For each course, Ms. Newberry, in cut-offs and a T-shirt that read, “Meat Is Murder — Tasty, Tasty Murder,” would emerge from her galley kitchen, barely shouting distance away from the two butcher-paper-covered tables set up in her living room, to describe the dishes. “This is quail,” she said of the entree. “They look a little obscene because they’re doing yoga.” The birds, splayed and stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in bacon, were served with corn pudding and pomegranate molasses. “Yum,” was the general consensus.

“Get messy!” Ms. Newberry exhorted the group. “Eat with your hands!” Ms. Spyres dutifully picked up and gnawed a tiny leg. After dessert — lemon curd tarts with blueberries and fresh whipped cream — Ms. Newberry left the clean-up to her hired sous-chef, Justine Renson, grabbed a bottle of wine and plopped on the couch to talk shop with two of her guests, who run another underground restaurant known as Homeslice West. . . .

Another ambitious venture is the New York Bite Club, which has as many as 45 guests for its twice monthly eight-course meals, asking each for a $150 “donation” (not including wine, which is officially donated to avoid selling alcohol illegally). It started two and half years ago and has grown so popular that the couple who founded it have hired both a part-time reservationist and a part-time Web site manager. But the couple still go by their first names, Alicia and Daniel, because they fear being shut down.

In an e-mail message, Elliott Marcus, associate commissioner for New York’s Bureau of Food Safety, said, “If you’re serving food to the public, you need a health department permit and you have to comply with all the health code rules to keep food safe,” adding that they inspect frequently.

I don’t want to commit to anything, and if I did I wouldn’t admit it in public, but this might be the coolest hobby in the universe. I’m intrigued. Just sayin’.

Price, like Priestley, corresponded with and was highly respected by many American Founders. Relatedly, over the years I have described a dynamic folks sympathetic to a “Christian America” reading of history skeptically receive: In the late 18th Century virtually all of the established churches adhered to orthodox Trinitarian creeds; yet, many of America’s Founders privately disbelieved in the creeds to which their churches held. This made them closeted or semi-closeted unitarian heretics. This was without question the case with J. Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin. And most likely with Washington, Madison, G. Morris, Hamilton, Marshall and many others.

So how was it that these notable Founders came to reject their churches’ official orthodox doctrines? They were influenced by heretical unitarian theologians, many of whom were ministers of Christian Churches, and whose ideas powerfully influenced the late 18th century Whig-republican zeitgeist. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley were the two most notable British Whig unitarian theologians who were contemporaries of America’s Founders. On the American side, Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy are notable examples. And from the early “Whig” era in Britain, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and Isaac Newton were at least purportedly closeted unitarian heretic theologians. Given the latter three faced potential execution (like Michael Servetus) for “coming out” they left fewer “smoking guns” to prove their unitarianism (and it was officially a crime to publicly deny the Trinity in Great Britain until 1813). But unitarians from the mid 18th century onward claimed Clarke, Locke, and Newton, and for good reason.

America’s Founders viewed these figures — Locke, Newton, Clarke, Priestley, Price, Mayhew, Chauncy (and others) — as philosophical giants. And as such, we should understand how, modeling them, so many Founding Fathers came to believe in the unitarian heresies, contrary to the teachings of their churches to which they officially or nominally belonged. These figures were like Abbie Hoffmans of their day — quite popular in elite circles, less so among the masses. Figures like Mayhew and Chauncy who were more popular among the masses tended not to openly preach about their unitarianism, but didn’t lie to their congregants either; they threaded the needle by simply not discussing the Trinity and related doctrines in their sermons. And this was exactly John Locke’s strategy. But, rumors (which turned out to be true) abounded.

To illustrate this dynamic, a parishioner once said to a notable Founding era secret unitarian minister: “Dr. Barnard, I never heard you preach a sermon upon the Trinity.” And he replied: “And you never will.”

Yet, the orthodox who retained much social, institutional, and at the state level legal power viewed unitarianism as a soul damning heresy at best, downright infidelity at worst! Hence, the need to tread carefully when positing unitarian doctrines. Hence some founders like Washington, Madison and Hamilton carefully guarding their religious secrets and leaving little evidence of their religious specifics during an era when public figures were expected to pay homage to Trinitarianism.

Price and Priestley are notable in that they were among the first theological unitarians to come out of the closet publicly and preach the unitarian heresies — Arianism in Price’s case, Socinianism in Priestley’s. And they were highly respected by America’s Founders for it.

Priestley served as a spiritual mentor to Jefferson, J. Adams, and Franklin. And his son recounted that that “his lectures were attended by very crowded audiences, including most of the members of the Congress of the United States at that time assembled at Philadelphia, and of the executive offices of the government of the United States.”

– Joseph Priestley, Jr., A Continuation of the Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley (Written by his Son Joseph Priestley), in John T. Boyer, ed., The Memoirs of Joseph Priestley, at 144 (Washington, D.C.: Barcroft Press, 1964).

Richard Price maintained friendly correspondence and personal interaction with Washington, J. Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Rush and others. Carl B. Cone in an article entitled “Richard Price and the Constitution of the United States” published in The American Historical Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Jul., 1948), pp. 726-747, documents Price’s profound influence on the American Founding. In particular, pages 732 and 733 chart the Founding Fathers who subscribed to Price’s publication entitled “Sermons on the Christian doctrine as received by the different denominations of Christians.” Among that list are eleven delegates to the Constitutional Convention including Franklin, Hamilton and Washington. Washington, who had nothing but praise for Price’s work, ordered 4 copies! Now, this is not to say that every subscriber held to Price’s Arian religious views. Rather, simply to show how profoundly influential his heterodox religious views were in elite Founding era circles.

Washington, Hamilton and Franklin, for instance, likely possessed religious views far more heterodox, less traditionally Christian, than Price’s Arianism. Washington, for instance, far less often than Price appealed to the Bible as authority (Washington actually was never recorded so doing, though he like everyone else during that era, including Paine, made biblical allusions) and hardly ever discussed Jesus by name or person. Washington’s 1783 Circular to the States, not written in his hand (and one of only two times Washington was officially recorded referring to Jesus by name or person), refers to “the Divine Author of our blessed Religion,” a reference to Jesus Christ that is consistent with both Trinitarianism and Price’s militant Arianism that saw Jesus as a Divine but created and subordinate being. (It may well be consistent with Socinianism that saw Jesus as 100% human, not divine at all, but on a divine mission.)

Indeed Price, the fervent Arian he was, unequivocally supported the sentiments of Washington’s 1783 Circular, writing he was “animated more than he can well express by General Washington’s excellent circular letter to the united states.”

Part II will examine Rev. Price’s “Sermons on the Christian doctrine as received by the different denominations of Christians” that Washington was so interested in that he received four copies.

I’m beginning to think that most media coverage of the election should be shifted to the ’sports’ section of the newspaper. There’s precious little substantive reporting of the sort that actually serves any civic purpose — e.g. helping citizens to decide who they should vote for come November. Hell, most of it isn’t even objective sports reporting (polls, etc.), but gossipy fluff about ‘expectations’ and ‘what person X needs to do’ in order to receive favourable reporting from oneself and other journalists. The media shapes perceptions through this process of allegedly reporting perceptions, and somehow these stories of mirrors within mirrors, reflecting nothing but themselves, is supposed to constitute news. Perhaps the ‘entertainment’ section is where they really belong: fluff that is only news because the media focus on it, alongside celebrities that are famous for nothing more than being famous.

One of the reasons why McCain’s “Paris Hilton” ads were so effective may have been that they came very close to the truth — or rather, roughly half of it. Just as everyone else’s god is false, and mine is true, everyone else’s candidate is superficial, media-centered, and doing more to play well on television than to address the issues that really matter.

But then, as someone with a very limited view of what government can or should accomplish in the first place, I of all people should be unsurprised: If you can’t achieve, at least you’ve got to talk a good game.

New research from a lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans civil rights group has revealed that the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their employment nondiscrimination policies.

Equality Forum reported that 471 (94.2%) of the 500 American corporations voluntarily include sexual orientation.

“In 2003, when Equality Forum began contacting the Fortune 500 companies, 323 (64.6%) companies explicitly provided sexual orientation protection in their workplace policies,” the group said in a statement.

Full report here. A pretty impressive accomplishment, particularly given the near-universal mistrust that gays encountered so recently.

Dampness/gurgling was nonexistent, thanks to the screen in the base, and for the same reason, the tobacco burned all the way to the bottom of the bowl. This is something that doesn’t or shouldn’t happen with a traditional design, in which the last few millimeters of tobacco basically catch and/or provide moisture, and aren’t expected to contribute otherwise to the smoking experience.

Tobacciana II:

Document Type and Number:
United States Patent 4204551

Abstract:
A smoking-pipe, usable as a replacement for a normal gearshift knob in an automobile includes a main body having a cavity, inside which a removable ventilated cartridge used to contain tobacco or other smokable material fits slidingly. A flexible smoke-tube conducts smoke from the base of the cavity to the user’s mouth, and a magnetically retained cover conceals the cavity, creating the outward appearance of a custom-made shift control knob. An O-ring and a gasket hold the cartridge in the cavity, prevent noise producing vibration of the cartridge against the walls of the cavity, and provide an air seal around the cartridge to enhance air circulation through the smoking matter.

Genius.

But I heard a related anecdote from my Hawai’ian cab driver, one I’d like to authenticate if possible: The cabbie said that Cleveland, when presented with a petition by certain members of the white minority asking to annex Hawai’i, refused it with the simple reply: “Get out of my office before I shoot each one of you myself.”

I’d love to believe it. Is it true?

One of the two best pollsters in the country, John Zogby, in a recent survey of ten “battleground states,” has some surprising poll numbers to report for Libertarian Bob Barr (who will appear on 49 state ballots).

What does this mean? Honestly, not much.

But to be fair, let me say that in 2000, Harry Browne never got double-digit numbers in any state from a national pollster. In 2004 Michael Badnarik got 7% in New Mexico, and it seems to me it was before the conventions as well. I worked on Harry Browne’s campaign, and I can remember getting excited by some 3s and 4s, so this represents a whole new level.

But Barr is a celebrity, of sorts — a former Congressman who was one of the Clinton impeachment managers. His celebrity has already gotten him some plum media appearances that Harry Browne didn’t get (like ABC’s This Week, and Fox News Sunday, a chance to testify before the Judiciary Committee on Bush Impeachment before a national TV audience). Moreover, there’s greater public dissatisfaction with the political parties than I can ever recall. And on top of that, lots of conservatives are unhappy with McCain.

To my knowledge, no Libertarian Presidential nominee has ever gotten 3% in any state on Election Day.

And I doubt this Bob Barr’s campaign will exceed this level.

When we (the Harry Browne 2000 campaign) got those 3s and 4s, we knew they wouldn’t last. This is because, as the election draws to a close, the race between the Two Principle Evils becomes a matter of picking the lesser one. This is game theory in action. Players in zero sum games tend to minimize their pain. And most people mistakenly believe their vote could decide an election.

You might be able to stop this trend with overwhelming visibility, but a) your candidate needs to be in the Presidential debates and/or b) you need money to generate and maintain high visibility, and third party campaigns just don’t have those kinds of funds. Funding-wise, Bob Barr’s campaign is running pretty much to spec.

But as exciting as these poll numbers are, they miss the point. A Libertarian (or Green, Constitution, etc.) campaign is about a) growing your party, and b) public education. If you’re really lucky, you might reach the rare but obtainable air of throwing a state to one side or the other — like Nader did for Bush in Florida in 2000. But luck is everything in that third scenario.

The way the Barr campaign will prove to its party that its been successful will not be record vote totals on Election Night, but by swelling the membership ranks.

The Libertarian Party donor-base peaked in 1999-2000, with 38,000 or so members and contributors during that time-frame. My understanding is that the number dropped to half-that years later. But I’m not in the loop anymore, and I think the party has stopped advertising the numbers.

Barr’s campaign will be a success if they start reporting those numbers again because they’re back up to record levels.

In general, vote totals fade and third place is still losing. Still, I would love to be wrong and find that Barr did break double-digits in a couple of states, and that the libertarian vote would be perceived as the reason John McCain lost.

Hardball delenda est.

Now, [the Democrats'] big goal is to have a green convention…to be able to reduce the carbon footprint and, in fact, have a zero carbon convention…

Here’s what we’d like to do. We would like to offer you carbon onsets…Please, please, it’s for our children… And what we’re trying to do is to erase all of the carbon offsets for the Democratic party. What we’d like to do is we would like to raise 70 million pounds of carbon… Now, how many, how many extra miles can you pledge? Can you drive five extra miles a day? Can you take the long way home, the long way to work? …. I know it’s August…Can you get up, start your car 15 minutes early and just let it run so it cools down… Can you give me an extra day of increased garbage, maybe two, maybe three? …

… Can you turn your thermostat down unnecessarily? I know you probably like it at a nice 70 degrees, maybe 72 degrees. Can you turn it down to 68 just this week. Can you take an extra long shower. How many loads of laundry can you do? Can you pledge just a few extra minutes in the dryer, after your clothes are dry, just let it go a couple of extra minutes. Do you have any fluorescent light bulbs? Can you would you pledge, would you pledge just to replace one of your fluorescent light bulbs with an incandescent light bulb today, just one. That’s all we’re asking, just one. We’re trying to raise 70 million pounds of carbon and it’s not going to be easy.

Let’s set aside how you feel about environmentalism, and the Democrats’ plan for a carbon-neutral convention. Let’s focus just on economics, and we can show what an assjack Glenn Beck is.

First, the most important principle of economics is that resources are scarce. That’s why things are costly, and consequently why we don’t tend to waste them. Of course waste is in the eye of the user. My mother generally only has one light bulb on in her house at any given time, the one she happens to be under at the moment. I hate a dim house, so I usually have the lights on in my living room, dining room, and kitchen, so the house appears bright and cheery. The cost is not worth it to her, but it is to me. So while an environmentalist might say I waste electricity, I would say I don’t (environmentalists, like all moralists, still believe in objective value, rather than subjective value). I have, however, switched to nearly all fluorescent bulbs–mostly because incandescents burn out an alarming rate in my house and it gets expensive to replace them constantly. See, I don’t “waste,” I use the minimum resources to achieve my goal of a bright and cheery house.

But Glenn Beck does want us to waste, not by some objective valuation but by our own subjective valuation. He says explicitly, “how many extra miles can you pledge? Can you take the long way home from work?”

Second, Beck is encouraging us to create more negative externalities. Carbon in the atmosphere, like all pollution, is a negative externality–a market failure that actually creates a justification for government intervention! The Democratic Party is voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions. Good for them. If it costs them more, still good for them; they’re internalizing the cost to avoid creating a negative externality. I don’t expect most people to go that far because they only benefit is the warm and fuzzy feeling you get about doing your part for the environment, but if to them that warm and fuzzy feel is worth the extra cost, there’s nothing wrong with that from an econmic perspective. But encouraging people to engage in the purposeful production of extra negative externalities–by driving extra miles, etc.–is truly perverse. He’s worried it will be hard to “onset” that 70 million pounds of carbon? Why doesn’t he just encourage American factories to stop treating their effluent for one day? Or would that be just a bit too obvious?

Here’s why this really bugs me. The vile pedants like Beck act as though the Democrats will be death to the economy, while the Republicans are the ones who really understand proper economics, and thus will set America on the path to prosperity. But by saying ridiculous things like this, he shows his complete ignorance of economics–an ignorance shared by the majority of Republicans.

Repeat after me: Encouraging waste of resources makes people poorer. Encouraging negative externalities encourages waste of resources, therefore making people poorer.

Yes, Beck–who apparently was a miracle baby, born without a brain but still able to talk–is encouraging Americans to engage in economic behavior that will actually make them worse off. And put that way, he doesn’t sound that much different from a Democrat.

[Addendum: Beck, apparently, is an idiot about the world in general, not just economics. Hence this:

the environmentalists have come out and said you can't use wind power, it makes bats explode and it's not because they run into the blades. Those are birds that do that. What, are you happy killing the birds?

Birds, mammals, what's the difference?]

Actually, I say this also to toot ISPU’s horn. They’re a great group of people, and I’m honored to be one of their token non-Muslims.

My next policy brief, on the presidential election, will be coming out in October.

One of my three mentors, Elinor Ostrom, has said that political science is the study of collective action problems. Reading that, even before I met her, was a defining moment in the way I viewed not just my discipline, but the world. In well-functioning free markets there are no collective action problems, just mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges. They’re so non-conflictual that, to the right-thinking political scientist, they’re boring. That is, if Joe Smith buys a new bathmat at Wal Mart, a good political scientist yawns and says, “how boring.” (A bad political scientist begins ranting about exploitation, false consciousness, and anything else that will justify coercive intervention into a non-problematic voluntary exchange; meanwhile, a good economist will say, “how fascinating!”) The good political scientist is bored precisely because there is no conflict. Harold Lasswell defined political science as “who gets what, when, and how,” a phraseology that just oozes the sense of conflict without ever saying so explicitly.

But just what is a collective action problem? A collective action problem exists when

• A collective good–a good that will benefit everyone in the group–is available, if some proportion of the group less than 1.0 participates in the effort to achieve it.

There are two keys built into that statement:

1. Achieving the good does not require the effort of every single person (< 1.0), so no one person’s effort is crucial to achieving it.
2. The good, if achieved, is available to all, even to those who do not participate in the effort to achieve it.

This is where markets fail. Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a claim that individual rationality leads to a collectively rational outcome (i.e., the effort to make myself better off results in making others better off). But in a collective action problem, each individual’s effort to make himself better off results in everyone in the group being no better off, and perhaps even worse off (including the individual himself).

Let’s say the collective good is worth 10 utils to everyone (utils are the utilitarian’s favorite unit of value), and the cost of any individual’s effort is 5 utils. Clearly it’s rational to spend 5 to make 10. But it’s even more rational to spend 0 to make 10! Those who do not participate are better off than those who do participate.

Of course the age old response (although not, perhaps from the PL crowd) is, “what if everyone thought that way?” So let’s consider that. What if everyone did think that way? Then if I was the only one who thought differently and put in some effort, I’d be spending 5 to make 0!

The Positive Liberty Pond

Let’s use an example: Say the Positive Liberty contributors all live around a pond, which is under no one’s control, and each makes a living by fishing in the pond and selling the proceeds. The collective benefit is a continued stock of fish, which requires that none of use overfish the pond. But one day Ridgely notices that I’m taking more fish than usual. His fishing is still good, so he figures it must not be causing harm, so he decides to take a few more fish than usual, too–after all, he could use the extra money. Brayton and Rowe see us doing so, and decide that if Hanley and Ridgely can swing a little extra cash that way, there’s no reason they shouldn’t. Finally, Baka and Kuznicki, seeing what’s afoot, realize they’d better catch as many fish as they can before there are no more, and increase their catch, too. In short order we’ve destroyed the fishery entirely. It would have been collectively rational to limit ourselves, but the individual rationality of each person led us to catch as many as possible. After all, if I limited myself, but Kuznicki, et. al, didn’t, I’m just hurting myself for no gain.

The classic libertarian response is to privatize the pond; create property rights. That would certainly stop the overfishing, but unfortunately there’s no government, and rights that don’t have the force of law to back them up are of no practical significance. I could whip out my cudgel and take control of the pond by force, but that’s not satisfactory to libertarians, either.

There is no market solution to collective action problems, just governance solutions. Note I said governance, not government. In a group as small as this one, we could probably negotiate a solution to the problem by creating a set of institutions (rules) that guide our behavior. (There is still the problem of ensuring conformance, but depending on the design of the governance institutions, that can sometimes be structured to be simple. Other times it relies on altruistic punishment (which occurs only because we are not, in fact, perfectly rational beings)). Elinor Ostrom’s great contribution to the world’s knowledge is to show that collective action problems–while they are real problems needing real resolutions–do not always need coercive government solutions. They need governance solutions, to be sure, but not necessarily government solutions. That is, self-governance is successful in a surprisingly large number of cases.

Cofradias
A case in point, that I learned from Marta, a Spanish girl with whom I shared a suite of offices at Lin Ostrom’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Marta was studying cofradias, a term for which there is no English equivalent (and good luck finding any actual information in English about this topic). Cofradisas are collectives of fishermen in Spanish fishing villages. They work a fishery in common, but each works individually. They face the same problem as I described above, of overfishing if each tries to catch as much as possible, and have evolved an elegantly simple method–a way of policing themselves–of ensuring their fishery is not overfished: they all gather together in the morning down at the docks and begin their day together, then gather in the evening as they all come in. By monitoring each other and ensuring no one is staying out too long they are able to spot defectors and apply social pressure to them to get them back in line.

Air Pollution

The reader may have noted that so far I have not made an argument for government coercion, but have shown how collective action problems can be overcome by the stakeholders without coercion, through self-governance. But just because some collective actions are effectively dealt with this way, avoiding a market failure, we cannot conclude that all are. Let’s start with an easy case, just to establish that there is at least one example of a collective action problem that is not so easily resolvable: the air we breathe. The atmosphere is a big commons into which lots of people dump their effluence, harming all of us. Because it
is cheaper to dump pollutants into the air than to treat them, it is individually rational to do so, even though when we all do so it makes all–including that individually rational individual–worse off. There are too many potential polluters for easy monitoring or for self-governance, and it is impossible to exclude non-participants, as the air is available to all. The only solution to air pollution, I believe, is government regulation–that is, coercion.

If we could wholly internalize the problem of air pollution, we could stop right there and would need no further coercion. For example, if all cars routed the exhuast back into the passenger compartment, we would quickly move to zero-emission vehicles. But because we can externalize the pollution, dumping it from our tailpipes into the atmosphere where it affects others more than ourselves, further regulation is required.

This approach does not glorify coercion or treat it as inherently legitimate. It just recognizes that given the nature of the external environment and the nature of human nature (if you will allow me that phrase), it is inevitable that there will be some collective action problems that are not resolvable through self-governance methods, particularly as the size of the relevant group .

The class of such problems is, I believe, much smaller than what liberals believe it is. Because of collectivist or communitarian inclinations, liberals have a tendency to see every failure to achieve some possibly desirable goal as a fatal collective action problem. But relatively few cases fit the model. Anthropogenic global warming, if it is a reality, is in fact a case that fits the model, and liberals damn well recognize it–that’s part of what gives them their strength of conviction on that issue, and is one reason why we shouldn’t toss aside the probability of its occurrence too lightly (although I personally wonder about the comparative benefit/cost ratios of trying to prevent/reverse it vs. adapting to it, but that’s a separate question).

The real key element in this argument is that individual rationality drives us to make decisions that, in their collective results, make us all worse off. The voluntary decisions do not, in that case, create anything remotely resembling the outcome each individual desires, much less the social gains that Smith discussed. In that case each individual may agree that each of us is better off if we accept coercion of our choices on this matter.

I don’t take politics very seriously; I see little point. Politicians always win elections, which means the rest of us lose. The name of the candidate or the nature of the loss–economic or social–doesn’t make much difference to me.

But I’m having a particularly hard time taking seriously the criticism of Obama’s “celebrity” from the same people who sent a B-movie star to the White House. Just sayin’.

How much of politics isn’t about substance — or even what trivially passes for it in the major parties? How much of politics is solely “my team versus yours”? (And how much does the urge to cheer for a team really end up costing us?)

What does the statement “A person owns himself” actually mean?

This is a very good question, because the words inside the quotation marks, though often repeated, are badly phrased. They are almost certain to be misleading.

Simply put, “I own myself” threatens an infinite regress. The attributes of ownership seem to exclude those of being owned; it is hard to see how one can simultaneously be both the owned and the owner. Although I may wash myself, or dress myself, or feed myself, and at the same time unproblematically be the recipient of these services, it is much harder to see how I can both have a control or dominion over myself, and also be controlled or dominated. (By what?)

It would be far better to say “A person has a property in himself.” Indeed, this is the very phrase that Locke used, and Locke never referred to “self-ownership,” in those words, in any of his writings as far as I am aware. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but the two phrases really do mean something quite different.

To “have a property in” a thing means that others ought to be excluded from it in some sense, perhaps from managing it, or from controlling it, or from disposing of it, except insofar as the individual who has the relevant property in the thing allows them to. I have a property in my shirt, for example, because it would be wrong for someone to take it away from me, or sell it, or damage it without my consent.

In this, the shirt is no different from my physical body, my conscience, my mind, or my soul. I have a property in these things; they form part of that order of things from which I may properly exclude the access of others. As James Madison put it,

This term in its particular application means ‘that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.’ In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of particular value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

You have a property in your self, as do I in my self. To own oneself, in the newer but more imprecise phrase, means simply that others are presumed to be excluded from control. It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that all systems of intolerance ultimately presume the opposite at some point in their reasoning.

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” [Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. at __; quoted in Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 574]

I in turn noted that this passage wasn’t all too removed from Locke; Van Dyke disagreed. I’ve never thought much about the “mystery of life” passage and admit that it’s a bit mushy. But if I were to argue how Locke’s ideals might support such a worldview, without the mushiness, I’d turn to Locke’s self ownership principle.

Harvey Mansfield discusses this dynamic in this article, where he writes:

For Locke, then, the harmonizing of liberty and virtue begins from the harmonizing of liberty and religion. In the face of the apparent fact that the Christian religion tells men how to live, he must show, if he can, that it actually permits them to live in freedom. How does he proceed?

Locke gives two descriptions of the character of men in their fundamental relation to liberty. He says that they are the “workmanship” of God, that men are “his [God’s] property” and so belong to God; but he also says that “every man has a property in his own person.” These appear to be directly contrary because the “workmanship argument” (as it is called by Locke’s interpreters) would make man a slave of God whereas the idea of property in one’s own person sets him free to do with himself what he wishes. Thus Locke says, in accordance with the former, that men have no right to commit suicide (“everyone is bound . . . not to quit his Station wilfully”). But in accordance with the latter, though saying nothing directly about a right of suicide, he pronounces that in the state of nature, man is “absolute lord of his own person and possessions.” Yet Locke does not make a point of the contradiction between these two descriptions. It is rather as if he had forgotten what he said earlier or perhaps lost his train of thought. Yet Locke does not seem to be a woolly-minded fellow, and his reputation shows that both his friends and his enemies take him seriously. His political thought typically contains contradictions, of which this one is perhaps the most important, but he leaves the reader to do the work of establishing the contradictions and working out their implications. In this case and in other cases, Locke does not leave the contradiction as flat as I have reported it; he teases readers with possible routes by which it might be harmonized. But most of all, Locke lets readers do their own harmonizing by allowing them to combine two things they want to believe. Almost all of Locke’s readers would want to believe in the truth of Scripture, and many of them would like to think, or might be persuaded to think, that their belief is compatible with, or even entails, the notion of liberty that Locke sets forth.

The difference between belonging to God and belonging to yourself is not a small one….

Some folks have observed that Mansfield makes too much of the difference, that it is easily reconciled by noting God gives men a “leasehold” or “life-estate” over that which ultimately belongs to Him. Fine. However, even so Locke’s ideal still demands that the individual, not the government purporting to “impose morality” have the ultimate Earthly say on how to live his life, in all but a few cases.

By way of analogy, the debate over Romans 13. That passage says:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained [1] of God.

AND:

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: 4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

Okay, so let’s say you have a tyrannical ruler, who is un-godly and doesn’t quite seem “not a terror to good works, but to the evil.” The context of the passage suggests that Paul was telling believers to submit to Nero. Indeed the dominant interpretation in the history of biblical orthodoxy teaches this. And Nero was indeed a pagan tyrant who ruthlessly persecuted Christians.

This dominant biblical interpretation teaches Nero was indeed a ruler ordained with God given authority. Therefore, the Earthly buck stops with him. Obviously his actions displeased the biblical God. And ultimately it’s God’s authority alone (not “the people’s”) to punish Nero for his evil behavior [and indeed Nero met an ultimately demise].

Another interpretation might suggest that since Nero didn’t seem to be “not a terror to good works, but to the evil,” he wasn’t a “ruler.” This interpretation has been a minority throughout Christendom, but has become more popular in the age of revolution where Christians attempt to biblically justify revolt against tyrannical leaders. But ultimately the early church fathers, medieval Roman Catholic Church, and first Protestant reformers disagreed with it. Indeed Calvin argued that “we must honour [even] the worst tyrant in the office in which the Lord has seen fit to set him” and “if you go on to infer that only just governments are to be repaid by obedience, your reasoning is stupid.”

Back to Locke. According to him, an individual owns himself, but ultimately belongs to God. So where does the Earthly buck stop? Why, with the individual of course. So if I own myself, I can do whatever I want with my body, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your right to do whatever you want with your body. And if I violate the natural law or God’s will, it’s up to God alone, not you or the collective to punish me for it. And indeed, individuals suffer consequences from drug and alcohol abuse, irresponsible promiscuous sex and the like. Someone who transgresses God’s law by drinking too much and dying prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver suffers from violating God’s law without the need for human intermediaries to step in on God’s behalf to prohibit the behavior because it violates God’s law. The individual owns himself, the earthly buck stops with him and, similar to Romans 13 and the tyrannical leader, it’s up to God alone to punish him for using his body in a way that might offend Him.

[Note: Yes, of course there is HUGE tension between the traditional understanding of Romans 13 and Locke's self ownership principle. America's Founders, it should be noted, chose to follow Locke.]

So, how does this play out in 20th Century American constitutional jurisprudence [and remember, Locke, for good reason has been termed "America's philosopher"]? Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick (the case holding states could criminalize sodomy, overturned in Lawrence v. Texas) held “the concept of privacy embodies the `moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.’” In Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork responded: “There are ‘moral facts,’ but that is certainly not one of them.” p. 104.

Well, John Locke is the author of the “moral fact” that an individual belongs to himself.

Oh, that’s right. I can get the same thing watching the Democratic National Convention, another mostly staged event, this week.

I vaguely remember, no, not the beginning of American political parties, but a time in the 50s and 60s when some honest-to-gawd political business other than marketing was conducted at these conventions. Mind you, much of that business was conducted behind closed doors in (ah, the good old days!) smoke-filled rooms and not on the almost equally smoky convention floor. Still, deals were cut, party platform planks (mostly meaningless even then) were bickered over and sometimes even who the candidates were going to be was decided by multiple ballot. Sadly, however, conventions have shifted from political Super Bowls to World Wrestling Federation championship events. Except, of course, that the WWF has the good sense not to tell the viewers in advance who will win.

A Positive Liberty reader recently commented sarcastically on another thread discussing the legacy of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, saying with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek that “1968 was the pivotal moment in all of human history, past and future.” Speaking on behalf of my terminally self-important Baby Boomer generation, I will note only that America’s major political parties did begin to conduct their business differently after 1968. Not so much because of the protests (“Yippie!”) outside the convention center — after all, it isn’t like a guy named Richard Daley would be mayor of Chicago forever, is it? — but because of the resulting McGovern-Fraser Commission and the subsequent shift to state primaries as the method of deciding delegates and, thus, selecting candidates.

Another “lesson” from 1968 was the increasing importance of television and therefore the need to control convention and convention related events as much as possible. I don’t think Nixon beat Humphrey in 1968 simply because of the violence in the streets of Chicago during the convention, but it sure as hell didn’t help Humphrey, either.

Needless to say, I won’t be watching either the Democratic or the Republican National Conventions in real time. Any really juicy gaffs or other “must-see” moments will be on YouTube before the evening wrap-up, so I’ll catch Ted Kennedy’s likely swan song, Hillary’s dagger-eyed stares, McCain being reminded how many homes he owns and where he left the keys, etc. in TiVo time.