Libertarians who recognise the oppressive effects of statism everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a society in which women have achieved effective legal and social equality, and indeed a certain degree of legally-mandated superiority.
Feminists who recognise the oppressive effects of patriarchy everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a free market in which government intervention has been scaled back to nearly nothing.
There’s an episode of the Teen Titans animated series when the Titans are trying to protect Starfire from some aliens who are attacking her (though they’re actually after Starfire’s sister – long story). At one point the aliens pull out some badges and say “You’re under arrest!” And the Titans’ immediate reaction is “oh no! – that means the aliens are the good guys!” (As indeed they turn out to be.)
Thus the show teaches two rather dubious lessons: a) cops are always good guys [even extraterrestrial cops about whose society of origin we know nothing]; and b) those who represent themselves as cops are always cops. Talk about tv shows having a bad influence on children!
I can’t recall the Timmverse DC cartoons (of which Titans wasn’t part) ever promoting attitudes quite that screwed-up.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Justin D.’s been nagging me to blog about the Tea Parties, so here’s my two pence:
Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment.
By the same token, the party that’s in power employs alarmist rhetoric about the other side’s supposed anti-government radicalism in order to drum up support for its own policies.
Thus events like the Tea Parties serve the interests of both parties; people with libertarian leanings get diverted into supporting one half of the bipartisan duopoly, the antistate message getting diluted by mixture with (in this case) right-wing statist crap about war and immigration and the Kulturkampf. Those turned off by this creepy right-wing stew get diverted into supporting the other half of the bipartisan duopoly, with any libertarian sentiments likewise getting diluted into (in this case) left-wing statist crap about gun control and the need to impose regulation on some imaginary laissez-faire economy. And so the whole power structure ends up being reinforced.
I saw this game under Clinton, I saw (almost) everyone switch teams under Bush, and now they’re all switching back again. And so we get Republican pundits and politicians suddenly howling about Obama’s fascism when they’ve never supported anything but fascism in their entire lives; and on the other side we get Democrats ridiculing the very sorts of concerns about oppression and civil liberties violations that they pretended to take seriously under Dubya’s reign.
Is it worth libertarians’ and/or anarchists’ while to participate in such events? Sure; because while the voices at the podium tend to be statist apparatchiks, the crowds will tend to be a mixture of statist yahoos and genuinely libertarian-leaning folks, and outreach to the latter is always worth a try – in Kierkegaard’s words, “to split up the crowd, or to talk to it, not to form a crowd, but so that one or another individual might go home from the assembly and become a single individual.” But of course the organisers of such events are on the lookout for us and always do their best to try to narrow the boundaries of discussion.
Ken MacLeod has expressed sympathy for anarchism in his novels; but on his blog today he writes this:
We already know how to have peace over large areas of the Earth, and that is by having large states covering those areas. … The combat death rate for men of military age in typical stateless societies far exceeds that in inter-state wars, including world wars.
So I posted the following comment there:
Congratulations on winning the BSFA!
On states and violence, though, I’ve got to disagree – I think it’s confusing cause and effect.
States are a luxury good (well, a luxury bad from my point of view – but a luxury commodity in any case); they fund themselves out of the social surplus. So a society needs to achieve a certain level of prosperity before it can have much in the way of a state; and it can’t achieve that level of prosperity if it’s racked by constant tribal warfare. So it’s no surprise that the societies that are racked by tribal warfare tend to be the stateless ones – but it’s the violence that explains the statelessness, not vice versa. As Thomas Paine noted, states piggyback on autonomously arising social order and then claim to have created it.
I think this is because states are essentially parasitic and don’t contribute to social order at all – rather the contrary, when they arise they hinder the further advance of cooperation and economic development more than they help it. (Certainly when states are imposed, or attempted to be imposed, on violent tribal societies it tends to exacerbate the violence, since there’s now a big gun in the room – the state apparatus – that each tribe needs to seize lest some other tribe seize it first.) But even if one thinks states are a good thing, they’re still an expensive thing, and so require a pre-existing attainment of a fair degree of peaceful commerce and productivity before they can get going.
Moreover, when large states consolidate their power and displace a previous more decentralised and more peaceful state situation, the result is often genocide (as the history of the 20th century demonstrates). That’s another reason for thinking that states are the effect rather than the cause of peace.
If some degree of peace and prosperity is needed to make states possible, then we’re going to get misleading data when we compare economically undeveloped, culturally tribal, relatively stateless societies with economically advanced state-ridden societies; the latter will often be more peaceful, and so we’ll be tempted to think that the state is what’s making the difference, but that inference just doesn’t follow.
Thus a more interesting comparison is to compare relatively stateless and relatively state-ridden society that are otherwise at comparable levels of economic development and cultural mores.
When we do that, I think we get a very different picture. Ben Powell’s research, for example, shows that stateless Somalia, while undoubtedly a crappy place to live, has been both more peaceful and more prosperous than either its earlier state-ridden self [argh, I actually wrote “earlier stateless self” but then corrected in a subsequent post] or its economically and culturally comparable neighbours. I would also point to the research of Bruce Benson and David Friedman on how relatively stateless medieval Iceland and the relatively stateless American frontier were far less violent than comparable state-ridden societies of the time.
If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they personally benefit, call them hypocrites.
If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they don’t personally benefit, call them selfish.
I’ve often noticed how right-libertarian criticisms of left-libertarians look a lot like statist criticisms of libertarians in general.
My bud (I was going to say “my compadre” before I found out what it actually means) Stephan (who, I must in fairness point out, is by no means a right-libertarian across the board, but who nonetheless is incontinently* prone to reveling in his right-libertarian side whenever opportunity permits) seems bent on proving my point; he thinks it’s a score against left-libertarianism that these prosthetic legs were developed by a capitalist corporation. How is this different from the statists’ notion that the state’s provision of roads, mail service, and the like is some kind of score against libertarianism?
Votre théorie s’arrête à ce qu’on voit, ne tient pas compte de ce qu’on ne voit pas.
* I use the term in the Aristotelean sense of excessive susceptibility to temptation, not in the medical sense of poor bladder control – though the meanings are not unrelated.