A Challenge to Anarcho-Capitalism

One of my Facebook friends, Matt Dubuque, recently posted on his wall a link to a BBC report on a "disaster zone robot competition announced by Pentagon."

According to Matt, this sort of development shows that government is or can be a good thing, a source of original and valuable ideas that, even if originally military in conception, will carry over into civilian applications. This is a rebuke (in his view) to those of us, emphatically including yours truly, who don't see government as the cause of any net benefit in human life at all.

I challenged him on this, saying that I think the $2 million involved in the disaster-zone-robot competition would "almost certainly be better spent if left in the hands of the Chinese who lent it."

It is intriguing that when people try to make this kind of point, they so often focus on the military. The manner in which Japan was defeated in 1945 gave rise to a desire (a penitential one, perhaps) to show that atoms could be split for peaceful ends.  An effort upon which Japan itself became overly dependent, a fact highlighted by last year's Japanese tsunami.

Matt doesn't want to argue that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki blasts have worked out for the best because they have given us nuclear power plants. Indeed, when I asked him about that point he called it a "very big and very public" mistake.

So the case for government goodness based on Pentagon sponsored inventions comes back to those robots working in disaster zones. The military need for such robots is clear enough. If you bomb a place into rubble you'll want to have robots explore the rubble first. The military benefits can hardly be considered net benefits for humanity bestowed by governments!  We don't sing hymns to the rivalry of governments which produces the wars and the chaos which also produces more efficient ways to conduct that rivalry. At best, clever robots in the context of war will mitigate some of the awfulness of war.

Ah, but there will be civilian benefits ... someday, maybe. If we don't look at such claims with some skepticism, after all, we might find ourselves encouraging warfare-based statism, in the expectation that it will create ever more wonderful stuff (for those who survive long enough to enjoy the stuff.)

A more promising candidate for Matt's point then is the internet. He asked me whether I was asserting that:

 "1. The government and the Defense Department played no central role in the development of FTP.

"2. That FTP was not central to the founding of the Internet and its subsequent offspring the world wide web.

"3. That, on balance, the Internet and World Wide Web are simply of marginal utility?"

I begged off, saying I would address such points in an upcoming blog entry.  Which is where we are. So ....

For the uninitiated, FTP is "file transfer protocol," a critical internet building block that dates back to the early 1970s, and allows the quick transfer of text from one computer to another. And yes, of course, I acknowledge the historical truth in Matt's points (1) and (2). In 1958, as a response to the Soviet advances embodied in their Sputnik satellite, the US established an advanced research projects agency (ARPA) -- later renamed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name change made explicit what had been clear enough anyway -- the new interest in supporting "advanced" projects was an interest in those with military significance, in the face of the threat from Soviet communism. FTP, and in the early 1980s for that matter the development of graphical user interfaces (GUI) too, were offspring of ARPA/DARPA. 

Now ... isn't that good?  Hasn't the internet brought us a lot of useful stuff, such as my ability to explain these thoughts to whoever you are, reading this right now?

Well ... yes. But as to question (3) above, I still have to say, "maybe not."   Indeed, "probably not."  

The phrase "marginal utility" is an inapt one in this context. That's a technical phrase in economics, with a meaning different from what Matt seems to have in mind. What I think he has in mind is a full cost/benefit analysis. The problem with this is that it requires alternative-path scenarios. The question is not "is a world with long-distance speed-of-light non-hierarchical communication better than one without" but something more like "is a world with long-distance speed-of-light non-hierarchical communication of the sort the world now has because of ARPA/DARPA better than whatever would exist had it not come about in that way?"!

In considering that question, one would have to consider other ways in which long-distance, speed-of-light non-hirearchical communication could have come about. Do we know it could never have happened had there been no such post-Sputnik reaction?

The problem is the old one of weighing what we don't see against what we do see. What seems obvious is that if ARPA had never existed, the money that it spent would have been spent or invested in some other way. How do we decide among different possible pathways unless we have some sense of what else might have been done with it, whether in the telecomm field or elsewhere?
 
As an ambitious extreme for this sort of analysis, I'm reminded of a science fiction story I read once in which mercenary time travelers had somehow changed the outcome of the Punic Wars. The protagonist had to decide whether to time travel himself and undo the mischief the first set of time travelers had done, allowing Rome to win and the 'natural' course of history to proceed from there. In this novel, there is no 'better' or 'worse.' The 21st century AD that resulted from Hannibal’s victory was neither better nor worse than the one that resulted from Scipio's victory in the natural time line. Just very different.

Now think of something much simpler. Think of a bridge, built several years ago over the river Hypothetical with public funds. There was no big market-based demand for this bridge, because both the two towns separated by the mighty river Hypothetical were small. But … due in large part to that bridge, the towns have grown large, and merged into one. Instead of East Burg and West Burg there is now the unified town of Burg.

We Burgers no longer think of the bridge as a matter for continuing expenditures. After all, the maintenance costs of this bridge are a very small part of the overall highway budget of the state of which Burg is a part, and as to whatever bonds were sold to build the bridge, they’ve likewise melded into the broad background of public finance.

You can imagine an admirer of big government waxing poetically about the wonders of the bridge over Hypothetical. Where would the Burgers be without it?  They cross that bridge all the time, a huge commerce depends on it, they would be in a terrible fix were it to disappear!

Yet that admirer would be misguided. (At least he’d have to be judged so without much better reasoning than that!)   As Henry Hazlitt wrote long ago, thinking of precisely such cases, if you have taught yourself “to look for indirect as well as direct consequences [you can] once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence.” What of that capital that was diverted to create this bridge and indirectly to create the Burg that depends on it? That capital would otherwise have created homes, cars, washing machines, dresses and coats, etc.

No doubt we will continue to use the bridge whatever our imagination or philosophy allows. But why suspect a priori that the world created by the diversion of that capital is better than the world strangled at that moment?

That other world – one in which the whole highway system around this river on both banks had been left to market forces let us say – would likely have had new bridges at some point, too, since bridges are valuable things for which there is a market demand. There would not have been (on our stipulation) this particular bridge built with these materials, at this particular time. Why do we know the cost/benefit ratio along that path would have been worse?

I suspect the burden of proof lies quite the other way, for bridges and for file transfer methods too, and it is a burden that cannot be satisfied.

The capital was diverted by force in one way or another. Either the bridge was built by taxed revenue or it was built with money borrowed, due to the low interest rates that can go to a sovereign because of its power to tax, and because of the further power to declare interest on its bonds tax free. Either way, it was a diversion by force.

Force is quite generally a way of doing that which free transactions among free people would not have done. How does that make it a good thing? How does that make force-built bridges magically superior to whatever the freely transacting parties would have done.

I have to deem Matt’s point yet unmade.

Why I Am Not A Conservative, Conclusion

In the end, the reasons I am not a conservative (the reasons that label doesn't apply to the views I do hold, and the reasons I don't agree with views to which the label more readily does apply) are roughly the same as those Hayek set out.

Hayek's essay of this title was published in the very same year as the Goldwater book I've been examining: 1960.  Hayek said that in our day (in this respect, he speaks even more to ours than to his own) "movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty."  A conservative and a real liberal, a defender of individual, may well be thrown together in mutual opposition to those progressive movements which may call themselves liberal.

But Hayek also said that the problem with conservatism is that it offers no alternative.  "Let-us-keep- the-good-things-we-have" is not an alternative to change, because the world will necessarily change, and the real struggle has to be over the direction of change.  Toward more liberty, or toward less?

Hayek wrote, "the tug of war between conservatives amd progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."

That sentence echoes remarkably Goldwaters sentence, written at roughly the same time, about how the trouble with liberals is that they are in a hurry.  That is just what Hayek warned us conservatives would falsely say the trouble with "liberals" -- the folks he called progressives -- is.  The real trouble, on the other hand, is that the progressives are pulling us in the wrong direction.

I am reminded of a buddy of mine in college who was arrested for drunk driving.  That was the 1970s, and -- so long as no one was hurt -- drunk driving was not yet regarded as the horrendous offense it is nowadays taken to be.  It was under the general category stupid-college-kid offense.

Anyway, my buddy was driving along a sidewalk when he was arrested -- which made the breathalyzer test almost entirely unnecessary.  The next day, after I bailed him out, he complained to me that among the 6 or 7 charges for which the police officer had written him up, there was "speeding."  This was too much.  How could he have been speeding when he was driving on a place he shouldn't have been driving on at any rate!

I'm not, BTW, making fun of DWI offenses.  I was simply amused by my friend's indignation, and it comes back to me now because Hayek was offering in all seriousness -- and I think rightly -- the same complaint against the Goldwaters of the world.  They should not pretend that any part of the offense is speeding.  The problem is that progressives have us on a sidewalk!

This problem won't be resolved by complaints that suggest that a slower rate of speed on the sidewalk would be okay.

So: what are we to say about Goldwater's opposition to Brown v. Board?  Does it tell us anything beyond that one historic incident?   It tells us, I submit, that at a time when the progressive agenda demanded the end to Jim Crow, the conservative attitude reflexively defended Jim Crow.  Of course, many people defended Jim Crow out of self-interest.  It helped a lot of white people avoid competition in the job market,  for example.  The privileged generally abstain from challenging the grounds of their privilege.  But even those who lived in states without Jim Crow often reflexively defended the system, or opposed its opponents, out of the knee-jerk reflex Hayek understood.

It tells us, also, that when the progressives won that one, when Jim Crow was dead, conservatives in time came along, and posed as the true defenders of equality of opportunity for the Linda Browns of the world-- not because their principles had changed, but because the real objection posed by those principles had been one of velocity, and that is irrelevant given an accomplished fact.

A true liberal -- a believer in liberty, and in such forms of progress as serve liberty, consistent with the preserving of such liberty as has been attained -- would have found the root of the problem in the whole notion of mandatory public education.  Naturally, if there are government-run mandatory schools, if taxes are used to pay for them, if people under an arbitrary age are ordered to attend them absent specific state-sponsored exemptions -- then virtually everything that is done in the administration of that system will seem tyrannical to someone.  Evolution is taught or it isn't -- coercion either way.  The pledge of allegiance is made part of a regular ritual, or it isn't -- coercion either way.  The races are separated or they aren't -- coercion either way IF one understands that the system itself is coercive.

The real direction of progress (not of progressivism) would involve getting people to see market alternatives, and understand that the forces of spontaneous order will address all such dilemma to the extent they are allowed to do so. 

In some moments Goldwater seems to want to follow that rule.  Alas, though, he was all too often a conservative instead.

Why I Am Not A Conservative

That title served for some famous reflections by Fredrich Hayek.  It will serve for me as well.

Should I be a conservative?  After all, many in our own day who use that label for themselves happily define their creed as the distrust of government, central planning, etc.   That is valid enough for me, since I'm an anarcho-capitalist.  (Going further in the libertarian economic direction, then, than did Hayek.)

So: am I a conservative?

Fortunately, conservatism conserves enough of a memory of its own past that some of its proponents today quote classic texts, and these texts can give me a fix on what I am or am not.  For example, in the mid-20th century US one of the most prominent conservatives was Barry Goldwater, long-time Senator from Arizona, 1964 presidential candidate, author of a book entitled The Conscience of a Conservative (1960).

Let us see if he had anything to say that helps me fix ideas about what I am, or should be, or perhaps should not be.

"Conservatism," Goldwater says rather early on in that book, "therefore looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.  Liberals, on the other hand, -- in the name of a concern for "human beings" -- regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.  They are, moreover, in a hurry.  So that their characteristic approach is to harness society's political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel 'progress.'  In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature."

There is a good deal of confusion in those sentences, and I believe the respects in which they are confused will help me get to me goal: clarifying why I am not a conservative in any sense in which the late Senator Goldwater was.

The pause to blame liberals for being "in a hurry" is one loose thread on which we might want to tug.  After all, if somebody wants something that is wrong, then it hardly matters whether he wants it quickly or slowly. It is wrong to move quickly to do a bad thing and it is wrong to move slowly to do a bad thing.  

Someone is trying to rob a bank.  Oh, a bad thing.  And what is more, they're in a hurry! they have a getaway car all revved up out front and they're motioning to the teller to be quick about putting the loot in the bag.  Is that an aggravating factor?

Consider another set of bank robbers.  More methodical, they take days to create a tunnel beneath the bank into the vault.  They aren't in a hurry, then,  They are showing some patience in working toward their goal.  Are they the "good" bank robbers?  Are conservatives more firmly against the one set of bank robbers than the other?

I think not.  Indeed, the only relevance of this "in a hurry" qualification would arise if there were things that would be good only if accomplished slowly.

My inference is that Goldwater was doing two things in this passage.  First, he was trying to link his conservatism with the views of Edmund Burke, as expounded in the 1950's by political theorist Russell Kirk.   The rest of his (Goldwater's) book has relatively little to do with the Burke/Kirk constellation of ideas, but Goldwater wanted to bow in that direction.

Second, though, Goldwater wanted to anticipate what he would say about the civil rights struggles of black Americans later in his book.  He would say "It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision.  I believe that it is both wise and just for Negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority."

But, of course, he didn't want to desegregate in a hurry.  That would be fighting against nature.  He wanted the Justices to leave the decisions to the state legislatures, and he hoped that moral suasion would in time bring the state legislators around.

I have to wonder about the pragmatic significance of this sort of "agreement with the objectives."  After all, the 14th amendment was enacted in 1866.  It was 90 years later that the Supreme Court ordered desegregation, and even then it included the key phrase "all deliberate speed."  The word "deliberate"  (i.e. you in the states and towns can think about this and make sure you do it right) was an invitation to further foot dragging -- an invitation that was immediately accepted.

So 90 years plus is "in a hurry"?  

But let us return to the passage in the introduction, the passage I italicized above. Goldwater is unhappy that liberals "regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission in society."  What does that mean?

Can "wants" be divided into economic and non-economic "wants"?  Or are all wants economic wants?  I hope to take things up from this point tomorrow.

Pragmatism Refreshed: Freedom Pursued

Is pragmatism an adequate and indeed an essential foundation for the advocates of liberty? I have long contended that this question needs a strong "yes" answer. As I explained in my September 12 blog entry, though, I am delighted that Frank van Dun has set forth his reasons for believing that I am wrong.

This is my reply to the case he has made, which was in turn a response to an editorial I wrote years ago for a now-defunct magazine called The Pragmatist.

Preliminaries

I am an anarcho-capitalist. I am no longer active within the Libertarian Party, but I wish the LP well, and I speak not merely of the anarcho-caps therein but of the minarchists as well. The advance of their ideas is infinitely to be preferred over the continued dominance of the "liberals" and "conservatives" in public debate.

My earlier essay on "The Necessity of Pragmatism," moved as concisely as I could manage through a theory of meaning, to the nature of truth and knowledge, and then on to ethics. I also said a few words at that time about restitution as the central principle of Justice. I will leave restitution out of this essay, but otherwise I will retrace and elaborate my steps, taking account as I go of van Dun's critique.

Van Dun agrees with me largely on meaning, so I will be very brief here. Pragmatists ask "what difference would it make" were one hypothesis rather than another true. If there is no practical difference, then pragmatists write off the dispute as an idle one. There is no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere else. I will not press that point except to provide the curious with this link for the story of James' squirrel, a bit of philosophical exposition that van Dun and I both admire.

Van Dun disagrees with me about truth, but I think that this is largely because he conflates the old correspondence theory of truth with a more new-fangled thing called the disquotational (or deflationary) theory of truth. The two are not at all the same, as we can see from works in which advocates of the real correspondence view argue against deflation, and even from efforts to reconcile the two.

I think James' arguments retain their old force against the genuine correspondence theory. Jamesians can probably consent to the deflationary theory without loss of anything James wanted to save, though, because if "truth" is the uninteresting tautological property that deflationists say that it is, then the notion doesn't really do any work in epistemology or anywhere else. I'm happy to concede that the statement "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. If we say that this is a full account of truth, though, then we abstract from a lot of other considerations that show up in all of the older theories.

The gist of the older disputes remains, nonetheless. Giving up "truth" to the deflationists means that the 19th century disputes among coherentists, correspondence theorists and pragmatists will have to rage again over other labels, such as "reference," or "knowledge," or (fittest of all) "warrant." And pragmatism in particular can easily enough refit itself as what is nowadays called a theory of warrant, of when we are warranted in asserting or believing that snow is white or anything else.

I suspect that van Dun's real objection to my old essay, the heart of our quarrel, doesn't really become evident until deep into his essay, when he gets to historical questions. We come to that point when he quotes me thus: “Human history contains plenty of data from which we might draw the conclusion that liberty works and slavery fails.”

Human history

To this he takes exception on a number of grounds. He asks: “[Where] do we draw the line between ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’?" I might interject: the line is easily drawn, because I mean by slavery here what the history books mean by it -- the ownership or control of a person as a chattel. His questions continue: "What is the point of asking whether it is liberty or slavery that works? Surely, no one holds that the abolition of the institution of slavery brings a libertarian society into existence. A person can be unfree without being a slave (or a prisoner) in the common meaning of the term.”

True enough. Allow me to get this riposte properly underway, then, with two examples of unfreedom that fall far short of slavery, that also conspicuously didn't work. I take examples from my own country's history. In the early 20th century a sophisticated political movement went to a good deal of trouble to secure an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in order to allow Congress to prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Why? The motives were perfectly understandable (it is difficult to deny that the consumption of liquor has been tied up with a good deal of heartbreak and disaster in human life), and these motives seemed to participants in that political movement to justify a constraint upon human liberty, upon individual decisions about the use of their own property and about the contracts into which they would or would not enter.

That unfreedom, imposed on us from 1919 until 1933, quite plainly did not work.
It fell because it failed.

Secondly, let us consider the sort of unfreedom typified by centralized social planning represented by the creation of a Federal Reserve Board, and ultimately by the introduction of fiat money. I think it safe to say that the headlines of the last year and a half especially make it clear that this unfreedom, too, does not work. This example is of a new sort because in each of the preceding two examples -- chattel slavery and alcohol prohibition -- we are discussing an institution that is no more. In the case of the Federal Reserve, we have to deal with an ongoing failure. Nonetheless, that it is a failure -- and that it is an instance of unfreedom -- are both very clear to me, and I hope to Mr. van Dun.

Business cycles preceded fiat money. But such money, and the central bankers whose "fiat" it is, surely worsen these destructive waves, these macrocosmic outbreaks of manic-depressive disorder. By flooding the land with the ever-cheaper legal tender, the central bankers cajole the retail and investment bankers, who in turn cajole men and women of varying degrees of prudence, industry, and business sense to accept their loans, for residences and for businesses; for the execution of good plans or bad plans or no plans at all.

Thus houses are built to be sold to families with fictitious income on the expectation that the houses will keep rising in price and will "flip" so no one will be the wiser; malls are built where there is no reasonable expectation that anyone will shop; deserts are watered and made to bloom at enormous expense in regions few wish to inhabit; dotcoms boast of "new paradigms" when their only real achievement is cluttering up cyberspace with yet more harebrainedness.

We know what comes next. What else can come next? Mises put it well: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." Either way, it is nasty, and the victims of the collapse are, insofar as they are victims thereof, unfree.

Slavery Fails

So why, if I acknowledge that not all unfreedom involves slavery, is it the case that when I say that freedom works, do I immediately couple that with "slavery fails"? The answer is simple: Slavery provides a neat textbook case, if you will, of the failures of unfreedom. It shows us for example that one important mark of the failure of unfree institutions is that they constrain the possibilities and deform the hopes even of those whom they seem to privilege.

Let us return to the issue of slavery, then. By the 1850s in the southern United states, it was clearly a dysfunctional pillar of a dysfunctional society. What did slavery do for the free laborers of the slave states? Hinton Helper was right about this, in his book on The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). Helper was wrong on much, but he was on firm ground in arguing that slavery undermined the economic development of the south. The great plantations that employed large numbers of slaves to tend usually just one out of just three agricultural staples suited to this arrangement also soaked up the risk capital than might otherwise have gone to entrepreneurs, manufacturers, or even more mixed-use varieties of farmer, thereby making a diversified and balanced economny impossible.

The LONDON DAILY NEWS, in its review of Hinton's book, described it as advocating "a thorough reform in the labor system and renovation of the capitalists." Alas, it was too late for the old South to renovate itself in this way. The region was straped into a kamikaze plane, about to dive bomb the aircraft carrier of the North.

Slavery, in short, fell not because of accidents of history, and not because it was inhumane toward its intended victims (though it surely was). It fell because it failed, even on its own terms.

Hinton's arguments against the slave system may be taken, then, as a paradigm of pragmatic arguments for liberty in general. Liberty works in directing capital toward a variety of fruitful products, and co-ordinating the activities of innumerable individuals pursuing innumerable courses of life. The slave system confused the movement of capital, and made such co-ordination impossible.

An Industrial Society

The economics of antebellum slavery in the US is a huge subject, but I will take it as established for my purposes here that slavery, as represented specifically by the slave states within the United States in the 1850s, did not work. This leaves us with another important question of van Dun: Where is the evidence that the experience of an industrial society with rapidly changing technologies, extended markets and a highly developed division of labour can be extrapolated to other types of societies?

First, I do happen to live in an industrial society with rapidly changing technologies, so I think it worth remarking that slavery failed here, and that other forms of unfreedom regularly fail to an extent that suggests the obvious generalization. They represent the problems that freedom does and will solve.

But, second: are there really any other types of "society" on this planet now? There is only the one, so far as I know. There are different governments, who strive to keep up the illusion that sovereignty is a valuable thing, and so pretend to represent not just arbitrary chunks of land and the people there but so many distinct "societies" or "nations." I don't buy it. Still, it all seems to be just the one, this industrial one with its rapidly changing technologies, where slavery as a central part of a society's structure is a thing of the past. And that one emphatically does not need an earthly sovereign.

Globalization is nothing new. It was well-established when Leonard Read wrote his classic exposition of the information value of prices, "I, Pencil." What did the pencil have to say for itself? My core, it said, comes from graphite mined in Ceylon mixed with clay from Mississippi to produce the mixture inaccurately called "lead." This lead is then treated with a hot mixture that includes candle wax from Mexico.
The rubber-like product that tops off the pencil so we users thereof can correct our mistakes is made by combining rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies (this was published in 1958) with sulfur chloride. And so forth.

I submit that all these contributions to the existence of that single pencil are themselves drawn from a single society incorporating both Indonesia and the US State of Mississippi. What has changed since 1958 is not this singleness but our awareness thereof.

A couple of digressions

By way of digression, let us acknowledge the final point of Read's essay. His point was not so much geographic spread as overwhelming complexity. No person, no central planning commission -- and we might easily add on his behalf, no bank of computers -- could anticipate or ordain everything that goes into putting together a pencil, which on its face seems such a simple implement. Only the whole of society consisting of innumerable individuals whose activities are co-ordinated by prices can accomplish this in the efficient way that pencil users take for granted.

There is only one society and within this one, slavery is wrong. Does slavery no longer exist, then? Alas, we can not say that. A second and much more solemn digression is appropriate here. According to a study by the U.S. State Department, 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders each year. Eighty percent of these are women, and about half are minors. Although most of the traffic is commercial sexual exploitation, manual labor is exacted from some such objects of traffic, too. There are likely millions of other victims who are trafficked within the borders of a single nation and thus don't show up in such statistics.

Everybody except the immediate beneficiaries (and they remain silent on their practices) has little trouble recognizing this as an evil and an atavistic practice. It is not something that works, nor anything that promises to work. It is simply on a continuum with the acts of battery and abduction with which it generally begins -- violent crime surviving because of the darker traits of human nature. Note indeed, that trafficking in human beings takes place largely for the benefit of a market, prostitution, that itself has been driven underground by misguided criminalization. Despite that, we have shaking ourselves into a better equilibrium than that in which such bondage was any essential part.

James' Moral Vision

Allow me now to move on to the most daunting portion of my exposition. I will try to convey the essence of William James' (and incidentally my own) moral vision. Not all value is moral value but moral value is the type on which van Dun and I seem to occupy distinct stands. I would ask him to try to grasp the Jamesian vision, and to note in doing so that it has both a conservative and a rebellious side -- the conservative respects and defends the social equilibrium that has developed, against the savage or the fraudulent and the threats each presents. But the rebellious side tells us that no equilibrium is final, and pushes forward toward something more inclusive, more tolerant...higher.

A thoroughly secular view can grasp both halves of this vision, as a logical matter. But depth in contemplation of the human predicament, James says, will lead an ethical philosopher to wonder what motivates and what sustains the rebels who challenge the existing order and upon whose efforts the pattern of moral progress depends. In one passage in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, (MPML) James said that every one of "hundreds of ideals has its special champion already provided in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf".

Expressly born? A champion already provided? Provided by whom? The most natural hypothesis is that champions -- saints, we may call them, to recall the lectures on sainthood and its uses in Varieties of Religious Experience -- they come to us and are sustained by what James near the end of MPML calls "a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands."

There are innumerable situations in which both sides are right. The conservative is right, as is the rebel. Mr. van Dun glances at this situation when he asks, "Does the fact that my liberty stands in the way of another's plans or hopes, provide him or any other with a sufficient reason to disregard it?" That is indeed a very good question. Given the adjective "sufficient" before the word "reason" in that question I can confidently offer an unequivocal answer: No. But this requires some explanation, and that in turn requires that we make the question a bit more concrete.

It is quite commonly the case that one person's liberty is in accord with the established systems of his day (in the 1850s, an Alabama white man may well have had plans or hopes that involved ownership of a slave) and the sort of conflict the question suggests comes about because other person's liberty will involve defiance of that order. A slave may plan his escape just as an aspiring owner approaches the site of the auction. With whose hopes and plans should the pragmatist side?

Victory and Defeat There Must Be

So we meet the conservative and the rebel in a rather stark form. There are reasons to lock out some interests and disdain some passions. The reasons always come down to this: those interests and passions are (a) inconsistent with the existing social equilibrium, and (b) we can not now see our way clear to a better one. But each passion has its champion, and the collective pressure of them helps make way (whether they as individuals wanted this or not is irrelevant) to a broader, more tolerant, equilibrium later. Here I quote James's MPML again. "Since victory and defeat there must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the more inclusive side -- of the side which even in the hour of triumph will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished party's interests lay."

Later, and adopting I would say a somewhat more Olympian tone, James writes, "The pure philosopher can only follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the kingdom of heaven is incessantly made."

James epistemology, then, leads to an ethic that has to unfold in history, and it conceives of history as progressive.

Let us move a bit further back to get a sense of how messy a process history is, even if conceived of as a moral progress. Consider the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay colony. They certainly felt locked out by the High Churchmen running the established religion in the mother country in the early 17th century. Some of their colleagues would in time rebel and help put a king to death. But the Puritans who show up in US history books are the ones who braved the ocean to create a "shining city on a hill."

Did their own rebelliousness entail tolerant attitudes on their part. Heck no! Neither Anne Hutchison nor Roger Williams thought so, at any rate. But the rebellions of the Puritans -- both the at-home King-killing ones and the emigrants -- helped contribute over time to greater tolerance in the English-speaking world. This business of rebellion and the emergence of ever more inclusive equilibria is a costly one, to be sure.

Every equilibrium has discontents, out of whose ranks come rebels. Every equilibrium also has its defenders, some of whom think that the status quo is wonderful; others of whom simply think that it is better than any of the other options on the table. So with this backdrop, we can confidently answer van Dun's question.

"Does the fact that my liberty stands in the way of another's plans or hopes, provide him or any other with a sufficient reason to disregard it?"

Remember that I said that "sufficient" is the crucial word there. If the question were whether it provides the "other" with a genuine reason to disregard it, I would have had to say "Yes." But that genuine reason is not a sufficient reason. There is history to consider. There is the question of which of our freedoms represents the more inclusive order. If he is the one proposing to break with an established equilibrium, there is the question whether his actions will help replace it with a better. The answer, then, is "No."

Infinite Regression

One of the classical arguments against pragmatism, either epistemological or ethical, is the claim of an infinite regression.

Truth, (or knowledge, or warrant, or successful reference) is understood by pragmatists to be that which works.

Works toward what end or by what standard? ask the critics. And if any end or standard is specified, they pounce. Does that end or standard work? If not, it is neither true nor good, according to pragmatism itself. Yet if the end or standard does work, it must do so according to some yet further end or standard, and so on forever. Surely nothing that requires such an endless loop can be an accurate account of how we do or should make our here and now decisions. So pragmatism stands defeated!

Although Van Dun makes no such argument explicit, I believe that some such notion operates between the lines of his essay, so I give it answer here.

The regression is not infinite because one can in principle imagine a world in which all desires are harmonized each with the others. That is not the world in which we live, but we may well see both history and ethics as a process of working toward that summit, and we may see freedom as the crucial means to that end -- the metabolism by which we can keep putting one foot in front of the other toward that eschatology.

Physics

But then there is the argument from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or from contemporary cosmological theory, that the world will not end happily -- that it will all end in a heat death, as detached particles move endlessly far away from each other and all meaning is lost. Won't that make a mockery out of the goals humans had pursued so assiduously during our span in this cosmos?

Not at all. All such scientific premises represent the latest word, hardly the last word. A century from now, some revived form of the old Steady State cosmology may be regnant and the second law may itself have been defeated by some real-life version of Maxwell's demon, brought us by nanotechnology. Indeed, who knows but that in some Big Picture the destiny of the human race is to reverse the flow of energy into heat and save the cosmos from the contemplated death? All the better, then, do we have a good reason to set each other free from one another's tampering.

And with that stunningly speculative flourish I had better conclude, for fear that anything else I might say in this post will be an anti-climax.

Antwerp, Belgium

Something I wrote long ago seems to have found a reader in Antwerp.

I don't see any date on this document, but I'm delighted by it.

The writer is obviously an admirer of the anarcho-capitalist intellectual Murray Rothbard, writing on behalf of something called the "Rothbard Instituut," which was apparently founded (according to their "about us" or "over ons" page) in November 2007. So sometime in the last two years, someone in Antwerp discovered and sought to reply at length to an unsigned editorial I wrote in the 1990s when I was managing editor of a very niche-publishing mag called The Pragmatist. That editorial was headlines "The Necessity of Pragmatism."

My critic appears to admire the "delightful story" I passed along from James' writings about the metaphysical debate over a squirrel in the course of a camping trip. The immediate point of that story is about the pragmatic theory of meaning, not of truth: although later in the book, aptly itself called "Pragmatism," James generalizes the method to the meaning of truth. That is where my critic's views and that of my 1990s self part company.

I won't contend with his argument today. I'm too delighted that my own literary/philosophical effort was thought worth of this painstaking a response. It is one of only four English-language articles so far listed on the site which makes my inclusion that much more intriguing.

If my critic, Frank van Dun, reads this: Hi. And thanks for making my day. I'll compose something more substantively responsive in due course.

A random link farm

Seven thoughts and a link for each.

1. Want a peak into the lifestyles of the young, unemployed, and entitled in NYC?

2. Scott Adams, the genius behind Dilbert, discusses some of the concepts with one metaphorical foot in the grave.

3. A classic prose poem on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, here because its my blog and I want to put it here.

4. An old ad (not TOO old) from a bank in Iceland that felt rather good about itself, until the house of cards collapsed Kaupthinking. Try to avoid it.

5. The Onion covers that ominous music everywhere. The FEMA bit is funniest, IMHO.

6. A bibliography on anarcho-capitalism, because I know you've been begging for it.

7. If you're old enough to remember the heyday of Space Invaders, play at your desk.

Saucepan revolution

The phrase "saucepan revolution" comes from the imagination of contemporary descendants of Viking warriors, and descendants perhaps of the closest thing the world has ever seen to a working model of anarcho-capitalism.

I refer to events in recent days in the Republic of Iceland, where crowds have gathered in front of the parliament building to protest their government's prominent part in the global financial crisis -- by banging on pots and pans.

On January 20, banners included one that said, "The USA is getting rid of Bush today, we want to get rid of you" and another with a slightly less direct reference to the inauguration, saying simply: "Yes, we can."

I don't know how easy these signs were to read. After all, isn't it dark in Iceand pretty much around-the-clock this time of year? That's where the audio equivalent of pan-banging comes into play, though. And it has had an effect.

Don't take your cue from us, guys. Your ancestors had it right. When they fled from the monarchies of Scandanavia, including presumably the one headquartered in Elsinor where all sorts of unsavory goings-on were underway ... what were they fleeing toward? What were they looking for in Iceland?

The government they were protesting with those signs and saucepans has duly resigned, and a new interim government has taken office, intended only to guide the country through elections in the spring.

Anarcho-Capitalism

An acquaintance who doesn't cotton to my theorizing about anarcho-capitalism put his objections thus: "How can money arise without a government? You're back to stuff with intrinsic value like precious metals but that puts power into the hands of those with mines or anyone who has enough power to corner the market."

To which I answered thusly.

Money can arise without government because humans are intelligent creatures who can easily recognize the utility of a medium of exchange.

As for going back to precious metals, that's possible. But why are precious metals "precious"? What is their "intrinsic value"? Use in jewelry? That's a big leap.

The value of gold comes from certain physical facts. First, there's only a limited amount of it in the world.

Second, it is a chemical element -- so it is neither created nor destroyed except by very unusual processes (is gold fissionable? -- probably not).

Third, gold is malleable enough so that numbers can be printed on it easily, yet sufficiently solid so that a coin can keep its shape.

There might be a more psychological point here, one that I believe John Maynard Keynes suggested. Perhaps to our symbol-hungry minds, silver reminds us of the moon and yellow/gold reminds us of the sun, and since these two heavenly bodies are of primordial importance, so are the metals.

Government doesn't have to exist in order to inform people of such facts. They operate whether or not they are broadcast, and they keep gold valuable as a medium of exchange.

Of course other media may also come about. I'm told that unopened packs of cigarettes are frequently exchanged under battlefield conditions. The intrinsic value of a cigarette, the pleasure of smoking, may be the original inducement to their value -- just as the decorative use of gold as jewelry might have originally suggested its value as a medium of exchange -- but once they start circulating they can be sought after simply because they ARE such a medium, and continue to circulate for a long time before anyone breaks the seal, reconverting the packet into a consumer good.

But suppose the precious metals were generally accepted as a unit of exchnage. You worry about this because it "puts power into the hands of those with mines...."

So someone will have a mine, even in the absense of government? Are you acknowledging that private property in real estate -- and in the sort of expensive capital tools used to dig and retrieve gold -- would survive anarchy? [This is btw the sort of contention that my acquaintance, earlier in the exchange, had denied]. If not, you are contradicting yourself here. If no one will "have a mine" then no one will have the power you say you're worried about.

"...or has enough power to corner the market."

Precisely what I'm worried about. The Federal Reserve Board has cornered the market in federal reserve notes. Shouldn't we rebel? Or work to undermine the conditions that cause people to think this is "necessary"?

The Irish Vote "No"

In a referendum held yesterday, voters in Ireland rejected the so-called Lisbon treaty, i.e. a package of proposed amendments to the institutions of the European Union.

Eureaucrats have been touting this treaty as the key to a "more democratic and effective" continent. It seems intended chiefly to make the EU a single player on the world stage, with a unified foreign policy. This is part of the slow movement of sovereignty out of the national capitals such as Dublin and London. [Anarchist though I am, I'm thinking within-the-box this morning, so I'll use words like 'sovereignty' without quarrel.]

So: what happens now? Do the changes require unanimity? And if so: is the Lisbon treaty dead?

The answers seem to be, "a lot, yes, and no."

The Eureaucrats are saying that they'll continue to press the "ratification process," the results of which now stand at 18 to 1, with 8 member countries not yet accounted for. Evidently, the treaty enthusiasts want to rack up as many "yes" votes as they can, so that they can go back tot he Irish and say, "it came out 26 to 1, you contrary slugs" or words to that effect, in hopes of getting a second vote there. Where better than Ireland for a "mulligan"?

Lisbon will likely be dead if there's a second "no" vote somewhere. One country standing alone against aspirations for One Europe has a problem. Two countries standing together mean those aspirations have become the problem.

Ireland, in compliance with its own constitution, is the only country in the EU that scheduled a ratification referendum at all. In the other countrues, ratification is by legislative act, although in the UK, the Tories are demanding a referendum, though prime minister Brown and his Labour government apparently plan to ratify via Parliament.

Anyway: why the "no" vote? Were the Irish rebelling against the loss of national sovereignty? Was it just the extremely complex character of the treaty ... and their sensible unwillingness to support something they couldn't understand?

Ireland's PM, Brian Cowen, who supported the treaty, now it appears supports the result of the vote, opposing a do-over. He'll meet with EU honchos next week and discuss where things go from here.

[Here I go outside the box again] The whole idea of sovereignty, at ANY level, national or continental, is perhaps unravelling. We can hope.

Anarcho-capitalism. Catch the fever!

Obama's victory

Obama seems finally to have sealed the deal.

Congratulations are due to him, not just on securing the nomination as it appears he has, but on dealing a blow to Clinton family influence in the nation and in its largest political party.

I have to say that I agree entirely with hawkish blogger Andrew Sullivan on one point: there's been far too much talk about how Hillary's persistence in this campaign constitutes admirable grit or determination or whatever. It constitutes nothing admirable.

"One request at least," Sullivan says, "can we retire from the dicourse the notion that there is anything even faintly admirable about the Clintons' refusal to accept that they have lost the nomination. This isn't tenacity or pluck or spunk. It's vindictive, sore-loser narcissism. And someone senior in the party needs to call it like it is."

She has been saying, in effect, that if she can't have the nomination she will at least render it valueless.

I suggest dropping out of the electoral system. That's the anarcho-capitalist way. Still, I admit that the Clinton crowd turns my stomach in a uniquely knotted manner.

McCain story: Keating Five Again

A story on the front page of the New York Times yesterday attracted a lot of attention. This is surprising because it is oddly structured, as if the editors and/or reporters involved wanted to delay a casual reader's recognition of their point. The headline doesn't really tip anyone off to the explosive nature of the contents. It says, "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses its Own Risk."

There's the implication in that wording that people who are too self-confident are those most likely to fall into an ethical trap or lapse, that "pride goeth before a fall." Still, its a roundabout bit of wording, and subtlety isn't what headlines are for.

The lead paragraph might also be a soporific. "Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers."

So events of 2000 are getting front-page attention just now? and they concern anxiety? about what? Ah, that would be the point.

The second graf finally gets us to the gist. Or does it? "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

It sounds a bit like the story's going to be about adultery here. But it veers from that soon thereafter. The story leaves the "anxieties" of staff members unconfirmed. There is no reason to think McCain was having a "romantic" liaison.

But the woman who made the staffers anxious was a "lobbyist," and that moves the story forward a bit. The lobbyist, Ms Isenman, represented telecommunications companies for whom the work of Mr. McCain's Senate Committee, Commerce, was critical. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his "campaigns" (by which I take it the team of reporters mean both his campaign for re-election to the Senate in 1998 [he won his third term that year] and that 2000 campaign for President.)

So the story is saying that McCain became very chummy (however 'platonically'!) with a lobbyist who helped him raise money for his campaigns and it is at least suggesting that she did this for the interest of her telecommunications clients -- there was an implicit quid pro quo.

The McCain camp has unsurprisingly denied that there was any impropriety involving Ms Isenman. The Democrats are too immersed in their continuing nomination struggle to pay much attention to it, although surely they're storing the clippings and will keep an eye on anything that might give one of them ammunition for the autumn.

In the meantime, we might consider the question of the quality of the journalism involved. As I'v already indicated, the story seems oddly structured. The traditional structure for a news story is the "inverted pyramid," so called because the structure rests on a single point. The lead paragraph should state exactly what it is that makes this story worthy of the reader's time. Everything else opens out, perhaps in various directions, but rests on that point.

Aside from that, there are both auspicious and inauspicious things about this story, and it will be interesting to see how it shakes out over time.

On the positive side, some of this jives with McCain's most tarnished hour as a public servant. I mean the "Keating Five" business. If it turns out to be creditable -- and I suspect we'll discover this as other news organizations chase the same rabbit now -- then it could mean real trouble for McCain. And he'd deserve that sort of trouble.

On the one hand, there's a lot of anonymous sourcing, which is always a bad sign in terms of reliability. Not every anonymous source is a public-spirited Mark Felt. Not every, not most, not many. They generally have their own agenda and "letting the public know important truths" need not be high on that list.

Indeed, the end of the second graf of this story is: "...several people involved in the campaign said on condition of anonymity."

So, as you can see, I'm on the fence.

Anarcho-capitalism: catch the fever!

Yes, Close the Loophole

I don't believe in taxation in general. I don't believe in sovereignty or government either. All that is implied in the label "anarcho-capitalist" which is part of the mission statement of this blog.

Ordinarily, then, I wouldn't get involved in debates over particular tax proposals up or down. It is my mission as an anarcho-cap to think out of precisely that box.

Still, I have seen (relatively) strong and weak arguments made in "within the box" terms, in debates especially over what does or doesn't count as a capital gain. I know the difference -- between strong and weak that is -- and some of the arguments made to defend tax loopholes, made to defend in particular favorable capital-gains like treatment for some very ordinary-income type cash receipts (by the managers of hedge and private equity funds) are painfully weak.

I keep hearing and reading these bad arguments for how compensation for that particular sort of well-remunerated employment should really be considered capital gains because it takes place within the context of a limited partnership and the managers have their own money involved so its only fair to be nice to them and we don't want to wage class warfare by calling compensation by its right name. It is painful to watch it, but I do my duty.

On September 8, on this blog, away from the obligations of employment and propriety, I discussed the general considerations governing why capital gains are generally treated favorably in the first place. All I'll say today in expansion upon that is: Leges non verbis, sed rebus, sunt impositae.

Or, in humbler non-Latin terms, I reminded of the story about Abraham Lincoln in which he asked a cabinet member, "how many legs does a dog have if we call a tail a leg?"

"Well, sir, then it would have five."

"No. It would have four. Calling a tail a leg won't make it a leg."

Income is income, and income earned by managerial effort is "ordinary income" for which the law prescribes a rate. Calling it capital gains for various spurious reasons ought to stop. Or ought to be seen for what it is by the general run of folks who can't benefit by such trickery, in the hope that seeing what is underway here will diminish their attachment to the myth of sovereignty and will help hasten the day of anarcho-capitalism.