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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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

Various dreams from here and there, below the fold. 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!

I found an odd argument from Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, around pages 48-49.

Coontz begins by suggesting that in the last couple of centuries, the power of “kin, community, and state to arrange, prohibit, and interfere in marriages has waned,” which is certainly true. And this is not a shocking, unprecedented development, but rather a return to the norms that prevailed during hunter-gatherer times, when marriage wasn’t about property or dynastic succession, and when partners enjoyed much greater freedom. They could choose freely among potential mates, they worried less about infidelity, they loved even illegitimate children, and they could enter and leave marriages more easily. She writes,

Legal scholar Harry Willekins argues that in most modern industrial societies, marriages are contracted and dissolved in ways that have more in common with the habits of some egalitarian band-level societies than the elaborate rules that governed marriage in more complex societies over the past 5,000 years. In many contemporary societies, there is a growing acceptance of premarital sex, divorce, and remarriage, along with an erosion of sharp distinctions between cohabitation and marriage and between ‘legitimate’ and out-of-wedlock births.

This may seem good or bad depending on one’s own beliefs about marital norms. Yet it’s debatable whether what’s being said about past societies is even true. Most of us, I suspect, have heard neither of moieties nor of phratries, but we should all pity the person who wanted to marry against the rules that these kinship divisions entailed. The much-discussed same-sex unions among Native Americans were actually quite rare. And the reason preliterate marriage had little to do with wealth transfer is in part because there was so very little to go around.

But let’s ignore all that and grant that hunter-gatherer societies did have fluid enough marriage norms to make the comparison apt. Coontz continues,

In hunting and gathering bands and egalitarian horticultural communities, unstable marriages did not lead to the impoverishment of women or children as they often do today. Unmarried women participated in the work of the group and were entitled to a fair share, while children and other dependents were protected by strong customs that mandated sharing beyond the nuclear family.

This is not the case today, especially in societies such as the United States, where welfare provisions are less extensive than in Western Europe.

One wonders: Would today’s single mothers be better off as hunter-gatherers? Clearly this isn’t what Coontz means, so I’m searching for what this passage is supposed to get at (aside from a gratuitous swipe at the United States, and some doubtful praise for Europeans, who now seem to be better ersatz hunter-gatherers as well as everything else that they do better).

No, the absolute difference in wealth between the two types of societies is so vast that it’s hard to get too worked up about relative differences at all. Even the poorest of us does better than the richest hunter-gatherer. But perhaps what’s being said really is that when compared to single-mother hunter-gatherers, today’s single mothers are relatively worse off when each is compared to the married people in their respective societies.

Yet it’s a bit hard to believe that in hunter-gatherer societies, unstable marriage “did not lead to impoverishment of women or children.” Certainly it did. Aside from the general poverty, which was extraordinarily severe, these women and children would by far have had the worst of it.

I also think that their relative poverty would have been worse, and that losing a husband would be a bigger step down from an already very low level. Today’s labor is vastly different from the kind done in hunter-gatherer bands; it favors mental skills rather than physical ones, and here men and women have the greatest degree of natural equality. Today’s battle of the sexes is fought on considerably more even turf, which may explain why men are so uneasy lately.

Men are physically stronger, and therefore relatively more valuable to hunter-gatherer societies. By the same token they are, relative to women, less valuable today: Men are not more adept at using their minds and may even be less so on average. This makes single mothers’ labor more valuable as well.

Let’s also add the great benefits of a commercial economy: Whereas marriage in prehistoric societies might have been the only way to get the goods that men provided (meat, protection), today’s women can earn money — a new invention — and exchange it for whatever they want. It doesn’t matter whether the goods they want are produced by the father of their children or by unknown factory workers on the other side of the globe. Every working man (and woman) in the entire world is competing, potentially, to provide goods and services for her. This increases her wealth still further.

Again, this may be why men are so uneasy these days. But it also suggests that even relatively speaking, there are powerful institutions and social processes favoring women and women’s labor in the modern world, and that even by relative standards, it would be better to be a single mother today than one in a noncommercial, non-monetized society where brute force had a higher economic value relative to mental traits. Frankly, women never had it so good, single or otherwise, relatively or in absolute terms.

What can be said about Saint-Simon? He is little read today and even less appreciated, that much is true. And on reading the “Letter from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries,” one is tempted to ask: Is this what they call socialism?

It is, it is. Continue Reading »

With a tip of the virtual mortarboard to reason’s Nick Gillespie, we find an interesting report from Andy Guess in Inside Higher Ed of a study by J. Scott Armstrong and Malcolm Wright with the remarkable conclusion that all scholarly papers and what they laughingly call ’studies’ and ‘research’ in all academic disciplines are entirely made up – plucked from out of the old nether orifices, as it were, by so-called ’scholars’ who certainly never bother to read the citations or made-up quotations they litter their papers with, knowing full well that no one is ever going to bother to check and, besides, those earlier studies and so forth are just as phony and filled with errors and fabrications as the new stuff, so why bother?

Or something like that.

Several of the pieces we have read or will read, including Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” make mention of free food and drink in the future: a sign, the authors suggest, of the vast economic growth between now and then. The same is true in the Star Trek universe and in so many others that I’ve basically lost count.

But it won’t happen that way, and here’s why. Continue Reading »

Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” takes place in a fictional era when government planning has succeeded so magnificently that people have begun to lose the will to live: All is planned, and all is successful. Individuals live for a predetermined length of time, but unlike in Logan’s Run, life expectancy has been radically extended — up to four hundred years in nearly all cases. Danger has been wiped out of human life, with diseases, accidents, and old age effectively eliminated.

And people are sick of it. Limitless abundance prevails, and as a result the urge to life has begun to disappear. Humanity lays dying, a victim of its own success. Something must be done. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” therefore comes at a pivotal moment in the fictional universe where nearly all of Smith’s fiction is set. Yet its story does not directly concern the great deeds done at the top, but rather a love affair between two ordinary people. Continue Reading »

As Rowe mentioned downblog, he and I recently had the chance to see The Birth of Freedom, a one-hour documentary produced by the Acton Institute. The aim of the film was to illuminate the Christian ancestry for the freedoms of the modern West, and to suggest that if we do not keep this ancestry in mind, we risk losing everything we’ve gained. The film made a number of claims that sat badly with me, both logically and empirically, yet I found them woven together so well and presented so confidently that it was a little breathtaking.

Now, there certainly were Christian elements, and vitally important ones, in the history of individual liberty. It’s hard to understand how we could have anything like the modern idea of liberty without several concepts that come to us directly from Christianity or Judaism. These elements’ origins are sometimes undersold or downplayed, particularly among libertarians of an Ayn-Randish bent. It is unfortunate that this should be so.

Some of the elements I have in mind here are the idea that there are higher standards of justice than mere promulgated law; that individuals possess a worth and dignity beyond what the state or the society imputes to them; and that every individual has supreme, inviolate purposes of his own, rather than being made for the purposes of others. We owe the origins of these ideas to Christianity, and to Judaism before it.

Yet there are right ways and wrong ways to argue for the importance of Christianity in the intellectual history of freedom, and I felt that the documentary made some highly doubtful factual assertions in trying to prove the case. Continue Reading »

It is said of a man that you cannot know how far he has come unless you know where he began. Perhaps on the occasion of George Carlin’s death this might be said as well about American comedy in the last half century and so also of America, itself.

Carlin’s 1972 Class Clown was the first comedy album I ever bought. It was dedicated “to Leonard Schneider for taking all the risks.” But like Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, Carlin was himself arrested for obscenity, ironically for doing his best known bit from that album, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” (As far as I can tell, at least when it comes to broadcast television, the list is still valid.)

I remember earlier appearances of Carlin, clean-shaven, dressed in suit and tie and more wacky than cutting-edge, doing guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, cracking Johnny up rattling off a meteorological jargon packed weather report only to end with “But our radar has also just picked up hundreds of ICBMs heading our way, so I wouldn’t sweat the cold front.”

Carlin changed with the times over the course of the sixties and early seventies and, it could also be said, helped in his own small way to change them. The sort of comedy we tolerate, let alone laugh at, says something about us. Carlin was funnier than Bruce, his “observational” eye for the absurd or the merely comical, especially in matters of language, was much sharper than Seinfeld’s and his “transgressiveness” was far more authentic than 99% of the comics that came along after him.

I don’t think it would be too unfair to describe Carlin’s politics as left-libertarian, though the leftist bent often got the better of his libertarian inclinations whenever the two came into conflict. But it is probably more fair to say that Carlin’s comedy was a study in equal opportunity misanthropy, notwithstanding the fact that some targets are just richer than others. Regardless, his was a unique talent. In any ranking of 20th century comedy genius, a pantheon that would include, for example, Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, George Carlin would almost certainly make the Top Ten.

Herewith, a 2005 Carlin interview with the Onion A.V. Club.