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(Note: The term “Libertarian” was originally used by anarchists/socialists such as Joseph Dejacque and Mikhail Bakunin, whose position was in opposition to both capitalism and state communism, and is still known in much of the world to apply to the anarchist Left. In North America since the post-WWII era, however, it has come to apply to an anti-government movement that could be described generally as being on the economic Right side of the political spectrum. This analysis is about the modern American sense of the word).

Libertarians have been described with several different idiosyncratic-sounding phrases: “Marxists of the Right,” “Individualists United,” “Republicans who smoke pot.” In reality, libertarians are, like those of many other political ideologies, harder to pin down than a simple phrase or characterization. There is less a single creed of “Libertarianism” than an amalgam of positions and worldviews that are often described together and usually work together. However, they sometimes differ from one another: there are disagreements, sub-factions, and tactical alliances, and there are different kinds of people that make up this broad group; when someone talks about “libertarians” as a broad sweeping category, it may not always be clear who he/she is talking about.

I’ve decided to post my personal analysis of the different viewpoints and strains of thought that tend to make up Libertarianism, using some distinct categories I’ve observed and expanded in my interaction and association with many libertarians, and my studies of the works of important libertarian thinkers. A libertarian may be and usually is a combination of any of these categories, and some of the differences between them are subtle but significant. The representatives I’ve chosen for each were the best I could think of for that category, although they still may strongly represent other categories as well. I’m generally not a fan of categorizing or pigeonholing people overly much; it should be remembered that these categories refer to general strains of thought that have been observed and people who have expressed those strains of thought--not (with the exception maybe of the first category) definite personality classes.

Randians/Objectivists/Egoists
Meet John or Jane Galt. While most card-carrying Objectivists assert that they are not libertarian in name, the movement started by Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) was and is an important influence on the thought of modern American Libertarianism (Cathy Young says that “Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand's ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild.”). They imagine an individualist/collectivist and egoist/altruist dichotomy and put it at the heart of their entire worldview as the supreme good vs. evil (along with some peculiar axioms like “A is A” and “existence exists”). According to those influenced by Randian Egoism, greed is a virtue, while compassion is a deadly sin. The word capitalism can stimulate a spontaneous orgasm.
They are prone to histrionics and delusions of grandeur.

Representatives:
Novelist Ayn Rand, her successor Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand Institute President Yaron Brook, Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, Neo-objectivist leader David Kelley, economist George Reisman, psychologist Nathaniel Branden, and political writer and critic Alex Epstein. Also, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Rush drummer Neil Peart, comic creator (Spider-man co-creator) Steve Ditko, and Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan. Capitalism Magazine is an associated publication.

Dominationists
Business giants and empire-builders, moguls, magnates and tycoons who don’t want antitrust laws, industry watchdogs, trade unions or environmental, worker, or consumer regulation to get in the way of their ambitions. They often fund libertarian and right-wing think tanks and organizations. Silicon Valley had many Dominationist younglings in the 90’s until most of them perished tragically in the bursting of the dotcom bubble.

Representatives:
Newscorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, Whole Foods Market Chairman and CEO John Mackey, Dallas Mavericks owner and HDNet Chairman Mark Cuban, and Virgin’s Richard Branson (although Branson is distinguished in being an environmental philanthropist, as well as wooing both Tory [Conservative] and Labour governments).

Market Fundamentalists
Focused on libertarian theories of economics/political economy, Market Fundamentalists believe the capitalist free market is best for the common good, and any interference with said market is contrary to the common good. They frequently use concepts like “the wisdom of the market” and “the invisible hand,” etc. Austrian and Chicago schools, neoclassical economics, neoliberalism, etc.

Representatives:
Economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and political writers Virginia Postrel and Brink Lindsey. Reason magazine is an important publication.

Naïve Libertarians
This was a hard to name category (I also considered “propagandist libertarians”). Naïve Libertarians are like Market Fundamentalists, except they usually parrot Market Fundamentalist arguments and harp on “how liberals are weakening America” instead of coming up with arguments and ideas of their own. They believe hardship doesn’t befall people who do what they should do, the environment isn’t in any real trouble and environmental/pollution problems are negligible, and big corporations are really responsible and good on their own (“Greenhouse gas emissions? Those are just ‘unrequested carbon surpluses’”). They are likely to listen to/host right-wing talk radio or do/follow right-wing journalism, and usually amount to little more than apologists for the Right.

Representatives:
ABC journalist John Stossel, talk radio’s Larry Elder and Neal Boortz, comic creator Bruce Tinsley, New York Times columnist John Tierney, and “Junk Science” environmental skeptic Steven Milloy.

“Liberty” Libertarians
Their libertarianism arises primarily from their ideas on the metaphysics of personal liberty, around concepts like “non-aggression” and “self-ownership.” Libertarian philosophers are usually in this category, some of whom were founders of the modern American libertarian movement.

Representatives:
Philosophers Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, Tibor Machan, and Albert J. Nock, and Sci-Fi author Robert A. Heinlein.

Libertarian Republicans
More traditional conservatives; Republicans who are against neoconservative big government and/or the religious right; conservative critics of the Bush administration. They consider themselves the true conservatives, and usually base their libertarian ideas on their perspective on the U.S. Constitution. “Goldwater conservatives;” Republican Liberty Caucus.

Representatives:
Senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and authors and political commentators William F. Buckley and Andrew Sullivan (the latter of whom calls himself a “South Park Republican”).

Crazy Libertarians
Primarily concerned about gun rights and privacy. Many survivalists, conspiracy theorists, tin-foil-hatters, etc. tend to fall into this group. They are likely to live in a rural area, with an impressive arsenal and weeks worth of food stocked up to secure against a New World Order threat.

Representatives:
Survivalist and blogger Claire Wolfe, Mormons who have the complete writings of Ezra Taft Benson and belong to the John Birch Society, and anyone who has ever belonged to an armed or militant libertarian group. The Samizdata.net peeps seem to fall into here at least a bit.

Lifestyle Libertarians
Like the Crazy Libertarians about guns, but also for drugs, sex, alcohol, uncensored material, not having to recycle, driving without a seatbelt, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph, driving without a seatbelt at 100mph while receiving oral sex, etc. They are basically people who want to do whatever they want. If conservatives want government to be your daddy, and liberals want government to be your mommy, Lifestyle Libertarians want to get rid of daddy and mommy and stay up all night eating ice cream and watching after-dark cable.

Representatives:
Shock jockey Howard Stern, author/political writer and humorist P.J. O’Rourke, humorist Dave Barry, South Park creators Trey Parker & Matt Stone, and illusionist duo Penn & Teller.

Localist Libertarians
Anti-Federalists, they would rather have autonomy distributed to the community level, like town halls, local school boards and churches, than a strong federal government or any centralized power. More Main Street than Wall Street, they are communitarians and traditionalists, largely Catholic, often Scouting enthusiasts, people with Norman Rockwell paintings throughout their homes, etc. More compassionate and worker-oriented than other libertarians, and more likely to be concerned with local environmental problems.

Representative:
Political writer Bill Kauffman.

Left-Libertarians
A special category. Left Libertarians believe big, powerful government is as oppressive and bad as big, powerful corporations. They are anti-war (including the War on Drugs), pro-choice, and against government favors for corporations (or against large corporations altogether). They usually favor participatory action and mutual aid over government for social justice and environmental causes, as well as smaller, more local businesses and community-centered marketplaces. They may caucus with right-libertarians (“vulgar libertarians” is a commonly used phrase) for strategic purposes, which is the primary reason they are on the list at all. They are also likely to work with Green parties. Often Georgist on physical property and against extensive and restrictive intellectual property (and a major front behind Open Source), they are related to others of the broad libertarian left--agorists, mutualists, libertarian socialists, cyberpunks and anarchists; also “Buddhist Economics.”

Representatives:
Comedian/talk-show host and political commentator Bill Maher, novelist Robert Anton Wilson, cyberculture icon R.U. Sirius, psychologist and psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary, philosopher/Eastern religion scholar Alan Watts, political philosopher Karl Hess, writer Samuel Edward Konkin III, and Loompanics publisher/editor Michael Hoy.
_______________________________________

A few notes on other prominent libertarians:

-“Anarcho”-capitalist economist Bryan Caplan could be argued to fit into the Randian, Market Fundamentalist, and “Liberty” categories (pretty much every other economist at George Mason University could, to varying degrees, be described as falling into the Market Fundamentalist and “Liberty” Libertarian categories).

-Economist and political theorist Thomas Sowell is somewhere between Market Fundamentalist and Naïve.

-Political writer Lew Rockwell, an anti-war paleolibertarian, is a mixture of Market Fundamentalist, Republican Libertarian, and a pinch of Localist.

-Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds is a mix of Naïve, Libertarian Republican, and Lifestyle.

-Extropian philosopher Max Moore is largely Randian, but also “Liberty” Libertarian. He, along with Glenn Reynolds and Reason science editor Ronald Bailey, subscribe to Libertarian Transhumanism (which I would consider a subcategory).

-Libertarian Godfather Murray Rothbard actually ventured closer toward Left-Libertarianism at one point before going back to the right (toward Market Fundamentalism), all the while being an important philosophical “Liberty” Libertarian.

Another note:
I associate partly as Left-Libertarian, which is much of the reason I care in the first place.

(Via Feminist Law Professors 2007-01-10 and The Dees Diversion 2007-01-08.)

In the past, [Afghanistan experienced] a serious drought every couple of decades, but now there have two in a row, and 25 million villagers have been affected. Arranged marriages are against both civil and Islamic law in Afghanistan, but that has not stopped a number of families from selling their daughters in marriage in order to survive. The girls range in age from 8 to about 15, and some of the husbands are also very young.

The last drought caused losses of between 80% and 100% of crops, and now the cycle has begun again. Children are suffering from malnutrition, and are often going on long treks to gather water and firewood. They are eating potatoes, and boiled water with sugar, and they are dying. There have been attempts to get food to the villagers, but the heavy snows have prevented delivery. Also, members of the Taliban have attacked food convoys coming in from Pakistan. The only way for many of the Afghan people to survive is to sell their daughers.

Well. At least they’re not doing anything really awful, like growing opium poppies for willing customers.

The Afghan Minister of Agriculture recently declared that the drought was the cause of the sharp drop in production wheat, Afghanistan’s main crop.

This is inaccurate. Afghanistan’s leading cash crop is not wheat, but opium poppies. Unfortunately, the Afghan government, under the influence of the United States government’s warped narco-diplomacy, is actively trying to eradicate the one viable source of wealth in rural Afghanistan in the midst of a drought and a famine. The milder tactics involve shaking down taxpayers in order to subsidize less profitable crops. The harsher tactics involve burning or poisoning the fields. So poor folks in the countryside are selling whatever they have left to sell. One good way to make any existing form of oppression even worse is to throw the people involved in it into desperate poverty: the first victims of poverty are always the most vulnerable people within the poor community, and in places where the human dignity and well-being of women and girls is worth less than nothing to the men who hold cultural and political power, one of the things that poor families are going to sell is likely to be the lives of their young girls.

The American government’s rabid pursuit of international narcotics prohibition, no matter what the predictable human consequences of their belligerence, reflects an absolutely deranged set of priorities.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-11-20: The tall poppies

The official police report on the Sal Culosi case was just released, according to Radley Balko. The whole ordeal of the Culosi family in waiting so long for an “official report” to tell them what they already knew - that SWAT teams should not be dispatched against non-violent, two-bit gambling suspects - is an outrageous tragedy. In his analysis of the report, Balko makes the central argument against police militarization:

Does the more traditional, less violent method of serving warrants put cops at greater risk? Maybe, though I have my doubts. But even if it does make warrant service safer for police, police are paid to take risks. That’s what they sign up for. We should do everything we can to minimize those risks, but not to the point where we begin to endanger everyone else, and we violate the rights of people the police are sworn to protect.

Police safety is a very important goal, but it’s not the most important one - citizen safety is. The latter justifies the establishment of a police organization; the former is something to aspire to but not the cardinal concern. If law enforcement takes the “destroy the village to save it” approach to protecting people they undermine their whole raison d’être.

Coupled with the SWAT team’s murder of a totally nonviolent offender, the whole excuse of officer safety takes on the appearance of an elaborate sham to enable the State to do pretty much whatever it wants. The theory that the officer who killed Culosi suffered an “involuntary muscle contraction” that caused him to pull the trigger, assuming this was the cause, juxtaposes the accountability of the citizen with that of the State and its minions.

Does anyone think Chief Rohrer or DA Horan would have bought this same theory [the involuntary muscle contraction trigger pulling] if it had been put forth by anyone other than a police officer? If a resident of Fairfax claimed that an involuntary muscle contraction caused him to shoot and kill another resident, does anyone buy for a second that Horan would also decline to press charges?

Once again, we get back to the unfortunate reality that regular citizens are held to a higher standard than agents of the government.

The ultimate standard, after all, is not right or wrong - it’s whether or not an action is performed in an “official capacity” or not. Cue the fairy dust.

Tags: radley balko, sal culosi

Geoffrey Plauché’s essay provides a fine synthesis of insights into the sustaining myths of statism: the myth of the Founder-Legislator and the fatal conceit of central planning. In the temples of the state cult there invariably stands an idol of the law-giver. The legends can be divided into those of legendary founders—such as Lycurgus of Sparta and Minos of Crete—and those of legendary reformers—such as Solon of Athens and Numa of Rome. (We might also add some indubitably historical figures to the list—in particular, the sanctified marble Founders who are so gaudily memorialized a few metro stops down from where we sit.) But while the stories differ, the use to which they are put is always the same—as Plauché notes, they serve to perpetuate and to sanctify the notion that a city or a nation is something to be deliberately crafted and worked on to serve a particular end—whether by the great founders or by lesser mortals who muddle through the business of legislating today. Plauché’s efforts to challenge these myths draws from many sources. He challenges the presumption of knowledge involved in statist efforts, drawing from Ferguson’s and Hayek’s work on the importance of spontaneous order and the power of unintended consequences. He traces the planner’s conceit to the corrupting effects of a professionalized political class, and the loss of the distinction between praxis and poesis. He also challenges the moral propriety of the mythological picture—deriving a theory of rights from (a suitably modified version of) Aristotle’s account of freedom and human flourishing. Both the epistemic humility called for by evolutionist insights, and the respect for individual freedom called for by Aristotelian liberalism, ultimately demand not only the containment or minimization of government force, but in fact anarchy—a demythologized society, where freedom is a recognized as a matter of the arrangements that people make with one another, rather than a law given by a Founder, Reformer, or Legislator. Demythologizing legislation ultimately means conceptually divorcing law from authority, and order from the State

There are two main sets of questions that I have at the end of Plauché’s essay. The first turns on his discussion of Aristotelian rights theory, and his endorsement of a supply-side view of justice (or, more precisely, of the reasons for being just). Plauché suggests that Aristotelianism grounds the obligations of justice primarily in facts about the agent, rather than the patient, of just activity. But it seems to me that for all the theoretical advantages of a supply-side approach, the costs of the way that Plauché spells out the approach are just too high. It seems intuitively wrong to suggest that the primary reason for me not to sock Geoffrey in the nose has more to do with my rational nature than it does with Geoffrey’s nose. Of course it’s true that I’d be betraying my rational nature, living life beneath what I am capable, etc. etc. But the primary reason not to sock Geoffrey in the nose is that that would hurt him. It is precisely the indifference to his suffering and the disregard for his wishes that makes the injustice a betrayal of my own rationality.

This is not to say that I think a purely demand-side account of virtue would do better at capturing our moral experience. In fact I think neither standpoint could adequately account for certain sorts of hypothetical cases. Imagine, for example, that you are dropped into a Holodeck, without your knowledge, and while you are there—thinking that you are living and acting in the real world—you decide to go on a pillage-and-murder spree and shoot 50 people to death. Unbeknownst to you, your massacre had no actual victims: the 50 people you attacked were in fact, holographs, and the injuries you did to them were completely fictional. Now it seems in a situation like this, a purely demand-side account of justice will go wrong by being inappropriately lax. Since there were no actual moral patients for you to mistreat, there was nothing directly wrong with going on the rampage. (At the most, you might be faulted for putting others at risk by cultivating and indulging nasty dispositions.) On the other hand, a purely supply-side account goes wrong too, by being inappropriately harsh. Since nobody was harmed for real, it would be grotesque to suggest that you ought to be treated no differently from an actual mass-murderer.

Perhaps the best way forward here is to look to what Aristotle says about another constitutive part of eudaimonia: the value of friendship. Aristotle famously suggests that in the truest form of friendship, your friend is like another self; her welfare is, in some sense, taken up into your own welfare. You care about your friends’ welfare not just because her welfare may turn out to promote some further goal of yours. Nor is it because the concern is virtuous. (Caring about your friends is virtuous and it may have good results, too. But neither of those is the point of caring about them.) In the highest form of friendship, your friend’s well-being enters directly into your own well-being, as an irreducible constitutive part. But where this is the case, it seems like it would be a serious mistake to offer either a supply-side or a demand-side account of the reasons you have to care about your friends. It is neither one side or on the other of the I/Thou divide; if anything, the reason you have for caring about your friends is precisely that that divide has, in some important sense, disappeared.

Now, friendship is a particular relationship that any one person has to a limited number of other people. It is something that you choose to cultivate with some people and choose not to cultivate with others. But perhaps the general duty of respecting the rights of your fellow human beings involves a similar constitutive relationship, where at least part of the eudaimonia of another person enters into your own. If so the way that A should treat B should not be determined primarily by facts about A alone or by facts about B alone, but rather by facts about the relationship that obtains between them.

The second set of questions that I have turns on Plauché’s discussion of spontaneous order and the conceits of planners. I quite agree with Plauché about the importance of spontaneous orders, and I share the suspicion about those who set out to plan others’ lives, and the mythical history that they construct to sanctify their activity. (As Bastiat said, the plans may differ, but the planners are all the same.) But there is a danger here, as well as an insight. Libertarians often speak as if spontaneous order were a synonym for a voluntary arrangement, and constructed order a synonym for coerced arrangement. (Notice how de Jasay, in the passage quoted by Plauché, simply equates constructed orders with orders imposed by authority or the threat of force.) But in fact these two distinctions are independent of one another. In particular, constructed orders need not be coercive orders (you can make plans for coordinated action without coercing anyone, so long as you don’t impose your plans on those unwilling to cooperate). What I wonder, then, is whether the lesson that Plauché want us to draw from Ferguson and Hayek counsels abstinence, or merely temperance when it comes to co-operative efforts at deliberate social change? Of course, the moral case against coercive orders is absolute; it is never justifiable to seize the person or property of the unwilling in order to remake society according to your own plans. But is there any place for non-coercive efforts to make deliberate changes to the order of society? Is there, in an important sense, any place for politics in a free society?

I think this is a point that it’s important to be clear on, because a lot of important questions turno n how severe one takes the problems facing constructivist projects to be. Spontaneous orders have proved very good at some things—the emergence of money, for example, or futures markets and other forms of arbitrage, or large portions of conventional property law. But since Plauché criticizes efforts to deliberately craft social outcomes through the making of legislation, it’s important to note that historically, legal systems that favored the spontaneous order of conventional law over the framing of legislation (as, for example, in Anglo-Saxon common law) have done a fairly good job of developing legal norms that respected the rights of those who were recognized as having standing in legal proceedings—free men. But they also did a very poor job of respecting the person and property of those who were not recognized as having the same standing — women, children, servants. In order to reverse the provisions of the common law that, for example, allowed husbands to summarily seize all or part of their wives’ property as their own, or to substitute their own legal decisions for their wives, or to beat and rape their wives with impunity, first-wave feminist activists organized and made a concerted effort to change the coercive order that had emerged from centuries of conventional law. The results of these efforts could not be criticized on the grounds of being coercive—insofar as the reforms protected rights that had thus far been unprotected, they created new space for voluntary orders rather than overriding them. But in the name of women’s rights to liberty and property, they did overturn a spontaneous order of man-made legal conventions that had emerged gradually over the course of centuries. Did these deliberate campaigns to remake society indulge in the same dangerous conceits as those Plauché criticizes in the Founder-Legislator mythos? If not, then what are the salient differences that set aside the appropriate forms of conscious political activism from the objectionable forms of social engineering? If so, then how much caution do we need to apply in campaigns that deliberately aim at greater liberty? And how far should we avoid even the most voluntarily organized efforts at deliberate, nonviolent social reform?

… Well, I, for one, have no opinion whether Marxists should be interested in exploitation. If Matt MacKenzie is right, though, perhaps a better question would be, Should exploitation theorists be interested in Marxism? If critiques of exploitation have heretofore been reserved for the use of state socialism—and Marxism in particular—then, as MacKenzie ably shows, that is the result more by default than by anything inherently statist in the notion of exploitation. Drawing from the work of Alan Wertheimer, MacKenzie offers a neutral concept of exploitation based on the virtue of fairness, and develops a libertarian conception of exploitation that compares favorably to the more familiar Marxist and Progressive theories. Thus, through MacKenzie’s insightful analytical work, exploitation joins class, oppression, dialectics, state capitalism, and other concepts that left-libertarians have swiped from the theoretical lexicon of the statist Left, and rehabilitated for anti-statist purposes.

Not surprisingly, this dialectical strategy tends to drive both state Leftists and right-wing libertarians bonkers. The statist Left may complain that we are plundering their private property; and the anti-statist Right may complain that we are trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. But the fact is that left-libertarian efforts are, in terms of the history of ideas, more like expropriating the expropriators: if we today sometimes find Marxian notions useful, it is usually because those Marxian notions were themselves swiped from anti-state, pro-market theorists—especially those in the French tradition of industrialism (out of which arose both Proudhon’s mutualist anarchism, and the radicalized classical liberalism of Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari). Although twentieth century libertarians often identified themselves with the economic Right, and treated complaints of exploitation with either indifference our outright contempt, nineteenth century libertarians—Benjamin Tucker, for example—drew directly from their industrialist heritage, and wrote extensively, even obsessively, about economic exploitation (or, as Tucker most often called it, usury), which they saw as pervasive, systemic, destructive, and indeed one of the chief evils for principled libertarians to confront. Thus MacKenzie’s efforts, insofar as they are successful, merely reclaim a word for liberty that we never should have given up to the statists to begin with.

MacKenzie’s careful analysis of the forms of exploitation represents some of the most important work in the essay. He uses this taxonomic backdrop to set out and defend a claim which is far more controversial than it ought to be: that there can be economic relationships which should be condemned as exploitative even though they are both mutually consensual and mutually beneficial (relative to a no-exchange baseline). For any principled libertarian, proving that an economic relationship is consensual is enough to show that no-one has any right to suppress it by force. But if MacKenzie is right, then that is very far from being enough to prove that it should not be condemned and opposed by non-violent means. This point has some import for the applied policy debates that libertarians have often involved themselves in: consider some of the more common libertarian apologetics for third world sweatshops against the objections of Leftists and so-called Progressives; or, to take another example, for the so-called sex industry against the objections of radical feminists. Libertarian writers have all too often suggested that if piece work or sex work is agreed to voluntarily, and if it benefits the workers more than other realistically available lines of work would have, then there must be nothing objectionably exploitative about either industry. But if our conception of exploitation refers not only to respecting rights, but also to questions of fair dealing and to the background conditions that enlarge or constrain the options that are realistically available, the defense of these industries against charges of exploitation must, at the very least, become more sophisticated than they have so far largely been. (I think, in fact, that libertarians who want to defend the so-called sex industry will find their position almost completely indefensible, and those who want to defend neo-liberal development policies in the third world will find that they have an eminently sensible position in some cases and a ludicrous position in others. But let’s try to postpone those quagmires until at least the question and answer period.)

For now, in the name of diabolical advocacy, I would like to prod MacKenzie a little on the applicability of his notion of fairness in exchange, and thus the applicability of his conception of exploitation. The concern that I’d like to raise, though, is not a logical but rather an epistemological concern. While I know some libertarians who would dig in and argue that there just is no tractable notion of harm, or unfairness, beyond the violation of individual rights—and thus no form of exploitation beyond transactions forced through direct coercion—I think that that claim is simply indefensible in light of any robust theory of human virtues. Here’s an objection I find much more plausible, though: if an economic relationship is both mutually consensual, then it may be very difficult to reliably judge whether or not it is exploitative. There are many virtues that are important for the sustainability of a free society, and while I think fairness is one of the most important of those virtues, tolerance is arguably another; one of the things that libertarians would be wise to cultivate is a certain amount of deference to other people’s judgments about the arrangements that they have voluntarily entered into, and exercising this virtue may make it correspondingly difficult to pick out exploitative economic relationships independently of workers’ decisions about whether or not the arrangement is worth staying in. The example that MacKenzie gives of an exploitative labor contract doesn’t help alleviate the worry, either: if it’s true that a worker making $6.50 an hour might make $11.00 if her bargaining were done against the backdrop of a free market, there remains the question of how we would ever know that this is true. Unless socialist calculation is possible (and it’s not), the hypothetical price of a good or service in a hypothetical free market will never be something that we can quantitatively predict, and orders of magnitude or even directions of change will be, at best, difficult to reliably judge. So might it not be difficult, at best, to identify concrete cases of mutually-consensual-but-exploitative economic relationships? And if so, would that not demand a great deal of caution, if not outright abstention, from putting exploitation to use in political debates?

I should say two things about this epistemological worry. First, I’m not actually convinced by it myself. Second, if it does have any bite, it’s important to note that the uncertainty involved affects only the question of moral force, not moral weight. Exploitation would be no less bad even if we could never figure out where it does and where it does not occur. Uncertainty may be a reason to qualify your judgments about what is or is not exploitative; it is not a reason to abandon your conviction that exploitation, wherever it may occur, is seriously wrong. Still, this may be an important caveat on the theoretical fruitfulness of exploitation within a pro-market theory; and I’d be interested to hear more about how MacKenzie would deal with it.

The second important claim that MacKenzie sets out to defend is that in the political economy of state capitalism, the exploitation of labor is systemic and pervasive. He favorably cites the work of Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson, identifying state violence as the basis of class conflict, and government-enforced monopolies for politically-favored businesses as the root of economic exploitation. It’s important to note that, for MacKenzie as for Tucker and Carson, the exploitative economic relationship may not be itself coercive, even though the conditions that make it exploitative do involve coercion. For most of his life, Tucker pretty clearly suggested that exploitation (or usury) could only survive as long as the background of government privileges for the monopolists was sustained, and that if the privileges were once repealed, the exploitative arrangements would quickly crumble under the pressure of free competition. But while government intervention in the economy is one of the most important ways in which economic options can be restricted, it seems like there are other factors that could have the same effect. For example, if widely-shared cultural prejudices tend to constrain women to lower-wage or no-wage work — such as mothering, housekeeping, nursing, teaching, or acting as a secretary or assistant — when they would otherwise be willing and able to take on better-paying careers, then arguably the sexist cultural norms sustain a form of exploitation that has little if anything to do with government intervention, either directly or indirectly. MacKenzie suggests that he recognizes cases such as these when he says that a genuinely free market will dramatically undermine existing systems of exploitation, but will not be enough to do them in entirely. Later in the essay he offers a number of reasons why libertarians should be concerned with the forms of exploitation that are closely linked with the background of government privilege and regimentation of the economy; but I wonder whether he thinks that libertarians, qua libertarians, should also be concerned with forms of exploitation where not only the transactions but also the background conditions are non-aggressive, e.g. the result of objectionable but non-coercive cultural norms. And, if so, I’d also be interested to know whether the grounds for libertarian objections to these forms of exploitation, which might persist or even flourish even in a free society, are significantly different from the grounds for libertarian objection to exploitation that directly or indirectly depends on government-enforced privilege.

Third, in a brief but important section of the paper, MacKenzie suggests that where exploitative economic relationships are systemic, prevalent, and seriously morally wrong, it deserves organized political efforts to undermine it. Since he includes non-coercive forms of exploitation in that suggestion, it’s important for him to make it clear that he rejects the identification of politics with the employment of systematic force; thus, while it may be appropriate to enlist organized force in order to suppress coercive forms of exploitation, the sort of politics involved in undermining the non-coercive forms of exploitation need not involve any use of force at all, either from the government or from organized private efforts. Instead he endorses a conception of politics that I’ve elsewhere characterized in terms of organized efforts to address problems of social coordination through deliberate, co-operative action (rather than through the spontaneous orders that emerge from unintended consequences of private actions). MacKenzie suggests that non-coercive forms of exploitation can appropriately be met through working to develop and maintain anti-explotiative cultural norms, values, and practices, and supporting efforts to challenge and develop alternatives to exploitative institutions and social relations. I’d like to hear more about what, in particular, he has in mind here, particularly since he suggests that at least some political activism against exploitation will be necessary even in a genuinely free market. What sort of concrete institutions should we look to, join with, and build up as part of the way forward?

Finally, MacKenzie ends his essay by suggesting several ways in which a critique of exploitation—even when the exploitation is not, in itself, aggressive—might be connected with the libertarian commitment to non-aggression and the decentralization of political power. To frame the discussion he uses five forms of thick connections between libertarianism and other cultural or political projects in my remarks at this session last year. While I think MacKenzie’s right that a libertarian critique of exploitation involves each of these forms of thickness, I’d actually like to suggest that, when exploitation depends on a background of government intervention to survive, it suggests yet another form of thickness, which addresses the issue more directly but which did not make it into my earlier list of five. (Fortunately the list wasn’t intended to be exhaustive, so I’m happy to welcome one more into the family.) You might gloss the form of thickness here as something like this:

Consequence thickness: Libertarians should commit to opposing E because even though E is not in itself coercive, (1) E would be very difficult to carry out or sustain over time if not for background acts of government coercion that sustain it; and (2) there are independent reasons for regarding E as an evil.

If aggression is morally illegitimate, then libertarians are entitled not only to condemn it, but also to condemn the destructive results that flow from statist aggression—even if those results are, in some important sense, external to the actual coercion. Now, there are a lot of details and caveats that I am skipping over, but I do wonder whether something like consequence thickness, as I’ve roughly described it, might better explain the immediate concerns that folks like Tucker, Carson, and MacKenzie have about (at least some forms of) exploitation—concerns which seem to arise well before questions about instrumental supports for statism or the ultimate grounds of libertarianism even get raised.

It's sad to hear that Robert Anton Wilson passed away yesterday. May he rest in peace. fnord

On a happier note, I'm holding in my hands the current issue of eigentümlich frei, which is the German libertarian magazine. It contains an article by me called "Für eine linkslibertäre Bewegung", which means "For a Left-Libertarian Movement." It's part of a series on the possibilities of a libertarian-conservative alliance in Germany. As you might guess judging from the title, I offer an alternative to the mainly right-libertarian (due to Hoppe's popularity in his home country) "mainstream" in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

In my article I talk about the left origins of libertarianism in classical liberalism and individualist anarchism. I give a short summary of the latter. After that, I talk about the rightist aspects of modern libertarianism in the US and in Germany. Then, I present the contemporary left-libertarian works where I quote Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, Kevin Carson and Samuel Edward Konkin III (unfortunately I don't talk about RAW). Later I argue that libertarians should emprace traditionally leftist stands on issues such as (state) capitalism, cultural politics (e.g. feminism, anti-racism, etc.), war, political participation(e.g. agorism). Thus, libertarians should form alliances with the left rather than with conservatives.

I'm very happy that eigentümlich frei printed my article.

Anyway, I just though I'd let my fellow left-libertarians know that their word is being spread in continental Europe. For those of you who know German, here's an online version of my article with a slightly different title: "Für einen linken Libertarismus" ("For a Left Libertarianism")

Tags: RAW, Robert Anton Wilson, left-libertarianism

Robert Anton Wilson died yesterday. May he rest in peace (as long as that’s not too boring). His book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, was the final nail in the coffin of my personal fnord adherence to statism. For that I owe him a great philosophical debt.

UPDATE: Via Roderick Long I found two great tributes to Wilson fnord at Reason: one by Jesse Walker and one by Brian Doherty. The former features an excerpt from an essay of Wilson’s called Thirteen Choruses For the Divine Marquis:

I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, “Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing?”

“Quite simple,” he replied, “don’t be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.”

And the line went dead with a triumphant click like a barred door falling open.

The essay is wonderful in its embrace of compassionate, honest anarchy. As I read it for the first time, I marvel that it’s largely a defense of the philosophy and character of Marquis de fnord Sade, an historical figure I’d never given much thought before. I especially like these powerful lines from the essay:

He was the first one mad enough and sane enough to accept the given, the immutable, to start from man-in-history rather than from man-in-theory. Well, he says, I don’t believe in the “noble savage,” I even doubt that he is “inherently good,” but taking him as he is I still say: Freedom. He deserves liberty because nobody else is good enough to take it away from him.

He looked into anarchy, he looked past the voluntarily organized anarchy of Proudhon and Tolstoy, he looked into chaos itself, and he said, yes, even that, I will accept even that, before I will bend the knee to any Authority that claims to own me.

That’s the kind of stuff that will make me read more about de Sade. I find Wilson’s spiritual insights juxtaposed with his refusal to take anything seriously to be such a fascinating and joyous way to not just live life but really engage with fnord it.

Doherty’s post showcases Wilson’s accomplishments, including fnord the trail Wilson blazed for us left libertarians with his political and philosophical insight into the much less diversified libertarian movement of two or so decades ago:

He did once write in an early 1980s article that “Ideologically, of course, I should have voted for Ed Clark, the Libertarian Party candidate; but I am not that kind of libertarian, really; I don’t hate poor people.”

But he also said, as quoted in my book, when asked to expound on the differences between him and the then-dominant Misesian-Rothbardian strain of the movement in a 1976 interview, “this is turning into a diatribe against the group I find least obnoxious on the whole politico-economic spectrum…The orthodox conservatives and liberals, not to mention Nazis and Marxists, are really pernicious, and the Austrian libertarians are basically OK.”

Something I should keep in mind when I’m bashing the vulgar types fnord.

Tags: robert anton wilson

Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily (2007-01-12): Navy dismisses chaplain who prayed in Jesus’ name:

A U.S. Navy chaplain who prayed in Jesus’ name as his conscience dictated is being ejected from the military service in retaliation for his victorious battle to change Navy policy that required religious rites be non-sectarian.

This fight cost me everything. My career is over, my family is now homeless, we’ve lost a million dollar pension, but Congress agreed with me and rescinded the Navy policy, so chaplains are free again to pray in Jesus’ name, Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt told WND. My sacrifice purchased their freedom. My conscience is clear, the fight was worth it, and I’d do it all again.

Klingenschmitt, as WND has reported, has fought an extended battle with the Navy over its restrictions on religious expression by its chaplains. He appeared and delivered a public prayer in Jesus’ name at a White House rally last winter and was court-martialed for that. The Navy convicted him of failing to follow a lawful order because his superior didn’t want him praying in Jesus’ name.

He’s also launched a legal battle that he said he hopes eventually will result in his reinstatement, alleging the Navy assembled a civic religion by ordering its chaplains to pray in a certain way.

There’s a Unitarian system of religion that’s aimed at Christians, John Whitehead, founder of the The Rutherford Institute, told WND. It boils down to that. We’re seeing it all across the country, with council prayers, kids wanting to mention Jesus. What’s going on here is it’s generally a move in our government and military to set up a civic religion.

I think the Supreme Court’s going to have to look at the idea of can the government in any of its forms tell people how to pray, set up a basic religion and say you can only do it this way, he said.

I’ve got nothing against conscientious objectors who refuse to obey government orders out of religious conviction. There are cases where zealotry leads to horrible evils (see, for example, Eric Robert Rudolph or Muhammad Atta), but there the problem has to do with the wicked content of the beliefs, not with the zealotry per se. Religious zealotry, in and of itself, signals a willingness to recognize commitments higher and deeper than obedience the will of an earthly sovereign; which is part of the reason why religious zealotry has often played such an important role in the development of radical freedom movements, from the Levellers to Baptist antinomialism to American abolitionism.

That said, the position that Klingenschmitt has found himself in is a bit different from that of, say, St. Valentine. Nobody is threatening to kill him for his beliefs, or for his refusal to indulge in non-sectarian prayers that omit the name of Jesus. What happened is that he lost his job. Specifically, his job with the government military forces.

Klingenschmitt has every right to pray how he wants to pray, in public or in private, and if the government says otherwise then the government can go straight to hell. But this raises the question: if Klingschmitt doesn’t want the government telling him how to pray, then why does he want to go on being the hireling of a government agency? If you don’t want the government telling you how to pray, then what are you doing demanding to keep a place within the chain of command for the United States government’s official Sacerdotal Corps?

Real martyrs accept the consequences of professing their faith. Among those consequences is giving up on government patronage, because a government that sponsors religion necessarily has the power to tell people how to practice that religion.

Real zealots do not pretend that they can serve two masters.

Rad Geek shares my opinion of Bob Barr’s possible 2008 Presidential Run on the LP ticket:

If they want someone really prominent for the 2008 presidential race, maybe they could drop Bob Barr to the VP slot, and instead nominate the exhumed corpse of Augusto Pinochet. Minor disagreements aside, he does have lots of name recognition. Plus I hear he’s for privatizing Social Security.

The sad thing is howmanylibertarians actually do carry water for Pinochet. How the principled have fallen.

Tags: pinochet, bob barr,

In the beginning, there was Third Party Watch, and it was good. Really. It still is. Check it out.

And on the third day, Austin Cassidy did rear back and pass a new miracle, Liberty Loop. And it was even better, because it’s like, all libertarian, all the time. Cool.