Positive Liberty

I teach U.S. Presidency every other year. It’s not one of my favorite classes, as I’m not a real expert on the presidency, and don’t often read about it except when preparing for to teach it again.

But as I prepare for the class, I once again find myself looking for a president I can admire. Continue Reading »

Tags: Grover Cleveland

Leda Smith heard someone breaking into her home, so she found the revolver kept by her bed, confronted the burglar and forced him at gunpoint to call 911. Then she and the seventeen year old intruder waited until the state police arrived to take him away.

Leda Smith is eighty-five years old.

Some random thoughts…

Purpose Driven Dialogue

Rick Warren, pastor of mega-church Saddleback and author of “The Purpose Driven Life” and “The Purpose-Driven Church,” was declared by one news outlet (I cannot recall who now) to be the new Billy Graham. Why? Is it because he preaches the gospel? Not really. It’s because he’s friends with presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle — friend of the next president. It’s also because he’s perceived as being less partisan and less divisive than the likes of the late-Jerry Falwell, the late-D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and David Barton. It’s because he seems like, and probably is a nicer guy.

I, for one, would like to see a new kind of evangelical leader — one who sees his role as “afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted.” There may actually be a couple of them. I’m aware of at least one such individual. But it’s a lot harder to climb the prestige ladder if that’s your attitude. People call you a radical, a liberal, and unpatriotic.

American Evangelicalism has become hotter and stinkier than the Gehenna dump.

Being Rick Warren gets you on all the right shows. Being James Dobson raises you an army and lots of money. Being a critic gets you neither.

Does this mean we can see Rick Warren’s purpose?

I don’t know. Actually, there are some things I like about Rick Warren. I’ll conclude this piece by mentioning one of them.

Brayton’s Reprobation

Our PL colleague over at his real big blog wrote, Continue Reading »

Tags: Dobson, evangelical, McCain, Obama, religious right, Rick Warren

Punditry is generally trite and boring these days. Cable TV news must’ve ruined it. Jon Stewart, on “The Daily Show,” can demonstrate, with a handful of clips, that Capitol Hill culture is an echo chamber. Little original thought flows out. They just mimic each other. It’s so bad it appears someone writes the scripts for all the networks and their routine pundits.

But even Jon Stewart can become part of the echo chamber.

Jon Stewart suggested that Bill Clinton’s response to the question, “Is Barack Obama ready?” (which, by the way, was “You could argue that no one is ready for that job”) was the work of a passive-aggressive ass. (If you click the link, the relevant part starts at 2:20).

Jon wasn’t joking. It was what everyone in the media was saying, minus the cuss word. But there is another plausible explanation. It’s so novel that it’s amazing that it’s been overlooked in the DC echo chamber… Continue Reading »

Tags: Biden, Bill Clinton, Chris Dodd, Daily Show, Obama

I recently asked PL readers why people had such inaccurate views of libertarianism. As a follow-up and as a way of more fully introducing myself to PLers, I thought it would be appropriate to explain what libertarianism means to me.

I actually began, when I first began really thinking about these issues, as a “market socialist.” At least that’s what I called it, although one of my friends derided the idea that socialism could be market-based. Continue Reading »

They relied on the excellent historical work of Gary Scott Smith chair of the history dept. at Grove City College and one of the most prominent evangelical historians. Notice their classification of the first half dozen:

PRESIDENT TERM DATES DENOMINATIONAL AFFILIATION
George Washington 1789-97 Episcopalian (theistic rationalist*)
John Adams 1797-1801 Congregationalist; Unitarian
Thomas Jefferson 1801-09 Episcopalian (theistic rationalist*)
James Madison 1809-17 Episcopalian (theistic rationalist*)
James Monroe 1817-25 Episcopalian (deist?)
John Quincy Adams 1825-29 Unitarian
Andrew Jackson 1829-37 Presbyterian

Here is what they put next to the “*”:

*The term “deist” is often used for a number of early presidents and founding fathers, though this causes confusion. For some of these founders, historian Gary Scott Smith prefers the term “theistic rationalism,” which mixed elements of natural religion, Christianity, and rationalism, and relied foremost on reason. Unlike deists, theistic rationalists believed that God was active in the world and that prayer was therefore effectual. They contended that religion’s primary role was to promote morality, which was indispensable to society.

What’s striking is according to Christian Nationalist standards, the first “Christian” President was probably Andrew Jackson. Traditional Christians define Christianity fairly narrowly according to orthodox Trinitarian doctrines. Because the “theistic rationalists” weren’t orthodox Trinitarians — yet because they also weren’t “Deists” — a new term was needed. Theistic rationalism is similar to John Adams’ “Unitarianism” in all but name only. It’s basically Christianity stripped of all of its orthodox doctrines such that theism and mere morality remain.

Glad to see there are honest evangelicals who get it. Indeed, they were among the first to get it.

In Jason’s post about the new Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, he says,

Time and again, libertarians find themselves in a strange situation, one that liberals or conservatives seem to face a lot less often: Very energetic people denouncing us for positions we don’t even remotely support, and never have, and that are dead wrong on purely libertarian grounds.”

I experience this as well. Continue Reading »

Yesterday I went to TG Cigars to pick up a couple of stogies for the vacation: 5 Vegas A-Series “Apostles.” To connoisseurs, they’re Churchill-sized, with a Costa Rican maduro wrapper. To everyone else, they’re known as stinky sticks.

Although a cigar is a nice change of pace, I’m usually more of a pipe smoker, so while at the cigar shop I took a look at some of their tobacco pipes and hookahs. I recalled my father’s pipe collection, and one pipe in particular: a relic from my childhood memories, possibly plastic, possibly ceramic, with a perfectly smooth, Carolina-blue finish and an aluminum stem looking for all the world like a heat sink on a CPU.

The pipe looked like a spaceship, or like something a mad scientist had improvised, artfully, from his lab equipment. Its races right past tacky, and verges closely on bizarre. I love this pipe, I thought to myself. I covet this pipe.

“Ah well, I’ll probably never find its like again,” I said to myself. I thought I knew, too, because I’d looked for it on eBay and never found anything quite like it.

I paid for my Apostles and left. And when I came home there was a package for me on the kitchen table. Here’s what I found inside. Continue Reading »

I have just engaged in a long and bitter debate on Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog about the power of one vote. Many Democrats are concerned about a repeat of 2000, when Ralph Nader stole enough votes from Al Gore to cost Gore Florida’s electoral votes (conveniently ignoring the other causes of Gore’s loss, such as his failure to win his own home state), and some of Ed’s readers were outraged that he plans to vote Libertarian–voting Libertarian, they fear, will take votes from Obama and allow McCain to win. Setting aside the dubious proposition that there are enough libertarians who might actually vote Democrat to make the difference in the election, the argument was stimulated by my claim that one vote can’t change the outcome of the election, and so no individual should change their vote for fear they’ll help their least-preferred candidate to win. This simple, and logically irrefutable proposition, caused a firestorm of disagreement and claims that voting Libertarian was “dishonest,” “illegitimate,” and ‘inexcusable.” Setting aside also these readers’ disturbing reluctance to grant their fellow citizens freedom of conscience at the ballot box, these arguments were all based on the continued belief that one vote can make a difference. It is fairly easy to see where this belief comes from, but it’s based on a continued confusion of two distinct levels of analysis, group-level vs. individual level, a distinction which is easily sorted out, for those willing to set aside their preconceptions and think analytically. Continue Reading »

Arguably yes. A reader of mine once posed that very intriguing question. This relates to my query “what is Christianity?” and my post on political theology that Cato Unbound reproduced. A little while ago I invited chess master Kristo Miettinen to react to my position and he did so here. I’m not going to reproduce his entire note, just what I see as his telling understanding of “Christianity.” Continue Reading »

I think I’ve finally found it. Maybe. I don’t know. There are absolutely TONS of books out there that address the “Christian Nation”/Religion of the Founders topic. I’m not even going name them. You know of many of them. I’ll simply note the best, latest one to come out is Stephen Waldman’s. My Dad is always asking me when my book is going to come out. I’ve always answered that the notion that America is not a Christian Nation/what religion did America’s Founders believe in? has been done so many times by so many more prominent folks that it would make no sense for me to write such a book until I’ve found my novel angle. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

Assorted links, in which various parties get what they deserve, below the fold. Continue Reading »

In a past post I wrote it’s impossible for America to be a “Christian Nation” because you first have to define the term “Christianity,” whose definition is disputed, and the doctrine of unalienable rights central to the American Founding forbids government from resolving this issue.

Yet, America does have a theistic or metaphysical underpinning — see the Declaration of Independence. And America’s Founders invoked quite a bit, a generically defined “Providence.” In short, America’s political theology is a generic Providentialism — a natural religion discoverable from reason, that is compatible with Christianity and all sorts of heretical non-Christian systems. Continue Reading »

In the current issue of Cato Unbound, Jim Manzi and Joseph Romm have both weighed in on global warming. In the next few days we’ll hear from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, as well as Indur Goklany. And then the real fun — the discussion phase — will begin.

Yes, we invited Joseph Romm. Yes, the guy who runs Climate Progress. To celebrate the appearance of his dire global warming predictions in a Cato publication, Romm’s Climate Progress blog ran a picture of hell freezing over.

As managing editor, it was a proud moment for me. Vigorous debate is what Cato Unbound is all about.

Yet not a lot has happened to change my own mind on the issue, which is to say that I don’t feel I grasp the science sufficiently to have a strong opinion. Although Manzi’s lead essay generally sidesteps the science and gives more attention to the political and economic aspects of the problem, Romm has made some pretty strong assertions about the data, and it seems like that’s where the conversation is headed. At least for now. But I shall say no more.

Where do I stand? Every time I read the “facts” from the go-slow keep-calm folks, I feel like they win. And every time I read the “facts” from the act-now save-the-world people, I feel pulled equally in the opposite direction. Often I don’t know how to evaluate the competing claims about the issues of fact, and this prevents me from having many strongly held views on the subject.

The one thing I am convinced of is as follows: If I don’t know whom to believe — or whom to dare to believe — then there’s a good chance that the vast majority of voters and policymakers don’t either. Instead, as I’ve noted in the past, we tell each other stories. This is a natural human tendency, though not necessarily a helpful one.

Here are some of the stories we tell:

Industrialists are Evil: By this narrative, big corporations don’t care anything about the environment, or animals, or plants, or human beings, either. They’d be perfectly content, not merely to deprive of property, but actually to kill off everyone who lived on the coasts of the world, if only it meant a few more dollars in their bank accounts. We have to shut them down immediately. . . .

Scientists are Heroes: This narrative often squares well with the previous, though they need not be found together. A bunch of heroic scientists discovered something that’s threatening worldwide destruction. We’re still threatened, but — if we act in time — we can still do something. . . .

So who wouldn’t want to get in on saving the world? It feels so good to be able to do something like that, whether or not there’s any actual threat to be had — which, I’d venture to say, most climate-change true believers couldn’t competently assess even if they had the data right in front of them.

And so on. These, I think, rather than scientific knowledge, are what impel most people to think what they do about global warming. Many of the people who would most vigorously assent to economically ruinous global warming policies certainly seem to be more motivated by narrative than by science. I’m not saying this of Romm, but the number of people I’ve talked to who don’t know hooey about the science, but who enjoy the thought of seeing Exxon suffer, is great enough that it ought to be cause for concern.

Libertarians aren’t immune from using narratives, not at all. We do tend to reach for different narratives than most, however, and I’m going to bring up one of them that seems particularly relevant, as well as particularly well-validated. This is that plans for the future are almost always garbage. Socialist economic planning is a joke. Government war plans? Same thing. Businesses are hardly any better, and for every successful product on the market, there are dozens of failures. The law of unintended consequences makes a ruin of everything sooner or later, and that’s just the nature of life on earth.

Climate forecasting seems every bit as difficult as planning an economy, and perhaps more. Our knowledge is smaller than we dare to admit.

This is one reason for our gut-level skepticism about what life is going to be like in 2100, and why we need to take these particular steps today. We libertarians have watched, with distinct satisfaction, as one set of planners after another have all failed, catastrophically, time and again. We’ve been in the right, even when no one gives us proper credit. This stuff? It looks for all the world like a Five Year Plan to us. And we know how those turn out.

“Communists couldn’t plan the economy,” say today’s planners. “In fact, they made a total botch of it. So instead, we’re going to plan a whole lot of the economy and the climate too.” I hope you’ll forgive me for shuddering.

Okay, okay… This one’s personal. Maybe a little too personal. Which is why it’s below the fold. Continue Reading »