Gus: “So — praise the most ruthless power in the White House for breaking the law to eliminate political oppoosition in order to help consolidate his hold on state power by punishing the wife of a man who told the truth about the government’s abuse of power, an abuse that has killed tens of thousands. Yeah, Karl Rove, defender of rights.”

According to the book of Revelation, in the coming ordeal, a servant of Satan or perhaps Satan himself will come into the world and destroy earthly tyrants as part of his rise to absolute power before the Second Coming. I mention this because I hear that Satan is a pretty bad guy, and his motives in destroying earthly tyrants will certainly be bad. But while these are good reasons to think poorly of Satan, they aren’t good reasons to cry about the trampled prerogatives of the fallen tyrants.

I mention this parable because, in the comment you are replying to, Stepp makes it quite explicit that his point is that if Rove outed a CIA agent, then he may be a real sleaze, but in this particular case what he did is, at worst, disregarding an expectation (confidentiality and support for members of a criminal conspiracy) that nobody has the right to demand be respected.

Stepp’s earlier claim that whoever did it deserves a “Libertarian Medal” is of course silly bluster. But so is your own reply, which simply substitutes a philippic against Bush and Rove in order to distract from the point being made about what CIA operatives do or do not have the right to expect — as if the sheer weight of their depravity could somehow make Plame’s complaint legitimate. You then follow up this red herring with a broadside against the intellectual “sophistication” of “anarchists, right or left”.

Come on, Gus. You’re smarter than that.

Macker: I have a question. Is this a lame attempt to paint those who are against open borders as racists? Are you trying to for instance smear Hoppe indirectly?

I believe the point is that Bob Wallace is a racist moron. This point is demonstrated by his statements to the effect of “Look at me, I am a racist moron. Here’s some unreconstructed anti-Semitism to go along with it, free of charge.”

The connection with Hans-Hermann Hoppe exists, as far as I can tell, only in your fevered imagination.

Macker: I guess Lopez thinks this style of argumentation is cute. I think it’s a vile ad hominem attack

The fallacy of argumentum ad hominem is committed when, and only when, irrelevant information about the person holding a position is used to dismiss the position without argument. Quoting idiotic racist statements that Wallace made in order to demonstrate that Wallace is an idiotic racist is not an argumentum ad hominem. It’s a straightforward argument from empirical evidence.

If Lopez were arguing, “Closed borders is a doctrine held by racists; therefore it is false” he would be using an ad hominem argument.

But he’s not arguing that.

drumgurl: “It’s possible that my perception of Republicans was wrong when I was a teen. But doesn’t it seem like things have gotten worse since 2000? Or did Republicans just spew small government rhetoric because Clinton was in charge? If so, I guess I fell for it.”

Well, I definitely remember a shift but I think it was probably earlier: certain members of the Republican leadership (e.g. Gingrich, Dole) were never anything other than opportunists, and the ideological foot soldiers’ focus seemed to shift heavily from any kind of principled opposition to big government to pure Clinton hatred somewhere around 1996 or 1997. (The Dole presidential campaign, for example, put about as much of an emphasis on smaller government as a convention of education bureaucrats.) By 2000 W. had made it pretty clear that support for the welfare state would be a key part of the electoral strategy and after 9/11/2001, rabid support for the State pretty clearly became the defining feature of the American Right.

On the other hand, it’s worth wondering how seriously committed Republicans ever were to smaller government, even back around 1994. I mean, yes, they asked for lower taxes, less federal welfare, and less federal control over education. But I remember that other big rallying cries included the push to expand State power in (1) cracking down on immigration, (2) harsher criminal approaches to victimless “crimes” such as drug use and homelessness, and (3) prohibiting abortion wherever possible. So there were small government elements involved but it also seems like there were substantial elements of the movement calling for a harsher, bigger police state when it could be directed against social “undesirables.” (I suspect because the Republican upswing in 1994 had little to do with small-government principles and a lot to do with the politics of white male rage: that is, substituting stick-based statism for carrot-based statism.)

Eric: “By the way Red, George H.W. Bush is what is typically referred to as a paleo-conservative (i.e. pre-Reagan, pre the original neo-cons).”

Well, no, he’s not. H. W. was a dyed-in-the-wool, realist / internationalist, establishment conservative, committed to some mild rollbacks of the welfare state and regulation along with a mildly pro-trade economic policy and a belligerent foreign policy allegedly based on realpolitik rather than ideological crusades. He’s much more like, say, Bill Buckley (who, like H. W., is widely despised by paleos) or Henry Kissinger. Paleoconservatives—such as Pat Buchanan, and the folks at The American Conservative—are often opposed to international free trade agreements, and sharply opposed to foreign interventions. (They call themselves “paleos” not just because they oppose the “neos,” but also because they think they hark back to the Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s, which opposed the U.S.’s entry into World War II; they also, as it happens, had their first major political break over establishment conservatism when Buchanan led a vocal opposition against H. W.’s war on Iraq.) So H.W. is properly neither a paleo (who are isolationists) nor a neo (who are idealist internationalists); he was just a jerk for his own reasons.

Robert: “My point is this: government is a convenient tool—used by various groups—to suppress ‘the enemy’, while promulgating ‘our’ agenda. I say a pox on all their houses. The state ought to be neutral…or non-existent.”

Since there is no such thing as a neutral government (any state requires coercively diverting resources from voluntary agreements at some point or another), this seems to entail (by a disjunctive syllogism) that the state ought to be non-existent. I don’t have a problem with that, but I wonder if you’re willing to draw the conclusion also. If not, you may want to reconsider the premises.

drumgurl: “I had to attend college my first year on the sly just to avoid severe beatings (or at least get them less often).”

Stephen: “I was born in a town of 5,000 people in farming country in Illinois. As you grow older, I think that you will find that your parents truly cared for you.”

By giving her severe beatings and trying to stop her from attending college?

Stephen: “Please take my advice, honey.”

She’s not your “honey.” Do you address male bloggers you’ve never met as “sweetcakes?”

Stephen: “My parents were a lot like yours and they were great people.”

You have absolutely no clue what her parents were like. Judging from the statements in this thread, in fact, it seems like there may be good reason to believe you’re positively mistaken about what they were like.

You condescending twit.

Scott:

I don’t think you suggest a persuasive reason why one cannot make purely positive claims about property

Why not? If a statement P just is a normative claim, then doesn’t it follow that you can’t make “purely positive” (i.e., non-normative) claims about whether or not P is true? And isn’t it true the claim “S owns P” just is a claim about the rights that S has toward P (and thus what would constitute legitimate use, legitimate defense, thieving, etc. with regard to P)? And aren’t those normative claims? So doesn’t any theory which says anything about the truth-making conditions for claims of the form “S owns P” a claim that necessarily deals with normative considerations?

I said:

…treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights is not conducive to libertarian politics.

Scott replied:

That may be true, but “treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights” is conducive to acceptable legal argumentation. … The alternative is likely to get the judge to rule against you.

The second sentence only provides support for the first if the criterion of “acceptability” in legal argumentation is the argument’s ability to ensure that violence is not used against you, rather than the logical strength of the argument and the truth of the premises. But why should we accept that? How is that any different from a textbook example of the fallacious argumentum ad baculum?

Brandon:

I’m sympathetic to arguments about courts capriciously (or systematically) ignoring contracts, but this is a problem for everybody, not just for homosexuals.

Well, come on now; this isn’t “a problem for everybody” any more than, say, lynch law in the South was “a problem for everybody” rather than Blacks specifically (there are a few cases of white people being lynched in the 1920s and 1930s). It’s a problem for gay people specifically because partners in gay relationships are particularly vulnerable to having their express agreements arbitrarily disregarded by courts; they’re often treated in ways that straight couples would almost never be treated because they are gay. That there’s an “almost” in front of the “never” doesn’t really affect the point that this is a politicized class structure that needs serious attention.

Brandon:

And as a libertarian, I’m obviously not moved by claims that gay couples can’t force taxpayers, employers, or other private entities to give them various material benefits or “social respect.”

I certainly agree with you here, but oughtn’t we be more concerned about the fact that straight couples today are already forcing taxpayers, employers, and other private entities to give them various material benefits or “social respect”? I mean, why dick around about expansion to gay couples specifically when the issue is that nobody at all should have access to government marriage privileges?

Speaking of which, here’s Micha:

I think people here are focusing on abstract freedom to contract without giving enough attention to the transactions costs of contracts. Even if it were true that gays could get all the various contractual benefits a married couple currently enjoys by using a mishmash of contractual arrangements, it still would be a violation of their freedom to contract since they cannot enter into a boilerplate marriage contract that includes all of these benefits without prohibitive transaction costs.

Come on, Micha, this is frankly silly. If transaction costs were the only issue, it wouldn’t be hard for someone to draw up a fill-in-the-blanks bundle of lifetime-partner contracts and sell it or give it away to anyone who wanted it. But civil marriage is neither a contract nor a bundle of contracts; it’s a change in legal status and it confers a number of privileges and obligations that are not and could not be privately contracted. The issue here isn’t transaction costs; it’s that the State is using coercion to grant special privileges to straight couples through civil marriage. But of course the proper reply to that is not expanding, but rather dismantling, the coercive entitlement.

S.K.: “Do you know Tom DiLorenzo? I do. He has nothing to do w/ the bucktoothed yahoo type you must envisage. He is a cosmopolitan guy, and very intelligent and sincere, and not the type to pine for the plantation. So give it a rest. These continual character assassinations are of fellow libertarians are disgusting.”

Who’s “envisaging” anything? I cited some things that DiLorenzo wrote and said (1) that they seemed like indications of “a fetish for the Confederacy and its leaders, which sometimes overrides respect for documented historical fact” and (2) that “in addition to unthinking pro-Confederate apologetics, it may also serve as a good example of unthinking contrarianism as well”.

If you think that believing either (1) or (2) about someone requires you to believe that he or she is a “bucktoothed yahoo type” then you should probably think harder about it. The “Lost Cause” mythology has always been promoted primarily by well-spoken, articulate white Southerners, including politicians (among them Jeff Davis himself, in his memoirs), educators, and professional historians. Being articulate and well-spoken, however, does not have any bearing on whether what they say is true or false, nor on whether what they say indicates sincere engagement with the facts or dishonest fetishism.

So, let’s move on to the actual issue, which is what DiLorenzo said, not the ad hominem context of what virtues or vices you think DiLorenzo has as a person.

S.K.: “As I have almost no interest in the Confederacy issues, I have no opinion on DiLorenzo’s comments on Jeff Davis etc. I don’t know what it has to do with “Confederacy” worship.”

If you care so little about “Confederacy issues” that you haven’t bothered to form any opinion at all about DiLorenzo’s decision to single out Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee for praise then how in the world do you know that DiLorenzo (or anyone else writing for LewRockwell.com, other than yourself) is not engaging in dishonest fetishism for the Confederacy? You make strong claims that he isn’t, but it seems to me that if you haven’t bothered to look into these questions you shouldn’t have any rational basis for giving an answer.

That said, the connection is simple. DiLorenzo singled out two central figures of “Lost Cause” Confederate mythology for praise, in spite of the fact that they are opposed to libertarian political principles on every important point—from slavery to conscription to secession. He did so in spite of the fact that they had no apparent qualifications for the praise other than their leading roles in the Confederate government and the Confederate war machine. And in his writings there and elsewhere, he has told flat lies (e.g. that Lee willingly freed his father-in-law’s slaves when he actually kept them in slavery as long as he legally could) and omitted important truths (e.g. that Jeff Davis, not Abe Lincoln, pioneered national conscription in America) in order to make Confederate leaders look better than they actually were. Doesn’t that seem like pretty clear indication of a fetish for the Confederacy to you? If not, what would?

Since none of my remarks had anything at all to do with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Lew Rockwell, or DiLorenzo’s criticisms of Lincoln (which I mostly consider to be just and well-founded), the rest has been snipped without reply.

Oh, I should add that besides what clearly looks like indulging in Lost Cause fantasy, DiLorenzo’s posts also clearly indicate the supposed offense that his comments are giving to “liberventionist” bogey-men as one of the chief motives for putting out the claims that he put out. (“Cackling like a flock of hens,” &c.) So in addition to unthinking pro-Confederate apologetics, it may also serve as a good example of unthinking contrarianism as well.

Stephan: ‘Pro-Confederacy stuff? I’m not aware of much of this . . . Palmer’s libel of Lew Rockwell et al. notwithstanding, there is not “fetish” over the “Confederacy” at LewRockwell.com. Palmer insists on labeling those who oppose Lincoln’s war as neo-Confederate apologists for slavery.’

Stephan, what do you think about Tom DiLorenzo’s recent post on LRC blog, nominating pro-slavery, anti-secession statist warrior Robert E. Lee for the top of his list of “greatest Americans”? Or his decision to lie about Lee’s role in the emancipation of his father-in-law’s slaves? Or his follow-up suggestion of pro-slavery, pro-conscription, anti-secession Jeff Davis for the state of Mississippi? How about his repeated false claims that Lincoln “introduced” conscription in 1863, “for the first time ever”, as an “unprecedented coercive measure”, etc. without ever once mentioning that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy implemented a national draft more than a year before the Union?

If these don’t seem like indications of a fetish for the Confederacy and its leaders, which sometimes overcomes respect for documented historical fact, on the part of a prolific author at LewRockwell.com, what do they seem like to you?

Kennedy:

“If you promise me $10 and then don’t deliver do I have any moral claim against you?”

Well, yes, obviously. That’s what promises are for: keeping.

There are lots of speech-acts that morally bind you to carry something through even though breaking them doesn’t count as a violation of anybody’s rights: not just making promises but also, e.g., swearing, taking oaths, exchanging vows, making alliances, etc. By giving your word you accept a moral obligation on yourself, and by breaking it you are doing wrong. If the moral obligation is an obligation directed towards somebody else (e.g. if you exchange a vow of sexual faithfulness with me, or if you promise me some gift) then by breaking it you are specifically wronging the other party.

Of course, it is only in the case of a contract that the sort of wrong you do is a violation of rights. But violating somebody’s rights is hardly the only way that you can do wrong by her.

Micha, replying to Scott:

So you are making a positive and not a normative claim?

Scott:

Yes.

The problem here is that you can’t make purely positive claims about property; to say that A owns P is to make a statement that involves normative claims about A, P, and what A can do with P. (“Owning” a piece of property just means having certain rights with respect to how it is used.)

For example, to say that the State has the right to transfer property rights in all the means of production, by fiat, to the Politburo, is to say that the State can (at will) give itself the right to do whatever it likes with the factories, mills, mines, etc.; that it will be within its rights to “recover” its new property from those holding it, using proportional violence if necessary; that anyone who resists the legally authorized grab by either passive resistance or violence will be trespassing or aggressing against State officials (and can rightly be punished for it); and that any successful effort to keep capital in private hands in spite of State efforts to “recover” it will in fact be organized theft and (since it disrupts the Politburo’s exercise of their newly-minted “property rights”), violent interference with the free market. These are all weighty normative claims that Scott’s theory seems to entail; apparently by State fiat innocents can be transformed into thieves and politically-connected brigands into peaceful property owners. I wonder if “for legal purposes, at least” they can make up into down, too.

If you make claims about how property rights are determined you’re making a normative claim, not a positive one. And treating government edicts as if they had unlimited authority to determine legitimate property rights is not conducive to libertarian politics.