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.