FD: The Hunt for Confederate Gold

From FreedomDemocrats, 29 Oct 2005:

Several months ago I placed an order for a new book I saw mentioned on LewRockwell, Thomas Moore's "The Hunt for Confederate Gold." Rarely do I read fiction, but I was going away on vacation and I looked forward to some light reading. Due to some problems, including Hurricane Katrina, the book didn't arrive until a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, I'd say that the book is well worth the wait.

There's no surprise that the book has a political agenda. Thomas Moore is a true conservative disillusioned by the Republican Party and his characters often give voice to his beliefs. His criticisms of the left are equally common, although I often found them rather childish and absurd. The general plot revolves around a quest to discover some long lost Confederate gold and a parallel story involving the federal government framing an innocent history professor as some type of terrorist.

I was pondering why it seems that right-libertarian novels seem so much more common than left-libertarian. But then I realized that this is partially due to how we name things. If anyone here is familiar with Daniel Quinn and Ishmael, I'd argue that his ideas are in many ways anti-state and left-libertarian. In the discussions below it was noted that sometimes people just don't think to connect a person's ideas with the title left-libertarian or non-authoritarian left. What's a book you'd suggest?

I might repost Freedom Democrats posts

I think that all the regular readers of my blog are people whom I met through the (now defunct) Freedom Democrats blog. We had a lot of good writing there, which in now inaccessible to the interwebs. I have copies of most of the posts from my RSS feed from the site. However, I don't have information about who the original author was. Would anyone mind if I post a bunch of the articles here, attributed to Freedom Democrats?

Fascism on the rise?

The Golden Dawn party in Greece is replaying the rise of fascist movements from a century ago. It sounds a bit like Germany in the early Nazi era:

The Golden Dawn has also begun engaging left-wing anarchy groups in street battles ....
But perhaps more worrisome, critics say, are signs that the Golden Dawn is establishing itself as an alternative authority in a country crippled by the harsh austerity imposed by its international lenders....As the party attempts to place a swelling number of unemployed in jobs, its officials say they have persuaded a major restaurant chain to begin replacing immigrants with Greek workers....Landlords can seek the party’s help with the eviction of immigrant tenants....

The big difference between Golden Dawn and the Nazis is that Greece does not have the economic and military capacity that Germany had. However, fascism didn't start in Germany, it started it Italy. So if Greece goes fascist, what other countries might follow?

More immediately, if the fascists bully themselves into office, how will the liberal West respond? Sure, they'll get kicked out of the EU (if they hadn't already) and they'll probably loose any economic aid. But what if a left-wing/anarchist rebellion breaks out? Will the threat of anarchy make a fascist state seem more legitimate, or will left-wing movements not seem as threatening as they were following WWI, even as history has demonstrated the threat of fascism? My bets are that the establishment will guess that it is easier to do business with (and influence) fascists than anarchists.

The most important contribution of left-libertarianism

Matt Zwolisnki's "Thoughts on Left-Libertarianism" (@BHL) evaluates the strength and weaknesses of left-libertarianism (LL). His criticism of LL utopianism strikes me as largely irrelevant, as is all discussion of utopian ideas. Seeing such wankery inspired me to specify what is actually the most important contribution of left-libertarianism: the perspective of the state as a fundamentally elitist (not democratic) institution.

This perspective is largely absent from contemporary American political ideology, despite the overwhelming evidence in its favor*. This misperception of the state leads to all types of idiocy on the part of Americans, and an effective liberty movement is probably impossible as long as this misperception persists. Next to this issue, everything else in the libertarian movement is wankery-- the utopionism, the (speculative) macroeconomic theory, and even the wonky policy discussions. The only thing that exceeds the importance of correcting this misperception is the creation of alternative institutions.

Most political activists are willing to accept that the state can be captured by self-serving elites, but they still cling to the fantasy that the natural function of the state is to serve the general welfare. Even in the face of constant abuses by the elite, they console themselves with the notion that these abuses arise from a problem no greater than having the wrong guy in office, and they respond by donating their meager leisure time and disposable income to the faction of the elite that promises to restore the natural relationship between government and citizen. They seem unfazed by the reality that "the bad guys" regularly acquire power and "the good guys" never live up to expectations.

We have to look back many decades to find political movements that recognized the elitist nature of the state. Even explicitly elitist ideologies (e.g. monarchism and racist slavery) asserted that the elite governed in the interests of their subjects. While the Marxists recognized the exploitative character of bourgeois democracy, they still seemed to think that a state-like institution could lead humanity into the communist era. Only anarchists recognized that the state was fundamentally incompatible with freedom and equality.

Within the libertarian movement, establishment libertarians (like many writers at Bleeding Heart Libertarians) accept the narrative that the state can be reformed by simply convincing voters to choose justice, while often ignoring how the elite systematically plays our legitimate interests against each other in order to confuse and divide us, and also has an effective system for obfuscating government action and the consequences of electoral participation. The right-wing (vulgar) libertarians are even worse, attributing statist policies to the sloth and greed of the unwashed masses (Mitt Romney's 47%), as if the poor had any power.

To sum this up, while utopianism and macroeconomic theory may be useful rhetorical tools for illustrating the elitist nature of the state, they are not of much value in their own right and should not be the focus of committed debate. Policy debates are only useful for the 1% of Americans who have any substantial influence over state policy -- for the rest of us, even the upper-middle classes, they are just a distraction and a temptation to waste scarce resources on electoral activism. While alternative institutions are important, it's hard for us to find many opportunities to develop these institutions in the current ideological context; too many of our peers will turn to the state for solutions unless they recognize the futility and danger of doing so. For the time being, the most important issue for those of us seeking libertarian equality is to illustrate the elitist nature of statist violence.

* See Kevin Carson for evidence of the historically constant dominance of self-serving elites, and the Ruling Class blog for institutional analysis of elite control of the state. There are probably better resources out there, but those authors would be a good place to start.

Is the state inherently elitist?

The other day I tried to explain to a liberal how libertarians can value public goods but still oppose taxation. In doing so, I described the state (and ruling class) as an "elitist syndicate". I felt clever, but I'm wondering if this is accurate. Leaving aside the use of "syndicate", I've been wondering if the state is inherently elitist.

I can definitely think of elitist policies of the state -- for instance, I consider pretty much any lifestyle regulation as elitist (i.e. based on the assumption that the ruling class possesses a superior understanding of the basic issues of life). However, there's no need for state policies to be elitist, and they can even be anti-elitist.

But the issue isn't the policies of the state; instead, it is the structure of the state. Is the basic structure of the state elitist? If Congress and the President assert authority over us, is it because they think they are better than us? Could they really just be administrators of the public will, as their populist rhetoric would have us believe? Do they naturally isolate themselves from regular people, such that they only pay attention to the thoughts and concerns of other influential people, and thereby create an elitist ruling class? Will they necessarily lavish resources upon favorite protegees in the younger generations, while ignoring the development of the bulk of that generation?

My suspicion is that the state is inherently elitist. We do not live under a simple government of the elite -- where we have selected the most capable administrators/representatives to do a specific job. Instead, we have government by an elitist class that self-consciously selects its membership by providing advantages to specific individuals and then claims broad powers over the population as a whole. While elections and anti-nepotism laws provide opportunities for social mobility and prevent the elite from becoming excessively insular, they do not change the fundamental elitist nature of the state.

From whence gay marriage?

There's a somewhat interesting article at Public Discourse questioning where the demand for gay marriage comes from. The thesis is basically that gay marriage wasn't an issue a few decades ago -- even advocates of gay rights didn't bring it up (for the sake of argument, I'll take his word on this). So the author wonders why this demand gained popularity so suddenly (and whether that speed is healthy). While I'm not an expert, I will propose an explanation for the suddenness of the transformation. Basically, I believe that the historic prosecution of homosexuality kept the idea of marriage off the radar. For heterosexuals, they never thought about it because they didn't know any open homosexuals and were unaware that anyone would care about homosexual marriage. For people with homosexual tendencies, they could not establish stable long term homosexual relationships (due to persecution), so it never really occurred to them what benefits could come from formal recognition. During this period, gays were by definition embracing an alternative lifestyle, which in turn influenced their views on traditional institutions such as marriage. Now that homosexual relationships are mainstream, the consequences of marriage discrimination are apparent and homosexual marriage has been embraced as a natural component of mainstream acceptance of homosexual relationships.

Aside from offering that theory, I want to quickly dismiss the authors assertion of the conjugal theory of marriage. He writes:

but they marry in order to make something new that honors and ennobles that attraction and love: the nucleus of a family, in a comprehensive relation of husband and wife that points toward the future, with an openness toward making that future through procreation.

From what I've seen and read, this is not the current mainstream attitude towards marriage. Instead, marriage is an expression of romantic love and commitment. What I learned in history class is that this romantic theory of marriage gained prominence in the 1950s and was largely the norm by the late 1970s (at least among the college-educated middle-class). Within this context, childbearing is an exciting opportunity offered by marriage, but definitely not the point of marriage.

To say that there is no reason for formal recognition of the household in the absence of childbearing is silly (and I won't give any attention to semantic quibbles over the word "marriage"). We have standard legal recognition of many arrangements, including business partnerships and corporations. Why not a household? Why not give a special place to a union of two adults. And no, the recognition of gay marriage does not imply that we should also recognize threesomes -- there is a major, consequence of the union of two people which is not comparable to the effect of adding a third*.

Anyway, it's not all that surprising that gay marriage has suddenly become an issue, and it's not all that radical given the preceding changes to our conception of marriage and the mainstreaming of homosexual relationships. In many ways, it is just the cherry on top.

*Okay, upon more thought, maybe my logic would allow for the recognition of threesomes (but not larger groups). The problem with recognition of pairs only is that if a threesome were to form, then one member would not have any recognition of his relationship.

Are "stand-your-ground" laws (un)libertarian?

Following the Sandy Hook shooting, I've been gloomily anticipating an authoritarian knee-jerk reaction to ban some types of guns. I've read libertarians calling for a renewed commitment to the pro-gun message. Despite this, I won't fall for the old trope that the pro-gun movement is somehow libertarian. Libertarians should evaluate each pro-gun initiative on its own merits to decide whether it advances liberty.

For instance, the NRA is clearly not a libertarian organization. Not only are they willing to attack free speech (by blaming violent media for real violence), but they are perfectly comfortable establishing a permanent police presence within schools. That's not to mention their refusal to address any other infringement on liberty, even those that so clearly exacerbate gun violence (such as the drug war).

The NRA has even managed to institute pro-gun policies that directly infringe on liberty. For instance, private institutions are often forbidden from regulating whether guns can be brought onto their real estate, all in the name of "gun rights". One issue of contention right now are the "stand-your-ground" laws, so I am wondering if these laws are libertarian.

On the "plus" side, the obligation to retreat is a regulation on individual behavior that is enforced by criminal penalties, so eliminating it seems to be libertarian. However, since it is only regulating an involuntary interpersonal interaction, I think that it can't really be libertarian or anti-libertarian.

On the "negative" side, many of the "stand your ground" laws over-ride the civil tort system (see Table 1, here), which seems anti-libertarian to me.

This issue is a bit difficult for me. Much of my libertarian preference is based on the idea that we should use the minimal necessary force when dealing with others, therefore I am opposed to the tough-guy spirit behind "stand-your-ground". On the flip side, I a person who stands his ground is not so far out of line that it is necessary to use force against him.

But this is coming from someone who is still pondering whether force is justified to deter theft.

P.S. more information on self-defense laws.

A success of small-scale farming in Tanzania

The Economist tells us of an Oxfam-backed TV show that is attempting to enable women-run, small-scale farms. The author even asserts that:

It showed that small-scale agriculture is a sustainable way of feeding the country.

Not what I expect from the Economist, which normally champions large-scale, mechanized commodity agriculture.

Is Strike Debt a good idea?

The "Strike Debt" movement is promoting a "Rolling Jubilee", in which distressed debt is purchased at a discounted rate and dismissed. This keeps the debt out of the hands of vulture funds who would turn to the legal system to confiscate whatever wealth they can from the debtor.

So can this work? It sounds similar to buying the freedom of slaves: it may help the individual in front of you, but it supports the system that enslaved them in the first place. Thoughts?

tip, of all places, to Reuters.

The workings of plutocracy: part 10^6.

Slashdot has been trumpeting copyright reform for a while. This issue was revived recently when the Republican Study Committee issues a report calling for restraints on copyright law. The report was quickly withdrawn and the author fired, apparently following pressure from the copyright cartel. This has all culminated in an article in Harvard Business Review describing how political corruption is strangling innovation.

When politicians own the city

Back when I lived in Pittsburgh, I was kinda peeved with how the city was half-shutdown for the G20 conference. But that was nothing compared to Mumbai, where the entire city was shutdown to commemorate the life of a Hindu Nationalist politician, and anyone who complained about it was thrown in jail.

Peace between Israel and Palestine is impossible

After the recent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, some pundits are calling for a renewed effort to establish peace between Israel and it's Palestinian/Arab/Muslim enemies. I believe that such peace is impossible. It does not take an expert to see that the barriers to peace are insurmountable without radical changes to the cultures of that region. That is not to say that there is no point in trying to contain the conflict, but I think that we should be realistic about what can be achieved with the traditional strategies, and then we should think about alternative strategies.

Below, I'll spell out the barriers to peace from each side.

Israel:
1) No reasonable Israeli would be willing to live under a state that is dominated by Palestinians (or Arabs or Muslims). The political cultures of those societies are frighteningly primitive. Add to that the Jewish experience as a minority in Europe and the decades of hostility from Arabs, and Israelis could not expect to have any freedom or security in an Arab-dominated state. They will rightfully fight to preserve Israel's independence and Jewish (or Western) majority.
2) Semi-reasonable (nationalist) Israelis will go to great lengths to preserve their own security, even at the expense of the security of non-Israelis. They will occupy neighboring lands if these lands can be used as staging grounds for attacks. They will limit the mobility of the residents there, close their borders, and occasionally launch military incursions if they feel threatened. Unless terrorist attacks from the occupied territories end for a substantial period of time (a decade or two), the occupation will not end.
3) Fanatical Israelis will attempt to annex the neighboring lands and create a "greater Israel".
4) Outside fanatics (largely in the US) will support Israel under all circumstances, even when it is promoting fanatical policies.

Palestine:
1) No reasonable Palestinian will tolerate living under Israeli occupation, particularly when it severely infringes on security and social/economic activity or pressures them to leave their current homes.
2) Semi-reasonable Palestinians will resent the Zionist invasion of Palestine. If their family was exiled, they will demand the right to return to areas within the 1967 borders, and/or a large compensation. They will not trust Israel.
3) Fanatical Palestinians/Arabs will demand that Israel be incorporated into a Muslim-dominated polity, where Jews will at best be second-class citizens.
4) Outside fanatics will support the Palestinians regardless of what they do.

The consequences:
Even if everyone were reasonable, this would be difficult to resolve. The Israelis and Palestinians would have to find a way that each of them could live in their own community without infringing on the other. Given the intermixing of their settlements (particularly in and around Jerusalem) and the differences in their political cultures, and the duration and intimacy of their conflict, this would be a challenge.
However, most people are not reasonable, in that they are strongly biased towards members of their own group (I call this "semi-reasonable", because they can still empathize with the suffering of outgroup members, but they discount it by a substantial factor). Combine this fact with the existential threat felt by each side, and peace is nearly impossible.
But it's worse than that, because fanatics are influential on each side (these people take no consideration of outsiders), and these fanatics are egged on by outside support and their ranks are swelled by each flare-up in the conflict.

The traditional strategy:
One strategy is to address the outside actors. The Neocons place their focus here: they hope to eliminate the outside support for the Palestinians, thereby weakening the fanatics and their military capacity. They hope that this would create an absolutely one-sided military situation on the ground. I think that such ideas are pure fantasy. It would essentially require that the USA occupy the entire middle east, and Israel establish a totalitarian regime over the Palestinians (which would inevitably have cracks).
Another strategy is to establish cease-fires that will allow trust to develop (allowing the semi-reasonable people on each side to come into alignment). This has worked in other conflicts, but as described above, I don't think it would be nearly sufficient here.
A more radical strategy is to develop compassion between the warring sides by building friendships between Israelis and Palestinians (essentially, making people reasonable). While this is a noble endeavor, I don't think that it can make sufficient inroads to have a strong political impact on its own.

An alternative strategy:
I can hardly say that I have a strategy. Maintaining cease-fires and building cross-group connections will probably be helpful under any circumstance, even if they cannot create lasting peace. The only peaceful outcome that I can envision is a radical change to the Israeli and Palestinian group identity. For instance, this could arise from a threat from an outside enemy that they each view as especially foreign and threatening, but I cannot provide any realistic prediction of what that enemy might be (robots? aliens? zombies?). The best that I can think of is for them to be absorbed into some sort of post-national cosmopolitan society. To the extent that such a society is developing, the Israelis have a decent connection to it. The issue is more how to entice the Arabs to refocus their attention to this society and give up their ancient obsessions. Even after the fundamental political and economic changes occur, it will probably take a generation or two for the old group identity to weaken sufficiently to allow peace to be established between Israel and Palestine.

Schedule I toys

If the Consumer Product Safety Commission ranked toys the same way that the Feds rank drugs, Buckeyballs would be Schedule I. They are now effectively prohibited.

Open WiFi

The EFF is encouraging everyone to open up their wireless network. I think this could be great... I used to leave my network open, but was eventually cowed into putting a password on it. IIRC, this was due to the combination of my ISPs prohibition on sharing, and concerns about network security and being held responsible for other people's abuse of my connection.

I hope that their information page can address my concerns; it would be so nice to be able to do this.

One commenter on Slashdot advocates the use of parallel "guest" and private WiFi networks from your own router, which should allow you to maintain network security and limit the bandwidth available to the public (both to discourage leaching and perhaps make it harder for guests to do illegal things like download movies).

A community-driven network may be ideal... but until then.

Food patents

I've been closely "Proposition 37" (GMO labeling) in California. For what it's worth, I'm strongly opposed to anti-GMO legislation such as this. To be brief, I think that the labeling mandate would be burdensome and non-informative.

While I do sympathize with much of the criticism of the modern food industry, I think that focusing on GMOs completely misses the point. One of the points is the abuse of patents. In this case, it seems that patents are being used to stifle independent testing of novel GM goods. As I've written repeatedly, I think it's important that we severely reduce the scope of patents and copyrights, and I'd be comfortable with completely eliminating them. However, I don't think that's going to happen until the constrains of intellectual property affect issues that people really care about.

Minnisota bans free education?

I find this hard to believe:

The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. 

 Supposedly this is some "consumer protection" law, but Coursera currently is neither charging for their service nor claiming any particular benefit from the service (such as offering a degree).

Liberty in North Korea

I recently ran into some activists with "Liberty in North Korea", and was impressed by their description of the groups activities. I like that they place their main focus on helping refugees, rather than political agitation. It sounds like a charity that might be up there with the Innocence Project in terms of the benefit it provides.

When currencies collapse (conflicted feelings)

Steve Hanke has charted the collapse of the Iranian rial:

I have conflicted feelings about this:

1) Sadness: this must be causing great hardship for the Iranian people
2) Comfort: this must be weakening the regime, particularly their ability to buy foreign weapons.
3) Discomfort: this collapse (following an embargo) was orchestrated by a regime with a history of dominating and exploiting foreign countries. In some sense, this is just another battle in the wars among various ruling classes.
4) Satisfaction: while any community would suffer from economic isolation, I think that the Iranian state has largely brought this on themselves, and this type of collapse is essentially inevitable. Better to get it done sooner than  later (assuming that the regime is replaced with a more humane one). The Iranian state has suppressed the creativity and initiative of the Iranian people, and their economy consequently is weak. This "black-market" deviation from state-sanctioned exchange rates indicates that the Iranian state is being sidelined within the Iranian  economy. Every black-market exchange is a tiny revolution (a la Agorism).


tip Marginal Revolution

California's middle-class car culture

Until I moved to California, I did not appreciate how pervasive and deeply ingrained their car culture is. I used to have the impression that CA was at the forefront of developing a post-car culture, with extensive public transportation and accommodations for bicycles on roads. However, once I saw this with my own eyes, I realized that relative to east-coast cities, California's urban areas are intrinsically unfriendly to pedestrian and bicycle commuting. Maybe this comparison is unfair, since I've mainly lived in declining cities, and their lower population density may facilitate biking; but my impression is that even Boston is intrinsically more bike-friendly than California cities. The only way that non-car transportation is possible in California is if cities really go out of their way to promote it.

As we all know, the dominance of cars in America's transportation system has been promoted by decades of state decisions to facilitate car transportation, often at the expense of other modes. I don't think there was any particular conspiracy -- it just made sense* given the socio-economic conditions after WWII. The problems with our car-centric culture started to become apparent in the 1970's, but by then powerful vested interests (both the car industry and car-commuters) made it hard to change course.

Anyway, we've reached the point where access to a car is practically considered a civil right -- at least for the middle class (as always, the lower classes get to bear the costs without reaping the benefits). So with this perspective, I was interested in proposition 33 on CA's ballot this fall. This proposition changes the rules regarding auto-insurance fees, by allowing companies to consider a new customer's history of coverage when setting rates. My libertarian impulse says "sure, let the markets decide", and when I look at the arguments against the measure I see that they are based on the idea that the right to drive is too important to be left to market forces. However, this initiative does not seem to simplify regulations in any general manner, so it gets no libertarian points, and I'll have to vote against it on the grounds that I am opposed to micromanagement of government by referenda.

Still, I wanted to check if this proposition might actually amount to an abandonment of car culture by the state of California. Since it is supposedly being promoted by the car insurance industry, it would not make sense for it to be designed in a way that discouraged new drivers from getting behind the wheel. When I looked at the details, I saw that it has an explicit clause to assure that middle-class spawn develop into the next generation of drivers:

(4) Children residing with a parent shall be provided a discount for continuous coverage based upon the parent’s eligibility for a continuous coverage discount.

So yeah, this is just a way to milk adults who temporarily give up driving for one reason or another.

I'm especially bothered by this notion that children gain legally enshrined economic rights based on the economic status of their parents. First it was Obama's health insurance coverage up to 26, and then this. It seems like this should be unconstitutional. As always, the state says "screw the poor".

*Clarification: it made sense to the ruling class...

"Cult of Personality"

Tonight's debates have brought the song "Cult of Personality" back to my mind. While poking around YouTube, I found this interview with Vernon Reid, Living Colour's basist. He describes how the song developed, then gives a lesson in playing the music.