Positive Liberty

It’s obvious that discussing metaphysical ideas is complex. And that’s how I came up with the brilliant title of this particular post, with some help from the Department of Redundancy Department.

But seriously, as I’ve tried to share some of my Deep Thoughts, I’ve run into people misunderstanding, more so than disagreeing with me.

Commenter Greyson had something to say about this in response to my last post, and it was so well-put, that I wanted to elevate here to where more folks would more likely see it.

I’m afraid what you’re encountering with your commenters is sort of the overarching problem of metaphysical discourse: the poverty of language. Issues that deal with the purpose or properties of life itself are so complex for our minds that even if you are one of the lucky few that manages to order them in a coherent, to say nothing about correct, manner within your own mind, it is an almost equally improbable task to succinctly express them to another mind (and even more improbable to the masses, or at least a larger number of minds.) Of course this task is only made harder in the cold, impersonal world that is the blogosphere (even this warm friendly corner isn’t close to ideal.)

Well, this corner is indeed “warm and friendly,” and I’ve appreciated the feedback I’ve received. I’ve learned and expanded my thinking as a result.

Jason, thanks for providing PositiveLiberty.com.

Oh, and Hardball delenda est.

Virginia, apparently affiliated with ServiceNation, writes in defense of her group’s activities:

Managing, training and maintaining volunteers takes a lot of work especially for non-profit organizations. Often an organization who needs or benefits from the efforts of volunteers such as some public schools or parks, do not have the labor to recruit, train, organize and coordinate volunteers leaving volunteers and those in the organization feeling frusterated. [sic] We all know people and at times we too want to help out and want to do good but it takes coordination to put us into a position that fits our strengths and gifts and contributes to the work of the organization. This is a vital piece that an coordinating [sic] organization provides.

Also, it can add to the experience of a volunteer to be connected with other volunteers while they are volunteerin. [sic]

Having served in the Peace Corps I know that this transformational experience would have been very difficult without a coordinating body to recruit, train, and connect me with the locals and my peers. I would not have done it and 20 years since my time in Peace Corps service, I am grateful every day for it. I bring the lessons I learned and the knowing I shared of myself and my culture to the Hondurans to my home, my work and my community. We are all richer for that.

All of this may well be true, but two standard caveats about market failure still apply. Continue Reading »

I’m still voting Libertarian. But Obama’s thoughts on the “Christian Nation” are spot on. Sadly, I doubt in his heart of hearts John “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation” McCain differs at all with Obama’s position. McCain like most politicians is a nominal Christian. It’s just he needs to pander to the religious right to get their support.

I recently read an article, that was really an excerpt from the book, “Paterno: By the Book,” where the legendary Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, explains what discovering Virgil’s Aeneid meant to him as a person and a football coach.

Paterno’s take on the mythical Aeneas’ trials really spoke to me. Aeneas had to suffer. Virgil provides his reason for why this suffering had to occur. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: It’s alright, we’ve told you what to dream.

Various dreams from here and there, below the fold. Continue Reading »

Here’s a follow-up to my Anti-Servitude Pledge….

I solemnly swear that I will never take part in any involuntary civilian service at the behest of the federal government, regardless of the consequences.

…which has provoked some agreement as well as some interesting responses. As usual, Joshua Claybourn is worth the read:

Volunteering for a good cause is something I think all of us can support. But government coordination and regulation of such volunteering brings a host of problems, particularly when the meaning of “good cause” carries differing definitions. Is assisting the local gay pride association a good cause? What about assisting the local Christian outreach organization? What about advocating for the little-known insect threatened by farming? Not every taxpayer funding such endeavors will agree on the definition of “good cause”.

If we really wanted to be hyper-Burkean, we might claim that there is an intrinsic value to sociability, particularly if it means we develop a deeper sense of belonging to the community. Thus it might not matter whether the cause was “good” or not; the fringe benefits are there regardless.

Still, I don’t see an Evangelical Christian being thrilled about new friendships at a gay pride parade, and I don’t see that I’d do much good by promoting a religion that I don’t even believe in. This would be the purest absurdity, if it weren’t for all the serious First Amendment issues.

Then there’s that whole compulsion angle, which makes these projects more a parody of Burke — with taxpayers as marionettes — than the genuine article. Joshua makes a good comparison here too:

But the potential exists for it to take root much like George Bush’s infatuation with “faith-based initiative” which now has its own federal agency and soaks up billions of tax dollars each year.

Lots of people are pro-faith, just as lots of people are pro-volunteerism. That’s why anything coming under these names will have an eternal life in government, whether or not it has any business being there.

And there’s a good observation from one of his commenters, too:

If such a plan is started it will also become corrupt like the draft did. Poor boys went to Nam, college boys stayed home, the sons of the rich or influential never had to serve although some did.

Indeed, the Rangel proposal already contains deferments and exceptions, and these are sure to become politicized as well.

Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy, whose earlier post inspired my anti-servitude pledge, has been doing excellent work describing and contextualizing the goals of Service Nation, the interest group lobbying for mandatory national service. He writes,

Under the medieval system in much of Europe, serfs or peasants owed obligations of actual physical labor (beyond military service) to their political overseers. As English liberties grew, this obligation of physical labor was replaced by the right to pay taxes instead, with the chief exception being obligations of military service for males. Free men were increasingly free to choose their line of work and pay their political overseers with money, rather than owing an obligation of service to whatever physical tasks happened to be thought important or profitable to the upper and the political classes.

Service Nation is an organization devoted to stripping away this bulwark of Anglo-American liberty, hoping by the year 2020 to require every young American man and woman to be drafted into either military or community service.

And this is why we have to stop the new wave of compulsiteerism. But how far should we go? My own commenters have debated this considerably, with some wanting to attack both taxes and the military draft, too. (I would, but these are different arguments, both legally and practically, and I’m going after this issue alone for the time being.)

Is it worth it, then, to take the pledge? Rojas at The Crossed Pond doubts it:

Unfortunately, I know myself too well to suspect that I have the courage. . . to undergo any meaningful penalty for the sake of protesting compulsory service. Case in point: I am writing this blog under a pseudonym for fear of the employment consequences were my writings to be publicly attributed to me. Such is not the stuff of the national service martyr.

But the penalty for his reticence could be high as well. Would your employer hold your job while the government borrowed you for two years? Would every employer hold every job for all those millions of people?

Of course they wouldn’t. Some employers would hire replacements, while others would cut jobs and shrink the economy. This alone shows how little the servitude lobby is thinking about the real effects of their plans.

Finally, Rojas’s economic insight deserves credit:

Where are we to find millions of hours of work that needs to be done, but which is not important enough that we are willing to pay anyone to do it?

Simple: We’ll neglect something more important.

These service hours won’t be made of idealism and spare time, as volunteer service is today. They will be made of opportunity cost: successful careers cut short, products and services unprovided, scientific discoveries unmade, and lives not enjoyed as their rightful owners see fit. These years — not hours, years — will be made of interruption, inconvenience, and waste, of college degrees going stale, jobs lost, small businesses ruined. While trying to cure the world’s miseries, the compulsiteers will create new ones all their own.

The fact that fewer people volunteer today than would be compelled under Rangel’s plan does not mean that there is anything wrong with us. It only means that time is a limited resource, and that work for pay is valuable. Working for pay is good, even noble — an honest living, they used to call it.

The national servitude peddlers seem to suggest just the opposite, that paid work is somehow second-best. The implicit denigration of paid labor is antithetical to both the American ideal and to plain economic sense. “Do something worthwhile” suggests all by itself that what you’re doing right now is not. But it is. That’s why people pay you to do it.

Yes, it would be nice if people volunteered more often, but then, it would be nice if Exxon gave away free gasoline, too. It would be nice if we could have everything we wanted for free, but only politicians and thieves ever try for it. The trouble is, they do it using other people’s lives. Yours.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m already in August Mode, a frame of mind common among Washingtonians, New Yorkers and other pretentious pseudo-intellectuals of my ilk during which time unless, let’s say, Obama is caught in fishnet stockings chasing a sumo wrestler or McCain is discovered to actually have spent the Viet Nam war in Canada making macramé bongs while his twin brother Skippy was the real POW, I simply don’t give a rat’s ass about politics. Save it for after Labor Day.

So I was surfing for non-political news earlier today at my usual haunts and ran across this story in Slate about amateur locksmithing.

This happens to be a topic about which I actually know a little something, albeit second-hand, because amateur locksmithing was the hobby of one of my oldest school friends, a fellow who shall remain unidentified despite the statutes of limitations having long since lapsed for his various youthful indiscretions.

Of which there were many. My friend, whom I’ll call here “Jimmy” after a fairly crude lock opening technique, became intrigued as a child with the inner workings of locks and keys and, more to the point, how to open the former without benefit of the latter. As skilled trades go, locksmithing is far more about brains than brawn and Jimmy has a logical mind and a meticulous temperament exactly suited to figuring out puzzles and therefore to picking locks.

By high school Jimmy had also managed to acquire a key cutting machine – don’t ask! – various tools of the trade including illegal lock picks and tension wrenches (more about which below), shims and so forth. He had also, um, ‘borrowed’ locks from schools, churches and other public and semi-public places, dismantling them and discovering in the process how to make master keys to those entire buildings or building complexes.

I hasten to point out that Jimmy had no larcenous intentions in any of this. He simply viewed a locked door or a lock of any sort as a challenge. The fun was all in figuring out how to thwart the lock owner’s desire to keep him out, not in actually entering where he wasn’t wanted. It was, in short, simply a game.

Okay, so every once in a while there were more, um, practical applications of this skill. In the late 1960s, when the suburban youth of America (1) had just discovered the pleasures of marijuana but (2) were convinced that there were millions of ‘narcs” lurking just about everywhere, having a key that could stop the elevator between floors in a local apartment building (not ours!) long enough to smoke a joint and then wait for the ceiling exhaust fan to remove the tell-tale scent before turning the elevator back on was the perfect solution to our privacy problem. Keys to the padlocked chains barring vehicular entry into public parks where a young couple might go parking at night similarly proved handy.

Of course, that was all many, many years ago and my friend Jimmy is now a respected member of one of the learned professions and a disquietingly conservative pillar of his community. My guess is that he doesn’t even smoke pot anymore, let alone take young girls parking.

Woolgathering about my salad days (“Block that mixed metaphor!”) aside, the thing about this amateur locksmithing business is that its opposition is such a classic case of vested interests trying to protect their once largely unchallenged turf and trotting out all the usual and typically disingenuous “public interest” arguments in the process.

Case in point: I could be charged in many jurisdictions with possession of burglary tools over the fact that I have, courtesy of Jimmy, a small lock picking kit I’ve used on countless occasions when I or a friend lost or misplaced a key. At least the way the law used to be written, unless you were a bonded locksmith, such mere possession was sufficient grounds for conviction of a misdemeanor or worse. After all, if you weren’t a real locksmith, what on earth could you possibly want with such implements except to commit a crime? Right?

[Insert “possession of rape equipment” joke here.]

I wasn’t aware that amateur locksmithing was so popular a hobby as the Slate article suggests, but I’m glad to hear it. Truth be told, I misplaced my old pick set a few years ago. Hey, maybe I can just order one online these days! To be sure, there are legitimate arguments in favor of keeping some sorts of information confidential. But knowing how to open a pin-tumbler lock, even a Medeco lock, without having to use bolt cutters hardly rises to the level of legitimate state secret. And as the enthusiasts correctly point out, the first step in building a better mousetrap lies in finding out the weaknesses in the old model. That’s what we call progress.

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub features a post about some debates I did with blogger Hercules Mulligan. This post is based off a comment I left there. Continue Reading »

I watched a good chunk of last Friday’s, Dennis Kucinich-inspired, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Impeachment, Non-impeachment Hearings” on C-SPAN. Both many Democrats and nearly all Republicans seem to hold an erroneous view about impeachment, and it goes like this:

“We can’t start impeachment now, because this President’s term of office will be done in six months.”

It appears that this statement is based on the erroneous notion that impeachment is ONLY about removal from office. But we have recent history to tell us that removal from office is a TWO-step process. Bill Clinton was impeached by the House — which is akin to an indictment. However, he was not convicted after his trial by the Senate, and therefore was NOT removed from office.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter whether or not there are just six weeks left in the term. Beyond removal from office, impeachment should be pursued for the following three reasons . . . Continue Reading »

Although I don’t often publish DownsizeDC.org’s Action Items, here is a slightly edited version of today’s Downsizer-Dispatch (a 23,500+ subscriber email list), which is notable on this forum because of who is recognized by the Quote of the Day, as well as the aggravating content of the message. Dare I say, “Enjoy?”…

Quote of the Day:
“We were not made to serve the state, but the state was made to serve us.”
– Jason Kuznicki

Subject: Vote on omnibus bill still pending

A vote is still pending on S. 3297, the “Advancing America’s Priorities Act” (America’s priorities? Where do they get these bill names?). This means we still have time to oppose it.

This bill groups together 36 completely different legislative proposals. What if your Senator strongly opposes most of these proposals, but votes for the whole package because he feels one specific proposal simply must be passed? If many Senators feel this way then than we end up with a lot of laws and programs that could not have passed on their own merits.

Please send Congress a message asking them to pass DownsizeDC.org’s “One Subject at a Time Act.” Use your personal comments to also ask your Senators to vote against S. 3297 because Continue Reading »

My friend and former co-blogger Mona has snagged Steven Horwitz for an online chatroom discussion of F.A. Hayek this coming Wednesday from 7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. EDT at The Art Of The Possible.

When he isn’t busying himself defending the libertarian bona fides of the rock group Rush or popping in from time to time here at Positive Liberty to correct dimwitted pseudo-economists like me, Horwitz is a real-life economist of the professorial variety at St. Lawrence University, a serious student of Hayek, and from all readily available evidence a splendid fellow.

At the risk of learning something, I might just pop in there myself this Wednesday, and you should too!

As I noted previously, I think Judge Michael McConnell of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals one of the best Establishment Clause scholars. And he shows off his talent in his most recent opinion. I’m not going to analyze the ins and outs of his Establishment Clause jurisprudence (you have Eugene Volokh for that). Rather, how the passage from the opinion well illustrates the impossibility of America being a “Christian Nation” in a civil governmental sense: Continue Reading »

I often comment on WorldMagBlog because lots of intelligent evangelicals comment there who are ready and willing to give my ideas critical feedback. Yes, I specialize in debunking the “Christian Nation” idea. And yes, I started my journey more sympathetic to the “secular” side (which I suppose I still am). However, I’ve moderated my position and try to articulate a balanced, nuanced middle ground between secular leftism and religious conservatism. Books I endorse that also represent this middle ground position include Steven Waldman’s “Founding Faith,” Jon Meacham’s “American Gospel,” and “The Search For Christian America” by Noll, Hatch, and Marsden.

On political-judicial matters, I describe my jurisprudence as somewhere between Justice Kennedy’s and Justice Thomas’. Further I accept the possibility that the Establishment Clause doesn’t properly incorporate to apply against state and local governments (but argue that the Equal Protection Clause, on religious matters, can do much of what the Court currently has the Establishment Clause doing) and think Judge Michael McConnell, a conservative evangelical, of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals one of the best Establishment Clause scholars. On Free Exercise, I differ with McConnell’s notion that the Clause grants a constitutional right to religious accommodations from generally neutral civil laws, but rather endorse Justice Scalia’s, Philip Hamburger’s and Marci Hamilton’s position that argues otherwise.

I write all this to try to put my personal positions into perspective because, in realizing that one has to pick one’s battles, I realize that I pick a battle — debunking the “Christian America” thesis — that is associated with the secular left (though it should be noted that many moderates, libertarians and conservatives likewise agree with my position). So my battle gives the illusion that I am more of a hard secularist than in reality, I really am. For instance, on the WorldMagBlog, one commenter notes:

Jon Rowe, I too have a hard time accepting your theses as a middle-ground approach. You are a man on a mission to prove that America was not founded upon Christian principles and to discredit those who say that she was. Your view of the Founding Fathers doesn’t strike me as any more nuanced than the view(s) that you oppose.

….As we look back to the Founding Fathers we can acknowledge that there were varied beliefs among them and that America’s founding principles come from varied sources. It’s neither as simple as David Barton implies or as simple as you, Jon Rowe, imply.

The ideas of religious and political liberty did not spring up in the eighteenth century. The entire history of the world contains a continuous struggle between liberty and control. It’s true that liberty scored an enormous victory in 1776 and again in 1789, but thousands of years of history underly it–not just Christianity and not just the Enlightenment.

I describe my personal position as “soft-secularism” — a “classical secularism” that derives from America’s Founding, “classical liberal” era.

Because it will help folks like this end up with less egg on their face. The first video speaks of Obama’s recent statement that America is no longer a “Christian Nation.” Obama’s mistake was intimating that America ever was a “Christian Nation.” When this fellow gets to arguing his case, he does so by relying on, you got it, those “unconfirmed,” that is bogus, quotations.

And in the following video another fellow discusses the much misunderstood Donald Lutz study and then cites the hoary “Holy Trinity” case of 1892, which even Justice Scalia in “A Matter of Interpretation” considers textbook piss poor legal reasoning.

Some Saturday music for you. Most of Walsh’s (of Kansas) best material was written by Kerry Livgren (guitar/keyboard/main writer for Kansas). Walsh wrote some good and some not so good tunes for Kansas and non-Kansas.

Every Step of the Way was from Walsh’s first solo album. It’s a good, straight ahead-blues rock song, though a prog-rock length of 9 minutes long. It starts off with Walsh’s low range and slowly builds from there. Even if Kansas/Walsh isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, hopefully you’ll understand from listening to the tune, why I think Walsh in his prime had the perfect white rock voice (something Steve Hackett once noted of Walsh).

In the meantime, like a lot of aging rock vocalists, Walsh lost some tone and range. But at his 1/2 best still sings better than most rock vocalists especially those his age. The following is a good solo song from the “mature” Walsh.