Mischaracterizations of Anarchism

Recent news of Michael Badnarik's heart attack prompted both my best wishes for his speedy and complete recovery and some musings about common misperceptions about anarchism.

In a debate at Drexel University with Stefan Molyneux (I prefer the audio recording over the video, just cause the audio records more of the debate), Badnarik defended the existence of a minimal state on the grounds that we need recourse to defend ourselves and our property rights, among a few other things. He seemed to argue that without government there wouldn't be any shared notion of legitimate force or property or any social life whatsoever. Part of this is a misunderstanding of government, and some of it could have been that he was using the wrong words; but a lot of it is due to a misperception of anarchism that anarchists themselves are not guiltless in propagating. Below I'll go through some mischaracterizations that I hear almost every time I see someone react to anarchist ideas.

1. That anarchism demands everyone be hermits. No, anarchism does not demand that everyone wander off into the hills, build their own shacks, grow their own potatoes, and interact with other humans only for the purpose of procreating. Granted, some anarchists do that. And a few actually have espoused ideas similar to that. Some might have said we shouldn't even procreate. But as a set of political ideas, anarchism demands only that humans interact without violating each other's sovereignty; it does not condemn interaction outright. And if you think about it, anarchism is really pro-interaction. It condemns any threat or use of violence that prevents people from peacefully interacting with each other.

2. That anarchism demands non-resistance. It is true that if you are an all-out pacifist who believes that any force is morally reprehensible, then you have to be an anarchist. But anarchism as a set of political ideas does not condemn all force outright. What it condemns outright is the initiation of force, threat, or fraud. The anarchist's dogma is individual sovereignty (or at least, this is the individualist anarchist's dogma). Since you are entitled to remain whole against the intrusions of others onto your person and justly-acquired property, you have the right to use discriminate and proportionate force to maintain your control over what is yours. Granted, anarchists would condemn just about every modern war they could think of, and maybe every ancient war too, since almost every war involves the death and deprivation of noncombatants. But this is a far cry from "Thou shalt and may only persuade the rapist to stop raping thy daughter, and thou art a criminal if thou offend the dignity of the rapist by intervening in any way more physical than persuasion or distraction." This misunderstanding isn't helped much by the fact that many anti-war people who aren't practitioners of non-resistance still call themselves pacifists.

3. That anarchism means homemade bombs. This is a funny one, because libertarian anarchism can justify some acts that fit the dictionary definition of terrorism (and while we're on the dictionary definition, what is government but the organized use or threat of force against persons or their property to compel those persons or others to adhere to some politcal agenda?). You have the right to destroy the property of someone who actively aggresses against the property of others. The mere fact that the government bans it and calls it "terrorism" is irrelevant to whether you have a right to do it. And you have the right to kill people who are actively murdering others, or are presently making a living by murdering others. The mere fact that the government will most surely send you (or someone it confuses for you) to the gurney is irrelevant to whether you have the right to do it. I myself think that any violence that the establishment can put a spin on is very unwise, since it gives anarchism a bad name and provokes a retaliation that would further restrict liberty. But besides terrorism's imprudence, a lot of anarchist terrorism actually was illegitimate by libertarian anarchist standards. Some of Ted Kaczynski's projects caused the deaths of people who were flat out innocent, and it's very hard for me to imagine why Garfield deserved to die. If we look at anarchism as a set of ideas that demand the complete liberty of every individual over his or her own body and his or her own affairs, then a lot of "propaganda by the deed" doesn't even deserve to be called anarchist. It should instead be branded as the authoritarianism that it is.

4. That anarchism is anti-family. Well, it depends on what you call "family". If by "family" you mean a father's supposed right to beat his kids, lie to them to impel subservience, mutilate their bodies without their say-so, lock them in their rooms, and hunt them down and drag them back when they run away with express intent to not be under such authority, then yes - anarchism is very anti-family. But if by "family" you mean a father's right to pull his kid away from a hot stove, then no. Anarchists have a wide range of opinion on this, but those anarchists who have their ideological feet on the ground recognize that a parent has the right to restrict his or her very young child's movement in order to protect that kid from immanent harm. Parental authority becomes purely contractual, though, once the kid gets old enough to make his or her own decisions. What age that is is where all the disagreement happens.

5. That anarchism means debauchery. True, there are some anarchists that fervently exercise their right to wallow in their own vomit. But none of them would consider it an enforceable duty (unless, maybe, wallowing in one's own vomit were the prescribed restitution for some criminal wrongdoing, in which case I would still deny that it's enforceable). Most of the anarchists whose material I've viewed online (which I confess are overwhelmingly individualist anarchists) embrace some kind of egoist personal morality, where they abstain from any act they perceive to go against their rational self-interest. That would include unsupervised binge drinking, other kinds of substance abuse, unprotected sex, some other kinds of sexual promiscuity, and basically anything else that would likely have undesireable consequences. But that's a personal morality - it's about what you should and shouldn't do to yourself. It isn't about what you should and shouldn't do to others, which is primarily what anarchism is concerned with. All that anarchism demands regarding debauchery is that you let those enjoying it to continue enjoying it, and that you not force it onto those who don't want to partake. Whether you yourself should partake is an issue that anarchism as a set of political ideas just doesn't address.

6. That anarchism demands total chaos. Only if you march in the streets with revolutionary Marxists. Do read 1 and 3 again.

7. That anarchism is anti-religion. I am one of the few anarchists who readily admits that anarchism is a religion. It has its own scriptures, liturgy, prophets, and saints. Like any other religion, it has schisms between denominations. And like any other religion, it upholds a set of ideas which it supposes to be the Fundamentals on which everything else in that sphere must stand (yes, anarchists are fundamentalist libertarians). Saying that anarchism is anti-religion is like saying that apple pie is un-American. And there's no reason anarchists can't be bi-sect-ual. There are numerous Christian anarchists, there are some Buddhist anarchists, some anarchists find inspiration in the Tao Te Ching, a denomination of Hinduism was propagated in America by an anarchist missionary, there's at least one Muslim anarchist, the list could go on. So no - anarchism is not, never was, never will be, and cannot possibly be anti-religion. A noticeable number of anarchists, though, display anti-God sentiments which can be connected to their anti-authoritarian views. And there's nothing anti-religion about that.

Of Course God is a Jew...

The other day I posted as my Facebook status this mildly derisive note:

"Of course God is a Jew. How else would you explain Him choosing the Jews as the superior race? Surely, you don't think God's an American Evangelical Christian!"

After one member of the Christian Republican Party of Kentucky *liked* it, and a libertarian-conservative mourned that he knows "lots of people who actually really do", a friend of mine who watches Glenn Beck as fervently as I read LRC started a conversation which turned into a debate on Zionism, nationalism, and the state. Below is the transcript of those wall posts.

Post-Bush Neocon: Well if God is Jesus, and vis versa, than didn't God separate the line between Jews and Gentiles when He died on the cross for all of mankind?

Me: I'm not sure I know what you're trying to say here.

Post-Bush Neocon: Nothing.. just that while we always hear how Jews are the chosen people, is it wrong to say that is no longer the case since Jesus died for all of mankind, jew and gentile?

Sorry.. I know your comment was probably strictly meant for humor, but it was something that popped into my head anyways.

Me: No yeah, that's a noble way for a Christian to view it.

The comment was meant as a jab at Christians who use their religion to justify what amounts to Jewish supremacism.

Post-Bush Neocon: Ahhhhh....I don't know if I've ever met a Christian who viewed Jews as the supreme race. I can't speak for others, but for myself, I've always viewed them as God's original chosen people, but when Jesus died on the cross, that line of supremacy vanished. Maybe this is why Jews don't believe Jesus was the real Messiah?

However, if this is also in regards to the land that God promised his "chosen people", well if you believe scripture, than yes, the palestinians need to back off, as that land was meant for the Jews. And even if you don't believe that, well Britain owned the land anyways, and split it up between the Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians didn't like this, and started a war and allied with most of the middle east. Israel kicked their butt and everyone else, and kept the land they conquered. That alone gives them the right to defend what they deem as their land today.

Me: If you believe the Israelites' chosenness makes it okay for the State of Israel to run non-Jewish people off land that their families lived and worked on for decades, to bulldoze their houses and chop down their orchards, to divert water away from their fields and villages and towards new neighborhoods built exclusively for Jews, to build walls with checkpoints that the non-Jewish subjects can only pass with work permits that are conspicuously hard to get, to inflict embargos and steep tariffs that dry up the flow of goods into the non-Jewish territories, to set up blockades cutting off access to even basic nutrition, to put on military galavants that result in the deaths of countless non-Jewish men, women, and children, and in the face of all this subjugation of non-jews, to make Israeli citizenship infinitely easy for any Jew to get and much much harder for anyone else to get, then you use religion to justify Jewish supremacy. Not to mention whether you believe the Israelites' chosenness means Americans have to hand over their tax dollars to the State of Israel no matter how severely it abuses its non-Jewish subjects. I don't know whether chosenness actually does justify all those things - I'll leave that to be figured out by someone who actually believes in chosenness.

Post-Bush Neocon: I get what you're saying, but can you answer me this? Why should Palestinians be allowed any rights at all, being that they forfeited those rights when they lost in a war they started? I mean, it's land that the Jews defended and conquered fair and square (seriously, I mean, the Palestinians practically had the entire middle east allied with them, and Israel stood alone). Why shouldn't they have the right to do what's best for their people first? Isn't that what any state or country should do? Have THEIR people's interests first before all others? I mean, that's why you're against policing the world, right? Instead of policing, we should just focus our energy on ourselves and the many areas we need work, instead of wasting our resources on others. Isn't that your belief? Why should it be any different for Israel?

Me: Palestinians should be allowed rights because each of them is a distinct individual with natural sovereignty over him or herself. Whether "they" started the 1948 war is irrelevant. Let's be honest about that war - MY DAD was a toddler back then. Most of the people we're talking about weren't even conceived yet. They didn't forfeit their rights simply by having the same ethnic background and geographic origin as the soldiers who fought in a war that happened more than half a century ago (and if their rights are forfeited that way, then so are the rights of all today's Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians, since all 5 of those states fought for the Palestinians in that war). To treat today's Palestinians as if they did forfeit their rights that way is to treat people according to what group they're stuck in, and not according to their own merit. That sounds a lot like racism to me. Actually, no, in this case it *is* racism.

This is a problem with states in general. Yes, it is the very nature of every government to lump people into different groups and raise up one to dominate the other. This is one of the main reasons I'm an anarchist. There is no individual or group of individuals whose status entitles them to hold privileges over the bodies and property of others. Those rights that belong naturally to one rightfully belong naturally to everyone else. For government to act against one group out of the interests of another is to violate the law of equal liberty. I should say that I'm an American Firster only in rhetoric. True, I think U.S. tax dollars can be better spent at home than on foreign tyrannies; but I really think there shouldn't be taxes.

Post-Bush Neocon: Ok...well while I'm all for rights of the Individual, I believe certain rights are only to be given to citizens of a state. I say this because whether you like it or not, people only work well together in unity. It's why this multiculturism crap in the US is tearing us apart because you have people who aren't assimilating to the American culture, and want to change our way of living to some of the socialist third world crap they came from. So, the path to citizenship is a must, because you then weed out those who won't assimilate (not perfect, but no system is). I mean, if we all believed one system of government, and one world religion, and had the same family values, maybe you could pull your ideas off....But I gotta say, I'm a bit surprised on how Utopian your ideas sound.

So, perhaps you can elaborate for me? What do you consider as individual's rights when it comes to property? Should an illegal mexican that crosses our border and breaks our laws be entitled to buy land? Should an individual be entitled to free healthcare (certainly there are those that view that as a natural born right)? You see where I'm going with this? Better yet, do you believe at all in citizenship rights vs. individual rights, and if so, what would the differences between the two be?

Me: Before we get to my anarchism, let's put together some of the things you said. You think that even some of the most basic rights depend on membership in a state, and that people just don't have these rights if they aren't members. Would you go so far as saying that people don't even have the right to live if they aren't citizens?

You also said, in effect, that it's okay to kill children who were born on the wrong side of a fence, since by being born on that side of the fence they inherited their predecessors' guilt. You said that after initially denying knowledge of any Christians who believe in Jewish supremacy. I doubt you can explain how your belief in the Jewish State's supposed right to kill and rob non-Jews doesn't make you a Jewish supremacist.

You don't have to be an anarchist to believe in individual liberty. Anarchism is just the logical consequence of classical liberalism, and I don't expect all of my acquaintances to be anarchist political theorists. I do, however, expect all my acquaintances to believe that it's murder to kill people who aren't killing anyone else. Now, on to anarchism.

A free society would have no distinction between citizen and non-citizen. This doesn't mean government-provided healthcare for everyone. Like the Leftists, you confuse positive and negative rights. Positive rights are rights to force other people who haven't aggressed against you to do things for you or give things to you. Those generally don't exist. Negative rights are rights to be left alone - your rights to not be killed, beaten, kidnapped, stolen from, etc. So when I say your rights don't depend on citizenship, I'm not saying that illegal immigrants are entitled to every government service that citizens and legal residents get. No one's entitled to profit off theft. I'm only saying that your rights to life, liberty, and property shouldn't depend on which side of a fence you were born on. When you say that people should go through some special procedure for government to not have the license to kidnap them, seize their property, and throw them out of the country, you're saying people's right to be left alone doesn't naturally exist and instead has to be bought.

If you want to read more on governance based on individual rights, here's a link to loads of essays. http://libertariannation.org/b/bibhome.htm

What I think of Metal Coins

It's not that my dad hates Asians. He just thinks there's a scientific reason Asian houses keep getting burgled - everyone knows they keep precious objects at home.

This is why I'm very reluctant to get buttloads of gold and silver coins. Representing that much value with an object that small and that easy to loose would make me go crazy - Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type crazy. Add to that my inborn love for anything shiny and diskoid, and you get a real-life Shylock.

My dad has a friend who likes to give me advice whenever he's around, and once he gave me advice on how to store my hard assets. I'm to get a safe that's so heavy it's immobile, and if I can't dish out enough money for that I'm to find a discrete place in the back yard where I can burry my gold watchs, necklaces, and coins.

This must be one of the reasons "right"-libertarians are uber-gun-lovers. God forbid a common burglar stumble upon half their life savings. I'm not saying that fecetiously. I sincerely would feel heartache for anyone who lost their booty to a thief.

Isn't this what banks are supposed to be for in the first place? You'd think the market demand for secure places to keep precious objects would produce a lucrative way to delegate the safekeeping of my metals. But alas, we are screwed yet again.

If I get a deposit box in a bank to keep my coins in, I'd basically be renting storage with armed guards. My coins won't get much more valuable than inflation would make them, since I won't be making interest off of them. Paying a regular fee while not earning interest = loss.

Thanks to legal tender, you can't bank in gold. If you make a loan in gold, your debtor's only obliged to pay you back in that inflationary currency we're all trying to cushion ourselves against, and you're obliged to accept it. Sure, you can save all the gold you want; you just can't earn the interest on it to pay the cost of someone else keeping it safe.

Now, since you can't bank in gold, you can't use it as a monetary unit. If the coin is to be money, you have to be able to buy little things with it. Unless you can make a silver coin small enough to worth $1.50, you'll have to be able to cary receipts that represent that small amount of metal. And since no one banks in gold, those receipts don't exist.

If you can't lend in it and you can't buy in it, well then why think of it as an alternative currency? Maybe soon we'll see the emergence of a (probably black market) bank where people earn interest in metal off the loans they make in metal. Or maybe it already exists and I just haven't heard of it yet. If you know of it, or if you can convince me that keeping metal in a deposit box can increase the "real" value of my stuff, please tell me cause I really want to know.

And besides - I have no income and I'm paying off my student debt. I can't be buying metal when Wachovia owns my soul. Gold and silver coins' virtue is their ability to preserve a general amount of wealth over a long period of time, and due to the present circumstances my mind's set on the very opposite of that.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, R.I.P.

Roger Roots's essay at LRC shows how the American "Justice" system didn't work out perfectly for the Rosenbergs. Ethel might have been completely innocent. The evidence incriminating her was perjured - in the trial, witnesses against her said that she typed up notes on goings-on in Los Alamos, but at the grand jury hearing one of the witnesses admitted to typing up those notes herself. Had the transcripts for the grand jury hearing been openly available, the testimony against Ethel would have been noticed as bad testimony. But alas, jury transcripts are secret because we have to respect "jury secrecy", which - believe it or not - used to exist to protect the jury against undue influence from the prosecutors. We weren't able to learn all of the truth until the transcripts were released just now, more than 50 years after the trial (and, needless to say, too late to save the Rosenbergs).

Now, even if Ethel did write up those notes, and even if the information Julius conveyed to the Russians actually were designs for the A-bomb, the trial and execution still seems completely unjust. I don't believe in capital punishment, but even if it is justifiable to kill murderers confined after the act, what are we left with? A right to kill people who murdered in the past. If no one was murdered, there is no murder to punish, and an execution is totally uncalled for.

How many Americans died from a Soviet nuclear attack? Zero. So how many Americans did the Rosenbergs murder by conveying information on the A-bomb to the Soviets? Zero.

There is a phrase that used to be quite important in the American legal system, which roughly means "Show me the body."* Now it is hard to show a cadavre that's been nuked, but obviously no one here got nuked. Had our courts had a diligent interpretation of that phrase "show me the body", the Rosenbergs might not have been executed for a crime that resulted in no one's death.
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*Actually, the "body" referred to in the phrase habeas corpus is the living body of the petitioning prisoner, not the dead body of the victim. I'm just being poetic here.

My Conception Day Partay!

Non-Theistic Religions aren't necessarily Atheist Religions

A theistic religion is a religion that gives center stage to something or someone we can call "God". The stage might be the role of Creator or Sustainer or Most Intimate Chum (or it might be all of those) but whatever the role is, it's the most important one. And God, however you define it, is going to occupy that role.

A non-theistic religion is a religion that does not give center stage to anyone we can call "God". This doesn't mean, though, that the believers reject belief in God and all gods. It just means that non-physical beings don't take center stage.

Let's look at a list of non-theistic religions. There's Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, a few others that I won't list here, and others that I don't remember. Followers of each of the four that I list have accepted the existence of at least ghosts. Both Buddhism and Jainism accept the existence of pretty much all Hindu gods.

If you go to the Jain temple in Milpitas, you'll see a shrine to Dhurga and a couple other Hindu gods. This isn't a belief in a symbolic god; it's belief in actual beings who watch over earthly affairs and intervene to protect the temples and the people who worship in them. Jains wouldn't reject the existence of Jesus or God, either. They just think, as do many Buddhists, that every single soul is subject to Samsara - that is, being reborn and treated according to how ethical you act. The Jewish God has yet to die, and when He does, he will be reborn into a position that reflects how justly he ruled as God. He may have to live hundreds, or thousands, or millions more times before he can attain moksha.

The ones who get most of the adoration in a Jain temple are a set of 24 ancient religious leaders who attained moksha and now do absolutely nothing but sit blissfully and peacefully (that's what you do in Nirvana). Worshipping them is more like honoring someone for adhering to a very strict ethical path, than worshipping any kind of God or god - you don't get favors from or have any personal relationship with these ones. We can say that it's really the path itself that's being worshipped. Center stage, then, isn't really occupied by anyone.

But though no God or gods take center stage in Jainism, Jainism can't be called atheist according to today's meaning of the word. Atheists, as understood today, reject all supra-empirical reality - if you can't prove it, they don't believe it. Jains and most Buddhists, though, believe in supraempirical reality.

For one thing, Jains believe that the souls of their 24 Tirthankaras are sitting peacefully in Nirvana. That is just as much a belief in the "superantural" (I don't like using that word) as the belief that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father. (Buddhists don't believe that Buddha exists, because if he is Buddha then he attained Nirvana, and Buddha himself defined Nirvana as the annihilation of the self.)

Also, Jains (and most Buddhists too) believe that each one of us who isn't going to attain moksha in this life is going to be reborn in a future life. This is just as supra-empirical as the belief that those who are saved go to heaven after they die. There's no way we can possibly prove that any one of us was someone else in a past life. And so, an atheist would reject belief in reincarnation for the same reason he would reject belief in heaven and hell.

To be a properly atheist religion, the belief system can't have any room for any thing whose existence can't be proven. God, Nirvana, Karma (as understood by Jains, which is as heavy dust particles that cling to your soul when you sin and literally weigh you down so that you're reborn as a lower life form), and rebirth all have to go out the window for the religion to be an atheist religion.

Three religions immediately come to mind when I think of atheist religions: Objectivism, LaVeyan Satanism (which can be described as Objectivism with robes and candles), and Marxism. All three of these reject God and all supernatural phenomena. Each one of them is a religion because each one of them is dogmatic - they're just not dogmatic about God (or rather, they're dogmatic about him not existing).

There are other atheist religions. There's atheist Judaism and atheist Christianity, and if it hasn't already come about, sooner or later there's going to be atheist Islam. There used to be an all-out atheist school of Hinduism called Carvaka, and from what I see there's at least one person today who identifies with that school. If there are others who share their Hindu and atheist beliefs with that blogger, then Carvaka is risen from the dead.

...Yet Another Political Spectrum!

I was overjoyed today when I saw Frank van Dun's essay "Freedom and Property: Where They Conflict" posted as a Mises Daily at my favorite anarcho-capitalist economics website. I was even more impressed when I saw that it's a chapter in that new book in honor of His Princely Majesty Hans the Great.

That essay wasn't my introduction to left-libertarianism. When it comes to economic and criminal justice, I've been some kind of a left-libertarian for about as long as I've been a libertarian (and I didn't consider myself a libertarian until I adopted views that pretty much amount to anarchism).

Neither was the essay my introduction to Frank van Dun. I was familiar with his work since the summer before last, when I tried to find a constructive and straightforward debate on limited liability and instead found this rich yet notably continental essay against it. I also found other rich yet continental essays at his website, and read to exhaustion.

That summer I was lucky enough to find and read the essay I mention and link at the top, or one almost identical to it. What's so "revolutionary" about it is its suggestion that if you want to be completely pro-freedom, then not only do you have to be anti-government but you also have to be a little anti-capitalist. Again, I've had that sentiment since I started calling myself a libertarian. But an essay like this helps you put it into words.

Being introduced to ideas like this can change how you mentally map out political views. The Nolan Chart, which I bet accompanied (or even constituted) your introduction to Libertarianism, helped you distinguish libertarians from regular off-the-wall moderates, centrists who say "We need a little government to do a little of everything", and totalitarians. Here's an even better political spectrum.

I'd like to offer a more zoomed-in political spectrum that can show where left-libertarianism stands and how it relates to other factions of the ideology we call "Libertarianism".

First, get a blank piece of paper. Fold it hamburger style, and then as it's folded hamburger style fold it hot dog style. When you unfold it and look at it "landscape" you should have four collumns. At the top center, write "4 Strands of Pro-Market Libertarianism". I say "Pro-Market" libertarianism because there are leftist factions that call themselves libertarian and which totally reject individual property rights (and which I'm a little sympathetic to).

In the furthest right collumn, write "Classical Liberalism". This is the political philosophy of those who have the strongest claim to being the ideological heirs of Thomas Jefferson. Classical Liberals understand that government is a monopoly on the use and threat of violence, and insist that its role should be strictly limited to the provision of those services that cannot possibly be provided in the free market - things like the common defense, police and courts, environmental protection, roads (Walter Block once called Milton Friedman a "road socialist", and Friedman responded "Yes, you're right, I'm a road socialist!"), universal access to education, and regulation or outright provision of "natural monopolies" like water, gas, and electricity. Classical Liberals also believe that government services should be as decentralized as possible. If gas and electricity can be doled out by the cities, then let the cities do it, and not any bigger government. If access to secondary education can be provided by state governments, then let the state governments do it, and keep the Federal Government out of it. The Federal Government should only be providing those services that can only be addressed on a national level, like national defense.

In the collumn just to the left of that, write "Objectivist Minarchism". Objectivists believe that government exists only to protect you and your stuff, and that's it. The only legitimate roles of government, they believe, are military, police, and courts. Everything else should be left up to the free market. Probably all of them dabble in clever daydreams about "voluntary taxation".

In the middle left collumn, write "Anarcho-Capitalism". These are the ones who recognize that (a) if all transactions should be voluntary, then there's no place for taxes anyway, and (b) if there is to be complete economic freedom, then there should be free trade in government services, and government as a monopoly of violence is just as illegitimate as any other monopoly that uses government force to make itself the only option available to consumers.

Then, in the far left collumn, write "Left-Libertarianism". Put simply, Left-Libertarians recognize that coercion is not just an action, but also a state of being. It is possible for coercive conditions to result from "voluntary" transactions - the mere fact that no one initiated the threat or use of force does not mean that everything is now really voluntary. There can be coercion even when no one was beaten, defrauded, or extorted. Probably the best example is the encirclement problem that van Dun writes about.

Now, roll up the paper so that the Classical Liberalism collumn overlaps a little with the Left-Libertarianism collumn, and staple the two ends together.

Both Classical Liberalism and Left-Libertarianism recognize that there should be limits on property rights, and that the way strict libertarian capitalists define property rights isn't good enough. Classical Liberalism and Left-Libertarianism differ on how that limit should be made.

Classical Liberals would want the limits drawn out and enforced by government. The limitations on economic power of private elite then amount to increases in the power of the political elite. Left-Libertarians, on the other hand, want the limits drawn out through the consideration of each individual case by arbiters selected by the involved parties. Authority and Power would be as separated as humanly possible.

Classical Liberalism and Left-Libertarianism also both accept the traditional distinction between the public and private spheres. In this regard, Left-Libertarianism is more "conservative" than anarcho-capitalism, which relegates everything to the private sphere. In a free society, not only would it be possible for certain resources to be set aside for public use, but it would be essential - it wouldn't be a free society if everyone always has to do another's bidding just to get around and get by.

Some of the ideas that Liberals have brought to the table in the past hundred years might actually become useful for Left-Libertarians. There is much opportunity to develop anarchist legal theories on which goods and services should be freely available to the public, how they should be made available, and what legal tools are necessary for that to happen, and many ideas can be borrowed not just from the Classical Liberals, but also from socialist anarchists and even from Contemporary Liberals (neither of whom I put on this spectrum because they're both anti-market, but if you must add them the socialist anarchists would be to the left of and overlapping with the Left-Libertarians and the Contemporary Liberals would be to the right of the Classical Liberals).

Again, Liberals and Left-Libertarians would disagree on how the public sphere should be created and maintained. Liberals think the public sphere should be managed by the monopoly of violence. Left-Libertarians insist that a public option from government is not a moral option, and that public resources should be provided in ways that are completely voluntary.

On a less theoretical note, I didn't vote for or against the measure on our ballot this month (we had one thing on our ballots). It was one of these "you'll approve of wrenching more money from everyone around you or you hate children" kinda deals. I wrote in my own measure, with Yes/Si and No/No options, and ticked Yes/Si. It calls for repealing all truancy laws and funding public schools completely through donation.

An answer to

this very good question.



This phrase got cut off at the end: "...clothing my uniqueness in an air of religiosity."

Two Communisms

Since October 9 is the anniversary of Che Guevara's execution/martyrdom (the word changes depending on what you think of him), I thought now would be a good time to share my opinion of communism.

Communism is the belief that all goods and services should be produced "by each according to his abilities" and distributed "to each according to his needs." Basically, it's the idea that your lot in life shouldn't depend on what others can get from you.

Now, I'm not a communist, though I could have made a good one. I do believe that your right to be left to enjoy your own life doesn't depend on what others can get from you - but this belief is individualism, not communism per se. There is a kind of communism that can be compatible with individualism, and there's another kind which isn't compatible with it at all. But before I go into these, let me further describe what communism is by saying what it is not.

Communism is not equal work, equal pay, nor equal work with equal pay. Some people can work longer and harder than others. Some have disabilities or obligations that make them unable to work as long, fast, or productively as others. Making everyone work the same amount of time is just not equitable.

Paying everyone equally isn't equitable either. Some people have greater needs than others. Some families have more kids. Some families have disabled members who require more attention. Paying every bread winner their "fair share" is really unfair to those with special needs.

In fact, payment has no place in communism. If your lot in life shouldn't depend on what you do for others, then your comfort shouldn't have to be earned. A communist would put it this way: if you can't make a living without selling your time and energy to someone else, then that isn't much different from slavery. In communism, there is no buying or selling of labor - or much of anything else, for that matter. And so, there's no place for money.

In communism there's no room for barter, either (or at least, the ways people meet their most basic needs can't include barter). Again, your life shouldn't depend on what you do for others. What you need for you to live should be available to you without condition. If you can't get those things without doing something for somebody else - without, so to speak, running after the carrot on the stick - then you're basically owned.

"To each according to his needs," then, has a very particular meaning: those things people need for a decent life should be available to everyone without condition - without buying, selling, renting, or any other market exchange.

Those of you on my end of the political spectrum are by now bouncing in your seats to strike down any hope of such a system "working." But rather than sneer that no such system could ever stay afloat, let's try to imagine how people would strive to meet each other's needs without market exchanges. (We wouldn't be productive thinkers without some imagination.) Anyway, whether a system "can work" is nowhere near as important to me as whether it can work morally. Whether communism can work morally is what I'll look at here.

Human life requires human labor. "To each according to his needs" can never happen without the things we ned being transformed from a crude state to a useful state (that is, produced) and taken to a place where we can use them. In other words, somebody has to make the stuff we need. The communist ideal is "from each according to his abilities." But how this phrase is interpretted matters a lot, and there are two very different ways to interpret it.

One kind of communism allows and encourages people to work on the things that they themselves judge useful to the community. "From each according to his ability" here also means "from each according to his own discretion." This system can be called voluntary communism.

It can also be called a Gift Economy, since the most important transactions in it would be freewill gifts and favors. People wouldn't be working for any reward in particular - if they do work for a reward that they've grown dependent on (for example, wages), then it's hard to tell that kind of obligation to work from all-out compulsion to work.

This kind of communism celebrates voluntarism in all its forms and eschews compulsion in all its forms. People would work, not for wages, or out of compulsion, or from any kind of "have to", but simply and completely out of love for their work.

Sound far out? Well, before brushing it off as a system that necessarily would devolve into diseased, starved druggies running naked through the tall grass, just look around and see all the other things people do for the mere love of it. People develop their skills at all sorts of tasks, just for the satisfaction that those tasks bring them. To think that a man can't similarly be motivated to do a task that's useful to other people is to have a view of humanity that's not just unfair to humans, but also inaccurate given the evidence.

I gawked when I heard that a family friend charged his daughter rent for living in the house she grew up in. I think most people would gawk too (until they learn she was an adult). Most people in our society look down on a parent charging his kids for the things he provides them. And when it comes to the basics - food, clothing, and shelter - most parents provide their kids these things for free, regardless of how low the kids scored on their tests or how crabby they've been. Just about every family in America, then, is a little commune (this is overlooking, of course, the grave power disparity between parent and child).

The power of gift extends beyond the bounds of love, and into anonymous, semi-anonymous, and very distant relationships. You all know by now that I love Wikipedia. It's democracy at its best - everyone has their say, and no one gets hurt. It's also a gift economy of information. In the few years that it's existed it has exploded into a loud bazaar where contributors share information out of the mere pleasure of making something that interests them more accessible to other people who would find it useful. No one pays a penny to use Wikipedia. And the vast majority of people who contribute to it aren't paid a penny, either. And yet, it thrives. The very fact that university professors forbid their students from citing it reveals how central it has become.

It's only a very small leap of faith (shall we call it a skip of faith?) to see how gift and mutual interest can work in producing and distributing tangible goods and services. Since February I've been volunteering at a nonprofit law office. Job experience and bragging rights aside, I really do think I can say that I do this for my own stimulation and for the satisfaction of knowing that I bettered someone's life.

An economy where people grow and give food for free and build and repair each others' houses and do other favors completely for free doesn't seem that distant in the future. The farmers, mechanics, grocers, handymen, scientists, and teachers can all survive and thrive on gift, so long as they're all paying it forward.

Let's suppose, now, that not enough people are paying it forward, or that not enough is being paid forward in the things that are most needed. According to voluntary communism, people are free to organize communal networks where needs are discussed and volunteers signed up. If not enough people volunteer for harvest, or if not enough people volunteer to reinforce the levees, then everybody's just going to have to make do.

There is another kind of communism which can take care of problems like these. Involuntary communism is what most people think of when they hear the C-word used perjoratively. It's the communism that makes red-blooded Americans wet their pants.

In this other kind of communism, if not enough people volunteer for harvest or to reinforce the levees, then people will be conscripted to do the task whether they want to or not. Here, "from each according to his ability" means "from each according to what he can be made to do."

There can be a variety of negative incentives to "encourage" people to work - they can be beaten into submission, they can be assigned a menial and brain-rotting job, or they can see the priviledges they enjoy equally with the others suspended by order of the authorities - whatever the "incentive", it's an offer you can't refuse, and looks more like a threat than a mere enticement.

This is the big red line between the two communisms. One relies on voluntary, unconditional gift and voluntary, unconditional favor; the other relies on compulsory gift and compulsory favor.

If voluntary cooperation isn't enough to meet the basic needs of every individual, then involuntary cooperation is needed. For involuntary cooperation to succeed, there needs to be some kind of master-slave relationship. If the master-slave relationship is unnecessary, then every goal of communal organization can be met through completely voluntary cooperation, and central planning and political authority would be unnecessary.

If the master-slave relationship is inherently immoral, as I tend to think it is, then any kind of social organization there is - be it capitalist, mutualist, syndicalist, or communist - cannot depend on it as a mode of production and still be moral.

Of course, different people have different definitions of slavery. But surely, someone who believes capitalism to be slavery must recognize that giving people offers they can't refuse in order to get them to do things they don't want to do is - well, pretty coercive.

If the goal is to eradicate all political and economic coercion, then there's a problem here. Involuntary communism proposes to eradicate political and economic coercion through some coercive political and economic relations. Maybe the involuntary communists envision a world where the severity and frequency of coercion is significantly less than it is right now. But a little slavery is still slavery, and to use it to bring about some less evil world is violently utilitarian.

I'm not going to put words into involuntary communists' mouths and speculate that their answer would be "well, it's not really coercive if you're free to leave the country." I respect them too much to think they're that nationalist. "You have the freedom to leave the country" sounds awfully close to "you have the freedom to get another job," and if they think that corporate structures and economic conditions are coercive, then they have to accept that political structures are too. Involuntary communists accept coercion as a legitimate way to get things done. Imagining otherwise is beating around the bush.

As I said, I am not a communist. I do dabble in communist theory, and some day I might indulge in a gift economy. I am sympathetic to voluntary (that is, anarchist) communism, because it condemns forcing people into things. I find that to be fully within the spirit of individualism, and I think voluntary communist arrangements can be totally legal in a libertarian society. Anarchist communism is even refreshing in the way it interprets freedom. If you haven't yet read Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work" that I linked quite a few paragraphs up, you really should. Yes, I linked the same webpage twice in the same blog post, because I think it's that fun to read.

Next time someone tells you they're a communist, ask them this one question: "Would you ever force me to work?" If they answer no, then you can predict that they're anarchist, and that they advocate a gift economy. If they answer yes, then you can predict that they're Marxist-Leninists or some other kind of authoritarian who advocate a slave economy without using the word "slave". If your predictions are wrong, then either they're confused about what they believe or they're in transition.

Common Land

Problems with privatization are depicted in Cromwell, the 1970 movie starring Richard Harris and Alec Guinness. In one scene, royal henchmen drive shepherds and cattle off a field and erect fences, all to the protest of Cromwell, who bellows "This is common land!" Certain fields and forrests in England at the time had been dedicated to public use, and were used by commoners to graze and hunt. By handing over to well-connected members of the nobility land that members of the general public depended on and had the legally-recognized and customary right to use, the King excluded people from using property which was considered theirs, and - through force - transferred control of a good from one set of owners to a new, illegitimate, owner. In short, privatization of common land robbed the general public of what was rightfully theirs.

I stand by "right wing" anarchists with the view that private infrastructure can be moral and would be more efficient than the provision of roads and utilities at prices below cost (that is, private infrastructure can make congestion and water shortages a thing of the past). But the morality and efficiency of private infrastructure doesn't mean that there shouldn't or wouldn't be any public property.

Roderick Long's essays on stateless public space, here and here, were two of the best things that happened to anarchist legal theory. He notes that public property can emerge through the uncoordinated efforts of the "unorganized public", without the actions of a government.

"Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms - not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day."

According to John Locke's theory of property, which many libertarian anarchists espouse, a formerly un-owned thing becomes owned by someone when they "take it out of the state of nature" by "mixing their labor with it". By picking fruit from un-owned trees, the fruit becomes the product of your own labor, and is yours to keep, give, exchange, and defend as yours. By planting on un-owned land, the land becomes yours, and any effort by someone else to use the land without your permission is an act of theft.

Long applies the labor theory of property to the lakeside village trail. "The cleared path is the product of labor - not any individual's labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned."

(The practice of armed guards stopping travelers on dirt roads and demanding "payment" in exchange for the "service" of safe passage should be recognized as the crime we intuitively think it is - armed robbery. This differs radically from the tolls that would be charged on tollways in a free market, where the roads would actually be maintained by the ones who legitimately own them, and where maintenance would be a service that one can legitimately demand payment for.)

"Since collectives, like individuals, can mix their labor with unowned resources to make those resources more useful to their purposes, collectives, too can claim property rights by homestead." And since this is a property right, violating it constitutes theft.

Fields and forrests on private land in the Los Altos hills are criss crossed by trails which are traditionally open to the general public. Supposing that these trails were cleared by the "unorganized public" before the land was demarkated, or that the space the trails occupy was voluntarily handed over for public use, these trails belong rightfully to the public. They go through private property, but the trails themselves are common land. By closing off trails that go through their own land, landowners deprive hikers of access to a good which is rightfully theirs. (Of course, this is supposing that the trails were homesteaded before the land was, or that the trails were voluntarily handed over for public use.)

The collective homesteading principle can be taken beyond trails and be applied to fields and forrests. Now, I don't recognize animal agriculture as a legitimate mode of production, so let's set aside grazing and hunting for now, and look at gathering.

I should say first that just picking an apple from a tree doesn't make the whole tree yours. But continually picking apples from that tree, in a way that excludes another's use of that tree, makes that tree yours to pick from. You don't have to plant an orchard to own apple trees. If you continually pick apples from certain trees, to the exclusion of others' use of those trees, then you homesteaded those trees.

Trees can be homesteaded collectively, too. If a group of people continually pick apples from trees, to the exclusion of other uses of those trees, then the trees belong to the group collectively for picking. If someone comes and chops down some apple trees, without the consent of everyone else, he's excluding other people's use of their "own" resource, and essentially commits theft against the unorganized public.

Fields and forrests that people freely roam to gather mushrooms, or dig up roots, or pick flowers, or get sap, or gather sticks, or get berries, or collect any other fruit of the earth, belong collectively to the people who keep the habit of using that land.

The tragedy of the commons is a problem for common land, but it doesn't have to be such a tragedy. For one thing, the unorganized public doesn't have to be so unorganized. If a people worry about too many men chopping down too many trees, they can agree to seasonal quotas and give each other incentives to abide by them.

Also, (and you already got hints to this earlier in this post) the very nature of commonly-owned land means that any use of it which denies others' access to it is an act of theft. If the apple trees belong to everybody for picking, then cutting some of them down effectively deprives other co-owners of the ability to use a resource that they too "own". Since it's theft, then members of the public have the right to prevent each other from doing it.

This would lead to different locales developing their own rules on who can take what and what can be done if someone breaks the rules. Since membership in these groups isn't going to be purely voluntary, these groups can become state-like. But I don't think they would count as states if they act within certain restraints. If they don't assume ownership over people's very bodies, then they would be very different from conventional states. And they definitely couldn't be states if the rules are determined by the people who actually use the land, and not by a group that just assumes ownership of it.

I was moved to write this after reading the Wikipedia article on Chief Joseph. It wasn't anything about him in particular that made me think about this - it was the idea of American Indians not appropriately transferring the land out of the state of nature. According to Locke and many other white men, the "savages" hadn't really made the land their own, and so didn't really own it. If people are just following buffalo herds, and not doing anything to the ground to make it useful in a way that a white man would recognize as useful, then the land they roam is still un-owned land, and whoever fences it off and tills it first is the legitimate first user.

I find such stringent criteria for "legitimate first user" to be unlibertarian. A free society has a diversity of lifestyles. If people aren't free to keep and use land without noticeably changing it, then they aren't free. And if people aren't free to keep land collectively, then they aren't free.

Collective homesteading poses a problem for both nationalization and privatization. Whether common land is taken by an "organized" public, or by a private entity, it is wrenched out of the hands of those who homesteaded it or inherited it from homesteaders. It is stolen either way.

Long writes that the rules for privatization can be left up to common law, but one rule that seems obvious to me is that the privatization of common land should require the consent of everyone who uses it. If it's sold off or given away against the consent of someone who actually uses it, and who inherited the right of that use from predecessors, then it's taken from an owner without the owner's consent - that is, it's stolen.

Though I believe in a free market in water, it's hard for me to imagine how a river would be privatized without stealing it from members of the unorganized public. Privatization would have to start, not with the privatization of rivers, but with the private construction of cisterns to collect and store water.

The same limits on privatization would apply to dirt roads formed by the unorganized public, and to roads that were paved through the chaotic cooperation of people all acting out of their mutual self-interest without direction from above. Privatizing these roads without unanimous consent of their users would be theft for reasons explained above.

Though many government roads were not created by the unorganized public, and though government roads are built and maintained with stolen money and probably on stolen land, they too should probably be treated as non-government common roads. In this essay on privatization, Rothbard writes: "Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State's act of aggression. These people then become the 'homesteaders' of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners." In the case of government roads, these rightful owners are all the members of the general public who use the roads and didn't work for the government. Privatizing a government road without stealing from somebody would seem as difficult as privatizing a river or a non-government common road without stealing from somebody - the rightful owners are most everyone who drives on them, and selling a road against the consent of a single driver who regularly uses that road would be depriving a fellow owner of the use of his "own" property.

Since they would still be public roads after they are taken out of government hands, they would still have the same problems that plague government roads (aka, congestion) and maybe more. For instance, not enough money might be contributed for repaving. But if uncoordinated effort and mutual self-interest can maintain Wikipedia, there's no reason people can't figure out how to make it work for roads. Big corporations can adopt whole stretches of highway, repave them, and line them with advertisements. And besides, when the potholes get big enough and numerous enough, and when rush hour gets long enough, the rich ones will be willing to spend money out of their own pockets to build monorails and tollways in the air or underground.

Sanctions

I heard this afternoon that the U.S. is going to take a different approach to the militarist government of Burma. Instead of inflicting an embargo while refusing to talk to the junta, it's going to inflict an embargo while talking to the junta. Maybe the pro-democracy Burmese actually want continued sanctions on their country. I don't know. In the TV report I saw, all the U.S. foreign policy experts said that's what the pro-democracy Burmese actually want.

Let's take some arbitrary backwards country, call it Country X. It's ruled by a military general who wants to force everybody to work in agrarian communes and force every woman to abort every child after her first live birth. If no foreign government does anything about it, and if the population, life expectancy, and living standards in Country X plummet, then we could all safely say that the policies of Country X's government strangled Country X. Some people would say that it happened as a result of the U.S. government's failure to intervene, and that would be debatable. But what's clear in this case is that the ones who actually caused the fall in population, life expectancy, and living standards were the ones forcing the people onto farm communes and forcing women to get abortions.

Let's suppose, now, that the U.S. government intervenes by banning the import into the U.S. of any goods manufactured in or transported through Country X, banning the export of goods and capital from the U.S. into Country X, and threatening similar actions to neighboring countries that don't adopt a similar policy. Suppose also that the population, life expectancy, and living standards in Country X drop nonetheless. Now, who strangled Country X? The government that forced people to work in the fields and forced women to get abortions, or the government that made sure nothing could come in or out of Country X?

In the first scenario, the U.S. government is only guilty of being a bystander. In the second, the U.S. government arguably bears the guilt of depriving a whole nation of economic opportunity.

Now, what makes the second scenario different from the Burma situation is that the U.S. government does not sanction countries whose governments refuse to sanction Burma, and so - as in the Cuba situation - other countries are free to trade with the targeted country, and do trade with it. So if anyone was hurt by the sanctions, it wasn't the targeted government, but U.S. businesses who lost to competing foreign companies.

But let's overlook that for now and suppose that the U.S. government actually sanctions Country X so dreadfully that Country X's government gives in and stops forcing people to work in farm communes and stops forcing women to get abortions. Would that be a good thing? Sure, in the way that wrenching money from taxpayers by threat of force in order to fund my education is a good thing. If the sanctions actually worked, then they worked against civilians. It is civilians who feel the pain of decreased trade and investment before anyone in the government does. And if the sanctions are successful, then you can imagine how many civilians died as a result of U.S. foreign policy. If sanctions actually work to bring about the intended consequences, then they're only good in a violently utilitarian sense - in the sense that good ends justify whatever means happened to bring them about.

We could bet, though, that sanctions don't work. According to this paper, 87 percent of the sanctions imposed by the U.S. government since 1970 failed to bring about the intended consequence. It's worse than the flip of a coin. If flipping a coin gives you better chances, then that should be a good enough reason to start thinking of something else.

Maybe that's why the regime whose battle cry is "Change!" decided to continue sanctioning Burma while talking to the junta.

More on God and Morality

Many of the arguments I see about whether we need God revolve around the issues of God's existence and Creation. The question to ask, though, isn't whether we would be here without God, but whether we could be moral without God. That is in fact what drives theists - they're trying to defend the obligations they live by and want everyone else to live by.

Most theists would give at least one of two answers to the question of God's role in morality. One of the answers is that God actually determines what's right and wrong. I've already written a good bit about this, but I'll say here that this view precludes the whole idea of moral principle. If right and wrong depend completely on what God says, if - as Luther and Calvin wrote - things that are right wouldn't be right without the will of God, and things that are wrong wouldn't be wrong without the will of God, then morality depends on somebody's will and not on immutable moral principles. To say that morality is merely relative to God's will is to embrace moral relativism, which is no morality at all.

The other answer is that our imperfect human minds cannot know what is right without God pointing us in the right direction. Even if morality can exist without God, they say, our human minds always have the capacity to make an error, and everything that passes through a human mind is bound to be distorted. According to this answer, God's direction is supposed to insure us against inevitable human error. But can God's direction insure us against inevitable human error?

Even if God himself were to descend in a physical form and open the gold box of all morality and let each one of us see all morality with our own eyes, we're still seeing it with imperfect human eyes and processing it with imperfect human minds. Information would still be handled by humans, and so would still be subject to inevitable human error.

Let's leave the hypothetical now, and talk about what fundamentalists and many evangelicals actually believe. The Bible is supposed to be the word of God, and all that humans need for their present condition is to read the Bible and follow it. Or, that's what they say, until you ask them about things like slavery. Not a single Bible verse condemns slavery, and yet most every Jew and Christian considers slavery a sin.

Christians haven't always condemned it, though. Conservative Christians in America in the mid-19th century thought that since no Bible verse condemns slavery and since the Bible actually seems to condone it, slavery isn't a sin. The issue was so big that it split denominations. The Methodists split in 1844, the Baptists split in 1845 (that's why there are Southern Baptists), and the Presbyterians split in 1857. The disagreement was over how to interpret the Bible. The liberal Yankees couldn't find Biblical passages to condemn slavery, and, from the perspective of Southern conservatives, were relying on something other than the Bible for moral guidance.

Frankly, any time you use a Biblical passage to condemn slavery you're really reading the condemnation into it. Your own ideas and the norms you were raised with act like a lense to filter out the Bible verses that bother you, highlight the Bible verses you emphatically agree with, and give certain verses the meaning you want them to have. Whenever you read the Bible, you're introducing to your understanding of it various ideas that are not contained in the Bible itself.

Just look at how many disagreements fundamentalists have with each other over what the Bible really means. If all or at least most fundamentalists are saved and if they read the same word of God and listen to the same Holy Spirit, then apparently being saved and reading the Bible and listening to the Holy Spirit aren't enough to know for sure what God wants. If God is telling us all the same thing (and he would be fooling somebody if he isn't), then why do we disagree over what he's trying to tell us? The reason must be that on at least one issue each of us has a hard time telling what's coming from God and what isn't. Even though the Holy Spirit dwells in each saved Christian, the Christian still has an imperfect human mind that can be deceived by imperfect human reasoning. The indwelling of the Spirit cannot insure the Christian against his own mind.

There is a third answer to the question of God's role in morality, but I've only read it and I can't remember anyone seriously saying it to me in person. This is the idea that without God human beings would be so depraved that they wouldn't even want to be good or have any moral opinion. My interaction with unbelievers would suggest otherwise. And what about unbelievers who passionately share moral positions with conservative Christians, like the pro-life atheists and agnostics? These people seem to have a Christian morality but without God. Now, many Christians believe that God can and does work in and through unbelievers (no one would get saved if God doesn't). If God really does, then maybe obeying someone you believe to be God isn't necessary for a moral life. Of course, saying that God secretly guides unbelievers to be good is still attributing our morality to God's direction, and I addressed that in the previous 6 paragraphs.

The claim that we need God for morality seems dubious. That is, if we think of God as a person. If we think of God merely as The Good, then by definition it's impossible to be good without God. Or, as Roderick Long wrote, "The only intelligible conception of God is one that identifies God with logic and morality, or what contemporary philosophers call 'the space of reasons', which is what I think the Gospel of John was hinting at in speaking of the Logos as what is 'with' God and is what God is."

But now, by logic and morality, do we mean the human practice of doing logic and moral theory, or do we mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves? Because if we mean a human effort, then we're talking about something fallible, and if we mean the abstract forms, then we're talking about something that still requires fallible human effort to know.

I think Long uses "logic and morality" to mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves. If that's the case, then he's talking about God as something that still requires fallible human effort to know, and it seems this idea of God has the same problem that I mentioned above - that it doesn't ensure us against inevitable human error. But insurance against human error is a God criterion that the conventional theists came forward with; it's not a God criterion that Long uses, or that I use. And so, the fact of inevitable human error despite God is a problem for conventional theists, not for Long. All that Long is doing is trying to help the theist coherently say "Yes, you need God to be moral". If you define God as morality itself, as Long does, then the sentence makes sense: "Yes, you need morality to be moral."

Traffic Laws in a Free Society

Last week I made the mistake of admitting to someone at my workplace that I'm an anarchist.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"Do you drive?"
"Yes."
"How do you put up with it?"
"Put up with what?"
"Stop signs. Traffic lights. Police pulling people over..."

She was one of the many who think that rejecting inherent political authority means rejecting law and order, as if there can be no such thing as law without government. But I condemn government, not because I condemn law, but because I find government to be completely incompatible with the one law that matters most - individual sovereignty.

"I have no problem with rules," I responded. "I just think people should be allowed to choose which rules to follow."

The one law (or maybe I should say one of the few laws) which isn't up for choice, but which is rightfully thrust onto everyone without their consent, is the obligation to leave others to enjoy themselves. Every other law, and every other governing body, and every other person or group of persons that wishes to exercise control over a man or his things, requires his consent, and has no authority over him without his consent.

Government laws prohibiting the manufacture, possession, use, or distribution of certain drugs are illegitimate, since they prohibit an act which harms no one and they lack the consent of the subjects. They imply that government has the right to control the bodies of its subjects.

The libertarian maxim on criminal law is "No victim, no crime." If no one is limiting another's liberty through a violent act against their body or property, or through a threat of violence against their body or property, then no one's liberty was violated, no one was victimized, and no one has a right to react forcefully.

Some libertarians have taken their rejection of victimless crimes so far that they reject laws against drunk driving. Since a crime is only committed when there is a victim, they argue, driving with an alcohol content above a specified amount should not be considered a crime. If a drunk driver drives recklessly and crashes into someone else's car and other people have to be rushed to the hospital, then the drunk driver can be prosecuted for endangering other people's lives, injuring other people, and damaging other people's property. But he should not, according to these libertarians, be prosecuted for the content of his blood. What matters is whether his actions deny someone else's sovereignty over themselves. If no one is injured, deprived, or threatened by his actions, then there is no victim, and whether he has a noticeable amount of alcohol in his body is irrelevant.

I originally wanted to respond to this line of reasoning by assaying whether drunk (or some other kind of reckless) driving poses such a threat to others that it can be treated like pulling a gun on someone. I guess I'll say very quickly that if the fear instilled by drunk drivers is so great that people actually refrain from setting foot or wheel on public roads, then yes, drunk and other reckless driving on public roads could and should be treated like any other threat that denies other people's liberty and against which people may forcefully react. But this argument only pertains to public roads, and it doesn't account for the rich diversity that would be able to exist in a free society.

Every good libertarian and classical liberal knows that we should be allowed to have private roads (and some libertarians believe that a system of private roads would be more efficient than what we have). We don't violate anyone's liberty by paving a strip of our own property and driving on it. Every good libertarian and classical liberal also knows that we should be allowed to do just about whatever we want on our own roads. If you want to ghost ride in your own driveway, parking lot, or road, that's your choice.

People already engage in activities that threaten their own lives and the lives of others, and only the most parternalist among us would call for those activities to be banned. If you want to race your own very light and very fast car on a race track, go ahead. You don't violate anyone's rights by driving that fast on that race track. So long as everyone else on the track knows that people are driving dangerously fast, and so long as the race track owners allow you to drive that fast, no one's rights are violated. If you are to be free, you should be free to take onto yourself whatever risk is necessary to pursue your own happiness. The courts are starting to disagree, but deep down inside we all know that if you want to drive like an idiot with other consenting idiots, that's your choice.

If there can be race tracks where drivers waive each other's liability and drive in a way that endangers themselves and each other without legal consequence, why shouldn't we be allowed to have private roads where drivers and passengers can do the same? From a property rights perspective, there seems to be a clear case for legally allowing private road owners to permit drunk driving on their roads.

This isn't to say, though, that all road owners have the obligation to allow drunk driving on their roads. Far be it. Road owners have the moral right to exclude drunk drivers, just as pub owners have the right to kick out belligerent drunks. To say that anyone has a moral and enforceable obligation to provide services to someone they don't want to serve is to condone slavery. And to say that anyone can be forced to allow others access to their property is to say that their property isn't really theirs to begin with. And so, from a property rights perspective, road owners have the right to keep drunk drivers and other reckless drivers off their road.

Over the past three years that I've been reading libertarian legal theory, I've noticed some anonymous fringe elements condemning police outright, and denying any right of police to pull people over or arrest anyone. Those attitudes might be libertarian in spirit, but they aren't libertarian in theory. Individual sovereignty implies that people be allowed to use proportionate and discriminate force to address threats (i.e., defensive violence is permissible), and if we should be free to hire chefs to cook for us and bus drivers to drive for us, we should also be free to hire police to protect us. And, since individual sovereignty implies each property owner's right to determine the conditions of use (that is, the rules) on his or her property, road owners have the right to employ police to pull over reckless or suspicious drivers.

Suppose I had my own house, and suppose also that I threw a party in it. One of my male guests makes some unpleasant comments about the human female, and out of consideration of my female guests I pull the guy to the side and explain to him that he can't be saying things like that at my party. If he continues, or if he goes ahead and gropes someone, I have the right to physically take hold of him and throw him out of my house. In fact, I don't have to wait for him to offend my guests, or do something that everyone acknowledges as offensive. If he so much as puts on a Che Guevara shirt, I have the right to throw him out, and to say otherwise is to say that the house I bought really doesn't belong to me. Now, I don't have the right to beat him for it, or lock him in the basement (unless he gets violent and that's the only safe place for him). I'm only entitled to use so much force as is necessary to stay sovereign over myself and what is mine, or to maintain other people's sovereignty over themselves and what is theirs.

The same goes for roads. Road owners have the right to come up with their own rules for their own roads, and they have the right to enforce those rules. Their police have the right to pull over people who don't follow those rules, to fine people who break those rules, and to drive home people who they think shouldn't be driving. Now, they wouldn't have the right to imprison people indefinitely or without cause (that's kidnapping). But they do have the right to remove from the road those drivers who break the road owner's rules, and that means they should have the right to pull people over, and chase down and set up road blocks for those who don't pull over. If I have the right to pull a guy to the side in my party, or throw him out of my house, then highway patrol should have the right to pull over people who break the road owners' rules.

Hopefully, those rules won't get too ridiculous. There's a chance that they would. Someone might strictly enforce a no bumper stickers rule, or cite people for having chrome that's too shiny. We can trust, though, that competition in roads and road security would render the most relevant and least intrusive policies, since road owners whose rules are absolutely uncalled for wouldn't see a whole lot of business and would be allowed to fail.

Now to qualify what was just said about private roads and private traffic laws. In the video I linked in the above paragraph, Walter Block suggested someone try implementing the death penalty for drunk driving. The audience laughed, and probably most of them thought he was joking. I'm quite sure he wasn't. Block thinks it's theoretically possible to voluntarily and peacefully alienate your right to live. He could and probably would argue that a driver signs away his right to live when he drives drunk on a road that is clearly marked with signs saying "Drunk drivers will be shot." Without writing a book about it, let me say that a driver doesn't alienate his right to live by driving on a road any more than a guest alienates his right to live by stepping foot in someone else's house. If he opens fire on police, or aims a gun at another driver, that's a different story. (I say more about retaliatory force in my entry on abortion.)

At any rate, even if a road owner were to have drunk drivers executed, I doubt that rule would take off. Rather than encourage drivers to not drive drunk, it would encourage drunk drivers to not get caught. Chases on those roads would be much more violent than on the other roads, and that would increase the cost of keeping that road. Also, people would want to use other roads if they know they could possibly be executed for driving funny or tired. Roads with that rule wouldn't see much business. And, if executions are so controversial, the road owners run the risk of getting boycotted.

Before closing, I'd like to underline that though road owners in a free society would be free to write and enforce their own traffic laws, they would not be free to perform disproportionate or nondiscriminate acts of violence on drivers or passengers. If it is a free society, then individual sovereignty would be the rule of law, and any act that punishes the wrong person, or punishes someone too much, would be considered illegal, and other people would have the legally-recognized right to prevent it.

Also, I should mention that private roads doesn't mean no public roads. Roderick Long has two essays, here and here, where he argues that public space is not only permitted by libertarian principles, but is also desirable, and would likely appear in a free society. Land does not need to be government-owned to be owned by and freely available to the general public. The question of who to write the traffic rules, what traffic rules to write, and how to enforce traffic rules on public roads in a free society is a question worth asking, and unfortunately a complete answer to it won't fit here. The very short answer is common law and mediation.

If you are bothered by the complexity and otherness of a system like this, just ask yourself these three questions. Should people be allowed to drive drunk on their own roads? Should people be allowed to drive drunk on roads designated for drunk driving? Should people be allowed to drive on roads where drunk driving is prohibited? If you answer "Yes" to the first, then I don't see why you shouldn't also answer "Yes" to the second. And who in their right mind wouldn't answer "Yes" to the third? If you answer "Yes" to all three of those questions (and I don't know any red-blooded American who wouldn't), then you basically want a system like the one I call for.

Dress Standards on Public Transportation, and other things

You're sitting on a public bus, and your stop is about half an hour away. The bus is gradually getting more crowded, and newcomers are standing in the aisle holding on to hand rails. A man gets on and stands right in front of you. He acts completely normally - he says "Excuse me" and "Thank you", he awkwardly smiles the way you're supposed to on a crowded city bus, etc. - but there's one thing that makes him look more than a little unusual, and which makes other people feel very uncomfortable. He's completely naked.

This is a city bus - it's supposed to be for everybody who either can't or doesn't want to ride in a car or ride a bike. And we know that, in freer societies like ours, we're supposed to be free to do with ourselves as we please. Is it okay to kick him off the bus, or to not allow him on the bus in the first place? In some cases, yes. But wouldn't that violate his sovereignty over himself? I don't think so.

You should be free to walk around your own bedroom and bathroom naked. If your curtains are drawn, you should be free to walk around your entire house completely naked. If your neighbors permit, you should be free to walk around their house completely naked. If the owner of a restaurant permits, you should be perfectly free to sit at a table and enjoy a meal completely naked. You do not, however, have the right to present yourself unclothed on the property of anyone who doesn't consent to your nudity. You have sovereignty over yourself and what is yours; you do not have sovereignty over other people and their property.

We see the signs in restaurants that say "No shoes, no shirt, no service", and we never think twice about whether excluding someone who isn't properly clothed according to that sign violates those people's rights. Restaurant owners want to maintain a certain atmosphere that caters to a particular segment of the population (those who don't want to be offended by the presence of shirtless people), and to run their business the way they want to run it (which they have a right to) they have to make clear certain rules about how they want their property used. When a shirtless man walks in, no one violates his rights by refusing to take his order. If he really wants to have a shirtless restaurant experience, he could go to a restaurant that caters to people who don't mind the presence of shirtless patrons.

So, if a naked man gets on a bus where nudity is forbidden by the owner, the driver has every right to keep him from getting on. The only problem with applying this line of reasoning to city buses is that city buses belong to "the city" and not anyone in particular. But that isn't a problem with this line of reasoning. That's a problem with the oxymoronic idea of "public" ownership. Things that are publicly owned are supposedly owned and run by everybody for everybody. But we know that "public" services are funded by one segment of society (not everybody), distributed by another segment of society (again, not everybody) for the benefit of a very select segment of society (again, not everybody).

But I think I can address the problem of dress standards on public transportation without opining that tax subsidies for public transportation violate individuals' property rights, or that the most efficient mass transit is private mass transit.

As I wrote above, the restaurant managers want to cater to a certain crowd, and to do that they have to have certain rules that express the dining preferences of that crowd. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" is a condition of use that expresses these preferences. If you want to be served, you have to be wearing shoes and a shirt.

In order to cater to a target ridership, the owners of public transportation services (whether they be public officials or private entrepreneurs) should be free to lay down conditions of use that express the riding preferences of that crowd. If a significant portion of the target ridership happen to be very socially conservative (as many working-class people are), then they might want to and should be free to take that social conservatism into account.

When I was taking summer classes at Cal, I drove to Fremont and took BART to downtown Berkeley. One day (I forgot whether it was the morning or afternoon) a woman and her 2-year-old daughter got on and sat right across from me. The girl was making a lot of noise, the mom was speaking to her in some Central or Eastern European language, and suddenly the girl was quiet. I looked up from my book, and saw that this woman was nursing her daughter (who was old enough to talk) on this train. They didn't hide it with a towel or anything.

Now, I didn't mind at all. If you want to nurse your kid right in front of me, you have my blessing. But you might not have the blessing of the other people on the bus or train. Luckily for her no one reacted with horror, and I doubt anyone would in the Bay Area. Even if people did dislike it, it would have to be a chronic "problem" and the number of people offended by it would have to be sufficiently large for any drop in business to be noticed.

If there are enough people who are offended by it, and if there are enough women who insist on nursing or pumping in transit, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating nursing cars or walled-off nursing sections in cars. Likewise, if there are enough people who are offended by nudity, and if there are enough people who insist on traveling nude, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating clothing-optional cars and buses. So long as people get on the proper car or bus, no one would be made a captive audience to the offending exposure.

Many urban areas in the U.S. are seeing a sharp increase in the number of conservative Muslim immigrants. Some of these women find it more appropriate to not be in any situation where their bodies are pressed against the bodies of men they aren't married to, and they would be very reluctant to get on a crowded car or bus. As of now, there aren't enough of them to make an impact, and women who prefer to not be touched by strange men just somehow make do. If transportation services in the U.S. want to cater to these women in the future, when the number of them might be drastically higher than it is now, they might want to consider designating women-and-children-only cars and buses, or women-and-children-only sections of cars and buses.

Before you spout off screaming "Segregation!", let me point out that we already have restrooms segregated by sex. Most women prefer to have a restroom experience that is free of men, and in response to this overall preference shopping malls, restaurants, train stations, and office buildings provide restrooms reserved only for women. No normal person would say that the women are discriminated against for having restrooms reserved specifically for them, or that men are discriminated against for not being allowed to use restrooms that women use.

And don't worry about this being some kind of special priviledge. It's just that in the near future there's going to be a large number of people who want a particular kind of service, just as there are large numbers of people today who want particular kinds of service, and if you can make a buck providing that kind of service then why not? So long as no one's assaulted, defrauded, burgled, or in some other way deprived of their sovereignty over themselves, the provision of special services is completely legitimate.

Another possible objection to women-only cars and buses can come from people who are bothered by social heterogeneity. If a society is to be stable, they say, then it must run on values that are shared by everyone, and allowing separate cars for women out of consideration for conservative muslim immigrants allows pockets of recent immigrants to exist as third-world peoples in an otherwise modern America. Now, whatever America's values are, social homogeneity shouldn't be one of them. We should be a people who tolerate experimentation - not just in technology, but also in ways of relating to each other. The fact that some people wear more clothes than you do, or separate themselves from the opposite gender more than you do, should be no political concern of yours. We pride ourselves in our freedom to live by the values we choose, and we even like to pretend that our nation was founded on that freedom. If other people value the segregation of sexes, then let them live according to that value. They don't violate your liberty by getting on their own train cars.

Did you ever wonder why there are a million different kinds of churches in America? It's because here we're relatively free to live according to the values we choose, so long as we allow others the same freedom. One of the main rules in "doing church" in America has been: If you don't like our rules, start your own church. And so for the past couple hundred years people have associated according to their shared ideas of what's right. We don't have an established church. No one's forced to go to any particular kind of church. We don't force everyone to adhere to the same church polity, listen to the same religious music, or keep the same dress code. If that's the freedom we're allowed in religion, why shouldn't we be allowed it in mass transit?

My radical proposal is this: allow people to choose their own rules. If they don't want naked guys on their buses, let them keep naked guys from getting on. If they want to be naked on the bus, let them have buses where they can be naked. If women want to go topless, they can get on the naked buses too. If women don't want to be touched by men they don't know, let them have women-only buses. This isn't an issue of what's appropriate in public. It's an issue of what preferences people have. And if this is to be a free country, entrepreneurs should be allowed to cater to different people's preferences.

Individualism

In matters of politics and social morality, I consider myself a "purified individualist". Now, by individualist, I don't mean long bangs and skinny jeans and music with unpredictable tempo changes and disorienting time signatures. I don't mean intentionally acting in ways that other people find distasteful. I don't mean crossdressing for the sake of insulting someone's sense of gender-appropriateness. Though some of you might think of me when you hear of things like that, that's not what I mean when I say my political ideology is Individualism.

By "Individualism", I mean that radical idea that you don't own other people, that you have no right to do anything to them that they don't want done, take anything from them that they don't want to give, or threaten to do any of those things, so long as they're not intruding into someone else's matters. Think of it this way: Every man is his own king, with absolute sovereignty over his own life (and every woman is her own queen, etc.). Sure, it means that if a guy wants to wear a dress just so he could insult other peoples' sense of gender-appropriateness, then you have to let him do it (unless of course, he's violating someone's property rights while he's at it). But that's all that it means. It doesn't mean that you have to act so different that other people say "omg, you're such an individual."

In his essay on Henry David Thoreau, Randall Conrad wrote "Despite his deep-rooted individualism, Thoreau was readily moved to activism against injustice." Randall's use of the word "individualism" doesn't match the way I use it. Randall uses it as if it means isolationism. Now there is a type of foreign policy called "isolationism", which people like me are accused of advocating, but isolationism isn't what's implied by individualism. Isolationism means you have to keep to yourself, and have minimal interaction with others (or stay in your own country, and have minimal interaction with foreigners); Individualism means you have no right to initiate force against another. According to Individualism, you have every right to intervene to stop injustice. You just don't have the right to force other people to help you do it. You could encourage others to help you, but threatening force against nonparticipants isn't the correct way to do it.

Sure, fight your wars of liberation. But

1. Don't kill civilians (that's murder);
2. Don't force other people to pay for it (that's robbery); and
3. Don't force other people to fight your wars for you (that's slavery).

So when you tell me that so-n-so's an individualist like me, you better not be talking about his predisposition to disagree with people, or about some weird diet he's trying (unless it's out of consideration for human or animal rights).

On a less serious note, my second nephew "arrived" yesterday. It wasn't as if he wasn't already here, though. When my sister visited last month it was kinda hard to ignore the fact that there was a baby inside her. And since it was inside her, where else could it have been but right here? Oh well. Since little Jordan was born yesterday, people will celebrate the beginning of his life on August 25th. I, however, will celebrate the beginning of my life in the month that it really began - November.

When I say I espouse "purified individualism", I mean that I believe individual rights don't depend on how drastically you can affect the world around you. They don't depend on what you've contributed, how strong you are, how smart you are, how many people you know, or any of that. They don't depend on your physical or mental capacities or state of development. If you have rights as an individual, then your rights don't depend on how others value you. They don't depend on your race, mother tongue, species, or age. You have them whether you're an adult human, a fetus, or an animal... I constantly strive to purge from my ethical framework all forms of anti-individualism, from utilitarianism to is-ought-ism. That's why I say "purified individualism".