Thoreau and Lapin

I'm not going to be as analytical in this post as I would like to be, partly because I don't know how I would be able to explicate my thoughts about this without sounding like an economist. There seem to be two different attitudes within the libertarian/libertarian-isch ways of thinking about personal independence which sort of rub against each other.

First, there's the "rugged individual"ism of Henry David Thoreau, which most of us know is expressed in his more famous book, but which I think is put clearest in his lecture "Life Without Principle". To be honest, this is the attitude that my own sentiment accords better with.

[9] The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work...Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

[11] The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business...

[12] Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage...

Then, there's this other attitude, as expressed here by Daniel Lapin.

Does God want us to be rich?...To tell you the truth, I can't say with any certainty on that subject. However I do know that God does want us to be obsessively preoccupied with the needs and desires of other people, whether they're your clients or your customers, whether they're your vendors or your employees. Be obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people. And it shouldn't suprise anybody who believes in a loving deity that the result of that is the great blessing of prosperity and wealth. Surely the ultimate way to acheive prosperity - become obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people.

Do not insist on making buggy whips while Henry Ford is building a car down the road. Because now you're not focused on what other people need or want - you're focused on what you want to do...[P]eople sometimes say to you "The important thing in life is to find a job that you really love. Go and work in an area that you've really got passion for." Wrong. Sounds very nice, but it's wrong! It's wrong because it's selfish. What it's saying is "I want to make a living doing what I like doing!" You're missing the point. This isn't about the money, it's about your relationship with other people. You've got to find what other people need and want and then learn how to get passionate about supplying it.

Laurence Vance, Ron Paul, Abortion

In response to recent criticisms of the Doctors Paul, Laurence Vance wrote this article that was published yesterday at LRC. Every pro-life conservative should read it. He says a lot of good things in it. He emphasizes that real change is social change, not political change, and that programs asserted from the top down end up like Prohibition. He mentions that there are all sorts of non-political routes that the pro-life movement could take besides the political route, which has progressed unremarkably at best. And, he suggests between the lines that a program for the rights of the preborn is pretty much meaningless outside of a program for total freedom.

I do have some criticisms of the article, though, and it just wouldn't be right for me to suggest his article without also offering my criticisms of it.

For one thing, Vance keeps talking about the Constitution. The Constitution has no inherent authority. It is just another piece of positive "law", and at best is just a useful legal tool to keep a positive law system relatively "libertarian".

Also, Vance rebukes American Right to Life for attacking national sovereignty. But frankly, there is no such thing as national sovereignty. If the people of another country start genociding Christians or Jews, we would have a right to violently intervene. That's half of what we mean when we say "right to live". To say that individuals don't have the right to intervene to stop a genocide abroad is to say that the rights of individuals depend on the dictates of the government they live under - and that smacks of anti-individual and pro-government sentiment. Our opposition to U.S. intervention abroad should be based not on some myth called "national sovereignty", but on the principle of individual sovereignty - that is, on the moral opposition to killing noncombatants and to forcing taxpayers to fund something they don't want to fund. If the proposal was for the U.S. military to intervene, sure I would oppose that. But if private individuals and groups wanted to intervene, and were subject to a procedure by which they are held accountable for any nondiscriminate or disproportionate violence, I'd have to say let them.

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".