Positive Liberty

…about this:

There’s been quite a bit of back-and-forth on the blogosphere about the Democrats’ rebranding of the Left. The debate centers around how liberal became a dirty word and the propriety of now using this other term, progressive (which Hillary Clinton explicitly favours).

The arguments aren’t important, but they are interesting. On the other side, Ross Douthat notes that this rebranding signals, “an epiphenomenon of a larger conservative ascendancy in American life,” and, “a blow for linguistic precision.” He can say this because, for him, the two terms represent distinct ideologies, and the shift in terms points to the adoption of not only the label but also the legacy of progressivism, which he politely points out has some dirty laundry (other conservatives have been not-so-polite). Jane Galt piles on with more problems the progressives gave us in the 20s and 30s. This rebranding isn’t giving the Left the clean break they want…

So what is this all about? People talking past each other. The key insight here is that conservatives and libertarians are concerned about intellectual legacies and the historic threads of their ideologies. Liberals, not so much. This is why libertarians and their sympathizers are enthusiastically grateful for Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism on the one hand, and Democrats unabashedly claim Thomas Jefferson as one of their own on the other. Liberalism, or progressivism, will always be more about advancing convenient policies, rather than hammering down a coherent genealogy of political thought. The current collection of left-wing policy proposals have simply been rebranded, as glibly and significantly as an advertising campaign. One really shouldn’t read too much into this.

Caveats:

–There are plenty of anti-intellectuals in every camp.

–In those areas where Zach and Henry may disagree, Henry is right: “The modern liberal position on abortion isn’t rooted in the genetic improvement of the species, or anything like it. It’s rooted in a particular notion of individual rights. That’s why they call it ‘choice’ rather than ‘embrace your genetic duty by destroying imperfect foetuses for the benefit of mankind.’” This is to the credit of the modern progressives, and to the eternal shame of the old progressives. (Why anyone would want to reclaim the old progressives’ mantle is a bit beyond me.)

–In my corner of the political quadrant, we only call ourselves “libertarians” because the “liberals” of today took the word “liberal” from us. We fought them for it, and we lost in the court of common usage. If I had my way, I’d simply call myself a liberal. I think most libertarians who know their history would do likewise.

–Yes, I wince when I hear Democrats claiming Thomas Jefferson as one of their own. Then again, libertarians like to claim John Stuart Mill, which makes us even, I suppose.

–As you can probably guess, I find “progressive” a much, much scarier term than “liberal.” But also a more honest one.

A great piece by historian Stephen Davies.

I’ve joined Facebook. I’m not a joiner, but there you have it.

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I now present the strangest bleg I’ve probably ever made.

Scott and I recently bought a theremin as part of our growing home music project. I’ve wanted a theremin ever since high school, when I was very into Led Zeppelin. We run the theremin through the same amplifier as my electric bass, and it can produce some very interesting interference patterns. Nothing I’d call music yet, but we’re getting there.

Our theremin is having some weird technical difficulties, though: After sunset it works pretty much as advertised, but during the day the range is radically lessened and there is a huge amount of static hiss, popping sounds, and other undesireable noise. We’ve ruled out temperature and light as possible causes of interference. Could it be like cosmic rays or something? Truly the theremin is a weird instrument, and not just because of the spooky sounds it makes.

(Yes, I know, I should probably just hop over to Theremin World and get an answer there. I searched but didn’t find what I was after. I may have to make an account and ask. And after that I’ll stop by Spatula City, too.)

Tom Snyder at his finest.

Snyder was someone who was entertaining in perhaps an unintentional way. He was a good interviewer. But when he did his monologues, his facial ticks and creepy laugh were fun to laugh at late at night in a college dorm room.

Here’s an underappreciated guitar hero I’ve lately been listening to a lot: Robert Cray, who blends a great blues style with more pop and R&B influences. As is often the case with these guys, he’s better live than in studio. Check out “Poor Johnny” and especially this great duet with Eric Clapton on “Old Love,” which he and Clapton cowrote.

I’m honored to have been featured as the quote of the day at Samizdata. That’s a great blog, and highly recommended.

Jacob Bronowski used to say that the greatest discovery of scientists was science itself. The scientific method, with its resolute search for causation, its refusal to cower before tradition and authoritarianism was responsible for the great advancement of humanity over the past centuries. Obviously scientists have not always lived up to these standards, but those who have took man to places he could only have imagined before (and not even imagined very well). Central to this accomplishment is science’s refusal to be satisfied with magical explanations of phenomena. Magic, after all, is not an answer—it’s the feeling of satisfaction without answers. It’s the willingness to tolerate a big blank spot in one’s understanding of the universe.

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The Firm’s Midnight Moonlight. Ed Brayton’s got a post on one hit wonders which mentions The Firm — the group Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers put together in the 1980s. My favorite song from them is Midnight Moonlight. It didn’t turn out to their next Stairway or Kashmir which I think they hoped it would. Midnight Moonlight (at least the instrumental parts) was written while Page was in Led Zeppelin and was to be called “Swan Song.”

Ah, Beer:

In the beginning there was beer, and some might have called that good enough.

But between today’s tinkering brewers and more experimental drinkers, we’ve got fruit-infused beers, summer beers, tequila beers and organic beers to go along with the stouts, Pilseners, pale ales, porters, Bocks and lagers we were finally getting used to.

Insert standard comment about the improving state of the world right about here.

Question of the Day: Suppose we created an official state church. Would this help increase religious faith and/or the intensity of belief? Or would the government botch the job of proselytizing, as it does so many others, causing people generally to lose their religious beliefs?

In other words, would government money turn religion into Amtrak? Or would it begin to look more like the military-industrial complex?

Personally, I am inclined to think that there would be a lot more religious faith if the state were to pick one religion and consistently funnel money to it. But much of this faith would be in favor of other religions, in the hopes of getting the state to choose a different favorite, and owing to the common tendency of persecution (or perceived persecution) to increase religious fervor.

Not only would there be more religious faith, but I tend to think that there would be more religious animosity, that things would get worse before they got better, and that the “better” could well take years or even centuries to reach.

If the experiences of England and France during the early modern era are any guide, state churches in the face of religious diversity produce a great deal of social tension, often erupting into actual warfare. This civil strife in the end produces a religiously disaffected populace that is deeply suspicious of faith in God. These disaffected see religion as just another scheme to control other people’s lives, and a rather unconvincing one at that. The state churches endure for a while or even indefinitely, but in the end religious faith is first greatly heightened, then greatly attenuated.

Now someone of my persuasion, who has no religious faith and who wouldn’t mind seeing an attenuation of religious faith more generally, might see this as a good outcome. But the end hardly justifies the violent and ugly means, and additionally the typical secularist of today can’t reasonably expect to live through the period of strife that would bring about disillusionment. The Amtrak church only arrives many decades or even centuries after the military-industrial church.

Instead of a Post on Georgism It wasn’t enough of an idea to make a post out of it, but here’s my thought. Henry George, who is something like a second cousin once removed to the libertarian movement, suggested the following: Abolish all taxes except for one — on the value of land. The idea has been kicked around a lot, getting attention from time to time all across the political spectrum.

The thinking goes like this: People deserve to own what they create, but they did not create land. The productive value of land, then, is an undeserved value, and thus it is a legitimate source of government revenue.

It’s an interesting idea, but I have a hard time seeing it as a compelling one. When I purchase land, I am in effect acquiring the discounted future value of the property, an idea I discussed here. In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises writes,

If the future services which a piece of land can render were to be valued in the same way in which its present services are to be valued, no finite price would be high enough to impel its owner to sell it. Land could neither be bought nor sold against definite amounts of money, nor bartered against goods which can render only a finite number of services. Pieces of land would be bartered only against other pieces of land.

A person buying a parcel of land is in effect buying its expected discounted future value, which is not infinite, even if the land were perfectly well preserved. This is because, even successful preservation efforts aside, we have a time preference toward acquiring goods and enjoying them sooner rather than later. Time preference applies to all goods, and if it did not apply to land, then we would see Mises’ barter market in land as the only form of land acquisition.

There seems to be a kinship here between the idea of infinitely valuable land (because its future worth is wrongly undiscounted) and the idea that the value of land is held irrevocably and for all time in the trust of all humanity. Both of them assume a kind of consistency across time that seems inappropriate: The barter world because it forgets that a claim to land a hundred years’ hence is not very valuable to me, and the Georgist world because, if we discount the future value of land appropriately, then it grows difficult to distinguish land from any other commodity that we do not produce ourselves. If their discounted future values are equal, then their present values are equal too.

Only a few simple examples are needed, I think, to demonstrate the point: No one’s making very much new petroleum, either, and we’re consuming it all the time. Would a Georgist have to treat petroleum likewise? And sunlight? It’s hard to see anymore why taxation should attach to land. It’s also hard to see why improvements on petroleum (plastic goods, say), should be treated differently from improvements on land (houses, farms, and the like).

Or look at it from another angle: The first owner of a piece of land presumably acquired it precisely because no one else was there to claim it. No one wanted it — and thus its future value to humanity was generally reckoned at zero. The first owner was the first person to find any value in it. It would seem rather grasping to tax something whose value we only moments ago reckoned at zero, and if we were to tax at a percentage of its value, then we would have to conclude that, at zero value, no tax was due at all.

Taxation remains a problem in political thought for many other reasons, but I guess the point of all of this is that a single tax on land doesn’t really solve many of the problems it claims to. At least, not as I see it.

Well, everyone, I’ve tried to pack in quite a few posts this week, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your hospitality. Thanks to everyone at Positive Liberty for having me as a guest blogger!

I’ll leave you with a couple of parting recommendations.

First, The Libertarian Futurist Society (the organization that bestows the annual Prometheus Awards to recognize and promote libertarian science fiction) has a new blog here. Of recent note is the controversial revelation that science fiction authors have joined the war on terror.

Second, I am happy to say that in the last year an excellent new English translation (by Natasha Randall) has appeared of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic and still all-too-relevant SF dystopia, We. Banned by the Soviet censors and not published in Russia until 1988, We tells the story of a totalitarian One State that controls its citizens’ lives with mathematical precision. Led by the Benefactor, the One State seeks to explore space in order to bring the rest of the universe under the dominion of the powerful government apparatus. Yevgeny’s descriptions are chilling in their timeliness. For example, the One State’s status quo is maintained the Welldoer (implying, of course, that everything the government does is good, and those who challenge it are Evildoers). Moreover, individual privacy is nonexistent. The very walls of the buildings are made of transparent materials so that everyone, everything, is always visible to the penetrating and all-seeing eyes of the state. Surveillance is not only a matter of government policy, but an intrinsic part of neighborly relations. Against such pervasive control, Yevgeny holds out little hope for dissent. The story is a powerful and haunting one, and We has rightly been hailed as the ancestor of 1984, Anthem, and a number of modern SF dystopias.

Even among the ancients, the most mature among them knew that the source of right is might, that right is a function of power. And so, we have the scales: on one side, a gram, on the other a ton: on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance the scale against a ton?

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

* Shawn Wilbur has just completed posting the entire collection of Benjamin Tucker’s journal of 19th-century individualist anarchism, Liberty, in PDF form. Learn more here.

* While I’m mentioning online archives, here are a couple of others I highly recommend:
- Hypertexts in American Studies at the University of Virginia
- The Online Library of Liberty (by Liberty Fund, Inc.)
- Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature

* And, especially for the Icelandic Sagas, there are several good resources:
- The Online Medieval and Classical Library
- Icelandic Sagas Page, including links to online texts
- Icelandic Sagas Archive
- Icelandic Lore from the Internet Sacred Text Archive
- “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case” by David Friedman
- “Privatization, Viking Style: Model or Misfortune?” by Roderick T. Long

* You may recall that I recommended Lois McMaster Bujold’s fiction here: her award-winning novella “The Mountains of Mourning” is available for download from the Baen Free Library.

Unlike Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, whose writings clearly explicate their religious creed, Washington and Madison leave some room for doubt because of their reticence to discuss what they exactly believed. Numerous smoking gun quotations prove that Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin denied the tenets of orthodox Christianity, but not with Washington or Madison. Rather, those two left clues (which I think strongly point towards their believing the same creed as Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin).

For the side arguing Washington’s orthodoxy, the smoking gun they argue proves Washington was Christian is that he took oaths to the Trinitarian creeds of the Anglican Church when he became a vestryman and a godfather. If he took oaths while not believing in them, then, the pietists argue, Washington was a hypocrite.

I would respond that those oaths were by in large perfunctory — a means to an end. If you wanted to become a vestryman (a largely political position in Anglican Virginia) or a Godfather, you had to take those oaths. And Jefferson, who clearly didn’t believe in the creeds of the Anglican Church, was also, like Washington, a vestryman. But Jefferson refused to be a godfather and explained he did so because he didn’t want to take an oath to the Trinity and its related doctrines in which he didn’t believe. Though, as I noted here, the Trinity clearly irritated Jefferson in a way in which it didn’t seem to Franklin and Washington. Washington seemed more indifferent or agnostic on the creeds of orthodoxy in which Jefferson actively disbelieved (and indeed, Madison testified that he thought Washington was agnostic on “the arguments for Christianity, and for the different systems of religion” and didn’t believe he “in fact…formed definite opinions on the subject”). Continue Reading »

Rodents of unusual size? I don’t think they exist. (HT Alan)

This one is primarily promulgated by Peter Marshall, whose historiography is abominable.

Part of the myth involves conflating America’s two foundings — the earlier colonial founding of Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc. — with the Founding of the federal government from 1776-1789. (This helps to peddle the “Christian Nation” myth generally.) To distinguish between the two, Michael Zuckert suggests we use different terms to describe these two “foundings.” The federal Founding Fathers were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al. Men like John Winthrop, John Smith, Thomas Hooker, and Roger Williams were planting fathers.

Whereas the Federal Founding documents are arguably secular (or perhaps generally theistic), earlier colonial charters of the planting fathers used explicitly biblical language and otherwise covenanted with the Triune Christian God (save for Roger Williams’ Rhode Island). Therefore, “Christian America” proponents try to find some explicit connection between the planting and Founding Fathers to show they were of one vision.

Peter Marshall’s myth is that Continue Reading »