality; I can’t answer his challenge as phrased. But let me say why.
What I wish to claim, more precisely, is that regulations that purport to help the weaker party generally fall into one of two categories: either a) they actually benefit the stronger party instead, or b) to the extent that they do benefit the weaker party they are outweighed in their effects by other regulations, so that the overall effect of regulation is to benefit the stronger party.
When it comes to regulations purporting to protect consumers and workers, I can think of lots of examples of both (a) and (b). When it comes to regulations purporting to protect tenants, I can think only of examples of (b); there may be examples of (a), but none comes to mind offhand. (Suggestions, comrades? Rent control is an example of a purportedly pro-tenant policy that actually hurts tenants, but it hurt landlords too as far as I can see.) So by asking for specifically (a)-type examples in the specific case of tenants, Bryan has posed a challenge I don’t know how to answer. But I call this only a technical victory, because it’s easy enough to give (b)-type examples for tenants, and both (a)-type and (b)-type examples for consumers and workers.
(Incidentally, it’s an interesting question why the existence of (a)-type examples is so much more widely accepted among libertarians for the case of consumers than for the case of workers. Most Rothbardians, for example, accept Gabriel Kolko’s case (summarised here) for the claim that regulations purporting to protect consumers from business interests have actually had the opposite effect and intention (even if such Rothbardians often haven’t fully assimilated the implications of this thesis); but the rather similar claim that regulations purporting to protect workers have likewise had the opposite effect and intention (as Kevin Carson describes in his latest C4SS study) is met with incredulity by most Rothbardians. I’m not sure why that is.)
“Under laissez-faire,” Bryan insists, “service providers, landlords, and employers would be free to adopt double standards more lopsided than current law allows.” Certainly, if what Bryan means is that no law would forbid them from doing so. Likewise, no law forbids me from selling toothpicks for a thousand dollars each. (Actually, for all I know some law does forbid that! But certainly under laissez-faire there’d be no such law.) Still, in another sense I’m prevented from selling toothpicks for a thousand dollars each because no one will buy them at that price. Likewise, I claim, in a freed market firms might offer contracts as onerous as they liked, but they’d have a lot harder time finding takers.
(A final note: since some of my left-libertarian comrades seem to be convinced that Bryan is Satan, I’d like to draw their attention to some pieces of Bryan’s that they will think more kindly of: here, here, and here.)
More to come ….
How Inequality Shapes Our Lives, Part 2
My friend Bryan Caplan has a response to my recent post about inequality. I’m preparing to leave town for the Alabama Philosophical Society and so probably won’t have a chance to reply in detail until I get back. (This also applies to the comments section of my previous post, which I haven’t had a chance to look at.) But three short points just for now:
a) Bryan’s response focuses on the ways in which free markets would solve the problems I point to if they were really problems. But the whole point of my position is that we don’t have a free market! Left-libertarians have pointed out in detail the ways in which the housing and labour markets, for example, are skewed in ologopolistic and oligopsonistic directions respectively. By ignoring these analyses rather than refuting them, Bryan in effect assumes the problems out of existence; he might just as well say “taxes can’t really be too high, because if they were, consumers would just switch to a rival protection agency with lower fees.”
b) The fact that workers can shirk, that tenants can be delinquent, etc., is beside the point. We already know upfront that each party to a contract can potentially screw over the other. The point is that, given that context, the contracts are then skewed to favour one side. That skewing isn’t counterbalanced by the other side’s capacity for delinquency, because each side has that capacity, and one side has the favourable contract in addition.
c) Yes, there are various regulations that purport to help the weaker party to the contract; but left-libertarians have argued in detail that those regulations in practice actually tend to help the stronger party instead. Maybe we’re right about that and maybe we’re wrong, but as far as I know, Bryan hasn’t addressed those arguments, and we can hardly be expected to pretend we haven’t made them.