Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether Mort Walker is a libertarian or not, he’s still not funny.

Political correctness won’t save the what is surely one of the worst comic strips on the planet.

dadahead: “… having a laugh at the expense of 1,000 dumbass cult members doesn’t really bother me.”

Two metal buckets of grape Flavor Aid laced with Valium and cyanide were brought into the assembly hall and the mixture was dispensed in small paper cups. Babies and children were the first ones to ingest the mixture as it was squirted into their throats with a syringe.

…

Hours after news of the mass suicide [sic] got out, local authorities found 913 of the 1,110 inhabitants dead, including 276 children.

Yeah, all those “dumbass” murdered infants. What a laugh riot. Maybe we can replace it with a topical zinger about, say, Andrea Yates’s kids—“Don’t get in the bathtub!” Hardy har har.

Brandon Berg:

Note in particular that Jim Crow laws were passed because white voters were unhappy that many merchants refused to discriminate against blacks.

Well, no, not quite. Jim Crow laws were passed because white supremacist terrorists systematically stopped Black people from going to the polls to stop them from being passed (or to stop candidates who would pass them from being elected). It’s not an accident that massive disenfranchisement of the Black population was one of the central planks of Jim Crow; there were many communities in the South, prior to the mass migrations of the 1920s, in which Blacks were the numerical majority, and they exercised substantial power in state politics when they had the chance (as they did in the 1860s-1870s, and as they did again in the 1960s-1970s) to vote.

Eric:

I have tried to say that Populism/Democracy leads to less freedom, not more, and you have presented irrelevancies that distract from that core concept rather than address it. The increased freedoms you constantly discuss did not result from Democracy.

Maybe you could explain more clearly what you mean when you distinguish the Republican parts of the American constitution from the Democratic/Populist ones. What makes a particular aspect of the government Republican as opposed to Democratic/Populist?

I ask this because a lot of libertarian discussions that I’ve seen on this topic end up simply defining Republicanism and Democracy in such a way that one’s guaranteed to have better outcomes than the other by linguistic fiat—e.g., by stipulating that part of what it means to be a “Republican” form of government is to have a constitution that effectively limits government power, while giving a definition of “Democracy” in some sort of purely structural terms (e.g.: election of legislators or 50%+1 referenda). Of course if you define one of them by reference to achieving the goal you want to achieve, and define the other only in terms of the means of decision-making, one of them’s going to look like a much stronger candidate for achieving that goal than the other. But it’s unclear what intellectual gains you make with that sort of apples-and-oranges comparison.

Well, I’ll definitely second the call for putting “… drinks the Kool-Aid” on the blacklist for 2006. In fact, I’d vote for a permanent spot. I don’t know how many people don’t know and how many people just don’t care that their snarky little catch-phrase is joking about the senseless deaths of nearly 1,000 people in a ghastly mass murder-suicide, but whether it’s through ignorance or sheer callousness that the allusion persists, the shorter its time remaining in this world the better.

I’m afraid you misunderstand my references to slavery. CIW has been involved in exposing and working to change two distinct things in southern Florida (and the Southeastern US broadly):

1. Extremely low wages and harsh working conditions

2. Enslavement of migrant farmworkers by large farming operations

I agree with you that (1) isn’t slavery in any but the metaphorical “wage slavery” sense, and that metaphorical phrases like “wage slavery” conceal at least as much as they reveal and usually don’t belong in serious analysis. But when CIW says “slavery in the fields” they don’t mean (1). They mean (2). As in, farming operations where bosses threatened to torture or murder immigrant workers if they left their jobs and pistol-whipped passenger van service drivers who had given enslaved workers rides out of the area. Here’s what CIW says about it:

Q: What does the CIW mean when it uses the term “slavery”?

A: When the CIW uses the word slavery, we do not mean “slave-like” or “resembling slavery” —- rather, we are referring to conditions that meet the high standard of proof and definition of slavery under US federal laws.

Modern-day slavery is a violation of the 13th Amendment. The cases we have helped bring to justice have been prosecuted by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

In our latest case, three Florida-based agricultural employers convicted in federal court on slavery, extortion, and weapons charges were sentenced to a total of nearly 35 years in prison and the forfeiture of $3 million in assets. The men, who employed over 700 farmworkers, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted — at gunpoint — passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by federal authorities from the Department of Justice (Civil Rights Division) after two years of investigation by the CIW.

You can find out more about cases of straight-up slavery that the CIW has helped expose from the Feds or from from the CIW.

Because I agree with you that neither (1) above (sucky pay and harsh labor conditions), nor my definition (3) of “capitalism” (a boss-directed labor market) constitutes slavery, I also agree with you that neither is coercive, and that they can’t legitimately be met by government force (or any other kind of force). But that doesn’t answer the question whether or not it’s O.K.; it just answers the question of whether or not you can use force to stop it. There are lots of things that you have unquestionably legitimate authority to do that are nevertheless absolutely despicable ways to act. Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable but it’s not the only virtue!

What I hold is that there are good reasons to think that we should be concerned—I mean that it is virtuous to be concerned, not that we should be forced to act concerned—about the living and working conditions of the people that make things we enjoy, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for the sense of solidarity that that concern entails to affect the decisions we make in a free market for goods. That’s a preference that most people act on, at least when it comes to family—few people are such scrooges that they wouldn’t help a child or a relation out in business, even at some economic cost—and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that you can (indeed, ought) to have and to act on a similar attitude—though weaker, and for different reasons—for all your fellow human beings. Also that it’s an attitude worth encouraging in other people, as long as you do it not through coercion but through education, persuasion, and peaceful incentives. Which is what the CIW has been doing.

As for the price of tacos—Jesus, do you really eat so many tacos in one sitting that a penny-per-pound increase in the cost of tomatos is going to make a difference in price on the margin to you? :)

The title of the post contains a category error. I have serious ethical qualms about prostitution, but whatever one thinks, women in prostitution are just doing a job to make a buck. If you want to find lazy, shiftless, greedy, shameless people trying to live off of others, you might look at pimps (who routinely employ coercion and graft to take money from others). Or politicians.

Or, for that matter, any number of corporations within the tech industry. I mean, this is lame, but it’s not like it isn’t Standard Operating Procedure in the tech industry for big firms to get out the legal club and use it to bar competition wherever they can get away with it. It’s just that the assault on substitute goods and services usually comes under the heading of a “patent”, so the companies can not only go around bludgeoning peaceful competitors with the law, but also piously proclaiming how they are doing it in the name of free enterprise (!).

Tex: “The labor theory of value and and the class theory of conflict still live on.”

You do know that the labor theory of value and class theory both predate Marx—and, for that matter, predate socialism entirely, don’t you? The former can be found in, inter alia, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and others; the latter is a bedrock component of republican political theory dating back to classical Greece and Rome. (Not surprisingly, class theory as such isn’t wedded to any particular theory about the respective roles of State and Capital, since it originated before either the modern State or modern capitalism.)

I mean, look, if you want to complain that both are wrong-headed, you can do so, but taking either one as a mark of Marxism or even Marxian influence is, frankly, historically illiterate.

I also have to wonder how many contemporary anarchists you have read when it comes to their relationship to Marxism. The historical rivalry between anarchists and state socialists (and Marxists in particular) is hardly a matter of little knowledge. On the contrary, a lot of contemporary anarchists are concerned to the point of obsession with Marxist betrayals in, e.g., Russia between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War, or in revolutionary Spain.

If you’re looking for embarassing quotations from Bakunin—an anti-Semite, among other things—or Proudhon or any number of other 19th and early 20th century anarchists, they aren’t very hard to find. On the other hand, since contemporary anarchists are both aware of and explicitly critical of these strands of their thought, I have to wonder what of value you think this sort of drive-by ad hominem abusive is going to accomplish.