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Ron Paul in the Debates, Part 3

By on June 5, 2007 18

Once again, summaries (paraphrases, not exact quotes) of Ron Paul’s answers from tonight’s debate.

Introduce yourself briefly.

I’m a Congressman from Texas in my 10th term; I’m the champion of the Constitution.

How soon should we leave Iraq?

Ron Paul The sooner we leave, the better; it was a mistake to go in and it’s a mistake to stay; if you get the diagnosis wrong you should change the treatment. We’re not making progress; there were no weapons of mass destruction; we went in under a UN resolution and not because we were threatened; we’re more threatened by staying than by leaving.

You voted for the bill calling for a 700-mile fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Do we need a similar fence for Canada?

No, and anyway the fence was the least of my reasons for voting for that bill. Border security and enforcing the law are important. I’m against amnesty. If you subsidise something, you get more of it. We subsidise illegal immigration with amnesty, birthright citizenship, and publicly-fund education and health care. We do need immigrant workers, but if we had a genuine free market they wouldn’t be the scapegoat.

If you think English should not be the official language, raise your hand.

Paul didn’t. [I’d like to ask Paul where in the Constitution it says we should have an official language. – RTL]

As a former Libertarian candidate, how do you view issues of church and state?

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law. We shouldn’t have laws made at the Federal level; leave it to local people, local officials, the state level. We don’t have perfect knowledge and shouldn’t have some central authority in Washington telling us all what to do and imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on everybody and ruining things for the whole country, as in Roe v. Wade.

In 2005 President Bush signed an energy bill giving tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies; at a time when they’re making record profits is this appropriate?

The profits as such aren’t the issue; they would be fine if they were earned in the free market. I object to their receiving subsidies and R&D money. But any discussion of energy policy has to deal with foreign policy; we’re fighting in the Middle East, we overthrew Mossadegh in Iran, because we succumb to the temptation to protect the interest of the oil industry.

Should the military’s policy on gays be changed?

I think the current policy is a decent one. The real problem is that we see people as groups instead of individuals. We don’t have rights as gays or women or minorities; we receive our rights from our Creator as individuals. If homosexual behaviour in the military is disruptive it should be dealt with; but if heterosexual behaviour in the military is disruptive it should be dealt with too. Apply the same standards to everybody.

If you think gays should be able to serve openly in the military, raise your hand.

Paul didn’t. [Why doesn’t this contradict what he just said above? – RTL]

Would you pardon Scooter Libby?

No. [Candidates were asked to stick to one-word answers. This didn’t stop Giuliani from blathering on forever. – RTL]

My brother died in Iraq. What can you tell me?

We’ve been doing this for four years and it’s not working. We’re losing 100 men and women a month, over 1000 a year. If we want the Iraqis to take up the responsibility, we need to give them an incentive. We should stop patrolling the streets; that’s a job for the police, not for the army. Yes, we should promote our goodness overseas, but through setting an example and encouraging emulation, not through the barrel of a gun and through armed force as the neocons believe. Woodrow Wilson also told us we could promote democracy that way; we’ve seen that it doesn’t work.

What is today’s most pressing moral issue?

The recent acceptance of the promotion of preemptive war. In the past we declared war in defense of our liberty or to aid someone. We’ve now rejected the just war theory of Christianity; and tonight we even hear candidates who are not even willing to rule out a preemptive nuclear strike against a country that has done us no harm. We should defend our liberties and rights, but not try to change the world by armed force, by starting wars.

What has the Republican administration done most wrong?

Bush ran on a platform of a humble foreign policy, no nation-building, not policing the world. Instead we’re spending a trillion dollars a year to maintain the power of our empire around the world. We need that money for education and medical care here.

How can the GOP reach out to disaffected moderate Republicans?

(Almost everyone got to answer this question, but not Paul.)

P.S. Having grumped earlier about Jon Stewart’s dissing of Ron Paul, I owe Stewart a nod for his excellent interview with Paul last night.

JLS 21.1: What Lies Within?

By on June 3, 2007 5

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The latest issue (21.1) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies offers a symposium on the topic “Market Anarchism: Pro and Con,” featuring Nozick and Rothbard Eric Roark vs. Robert Nozick on whether a dominant protection agency can justly evolve into a state, Randall Holcombe vs. Walter Block on whether the state is inevitable, Walter Block vs. Tibor Machan on whether government is essentially coercive, and Jordan Schneider vs. myself on whether the market can provide objective law.

Read a fuller summary of 21.1’s contents here.

Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.

Read back issues online here.

Subscribe here.

Caning Darwin

By on June 1, 2007 9

[cross posted at Liberty & Power]

Joseph Sobran suggests (conical hat tip to LRC) that people’s willingness to help or praise others refutes Darwinism and atheism, and defies Randian egoism. Let’s take these in turn.

Charles Darwin Darwinism: Sobran seems to imagine that if Darwinism were true, people would be interested solely in their own narrow survival and would have no genuine concern for others. This is wrong on two different levels.

First, Sobran mistakenly assumes that Darwinism commits us to holding that all our mental contents, all our beliefs and desires, are there solely because they promote survival. Yet Darwinism implies nothing of the kind. Natural selection explains our possession of various capacities for learning, choosing, being influenced; but natural selection by itself does not guarantee that these capacities will be exercised solely in survival-conducing ways. How could it? My belief that 666 is the square root of 443556 isn’t there because that belief has survival value; there may be cases where it would, but I doubt that it ever has. Instead my belief that 666 is the square root of 443556 is the product of a general capacity to figure things out (i.e., reason), and that capacity has survival value.

Second, even if Darwinism did imply that all our mental contents are directly explainable by natural selection, it still wouldn’t follow that we should be surprised at the existence of genuine other-concern. Suppose (and this does not seem to be an especially heroic assumption) that creatures who are inclined to cooperate with one another are more likely on average to survive than those who aren’t. What more does one need by way of an evolutionary explanation? Has Sobran never read Spencer? Or Darwin himself?

Sobran thinks it should be a puzzle for the Darwinian why human beings express varieties of concern that other animals lack. But he himself offers the answer: reason. And as I noted above, this is a perfectly Darwinian-compatible explanation.

The weirdest section of Sobran’s article comes when he suggests that “killing your own children” (this is Sobran’s tendentious description of abortion; he seems to have forgotten that before a woman has given birth she has no “children”) “makes some sort of sense from an atheistic and Darwinian point of view,” since “[i]f survival is a ruthless competition, your kids are your competitors.” Um, Darwinian natural selection promotes traits that enhance the likelihood of reproduction; survival is selected for only insofar as it promotes reproduction. (Of course we can outwit natural selection, and a good thing too; the view, mysteriously popular among many religious conservatives, that we should bow to the purposes of our genes surely contradicts Genesis 1:26.)

Atheism: I was initially puzzled as to how Sobran’s argument was supposed to be relevant to atheism, until I realized that he is treating atheism and Darwinism as equivalents. But they aren’t. One can be a Darwinian without being an atheist (for this we have the assurance of no less an authority than Pope John Paul II), and one can likewise be an atheist without being a Darwinian (as all atheists were, prior to the 19th century, and as many have been since).

Randian egoism: Sobran treats Randian egoism as though it counseled against genuine concern for others. But Randian egoism says no such thing; its conception of self-interest is modeled on Aristotelean eudaimonia, and most definitely includes various forms of other-concern. There is a dispute in Randian circles as to whether such concern is related causally or constitutively to self-interest; but such concern remains genuine in either case. Egoism is a doctrine of the ground of our legitimate concerns, not of their scope. If egoism is Sobran’s basis for rejecting Rand, he should reject Thomas Aquinas for the same reason.

More Spencer Nonsense, Part Deux

By on May 29, 2007 6

Earlier this month I wrote a letter to the New York Times and posted it here. Then I discovered that the Times would only print letters that haven’t appeared previously, so I deleted the letter from my blog. But since they didn’t print it anyway, here it is again:

To the Editor:

Patricia Cohen’s May 5th article “A Split Emerges As Conservatives Discuss Darwin” contains the following remarkable sentence: “Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.”

Ms. Cohen’s charges against Herbert Spencer are false in every particular.

Herbert Spencer First: Spencer was in fact Victorian England’s leading opponent of imperialism; in Social Statics he described Western colonialism as bearing “a very repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers.”

Second: in his Principles of Sociology, Spencer hailed labor unions as a bulwark against the “harsh and cruel conduct” of employers, and advocated replacing the “slavery” of the wages system with self-governing workers’ cooperatives.

Third: far from advocating the “withdrawal of aid from the sick and needy,” he regarded the provision of such aid as a positive moral duty (though he stressed that it should be given in such a way as to avoid encouraging dependency).

Finally, inasmuch as Spencer developed and published his basic ideas on biological and social evolution prior to and independently of Charles Darwin, it makes little sense to describe him as a “Social Darwinist.”

Why do these bizarre distortions of a great humanitarian thinker persist?

Roderick T. Long

While, as I said, the Times didn’t print my letter, they did publish the following partial retraction:

A front-page article last Saturday about a dispute among some conservatives over whether Darwinian theory undermines or supports conservative principles erroneously included one social Darwinist among Victorian-era social Darwinists who adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism. Herbert Spencer opposed both.

Score a victory for the Herbert Spencer Anti-Defamation League!

Immigration, Secession, and Taxation

By on May 23, 2007 16

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

1. A frequent argument against secession is: What about the tax money that the rest of the country has invested in the would-be secessionist region for infrastructure, education, security, etc.? A region shouldn’t be allowed to secede until it first pays back the full costs of those investments.

Berlin Wall Now many things could be said in response to this objection: do these investments really outweigh the costs, direct or indirect, that the larger unit has been imposing on the region? to what extent did the region voluntarily solicit these investments? and so on.

But I want to offer a somewhat different response. Suppose this argument is a good one. Then by the same logic it should be justifiable to forbid individuals to leave the country. Let’s say I want to move to Canada, and the U.S. government says, “Not so fast – we paid for part of your education, we’ve protected you from criminals and foreign invaders, and now you can’t leave the country until you first pay back our investment.”

Now some countries have indeed had just such a policy – the Soviet Union, for example. But nowadays hardly anyone, including opponents of secession, is willing to embrace the idea of forbidding emigration. So if a history of tax-funded investment isn’t legitimate grounds for forbidding emigration, why is it grounds for forbidding secession? What’s the difference? Why should the principle of “consent of the governed” apply in one case and not in the other?

If the claim to a return on tax-funded investment doesn’t justify a prohibition on emigration (and I agree that it doesn’t), I don’t see how it can justify a prohibition on secession.

2. A frequent argument against open borders (strikingly similar to the anti-secession argument above, though not necessarily offered by the same people) is: What about the tax-funded benefits, such as welfare and education, that immigrants become eligible to receive? So long as immigrants can draw on these benefits, don’t those who pay the taxes have the right to demand that immigrants be excluded from the country?

Smash the Borders Here too, many things could be said in response to this argument: is the average immigrant really a net tax-recipient rather than a net taxpayer? and so on. But here too, I want to offer a somewhat different response.

Suppose this argument for forbidding entry by those who would probably become net tax-recipients is a good one. Why wouldn’t it be an equally good argument for deporting native-born citizens who are likewise net tax-recipients? Now most proponents of restrictions on immigration don’t favour deporting existing U.S.-born welfare recipients. But again, what’s the difference? How can the right of net taxpayers to defend themselves against net tax-recipients depend on where the net tax-recipients were born?

Just as in the secession case, so here, if tax-based considerations don’t justify compulsory emigration (and I agree that they don’t), I don’t see how they can justify compulsory non-immigration.

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