Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, And Not Just Him
So during my mini-blogging vacation last week, the President put torture back in the news, campaigning for a bill to make torture okay so long as the President meets the strict requirement of deciding to torture someone. Some Senators have squawked. Colin Powell has decided to try to reconstitute some shred of the dignity his stint as Secretary of State forfeited and a bunch of retired servicemembers remembered that they took an oath to defend the Constitution and a much better nation than one where, as Eugene Robinson writes, “the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a ‘high-value’ terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture.”
On one level, it’s hard to figure out how this got started. The President and his co-conspirators propound a doctrine that, because the country is “at war,” the President already has all the authority he needs to do pretty much anything he wants if he says it’s for the war, a claim no outside authority has standing to dispute. Everyone knows that he’ll slap a “signing statement” onto any supposed compromise legislation that comes to him and he and his underbosses will do whatever they wanted to do in the way of torture in the first place. Why bother proposing legislation?
One possible reason is to provide some cover against international legal jeopardy. Sure, the Hague is run by NATO allies and Belgium has repealed its universal jurisdiction provisions, but you never know when some foreign prosecutor will pull a Pinochet on you while you’re abroad. While the President himself probably won’t travel abroad much after stepping down, some of his lieutenants like to get around, and there are the little people to think of too, all those intelligence officers and armed services personnel risking arrest every time they pass through a foreign airport. (You know who “the little people” are – they’re the only people, so far, to suffer any substantial punishment in abuse cases from the Long, Long, Long, Long War to date.)
But for that purpose, the joke is on the Bush Administration. The United States government cut down all the principles of state sovereignty and sovereign immunity in its eagerness to get at Saddam and Milosevic before him. When international do-goodery rounds on American officials, there will be no stump to hide behind. No international court that bothers to prosecute American officials will be impressed that, “No, you see? We passed this law!”
That only leaves the really depressing theory, which I’m not the first to advance. The White House is picking a fight with Congress over torture because the White House thinks it will help the President (and his party’s) standing with the voters. What makes the theory depressing is, it may be right. And what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, government power, Mr. Managerial Liberalism?
I’m not blaming liberalism for the Bush Administration. I’m not telling you, a la David Boaz, that “liberals ought to love President Bush for expanding the size of the government.” I’m not saying that taxation is torture is the holocaust. I’m saying, to paraphrase the sage, you go to the polls with the electorate you have, not the one you might wish to have. I don’t think Americans are especially depraved. Americans combine the usual human atavisms – instinctive suspicion of strangers and a desire for safety – with an unusual, maybe unprecedented amount of relative power, is all. But our country’s more successful political party plausibly believes that appealing to the country’s worst instincts is the key to maintaining power. To the extent they’re right, I want that government to have as little power and prestige as possible. The Bush Administration is uniquely awful, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and what gave rise to it will persist.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 19, 2006 @ 10:56 pm
I don’t think this argument bears as much weight as you want to put on it, Henley. You are, in the end, pointing to culture, and these people are pretty clearly not of our Blue culture. This one can’t be laid at our feet.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:00 pm
Tim, with all respect, I don’t think you’re getting the argument. It doesn’t matter whether “they” are “our” culture or not. The same government is going to hold sway over us and them. What’s more, there’s no way you and I can keep them from having a good deal of say, in recent history a preponderant say, in just who that government is. So I don’t think it’s safe to leave the government with that much power.
Comment by Brett —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:01 pm
I just thought it was part of the September Surprise: Bush stakes out an absurd position. The GOP up for re-election condemns it. If you like the absurd position, you vote for the president’s party, despite their opposition. Because, you know. If you don’t like the absurd position, you vote for the courageous Congressman who stands against it.
Either way, they don’t get voted out of Congress.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:04 pm
Brett, I don’t know if I like you being smarter than me.
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
That’s right, blame Americans first.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:11 pm
Brett is an American . . .
Comment by anodyne —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:25 pm
If I put aside subjective statements such as “appealing to the country’s worst instincts†and the minor remonstration against those who advocate big government liberalism, I think I hear you saying these guys may have a mandate to continue doing what they are doing for as long as they want. That’s why WE have to limit their power. If that’s a correct interpretation, then can you tell me who you think WE is? Or was this just a lament?
Comment by Josh —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:03 am
The White House is picking a fight with Congress over torture because the White House thinks it will help the President (and his party’s) standing with the voters.
There’s that. The other explanation I’ve heard is that since Hamdan, it’s become decidedly less clear to the folks further down the chain of command that what they’d been told was legal is in fact legal, and that they’re getting nervous and refusing to go along anymore. If the administration can get this legislation passed, it’ll solve that problem.
Comment by Jon H —
September 20, 2006 @ 1:58 am
“I just thought it was part of the September Surprise: Bush stakes out an absurd position. The GOP up for re-election condemns it. If you like the absurd position, you vote for the president’s party, despite their opposition. Because, you know. If you don’t like the absurd position, you vote for the courageous Congressman who stands against it.”
The thing is, Bush has a long history of wanting this, badly. Frankly, I think he would have okayed police torture when he was governor of Texas, if it had come up.
I don’t think it’s the kind of ruse you suggest. I think they’re genuinely using “tough enough to torture” as a selling point.
Comment by Realish —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:14 am
Whoa nelly.
The phrase “government power” is a rhetorical papering over of the difference between government-of-laws power and government-of-people power.
I know libertarians are inclined to think the former will inevitably become the latter. I disagree. But certainly nothing, nothing about the power Bush now wields is congenial to liberalism.
Don’t forget the ACLU et. al. Formal, procedural restraints on the power and reach of government are as integral to liberalism as support for activist government.
Comment by bad Jim —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:35 am
The present administration’s enthusiasm for torture and invasion is not really much of an argument against progressive taxation or universal health care, is it?
Comment by Madeline F —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:30 am
The White House is picking a fight with Congress over torture because the White House thinks it will help the President (and his party’s) standing with the voters. … And what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, government power, Mr. Managerial Liberalism?
Aren’t you the one who’s like “Oew oew oew, where is our lovely legislative branch oew oew?” What I want to know is, how do you like your rule by the strong man, Mr. Laissez-Faire Libertarian?
Comment by chris y —
September 20, 2006 @ 5:38 am
Jim,
You’re entitled to a cheap shot once ion a while, but you know perfectly well that there’s a difference between believing that it’s possible to legislate to correct for social inequity and believing that the executive should overwhelm the legislature and the judiciary.
In fact I can’t see anything in common between the two positions.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
September 20, 2006 @ 5:53 am
I dunno, I thought Jim’s point was clear and sensible. Power gets used, when it’s lying around, and if people with some power see a way to conveniently grab more, some of them will do so. I differ with the underlying message only because I see exactly the same thing happening with private power – individuals and businesses screw up markets in just the same way, and (if not stopped) with just as much totalizing brutality as they do with the power of the state. It’s a human thing, and will happen, again and again, and have to be responded to again and again. But it’s always worth pausing to recall that what you want to do good with, someone else will find a way to do harm with, and think about what you’ll do when (not if) it happens.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:07 am
This post is nonsensical. American liberalism is all about putting power against itself in the service of more freedom for the not too powerful. Libertarians just don’t get that; their willingness to have an unrestrained market is why they really shouldn’t call themselves classical liberals.
The American system of seperation of powers is breaking down because the American people want torture and want aggressive war. There’s nothing that you can really do about that. It’s classic declining-Empire decadence.
Comment by Nell —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:45 am
Rich P: The American system of sep[a]ration of powers is breaking down because the American people want torture and want aggressive war. There’s nothing that you can really do about that.
Yes, there is, and I think you are grossly slandering the American people. Declining-empire decadence isn’t like the weather.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:50 am
You probably should have written, or saved, this post for after the election, Jim. It’s too early to say with any degreee of certainty that Bush’s torture gambit will work.
And, quite honestly, if it appeals to any slice of the electorate, it is not to “liberals.” It is to Bush’s base.
The lesson, then, is to elect people who aren’t fascists, or who have fascist tendencies to office. Our history has shown that those people tend to abuse the power they are given.
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 20, 2006 @ 8:22 am
The interesting thing about your argument, Jim, is that it concerns abuse of the few powers of the state that even most libertarians will acknowledge as legitimate — national defense and law enforcement. So it seems to me that you’re arguing, in effect, that the people empowered to deal with those issues would be less likely to abuse that power if all other state functions were cut away, and they were the only game in town.
I’m not sure that powerlust works like that…
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2006 @ 8:31 am
BJ:
As soon as you give me a state that can do one but not the other, no, it’s not. Maybe you can. I’m all ears.
Medeline: In all sincerity, I don’t get your point. Can you please restate?
Chris: It’s not about liberal intentions. It’s about the nature of the tool available for use by whoever actually captures it. I think it should be clear by now that I think you guys are better citizens, human beings, what have yous generally. That’s not what matters.
Bruce: Thanks, yes. I’m not sure I disagree with you about it being a universal tendency of all institutions.
Charles: Good point. That intuition has certainly increased my anarchist sympathies. But the root of the trouble is, I think, an idea that conservatives, when they existed, used to scorn: that the state can and should guarantee perfect safety. The “security mom” phenomenon. Nevertheless, you’ve got the strongest objection on the table right now.
Comment by thoreau —
September 20, 2006 @ 8:32 am
The Bush Administration is uniquely awful, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and what gave rise to it will persist.
Other evils there are that may come; for Bush is himself but a servant or emissary.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 20, 2006 @ 8:35 am
Nell, of course declining-empire decadence isn’t like the weather; it’s a result of a large number of historical decisions. And it’s not amenable to easy turnarounds. When you say that I’m grossly slandering the American people. you’re advocating the Bad Apple President theory — as if the Bush regime wasn’t supported by a near majority of Americans, and as if you possessed some kind of unusual discernment to see that Bush supports torture, while those voting for him just couldn’t see it.
Bush may lose, but he certainly sees no need to run away from torture and war. Hesiod’s bit about him appealing to “his base” is beside the point; he’s been winning elections with that base.
Comment by Peter Schledorn —
September 20, 2006 @ 9:06 am
Aside from Charles’ excellent point that this involves the core functions of any government, even the most minimalist, we have the fact that this power grab has been done in secret, not through legislation, for the most part.
Sure, the Patriot Act impinged on civil liberties, but the secret prisons, the NSA wiretapping, the torture, the renditions, and so forth have been done out of the public view as far as possible. Most of this we know about because of media reports.
That’s a far cry from the usual big government method of passing legislation and implementing regulations.
Most of this power grab has been illegal, and the proper role of government in this case is to inhibit the actions of its executives (and it may still be if we can get some vertebrates elected in time–faint hope, I know).
The power grab has been illegitimate under the rule of law, and I think you’re put yourself into the position of someone arguing that there should be no private property because someone may steal it.
Even the smallest government is significantly more powerful than the biggest individual. What we need in government is self-discipline, which takes in respect for the rule of law.
What we have is a government being run by a spoiled child (Bush’s behavior makes no other conclusion possible). But spoiled children need enablers, which Bush has in abundance. Lacking in self-discipline, they need discipline imposed from the outside (oversight and, hopefully, prosecution). They know this and have taken every step possible to avoid that discipline.
If a child gets behind the wheel of a car, we don’t think about getting rid of cars, or of making them out of gelitan so that they don’t hurt as much. We focus on making sure that only competent and mature people handle dangerous implements.
This is a long-term problem we’ll have to solve as a society, and the size of government has nothing to do with it.
Comment by Avedon —
September 20, 2006 @ 9:37 am
Not that I’m so sure that Bush has won any elections (”with that base”), but I do want to quibble with the idea that the pronouncements (not even backed up by an unscientific online poll) of one religious nut that McCain will lose that base because of his stand on torture do not amount to any evidence that it’s true.
The evidence I’ve seen is that a lot of the Christians who have supported Bush in the past are losing faith in him because of his treatment of the poor and his stand on things like torture.
So if you’re saying that there are nuts who won’t support McCain because he is pretending to oppose torture, well, sure, there are always nuts. But that doesn’t mean that we, as a country, are necessarily that nuts.
(I’m not impressed by McCain’s attempts to pass new law that says, basically, “Torture is wrong, but we shouldn’t actually prosecute anyone for it.” If he really opposed torture, he’d oppose new laws and insist on enforcing the ones we already have. It doesn’t appear that any Republican is prepared to do that. Maybe the people who oppose torture are looking elsewhere to vote for someone who looks like they will.)
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:14 am
Charles writes:
Well, yes. In the abstract, this is a good point. But there are certainly many connections and dependencies among state powers.
Consider taxation. Taxation is required to support a standing army. Heavy taxation is required to run a high-tech standing army. Without the income tax (or an equivalently heavy tax), we would not have the large army that we do. And hence, no Iraq adventure. (Not the first time, nor the second.)
Taxation is also required to do foreign aid; and heavy taxation is a practical necessity for large-scale foreign aid. $4 billion per year is a small portion of our current budget; if the budget were $40 billion/year it would not stand. Our foreign aid in recent years has gone to play the great game in the middle east, supporting Israel, certainly, and also supporting the many dictators there.
Thus: our heavy taxes have made the situation possible where we (a) intervened in Iraq the first time, leading to (b) “sanctions”, and (c) support Israel militarily, as well as (d) repressive Muslim states. That is, all of Al Qaida’s grievances against us are ultimately dependent on the tax power. Without it, no 9/11, and hence, no panicky reaction amongst the lumpen electorate.
Or, let’s take another example a bit closer to the point. For over a hundred years, the USA had almost no federal police. (If you’ve ever wondered why treasury agents guard the president, this is why – they seemed the best fit to the task among the very limited options there were in 1900.) With very few police, naturally most policing was done at the local level. Hence, there was little “need” for the Feds to torture; even if they wanted to, it would have got them almost nothing since they simply did not have the administrative capacity to process large numbers of people.
When we think about minarchism, it is also important to realize that even with the same control system — democracy — the issues will be different. Our current state has its fingers in every pie. Hence, there are many issues each time a vote is held. When there are many issues in a democracy, two effects happen. First, control over the government by the population is attenuated. Single-issue voters tend to be disenfranchised (if their issue isn’t at controversy in an election), or else, split. As the number of issues increase, the fragmentation of the electorate increases with it. Only a few issues at a time will be the “main” ones, and even those will be different in various races. You can see proof of this in how much you like the canditates as a whole. A candidate who matches you on all the issues is a rarity (non-existent for me, not even Ron Paul). Much more common in modern social democracy is the phenomenon of voting for the lesser evil.
The other effect of many issues at at time in a vote is that any given issue loses important as a decisive factor. If you think torture is important (I do), you also have to worry that war is important (it is), and taxation, (ditto), “welfare”, corporate welfare, environmentalism, socialism, etc. etc. All of them important. Thus, even as a premier issue, a lot of people don’t really care enough about torture to change their vote. They have other more important issues.
Thus, in minarchy there are two ways in which abuse of power is restrained. One is that the control system (democracy) works better. With fewer issues, abuse of power is likely to be an issue when it happen. Second, that power is much harder to abuse when there is much less of it. Standing armies get used, abusively or not. If you set the system such that having one is hard, you cut off many abuses before they are even conceived.
One need only look at the history of the early USA, which was close to minarchy as we could ask for in history. Yes I know, they had slavery. (Sigh, you are so predictable.) That’s not at issue. At issue: did they or did they not accrete power into the center at the same rate as we moderns do?
Comment by IOZ —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:30 am
To the contention that “American liberalism is all about putting power against itself in the service of more freedom for the not too powerful” by Rich above, I’d say that it’s a good thing that American liberals don’t lose elections, what with all that power lying around.
Otherwise, Charles does make an awfully convincing argument for my own personal political philosophy of anarchofaggotry, in which we only keep the police and the army around for all those uniforms . . . It Takes A Village People.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:44 am
I find it highly ironic that Jim seems to be advancing the saem argument in favor of limited government that gun control advocates make in favor of, well, gun control.
The powers of the state (guns) are inherently dangerous, so we should restrict access or the avilability of those powers {guns} because a subset of individuals frequently abuses them.
Don’t gun control advocates argue that “guns don’t kill people. People kill people?”
The state is a tool. It is not an independnt, conscious entity with a will of its own. Just as a scalpel can be used for great good in the hands of a dedicated, moral and skilful surgeon, it can also be sueed for evil in the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Jim’s argument, as he admits, is one in favor of anarchy, not libertarianism. Although, I’m not sure who anarchy would save him from George W.Bush’s excesses. Arguably, it has actually be the structure of our Republica itself which has orevented Bush from doing even greater harm.
The mere fact that he still has to maintain the support of 51% of the electorate in a majority of Congressional districts and states has checked his ability to, say, invade Iran and/or Syria and instituting a draft.
My conclusion is, then, that it is ot Government that is the problem. It is the bad people who are running it who are the problem. There’s a serious qualitative difference between the run-of-the-mill complaints of libertarians about Gvt (such as excessive taxation) and what George W. Bush is doing (abrogating basic due process and human rights).
Comment by jlw —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:59 am
Government power is a tool. A tool that people can use–much the same way that a gun is a tool that people can use.
Now, I’m old enough to remember many, many Second Amendment absolutists repeat that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. In other words, the tool is not the act, and so restricting the general access to the tool is wrong.
It’s been my experience that many Libertarians are Second Amendment absolutists. Correct me, please, if this is a misconception.
It’s interesting, therefore, that when it comes to guns, which are pretty much only designed to kill people (i.e., irrevocably take one’s personal liberty, often without their concent) we are instructed to focus not on the tool, but the actors. When it comes to government power, which (regardless of one’s pessimism) can have both positive and negative consequences, we are instructed by Libertarians to banish the tool.
Hmmm.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:00 am
Tim, with all respect, I don’t think you’re getting the argument…. What’s more, there’s no way you and I can keep them from having a good deal of say, in recent history a preponderant say, in just who that government is. So I don’t think it’s safe to leave the government with that much power. Ack! I wasn’t very clear; what’s worse, I knew I wasn’t being clear, and I just didn’t care. I think I get the argument: the recent misuse of government power should lead libs (or Dems) to the realization that “it’s not safe to leave the government with that much power.” But, a la Kinsley (http//www.slate.com/id/2130035-I can’t figure out how to link here) (”there’s something else, something hard to describe because it’s essentially a ‘love of freedom’”), I think the cultural norms about government power are the only governors of that power that matter. Moreover, I think you’re advancing the same sort of argument*; we should get in the habit of denying the government power; that habit will result in angry public reactions when government does overreach, and recognition of that result will limit government attempts at such overreach. Unlike you, I no longer believe we can create such national norms. In the past, I had believed differently. But, in the past, I believed that everyone would yell about something like the Padilla policy, and that recognition of the probability of such yellng would limit government attempts to impose such policy. I was wrong. But I was also right, in that we did have such a subculture, and it’s the one that informed my growing up. I was a kiddie Reaganite who was raised in a state that usually voted for the Republicans in Presidential elections, yet I grew up (apparently) with such a norm. So it’s not unreasonable to think that we had, to some extent, built a culture with at least that specific limitation of government deeply rooted in our psyche. Except we hadn’t — there’s a whole ‘nother culture (which I locate down South, but maybe its locus is elsewhere) that, to varying degrees, lacked power for a long time, and that interpreted the various cultural events in totally different ways. Moreover, it’s a culture that explicitly claimed to prefer limited government. And now that it’s in power, we’re seeing these aberrant uses of that power. So I’m suspicious of claims that we can form such a culture nationwide, and similarly suspicious of claims that evidence of such a culture, such as a professed desire for limited government, means much. * I’m not sure though. You may be advancing some narrower argument. Perhaps something like, “A weak government could never attempt such overreach.” So maybe I don’t understand the argument.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:01 am
Also, your comment form hates me.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:04 am
Leonard wrote:
“Thus: our heavy taxes have made the situation possible where we (a) intervened in Iraq the first time, leading to (b) “sanctionsâ€, and (c) support Israel militarily, as well as (d) repressive Muslim states. That is, all of Al Qaida’s grievances against us are ultimately dependent on the tax power. Without it, no 9/11, and hence, no panicky reaction amongst the lumpen electorate.”
A classic case of circular reasoning. The US managed to fight the civil war without a direct personal income tax. Revenues will be found where they are found,. Either through increasing tarriffs (as the founder envisioned and was de reiguer iat the beginning of the Republic) or from taxing propeerty or incomes.
“Heavy taxation” is the crowing rooster, while militarism and foreign adventurism are the rising Sun. It’s not the other way around.
The only option, then is to outlaw all tacxtaion in any form. Which, of course, would eliminate the federal government altogether. And one of the princople arguments amde in favor of the constiturtin in the first place was that the old articles of confederation did not give the central governemnt the power to raise revenues.
My other problem with Leonard’;s construction is taht it is so idealistic. The classic argument made against “liberals” is that we don’t take into account human nature. Well, neither does Leoonard. I got news for you, there’s a reason why Hobbesian systems are not all over the place. Survival of the fitest. Pure Darwinian theory.
People who live “in a state of nature,” tend tyo eventually become either dead or subjugated by more powerful neighbors.
So, naturally, human beings started to aggregate into, first, family units. Then clans, then tribes, and finally (with the invention of domesticated animals and agriculture) into villiages. And these villaiages, owing to their strategic positions on trade routes, or close to supplies of water and arable land, became more or less propsperous, which increased tehir populations.
As population grows, the complexity of a society grows. You have to figure out a way for all teh diverse groups living in the community to live together without killing one another. So you introduce laws of behavior. But when you introduce “laws,” you have to first determine who makes those laws, how those laws are made, and who determines whether a specififc scenario fits under those laws.
This leads to social stratification and class distinctions, anbd the diversifying of functions within the community. You get a legal or preistly class that can read and interpret the laws. And so on.
The point I am making, of course, is that we basically have two choices: Either we have a state, or we don’t. And if we have a state, then the debate is only about what it can and should be doing. But, in my view, once you concede that having a state is necessary, you have to give up the argument that the state, qua the state, is inherently the problem. It’s not. The problem, as always, is that bad or evil people sometimes abuse the powers of the state to further their own ends. This isn’t an argument against the state. Its an argument in favor of a process that weeds out bad people as much as possible from weilding power.
If Jim sees the problem residing in the electorate, maybe the problem is that our system is set up to protect individual member districts, and rewards low population states with the same number of Senators as California.
Comment by jlw —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:05 am
Hesiod, you f—ing bastard.
I mean, good point.
Comment by Michael Sullivan —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:15 am
(This may be being caught by the spam filter? Second attempt to submit.)
“Bad Jim” writes: The present administration’s enthusiasm for torture and invasion is not really much of an argument against progressive taxation or universal health care, is it?
Sure it is. Does anyone doubt for a second that if we had universal health care, the socially conservative right wing would be trying to deny it to, say, homosexuals? I can see the argument right now: “We aren’t against gays, but there is an undeniable statistical correlation between male homosexuality and venereal disease. And WE’RE paying for the treatments to those diseases. So we’re going to teach the children that only heterosexual sex is safe (read: acceptable) and give a tax penalty to gays.”
Everything is a lever. Establishing a direct financial interest in your neighbor’s health is a lever that reaches deeply into their personal life — it doesn’t take a genius to think of a million behaviours that conservatives might disapprove with that have at least a tenuous connection to your health. And, for those who haven’t been paying attention, tenuous links are the bread and butter of this administration.
“Hesiod” writes: The powers of the state (guns) are inherently dangerous, so we should restrict access or the avilability of those powers {guns} because a subset of individuals frequently abuses them.
That’s an argument that cuts both ways. Are you prepared to grant that your support for a more empowered state means that gun control is bogus? If you aren’t, you can’t really have it the other way.
(As to the rest, it’s a matter of quantity, not quality. Nobody argues that civilians should be allowed tacnukes — yes, it would be nice if we could be totally free to have whatever we want, but the social harm there is too great to risk. The potential social harm produced by a government inclined to abuse its powers is far greater than the potential social harm caused by a plausible number of people who wish to abuse their gun ownership.)
“Hesiod” also writes: Jim’s argument, as he admits, is one in favor of anarchy, not libertarianism. Although, I’m not sure who anarchy would save him from George W.Bush’s excesses. Arguably, it has actually be the structure of our Republica itself which has orevented Bush from doing even greater harm.
It’s only an argument for anarchism if one denies all nuance. Jim’s argument is not that governmental power is unalloyed evil, or can only be used for malignant purposes, it’s that it’s very easy to subvert to malignant purposes. Some governmental power is necessary, yes, very much so. But the more there is, the easier it is for an unscrupulous governor to twist it to his own ends.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:03 pm
IOZ: “I’d say that it’s a good thing that American liberals don’t lose elections, what with all that power lying around.”
That’s a classic libertarian-style fallacy. It’s not that power is created by liberals; it’s only moved around. The particularly libertarian concern with centralization of governmental power depends on the assumption that market actors have no power.
There are plenty of levers available for people to change what Bush is doing, if enough people wanted to. But they don’t.
Jim’s post is right in that you go to the polls with the electorate you have. It’s only foolish insofar as Jim appears to think that lowering the power and prestige of the government would change this. Lowering the power and prestige of the still mostly democratic government only gets you to fascism.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:09 pm
[same as #26, edited to lTim, with all respect, I don’t think you’re getting the argument…. What’s more, there’s no way you and I can keep them from having a good deal of say, in recent history a preponderant say, in just who that government is. So I don’t think it’s safe to leave the government with that much power. Ack! I wasn’t very clear; what’s worse, I knew I wasn’t being clear, and I just didn’t care. I think I get the argument: the recent misuse of government power should lead libs (or Dems) to the realization that “it’s not safe to leave the government with that much power.†But, a la Kinsley (http//www.slate.com/id/2130035-I can’t figure out how to link here) (â€there’s something else, something hard to describe because it’s essentially a ‘love of freedom’â€), I think the cultural norms about government power are the only governors of that power that matter. Moreover, I think you’re advancing the same sort of argument*; we should get in the habit of denying the government power; that habit will result in angry public reactions when government does overreach, and recognition of that result will limit government attempts at such overreach. Unlike you, I no longer believe we can create such national norms. In the past, I had believed differently. But, in the past, I believed that everyone would yell about something like the Padilla policy, and that recognition of the probability of such yellng would limit government attempts to impose such policy. I was wrong. But I was also right, in that we did have such a subculture, and it’s the one that informed my growing up. I was a kiddie Reaganite who was raised in a state that usually voted for the Republicans in Presidential elections, yet I grew up (apparently) with such a norm. So it’s not unreasonable to think that we had, to some extent, built a culture with at least that specific limitation of government deeply rooted in our psyche. Except we hadn’t — there’s a whole ‘nother culture (which I locate down South, but maybe its locus is elsewhere) that, to varying degrees, lacked power for a long time, and that interpreted the various cultural events in totally different ways. Moreover, it’s a culture that explicitly claimed to prefer limited government. And now that it’s in power, we’re seeing these aberrant uses of that power. So I’m suspicious of claims that we can form such a culture nationwide, and similarly suspicious of claims that evidence of such a culture, such as a professed desire for limited government, means much. * I’m not sure though. You may be advancing some narrower argument. Perhaps something like, “A weak government could never attempt such overreach.†So maybe I don’t understand the argument.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:09 pm
I give up.
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:21 pm
In response to Leonard, it may be useful to review a few of the actions of the early Federal government. One of its first significant military acts (if not the first) was sending an army into the field against its own citizens to assert its power to tax them, in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion. That was under Washington, who was followed by Adams, signer of the Alien and Sedition acts, which made criticism of the government a crime — the excuse being the trumped-up threat of a war with revolutionary France. (There were real issues there, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with by diplomacy — as, to the credit of the Adams administration, they ultimately were).
That may look like a minarchist government to Leonard. I submit that reasonable people may disagree.
What’s perhaps more apropos, though, is to point out the sole reason that the government of England’s erstwhile American colonies didn’t have the overt form of a military dictatorship at that point in time — which is that at Newburgh, in what I personally count as the real founding moment of the American republic, Washington told his officers, who by and large very much wanted him to establish such a regime, to stuff it. (Father of his country? Damn straight). Washington had the character to do that. Plenty of other perfectly good generals — Ataturk, say, or Napoleon, who famously lamented “they wanted me to be another Washington” — did not.
So, when the only really effective power structure in a country is a military one, you aren’t guaranteed a military dictatorship. You might get another Washington. But if the generals won’t stop themselves, there’s not a whole lot else to stop them — and I’m not really sure I like those odds.
Comment by IOZ —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:21 pm
Rich: I think you’ve overblown a facetious response into a declaration of principle. But your serious response deserves a serious answer, which is that the government (or government power, if you like) is not an instrument, as the guns-n-government folks have argued above. It’s an entity. So I’ll see your libertarian fallacy and raise you one liberal misapprehension: that governments are only instrumental extensions of the relatively small cliques of elected officials. Large, centralized governments develop transelectoral institutional imperatives, particularly when it comes to military and security policy.
Comment by sniflheim —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:21 pm
Countries around the world that have, well, states: Pretty much all of them outside Africa.
Governments around the world that claim the right to invade other countries at will, disregard the Geneva Conventions, etc.: Pretty much one. And that one despite being the world’s libertarian HQ.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:33 pm
Hesoid:
Although I agree that militarists want their armies (and thus will support taxes to get them), your analogy here is bad.
Heavy taxes are supported by people who want many kinds of things that people will not do voluntarily, not just militarists. Sweden, for example, has heavy taxes. Further, militarists in many places, including the early USA, did not cause heavy taxes. Rather the Constitutional structure of the state was a constant frustration to them. (It is not any more.)
BTW, there was an income tax during the American “Civil War”. You’re just plain wrong about that. The USA has not fought any major war without income taxation, except for the Revolution. (The War of 1812 may also count, depending on how major you think it was.)
You say my reasoning is circular. How so? Heavy taxes were necessary for all the things that have drawn Al Qaida to declare war on the USA. Do you dispute that?
Trackback by Making Light —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:47 pm
Your essential political blog reading for today…
Jim Henley makes a smart libertarian argument, and his commenters argue back with equal vigor. (Personally, my money’s on Charles……
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 1:07 pm
Charles, I didn’t say the early USA was minarchist, just as close as we’re likely to get out of history. And it was towards a particular point: to compare how fast their governments managed to accrete power into the center, as versus those in our time. Reasonable people may disagree about how minarchist the early USA was; but do you disagree that it is worth looking at the early USA if you are interested in minarchy, or more broadly, libertarianism?
But yes, let us review their actions. Any fair minded person will be struck at how little power the Federal government had, and how well democracy worked to rein in abuse, such as the alien and sedition acts. The very next election, with those acts as a prime election issue, they threw the bums out! How was it possible, we wonder, here in the future, where the bums are never thrown out? Could it be the hundreds of other issues our social democracy must deal with? Does the existence of abortion as a Federal issue perhaps make it harder to deal with Federal torture electorally?
As for Washington, although I do believe he was a special man in not attempting to become president-for-life, I hardly think that he could have become a military dictator. If he would have tried, he could have siezed power in his country — Virginia, that is — maybe, but not in the other states. There most certainly was polycentric power in existence then – the militias of the several states.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 1:44 pm
sniflheim: Governments around the world that claim the right to invade other countries at will, disregard the Geneva Conventions, etc.: Pretty much one. And that one despite being the world’s libertarian HQ.
You’re doing a pitch perfect ignorant-American thing. Go to any strong country in the world, and then go talk to its weak neighbors. Say, Sri Lanka and India, or Tibet and China, or Chechnya and Russia, or Lebanon and Israel, and make that same statement. Have fun counting the seconds until you’re laughed out of the room — you won’t even need both hands.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 1:58 pm
Leonard wrote:
Although I agree that militarists want their armies (and thus will support taxes to get them), your analogy here is bad.
Heavy taxes are supported by people who want many kinds of things that people will not do voluntarily, not just militarists. Sweden, for example, has heavy taxes. Further, militarists in many places, including the early USA, did not cause heavy taxes. Rather the Constitutional structure of the state was a constant frustration to them. (It is not any more.)
So, by your theory, Sweden is one of the momst militaristic countries in the wordl, and has an adventurist, interventionist fdoreign policy, correct? Oh wait. It doesn’t.
Heavy taxation doesn’t create the desire to use the money. The desire to use the moeny comes first, and the heavy taxation follows.
You say my reasoning is circular. How so? Heavy taxes were necessary for all the things that have drawn Al Qaida to declare war on the USA. Do you dispute that?
Heavy taxation is a symptom, it isn’t the disease. Take Sweden! Why hasn’t al Qaeda gone hog wild and attacked Havy taxing Sweden? Because Sweden didn’t do any of the things you say “drew” Al Qaeda into attackkng us.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:05 pm
Actually, Neel, there really IS only oe Government on Eartyh claiming the Geneva Conventions are “quaint.” That’s us.
The rest of the world at least pays them rhetorical, if not actual respect.
So either you should give Bush props for just being honest, or discredit for being thenonly bastard in the whole world who openly pisses on the Geneva conventions.
This goes back to the whole argument about whether ther really is such a thing as “international law,” when there’s no power than can universally enforce these laws.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:05 pm
Rich, when you write “It’s not that power is created by liberals; it’s only moved around. ” you’re simply wrong. Power is the capability to coerce people into doing things they don’t want to, and it’s emphatically not a conserved quantity like mass or energy.
Coercive power depends on the social and institutional context people are in, and it can go up or down depending on changes in that context. If Congress passed a law mandating that everything sent over the Internet had to approved by the RIAA, their power over you would increase — even though Congress’s power would not go down at all. There’s no power being moved around, it’s being created. Conversely, having multiple, opposed, branches of government reduces some of the power of the government over you, because when one branch rules against you still have some recourse by appealing to the others.
The reason that libertarians worry more about the government than about firms is not because we have some magic faith in the power of corporations — anyone who reads Dilbert surely has no such faith. Instead, it is because people have a much greater capability for exit (in the sense of Hirschmann’s concept of the interplay of exit, voice and loyalty) with respect to a corporation (eg, Microsoft’s Windows monopoly) than with a government (eg, the prison at Guantanamo Bay).
Comment by jlw —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:07 pm
Leonard writes: “Could it be the hundreds of other issues our social democracy must deal with? Does the existence of abortion as a Federal issue perhaps make it harder to deal with Federal torture electorally?”
Why stop at abortion? Does the existence of lynching, or child labor, or slavery, as a Federal issue make it harder to deal with torture (or global warming, or whatever)? There were fights over lynching and child labor just as contentious as the one being fought over abortion, but somehow they did not give cover to monsters who wanted to hijack the government and institute a doctrine of limitless executive power. Even FDR, who had no small ego and two world powers to defeat, was able to restrain himself from dictatorial delusions.
And IOZ, I think you need to re-argue your point that government is an entity, not a tool. It’s far to easy to counterargue that your “transelectorial institutional imperitives” are just one set of bad actors learning tricks from another. Please show how a government totally devoid of people to make policy or carry out instructions has any power to coerce or co-opt.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:09 pm
Bush may lose, but he certainly sees no need to run away from torture and war. Hesiod’s bit about him appealing to “his base†is beside the point; he’s been winning elections with that base.
With the decided help of libertarians who care more about lower tax rates than, well, human rights, due proces of laws, seperation of powers, etc.
Physician, heal thyself.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:16 pm
It all boils down to Order vs Chaos.
The larger a human population is, the more variables are thrown into the system (because we are all individuals).
The more variables there are, the harder it is to maintain basic minimums of public order.
So, over time, you have states that become bigger and biggerm and that accrete more powers. Eventually, the system collapses, and things atomize.
I’m a follower of Joseph Tainter in this regard. Tainter posits that the only way to forestall collapse of a complex society is through technological innovation and the disocvery of cheaper and more plentiful energy resources to maintain the system.
I highly recommend his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Comment by Mathew —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:16 pm
Arms are tools used by the people to protect themselves against the government and themselves. I don’t equate my right to defend myself with a “right” to torture someone. I don’t think the ends justify the means in this case. If you wanted to be libertarian about it (and I do), you’d not be in this situation in the first place as we would not have the interest we have in other governments as we do now. Using war as an excuse to do anything to personal freedoms (what they are doing) is wrong no mater what the goal is. I’d rather die in the next trade center building then be involved with this. Sadly, people seem to want to let fear and false fear get in the way of their own rights. As far as the war on terror goes: What is the point of telling the world that you are getting rid of barbarians if you are going to turn around and legislate the legalization of barbarous acts?
Really want to stop thousands of pointless deaths in the US every year? Legislate people to get off their ass and exercise.
Comment by abb1 —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:18 pm
And, quite honestly, if it appeals to any slice of the electorate, it is not to “liberals.†It is to Bush’s base.
I think this is correct. I saw a poll today where among the registered voters the Democrats have a 10-point advantage and among the likely voters it’s even-steven.
They are trying to stimulate turn-out of their torture-loving base, that’s all; it doesn’t necessarily reflect on the whole population.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:27 pm
Per Neel: The reason that libertarians worry more about the government than about firms is not because we have some magic faith in the power of corporations — anyone who reads Dilbert surely has no such faith. Instead, it is because people have a much greater capability for exit (in the sense of Hirschmann’s concept of the interplay of exit, voice and loyalty) with respect to a corporation (eg, Microsoft’s Windows monopoly) than with a government (eg, the prison at Guantanamo Bay).
And without the Government to keep coporations from doing so, they would act in exactly the same ways as the Government. And they could collude to do it. And, unlike in a Republic, there ain’t a damn thing you could do to stop them unless you already had tremendous resources.
I object to the abuse of Gvt power. Not Gvt power, per se. It’s more workeable.
Comment by tavella —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:30 pm
Note, however, that the income tax law was passed after the Civil War had begun, in reaction to that war; in other words, the sun rose and the cock crowed, as Hesiod astutely phrased it.
War having been determined on, income to fund that war will be found, not the reverse.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:32 pm
Arms are tools used by the people to protect themselves against the government and themselves.
Yes. That’s one use for the tool. Another is to coerce people into giving you things like money or sexual gratification. Or to seek revenge. Or to punish your bitch whore wife for sleeping with your best friend. Or to take out that guy who’s horning in on your Crystal meth distribution territory.
I don’t equate my right to defend myself with a “right†to torture someone.
But Bush does. That’s the problem. He says that he has to “torture” people in order to “defend” the United States from “tarra-ists.”
I don’t think the ends justify the means in this case.
I agree.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:33 pm
War having been determined on, income to fund that war will be found, not the reverse.
Unless you’re George W. Bush and the Republican party. Then you just borrow the money against future tax revenues.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:40 pm
Leonard: Any fair minded person will be struck at how little power the Federal government had, and how well democracy worked to rein in abuse, such as the alien and sedition acts. The very next election, with those acts as a prime election issue, they threw the bums out! How was it possible, we wonder, here in the future, where the bums are never thrown out? Could it be the hundreds of other issues our social democracy must deal with? Does the existence of abortion as a Federal issue perhaps make it harder to deal with Federal torture electorally?
IN many weays, though, political and civil rights NOW are far more advanced than they were at the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts. What has become more restcicted is economic freedom.
So, in essence, Leonard is pining away for Laisez faire economics coupled with a lack of meaningful civil and political rights for anybody but landed white men.
You’d think libertarians would be in hog heaven today, considering the ending of slavery, the expansion of the franchies to women, and the increasingly broader interpretation of the first amendment and due process. [To this point, at least].
But, nope. They think regluations are worse than slavery.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
Hesiod: Indeed. And the structure of the polity is such that we have enforceable sanctions for the misuse of firearms. Among other things, murderers aren’t in charge of investigating, trying and judging themselves.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 2:58 pm
Hesoid, I anticipated your #55 at #24. As I said then, you’re so predictable. Sigh.
By the way, I take your attempt to backproject my motives using your assumptions very poorly. If you want to know whether or not I am an evil, sexist, racist pig, why don’t you ask me? I’m here. Rather than putting words in my mouth, that is.
Comment by jlw —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:00 pm
Our host writes: “[M]urderers aren’t in charge of investigating, trying and judging themselves.”
We’re the government functioning, one could say the same thing about it. That’s what checks and balances are all about. It’s only that individuals have seized an unprecedented and likely unconstitutional amount of power for themselves that we are in the
statefix we are in.Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:04 pm
jlw: I take your point. My two objections are, as I’ve written before, I think that, in retrospect, separation of powers combined with a political-party structure is not after all an effective check on government power; also, yes, this gang is particularly awful, but as with the atomic bomb, how do you get rid of an idea? Absent strong punishments that I don’t see coming, the example of the Bush gang will hang before America’s executives forever after this.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:06 pm
Hesoid, I anticipated your #55 at #24.
I’m not sure “anticipate” is generally understood to mean “assumed away as not at issue.”
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:07 pm
Hesiod, corporations can’t exist without a reasonably competent government, because they are basically an organization full of people with money, but no significant number of guns at their disposal. That’s exactly the reason you or I can decline to do business with Microsoft — since Bill Gates can’t send dudes to shoot you for running Linux, you have a much greater capability for exit when dealing with his firm.
So yeah, of course I like an honest system of laws creating well-defined property and civil rights. It makes it possible to have a market, where people can refuse to do business with a firm without endangering themselves. This increases the amount of exit that individuals have, which means that the amount of voice we have in determining our life circumstances goes up as well.
When you suggest going beyond that, you’re saying we should move the provision of some good or service from a sector with exit to one without it. This is a very hard case to make, and saying that corporations could possibly collude against us isn’t yet a case. Of course they’d like to do so, but you have to further argue that a) they can do so successfully, and b) the government (staffed by fallible, corruptible humans, just like the corporations) can make it better. I think this is much, much harder than you think — almost every one of the most egregious examples of businesses screwing the public that I know of has a government handout (whether as direct subsidy or indirect monopoly grant) as its immediate source.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:12 pm
Hesiod: You wrote, “They think regluations are worse than slavery.”
Um, you just called me a racist. Rhetorical overkill comes too easy on the Internet, so a quick apology and we can call it no harm, no foul?
Comment by radish —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:22 pm
This self-identified reasonable person happens to think that the early USA was pretty damn minarchist by contemporary standards, but also that its minarchism was, to a large extent, a result of the atypically “altruistic” actions of various founders. Washington and others, as pointed out above weren’t obligated to hew to the individualist/egalitarian democratic model. They chose it, in some ways against their own self interest.
However, I submit that if you want to encourage good governance in a systematic way, trying to find the sweet spot along the minimal vs maximal axis is guaranteed to fail.
The real genius of the US system wasn’t (IMO) that it found the “anarchist vs totalitarian” sweet spot, but that it (deliberately) allowed authority to accrete and disperse far more efficiently than had previously been the case. That was mind boggling and revolutionary in the the same way and for roughly the same reasons that the first automobile with a multi-ratio transmission was revolutionary.
Political power always accretes, and it always disperses again, and both processes are desirable under different circumstances. The tricky bit is to make it so that you can switch gears easily when you reach a different grade. Arguably that’s the problem before the US today. We’ve been in accretion mode almost nonstop since WWII.
BTW as a decentralist I would just like to point out that the importance of scale and localization appears to be the one issue that Hesiod and Leonard strongly agreed on in this thread
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
Neel, businesspeople can and did shoot people, and did have people with guns at their disposal, before the government started to intervene. You can’t understand the growth of modern liberalism without understanding that. If the government stopped intervening, that slack would simply be picked up by business once again.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:30 pm
Rich, they shot a lot more people with the connivance of cooperative states, though, no? Wasn’t a good deal of early-modern liberalism/populism about trying to get government out of the strikebreaking business?
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:32 pm
No more calls please, we have a winner!!
radish in #63: The real genius of the US system wasn’t (IMO) that it found the “anarchist vs totalitarian†sweet spot, but that it (deliberately) allowed authority to accrete and disperse far more efficiently than had previously been the case.
Let’s have a round of applause for checks and balances people! If we clap loud enough, maybe they will come back.
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
In response to Leonard@41, two points.
First off, what I’m trying to address in this discussion is whether a government whose powers are largely limited to law enforcement and foreign (including military) relations would be less likely to abuse those powers than one with more to do. I agree that the early Federal government is an interesting test case; I just take the abuses that occurred at that time, apparently, rather more seriously than you.
As to the possibility of throwing the bums out in the modern era — again, we seem to have a difference of opinion. I personally thought George H.W. Bush was a bum, and I was rather pleased to see him thrown out…
Comment by derek —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:49 pm
The United States government cut down all the principles of state sovereignty and sovereign immunity in its eagerness to get at Saddam and Milosevic before him.
.
I don’t get why an anarchist would care so touchingly about the state’s right to sovereignty.
.
But then I’ve never gotten why an anarchist would care if the ultimate power to kill or enslave him lay with a bully and the thugs he commands, since, absent the Anarchy Fairy who stops the bad thing happening, that’s been his fate in all historic and current anarchies.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:55 pm
radish, we’ve been in accretion mode since the Civil War, and even back to the very beginning. At least in the big picture. There have been small reductions in centralization, as happened for example after the Civil War when they eliminated the income tax. But in the big picture, it’s not about accretion of power and letting it go. Rather it’s about the rate at which power accretes. It can be slow, or fast, but it’s always positive and non-zero (over, let us say, a period of at least 10 years, empirically) in a modern nation-state.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:00 pm
Your primary interest here seems to be snark rather than inquiry, but for the record, a) I’m an anarchist-symp, not an anarchist; b) if you reread that section with the recognition that I’m not the one facing possible human rights prosecutions in foreign courts, it might seem less confusing.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:06 pm
Rich, I think Jim has the right of it. I know mostly about the Pullman strike and the Homestead strike, and in both cases you have selective interference (from the federal and state governments, respectively) to bolster the (successful) attempts of Pullman and Frick to break the strike and the union calling it. The Pullman strike even featured the bogus invocation national security, when Grover Cleveland announced to the public that the strike was interfering with the US Mail and thereby threatening the Republic.
Another example: Plessy vs. Ferguson, the source of the famous and reprehensible phrase “separate but equal”. Homer Plessy was the light-skinned black man arrested for breaking Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws by buying a first-class railroad ticket. The railroad companies supported him in his effort to get those laws overturned so that they wouldn’t have to pay for separate black and white railroad cars. The Supreme Court didn’t like this plan, precisely illustrating Jim’s point that it’s hard to ensure that the government is staffed by angels.
Comment by colin roald —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:08 pm
Neel says: Corporations can’t exist without a reasonably competent government, because they are basically an organization full of people with money, but no significant number of guns at their disposal.
I don’t believe “not having guns” is an essential property of a corporation. Consider Pinkertons. Or Blackwater USA (”private military contractors” being the second-largest armed force in Iraq). Or the British East India Company, which fielded both full regular army battalions and a respectable navy.
Microsoft doesn’t have guns because the power and orderliness of American police means that they don’t need guns. In places where civil order has fallen apart, you find that companies acquire guns very quickly.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:11 pm
Derek, Jim is no anarchist, he’s a minarchist. Minarchists do care about sovereignty. But I am an anarchist, so let me respond.
Anarchists reject the concept of sovereignty; no rule without consent, period. However, we also are tolerant in the classic sense. If the US went anarchistic, I think few of us would go abroad looking to “spread the revolution”. We’d let foreign states be, since that’s none of our business, although we probably would try to lure away their customers.
As for your second para, your writing is not clear to me. You seem to be saying you believe rule by bullies and thugs is an inevitable result of anarchism. Very well then: try to use your imagination. One of these must be true:
(a) we really do want to be ruled by thugs
(b) we don’t believe rule by thugs is an inevitable result of anarchism
Which do you think it is?
Comment by James —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:28 pm
This is a really good example of something I’ve come to call the “no problem problem.” Gee, if everyone had followed libertarian ideals before now, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Well, gee, if everyone followed liberal ideals we wouldn’t have this problem either. In fact, if everyone followed any ideals we wouldn’t be here, including whatever ideals Bush’s followers hold, i.e. that the great man can do no wrong. In that case, Mr. Henley would not be saying what he’s saying, because he’d be someone with different ideals.
But you don’t need for total groupthink; a solid majority will suffice. That would put better people in charge of things. Oop, no problem there, either. So, yes, I do agree that if Jim Henley ran things, we wouldn’t have this current problem.
Moreover, if we didn’t have corporations, we’d never have corporate scandals. If we didn’t have a judicial system, we wouldn’t have corrupt judges. And if we didn’t have a military, we’d never get into foreign wars.
See, no problem. You can always eliminate your problems by going back far enough or to a high enough level of abstraction. No problem at all.
Comment by sniflheim —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:28 pm
Neel #42, you think I don’t know about that? I took Jim to be talking about the specific pathologies of the Bush regime. If you don’t see them as anything new of of note, never mind. If you see them as inevitable results of statism, again never mind. I’m trying to get inside your head here, but it’s difficult…
Comment by Glenn —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:33 pm
“With the decided help of libertarians who care more about lower tax rates than, well, human rights, due proces of laws, seperation of powers, etc.”
You’re having it both ways. If the argument is about principle, then you can’t invoke people who so obviously don’t follow that principle. Glenn Reynolds et cetera walk and talk like exactly that thing libertarian principles are designed to fight against, regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as libertarians.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:35 pm
Charles, to me it is seems pretty clear there was less abuse back then than now. But then, that’s a pretty hard thing to characterize objectively. Sure it was bad to impose whiskey taxes on those farmers. But… now we are torturing people as a matter of official US policy. Which is worse?
Or, consider alien and sedition. They were bad laws (especially the sedition act) even by modern standards. But they were repealed democratically; arguably, the system worked. These days the executive simply commands his own understanding of the law, and the congress generally doesn’t do anything at all.
A further problem is the scale of such things. Alien and sedition was a major controversy in its time; how many of other such things were there then? I don’t know. I have a much better sense of how many annoying things the Federal government does now.
One final problem is that of defining “abuse”, in terms of intent versus capacity. For example, take the War of 1812. It was largely a failed attempt by the USA to land-grab nearby Canada. Standard rapacious state stuff, right? Bad state! But they had little ability to pull it off, because their army was tiny and poorly trained, because they had little tax power. Thus they failed, and basically fought a pointless war.
Is that better, or worse, than fighting a war for noble reasons (such as to Save the Union! to make the world safe for democracy! To end all wars! To stop communism! To reform the Muslim world!)? And is it better to fight a small war with all the power available (when constrained by lack of power), than to fight a far larger war with only a small fraction of the actual resources you could use?
Comment by Madeline F —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:37 pm
Hey, Jim! The thread really took off, but I wouldn’t want to leave you worrying about whether there was sinister meaning to my words.
I read your post to be saying that the Bush administration was an inevitable result of the sort of government that liberals wanted, and to be using Bush’s scumminess to attack liberals. In response I suggested that the Bush administration was an inevitable result of government allowing power to concentrate in the hands of one man, which follows naturally from the tiny-government hopes of libertarians.
Also, I honestly had thought you were one of the people who wanted Congress to find a backbone and go back to demanding Bush respect their authoritah. I realize reading this, (”separation of powers combined with a political-party structure is not after all an effective check on government power”) though, that I must have accidentally mixed you up with someone else. Sorry about that.
To explain a bit more, it seems to me that liberals are not eagerly in support of expanding just anything that calls itself a government. The ones that want to expand our government want to expand the government that we all thought we had, with separate coequal branches.
I’d also say that separate coequal branches is the best government structure I’ve seen proposed so far, when it comes to restraining individuals with a hunger for dictatorship.
Comment by Lenny Bailes —
September 20, 2006 @ 4:39 pm
The Bush Administration is uniquely awful, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, and what gave rise to it will persist.
Here are some cliched observations:
Apply enough pressure to subtract “in the public interest” and “good workmanship” elements out of the economy (in favor of “cheap” “shiny,” “easy to mass-market”) and sooner or later, you might see some consequences that extend beyond the abundance of cheap, available merchandise and the free-market instantiation of a larger, richer, upper class.
Were the Federal trust busters of the early 20th Century just a nanny state impedence to the quality of public life for trying to stop profiteers? Was Jimmy Carter a foolish meddler for attempting to spend government money to encourage progressive industries and research?
If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then maybe you can point me to a laissez-faire explanation for where the enlightenment in “enlightened capitalism” has been going, recently.
Bush and Cheney wouldn’t be sitting where they are today, without substantial paradigm shifts in the role of public news media and changes in popular belief about the essence of “the American Dream.” What’s been causing those shifts?
PS: Feel free to make the sign of the horns at this.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 5:04 pm
sniflheim: I think when a great power succumbs to the temptation to attack its weaker neighbors with military force it: a) is a pathology, b) isn’t unique to our current administration, and c) isn’t universal (eg, modern Japan).
I take it we differ at point b). I think that the structure of the Bush administration’s evasions wrt our continuing failure to live up to Geneva is exactly parallel to the structure of the evasions that the governments of Singapore or China use when confronted about their own use of torture. In both cases you get an unsupported assertion of difference that means the government doesn’t have to obey human rights, which is then followed by legalistic hairsplitting to explain why it’s not really torture. On one hand we have “Asian values” and in the other “protecting America”. Neither hand holds any truth in it.
Comment by radish —
September 20, 2006 @ 5:26 pm
Thank you Mr. Obscura. Yes, checks and balances…
From the long-term big-picture view I’d have to agree. If we got down to details and definitions and decades I think it’s debatable.
Okay, granted, but tweaking that rate is what I’m advocating. I find the argument against having any systematic mechanism of power accretion personally persuasive, but I also see that it doesn’t survive in the wild. The more anarchist a polity is (i.e. the fewer accretion mechanisms it has) the more vulnerable it is to threats which require cooperative action. Any tragedy of the commons, any public health crisis, any foreign invasion; those are just that much more likely to be terminal. Since those kind of things happen regularly, and they almost inevitably lead to rapid concentration of power, anarchies turn into states.
So trying to prevent the wheel from spinning forward doesn’t work — the wheel always wins. How about letting it happen in an orderly and reversible fashion? Especially since the bigger your polity gets the higher the stakes are for each turn (thus my decentralism). Systematically minimizing or even temporarily reversing the ratchet effect is not only the best you can hope for, it’s not even particularly unrealistic now that we know a little bit about how to go about it.
If you care about personal freedom then what you want is a way to throw the bums out quickly and painlessly without bringing down the whole house. If all you care about is economic results or stability then you don’t even have to throw the bums out — all you have to do is have some mechanism to ensure that the bums in power continue to do a good job (whatever that means).
In the long run, yeah, you’re screwed because you’re battling entropy. But if your goal is to keep playing as long as possible then flexibility is the best strategy.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 20, 2006 @ 6:16 pm
Jim: “Rich, they shot a lot more people with the connivance of cooperative states, though, no? Wasn’t a good deal of early-modern liberalism/populism about trying to get government out of the strikebreaking business?”
Yes, that is true. But you still seem to have the impression that liberalism is in some way about favoring strong government without reference to what kind of government it is. That’s what your original post seemed to be about — that you thought that liberals raised the power and prestige of the government for any use, and that you wanted it lowered for any use so that it couldn’t be abused.
I don’t think that it works that way. A weak government, one with low power and prestige, becomes the tool of some stronger interest. It doesn’t necessarily have to be business. It could be religion, perhaps. And then you get the same abuses through a different power structure.
Basically, I think that Leonard is confusing cause and effect with his historical narrative. The cause of increasing modes of power that I see is basically technological. It’s possible to control events and people to a higher degree than used to be the case. And every structure becomes dominated by those who wish to use this power. It doesn’t matter whether you call the structure a government or a market or whatever; if it is unrestrained, the same kinds of events will occur. In the case of a market, this can occur through individual monopolies, or though the same institutional interests that IOZ points out develop around governments.
The advantage of having the government able to intervene is that a democratic government, at least, has formal mechanisms for widening power. As in the case of Bush and torture, though, that doesn’t do any good if a broad group of people want something bad.
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 20, 2006 @ 6:44 pm
Leonard, you say, “it is pretty clear to me that there was less abuse back [in early post-Revolutionary America] than now.”
Well, comparing the societies (not the governments), I’ll observe that early America featured slavery, widespread child labor, indifferent civil rights at best for minorities (even white male suffrage was far from universal), and essentially nonexistent public health and welfare services. On the whole, on the society-vs.-society level, I prefer the current model. And I’ll also observe that the exercise of central government power had a great deal to do with the removal of these defects.
Central government power is not without its dangers, of course. But to return to the observation I started with: If a central government has only the powers of law enforcement and national defense, and it wants to be abusive, it already has all it needs. Dubya isn’t keeping anyone in Guantanamo by exercising the power of the FDA. Conversely, as a liberal, in areas (like food safety, say, or those listed above) where central government can do a great deal of good, I’m fine with it doing that, in reasonable confidence that the checks and balances which do a decent (if imperfect) job of keeping the law enforcement powers in check, will also do a decent (if imperfect) job in other domains as well.
Beyond that, I’m not sure it makes sense to continue the argument, in part because I’m not sure we agree about what exercise of central government power is “abusive”. Frankly, there are areas in which I’d like to see the central government a lot more active. For instance, Americans have a lot less control than Europeans about how information about, say, their purchasing habits is collected and sold because the American government has been a lot more reluctant than European governments to pass laws allowing them to exert control over the corporations doing the collecting and selling. As a liberal, I see this as the American government failing to do its job as agent of the people in keeping large and dangerous power structures outside the government, per se, in check.
More generally, as a liberal, I’m not even interested in the question of whether a particular power structure is formally considered to be part of the government or not. I’d rather have French health insurance than my current PPO plan not because the French system is run by the government, but rather because, according to both broad social statistics and the experience of people who’ve been through boht systems, the French just do a better job.
Which seems to be a big difference between you and me. You started out by saying that slavery was “not at issue”, apparently because you didn’t consider it to be an exercise of central government power. I think that’s wrong. Support for slavery was written into the frigging Constitution, and it’s not just a theoretical point to say so; there were huge fights over Northern “free” states being forced to support the institution of slavery by enforcing the Federal Fugitive Slave Act. (Which really gives the lie to the “States’ Rights” malarkey that erstwhile Confederate politicians were peddling after the war). But I also think it’s wrong-headed. In a society with a weak central government, there will inevitably be other power structures (some local, some central — but if you’re in a local jurisdiction and you can’t get out; if your ability to get out is the very thing at issue; how much does it matter?) which have as much power over particular individuals as your typical modern-day federal government agency. And I don’t think that there’s anything about private enterprise, per se, that makes it necessarily more responsive or responsible than government.
To take a concrete example: if you live in America today, there are few things that can screw up your life as badly as a bum credit rating. Yet the credit agencies don’t do a particularly good job of letting you get at the information they store, or about cleaning up inaccurate data. Note that the great salve which typically comes up in libertarian argumentation — that private businesses will be responsive to their customers — doesn’t really apply here: the credit agencies are responsive to their customers, but you aren’t their customer, and their actual customers — credit issuers, insurance agencies, and the like, are getting what they want: they’re willing to accept a certain level of inaccuracy for a cheaper product, innocent victims be damned.
If you’re trapped in this situation, though, you have more options than you did in, say, 1970, both to find what’s in your own records (time was you couldn’t do that), and to get it fixed. Why? Because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, in which these agencies, formerly completely unaccountable to individual consumers, had checks placed on their activities by the government.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:01 pm
Hesiod, corporations can’t exist without a reasonably competent government, because they are basically an organization full of people with money, but no significant number of guns at their disposal. That’s exactly the reason you or I can decline to do business with Microsoft — since Bill Gates can’t send dudes to shoot you for running Linux, you have a much greater capability for exit when dealing with his firm.
First of all, “corporations” aren;t the issue. Corporations are a fictinal construct of Gvt. They are a way to organize a business. I’m talking about the accumulation of money and power in the hands of private individuals, or groups of individuals. Whether we call it a “corporation” a guild” or the mafia makes no difference. And that mafia reference leads me to address your next point…
Yes, Bill Gates can send armed guys to coerece you to using his operating system. The fact that he doesn’t is, because, well there is a countervailing power that prevents him from doing it caled “Government,” which says things like that are illegal and would cause problems for you if you acted that way. Thus my point. Gvt and the private sector need to balance each other.
you’re saying we should move the provision of some good or service from a sector with exit to one without it. This is a very hard case to make, and saying that corporations could possibly collude against us isn’t yet a case.
Umm…no I’m not. I have no propblem wth the free enterprise system. I just have a probelm with peole who claim that private actors can’t act exactly like Gvt bullies. It’s a fallacy to claim that ONLY Gvt power can b abused or poses a serious threat to freedom. That is clearly not true.
almost every one of the most egregious examples of businesses screwing the public that I know of has a government handout (whether as direct subsidy or indirect monopoly grant) as its immediate source.
All the more reason to stop electing “Pro-Business” folks to the Gvt. all the time. Sounds like you are a member of the Green party to me. Complainiung about how Gvt and Business work hand in hand to screw people over. I guarantee you will get less of Businesses screwing the people over with the help of the Gvt by electing fewer Reopublicans to office.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:06 pm
Hesiod: Indeed. And the structure of the polity is such that we have enforceable sanctions for the misuse of firearms. Among other things, murderers aren’t in charge of investigating, trying and judging themselves.
And we have laws on the books making torture a capital offense, when it results in death. And we have, well, imnpeachment.
And the political equivalent of death: Being voted out of office.
So the point remains: Governments don’t torture people. People torture people.
Maybe we should make that into a snazzy bumper sticker?
Comment by Hesiod —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:14 pm
Hesoid, I anticipated your #55 at #24. As I said then, you’re so predictable. Sigh.
By the way, I take your attempt to backproject my motives using your assumptions very poorly. If you want to know whether or not I am an evil, sexist, racist pig, why don’t you ask me? I’m here. Rather than putting words in my mouth, that is.
I’m just hoisting you on your own petard, Leonard. You state dthat “minarchisM’ is better than what we have now. And you state dthat the closest this country ever got to “minarchism” was back in the gloray days of the early Republic. Back when slavery was legal, women couldn’t vote, and you had to own land in order to vote as well.
Oh, and you pretty much had to be white, too.
So, apparently, minarchism isn;t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, that’s REALLY minarchic, if only about a quarter of the population had civil and political rights.
In fact, it was downright minutarchic.
Actually, what it was was Timocratic, not Minacrchic.
And, ironically, I guess, it was “Big Gummint” that expanded the franchise, and ended slavery. Two of the greatest expansions in freedom in the history of the United States.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:16 pm
re jlw’s #46: it’s actually not the case that FDR “managed to restrain himself” from indulging his dictatorial impulses. The other branches of gov’t restrained him, and only barely enough to save the skeleton of the Republic. If the Court had supinely approved the First New Deal (which contained much worse measures than the ones they assented to after the “switch in time”) or if Congressional Dems hadn’t fought court-packing, there’s every reason to suppose FDR would have gone on to be a left-populist strongman of the Chavez/Mugabe type.
Then of course there’s Wilson– another still-beloved “progressive” president who had the support of all the well-meaning do-gooder coastal intellectuals of his day. He used his war as an excuse to commit far greater offenses against liberty and the rule of law than anything Bush has yet done, and he got away clean.
One would hope their examples would make it more understandable why some of us are a bit skeptical when their political heirs talk about how much better things could be if the right sort of people were running the show.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:29 pm
Charles, your “concrete example” is actually a very nice illustration of the libertarian argument for a couple of reasons:
1. the credit agencies, and the credit/banking sector in general, have been since 1933 one of the most heavily regulated portions of the economy– FDR’s “progressive” corporatism at work. The dynamics of competition and customer responsiveness (or lack thereof) in that sector are *not* the product of laissez-faire. And banking is far from the only sector in which one wave of regulation creates problems that the next attempts to solve.
2. as bad as a ruined credit rating may be, it isn’t remotely as bad as being shot, or even being imprisoned, tortured, or drafted– which is to say, it’s not nearly as powerful as the primary levers governments use. If the worst you can say about a laissez-faire system is that a bunch of people would get their credit ruined unjustly, you haven’t done much to give the proponents of laissez-faire pause.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:45 pm
But you still seem to have the impression that liberalism is in some way about favoring strong government without reference to what kind of government it is.
I think what the liberals here should have the courage to acknowledge is rather obvious. For all the talk of “separation of powers” and “rule of laws, not men” we see here, liberals have spent the last several decades doing at least as much as the conservatives to weaken or destroy the very barriers, restrictions, and separations that keep government in check. They, like the conservatives, have enthusiastically argued that any limit on government that’s impeded their goals is ridiculous, outmoded, or outright fictional. They’ve helped move the US government from a limited, federalist body to an amorphous, all-encompassing entity.
Liberals helped build the handbasket around us, and now they’re indignant about where it’s headed.
I’m genuinely saddened by the sorts of arguments folks are trying to use against this point – because they’re not remotely unique to the people here. Every time I see someone suggest that maybe Democrats should look into checking government power in light of what the Bush administration’s done, the Democrats present always explain that the problem is simply due to having the wrong sort of person in charge, and that even more power would be fine and dandy in the hands of the right people. They never really give a reassuring explanation of how to make sure only the right people get to wield all that power, but they’re very clear on how that power should never, ever be reduced or even restricted, lest they be inconvenienced when they get their hands on it…
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 20, 2006 @ 7:58 pm
I’m just hoisting you on your own petard, Leonard. You state dthat “minarchisM’ is better than what we have now. And you state dthat the closest this country ever got to “minarchism†was back in the gloray days of the early Republic. Back when slavery was legal, women couldn’t vote, and you had to own land in order to vote as well….
…And, ironically, I guess, it was “Big Gummint†that expanded the franchise, and ended slavery. Two of the greatest expansions in freedom in the history of the United States.
I’m actually a little morbidly curious about two things. How do you propose to pin slavery, etc. on minarchism, and by just what fascinating criteria do emancipation and voting rights count as “big government”?
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 9:37 pm
by just what fascinating criteria do emancipation and voting rights count as “big government�
Insofar as you see some support for the claim that the Civil War was about states’ rights vs. the federal govt., the connection seems pretty clear. Moreover, in any number of ways, the expansion of the federal government has been tied to the inability of citizens of specific states to reasonably rely on those states to vindicate their rights. I’m assuming that things like the Civil Rights Act meet the requirement of “big government.”
Comment by JRoth —
September 20, 2006 @ 9:38 pm
I’m actually a little morbidly curious about two things. How do you propose to pin slavery, etc. on minarchism, and by just what fascinating criteria do emancipation and voting rights count as “big government�
First, Hesiod was responding directly to Leonard’s claim that early US gov’t was the best-ever real world case of minarchism. That would be the minarchy that wrote slavery (daring not to name it) into the Constitution and forced anti-slave states to collude in slavery. So maybe the morbid curiosity could lead you to review the relevant context.
Further, if you don’t understand what big government had to do with voting rights in the US, you appear to need a refresher course on the 1954-1972 period of US history. Or perhaps you’re being deliberately obtuse.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:04 pm
So, re the minarchism thing. There are at least two variables that are relevant to determining the overall level of freedom in a country:
(1) how much the gov’t intervenes in the lives of those it considers first-class citizens
(2) who it considers first-class citizens
Minarchism says simply that the answer to (1) should be “very little”. It doesn’t by itself imply anything about (2) one way or the other. Minarchists and other libertarians do of course also have beliefs about (2), and those beliefs coincide more-or-less perfectly with those of modern liberals, which is why we rarely feel it necessary to state them– we can take it for granted that we already agree on that part. The argument we have is over (1) alone.
Now, the early-American government was among the best in history on (1), and– like every other gov’t of its time– utterly abysmally horrible on (2). So it’s correct to say that it was relatively minarchist. Saying so, and also saying that *ceteris paribus* more minarchist is better, does not remotely imply that you believe the income tax is worse than slavery, or any other such nonsense. Claiming that, because we would like the gov’t to be better on (1), we must insufficiently value goodness on (2) is a groundless slander.
Clear?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:28 pm
Insofar as you see some support for the claim that the Civil War was about states’ rights vs. the federal govt., the connection seems pretty clear.
This wasn’t true, though. The slave states cited the failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (ie, federal legislation) as one of the primary justifications for secession. The cause of the Civil War was slavery, in the plain and simple words of the secession declarations of the Confederate states.
Your grade school teacher telling you otherwise otherwise is a legacy of the systematic whitewashing program begun by the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century to reconcile the Southern states to the Union by ascribing noble motives to Southern leaders and soldiers. The Progressives were typically violently racist, perhaps as a consequence of their worship of scientific, technocratic management combining very badly with the crudely racist scientific sociology of the day. So Union Forever at the price of Jim Crow was an easy tradeoff for them to make.
(This is, I should hasten to add, emphatically not a claim that modern small-p progressives of are racists.)
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:43 pm
Hesiod: First of all, “corporations†aren;t the issue. Corporations are a fictinal construct of Gvt. They are a way to organize a business. I’m talking about the accumulation of money and power in the hands of private individuals, or groups of individuals. Whether we call it a “corporation†a guild†or the mafia makes no difference.
This is total nonsense; of course there are profound differences between how Microsoft, medieval guilds, and Lucky Luciano operated. Calling them all “private accumulations of power” and claiming they are equivalent is like saying that there’s no difference between Sweden and North Korea, because they’re both states with a monopoly of force within their territories. You’d justly laugh at me if I said something like that, because the details of your institutional arrangements matter profoundly, and eliding them will lead you to dumb conclusions. But you’re making the same mistake.
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:51 pm
Blog.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 10:58 pm
Claiming that, because we would like the gov’t to be better on (1), we must insufficiently value goodness on (2) is a groundless slander.
But lookit, you can generate the vast majority of liberalism by conforming (1) to address (2). In fact, there have been a fair number of attempts to do just that; many, if not most, justifications of liberal policy claim that the policy must be made in order to respect (2). That’s the heart, it seems to me, of “identity politics”–an attempt to make sure that all are treated as first class citizens. Liberals (and Dems) see something suspicious–perhaps wrongly–in libertarian denials of the connection between (2) and the size of the government.
Nobody wants a larger government for the sheer joy of a larger government.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:25 pm
SCMT: you can get the Civil Rights Acts and the ERA and similar things that way, sure, but that category of law is hardly the “vast majority” of modern liberalism, and certainly it doesn’t contribute very much, in a relative sense, to the overall size of the government. I don’t see how you generate any of the centerpieces of the welfare-regulatory state that way, except perhaps with an extremely tendentious redefinition of “first-class citizen” that you basically gin up precisely to generate such things.
Yes, some left-liberals have in fact tried to use tendentious redefinition of that and allied concepts to support their policies. Doesn’t make me more sympathetic to them.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:25 pm
Hesiod,
No, I didn’t. (Although I do believe it.) Please pay attention: you are projecting all sorts of ideas onto me in your ignorance. I did say that for several reasons, minarchism will tend to have less abuse of power. That is, I stated that minarchism is better that social democracy in a specific technical sense.
Yes.
This statement shows the same error as Charles makes in #82, so guess I should address it. One might think it is rather obvious, but: things were different then. In particular, in between then and now was the industrial revolution, which has increased our standard of living immeasurably. Additionally, knowledge has accumulated since then, for example, the idea that women are, and should be, basically equal to men. Not clear to them then; clear to us now. It is simply a category error to compare our society now, to what it was 200 years ago, and make any definitive claim about the relationships of things based on wealth or ideology.
If you want fair comparisons, you would compare America of 1800 to other countries in 1800. And you would compare America of 2006 to other countries in 2006.
Thus, for example, the claim that minarchy (and by extension, me) is racist, sexist, etc. because the early republic was. Well, compared to other nations in 1800, the USA comes off quite well. Not a utopia, sorry to say. But a very admirable nation, in spite of its flaws (chief among them race slavery).
But to criticize America of 1800 for having children laboring is simple ignorance of history, and ignorance of economics. Children worked then, in every nation and every class save the most wealthy, because they had to. To eat. And it was not always enough; they starved in significant numbers in many nations. The societies simply were not wealthy enough to support our ideal of the idle childhood. That we can afford it now is a testament to the phenomenal production of wealth from the industrial revolution.
Wealth is a very, very nice thing.
Would I choose to live in minarchy in 1800 if I could, as versus living in our modern cryptosocialism now? Hell no, even assuming I got to part the veil of ignorance and be a propertied white man. We have, for example, air conditioning and window screens, antibiotics and computers. All wonderful things that simply didn’t exist then. We also have valuable ideologies that were not widespread then, such as feminism and racial egalitarianism.
But would I choose to live in a minarchy now, with our wealth of technology and capital, as well as our modern ideologies? Hell yes!
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:39 pm
Additionally, knowledge has accumulated since then, for example, the idea that women are, and should be, basically equal to men.
Oh, sweet Jeebus. This is why “And a pony” posts get written. We ended up vindicating African-American rights in the sixties, and women’s rights after that, and gay rights, again, after that. After a lot of fighting that included the deployment of the National Guard.
Comment by Leonard —
September 20, 2006 @ 11:48 pm
Charles, you wrote:
I think the example of the early republic is helpful here. There was a central government, but it did not monopolize law enforcement (which was almost all done locally, with some Federal marshalls about). It did monopolize defense, more or less, although the several states retained their militias until the progressive era IIRC.
Thus, we see the assumption of a “central government” with all those powers is belied by the example we have of a more minarchist society.
Furthermore, we even see in the early minarchy a hint of more anarchic forms: the early states toyed with nullification and secession rather a lot. That is, the central government was checked in ways complete foreign to the modern way of thinking.
So, I think your statement assumes a bit too much. If we assume that there is a hypothetical minarchy somewhere which really has monopolized coercion, and which also is modern in the sense that there is no ideology of “state’s rights” or any equivalent interposition between state and citizen — then, yes, it would seem that said minarchy is dangerously unchecked. But that’s assuming too much.
Comment by Frank —
September 21, 2006 @ 8:06 am
One hundred
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 21, 2006 @ 8:18 am
Nicholas at #93 suggests that the early American government was “among the best in history” at minimizing government intervention “in the lives of those it considers first-class citizens”. Several others suggest (viz., Eric at #89) that the abuses we see from Dubya’s crowd would have been unthinkable in the early American Republic because it didn’t have the full regulatory apparatus of the modern state.
Well, I believe I’ve already mentioned the Alien and Sedition acts. “First-class citizens”, including relatives of Benjamin Franklin, were arrested and jailed for suggesting that President Adams was a closet royalist who was centralizing power using the bogus, trumped-up threat of a war as an excuse — charges that appear, now, to have no small degree of merit. And guess what? The government of the day didn’t need the NLRB to do that. Or the FDA. Or the FCC. Or even the FBI. Your ideal minarchy did that. Its minimality has been proven no bar against the most extreme forms of abuse.
Meanwhile, Leonard at #97 points out that society has improved in all sorts of ways which, he deems, have nothing to do with government per se — ignoring the point that I and others have repeatedly raised that the application of (more properly checked and balanced) central government power had a great deal to do with how those improvements came about. It’s a tool. It can be a very useful tool. We’d be living in a much worse place had no one ever had the courage to use it. Deal.
Which brings me to the several libertarians who suggest that central government power cannot be tolerated unless someone offers them a guarantee that it will never be abused — as if, absent such a guarantee, the citizens of Norway and Sweden are in imminent danger of imprisonment for voting for a right-wing party (which, by the by, a majority of Swedes just did, though “right wing” there is still three steps to the left of, say, Ted Kennedy).
Guys, grow up. There are no guarantees. Getting back to early America, the men who wrote the Federalist papers had what I consider to be a pretty good theory about how central government power could be moderated and restrained — one which, I think, has worked out rather better than one might have expected over the past two hundred years or so — but there were no guarantees that it would work then, and no guarantees that it will keep working now.
And there are likewise no guarantees that the minarchist regime that you guys seem to be pining for would work out anywhere near as well as you guys seem to expect. It would, at best, be an experiment. If you say that it would be an experiment like the early American experiment, in some respects, you might be right — but that experiment ran into problems, and the expansion of government proved useful to dealing with those problems, which is how we got where we are today. Why do you all seem to expect something so very different if we tried it another time?
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:17 am
This is total nonsense; of course there are profound differences between how Microsoft, medieval guilds, and Lucky Luciano operated. Calling them all “private accumulations of power†and claiming they are equivalent is like saying that there’s no difference between Sweden and North Korea, because they’re both states with a monopoly of force within their territories. You’d justly laugh at me if I said something like that, because the details of your institutional arrangements matter profoundly, and eliding them will lead you to dumb conclusions. But you’re making the same mistake.
I’m not arguing they are equivalent. I am arguing they are on a continuum. Just like Governments.
Some Governments are totalitarian, some are fasc ist, some are constitutional Republicans that respect (ostensibly) basic human rights.
To throw all Governments under the bus is, well, stupid, just because some do bad things.
Thus, to suggest that the US Government is Stalinist Russia waiting to happen, is like saying Microsoft is like the Gambino crime family waiting to happen.
It’s nonsensical.
BUT, that doesn’t mean that the Gambino crime family, or Columbian drug cartels, don’t exist.
Comment by jlw —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:24 am
“And a pony” is right. One of the wonderful things about reading a Libertarian argument here is how things are described not by how they exist in real life, right now, but by how they appear in the Randian funhouse mirror. Libertarian proposals are judged by how they work in a perfect, frictionless environment populated by Hayek-quoting angels. Existing social democratic programs are condemned based on how they might possibly fail in a worst case scenario.
In health care, for instance, an imaginary system based on personal savings accounts is deamed to be superior to the existing national health insurance schemes that deliver the highest life expectancies. The U.S. under the Articles is held up as the pinnacle of human self-rule (as long as we could add the wealth and enlightenment “crypto-socialism” has wraught) but Franklin Roosevelt is condemned on the counterfactual that he was one vote away from being a murderous tyrant. And on and on.
Which is not meant to slag Libertarians–I wouldn’t come here every day if I didn’t find all this interesting. But it seems as useful to making real policy for real people as deconstructionism was to writing novels anyone would want to read.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:24 am
I’m sorry, Nicholas, but the Ameriucan Government was actually WORSE on basic political and civil rights than some contemporary governments.
For example, Salvery was outlawed in both France and Great Britain. And women had greater political and property rights in France than they did in the United States. And this was even before the Frenchy revolution. Afterward, it wasn’t even close.
Napoleonic France was lightyears ahead of the US in terms of civil and politcal rights, per se. The problem was there was no check on the executive.
So the suggestion that the US was a product of its times is, well, bullshit. Itw was backwards even for its times. The only thing that was revolutionary about it was in abolition of a formal aristocracy, and the institution of Republican government.
At the time, the US showed the greatest dichotomy of preaching one thing about the rights of man, and doing another.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:33 am
2. as bad as a ruined credit rating may be, it isn’t remotely as bad as being shot, or even being imprisoned, tortured, or drafted– which is to say, it’s not nearly as powerful as the primary levers governments use. If the worst you can say about a laissez-faire system is that a bunch of people would get their credit ruined unjustly, you haven’t done much to give the proponents of laissez-faire pause.
So you want to go back to the hoary days of yesteryear, when the Roman Republic recoignized “debt-bondage” and enslaved people who got into serious debt. And, no, the Government didn’t do it back then. That was part of the private sector, if you will. Clients became indebted to tehir Patrons, and were enslaved through a concept known as Nexum.
And it was, actually, the Government of Rome that eventually outlawed it.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:50 am
I’m genuinely saddened by the sorts of arguments folks are trying to use against this point – because they’re not remotely unique to the people here. Every time I see someone suggest that maybe Democrats should look into checking government power in light of what the Bush administration’s done, the Democrats present always explain that the problem is simply due to having the wrong sort of person in charge, and that even more power would be fine and dandy in the hands of the right people. They never really give a reassuring explanation of how to make sure only the right people get to wield all that power, but they’re very clear on how that power should never, ever be reduced or even restricted, lest they be inconvenienced when they get their hands on it.
Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, didn’t do what George W. Bush is doing. And I have little doubt that Al Gore wouldn’t have done what Bush has done in the wake of 9/11 either.
Lieberals don’t do that sort of thing. They creep at the margins. They don’t rip the Constitution to shreds.
Even on the big bugaboo of Gun control, liberals have for the most part gotten off the bandwagon.
At our core, libeerals believe in the expansion of poilitcal freedom. Conservatives believe in advancing economic freedom above all else.
So, decide wich the the lesser of two evils. A bit more regulation of the economy, and a higher, but not oppressive marginal income tax rate,, vs.
…secret prison, suspension of habeas corpus, legalized torture, undeclared wars of aggression, massive debt, and unprecedented spying on American citizens.
I used to think libertarians cared mnore about the latter than the former. But it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it.
Comment by IOZ —
September 21, 2006 @ 10:13 am
jlw: Really?
Comment by radish —
September 21, 2006 @ 11:37 am
I’m nodding in agreement with a lot of that lesser evil stuff Hesiod (even though you’re being kind if an asshole about it), but this…
is problematic. Or maybe flat wrong, depending on what you meant exactly. It’s certainly at least as misleading as saying that slavery was outlawed by Congress in the US in 1787 (Which it was. Look it up. I’ve only omitted one tiny detail). In France and Britain, as in the US, slavery was simply limited to areas where it was economically significant. For the US this meant the Southern states; for France it meant territories in the Caribbean. Ditto Brittania.
Slavery was not “outlawed” by France until it had pretty much lost control of its slaveholding territories to revolts anyway. And in Britain it wasn’t outlawed until the 1830s.
Also I would venture to guess that French (and definitely British) jurisprudence was a lot more specific and voluminous than that in the US, meaning that not only did second class citizens have more rights, they also had more obligations. Which is to say the US was minarchic by comparison.
Re the status of women, the sort of “civil and political rights” you refer to were available if and only if they were
noblefirmly established bourgeouisie. That women had more extensive property rights in Europe I don’t doubt, but civil and political rights? What kind of political rights can you have absent the right to participate in the political process? Women were still honorary rather than first class citizens (even in postrevolutionary France, which I’d guess was a lot better than England), and they didn’t get to be an honorary citizen just by being born. The lot of yer average female person was (AFAIK, and taking to account different levels of urbanization) pretty much the same in US as in Europe, before, during, and after all the upheavals.All told though, maybe what we’re describing as the minarchy of the early US would be better described as “easy availability of lebensraum” and an absence of legislative history.
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
September 21, 2006 @ 11:44 am
Nicholas@93 claims that “the early-American government was among the best in history” when it comes to minimizing “how much the gov’t intervenes in the lives of those it considers first-class citizens”. Leonard@99 cites the lack of a formally constituted federal police force at the time, to the same effect.
Well, I believe I’ve already mentioned the Alien and Sedition acts. “First-class citizens”, including relatives of Benjamin Franklin, were in fact arrested for claiming that the Adams administration was trying to use the trumped-up threat of a war to undermine democratic governance — claims which certainly look valid from here. Your near-ideal minarchy did that. And they didn’t need the NLRB to do it. Or the FCC. Or even the FBI. The mere “minimality” of the Federal government of the day demonstrably did nothing to prevent some of the most severe abuses of government power in the whole history of the American republic.
Conversely, Leonard@97 cites numerous improvements in American society over the past 200 years or so, without acknowledging the point that made liberals like me bring them up in the first place — that the proper application of government power, under a more thoroughly tested and more functional set of checks and balances, did a very great deal to bring those changes about. It has been a useful tool throughout our history, and if no one ever had the guts to use it, we would be living in a much worse place.
Which brings me to those, like Eric@89, who seem to say that central government power can only be tolerated if its proponents can somehow provide a guarantee that it will never be abused — as if the citizens of Sweden and Norway were in imminent danger of censorship and arrest for support of right-wing parties. (The Swedes just voted one in, by the by, though “right-wing” there is still way to the left of, say, Ted Kennedy).
Well, grow up. There are no guarantees — any more than there are guarantees that the theoretical minarchist paradise that you’ve basically made up would work out the way you expect. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, under any system.
What we can say is that in the minarchist early American society that you guys keep harking back to, things didn’t work out like that. That society had problems, and the application and extension of government power over time was found to be useful in solving some of those problems — which is how we got where we are today. What makes you think it would be any different the second time around?
Comment by James —
September 21, 2006 @ 12:05 pm
I’ve always thought it interesting that when libertarians are presented with a problem in governance, it always results in a statement that this is inconsistent with libertarian ideals and a demand for the institution of a libertarian society, i.e. a prescription for how other people ought to behave, based on a self-assessed personal superiority.
Some might consider this as a form of psychological projection. Others might call it a retreat from personal responsibility. Either way, it looks awfully hostile to democracy.
Comment by Leonard —
September 21, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
The state does not and did not create any wealth nor enlightenment. Rather, these things are created by individuals, working hard, thinking, and trading. The USA was a leader among the places where it happened early and fast, because we had economic liberty for the vast majority of citizens.
Modern liberals have a historical narrative in which wealth was created by the government. (This is why we see historical mistakes like damning the USA in 1800 for having child labor: some people think that a stroke of a pen could have changed basic economic realities not subject to speechmaking.) In this narrative, the USA was basically a poor place until the government made it wealthy under Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson. It’s not so. Wealth creation happens independent of government, not because of it, once you get above the level of basic law and order. (In our highly regulated state, it sometimes happens in spite of government.)
Which is not to say that basic law and order is easy, nor unimportant, as we see today in many places (including Iraq). It isn’t easy and it’s very important. However, law and order is something that both the early USA and the current one provide, so it is not something we can distinguish between the two on.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 21, 2006 @ 1:04 pm
Modern liberals have a historical narrative in which wealth was created by the government.
Are we at least winning in Iraq in your world?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 21, 2006 @ 1:05 pm
Liberals don’t do that sort of thing. They creep at the margins. They don’t rip the Constitution to shreds.
No. CALEA, the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism and Anti Death Penalty Act, the prosecution of Phillip Zimmerman, or the Clipper chip ring any bells? Perhaps you never heard that extraordinary rendition began with a presidential directive signed by Bill Clinton. Or maybe we can look to the sterling record of our liberal attorney general Janet Reno, who pioneered “the Miami method” of getting convictions by faking evidence, coercing testimony, and even torturing suspects until they confessed. Maybe you forget that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a Democratic proposal? Or that the PATRIOT Act passed 98 to 1 in the Senate (bless Feingold’s heart)? Heck, W.’s favorite Supreme Court case, Ex parte Quirin, is part of the legacy of that great liberal FDR (which legacy, lest we forget, also includes the internment camps for Japanese Americans).
Yes, of course, Reno was not as bad as Ashcroft or Gonzales. But maybe, just maybe, that has a little to do with the fact that we had divided government then, and don’t have it now? You’ve got me on your side for getting the current set of bastards out, sure, but when you tell me liberals “don’t do that sort of thing”, I wonder if we read the same history books.
Comment by Leonard —
September 21, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
Charles, again with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the question is not whether they were wrong, nor in violation of the spirit of liberty. I don’t think we disagree on those things. There are two questions of interest here. First, how common were such abuses of the central state then, and how common now? Seems to me the early republic had pretty few really serious abusive laws passed. However, obviously I live now, and not then, and I know a heck of a lot more about now. So, I am quite willing to be educated. If there’s a train of abuses and usurpations in the early republic, let’s hear about them.
Thus far, as fair as I recall the only two abuses mentioned in this thread are the excise tax of 1791(?), and the subsequent rebellion and its violent suppression, and the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798-1800. Of these two, we probably disagree what was wrong about the first, and in any case, it is nothing any modern save a libertarian would call an abuse of government. (A liberal should argue that the farmers were morally required to pay the tax since “they had voted it on themselves” via Congress.) Only the second is something we agree on as an abuse.
So, from 1789 to 1800 there was, as mentioned here, just one abuse of government. And it was voted down after the next election because it was so unpopular.
Can you think of more than one abuse that has happened in the past 11 years? I can. Have any of them been voted down by Congress?
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:10 pm
The state does not and did not create any wealth nor enlightenment. Rather, these things are created by individuals, working hard, thinking, and trading. The USA was a leader among the places where it happened early and fast, because we had economic liberty for the vast majority of citizens.
And an extremely cheap source of labor (slaves) and women who couldn’t vote. And huge natural resoirces and “untamed” wilderness that made it difficult to impose centralizedd rule even if we wanted to. [And John Adams did].
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:24 pm
Actually, Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807. And, before that it was declared illegal in Great Britain under the Common Law in a seminal case decided in 1772. In fact, slkavery had actually be legally abolished in Englad as early as 1102, but with the rise of the british Empire “black slaves” started bcomning more prevalent in the early to mid 18th century.
And revolutionary France abolished slavery IN THE COLINIES in 1794 by an act of the The National Convention.
So, unfortunately, “Minarchism” in the United States actually had no effect on political liberty. If anything, it was negatively correlated with the expansion of political liberty.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:28 pm
I do withdrtaw my comment about the political rights of women.
In actuality, women gained the right to vote in the United States earlier than they did in both France and Britain. In fact, only Finland and Norway granted women sufferage earlier than the US did.
Comment by jlw —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:40 pm
Can we close the circle by asking why, if
is true, the idea that
is so difficult for Libertarians to accept?
Comment by Skarl —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
Wow. I had to comment just to throw in this phrase in the thread:
Military-industrial complex.
All this talk about the appropriate size of government, and no one mentions why the US has a massively over-sized military, or why the US seems to always have a war going on?
I mean, this isn’t a kooky idea – Eisenhower, President and military general, came up with it.
Moreover, the current administration is a perfect example of its operation, with its strong ties to military contractors (and Halliburton’s high-profit, no-bid contracts in Iraq.) What if the problem is simply that the stunning achievement of US WWII military production created a monster, a massive interdependent network of business that is deeply intertwined with goverment?
Or if you don’t like that theory, how about the US’s corporate-owned media, that makes no attempt to inform or educate? What about studies showing the appalling lack of knowledge US citizens have about basic facts (such as, Were there WMDs in Iraq? Was Saddam involved in 9/11?)
Hesiod has it right. Big Organizations are a necessary part of a complex, post-industrial society. Different types of organizations are appropriate to address different problems: businesses, corporations, unions, governments, non-profits, etc. If we remove some types of organizations from the table, or refuse to use them to solve the problems they are suited for, the problems will be solved poorly, or not at all.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 2:57 pm
So, from 1789 to 1800 there was, as mentioned here, just one abuse of government. And it was voted down after the next election because it was so unpopular.
First of all, why are you limiting your period to 1800? It is not a cincidence that the staunchkly republican (with small R) George Washington Was President for most of those years. This actually undercuts your argument, and supports mine. The reason there was no abuse of power (or little of it — I disagree about the supression of the Whiskey rebellion being an abuse of power. It was an armed insurrection]).
It’s because george weashington was President.
When John Adams took office things went south.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 3:20 pm
Man. I’ve just beeen skimming through some of the Annals of our earliest Congresses.
You shuld all read the debate on the Alien and Sedition Acts.
And, one outrageous example of minarchism gone amok was particularly interesting. The State of South Carolian passed a law that made it, essentially, illegal for FREE blacks to enter the Port of Chareslston on ships.
If they did, they would have to be imprisoned for the length of their stay, and the Captain of the vessel would have to pay for the incarceration.
If he failed to do so, he would be subject to a hefty fine and imprisonment himself, and the FREE BLACK would be, essentially, sold into slavery!
No wonder we had a civil war.
Anyone who claims that war was about “states rights” is either full of shit or extremely stupid.
And, likewise, anyone who claims that centralized Government in Washington hindered, rather than (on the whole) expanded liberty in this country is smnoking crack.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
Here’s the link to that South Carolina debace, by the way.
Its unbelievable.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
jlw’s post in 117 actually makes a great point. Libertarians are essentially arging that indvidual responsibility ceases to exist once you become employed by the Government.
If you are President of the United States, you no longer are responsible for your actions. The evil Gummint took over control of your body and made you do bad things.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 21, 2006 @ 3:35 pm
Not remotely is that what we’re arguing. Hesiod, you can be a sharp analyst on a lot of topics, but when you slip into fencing mode like this you lose your mojo.
Everyone: Is there a single trope of the Eternal Internet War Between Liberals and Libertarians people don’t want to replicate in this thread? Or have we got them all, already?
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 21, 2006 @ 3:56 pm
Jim:
I’m honestly unclear whether libertarians think liberals support expansions of government for their own sake. I can’t believe that’s true. I also can’t believe that libertarians think that it’s unreasonable for liberals to tie the expansion of a series of rights for a series of classes of people to government expansions. But that seems to be what we’re all arguing about.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 21, 2006 @ 4:00 pm
Just to clarify:
(1) The argument that we could have got the same expansion of rights with less government is a sane one.
(2) The argument that the benefits of those expansions is not sufficient to justify the ill-effects of those expansions is a sane one.
(3) The argument that there have been expansions that help no one is a sane one.
But I’m not really seeing anyone–and I’m mostly following Leonard with amazement–make those arguments. The argument that’s being made appears to be closest to #3, with the modification that it applies to all expansions after 1800.
Comment by Avram —
September 21, 2006 @ 4:15 pm
And what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, government power, Mr. Managerial Liberalism?
.
I think that’s obvious: We like it well-done, while you prefer it rare.
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
Not remotely is that what we’re arguing. Hesiod, you can be a sharp analyst on a lot of topics, but when you slip into fencing mode like this you lose your mojo.
I actually prebutted that rejoinder in my original post you are responding to. But took it out, just to see who would take the bait.
Sadly, it was Jim!
I was at least hoping for Neel or Leonard.
Yes, I know the libertarian argument is that people are inherently untrustworthy, so the less power we give them to weild against others the better.
But as one of the others upthread pointe dout, the powers George W. Bush is abusing — that are the most odious –are not the powers accreted to the government by “liberals.” They are the ones granted to him by the Constitution itself. So, in essence, he’s the reincarnation of John Adams, but without a countervailing Jefferson in opposition.
Therefore, my point stands. Bad people do bad things. Government is a tool. It is a very powerful tool. People who abuse that tool can do great harm.
Of course, maybe we should just make every Presidential candidate read Amazing Fanbtasy #15 from now on. And memorize Stan Lee’s immortal words: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Comment by max —
September 21, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
Lifted entirely from Jason Allens comment on Brad Delong’s where this blog entry is discussed. All credit to Jason – there is more to that comment, go read the thread on Delong’s blog.
——————-
Pop Quiz: if the *more successful* political party is the one that is appealing to hate, fear, and violence, what does that imply about the *actual society* that Libertarians wish to rule with their laissez-faire, non-coersive, utopian principles? In practice, would Libertarian ideas and ideals lead us to a Randian heaven or something much worse, given the facts on the ground? Bonus Points: regarding point **2** in quotes above, would it be better to 1) aid the Vandals in their sacking of Washington by voting for them in every election, in hopes of staying ideologically “pure” and/or “starving the beast” or 2) limiting the ability of the Vandals to sack Washington by voting for the minority party, even though they might either increase or use existing gov’t power in a powerful, positive, and socially responsible manner.
————————–
What can you say to that – can a society which elects torturers suddenly become heaven under Libertarian rule? Dont you create the Libertarian society with “the electorate you have, not the one you might wish to have” ?
Comment by anodyne —
September 21, 2006 @ 5:29 pm
We’re nearing the end of the night’s festivities and Matt Hogan has asked me to say a few words. The band has packed up for the night, but we’re going to continue to pipe in music, and there are a few bottles of wine left for those revelers that wish to linger. Special thanks to our host and keynote speaker this evening, Jim Henley. I think you’ll all agree that Jim’s rants are among the very best to be found on the internets. Though lacking in the more “colorful†language we’ve come to enjoy, tonight’s entry was no exception. And at the risk of sounding like a fawning sycophant, let me say that the love tap to liberals on the flip side, which generated a spirited round of, well, conversation, was nothing less than masterful.
I’d like to thank everyone for coming out tonight for such a worthy cause. If you decide to go to the polls in November, whether holding hands or holding your noses, take comfort in the knowledge that even though the chicken may be looking down at you, the dog will still be looking sideways. Good night and Kumbaya.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 21, 2006 @ 5:45 pm
That was from like the first comment, right? Because I read that one and figured, “This is a thread that will be too stupid to follow.”
You and Jason are, like a lot of liberals in this thread and elsewhere, confusing categories and making unwarranted assumptions. The worst of the latter is that we libertarians are aiming at “heaven” and think that a libertarian society would deliver same.
The category confusion is between what the inchoate lust to torture scary foreigners can accomplish residing in unorganized, dispersed breasts, and what it can accomplish instantiated in a political system with gobs of (borrowed) money at its disposal. You also miss the extent to which the political system has enabled bad actors, starting with the President, to amplify and prolong this particular episode of atavism, stimulated by the atrocities of September 11.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:01 pm
What can you say to that – can a society which elects torturers suddenly become heaven under Libertarian rule?
You know, Scalia made precisely the same argument in order to justify gutting the exclusionary rule.
His argument was that permitting illegally obtained evidence to be used in trials will have no effect on the police’s decisions to get evidence illegally, because it’s the same people under both sets of rules, and we can trust their professionalism or not. I don’t believe him — I think that incentives matter, and we have eliminated an incentive for police not to violate the fourth amendment. So we’ll see more abuse, with exactly the same people doing police work.
Likewise, incentives matter for our politics. If the great policy questions of the day have to do with foreigners, then the voters will make bad choices, because everyone has a systematic cognitive bias against members of out-groups. So if we didn’t prop up foreign dictators and fight pointless foreign wars, then there wouldn’t be any reason to be bringing up torturing Arabs as an election issue.
Comment by radish —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:07 pm
Er, you’re just being hyperbolic here, right? I can’t think of anyone even remotely “liberal” who argues seriously that governments are primarily (or even substantially) responsible for wealth creation. I can think of plenty of people who argue that governmentally provided infrastructure increases the opportunities for wealth creation, and thereby increases overall net wealth, but that’s not the same thing at all.
Well, yes. Only it didn’t actually outlaw the ownership of slaves until 1834.
I’m kind of torn about replying any further, because all I was doing was (pedantically) disputing the characterization that France and Britain were “light years” ahead of the US. But what the hell. The political trajectory of abolition in Europe was, yes, way ahead of the Southern states (about 30 years as it eventually turned out), but roughly parallel to the Northern states.
Well, yes. And I’m sure that was a great relief to all the slaves in the British West Indies. And it wasn’t declared illegal so much as it was declared to be unenforceable. As I understand it Mansfield freed Somersett and enabled some unknown thousand of others to gradually leave their masters over the next few decades. That was certainly a big deal, but it was not wildly dissimilar from the situation in the Northern US, with the exception that a slave who escaped from a colony to Great Britain was free and clear (not counting the greater difficulty of getting there and the relative lack of economic opportunity), whereas a slave who escaped to a free state/territory from a slave state might well be returned to their master (especially after 1850).
The reason British-colonial emancipation happened 30 years earlier than US Southern emancipation is that Parliament could unilaterally decide to prevent the colonies from holding slaves without starting a civil war. Congress, as became clear shortly afterward, did not have that ability.
Quite so. And this only seven years after the abolishment of slavery in the Northern Territories of the United States of America. And heaven knows it must have cost them, because the French had such a firm grip on those colonies, and… Oh, wait…
OTOH your interpretation would explain the mystery of why the French were so nice to Toussaint L’Ouverture after they recaptured Haiti — they were obviously grateful that he opened their eyes to the moral necessity of emancipation.
Comment by max —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:15 pm
If I understand this correctly, you are saying that in a libertarian system, no-one will have the power or means to torture.
But, can such a society – where inchoate lust to torture scary foreigners reside in unorganized, dispersed breasts”- continue to be libertarian?
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:18 pm
what it can accomplish instantiated in a political system with gobs of (borrowed) money at its disposal.
We’re not clear (or at least I’m not) about what keeps government small; if you have a stable majority party, why wouldn’t you exploit your power to do what you want? And what is there to keep you from doing that, other than some broad cultural norm that seems really hard to create?
It seems like liberal concerns are somehow orthagonal to the libertarian concerns you’re speaking about. You’re saying, “Keep govt. small.” We’re saying, “Given a govt., how should it behave.”
Comment by Leonard —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:50 pm
Tim, I have not been responding to you much because you’ve been sniping unhelpfully, as in 60, 98 and 111. However at 124 and 125 you are engaging this thing honestly, thus, response.
I cannot speak for all libertarians, even more than you cannot speak for liberals. However, I think that some libertarians do think some liberals would expand government strictly to expand government, i.e., with no other motives. However we have a slightly more intellectual set of libertarians here, and I don’t think any of Jim’s regulars share that opinion.
It’s unclear to me why you think that is germane to the thread. Perhaps you might expand on that.
The thread, if I may characterize it, is about abuses of government. Not just “use”. Torturing people is an abuse of power. Giving people the vote, not. Taxing them – a matter of debate between us. Libertarians are very keenly aware that we think of many things as “abuse” that others call use. (Probably we’re much more aware of your preferences than you, ours, because we are the tiny minority. You (meaning non-libertarians) are the overwhelming majority.) Consider taxation. I’d call the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion wrong, because it was enforcing an unjust (although Constitutional) law. Those farmers did not agree to the Constitution. Hesiod, and probably most modern liberals, thinks the rebellion itself wrong, and thus, suppressing it was not an abuse. Fine. We disagree on that. To you, then, it is not an “abuse”, and I will respect that insofar as I won’t try to argue that it shows anything about the “abusiveness” of a minarchist state.
We agree on some things, i.e., that the Alien and Sedition acts were wrong. That torture, now, is wrong. And for that matter, that slavery was wrong, as was racial discrimination, and that denying women the vote was wrong. These are the things that we should be discussing, as well as other modern abuses.
But the thing here is, women’s rights and racial equality are perfectly compatible with a minarchist state. Further, sexism and racism were rampant in the USA, as well as everywhere else, at the time they wrote the Constitution. So, they didn’t change anything. No surprise. In 1800 no state allowed women to vote. The USA didn’t either. You can’t blame that on the form of government, unless you think strictly in utopian terms, and attempt to impose modern ideas on history.
This is why I have mentioned the Alien and Sedition acts, and not much else. That is the sole example I have thus far of a law that was:
(a) abusive
(b) passed by a minarchist government
[c) not a codification of near-universal prejudice of all other societies at the time
(d) something you and I would agree on as “abuse”
Your three arguments in #125 are all lines of argumentation that I have made before in other contexts. And perhaps I will here, too, but they aren’t yet necessary.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 21, 2006 @ 6:50 pm
Colin 72 — I just now saw your post, which I somehow missed when reading this thread (I can’t imagine how, can you?
Anyway, sure, if you’re an Indian who wants to say no to the British East India Company, you’re screwed. That’s precisely my point: what we want, from a liberty standpoint, is the right of an individual to say “no thanks” and move on. Even if they don’t actually refuse, the fact that they could will induce the organization they’re dealing with to take their concerns much more seriously. (This is how the right of exit increases the amount of voice that people have within their organizations.)
So someone who is free has most of his or her important organizational interactions taking place in a social context where they have an effective right of exit. Being able to change jobs, churches, neighborhoods, opinions, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, and so on, lets people find the mode of living that makes their lives the best for them. We fear company towns and totalitarian states precisely because the people living in them have no alternatives for the many goods and services they need to make their lives. Even if the company store has good prices right now, that might not be true next month — the inhabitants are vulnerable. (In fact, the Pullman strike happened exactly when a “benevolent” company town became less benevolent. And the Warsaw pact countries often punished dissidents by depriving their children of schooling. It’s the same principle at work.)
So, back to corporations. In a well run state, the state guards property rights well, and so people can start businesses with the confidence they won’t be robbed. So you get companies without guns, which means that you have companies that people have some way to stop dealing with. That’s great, because now you can get stuff with a right of refusal. Maximizing the size of this sector is good, because it maximizes the range of things individuals can do freely.
So far, I doubt I’ve said anything you disagree with; libertarians and liberals both want our government to arrest murderers and robbers, but not to shoot dissidents; companies not to shoot strikers; religions not to burn rival denominations’ churches (or members); and for individuals to basically do what they like as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.
I think where we part company is in our understanding of how private organizations can accumulate coercive power. So, take the example of a monopoly, like the railroads last century or AT&T a few years back. Obviously, our ability to exit is pretty weak in this case, because there’s nowhere else to shop. So we have less freedom than we would have in a more competitive environment.
I think that it’s fair to say that the instinctive liberal response in this kind of situation is to use the government to do something about the industry, like fire up the Sherman Antitrust Act, or to heavily regulate the industry so that it can’t do harm. Now, of course it’s theoretically possible to regulate beneficially, but as a libertarian I also think this is usually a misguided impulse.
Let me see if I can explain why. That’s because “the state” and “the private sector” are not countervailing powers the way Hesiod suggests.
Following Weber, the state has an effective monopoly on force. Its laws and regulations have a decisive impact precisely because of that monopoly. This makes being able to influence its decisions very, very attractive. Clearly, if the law makes your company a monopoly, then it doesn’t matter how brilliant an innovation a competitor might make — they can’t enter the market and can’t take your business away from you, because they’ll go to jail if they try.
Next, strict regulatory regimes pretty much inevitably lead to regulatory capture, whereby the regulator ends up issuing regulations on behalf of the incumbent firms of the regulated industry. Even the FDA’s rules on clinical trials exist in large measure to keep small startups from threatening the incumbent firms (which are the only ones that can afford the large trials needed). This happens because the regulators are in constant contact with the regulated firms, and the usual human ties form between them, and because firms realize they can use regulations to ward off competitors. This is not a particularly libertarian insight, by the way; it was the Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko who first brought the phenomenon to widespread notice.
This doesn’t mean that all rule-making is bad; we need new rules to deal with CO2 emissions, for example. It’s just that we need rules which are neutral, and don’t require constant, intrusive oversight. For example, it would be smarter to tax carbon rather than specifying the fuels to be used, mileages for cars, and so on. But, in actual practice, we tend to do the opposite. That’s where libertarian skepticism about regulation comes from — real government seems to produce bad laws.
There’s also another dimension of people lacking the capacity to choose, which is when they are impoverished. I’ll skip over that, because this comment is long enough. (Even though there’s interesting stuff about things like Milton Friedman’s support for a basic income and the liberal tendency — inherited from the Progressives — to over-value technocratic management.)
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 7:29 pm
Yes. Yes. Of course, the French also came up with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in the wake of the French Revolution. That actually went further, in some cases, than our declaration of independence and Constitution. [It actually came out in August of 1789. A few weeks before our Constitiution was ratified].
Appropos of this thread, here is article 16:
“A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.”
Comment by Hesiod —
September 21, 2006 @ 7:41 pm
Yes, prvate actors and the Government ARE countervailing forces. But only in a constitutional republic that adheres to basic protections of individual rights.
The Gvt doesn’t have a “monopoly of force,” er se. It has one only if the people give it one. Ask the Iraqi militias if the Iraqi Gvt has a “monopoly of force.”
And, of course, you onmce again forget the human element in all of this. In order to crack down on citizens, you have to have a willing military or police establishment. In some cases, they’ll go along. In others they won’t.
Think Boris Yeltsin on a tank, and you catch my drift.
And even Tienanmen Square was only broken up when the Chinese authorities brought in troops from the outer provinces who had no sympathies with the student protesters.
Revolution is revolution.
Comment by Sifu Tweety —
September 21, 2006 @ 8:04 pm
Aaaaaah I can’t read this all.
Libertarianism: better equipped than any other political philosophy to produce REAMS AND REAMS OF TYPING.
Good points, everybody, that I didn’t read.
At the risk of being repetitive: what is to tell us that the structural deficiency Jim identifies (what I have previously called an “error condition”) is less a downfall of the “liberal” system than one of the “democratic” system? Arguably, harnessing the most warlike, “base” instincts of the electorate is a problem with any kind of representative democracy? Given this, wouldn’t the huffiest see-liberals-toldja advocacy of full-on stateless libertarianism really be a call for some kind of non-representative authoritarianism, just with a corporate face?
Anyhoo. Apologies to whoever already said that.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:22 pm
Hesiod: Yes, private actors and the Government ARE countervailing forces. But only in a constitutional republic that adheres to basic protections of individual rights.
No, they aren’t. We’re all members of the same society, and our relationship with our government is not an inherently antagonistic one. This can have good consequences, like when someone calls the police to stop a murder or burglary. This can also have dire consequences, like when our officials decide to shower ADM with ill-conceived subsidies.
The rest of your post I agree with, except for the wording of “only if the people give it one.” The use of the word “give” suggests voluntary assent to me, and I don’t think it’s right to say that the inhabitants of, say, Franco’s Spain really gave their consent to his rule.
Comment by Douglas Knight —
September 21, 2006 @ 9:44 pm
I think the discussion of slavery is very helpful to illustrate a factual disagreement. Governments get a lot credit for things I don’t think they really did, like abolish slavery or child labor. The actual legislation happens only when the practice is pretty weak.
There is something to be said for a government with a large expanse of territory. I do give the British some credit for abolishing the slave trade and eventually their colonial slavery. I give Congress credit for the voting rights act (although not for the civil rights act, which I don’t think was capable of having any impact).
It’s a disagreement of facts, but facts about causality, very hard to check.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
September 21, 2006 @ 10:03 pm
Douglas, the US Civil War took 300 thousand lives and four years to prosecute; that suggests that it was not a weak practice. And yes, it was fought over slavery — look at Mississipi’s Declaration of Causes of Secession:
Comment by the talking dog —
September 21, 2006 @ 10:57 pm
Amazing, but now in the 140’s on this thread… this is off topic, of course, but you all DO know that Sens. McCain, Warner and Huckleberry have completed their kabuki, and now have the heretofore hypothetical torture and star chamber and habeas killing deal they want now.
Democracy has an intrinsic flaw, when the voters are given a chance to behave like a genuine mob… and it seems to be the instinct of the Rovians to keep permitting the voters to believe that they are themselves (or by their governmental betters) rampaging through the streets with pitchforks and torches making sure that swarthy troublemakers don’t bother us.
Yes, Jim is right, of course, that if the principle of liberal government (classic version) that smaller really is better, meaning that either Libertarian by Design (who I voted for) Ed Clark or Libertarian by Making Everybody hate the Government Jimmy Carter won in 1980, we would have had some semblance of more limited government, freed from the paradoxical expansions of Reagan and the Bushes…
But you know what? The power part is absolutely true: and no one believed Jim here when he pointed out over and over and over that war like the one in Iraq was just a massive governmental public works program.
But torture… well, not much you can say there.
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
September 22, 2006 @ 6:47 am
Oh please. Libertarians support the rule of law — such as the English Common Law — protecting things like property rights, enforcement of contracts, etc. To say that libertarians support the “unrestrained market” is true, if by restraint, you mean the actions of government. But then classical liberals also supported unrestrained markets, or, to be French about it, laissez faire.
I pretty much endorse most of Jim’s thesis. If you have people who think ends justify means, whether that is creating democracy in the ME, ending inequality or halting global warming, then powers get used. In some cases, people get killed, while on the milder side, people pay higher taxes, or get their lives regulated, etc.
Comment by Michael Sullivan —
September 22, 2006 @ 11:14 am
Neel: The regulatory capture thing is an interesting phenomenom that I think many liberals just don’t get.
Have people here read Fast Food Nation? The author very clearly lays out the regulatory capture of the USDA (the people who certify beef), explaining not just that it happened, but why it happened: he points out that when the government staffed the USDA, they needed people who actually knew about cattle farming. Who knew about cattle farming? Well, cattle farmers. So they hired from the industry that they were regulating, and not surprisingly, the people they hired were pretty sympathetic towards the industry that they came out of. Then you had a predictable cycle of lobbying and the standard government tightrope walk where they want to restrain industries but at the same time keep them profitable and avoid mass layoffs and closures, and pretty soon the USDA exists to support the major factory farms.
My summary doesn’t do the book justice, by the way — it’s a really well-written section, and seems to show great insight.
And then you get to the conclusion of the book, and what’s the author’s proposed answer to the problematic parts of the fast food industry? Well, he thinks that Congress should create a regulatory agency. With no discussion of or seeming cognizance of the fact that he’s just spent a chapter dissecting the total failure (it doesn’t just not work, it’s actually worse than nothing) of that approach to a slightly different sector of the same industry!
I think that there’s a really unfortunate liberal tendancy to regard regulatory capture as a rare aberration instead of a constant tendancy.
(I don’t know why I bothered to write this out, as it’ll be spam-filtered.)
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 22, 2006 @ 11:20 am
Au contraire, Michael Sullivan! You got through. OTOH, both Nick and Charles Dodgson had a message in Akismet hell, but I just freed them.
Comment by colin roald —
September 22, 2006 @ 11:21 am
Neel @136: I think we have a basic confusion here that each of us has a different idea what the debate is about
At any rate, your long answer doesn’t seem to contain anything I disagree with. The point I was trying to make was in response to Jim’s declaration of anarchist sympathies — that the reason companies don’t have guns is because we have a government with sufficient power to control them. And the reason interactions with companies offer the right of exit is because we have a government that guarantees it. For example — you point out that AT&T used to have a monopoly that individual consumers couldn’t do much about. They were broken up, and the rules were put into place to require local telephony companies provide open access to long distance service. And then we had a great flowering of competition. The companies didn’t volunteer for that on their own; government made them. And the reason we know this is that they are currently working to put Ma Bell back together again as fast as the regulators will allow.
So this is the key point: why did that monopoly exist in the first place? Did government regulation create it, and if we abolished the FCC entirely it would disintegrate into thousands of competing mom-and-pop phone companies? Or was it a “natural monopoly” driven by vast economic forces? In this case, pretty clearly the latter. Which leads to the next question: how unusual are natural monopolies? Are they isolated cases, or are do many industries have monopolistic tendencies, inclinations towards cartels, and temptations to thuggishness? How much do we need a force to channel entrepreneurial energy in constructive directions? Why *don’t* company towns exist any more, anyway? (Obviously I have an answer in mind for these questions. But I admit room for debate.)
I don’t *like* government. I wish we abstractly had less of it. I’m not a pinko. I will quite probably agree with nearly every example you come up with of a stupid government regulation. But I also believe there are many vital cases where government regulation is extremely constructive, and I’m not inclined to believe that eliminating government will make everything better.
Comment by MQ —
September 22, 2006 @ 6:47 pm
I read as much of this as I could take, and this liberal STILL doesn’t understand how getting rid of progressive taxation in peacetime will stop government from fighting stupid wars, torturing people, etc. The financial resources will be found somewhere so long as government is sovereign over a wealthy economy.
You know, “government” is an abstraction, and so is “government power”. There are many different specific institutions doing specific things, in both the public and private sectors. Calling down a pox on government power the abstraction will not stop people from using the tool of collective, organized violence if they want to do so. That’s especially true because most people who call down such a curse seem to readily make an exception for government in its “national defense” (read: warmaking) role.
I think we have a cultural problem here, a problem with the nature and values of the citizenry. I don’t think saying “government power, bad!” is the most direct or best way to address that problem. I think our culture is too militaristic, sadisitic, and violence-loving, and that’s what we need to take on. One can debate about progressive income taxes or universal health care, but I really don’t see much of a connection between that and militarism.
Comment by Mike Sullivan —
September 22, 2006 @ 8:54 pm
MQ:
You’re right, progressive taxation and universal healthcare have very little in common with warmongering, and a country which is inclined to give the government huge tax-collecting and healthcare powers may well be inclined not to give the government huge war-making powers, and vice-versa.
And if one’s only problem with the Bush administration is the war in Iraq, Iran, or whomever we’re invading this week, then I think it’s completely fair to say that one’s support for progressive taxation and universal healthcare is in no way culpable for the things that one does not like about the Bush administration.
If one does not like the Bush administration’s approach to, say, healthcare, global climate change, education policy, immigration, race relations, law enforcement, economic incentives, and tariffs, (and that’s just a random grouping of things I think that many liberals don’t like about the current administration, mind you — not things I am necessarily particularly passionate about), then I think that one has a harder time suggesting that one’s take on traditional liberal roles of government have not enabled some of Bush’s abuses.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
September 24, 2006 @ 7:51 pm
Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, didn’t do what George W. Bush is doing. And I have little doubt that Al Gore wouldn’t have done what Bush has done in the wake of 9/11 either.
And I have no doubt that he would have. He probably wouldn’t have attacked Iraq, but he would have been just as eager to pass PATRIOT and continue and worsen the practice of extraordinary rendition that he was a fan of as VP.
Lieberals don’t do that sort of thing. They creep at the margins. They don’t rip the Constitution to shreds.
Creep at the margins enough, and it starts to shred – especially when someone sneezes. Someone sneezed a few years back.
At our core, libeerals believe in the expansion of poilitcal freedom. Conservatives believe in advancing economic freedom above all else.
And the conservatives say they’re for the expansion of political freedom while the liberals try to advance equality and fairness above all else. It looks like both sides are fond of trying to claim freedom while having no actual interest in it.
So, decide wich the the lesser of two evils. A bit more regulation of the economy, and a higher, but not oppressive marginal income tax rate,, vs.
…secret prison, suspension of habeas corpus, legalized torture, undeclared wars of aggression, massive debt, and unprecedented spying on American citizens.
Not even mentioning the Republican love for big government, or the Democratic complicity in some of those very things (Carnivore, anyone?)…let’s make a deal.
You guys actually put up candidates who’ll unequivocally say they’d stop the torture, the unconstitutional detention, and the spying on Americans, and I’ll actually buy all the posturing about how much liberals disapprove of it all. After Kerry, I expect you to put up a guy who says he’d have done the torture, the spying, and the detentions better, but hey. Prove me wrong.