Libertarianism.org

Subversion for Fun and Profit: An Evening with Karl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson

Karl Hess, Robert Anton Wilson — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:42:52 -0400

Dr. Robert Anton Wilson was the co-author of the popular Illuminatus! trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. Wilson has been described at various times throughout his life as a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and agnostic mystic.

Karl Hess was a noted speechwriter (for Barry Goldwater among others) and author, and later in his life became known as a tax resister, welder, and market anarchist.

In this video from the Libertarian Party’s Nominating Convention in 1987 Wilson and Hess team up and field questions from the audience in a humorous, frequently witty, and occasionally irreverent dialogue on everything from early 20th century European and American literature to politicians’ inflated egos to pranking the government, yuppies, jaywalking tickets, what the average American should know, and covert operations in Cuba.

What’s So Bad about Guantanamo?

Brian Kogelmann — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

The controversy surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is one that ebbs and flows throughout our national discourse. Going unmentioned for months at a time, some timely issue pertaining to torture or due process or our current war on terror will bring Guantanamo back into the national spotlight for but a few fleeting moments, only to be forgotten again in exchange for more timely issues. Currently, we are a time of more flow than ebb. The recent rash of hunger strikes occurring at Guantanamo—in which as many as 45 detainees are refusing to eat, thirteen of which are being force-fed—has brought the secretive detention facility back into national headlines, if only for a few moments. Given the timeliness, I would like to take the opportunity to explore Guantanamo Bay in a more philosophical manner than is usually done. Most libertarians, I believe, think Guantanamo Bay is somehow morally bad. But even though many libertarians might harbor this disposition (present company included), we might remain unable to articulate why it is we feel this way. In this essay I try to state clearly why I think the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is morally bad.

Here is one reason to believe that Guantanamo is morally bad: it is morally bad because it stands in defiance of both national and international law. Internationally, detention practices at Guantanamo remain in violation of several statutes of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966, and enforced from March 23, 1976 forward. While there are many statutes composing the ICCPR, it remains a relatively uncontroversial fact that detention practices at Guantanamo stand in defiance of several requirements of the multilateral treaty, namely articles seven, nine, and fourteen. Moreover, it could also be argued that detention practices at Guantanamo stand in defiance of national law as well, particularly the guarantee of due process secured through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, though this is a much more controversial claim.

But even though the Guantanamo Bay detention center is in defiance of the law, it is not morally bad because so. This is because actions and institutions cannot be morally wrong solely because they are in defiance of the law; such a view would commit us to absurd conclusions. For example, suppose there was a law requiring every parent to kill off their children until they were left with only two offspring. If a parent with six kids refused to kill four of them off—in defiance of our hypothetical law—have they done a morally bad thing? Hardly. We don’t even need to delve into the realm of counterfactuals to prove this point: were the actions of Harriet Tubman and other abolitionists, who sought to free slaves by providing passage to the north in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act, morally wrong? Again, obviously not. As such, we cannot commit ourselves to the position that actions and institutions are morally wrong because they are in defiance of the law. By implication Guantanamo is not morally bad because of its questionable legal status.

It might be true that Guantanamo is morally bad because torture happens within the facility. After an inspection the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concluded that the institutional infrastructure present within Guantanamo “cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.” Reported practices included humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and forced positions. Although the U.S. government has denied allegations of torture, released prisoners have corroborated the ICRC report, claiming that beatings, sleep deprivation, prolonged hoodings, along with other torturous practices occurred. It is due to the presence of these inhumane practices within the facility, it might be argued, that gives Guantanamo its suspect moral status.

We cannot say that Guantanamo is bad because of the alleged torture taking place there, even though we might have problems with specific instances of torture occurring. Here is why: most people believe that torture, in some cases, is morally justified. Consider the banal ticking time bomb example: we know that a nuclear bomb is going explode in New York City in one hour, and we also know, without doubt, who planted the bomb. We also do not know where the bomb is located. Would we be justified in torturing our bomber to learn the location of the bomb? Most would say yes. As a result, torture is not always morally wrong (though oftentimes it is). Now consider the relation between this corollary and Guantanamo: suppose it was true we knew for a fact that every instance of torture happening in Guantanamo was of the type that we could confidently predicate as morally just. But even so, torture is still happening in the facility.

Under such circumstances—where only justified torture takes place in Guantanamo—is there still something morally problematic with the detention camp? I think so. If the above counterfactual is too difficult for the reader to imagine, or if the reader believes that torture (as many libertarians do) is never justified, then consider this: imagine that, in some possible world, every fact about Guantanamo remained the same, except no torture whatsoever took place there. There was still the detention camp; still filled with both civilians and those picked up off of the battlefield; and they were still denied basic due process of law, being kept in the facility for years upon years with no chance of defending their innocence in front of a legitimate, unbiased court. Under such conditions, is Guantanamo now morally good, or at the very least not morally bad? Doubtfully. Something still seems off to most of us—suggesting that torture is not the rasion d’être of the moral badness.

It might be true that Guantanamo is morally bad because it refuses to give its detainees the full extent of due process given to other individuals tried within the U.S. criminal justice system. It is not the case that detainees in Guantanamo receive no due process of law; indeed, both Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld did much to improve the legal rights of the accused, requiring that enemy combatants be able to challenge their status in front of military commissions, and also setting certain—though still meager—standards with which these commissions must adhere to. But even so, the military commissions detainees are given access to lack a certain standard of fairness we might want to be present: according to Human Rights First, for instance, the Military Commissions Act of 2009 allows for the introduction of coerced statements in proceedings; the use of evidence derived from statements obtained through torture if “use of such evidence would otherwise be consistent with the interests of justice”; and it allows for defendants to be tried ex-post facto for conduct not considered to constitute a war crime at the time it was committed. This list deficiencies, the reader should be reminded, constitutes a mere proper subset of all the problems inherent within the current military commission system.

Even though detainees at Guantanamo lack access to as robust a conception of due process as we receive in the U.S., it is still not clear why this is such a bad thing. Here is one reason why refusing due process to detainees is morally problematic: due process constitutes an institutional check on the epistemological problems we face when imprisoning individuals. In seeking out terrorists and other enemy combatants to imprison within the detention facility, the U.S. uses specific criteria that certain individuals must satisfy in order to be considered someone who ought to be locked up. We hope that when individuals are sought out to be detained, such a task is done in good faith; that those carrying out such a mission are careful to not wrongfully lock up those who do not deserve to be locked up, and, moreover, before anyone is selected for detainment, it is made sure that they actually do satisfy the relevant criteria. But even so, mistakes can be made.

One of the functions of due process, then, is to help remedy these mistakes—to make sure that detainees actually ought to have been detained, by virtue of them having instantiated the relevant properties. This determination, obviously enough, is litigated in court when determining whether someone is guilty or innocent. When detainees are denied their day in court then these epistemological worries go unaddressed, leaving it indeterminate whether detainees really ought to be in the detention facility or not. As such, denying due process is morally bad.

While due process’ ability to remedy the epistemological problems of justice we face is important, it is not sufficiently important to make the lack of due process morally bad. Consider this example: suppose the U.S. had a policy of locking up in Guantanamo every individual who Googled the term “Islamic extremism.” Also suppose that every such individual put away in the detention facility was given a brief hearing to determine whether they actually did Google the illicit term. Even so, in the trial, the accused were not allowed to challenge the content—that is, the constitutionality or justness—of our hypothetical law. Even with the presence of this non-robust conception of due process, is Guantanamo Bay still morally bad? I think so, though perhaps we are closer to the truth of the matter than we were before.

The problem here is that due process does more than simply remedy potential epistemological problems, though it certainly does that. Due process also allows litigants to challenge the content of specific laws—it allows our detainees to question whether what is being done to them is just, or whether what is being done to them is constitutional. Not merely if laws are being carried out correctly, but if laws that are being carried out should even be carried out in the first place. When this second, substantive feature of due process is present, then we begin fleshing out why due process is so important a thing, and also why the lack of due process in places like Guantanamo is so bad.

When detainees are granted the ability to (1) determine whether they have actually violated specific laws that we claim they have violated and (2) challenge the content of the laws they are being charged with violating, then we begin approaching fairness. Obviously enough, the ability of detainees to exercise these two important features of due process is contingent on their ability to have a day in a fair court, not merely to show up to what seems like a one-sided military commission. By implication, lacking these two essential features is a morally bad thing. Since the Guantanamo Bay detention facility does lack these two features we can thus conclude that it is a morally bad place, answering our original question as to why the detention facility strikes us as morally problematic.

"The System of Liberty" by our own George H. Smith

Aaron Ross Powell — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

George H. Smith has written a new book. For readers of Libertarianism.org, this is welcome news indeed. With his weekly “Excursions in the History of Libertarian Thought,” George shows off his enormous knowledge of intellectual history, and teaches all of us a great deal.

If you enjoy “Excursions,” think of The System of Liberty as a marthon session. George has arranged the book around conflicts within classical liberalism. This allows him to do what we strive for here at Libertarianism.org: show the libertarian intellectual tradition not as a monolithic single “school,” but as a big tent of ideas with significant overlap, but not total agreement. But, George notes,

Although much of this book deals with the internal problems of classical liberalism, and although I believe that liberals failed to resolve some of these problems, my sympathies with this school of thought will quickly become apparent to readers. In their search for answers to difficult questions, the classical liberals may not have been successful in every respect. But they did have many successes, both theoretical and practical, in their effort to justify and explain individual freedom, and we owe them an incalculable debt for many of the freedoms we enjoy today.

The System of Liberty explores natural rights and utilitarianism, anarchism, state sovereignty and self-sovereignty, positive versus negative liberty, the role of the state in education, charges of “social atomism” and “social Darwinism,” and methodological individualism. And it does so with George’s typical clarity and voluminous knowledge of the literature.

If you’re a regular read of “Excursions,” you owe it to yourself to check out The System of Liberty, too. Nobody does the history of political thought quite like George H. Smith.

Overcoming Barriers to Romantic Love

Nathaniel Branden — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:45:54 -0400

Once a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle, Nathaniel Branden has played a prominent role in spreading the ideas of Objectivism, including founding the Nathaniel Branden Institute. He is also a prominent psychotherapist and is well-known for his work establishing the self-esteem movement in psychology.

In this video from a libertarian meetup in Long Beach, California, in 1984, Branden gives a lecture on romantic love, fear, self-fulfilling prophecies, happiness, and a variety of other topics. He also takes questions from the audience.

Defending the Non-Aggression Principle: A Reply to Matt Zwolinski Part 5

George H. Smith — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:33:42 -0400

Most of this final part of my series is a general commentary on the non-aggression principle (NAP) rather than responses to specific points raised by Matt Zwolinski in “Six Reasons to Reject the Non-Aggression Principle.” At the end I briefly consider the problem of pollution.

According to Zwolinski, the non-aggression principle (NAP) “holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.”

As I noted in Part 1 of this series, “the NAP usually is (and should be) expressed in terms of physical force, not violence.” A possible distinction between these two terms may be illustrated as follows: Suppose a large man physically blocks the doorway of an old lady’s house and will not allow her to enter. We might say that this is not literally a violent act, since the man never comes into contact with the lady. And even if we agree that his action should reasonably be interpreted as an intent, or threat, to use violence should she attempt to enter her own house, it is the blocking of the entrance by physical means that qualifies as a violation of her property rights. Thus, in this as in many other cases, it seems more appropriate to speak of physical force rather than of violence per se.

Given that Murray Rothbard often framed the NAP in terms of “violence,” Zwolinski cannot be faulted for following his lead. But it should be kept in mind that many (and perhaps most) libertarians follow Ayn Rand in framing their fundamental political principle as the non-initiation of physical force (often abbreviated NIOF), rather than speaking of violence. As Rand wrote in “Man’s Rights”:

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force.

Similarly, in “The Nature of Government,” we find this formulation:

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or compel him to act against his own judgment.

In Part 3, I discussed how Rothbard applied the NAP to the issue of fraud. That Rand applied her NIOF principle in essentially the same manner—as well as to other problems, such as breach of contract—is clearly indicated in this passage from “The Nature of Government.”

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of the owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Thus, as Rand put it in “Galt’s Speech”: “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate – do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.”

Although Rothbard’s usage may be confusing at times, three things should be noted. First, his use of “violence” is consistent with a legalistic meaning, according to which violence is regarded as the unjust or unlawful use of physical force. The entry on “violence” in Black’s Law Dictionary reads, in part: “Force, physical force, force unlawfully exercised, the abuse of force, that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty.”

Second, that Rothbard intended his non-aggression principle to be identical with prohibiting the initiation of physical force may be seen in the fact that he sometimes used the latter phrasing—as we see in his article “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution, in which he depicts “the basic axiom of libertarianism” as “no initiation of force against person or property.”

Third, throughout the history of classical liberalism we sometimes see the terms “force” and violence” used more-or-less interchangeably. For example, in The Constitution of Liberty F.A. Hayek wrote that “the threat of force or violence is the most important form of coercion.”

At times, Rothbard used neither “violence” nor “force” when formulating the fundamental libertarian principle. In Man, Economy, and State, for instance, he focused on the libertarian prohibition of “invasive action,” which he defined as follows:

Invasive action may be defined as any action—violence, theft, or fraud—taking away another’s personal freedom or property without his consent.

While conceding that Rothbard formulated the NAP in various and sometimes imprecise ways, I think it is clear what he meant. Another potential source of confusion is Rothbard’s use of “axiom” in regard to the NAP. Since Rothbard attempted to provide a moral justification for the NAP (especially in The Ethics of Liberty), by “axiom” he obviously did not mean a fundamental moral principle, much less a self-evident moral principle. Rather, he used “axiom” to signify the fundamental political principle of a free society. Whether this was a judicious use of “axiom” is something I will leave for readers to decide.

As with many earlier libertarian thinkers, regardless of the terms they used, both Rothbard and Rand attempted to justify a theory of rights, and they then used that foundation to distinguish between voluntary and coercive interaction. As Rothbard wrote in Power and Market, “liberty is defined as freedom to control what one owns without molestation by others.” (This notion of “freedom” was squarely in the Lockean tradition, as I discussed in an earlier essay.)

Rothbard, who was well-versed in the history of libertarian ideas, often used “property” in the older, classical sense to mean moral jurisdiction over something. It was with this meaning in mind that James Madison spoke of property in one’s time, and an earlier Lockean, William Wollaston, spoke of property in one’s happiness. This was what Rothbard meant when, following the lead of the nineteenth-century libertarian Auberon Herbert, he defended “self-ownership” as the fundamental human right.

Rand, in contrast, preferred to speak of “the right to life” instead of “self-ownership,” while reserving the word “property” to denote external goods. Nevertheless, she occasionally reverted to the classical meaning of “property,” according to which to own x, or to have property in x, means to have sovereign jurisdiction over x, i.e., the right to use and dispose of x as one sees fit. In “What is Capitalism?” Rand put it this way:

Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products—or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products?

Despite the linguistic differences between Rothbard and Rand, both emphasized consent as a fundamental condition of justice in human relationships. As Rothbard put it in The Ethics of Liberty, after explaining the nature of “the free society, the society of peaceful cooperation and voluntary interpersonal relations”:

There is, however, another and contrasting type of interpersonal relation: the use of aggressive violence by one man against another. What such aggressive violence means is that one man invades the property of another without the victim’s consent. The invasion may be against a man’s property in his person—as in the case of bodily assault, and/or against his property in tangible goods, as in robbery or trespass. In either case, the aggressor imposes his will over the natural property of another—he deprives the other man of his freedom of action and of the full exercise of his natural self-ownership.

Disagreements over how certain key words should be used are nothing new; we find similar discussions throughout the history of classical liberalism. An interesting and useful analysis appears in an unpublished manuscript by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). After dividing coercive laws into two broad categories, commands and prohibitions. Bentham continued:

In either of the two cases of command and prohibition, the person whose act it is that is in question, may be said (on account of such act) to be coerced: to be under coercion.
In the case of command he may be said to be constrained: to be under constraint.
In the case of prohibition he may be said to be restrained: to be under restraint.
When a person is neither constrained nor restrained with respect to an act, neither constrained to do it nor restrained from doing it, he is said with respect to that act to be free, to be at liberty.

Bentham concluded:

Liberty then is neither more nor less than the absence of coercion. This is the genuine, original and proper sense of the word liberty. The idea of it is an idea purely negative. . (Quoted in Douglas G. Long, Bentham on Liberty, University of Toronto Press, 1977, pp. 73-74.)

F.A. Hayek, among other classical liberals, agreed that “to be precise, we should probably define liberty as the absence of restraint and constraint”—so long as it is understood that these terms refer to the actions of human beings rather than to natural phenomena.

We now arrive, at long last, to the only point by Zwolinski that I have not yet considered, viz., pollution. Zwolinski writes:

As I noted in my last post, Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP. The NAP implies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects, and no matter how essential they our to daily life in the modern industrialized world. And this is deeply implausible.

In an earlier article, “Libertarianism and Pollution,” Zwolinski explores in greater detail the possible implications of the NAP for pollution, and he cites in passing Rothbard’s most complete treatment of this issue, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” which was originally published in the Cato Journal (Spring 1982).

At the risk of ending this series with a whimper rather than a bang, I’m afraid I have little to say about pollution and the problems it creates for the NAP. For one thing, I have not given this issue much thought over the years; for another, I think Rothbard deals quite well with the problems in his article in the Cato Journal, though I might take issue with a few minor points.

I will concede that Zwolinski is justified in raising the problem of pollution. Of his six objections to the NAP, this is the only one that is credible, in my view. But I see no justification for rejecting a strict interpretation of the NAP on the basis of one difficulty.

All general theories, including those in the hard sciences, confront unresolved problems and unanswered questions. Libertarian theory is no exception. But to call for a radical paradigm shift because of such problems, as Zwolinski does with the NAP, cannot be justified unless the dominant paradigm (to use Thomas Kuhn’s expression) experiences drastic failures in a number of areas, and unless a more satisfactory paradigm is offered in its place.

Should Zwolinski ever decide to explain his own paradigm, then we may examine its strengths and weaknesses and thereby compare it to a strict interpretation of the NAP. But no such comparative analysis is possible in a theoretical vacuum. Merely to claim that there are exceptions to the NAP does not come close to telling us what we need to know. Unless we accept Zwolinski and his fellow Bleeding Hearts as the final arbiters in this matter, we will need clearly defined criteria by which we can identify legitimate exceptions to the NAP, and distinguish them from purported exceptions that cannot be justified. Again, it will not do for Zwolinski (or anyone else) to proclaim that x is an exception to the NAP unless he also explains and justifies the criteria we should use to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate exceptions.

Meanwhile, until this groundwork has been laid and justified, I will continue to view pollution as merely one among numerous problems in libertarian theory that requires additional work.

Anarchism at The New Yorker

Aaron Ross Powell — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:06:48 -0400

The New Yorker has an article on the revival of anarchism, and it’s pretty good. While focusing mostly on the ideology of the Occupy Wall Street movement, author Kelefa Sanneh does manage to work in some nice references to more libertarian forms of anarchism, such as the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard.

While the essay contains some history–including the debate between Karl Marx on one side and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin on the other–most of it focuses on the work of David Graeber, an anthropologist, prominent Occupy member, and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber represents the most visible form of anarchism today, and one that’s decidedly non-libertarian. That is too bad, because so much of the anger Graeber-style anarchists have for the current system fits nicely within critiques of statism and corporatism made by both anarchist and mainstream libertarians.

Like many in the Occupy movement, Graeber does not seem to think much about “how things will work if we get our way.” The state’s bad, these anarchists say. So are markets. Coercion is terrible, as well as money and debt. And even voluntary leadership roles aren’t any good. All we’re left with are prohibitions: “no parties, no leaders, no demands,” as Sanneh puts it.

And that’s the problem with the sort of anti-market anarchism Graeber represents. While much, if not most, of his criticism of the state and big business hits the mark, this sort of anarchism offers us no meaningful, practical alternative. Society, if it is to operate at any scale, demands organization and coordination. One way to do this is via some entity that “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,” as Max Weber put it. We call that the state.

Or it can be done–and these two need not be mutually exclusive–via emergent orders. People naturally fall into groups, naturally develop decision-making processes, and naturally settle on systems of exchange. We call this the market, and it’s what you get when you let folks interact freely and respect their innate sense of “mine” and “thine.” (An innate sense Graeber seems to lack, Sanneh tells us: “Like many anarchists, Graeber doesn’t think property damage is violence.”)

Graeber would have us banish both the state and markets. In part, these Occupy anarchists believe that, without the state to prop it up, the market would naturally fade away as people no longer felt compelled to participate. They say that the natural state of man is socialism, and it is only statism that makes capitalism possible.

But these anarchists also want to speed the market–and, in fact, civil society–on to an early death. Graeber “proposed a grand debt cancellation, to remind the world that debt is merely a promise–that is, a plan, and one that can be changed.” Here we see the Occupy-style anarchists eager to throw the moral baby out with the capitalist bathwater. Debt is a promise, and “keep your promises” is one of our most baseline moral rules. What’s more, we keep promises not just because doing so is right or virtuous, but because if we don’t, then people will come to assume we won’t. And if this happens throughout a society–if debts are routinely cancelled, for instance–then parties won’t be willing to risk future agreements. A society lacking the expectation that we’ll keep our promises is a society destined for failure.

Toward the end, Sanneh brings up the other kind of anarchism, the libertarian kind, represented by Murray Rothbard.

Rothbard was an anarchist, but also a capitalist. “True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism,” he once said, and he sometimes referred to himself by means of a seven-syllable honorific: “anarcho-capitalist.” Graeber thinks that governments treat their citizens “like children,” and that, when governments disappear, people will behave differently. Anarcho-capitalists, on the contrary, believe that, without government, people will behave more or less the same: we will be just as creative or greedy or competent as we are now, only freer. Instead of imagining a world without drastic inequality, anarcho-capitalists imagine a world where people and their property are secured by private defense agencies, which are paid to keep the peace. Graeber doesn’t consider anarcho-capitalists to be true anarchists; no doubt the feeling is mutual.

It’s of course worth pointing out here that many pro-market anarchists believe that, in the absence of state involvement in the economy, and without business being able to turn to government to protect them from competition, income inequality would dramatically decline under anarchism. It wouldn’t go away entirely, because liberty upsets patterns, but it also likely wouldn’t be “drastic,” especially if we consider the enormous benefits markets bring to the world’s poorest residents.

The difference between Graeber and Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists is that the latter have baked into their philosophy a respect for lifestyle pluralism. Rothbard certainly assumes that, in the absence of a state, we’d still have markets–even global ones. He’s probably right. But Rothbardian anarchism would allow for the legitimacy of alternative choices–provided, of course, they are choices and the not violently enforced preferences of “leaders.” Rothbard says we all have rights and as long as we respect those, anything goes.

The philosopher Robert Nozick called this a framework for utopia, and it’s a powerfully moving vision. All of us can choose the sorts of lives we want to lead, and live them without the threat of coercion, provided we afford the same right to everyone else. Many of us will choose market capitalism–perhaps because it so clearly works better at enriching us than other systems–but we don’t have to. Graeber’s utopia–“a kind of decentralized socialism, with decisions made by a patchwork of local assemblies and cooperatives”–can exist peacefully alongside Rothbard’s capitalism. That’s what anarcho-capitalism tells us it offers. Not a utopia, but a utopia of utopias.

Graeber, on the other hand, wants his vision for all. Any choice we might make to live differently is simply illegitimate. How Graeber would enforce his vision? Would he ban “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” to use Nozick’s phrase? It is unclear. But if he’s serious about it, he’ll eventually have to resort to violence–and likely a monopoly on violence. And then we’re right back to Weber’s “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” In other words, we’re right back to the state. In this sense, the anarcho-capitalists are right: the Occupy anarchists aren’t really anarchists at all.

But, then, neither are most libertarians. Anarchism is certainly one kind of libertarianism, but then Nozick wasn’t an anarchist, nor was Hayek, nor Friedman, nor Locke, nor Rand. Still, even for the many libertarians–and non-libertarians–who reject anarchism as a political goal worth aiming for, the philosophy of anarchism has value. An anarchist stance (a true anarchist stance) takes no aspect of the state for granted. Every last bit must be justified.

This flips the typical approach to thinking about the state and puts us back in the shoes of enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes who thought any state had to be justified. Now, most people take the existence of the state–usually a rather big state–as the default position. It’s then up to anyone who wants to shrink it–even if they don’t want to shrink it to nothing–to argue for each reduction. Anarchism says that freedom, the absence of coercion, is the default, and that anyone wanting to introduce state coercion must present arguments for why it’s better than the alternative. And they must do this at every step of the way.

What separates anarchist libertarians from non-anarchist libertarians is that the latter believe there are some steps the state can successfully clear. What unites both groups is the belief that the current state has taken far more steps than it legitimately should have.

Socialist Calculation III: The Value of Capital Goods

Jason Kuznicki — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:42:52 -0400

This is the third in a series of posts on the socialist calculation debate. Parts one and two appeared earlier.

Many early socialists denied that their utopia even needed economic calculation: The habits and morals of mankind would simply change, they declared, and each of us would come to feel in our very souls what we should do, in whatever economic circumstances might arise. That was heady stuff, but not at all practical. As a result, some of the more hard-nosed socialist theorists turned to calculation. But it should be remembered that the theory of economic calculation always far outstripped the practice.

Even in the Soviet Union, and even despite talented economists like Leonid Kantorovich, mathematical planning was rarely more than window dressing on what amounted to an elaborate, politically driven wish list.

Planners bickered, formed factions, falsified, cheated, stole, and – when all else failed – they allegedly lifted consumer prices directly from the Sears Catalog. But they didn’t calculate, whether in money prices, or shadow prices, or hours of labor, or anything else. In some ways this is a stronger indictment of the Soviet system than even the existence of the gulag: It shows the Soviets weren’t eating their own dog food.

One may wonder, then, how much of the socialist calculation debate amounts to the good guys being completely gulled by the other side. When real socialists do not calculate, how can we call it “socialist” calculation?[1]

As I’ve stressed before, though, we study socialist calculation because it is a kind of outline or a shadow to the market economy. Socialist calculation attempted to obtain consciously all of those things that markets tend toward through unplanned human action, through the so-called invisible hand. Examining socialist calculation makes the actions of the invisible hand more visible.

One such action is finding the value of capital goods. Ludwig von Mises was the first to stress the peculiar difficulty of this task under socialism.

Mises noted that consumption goods would be distributed in a planned society according to whatever criteria its leaders thought proper: presumably these criteria would be very egalitarian, perhaps with special consideration to individuals’ needs, although in practice a planned society could use whatever criteria its leaders wished.

Yet these distributions, whatever they were, would have great difficulty taking into account consumers’ varied and ever-changing preferences: We can’t give everyone a set of dentures and expect them all to be made equally happy.

Exchange would probably arise, regulated or not, with money or not, and it would likely be beneficial even in a planned society – but only for consumption goods. Capital goods, remember, would never be allowed to go to market. They’re owned collectively.

But how does one determine which capital goods go to what use? Whenever possible, we will want them to produce the consumer goods that have the highest consumption values, of course. But which kinds of capital goods should be preferred, and how are they to be used, and when? And how do we know when to stop using them here and start using them there? When a raw material goes through several stages of production, with choices of different later end products and/or intermediate processes, how do we know where to direct the intermediate goods – if not with price signals from the (sadly non-existent) capital goods markets?

Mises writes:

One may anticipate the nature of the future socialist society. There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods. All these concerns will be interrelated. Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings. It will never be able to determine whether a given good has not been kept for a superfluous length of time in the necessary processes of production, or whether work and material have not been wasted in its completion. How will it be able to decide whether this or that method of production is the more profitable? At best it will only be able to compare the quality and quantity of the consumable end product produced, but will in the rarest cases be in a position to compare the expenses entailed in production. It will know, or think it knows, the ends to be achieved by economic organization, and will have to regulate its activities accordingly, i.e. it will have to attain those ends with the least expense. It will have to make its computations with a view to finding the cheapest way. This computation will naturally have to be a value computation. It is eminently clear, and requires no further proof, that it cannot be of a technical character, and that it cannot be based upon the objective use value of goods and services.

Because capital is heterogenous—better at some things and worse at others—a mere reference to the exchange values of consumption goods is not enough to tell us where different capital goods should go.

The Soviets did make some theoretical efforts here. In particular, Leonid Kantorovich proposed mathematical techniques for optimizing the allocation of labor and capital goods to best fulfill a given set of production quotas. Inputs would be “priced” in terms of the gained or lost amount of product that would be had in pursuing one course of production rather than another, in a process known as shadow pricing.

His approach, though, is inapplicable to an economy for two reasons that have nothing to do with math. (Mathematicians, who understand such things better than I do, agree that his math is just fine as far as it goes, and it’s now an important part of many different optimization techniques in engineering.)

First, Kantorovich held that capital goods’ value was to be determined by the value of the labor that they saved, and by no other criteria. Like all good communists, Kantorovich was ultimately committed to the labor theory of value, at the very least for determining the efficiency of capital goods. (But you can’t please everyone: That he did not use the labor theory of value in directly formulating all of his shadow prices rendered Kantorovich a dangerous heretic to some Soviet commentators!)

Still, as Mises and many others have argued, the labor theory of value simply doesn’t work. One hour’s labor varies greatly in its productive value, not just as a function of the capital goods that back it up – a problem we could solve by looking recursively at the labor required to make the capital goods that amplify a laborer’s productivity – but also as a function of skill, serendipity, workers’ enjoyment or lack thereof in labor, and many other factors.

Nor does labor find anything like an egalitarian reward in the eyes of consumers. One may spend many hours in very difficult labor, all to no valuable end. Or one many stumble onto a million-dollar discovery in a moment of idle reflection over a beer. There just isn’t any correlation between labor and subjective value. In a slightly more just world, there might be. But not in ours. This is also why mainstream economics has rejected the labor theory of value.

Second, Kantorovich’s method was limited by the fact that it took the schedule of consumer goods to be produced as if it were a given. Which in Soviet society, it was. Given how? Given by the political and economic authorities. And not, in other words, by actual consumer demand.

And yet the search for what consumers really want is one of the biggest parts of the information discovery process performed by the market. One may very well optimize for labor under a given set of output constraints. But the discovery of the proper constraints themselves – that is, the discovery of consumers’ real demand schedules – is a process that, in a free market, unfolds in coordination with the allocation of labor and capital goods. At best, Kantorovich solved half the problem, but only by pretending that the other half didn’t exist.

As one reviewer put it:

First and most important, the planner takes as given by “the political and economic” authority and specified social needs the aims of society in the form of final demands. The shadow prices and standard effectiveness are not “regulators” of the economy but only means to the effective realization of goals… In general, the planners start and end with the final demands determined outside the planning system.[2]

Emphasis added. And yet it is the very function of an economy as we now understand it to discover such goals, not to presuppose them or to conjure them out of thin air. Further, as we will see in the next post, there are never really any “final” goals at all, only provisional ones.

Sure, there was Project Cybersyn in socialist Chile – but if a socialist calculation system’s most notable success lies in crushing a labor movement, well, something’s definitely a little off here, if not in the calculation, then at least in the socialism. ↩
Benjamin Ward, “Kantorovich on Economic Calculation,” The Journal of Political Economy 68:6, December 1960, p 553. ↩

The Sanction of the Victims

Ayn Rand — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:23:40 -0400

Ayn Rand defected from the U.S.S.R. and came to the the U.S., where her anti-collectivist writings formed the intellectual basis for the philosophy she called Objectivism. She is the celebrated author of many books and essays including We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943), Atlas Shrugged (1957), and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966).

This video is of Rand’s last public lecture at a 1981 National Committee for Monetary Reform conference in New Orleans. The text of this lecture, which is titled “The Sanction of the Victims,” would later be published in a collection of her works called The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1990).

In the lecture, Rand admonishes American businessmen for apologizing for capitalism and for, in some cases, directly funding detractors of the free market. Notably, she says that “It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers.” She also answers audience questions after the lecture.

Natural Law Origins of the Common Law

Kevin Bjornson — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:32:03 -0400

Kevin Bjornson was one of the founding members of the Libertarian Party in the early 1970s, and is still active as the co-chair of the Libertarian Defense Caucus. He lives in Washington state.

In this video from an International Society for Individual Liberty conference in 1992, Bjornson speaks on the origins of the common law and a variety of other topics. He also shares the story of his own run-in with civil asset forfeiture law and the War on Drugs.

What Do Libertarians Believe About the Non-Aggression Principle?

Matt Zwolinski — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:21:36 -0400

There has, of late, been much debate about the philosophical merit of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). See here for a partial summary. Personally, I have been deeply gratified by the quality of argument that debate has elicited—on both sides—and I look forward to watching it continue to unfold. No doubt I will have more to contribute to it myself before long.

But, for now, I want to put to the side the philosophical question of the NAP’s defensibility, and ask instead some questions of a more sociological nature. Just how many libertarians really believe in the NAP, anyway? And for those who do, how does it inform their analysis of practical moral and political questions?

As far as I know, there hasn’t been much empirical work done on the moral and political beliefs of self-identified libertarians. But one always-fascinating source is Liberty’s decennial readers’ survey (No, not that Liberty, and not that one either. This one). First in 1988, then again in 1999, and finally in 2008 (before the magazine’s demise as a print periodical in 2010), Liberty published the results of an extensive survey of their readers and other libertarians. In each of these surveys, respondents were asked to provide demographic information, name their intellectual influences, say whether they agreed or disagreed with various moral, political, and religious beliefs, and analyze a handful of applied moral problems.

The results are fascinating along a number of different dimensions. But one item on the survey is of particular interest for my purposes:

“No person has the right to initiate physical force against another human being.”

Respondents were asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement – essentially an unlabeled formulation of the NAP. In 1988, a full 90% of respondents said that they agreed. By 1999, however, the percentage expressing agreement had dropped by almost half to 50%. And by 2008, it was down to 39.7%.

It is possible that some of the drop was due to a change of wording in the question between 1988 and 1999—more on this below. But on its face, this is a pretty radical shift away from support of the NAP.

Interestingly, though, there doesn’t seem to have been much of a corresponding change in respondents’ answers to the kind of practical moral questions that would seem to involve the application of the NAP.

For instance, in 1988, the survey asked a pair of questions about a scenario labeled, “How much is that baby in the window?”

Suppose that a parent of a new-born baby places it in front of a picture window and sells tickets to anyone wishing to observe the child starve to death. He makes it clear that the child is free to leave at any time, but that anyone crossing his lawn will be viewed as trespassing.

The questions asked were, 1) Would you cross the lawn and help the child? And 2) Would helping the child violate the parents’ rights?

In 1988, 89% of respondents said they would cross the lawn. 26% said that doing so would violate the parents’ rights. In 1999 those numbers were 87% and 31%, respectively. And in 2008 they were 90.9% and 24.1%. In other words, despite the radical change in the professed belief in the NAP, and despite the fact that crossing the lawn in this case certainly looks like a violation of the owner’s property rights, there was almost no change at all in professed belief about either the question of whether respondents would themselves cross the lawn against the owner’s wishes, or in the question of whether doing so would violate the owner’s rights.

The same is true of another scenario, “Trespass or Die!”

Suppose that you are on a friend’s balcony on the 50th floor of a condominium complex. You trip, stumble and fall over the edge. You catch a flagpole on the next floor down. The owner opens his window and demands you stop trespassing.

In 1988, 84% of respondents said they believed that in such circumstances they should enter the owner’s residence against the owner’s wishes. 2% (one respondent) said that they should let go and fall to their death, and 15% said they should hang on and wait for somebody to throw them a rope. In 1999, the numbers were 86%, 1%, and 13%. In 2008, they were 89.2%, 0.9%, and 9.9%. Once again, change in professed belief about the NAP appears to have had virtually no effect on change in professed belief about the right thing to do in a situation that seems to involve aggression against an innocent person.

A few thoughts:

1. In 1988, respondents were asked whether they believed that “no person has the right” to initiate physical force against another human being. In 1999, the wording was changed, and respondents were asked whether they believed that “it is always wrong” to do so. The 1999 wording was kept in 2008.

Strictly speaking, these questions are asking about two different things. And it is possible to believe that no one has the right to initiate force, while nevertheless believing that in some extreme circumstances it would not be morally wrong to do so. Indeed, this seems to be the position Rothbard himself took in his chapter on “Lifeboat Situations.” It is possible, then, that respondents’ belief in the NAP didn’t really change at all between 1988 and 1999, and that the change in response simply reflected a philosophically sophisticated reaction to the changed wording of the question.

Bill Bradford, the founder and editor of Liberty, writing under the name of Ethan O. Waters, saw things somewhat differently.

To me, the most salient finding of the Poll is that libertarian moral thinking is not very rigorous … Although nearly all libertarians (89%) agree with the non-aggression axiom, a great many are willing to dispense with it when convenient: 89% will trespass to prevent a parent from starving his child for the fun of it; 98% would rather trespass than die in the flagpole question, including 14% who would restrict their trespassing to his flagpole and 84% who would go so far as to enter another’s residence …. It is apparent that many of those willing to dispense with the nonaggression axiom have no clear or consistent criterion for deciding when to dispense with it.

It’s hard to adjudicate between these two interpretations without more information. But one datum of interest is the fact that most respondents did not view crossing the lawn to feed the starving child as a violation of the parents’ rights. This suggests, at least, that respondents were not in this case making the distinction between the moral permissibility of an act and the question of whether that act violated someone else’s rights. And this, in turn, casts at least a bit of doubt on the idea that seeming discrepancies in their answers were undergirded by a sophisticated Rothbardian analysis of the ethics of emergencies.

2. How well do the results of these surveys represent the beliefs of libertarians in general? In each case, the respondents were drawn from attendees at the Libertarian Party National Convention and readers of Liberty magazine. Liberty was a magazine for “movement” libertarians—people who were very clear in their self-identification as libertarians, and enjoyed reading articles about the possibility of privatized roads, gossip about Ayn Rand’s inner circle, and the like. A very different kind of reader than you might expect from an “outreach” publication like Reason, for instance. And, of course, the kind of people who hang out at LP conventions (filling out surveys, no less!) are, well, a “different” breed as well. (As Ed Crane quipped about his experience at the 1971 founding convention in Denver, “As a libertarian, I always knew it was important to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles, but … until I went into that convention hall, I had no idea how many alternatives there were.”)

The respondents, then, were probably significantly more “hard core” than the median libertarian. And it’s probably reasonable to assume that hard core libertarians are generally more likely to agree with the NAP than the less hard core ones. If so, then the survey results probably overstate the extent of agreement with the NAP among libertarians as a whole.

3. I wonder what’s happened since 2008? My sense from conservations online and at various libertarian conferences is that the NAP might be making a comeback. Is this accurate? And, if so, what might explain it? Well, 2008 was the year of Ron Paul’s first campaign for the presidency, and his rise to stardom among libertarian youth. Paul has a long connection to the Ludwig von Mises Institute via Lew Rockwell, and my sense is that the LvMI has used this connection and its incredible web presence to draw a lot of young Ron Paul supporters into its fold. And the NAP is, of course, a central part of the “plumb line” libertarianism that LvMI seeks to defend and spread.

At the same time, 2008 was also the year in which Students for Liberty was created, and it too has enjoyed tremendous growth and success in the last few years. And, compared at least to LvMI, SFL is less closely wedded to the Rothbardian vision of libertarianism, including the NAP.

Both LvMI and SFL are diverse organizations, of course, and there are plenty of individuals in each of them for whom my generalizations will not hold. I’m painting with a broad brush here simply in order to speculate about possible large-scale trends in the libertarian movement. But, in the end, it’s just one guy’s speculation.

Perhaps it’s time for another survey?

Defending the Non-Aggression Principle: A Reply to Matt Zwolinski Part 4

George H. Smith — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:09:18 -0400

Once again I must beg the indulgence of readers as I push back the final part of my reply to Matt Zwolinski by at least one essay. This is necessary because I wish to discuss the issue of children’s rights, a complex subject that cannot be covered in a paragraph or two. Even devoting this entire essay to the subject of children’s rights has resulted in an inadequate treatment, but at least I have been able to outline a theoretical infrastructure.

In Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle, Matt Zwolinski wrote:

What About the Children???—It’s one thing to say that aggression against others is wrong. It’s quite another to say that it’s the only thing that’s wrong—or the only wrong that is properly subject to prevention or rectification by force. But taken to its consistent extreme, as Murray Rothbard took it, the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own. Or, at least, it implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread. This, I think, is a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced. That it was Rothbard himself who presented the reductio, without, apparently, realizing the absurdity into which he had walked, rather boggles the mind.

The issue of children’s rights is of special interest to me. During the many years that I lectured on rights at summer seminars for the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), I devoted most of one lecture to the rights of children. I also published a lengthy and densely documented article on “Children’s Rights in Political Philosophy” in my 1991 anthology, Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies. The last part of my article deals with “The Individualist Tradition,” as exemplified in the views of three classical liberals: Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jeremy Bentham, and Herbert Spencer.

I devoted a fair portion of my IHS lecture to criticizing Murray Rothbard’s views, especially his contention that parent-guardians have no enforceable duty to preserve the life of an infant. Unlike Zwolinski, however, I did not depict Rothbard’s position as a “reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced.” For one thing, this is not even an accurate characterization of Rothbard’s position, since he obviously believed that positive obligations voluntarily assumed (as in a contract) may be coercively enforced. Rothbard’s point was that there are no natural positive duties that are enforceable. But this does not preclude what classical liberals typically called adventitious duties, i.e., enforceable obligations that are not inherent in human relationships but can be acquired through voluntary means.

I never published my ideas about children’s rights (though I did discuss them on various e-lists throughout the past twelve years), so I will summarize them now.

Rothbard published two major treatments of children’s rights: one titled “Children and Rights,” a chapter in The Ethics of Liberty; and another titled “Kid Lib,” an essay in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. Rothbard’s treatment in the latter is better overall, but in both discussions he does a poor job analyzing the nature of guardianship rights and duties. This is the deficiency that led him to advocate the view that parent-guardians have no enforceable positive obligations to an infant-ward and so may leave him to starve, however monstrously immoral this neglect may be. (It is interesting to note that Rothbard defended this extreme view only in The Ethics of Liberty. In Egalitarianism, he merely argued that no third party, including government, has the right to intervene in order to insure that an infant is raised “properly”—a sentiment with which I largely agree.)

Rothbard embraced a guardianship (or trustee) model of parental rights, but he was wrong to view this as a type of limited ownership claim. It is nothing of the sort. And, contrary to Rothbard, voluntarily to accept the enforceable right of guardianship entails accepting an enforceable duty as well, specifically, the duty to maintain the life of the infant in the guardian/ward relationship. Let’s explore this issue in more detail.

We first need to distinguish between infants and children. An “infant,” as I use the term, is a child who has not yet attained the age of reason, i.e., the age when he is competent to make rational judgments about his own welfare and take the actions needed to sustain himself. Infants depend wholly on adults for their survival. An older child, in contrast, may be able to take the basic actions needed to sustain himself, so he is not dependent in the same sense; he is not helpless, in other words. (I hereby bypass the thorny problem of when an infant may be said to attain the age of reason, except to note that this will vary from child to child.)

It is important to understand that the guardianship/ward model applies only to infants, not to children who have attained the age of reason. In the latter case, as Rothbard correctly maintains, a principle kicks in that says, in effect, “My house, my money, my rules.” Moreover, children at that age possess the right of elopement, i.e., the right to leave home—a right that makes no sense when applied to infants.

It is owing to the utter helplessness of an infant that the guardianship/ward model becomes necessary. An infant would be unable to survive without the help of a guardian, and we must keep this primordial need in mind when we analyze the nature of guardianship. A guardian, whether that be a natural or adoptive parent, is an adult who has the enforceable right to make decisions on behalf of an infant. This means that a guardian has the right to say how an infant shall be fed, clothed, educated, and so forth. But what are the implications of this right? Rights entail corresponding duties, so to say that I have a right to x means that others have the duty not to forcibly interfere with my exercise of the right in question.

To whom does this duty of noninterference pertain in the guardian/ward relationship? Not to the infant, certainly—for part of what it means to say that an infant lacks mental competence is that an infant is unable to understand and conform to juridical duties. So of whom are we speaking when we say that someone has a duty not to forcibly interfere with how a guardian raises her infant?

The duty involved here applies to third parties who may disapprove of how a guardian is raising her infant and who might impose their ideas of what is best for him, if not for the right of the guardian to make final decisions in this realm. So what gives the guardian this enforceable right to exclude third parties from imposing their wills in regard to the infant? Simply this: The guardian has voluntarily accepted the duty of sustaining the life of the infant, and it is from this voluntary, self-imposed duty that she acquires the right to exclude third-party intermeddlers.

Without this primary duty, the corresponding right of excluding third-party intervention could not be justified. A guardian, including the natural mother, cannot claim any kind of ownership rights in the infant, who is a self-owner. No guardian can legitimately claim, “This infant is mine, and I will do with it as I please.” All persons have the enforceable duty not to aggress against an infant by harming it physically, etc., but a guardian voluntarily takes on the additional positive duty of sustaining the life of her ward—first, because it is only the helpless nature of an infant—its need for a guardian to survive—that generates guardianship rights in the first place; and, second, because a guardian cannot claim the right to exclude third parties unless she accepts the positive duty of sustaining the life of an infant.

With this foundation, we now come to the questions of if a guardian may terminate or transfer her duties and rights qua guardian, and, if so, under what conditions. Such questions would require a lengthy essay to answer satisfactorily, but some brief comments will serve my purpose here.

Yes, a guardian may terminate (or transfer) her guardianship rights, but she must do so in a way that will not violate her fundamental duty to sustain the life of the infant. To leave an infant to starve in its crib is to renounce all guardianship rights to the infant, after which the former guardian can no longer prevent a third party from caring for him. And from this it follows (after some steps that I won’t mention) that the original guardian must make a good faith effort to find another guardian (which is usually not a difficult thing to do).

Just as a pilot who has agreed to take passengers to their destination may not bail out in mid-flight, while protesting that he does not recognize any positive juridical duties, so a guardian may not bail out of her guardianship duties, willy-nilly, after accepting the duty to maintain the life of her ward. For a guardian to leave an infant to starve (if she is able to feed it) would violate her most fundamental duty qua guardian; it would be nothing less than willful murder.

What I have presented here is merely a framework, and I don’t pretend to have developed or to have justified it fully. But it is a sensible analysis, one that is compatible with a strict interpretation of the NAP. What I have done is to focus on Rothbard’s flawed understanding of the guardianship model and to present what I believe is the correct analysis.

This process of criticism and reconstruction is how libertarian theory advances, and it is a far cry from Zwolinksi’s superficial complaints. Although Zwolinski was correct to reject one of Rothbard’s conclusions, he failed even to consider the possibility that the unacceptable conclusion flowed from Rothbard’s faulty understanding of guardianship. Instead, Zwolinski conveniently assumed that the NAP is to blame, when in fact Rothbard’s unacceptable conclusion had nothing to do with the NAP at all.

To be continued….

Socialist Calculation II: What's a Good?

Jason Kuznicki — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:03:54 -0400

Socialism is not actually the reason why the socialist calculation debate is important.

What we term socialism today is only a family relation to the thing that the socialist calculation debate addressed, and I’m not all that interested in refuting (yet again!) a form of social organization that has only properly speaking existed on paper–namely, a calculating socialism that earnestly tries to solve the optimization problem.

In real-world socialist economies, and excluding those that aspire to full communism, the state segment of the economy is perhaps best thought of as a very large firm that enjoys–and suffers from–a number of exceptional privileges. That firm’s size causes it many difficulties. Its monopolization of certain markets brings the usual consequences of monopoly. And so on.

These are related to, but different from, the problems faced by a calculating socialism. The Austrian School finds the calculation debate interesting not primarily for its applications to real-world socialism, but because the debate helps explain what markets do, and what any social system must also do if it proposes to do better.

Consider what was to me the most arresting passage of this essay by Cosma Shalizi. Though very long, I encourage you all to read it:

That planning is not a viable alternative to capitalism (as opposed to a tool within it) should disturb even capitalism’s most ardent partisans. It means that their system faces no competition, nor even any plausible threat of competition. Those partisans themselves should be able to say what will happen then: the masters of the system will be tempted, and more than tempted, to claim more and more of what it produces as monopoly rents. This does not end happily.[1]

The possibility of a mathematically modeled socialism may be one of the closest things that the mixed-market economy has had to a competitor. It’s a paltry competitor, but even it tells us a lot. Which brings us to the second key facet of the socialist calculation debate.

II. What’s a Good?

As I mentioned in part I, finding equilibrium prices in Walras’s model requires an additional simultaneous equation for each additional good in the market. Supply and demand schedules for all goods are connected together in one way or another, and economists want to optimize for all of them at once. But how many goods are there, exactly?

This is not merely a technical question–not, in other words, just one of counting the different things for sale in all the stores. It is also to a high degree a question of subjective judgment, and it reveals some of the conceptual simplifications that make economic modeling both very powerful and yet distinctly limited.

Is a car a good? Yes, of course. But are all cars alike, such that we should think of them as only one type of good? Surely not. How many different types of cars shall we consider? Before, that is, we say “Ehh, close enough”?

Is a car in Florida the same good as a car in Alaska? Should it be considered as such? As a technical matter, and in modern capitalist economies, cars are often made to different specifications depending on the weather conditions they will likely meet. Pianos and lots of other goods are made this way too. And that’s just on the consumer side–capital goods likewise must be adapted to their environments.

Even a gram of gold in New York is a different good, in a certain sense, from a gram of gold in London. Economists conceptualize a “good” as being part of a uniform class of things, but goods are always differentiated somehow, even if it’s only by position. So when an economist solves an optimization problem for all of the goods in an economy, he or she has simplified tremendously–not only by creating fixed, a priori categories of goods, but also by ignoring the problem of their distribution.

(Shalizi concludes, by the way, that even the purely mathematical part of the socialist calculation problem is unworkable: Once we consider transportation, the difficulty goes from supercomputer to supernatural. That may or may not be so. I’m not a computer engineer, only a historian of ideas. But either way, the claim “this math problem will never ever be crackable” is not one I’d like to hang a social theory on!)

And there’s more. That’s because it’s always possible that individual actors will find themselves in new circumstances, or simply have a new idea, and a previously unappreciated difference within a lumped-together category of goods will suddenly open up. When that happens, something very interesting takes place–what we had all along conceptualized as one good now turns out to have been two. And all of the equations must now be redone.

This sounds weird, but it’s actually quite ordinary. It’s called “discovery” or “innovation.” As F.A. Hayek put it:

That the price-fixing process will be confined to establishing uniform prices for classes of goods and that therefore distinctions based on the special circumstances of time, place, and quality will find no expression in prices is probably obvious. Without some such simplification, the number of different commodities for which separate prices would have to be fixed would be practically infinite. This means, however, that the managers of production will have no inducement, and even no real possibility, to make use of special opportunities, special bargains, and all the little advantages offered by their special local conditions, since all these things could not enter into their calculations… [I]t would never be practicable to incur extra costs to remedy a sudden scarcity quickly, since a local or temporary scarcity could not affect prices until the official machinery had acted.

Although it disrupts the process of central planning, this type of local, spontaneous repurposing is still something we probably want to have in an economy. Sometimes increasing our well-being means not approaching a given economic equilibrium, but rather abandoning it in favor of a better one. And yet such opportunities for innovation are never knowable ex ante. They can never be subject to a plan.

What does this mean for economics? In the final analysis, the supply of a “good” is not really a class of things at all. It’s a conceptual crutch that allows economists to treat many ultimately very different things as if they were all alike. Why do they do that? Because that way, they can tell some very important stories about the economy–things like the supply and demand curves of Economics 101.

Those things are important as a first step to understanding what people do when they produce, exchange, and consume. But they aren’t the whole story. They are rather the backdrop before which the story takes place.

This though may not be the case in the real world. As long as voluntary socialist or collectivist experiments can still be tried within the larger market order, one may argue, plausibly, that the system does face competition after all. ↩

The Non-Aggression Principle (i.e., Respecting Liberty) is Necessary and Sufficient for Libertarianism

J. C. Lester — Sat, 04 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Zwolinski tells us that “Many libertarians believe that the whole of their political philosophy can be summed up in a single, simple principle … the ‘non-aggression principle’ or ‘non-aggression axiom’ (hereafter ‘NAP’) ….” And this is what he intends to refute. Despite having criticized some interpretations of the non-aggression principle myself, I should here like to defend one version of it. For I see no inherent confusion in using the NAP as a shorthand reference to how people ought to behave and what is necessary and sufficient for interpersonal liberty fully to exist. However, in the event of a clash of liberties (e.g., I need to have a fire but you would suffer from my smoke) we need to resort to the MAP: minimization of aggression principle. And it seems reasonable to interpret the MAP as an attempt to apply the NAP as far as possible. Therefore, I view the MAP as practically implied by the NAP rather than as a separate and additional principle. This should become clearer as we proceed.

Zwolinski continues that the NAP “holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong….” Except that, as we have seen, very often two parties cannot help impinging on the liberties of each other (for instance, whether pollution is allowed or prohibited: one side or the other side must suffer an interference/constraint/cost). And in such cases “aggression” may not seem to be exactly the right word, though it will do. And what is inevitable is not obviously “wrong”.

Zwolinski writes that “aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.” I had rather say, somewhat less imprecisely, “aggression” is proactively interfering with another’s person or property (when these are not themselves the result of any proactive interference). Is it true that “From this principle, many libertarians believe, the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic”? Most libertarians appear to have supplementary or additional principles. However, my own view is that only a pre-propertarian conception of libertarian liberty can fully allow that “the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic.” But that is, indeed, a single principle and one that I wish to explain and defend.

As an implicit criticism, Zwolinski observes that “The libertarian armed with the NAP has little need for the close study of history, sociology, or empirical economics.” That is surely a great virtue in a practical principle for everyone. Moreover, this appears to overlook that, because study is bound to be finite, no study can support a universal theory such as the NAP—although it can test it and possibly refute it. He continues that “With a little logic and a lot of faith in this basic axiom of morality, virtually any political problem can be neatly solved from the armchair.” And such simplicity is clearly highly desirable. Strictly speaking, no faith is required or possible: we do not choose what to believe. However, any—necessarily conjectural—solutions can be derived. And they are then ready for criticism and testing.

What is the philosophical significance of the fact that “On its face, the NAP’s prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense”? Common sense is a fallacious criterion of truth or morality. So it is similarly irrelevant to say that “it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute.” But it is relevant to present “any other possible consideration of justice or political morality” as a criticism of the NAP conjecture. It might seem that “There is a vast difference between a strong but defeasible presumption against the justice of aggression, and an absolute, universal prohibition.” But in practice our, necessarily conjectural, theories are always open to potentially refuting criticism no matter how “absolute” we might think them to be. Zwolinski approves of Brian Caplan’s view that “if you can’t think of counterexamples to the latter, you’re not trying hard enough.” But counterexamples that are merely logical possibilities and unlikely scenarios are beside the point. Real systematic refutations of the practical morality of the NAP/MAP do not appear to exist, as far as I can tell.

We then move on to the “six reasons why libertarians should reject the NAP.” And we ought to note immediately that to refute one, dubious, interpretation of the NAP is not to refute every interpretation of it.

1. Prohibits All Pollution

Zwolinski asserts that “industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited” moreover, even “personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP.” As I have explained, prohibiting pollution (for instance, coercively preventing someone from lighting his fire for needed warmth and cooking) also violates the absolute NAP. Hence the MAP comes into play.

2. Prohibits Small Harms for Large Benefits

Zwolinski asks us to “suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger?” And here I would reply that the NAP is about the real world rather than about every logically possible world and thought experiment. He goes on to “suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children.” This is slightly less implausible but it is still not realistic. We don’t need to tax anyone to develop new vaccines. And the institution of any taxation would disrupt productivity immediately and then do cumulative damage as the economy has its growth slowed. Moreover, that growth would probably have included new advances in vaccines sooner or later. Zwolinski concludes by asking “is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?” And the obvious answer appears to be that implausible assumptions do not refute a practical principle.

3. All-or-Nothing Attitude toward Risk

Zwolinski asks, “what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger?” And the answer is that it is an aggressive act to take such a serious risk at someone else’s expense. In monetary terms, the degree of the aggression is something like the amount of money that the victim would have to be paid to accept such a risk (I don’t mean to imply that everything can be reduced to money, of course). Without such an agreement, you are using someone else’s property—his head—without his permission for your dangerous game. Imposed risks are aggressions; actual damage is not necessary. Otherwise, by analogy, you may as well say that coercing someone to do something at gunpoint only becomes an aggression if you actually shoot them when they fail to comply.

Zwolinski then observes that “almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons” and that “Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not” but our reasonable explanations “carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression.” And, again, this overlooks that there is aggression whether such risks are allowed or coercively prohibited. But there is no insuperable problem with applying the MAP, as long as we have a reasonable account of what policy best deals with the clash in an unbiased way (it need not be perfect or admit of cardinal accounting).

4. No Prohibition of Fraud

Zwolinski asserts that “Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud.” Do libertarians “usually” use the word “violence”? “Coercion” seems more likely and more appropriate. He continues that “according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence.” This is easily answered. A fraud is an aggression because it violates the property rights that the relevant agreement establishes. All this talk about “violence” is merely confused.

5. Parasitic on a Theory of Property

We are told that “Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property.” In fact, it need not be “parasitic on an underlying theory of property.” It is true that some NAP advocates argue along the following lines: “aggression” is the violation of legitimate property, and legitimate property is only established using assumptions that libertarians independently argue to be legitimate (self-ownership, labor-mingling ownership, etc.). That is because they don’t have an abstract theory of liberty from which to derive property. However, if we say that libertarian ‘liberty’ is ‘the absence of aggression’, then we can interpret this in a pre-propertarian way. Property comes into existence in a libertarian manner when that property does not aggress on (i.e., proactively constrain or interfere with) other people. For instance, I make and claim this spear, hut, rabbit stew, at no cost or loss to you: you are not worse off as a result. And if there is some vestigial cost or loss to others (for instance, you cannot now use the very same natural resources that I did), then we again resort to the MAP. I hope the gist of this view is clear enough (I have written at length in other places to deal with myriad details, but some readers become lost in their own inaccurate paraphrases of the details without first showing that they have grasped the basic problem or the basic idea of the solution). In this way, respecting liberty—as the absence of aggression—can indeed be the “fundamental principle of libertarian ethics.”

By way of illustration, Zwolinski asks us to “Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head … If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B.” It seems worth noting that a disproportionately large retaliation itself becomes a new act of aggression. I won’t give a theory of proportionality here, but it is derivable from the NAP/MAP.

Thus we can readily agree with Zwolinski that “‘aggression,’ on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all.” And we can even agree that “It means ‘violation of property rights’”—as a rule of thumb. But property rights themselves can be derived from whatever control of resources does not aggress, i.e., proactively constrain or interfere with others (or, in the event of a clash, what minimizes such constraints or interferences). Hence, it is false to say that “It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.” As we have now seen, it is liberty itself—interpreted as the absence of interpersonal aggression—that is “fundamental to libertarianism.” That conclusion should not be completely astounding.

6. What About the Children???

Zwolinski then tells us “the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own.” An analogy might help to answer this point. A child will not swim in the pool without a lifeguard. You volunteer to be the lifeguard, and as a consequence he gets into the pool. Then to allow the child to drown flouts the claim to your protection that you have previously given him: it is thereby an aggression against the child (positive actions are not always necessary to aggress against the claims we cede to people). In a relevantly similar way, a parent has assumed a duty of care for the vulnerable person that he has brought into existence. Negligently to allow one’s own child to starve to death is to flout that duty and thereby commit an aggression against that child. Therefore, one has a libertarian obligation either to feed him or to discharge the parental duty by finding someone who is willing to take it on. (I have some reservations about this position, but I won’t discuss them here.)

Consequently, it is incorrect to say that the NAP “implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread.” As the starving child is having his given claims aggressed against, anyone has a right to come to his aid in his defense. Any duties that we create by our behavior, including but not limited to explicit contracts, may be coercively enforced if that is what is necessary to minimize any overall aggression.

Zwolinski then sums up his position with a few observations. He first notes that “There’s more to be said about each of these, of course. Libertarians haven’t written much about the issue of pollution.” Is that correct? For what it’s worth, when I typed “pollution” into cato.org I saw “465 results.” Then he observes that libertarians “can think up a host of ways to tweak, tinker, and contextualize the NAP in a way that makes some progress in dealing with the problems I have raised in this essay.” And, indeed, the Rothbardians have already done this with their interpretation of the NAP. But Zwolinski concludes that “There comes a point where what you need is not another refinement to the definition of ‘aggression’ but a radical paradigm shift in which we put aside the idea that non-aggression is the sole, immovable center of the moral universe.” However, this overlooks a third possibility: one can have a paradigm shift within the interpretation of what constitutes “non-aggression” (or ‘liberty’). And this is what I claim to provide.

Zwolinski’s concluding sentence is that “Libertarianism needs its own Copernican Revolution.” The analogy is more apposite than he realizes (although, of course, Aristarchus of Samos long antedated Copernicus). For the “Copernican Revolution” that we can have here is to stop trying to theorize “non-aggression” (or liberty) ultimately in terms of legitimate property and do the reverse: to theorize legitimate property ultimately in terms of non-aggression (or liberty). And with this approach all six given reasons to reject the non-aggression principle can be comprehensively refuted.

Yet I fear that this ‘revolution’ is seen as ‘heretical’ by some libertarians—where it has been noticed at all—and this is compounded by my ‘incomprehensible’ rejection of all supposed justifications in favor of the critical-rationalist epistemology that I apply (see my earlier reply on this matter). And so I should just like to emphasize that this position is not a criticism of libertarianism or any kind of compromise with non-libertarian principles. Rather, it is intended to clarify and unify much currently diverse libertarian theory behind a single principle of liberty itself. With that aim, at least, real libertarians ought to have some sympathy.

Libertarianism and Virtue

Aaron Ross Powell — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:44:42 -0400

This next piece in my series on arguments for libertarianism looks at virtue ethics. Which presents something of a problem. Most of the ways to justify a libertarian state begin with a moral philosophy and then extend it to politics. This was the case with the last three installments on Robert Nozick. Nozick takes the idea of basic rights already familiar to most of us and asks what sort of state they allow. Similarly, consequentialist libertarianism–where I’ll likely turn next–draws on another familiar moral philosophy: what’s right is whatever produces the best results.

But unless you’ve studied moral philosophy, it’s unlikely you’ve even heard of virtue ethics. And, unless you’ve studied virtue ethics, it’s unlikely you have much of a sense of what it’s all about. This is in large part because virtue ethics looks almost nothing like other schools in its basic approach to addressing moral issues.

Which all means I probably can’t assume the kind of background knowledge I did with Nozick or I will with consequentialism. And that means first writing a post introducing virtue ethics, before moving on to what it’s all got to do with libertarianism. Before undertaking that task, however, it’s important to be clear about something. Just as “consequentialism” isn’t a single, agreed upon moral theory but rather a name for a category of theories often in disagreement, virtue ethics is a school of thought, with multiple, often conflicting forms. In what follows, I do my best to stick to the areas of agreement and paint with broad strokes, avoiding the niggling–and for now, unnecessary–details.[1]

Let’s start with the biggest difference between virtue ethics and other schools of moral philosophy. Typically, the key question of morality is “What’s the right action?” For consequentialists, the answer is whichever choice produces the best results. They’ll differ on what “results” means, though typically they’ll say it has to do with “the most happiness” or “the least pain.”

Deontologists hold that the right action is whichever conforms to proper rules or duties. While the content of those duties varies among deontologists, most libertarians align them with natural rights. Thus the morally right action is the one that doesn’t violate another person’s rights. Any action violating rights constitutes a moral wrong.

Libertarians will recognize this divide. On the consequentialist side, you have people like Ludwig von Mises and David Friedman, who argue that free markets just work better than the alternatives. On the deontological side, we find Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick, grounding their libertarianism in fundamental human rights. Writes Nozick, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).”

Virtue ethicists think they’re all starting with the wrong question. Rather than “What is the right action?,” we should ask “What is a good (i.e., virtuous) person?”

A good person is a person living a good life by the standards we share because of our common humanity. In other words, what’s a good life for humans is not the same as a good life for cats or a good life for tulips. We have a nature, and that nature defines the contours of the good life, just as our nature defines the contours of good nutrition.

But does this mean there’s really only one sort of good life? That we can’t reasonably disagree about what makes a life good? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that two lives, both equally good, may look rather different in their details. A good life lived by an urban business woman isn’t much like a good life lived by a member of the Amish. And clearly we don’t want to say that only the Amish live good lives or only cosmopolitan city dwellers do.

But at the same time, enormous commonalities exist between good lives of any sort. To have a good life is to be loving and be loved. It is to pursue–and one hopes, achieve–meaningful accomplishments. It is to be fair and honest and kind. No one really believes otherwise. Would any of us defend as “good” a life without love, without accomplishments? One filled with dishonesty and animosity? A life of violence and insecurity? Certainly not.

It is that sort of good life, defined in broad universals, that virtue ethics is all about. It’s the sort of life we’re talking about when we say, “He’s a good man.” We all know what that means.

The ancient greek philosopher Aristotle, whose writings inspire and inform most modern virtue ethical thinking, called this good life one of “eudaimonia.” While often translated as happiness, the term more precisely means something like “human flourishing.” Eudaimonia isn’t found in a moment but rather in a lifetime. Only at the end of our lives can we be sure we’ve achieved it, as it takes into account the life as a whole. Eudaimonia is the well-lived life. Thus we can be on the path to it even at those times when we are immediately unhappy, as those temporary bouts of displeasure can have effects that enrich and improve our lives as a whole.

Our purpose as humans is to find eudaimonia. (And this isn’t just a purpose, but a strong desire. Who, after all, wants to lead a bad life?) The way we assure our lives will be good is to possess virtues and to make choices in accord with them. In order to achieve eudaimonia–to live well–we need access to goods and we need to possess virtue.

Goods are things like food, shelter, clothing, books, health, education, and so on. Without them, we won’t have the resources necessary to let us cultivate virtue. Clearly this is one of the points by which virtue ethics can lead to libertarianism. For free markets represent the best way humanity’s found for delivering goods. Thus if goods are necessary for virtuousness, which is necessary for eudaimonia, then a system of markets will be preferable to one without.

Next, we need virtues of character. These we’re all familiar with: compassion, courage, hope, integrity, honesty, benevolence, and so on. They can be thought of as both skills and dispositions. We have to fully understand the content of the virtue, which is why virtue ethics places such emphasis on moral education. We must also be disposed to act in accord with the virtue. I may understand benevolence, but unless I’m inclined to act in accord with it, I’m not myself benevolent.

Finally, we need the virtue of practical wisdom. This is the skill of understanding what virtues apply to a situation and how to act in such a way as to manifest them. Practical wisdom is the trait of being morally wise. Without it, I may act out of a sense of benevolence, but my actions could do harm to those I intend to help, and so I won’t truly be benevolent. Thus practical wisdom is a necessary component of–or prerequisite to–all the virtues.

Thus a virtuous person is one who has learned about and fully internalized all of the virtues. They have become a key part of who he is, such that his actions are always motivated by them. And he has the practical wisdom necessary to ensure that his motivations and his actions are in line.

Really being virtuous means we don’t try to behave morality, because if we have to try–if our urges tell us to do something else–then we haven’t properly internalized the virtues. Instead, we aim to be virtuous people and, when we are, one of the results will be morally right action. Here again we see an important connection between virtue ethics and libertarianism. Virtue is a character trait, not a command. It is something we must achieve ourselves (though certainly with help from others), not something that can be forced upon us by the state. The state may provide part of the framework that enables us to achieve virtuousness, but it cannot (and so should not try to) make us virtuous.

Taking morally right actions isn’t why one cultivates virtue, of course. Rather one cultivates virtue because being virtuous is just what it means to achieve eudaimonia. The virtuous life is the good life.

With all this in mind, we can finally answer the question of moral action. To act well when faced with a moral dilemma is to do whatever a virtuous person would characteristically do in a similar situation. A fully virtuous person possesses all the virtues, as well as the practical wisdom to act well. We say “act well” instead of “right action” because virtue ethics acknowledges that not all dilemmas have a right answer. Two virtuous people, in the same circumstances, could take different actions, while both acting in accord with the virtues.

Notice that this formulation is not a recipe for acting morally but, rather, a means to evaluate the morality of an action. If presented with a moral dilemma, we shouldn’t ask, “What would a virtuous person do in this situation.” Rather, we should act in accord with what our own virtue tell us to do. Thus a person lacking virtue will not be able to behave virtuously–though he can still stumble upon the right moral action by accident.

In one sense, this means virtue ethics isn’t as clear a path to right moral action as the alternatives. You can’t just apply a rule and get a result. Rather, virtue ethics says, “Let us start by enabling people to develop kindness, honesty, prudence, caring, and so on. Then we we can trust those virtuous people to act well.” In fact, the acting well will simply be whatever choices those virtuous people make.

It’s possible to argue that much of the wisdom of consequentialism and deontology can find a place within a virtue ethical framework. A virtuous person will care about the consequences of his actions and he will act in ways that respect the autonomy of others. We cannot achieve eudaimonia by actively and consistently doing harm, nor can we achieve it by treating our fellow humans as means instead of ends.[2]

And all of this has profound implications for the state, a topic I’ll turn to next time.

If you’d like to explore that detail, the entries on virtue ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are perfect places to start. ↩
For more on what distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism and deontology, as well as what advantages it may have over both, take a look at Why Virtue Ethics is Better Than Consequentialism and Deontology at Philosophus Autodidactus. ↩

The Sovietization of America

John Hospers — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:07:10 -0400

John Hospers was professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He was also the first Libertarian Party Presidential candidate in 1972.

In this video from a 1994 International Society for Individual Liberty conference, Hospers shares his thoughts on the current state of affairs in America, citing the litigation explosion, silly laws and regulatory overreach, the proposed Clinton healthcare program, minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines and civil asset forfeiture policies, and more generally all manner of government interference in Americans’ lives.

The Socialist Calculation Debate, with Prolegomena to Any Future Metamarkets. Part I: Really Hard Math.

Jason Kuznicki — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:50:36 -0400

The socialist calculation debate is an important episode in the history of economic thought in part because it revealed some of the previously underappreciated things that markets accomplish. It did so by supposing the existence of a socialist planning agency that would have to do all of those things instead - a thing that many socialists of course wanted, but that supporters of the free market have also found very useful to examine. It turned out that the planning agency would face a large number of previously unanticipated problems. Many of them now appear insoluble.

Not that we haven’t tried. On the contrary, lots of work has been done here. That work illuminates what markets actually accomplish (not always what we thought they did!), what economic science can know about them (not as much as we’d like!), and what institutions, if any, might ever be able to improve on them.[1] There are many facets to the socialist calculation debate, and in what follows I’ll talk about only some of the more relevant ones.

One problem in talking about this fascinating episode in the history of economic thought is that each of its lines of argument is often conflated with the others, and, at times, an author raising objections to the prospect of socialist calculation will veer from one problem to another with little in the way of transition. I’ve tried hard to sort out the threads as I see them, but it’s very possible that someone more well-read in Austrian economics will come along and disagree.[2]

Anyway, let’s begin looking at objections.

I. The Math Is Too Hard.

This is by far the weakest objection to the prospect of socialist calculation. It’s also one that I still seem to find in all kinds of places, and still offered as if it mattered. It doesn’t, and it’s not a terribly important objection anymore, but it’s necessary to go through it to get to the interesting stuff.

By the early 20th century, economists had shown that in theory, a centrally directed socialist allocation of resources could match that of a market economy that was in a Walrasian general equilibrium.

What’s a Walrasian general equilibrium? The economist Léon Walras had earlier shown mathematically that, under certain not obviously problematic assumptions it was possible for the markets in many different goods to clear simultaneously – that is, a multi-good market could theoretically adjust all of its prices so that supply and demand were in balance for all goods at the same time. Producers could theoretically make the exact amounts needed to fill consumer demand, and consumers who were willing to pay the market price could always get what they wanted. Most importantly, Walras showed that nothing about the simultaneous existence of many different goods in his model would get the way of the process, and the existence money wouldn’t either.[3]

General equilibrium has obvious appeal, and yet real-world economies never seem to reach it. Walras himself emphasized that markets only approximated his theoretical equilibrium through a process he called tâtonnement–literally, “groping.” And they were therefore not terribly efficient when compared to the mathematical ideal. Which I think is true.

Scientific socialists, in part inspired by Enrico Barone, proposed to do better.[4] Solving the right system of equations would in theory give planners the optimal allocations of all capital and consumption goods, allowing them to reach Walrasian equilibrium directly, even as markets could only grope about in the dark.

In the early twentieth century, theoretical economists – even folks like Lionel Robbins and F.A. Hayek – conceded that all of the above was true. But, they said in part, the math was just too hard. It’ll take forever to solve all those equations.[5]

But forever is a very long time, and today we have computers that can most certainly crack problems like this one. Even, as some have claimed, for an economy with millions of goods.

In 1993, Allin Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott examined the calculations needed to very closely approximate market-clearing prices for all goods in the Soviet economy circa 1983. For this economy of around 10 million goods, and using only a commercially available supercomputer of mid–1980s vintage, they determined that market-clearing prices, denominated in hours of unskilled labor, could be roughly arrived at in just 17 minutes.

That’s a pretty impressive result. So impressive, in fact, that one gets the feeling that something else must almost certainly be going on here.

And indeed, something else is going on here, but what it is will have to wait for the next post in the series.

Do I seem perhaps dangerously open to the prospect of something one day supplanting the market? Well, I am! My commitment is not to markets as an end in themselves, but only as a means to the end of human well-being. The same is true, I think, of basically any other reflective advocate of a market-driven social order. ↩
Markets have been great for humanity. But if there’s something better, do let’s find it, shall we? But only – and this is key – only after we understand what markets have actually been doing for us, and thus what pitfalls might await us if we abandon them. Some of these are wholly evitable, I think, and this is a matter that the socialist calculation debate does much to clarify.
Yes, Austrian, and not Chicago. The Chicago school of economics stands condemned in the eyes of Austrians for making many of the same errors that the scientific socialists did. I think the Austrians are basically right, and while Chicago economists have done many interesting and worthwhile things, their claims about what we are capable of knowing about markets sometimes verge on hubristic to me. The reasons for this will become more apparent as the series goes on. ↩
There are many later objections to Walras’ model, including those of John Maynard Keynes. We don’t need to get into them here. It’s enough to say that if Keynes is right, then his work may pose a problem for both laissez-faire markets and for those calculating socialisms that try to emulate markets in Walrasian equilibrium. ↩
Marxists of course term themselves scientific socialists, in contrast to the utopians, but Marx did relatively little in the way of describing mathematically how a centrally planned socialism would work. Still, though, this term is almost a necessity for labeling those who did. I can’t think of a better one. ↩
They raised other objections, too. Particularly Hayek, of whom we’ll have much more to say in future posts. Part of what I’m doing here is chunking the story into discrete analytical bits, and this one – sorry – is only about the Really Hard Math. ↩

Defending the Non-Aggression Principle: A Reply to Matt Zwolinski Part 3

George H. Smith — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:36:13 -0400

In Part 1 of my critique of Matt Zwolinski’s article, “Six Reasons Why Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle,” I noted that I was not obliged to write detailed responses to Zwolinski’s sketchy criticisms. But it is nearly impossible to explain the flaws in three of Zwolinski’s “reasons” without going into a bit of detail. This will leave two additional points for the fourth, and final, part of my critique.

Of course, Zwolinski might claim that he could not cover everything in a single, brief article. But brevity does not excuse misrepresenting some of the positions that he set out to criticize, as we find with the last two “reasons” that I discuss in this part.

Zwolinski claims that the non-aggression principle (NAP) entails an “All-or-Nothing Attitude Toward Risk.”

The NAP clearly implies that it’s wrong for me to shoot you in the head. But, to borrow an example from David Friedman, what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger? What if it is not one bullet but five?

Unless you have consented to play Russian Roulette, this situation involves far more than a risk; it is first and foremost a threat, and you have the right to defend yourself against legitimate threats. If someone shoots a pistol at you from a distance but misses his intended target on the first shot, then you don’t need to wait for a subsequent bullet to strike your body before exercising your right of self-defense, say, by shooting back. Similarly, if someone loads one or more bullets into a revolver and points it at your head, then you don’t need to wait until he pulls the trigger before you may respond with defensive violence, so the number of bullets in the revolver is irrelevant. The mere pointing of a gun at your head qualifies as a serious threat, even if, unbeknownst to you, Zwolinski’s revolver is empty. (See my detailed treatment of threats in “Justice Entrepreneurship in a Free Market” and “Justice Entrepreneurship Revisited,” in Journal of Libertarian Studies, 3, 1979). Zwolinski continues:

Of course, almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons. We run this risk when we drive on the highway (what if we suffer a heart attack, or become distracted), or when we fly airplanes over populated areas….

Here Zwolinski raises the possibility of accidents, but accidents are in an altogether different category than deliberate threats. Suppose someone forces you, on pain of death, to walk a narrow plank across a deep chasm. Does this involve a risk? Of course it does, but this risk has been imposed by the threat of force, and that’s the relevant point. If you fall off the plank to your death, we would not properly call this an accidental death, as we do with automobile and plane accidents, since you were coerced into taking the risk. Similarly, if the hammer of Zwolinksi’s revolver strikes a loaded chamber and you are shot in the head, then your death would not be accidental, provided you did not consent.

If you don’t wish to assume the risk of driving, then don’t drive. And if you don’t want to run the risk of an airplane crashing into your house, then move to a safer location. (You don’t own the airspace used by planes, after all.) No scenario of the risks encountered in everyday life is remotely comparable to Zwolinski deliberately pointing a gun at your head—an act that any reasonable person would interpret as a serious threat.

Zwolinski claims that the NAP does not prohibit fraud.

Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud. But according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence. If I tell you that the painting you want to buy is a genuine Renoir, and it’s not, I have not physically aggressed against you. But if you buy it, find out it’s a fake, and then send the police (or your protective agency) over to my house to get your money back, then you are aggressing against me. So not only does a prohibition on fraud not follow from the NAP, it is not even compatible with it, since the use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.

Zwolinski seems unaware that Rothbard analyzed the issue of fraud in the context of a title-transfer theory of contracts. As Rothbard wrote: “When Smith exchanges a bag of apples for Jones’ pound of butter, he is actually transferring his ownership rights [i.e., title] in the apples in exchange for the ownership rights to the butter, and vice versa.”

It is not as if Zwolinski needed to search obscure articles by Rothbard to find his treatment of contract and fraud, since it appears in his major work on “political ethics,” The Ethics of Liberty. (For a briefer explanation, see the Wiki article, Title-transfer theory of contract.) Here is an excerpt from Property Rights and the Theory of Contract (Chapter 19 of The Ethics of Liberty):

Under our proposed theory would fraud be actionable at law? Yes, because fraud is failure to fulfill a voluntarily agreed upon transfer of property, and is therefore implicit theft. If, for example, A sells to B a package which A says contains a radio, and it contains only a pile of scrap metal, then A has taken B’s money and not fulfilled the agreed upon conditions for such a transfer—the delivery of a radio. A has therefore stolen B’s property.

This analysis, which has been standard libertarian fare for many decades (Ayn Rand’s approach was very similar), rests on a distinction between a title to property and the possession of property. A title is a rightful claim of ownership and should be distinguished from physical possession. If a thief enters your house and steals your computer while you are absent, then you still retain the title to that computer even though the thief has physical control over it. And since to have a property right, or title, to a computer means the right to use and dispose of that computer, the thief is violating your property right to the computer so long as he maintains possession of it without your consent. In short, the thief, by exercising physical control over your computer without your consent, is forcibly preventing you from using your property as you see fit.

It is a simple matter to apply this reasoning to cases of fraud. Suppose I purchase a diamond ring from a jeweler for $1000, but I am given a fake diamond. According to our agreement, I transferred my title to $1000 to the jeweler in exchange for his title to a diamond ring. Well, he now has possession of the $1000 but I don’t have possession of a diamond ring, even though I have the title to one. Hence if the jeweler refuses to transfer possession of the property to which I have legitimate title, then, as with a thief, he is withholding my property by force. And if perchance the jeweler doesn’t have a diamond ring, then the title to the $1000 reverts back to me. Thus, once again, if the jeweler refuses to refund the money, he is again forcibly preventing me from using and disposing of my property as I see fit.

As with any theory, objections might be raised against Rothbard’s title-transfer theory of contract and its implications for fraud. But such objections are irrelevant to Zwolinski’s critique, for he doesn’t so much as hint that Rothbard even had a theory of fraud, much less one that meshes quite nicely with his title-transfer theory of contract.

Zwolinski claims that the NAP is “Parasitic on a Theory of Property.”

Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property. Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head. It certainly looks like B is aggressing against A in this case. But on the libertarian view, whether this is so depends entirely on the relevant property rights—specifically, who owns the field. If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B. Thus, “aggression,” on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all. It means “violation of property rights.” But if this is true, then the NAP’s focus on “aggression” and “violence” is at best superfluous, and at worst misleading. It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.

As before, Zwolinski seems unaware of how Rothbard dealt with the topic at hand. In “Property and Criminality” (Chapter 9 of The Ethics of Liberty), Rothbard clarified “the basic rule of the libertarian society” by stating “that no one has the right to aggress against the legitimate or just property of another.” As Rothbard put it in the second chapter of For a New Liberty, “the central axiom of the libertarian creed is nonaggression against anyone’s person and property.” Again, in the first paragraph under “The Nonaggression Axiom,” Rothbard incorporates the notion of property rights into his formulation of the NAP.

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion [of property rights].

Given these and many similar statements by Rothbard, it is very odd to complain, as Zwolinski does, that the “meaning and normative force [of the NAP] are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property.” Rothbard made precisely that point many times and in considerable detail by incorporating a theory of property rights into his conception of aggression. In other words, it is only by specifying the relevant property rights that we can identify aggression in the first place.

Again, Rothbard’s approach might be open to criticism, but for Zwolinski to state that Rothbard’s notion of aggression depends on a theory of property rights, and to offer this as a criticism of Rothbard when in fact it is essential to his conception of aggression, displays an ignorance of Rothbard’s ideas.

At least Zwolinski doesn’t completely miss the boat when he says that “’aggression,’ on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all.” This relates to a distinction I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, namely a possible difference between “violence” and “force.” I will take up this topic in Part 4, along with Zwolinski’s other two points about pollution and the rights of children.

To be continued….

Pollution and Minimizing Aggression

J. C. Lester — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:30:46 -0400

In his post on pollution and the non-aggression principle, Matt Zwolinski begins by telling us that “Libertarians generally believe that aggression against innocent persons is morally wrong, and that the only just use of violence is to prevent aggression by others.” Somewhat less imprecisely, we might say that the only just use of coercion (using force and the threat of force against people) is to prevent or redress aggression.

He then says, “In this respect, at least, the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls was on precisely the same page as his libertarian colleague, Robert Nozick” and quotes Rawls on “freedom” purportedly to that effect. However, Rawls has an understanding of “freedom” that is inherently political and which sanctions much that libertarians would rightly see as itself involving aggression. Consequently, Rawls and Nozick are certainly not “on precisely the same page”.

We are soon asked, “Suppose I aggress against you not by beating you over the head with a club, but by blowing tobacco smoke into your face? The smoke-blowing, just like the clubbing, is a physical invasion of your body. And it is a harmful invasion.” And here we should note that the physical harm itself is irrelevant to liberty. What matters is that the victim disvalues the invasion for whatever reason. If an aggression were to improve the victim’s health, then it would still flout his liberty.

After such considerations, Zwolinski concludes that “The consistent application of Rothbard’s absolutist principle of non-aggression thus seems to require a prohibition on all forms of non-consensual pollution.” And in its absolutist form I agree. However, this overlooks something crucially important: it cuts both ways. The enforcement of the prohibition would itself aggress against the people whose activities would produce the pollution (e.g., having fires for needed warmth and cooking). So such prohibitions cannot be allowed either. We have reached not one but two unacceptable conclusions and, more to the point, they amount to an inconsistency in the “absolutist” version of the theory. Hence that form of the theory is a priori refuted. (I know that Rothbardians try to introduce various points to solve such problems, but they look ad hoc and invalid to me.)

There are two main problems with the absolutist theory that lead to this result. First, while liberty itself can be interpreted as the absence of aggression, the libertarian policy must be to minimize aggression when there is such a clash as that described. Thus some sort of compromise is required, maybe with some damages being paid in one or the other direction. Second, “aggression” understood in terms of violating property rights is only a rule of thumb. “Aggression” can be more abstractly and accurately theorized as proactively imposing costs (such as both pollution and pollution prohibitions) on other people. This pre-propertarian theory is required for consistently solving such property problems, paradoxes, and inconsistencies whenever they occur.

This alternative approach should become clearer and more cogent as I reply to Zwolinski’s final essay, in which he attempts to refute the “non-aggression principle” beyond any salvation.

Politicians, Peptides, and Stupidity: An Evening with Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:02:58 -0400

Dr. Robert Anton Wilson was the author (along with Robert Shea) of the popular Illuminatus! trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. His other books have found great acclaim as well, many of them achieving “cult classic” status. Wilson has been described at various times throughout his life as a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and agnostic mystic.

In this video from the Libertarian Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention in 1987, Wilson treats the audience to a humorous and irreverent talk about everything from the state of world politics to a discussion on metaphysics, chemistry, and the nature of reality.

The Myth of Immigrant Welfare Use

Alex Nowrasteh — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:21:35 -0400

Alex Nowrasteh, an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, explains that according to every major study on labor markets, immigrants to the United States don’t use welfare nearly as much as some think they might.

Produced by Evan Banks and Aaron Powell.

Defending the Non-Aggression Principle: A Reply to Matt Zwolinski Part 2

George H. Smith — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:59:24 -0400

In Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle, Matt Zwolinski presents sundry arguments to buttress his case that the non-aggression principle (NAP) should be viewed as a defeasible presumption. In this essay I will deal only with his second point—according to which minor infractions of the NAP are morally permissible when they result in significant benefits—and leave his other arguments for a later time.

I am devoting so much space to this issue, not because Zwolinski presents much of an argument, but because his examples typify a form of argument that is exceedingly common. Libertarians have been discussing similar hypotheticals for as long as there have been libertarians. If you and your libertarian friends have ever spent too much time in a bar, then you almost certainly have heard or even posited examples that fall in the same category as the examples given by Zwolinski.

Zwolinski basically engages in arguments from examples. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, this is a problematic approach because examples do not explain themselves. Their significance, if they have any, can be discerned only with the aid of a general theory, so philosophers with different theories will interpret the same example in different ways. Unfortunately, Zwolinski has only told us that he thinks the NAP is a defeasible presumption, so unless he specifies some criteria of defeasibility (see Part 1) we don’t have much of a theory to work with, nor do we have anything more than a floating fragment of a paradigm.

Zwolinski claims that, according to a strict interpretation of the NAP, “No amount of aggression, no matter how small, is morally permissible. And no amount of offsetting benefits can change this fact.”

This fuzzy account fails to distinguish a theory of justice from a more general theory of ethics (a point I raised in Part 1). To commit an unjust act entails that the victim has a claim of redress against the aggressor, often in the form of reparations. And though matters of justice and injustice normally harmonize with our fundamental moral principles, this is not always the case. There may be exceptions.

Suppose that a mother with a starving child has no realistic course of action except to steal food from a grocery store. In this and in similar “emergency” situations, I would argue that the theft might be morally justifiable. However, it would still be unjust. That is to say, the mother would be obligated to compensate her victim (the grocery store owner), and should she refuse, the victim would have the option (which he need not exercise) to take legal action against the thief. Libertarian justice is concerned with rights, their violations, and restitution, not with the moral worth of actions per se. The owner of the food does not forfeit his property rights because of the needs of the mother, however legitimate and severe her needs may be.

Let us suppose that the opposite is true. Let us suppose that the mother, in virtue of the need to save her child from starvation, did not commit an unjust act against the owner of the grocery store by taking food without his consent—in short, let us suppose that her action was just. From this it follows that the mother had a right to the food, in which case we could not properly call her action “theft” at all. Moreover, if the mother had a juridical right to the food she took, this would mean that the grocery store owner had an enforceable duty to let her take the food. Thus, if he used force in an effort to stop the mother, then he would be guilty of violating her rights and could be prosecuted in a court of law.

Zwolinski continues with this hypothetical:

But suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger?

Although I don’t recall encountering this hypothetical in Hume’s writings, it may be based on Hume’s famous remark (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Section III), ‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” In any case, Zwolinski’s version is a prime instance of what I call itsy-bitsy counterexamples to a general principle. Itsy-bitsy hypotheticals can be used against virtually any moral or juridical principle—including, I suspect, principles that Zwolinski himself would defend—so they may be dubbed counterexamples for all occasions.

The itsy-bitsy counterthrust to general principles consists of positing very minor exceptions to a rule, and then concluding that only a rigid dogmatist would fail to admit the legitimacy of those exceptions.

Now, true enough, if Zwolinski could save the world by scratching my finger, then that would be a reasonable price to pay for saving every human being. But since the destruction of the world would entail my destruction as well, we must wonder why I would not gladly permit Zwolinski to scratch my finger, which would make his action voluntary and not aggressive at all.

Of course, a notable feature of itsy-bitsy hypotheticals is that they can be adjusted to meet the demands of the philosopher. In our case, Zwolinski might stipulate that he could save the world only by scratching the finger of an unwilling victim. If Zwolinski is unable to convince me (or anyone else) about the urgent need to scratch a finger, then he might have no recourse except to use force rather than persuasion to achieve his noble goal of saving mankind.

If Zwolinski told me that he could save the world by scratching my finger, then, in all probability, I would write him off as a nutcase and tell him to go away. There is a good reason for my reaction, namely the probable fact that Zwolinski would be unable to explain and justify the supposed connection between cause (a scratch) and consequence (saving the world). We do not live in a world where scratching fingers can save the earth from destruction, so I would have no reason to take Zwolinski seriously.

Only in some alternate world, a world with different causal laws than the world we know, might the finger-scratching hypothetical make sense. But in a natural-law moral theory of the sort that most libertarians defend, our theory of justice is based on certain presuppositions about the causal relationships among human beings and their physical environment. Suppose, for example, that a self-identified witch threatened to cast a spell on Zwolinski that would cause his penis to disappear—a power that was seriously discussed in the famous witch hunter’s manual, Malleus Maleficarum (1486).

Using the reality of witchcraft as a hypothetical framework, I could easily spin my own dilemmas for the NAP. As I recall, the Malleus Maleficarum discusses two possibilities in regard to a witch’s power to make penises disappear: Either this was an optical illusion of some sort or there was actually a physical detachment. The manual tells the story—which was probably a bit of medieval folk humor that the authors took too seriously—about a witch who placed her stolen penises in a basket that she hid in a tree. When an unfortunate victim gave in to her demands in exchange for having his penis restored, she led him to the tree, told him to climb it and then search the basket for his penis. But the victim proved too greedy. Instead of taking his own penis, he took the largest one in the basket and presented it to the witch for restoration. But she was not fooled, and in retaliation for his deception she reneged on the deal and the poor fellow ended up less than a man.

So how would a libertarian, working with the NAP, analyze some complexities of this situation? For example, suppose the man previously stole a pig from the witch, so she took his penis in retaliation and said she would keep it until he returned her pig. Would this be justifiable, according to the NAP? Well, among other contingencies, we cannot even begin to solve this problem unless we know other options that were available to the witch. If she had the power to steal penises, then it seems reasonable to suppose that she could have used her magical powers to get her pig back by some other means.

We have a similar problem with Zwolinski’s hypothetical. A world in which scratching a finger can save the world from destruction would be a world totally unlike the world we know. And if we wish to base our moral theories on “the nature of things,” then we cannot possibly arrive at a theory of justice appropriate to Zwolinksi’s alternate world unless we understand its causal laws. For instance, it might be possible for Zwolinski to save the world by scratching his own finger, thereby removing the need to aggress against me or anyone else.

Alternate-universe hypotheticals are a cottage industry among academic philosophers. Decades ago, while in college, I encountered the following scenario in the first edition of Human Conduct, an excellent text on ethics by John Hospers. Suppose you could cure all the cancer in the world, and prevent all cancers in the future, by willing the death of a single person unknown to you. Would not the death of one innocent person somewhere in the world—a person you don’t even know—be offset by saving millions of lives?

Here again we face the problem of a world with different causal laws than the world we know. And here again we are given no sense of the options that might exist in that alternate world. If, using the power of your mind alone, you could cure cancer by willing the death of one innocent person, then maybe, with a little practice, you could learn how to bypass the middleman and use your mind to cure cancer directly. Other possibilities suggest themselves as well. Are you the only person in this alternate universe with remarkable psychic powers? It seems reasonable to suppose that others would possess the same powers, so perhaps they could assist you in curing cancer without sacrificing an innocent life. Or perhaps you could find someone who is going to die anyway, or who plans to commit suicide, and then get permission to direct your Darth Vader-like powers against him or her. Again, no injustice would be involved in this alternative course of action.

Needless to say, such hypotheticals never present us with reasonable alternatives, because to do so would require an explanation of some weird causal properties in a nonexistent world that the philosopher is unwilling—indeed, unable—to explain.

The libertarian theory of justice is based on the world as we know it, not on some magical world about which we know nothing. A different world with different causal laws could very well generate a different theory of justice, but we can say nothing more without knowledge of how that alternate world would work.

Lest I be accused of evading the bull, let’s take him by the horns, put reason aside, and consider Zwolinski’s itsy-bitsy hypothetical at face value. Would it be morally permissible for Zwolinski to forcibly scratch my finger in order to save the world from destruction? Would not this itsy-bitsy act of injustice be morally offset by its beneficial consequences?

I agree that for Zwolinski to scratch my finger (against my will) would be a small price to pay for saving the world, so I would recommend that he pay the price for his moral but unjust action by compensating me for the scratch. If I should demand reparations, then I doubt if the money involved would amount to much—and I think highly enough of Zwolinski to assume that he would be willing to fork out a few bucks as the price of saving his own life and the lives of everyone else in the world. And in the event that he could not afford to restitute me on a philosopher’s income, I think millions of grateful people—those whose lives he saved—would be more than happy to chip in.

Fortunately, Zwolinski’s next itsy-bitsy hypothetical is more realistic and does not suffer from the same problems as the first. In fact, it is positively Obamaesque.

Or, to take a perhaps more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children? Even if we grant that taxation is aggression, and that aggression is generally wrong, is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?

How does one deal with this sort of argument, especially when it comes from a philosopher who calls himself a libertarian? I know of no other way except to repeat what should be obvious to libertarians: Yes, it is unjust to take money at the point of a gun from some people in order to benefit other people, regardless of how Zwolinski may plan to spend the ill-gotten gains. If a gun-brandishing thief accosts a billionaire in the street and demands $1000, then that act is no less unjust than if the thief had stolen money from a lower-income person. One’s rights do not diminish as one acquires more money. The fact that $1000 is pocket change to a billionaire is irrelevant.

If Zwolinski wishes to provide vaccinations for thousands of poor kids, then he should launch a charity drive and raise the necessary funds by voluntary methods. He may regard the tax on billionaires as minor when measured in terms of money, but from a moral perspective there is nothing minor about using force against innocent people. If Zwolinski thinks his itsy-bitsy tax, though technically unjust, would be morally permissible, then let him don his Robin Hood costume, arm himself with a bow and arrows, and accept personal responsibility by robbing billionaires himself.

Of course, were Zwolinski to do this, he would risk being hunted down, arrested, tried on numerous counts of armed robbery, and then thrown in jail—even if he stole only a relatively small amount from each billionaire. Would he be willing to take this risk? Perhaps he should. Even if Zwolinski ended up in jail, some of his Bleeding Heart colleagues might view his loss of freedom as more than offset by saving the lives of thousands of children. So let’s all whip out our interpersonal utility calculators and figure out what Zwolinski should do.

To be continued….

Rape and the Minimum Wage

Matt Zwolinski — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:42:35 -0400

Just to clear up any misconceptions, I think the minimum wage is an unjust and inhumane public policy. It is morally wrong. I also believe—I hope less controversially—that rape is a serious moral wrong. And no, George, I didn’t need to study history, sociology, or empirical economics to come to that conclusion.

I suppose George Smith thinks he has snared me in some sort of philosophical trap by forcing me to admit this. After all, in my original essay on the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), I criticized devotees of the NAP for the casually a priori approach they often take to issues like the legitimacy of public roads, public schools, and the minimum wage. But—A-ha!—if I don’t think that careful empirical study is necessary to determine the injustice of rape and child molestation, then how can I simultaneously hold that it is necessary in order to determine the injustice of the minimum wage? Gotcha!

Well, maybe it doesn’t sound quite so much like a gotcha when I put it that way. Is it really so absurd to believe that the immorality of rape is considerably easier to discern than the immorality of the minimum wage? That the latter might require a more careful study of a wider array of empirical evidence than the former? I suppose it doesn’t seem that way to me. Some acts wear their immorality on their sleeve—it is part of “what is seen,” to borrow Bastiat’s famous distinction. With others, and perhaps the minimum wage is one of them, most of the wrongness derives from facts that are “unseen,” and require a bit of careful digging to unearth. Is there really an inconsistency here?

Of course, if you think as I do that coercion is bad, then you’ll think that minimum wage laws are prima facie objectionable even before engaging in this digging. But notice that even in the case of rape, we wouldn’t want to end our analysis here. Rape is coercive, yes. And it involves a violation of one’s property in one’s body. But if this is all we understood about rape, then we wouldn’t have come anywhere close to understanding the full weight or significance of its injustice. We wouldn’t understand the devastating psychological effect that rape can have on a woman. We wouldn’t understand that women are often blamed for their own rape, or the ways our entrenched institutions protect rapists while shaming and silencing their victims. We wouldn’t understand, in other words, why a lot of people think rape is an especially serious injustice, or one that calls for more attention and more action to effectively combat.

Rape is aggressive and a violation of property rights, just like stealing someone’s car radio or imposing a minimum wage law on them. But rape is not just like a minimum wage law. And that is because aggression and property rights are, by themselves, not the only categories relevant to moral or juridical evaluation.

This is a rather obvious point, as far as moral philosophy goes. But it does seem to pose a challenge to those who believe that all the thorny questions of justice can be resolved by the application of a neat and tidy principle like the NAP. If not all aggression is on a par—if some, like rape, is very seriously wrong, while some, like shining a flashlight at your house, is not wrong at all—then why should we believe that the non-aggressiveness or aggressiveness of conduct is anything like a sufficient indicator of its justice or injustice? And why should we believe that aggression (no matter how small) must never be permitted in order to produce any kind of social or individual benefit (no matter how large)?

Smith raises a number of other points in his essay, most of which I won’t be able to address here. Which is just as well, I suppose, since he hasn’t yet managed to develop many of those points himself. He stresses (contra Rothbard) that the NAP is about “force,” not “violence,” but doesn’t bother to explain what he takes the difference between those two concepts to be. He asserts that the NAP is about justice, not about moral permissibility, but again he leaves the difference almost entirely unexplained. Since these distinctions appear to play an important role in Smith’s argument, I assume that he will explain them at some point in his series. But until he does, there is little I can do to respond to them.

Smith concludes his essay by accusing me, somewhat uncharitably, of having engaged in a “hit-and-run” against the NAP. I’m not sure what he was expecting from a 1,200 word blog post. Apparently, criticizing the NAP on a number of grounds isn’t enough—I should have developed and articulated my own alternative theory of libertarianism too. Well, I’m happy to do that, and to discuss in more detail the various topics I raised in my initial post. There is certainly more to say about each of them. So I must object to Smith’s characterization. It’s only a hit-and-run if you hit and then run. And I’m not going anywhere.

Practical Tools for Libertarians

Karl Hess — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:07:00 -0400

Karl Hess was a noted speechwriter (for Barry Goldwater among others) and author, and later in his life became known as a tax resister, welder, and market anarchist.

In this video from a National Libertarian Party convention in 1985, Hess speaks about how the invention of various tools throughout history has changed the world for the better, in many cases despite the best efforts of bureaucrats and politicians. He also gives general remarks about the libertarian movement and gives advice regarding his own brand of simple, harmonious living.

Epicycles and Non-Aggression

Brian Kogelmann — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:11:17 -0400

There has been much buzz lately in libertarian Internet circles concerning the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), a favorite ethical maxim adopted by many libertarians in defense of anarcho-capitalism. This increased attention to the NAP is due in large part to Matt Zwolinski’s excellent article articulating many of its counterintuitive implications. Zwolinski recommends that instead of radically editing the principle as stated – that is, instead of adding epicycles to our original understanding of the orbital paths of celestial bodies – libertarians ought to undergo a “Copernican Revolution” by developing a new ethical system to justify our preferred socio-political order. Like any good controversy, there has been much response, most notably by Jason Kuznicki in his equally-excellent essay “Non-Aggression and Billiards.” In this essay I examine Kuznicki’s defense of the NAP, not necessarily as an absolute and inviolable axiom, but at the very least as a strong though rebuttable presumption.

We are all taught that certain things are true when in actuality they are false. We are taught, for instance, that there are three inviolable laws of motion governing all moving bodies in our universe, when in reality things work a bit differently when we start dealing with very small particles. We are also fed exaltations concerning the immutable axioms of Euclidean geometry when such an axiomatic system remains contingent upon a series of assumptions that may or may not hold true. Even so, these kind-of-true-but-strictly-speaking-false principles of physics and mathematics are very useful to us: they can allow us to understand how billiard balls interact with one another, or perhaps they help us find out how much manure we need to help fertilize a 16 foot by 24 foot field. The NAP, so Kuznicki argues, is of similar value: it gives us a good starting point to help determine when actions are morally right and morally wrong, though some refinement, or “engineering,” might be required for more advanced situations.

But many times Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry are insufficient. Surely the rocket scientist and quantum cryptologist need to go beyond high school mathematics and physics classes in order to do their jobs properly. This, of course, does not change the fact that most people need only an elementary understanding of physics and mathematics to get through their day-to-day lives. But in comparing the NAP to something like Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry, we need to see if the analogy carries over to this corollary: do practical agents, trying to navigate through life, require only the NAP to help guide most of their decisions, or do they need a more robust version of the NAP – or perhaps a new moral system altogether – in order to navigate life’s imbroglios? As practical agents, are we high school students or rocket scientists?

I contend that we are rocket scientists. We are rockets scientists not because life is that hard a thing to navigate through (though it certainly has its harsh contentions), but rather because the high school math many libertarians want us to adopt – the NAP – is so insufficient as a moral theory that it cannot stand up to the basic experiences we all, as practical agents, face. For example, most of us, it seems reasonable to suggest, will end up having and raising kids. Will the NAP (Newtonian physics) tell us how to raise them right? As Zwolinski points out, it will not only not tell us how to raise our kids correctly, it will, in actuality, approbate actions that any sane person would think constitutes morally impermissible methods of child rearing. Thus, quantum mechanics is required. Many of us also frequently engage in behavior that yields some sort of environmental pollution. Will the NAP (Euclidean geometry) gives us the right answer as to what we ought to do? Again, no. It will tell us that we cannot, as Zwolinski once again points out, drive an automobile or light a campfire, conclusions that are surely absurd. Thus, non-Euclidean geometry is required. Several people are confronted every day with the chance to commit some kind of fraud to make a quick buck or reap some benefit. Will the NAP tell these individuals how they ought to act? As Zwolinski shows, it will not. Our high school physics and mathematics has failed; we need a more sophisticated theory.

Since the adoption of the NAP results in rocket scientists trying to make their way with Newtonian mechanics, we need to beef up the NAP, rendering it capable of handling the sorts of problems we as rocket-scientist-like practical agents face. In editing the NAP, there seems to me to be two paths we can take. First, we can radically alter or add to our definition of “aggression,” in hopes of reproaching the sorts of actions our original NAP failed to delimit as off-limits. Kuznicki offers an attempt at doing this in hopes of rendering fraud impermissible; namely, he advocates we classify as morally impermissible actions that are “impediments to reflective self-rule” to go along with our ban on brute physical aggression. This may work, but it is certainly not enough. What do we add to physical aggression and impediments to self-rule if we are to outlaw a parent starving their child? What do we add to allow for reasonable amounts but not too much pollution? Moreover, we also run the risk of our amendments yielding results we find unacceptable. Would my neighbor playing loud heavy metal music several hours throughout the day impede my ability to reflectively self-rule? Maybe, if it sufficiently hindered my concentration. Yet most libertarians would find it acceptable to do something on one’s property as benign as playing loud music. So now we need to further edit what is meant by “reflective self-rule” to account for this result. Epicycles upon epicycles.

The second way we can strengthen the NAP proceeds as follows: we can keep our original understanding of what constitutes aggression, but then add a list of exemptions we consider to be legitimate instances of when the NAP may be transgressed. We then get something like this: it is morally obligatory to follow the dictates of the NAP except in cases x₁, x₂, x₃,…, x_n, in which case it is morally permissible (or perhaps obligatory) to disobey the dictates of the NAP. The problem, though, remains that variable n can be a high – indeed very high – number, to the point at which listing all exemptions becomes difficult, if not impossible. In fact, there is probably a case to be made that, given the tremendously narrow scope of the NAP and the ingenious ability of philosophers to dream up counterfactuals, the list of exemptions might be un-codifiable, presenting a problem for this approach to amending the NAP. Instead, it might be argued that rather than listing each and every exemption to the principle, we might simply develop a secondary rule determining when some situation constitutes a legitimate instance of when the NAP may be permissibly violated. But this project also seems rather hopeless, for any rule that concretely adjudicates exemptions from non-exemptions will have to contain excruciating detail – perhaps an un-enumerable amount of detail (we could not, for example, simply say that situation s constitutes an instance permitting exemption from the dictates of the NAP just in case situation s yields a severe reduction in an agent’s autonomy, because it is not clear what constitutes a “severe reduction in an agent’s autonomy”). Once again, epicycles upon epicycles.

It is not the case that every ethical system yielding implausible implications through counterfactual analysis must be abandoned for another ethical system. It might be that an ethical theory is polished to the point that it can be revised to such a miniscule extent that it remains worth holding on to – after all, one or two epicycles does not grossly detract from the elegance of an otherwise perfectly elliptical orbital path. But there comes a point when the amount of revision borders on the absurd – after we have drawn the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth epicycle. At this point, it makes sense to start anew in hopes of developing a better theory that does not require such extensive revision, allowing for maintained elegance. I think the NAP is in this latter category. As such, it is high time we, as libertarians, do as Zwolinski bids by undergoing our own Copernican Revolution in search of a better moral and political philosophy.

Revising Traditional Notions of Competition and Monopoly

Mario Rizzo, Jack High, Richard Langlois — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:47:00 -0400

Mario Rizzo is currently an associate professor of economics at New York University and the director of the Program on the Foundations of the Market Economy.

Jack High is an Austrian school economist and a professor of economics and public policy at George Mason University. He specializes in the process of competition and antitrust laws.

Richard Langlois is a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut. He is also a contributor at the blog Organizations and Markets.

In this video from a 1983 Center for the Study of Market Processes (now the Mercatus Center at George Mason University) event, these three economists each present papers that take various approaches to the issue of antitrust legislation, and then take questions from the audience. Rizzo’s paper is titled “A Reexamination of the Laws of Horizontal Collusional Arrangements,” High’s in entitled “Perfect Competition and the Economics of Information,” and Langlois’s is titled “Nonconventional Approaches to the Theory of Competition.”