Stefan,

Well, as I mentioned above, I don’t have a decisive opinion on the moral status of accepting a tax-funded salary; all I’m saying is that if there’s a moral problem, it has to do with the requirements of justice on your individual conduct, not with the sort of consequentialist calculation that was being suggested. I’m not positive that there is a moral problem.

As for Universities, I’m not sure precisely what question you’re asking. If you’re asking about the payments that governments make to some Universities at an institutional level, then it may well be true that justice obliges University administrators not to profit from the looting. Whether or not this is an obligation of justice, I think it would be wise not to lay claim to the loot: government money means government control, and the freer that Universities are from political power, the better. (Autonomy from political power is historically one of the most important values of the University; when Universities are reduced to branches of the civil service it debases them and undermines their purpose.)

If, on the other hand, you’re asking about salaries for faculty or staff at government Universities, I’m not worried much about that at all. The reason being that the money for those salaries isn’t solely tax loot. Some Universities are tax-funded but all are at least partly funded by voluntary contributions and fees from individual students. So what you’ve got here is accepting a salary from a tax-subsidized institution, rather than accepting a tax-funded salary. (The same would apply to, say, employees of firms that benefit from corporate welfare.) Now, you could argue that, if you accept position (2) as I outlined above (that nobody has a right to any tax-funded salary or benefits), then a professor would be morally obliged to return to net tax-payers whatever portion her salary comes from tax funds. But how could you calculate the portions, even in principle? The cases that worry me, and which push me towards position (3), are different ones, in which people are doing similar kinds of work but receiving a 100% tax-funded salary (e.g. teachers in K-12 government schools).

Ryan,

Granted: if you have unique skills to contribute (or not to contribute) to a position that’s especially demanding of them, then your co-operation or refual to co-operate with the government may make some concrete difference on the margin. Being in that position may create some special obligations for you, if your co-operation will make crimes possible that would otherwise not be possible. But this is not the position that most people on the government payroll are in, and it’s not the position that Ron Paul in particular or anybody else in the United States Congress is in. If Ron Paul resigns tomorrow, he will be replaced; and even if he were never replaced it would make absolutely no difference to the prospects of the U.S. Congress (plenty of seats have been vacant for various lengths of time). Whatever moral obligations Ron Paul has, as far as his seat and his salary are concerned, they have very little to do with the (effectively nonexistent) power that he has to sway the course of the federal government one way or another by those sorts of actions.

T.J. Madison: If by partially (or totally) withdrawing my support from the State I can decrease the number of such crimes, …

But T.J., you can’t.

If Ron Paul resigned tomorrow, his seat would promptly be filled. Outside the military, the government is not facing any kind of staffing shortage; every resignation or refusal means nothing more than that the seat will be filled by somebody else. Speaking strictly from the standpoint of consequentialist calculation, your personal refusal to fill any given government post, or to accept any particular salary from the government, is completely irrelevant, either on the whole or on the margin, to the prospects for the government’s ongoing cannibal feast.

I do think that there may be moral problems with accepting a government salary. But if there are any such problems, the reasons for them have nothing in particular to do with its practical effects.

Well, Roberts seems to be suggesting a couple of different directions in his comments. One of them is radically reducing the amount of energy consumed; another is lifting government subsidies that heavily favor big, centralized power generation over decentralized production (at the level of neighborhoods or individual homes). I think actually the latter has a lot more practical potential than the former: rewiring homes to draw electricity off a local source requires quite a bit of capital up front, but drastically overhauling lifestyles to drop energy consumption by 2/3 will involve a lot more of a cost upfront. There’s also good reason to think that, once the current regime of subsidies and government-granted privileges is knocked down, the market will quite naturally adjust to more decentralized production, without needing to get people to fundamentally change their attitudes towards power consumption. (That’s leaving aside the question of whether getting people to fundamentally change their attitudes would be a good thing; maybe it would be, but I wouldn’t count on that alone, or even primarily, to solve pressing environmental or economic issues.)

I couldn’t disagree more. This would only result in an even higher chance of being incarcerated for crimes that you didn’t commit, or crimes that were never committed at all by anyone.

Oh, well then, let’s bring back something really embarassing for the government to foul up. For example, we could kill people like this:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned ‘to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris’, where he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds’; then, ‘in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds’(Pièces originales …, 372-4).

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 3

With these kind of punishments in place, I’ll bet the politico-legal system would be really careful not to convict the wrong person, right? Let’s hear it for de-abolition of public torture!

Trygve: “Second, I agree that brick walls are a waste of time, but plenty of people who are not brick walls could nonetheless use an education on the subject.”

People who are earnestly interested in learning something about sexism and feminism would be better off picking up one of the many fine books on the topic and reading it. Quite frankly, feminist activists have enough to do already without having to spend more time trying to educate the well-intentioned but clueless. There’s lots on this topic that men can look up on their own time, and indeed they ought to be expected to look it up before they go around making confident pronouncements about the existence of sexism, or about where it is or isn’t an active force. If they have not made the effort to make themselves less than ignorant about something before flapping their yap about it, then I can’t see why it would be obligatory or even useful for feminists to treat them as anything more than a waste of time and energy, unless and until they actually do make some effort to learn the basics on their own time.

Larry,

I don’t think it’s true that Hoppe is “as far from a collectivist as can be imagined.” His positions on immigration and ethnicity being exhibit A for that charge.

It’s true that in a free society people will have the right to create intentional communities where they can do stupid things like require new residents to sign on to contracts curtailing immigration on the basis of ethnicity. It’s also true that in a free society people will have the right to close privately-owned roads, town squares, and other thoroughfares to immigrants on the basis of ethnicity if they want to. However, a couple of points need to be made. Although politically people have the right to engage in this kind of nonviolent segregation, it is frankly stupid, and the premises that it operates from are nothing less than pure tribalism. In a free society people will be free to indulge in nonviolent tribalism of whatever sort they like, but there’s no reason why that kind of bigotry deserves anything but the contempt of rational people.

Further, Hoppe’s policy prescriptions don’t even qualify as peaceful in the first place. Even if it were true that, under a “natural order,” residents of San Diego would make a community covenant obligating residents to sharply limit immigration from Tijuana, in the actual world there is no such covenant and no resident of San Diego has ever agreed to, or been asked to agree to, those terms. Invading their property, or public property in which they arguably have a stake in the rightful ownership (e.g. roads near their house, town squares, etc.), on the excuse that you’re enforcing the terms of this counterfactual covenant that they never agreed to, is as obvious an invasion of people’s rights as you can think of.

Finally, economically speaking Hoppe’s proposals are absurd. Continent-spanning government’s can’t approximate the outcome of free control over private property. In a free society people wouldn’t own continent-spanning swaths of land, and socialist calculation of the outcomes for a dispersed network of land-owners is impossible, for the usual Misesian and Hayekian reasons. At this point Hoppeans typically appeal to poll numbers on attitudes towards some form of immigration or another to justify the idea that if land were free of government control, immigration would be more tightly restricted; the sight of Hoppeans, of all people, suddenly rushing to defend a centralized, democratic plebiscite as a way of calculating hypothetical market outcomes is one of the most grimly funny things in the current libertarian movement.

Just as a side note, I don’t reject the concept of public property per se. I think there is rightful public property; I just deny that “public property” means “government property.” Cf. Roderick Long’s essay A Plea for Public Property. This has some bearing on immigration: private owners of roads (for example) can exclude whomever they want for whatever reason they please, but there may be cases where roads, paths, etc. are rightfully public property, and where (because of the sort of public ownership in question) there’s nobody who really has the right to bar immigrants from using the road, as long as they are using it safely and their use is not excluding others from using it. Of course, whether things would actually pan out this way, or whether people would choose to keep road ownership strictly private, in the hands of single proprietors or contractually defined firms, is something that we’ll need an actual free society to discover.

Patrick,

Nobody in the feministing post is “categorically declaring positions and people as beyond the pale prior to investigation,” as far as I can tell. You’re talking about this as if feminist activists were unfamiliar with anti-feminist arguments or positions. By and large, that’s not so; most of us have had a great many anti-feminist arguments and positions thrown at us. Here’s what Alice Tiara was quoted as saying in the post you linked to: “I’ve been studying gender politics for more than a decade, and I want to talk about feminist issues on a fairly high level, which is not possible when you are constantly having to repeat yourself to men who don’t see sexism because of male privilege.” In other words, she’s studied the issue for quite some time, come to some decisive conclusions (say, that sexism does indeed exist and is in fact a social force), and isn’t interested in constantly revisiting the topic when there are other, less rudimentary issues that she’d much rather discuss.

I don’t see how this is any different from a 20th century historian who says she’s not interested in “debating” the Holocaust or the moon landing, or a serious evolutionary biologist who says she’s not interested in “debate” with Young Earth Creationists. This isn’t a matter of marking off some hoary dogma as unquestionable; it’s a matter of having some confidence in your conclusions after a lot of study and having better things to do with your time than try to enlighten the ignorant about such elementary matters. If earnest but ignorant people want to learn the basics about sexism or feminism, there are after all plenty of introductory books that they can pick up and read on the subject before they start demanding that feminists spend their time on arguing with them.

As for the means by which feminists can end male oppression of women, persuading sexists not to be quite so sexist is only one means among many, and not always the most useful. Building battered women’s shelters, staffing rape crisis centers, organizing co-operative childcare, disseminating information about reproductive healthcare, setting up abortion funds, clinic escorting and clinic defense, providing illegal abortions, refusing to do housework, etc. are just a few examples of the sorts of nonviolent direct action that feminists have employed to undermine sexism, which have little to do with either debating sexists or shooting at them. Labor unions don’t exist to persuade bosses to be pro-labor; they exist to organize workers for their own benefit. Similarly, feminist activism doesn’t exist to convince men to be anti-sexist; it exists to organize women for their own liberation.

“This is not an attitude that is conducive to genuinely democratic deliberation.”

What the feministing post says, quite straightforwardly, is that they have better things to do with their time: more interesting people to talk to and more useful ways to spend their time than rehashing Feminism 101 yet again for yet another group of dudes on the web too lazy to pick up a copy of Sisterhood is Powerful. And why should they be expected to do anything different?

The goal of the feminist movement is to stop men’s oppression of women, not to sit around “deliberating” with sexists until they are persuaded to be a bit less sexist than they are. Sometimes the second is a means to the first, and sometime it is a distraction from it or even an obstacle to it. When they conflict, the first is always more important.

Matt,

Let me try to put the point in a less “arid” way by not mentioning the word “philosophical.”

Enmity towards people who are wealthy and opposition to wealth as such are two different things and need to be distinguished if you want to offer any kind of useful characterization of people’s reasons for action.

There are lots of reasons that you might feel enmity towards people who are wealthy today. It might be because you have some kind of problem with wealth itself. On the other hand, it might be because you think there’s nothing wrong with wealth but there is something wrong with the way most people come by it. You may remember that Adam Smith, just to take one example, often wrote quite harshly of the wealthy people of his own day, because he thought that many of them came by their wealth dishonestly (through feudal privilege and mercantilist political patronage). It is perfectly possible, and probably even wise, to criticize how many people in our current state-dominated, cartelized, subsidized, hyperregulated business environment come by their wealth, without having any problem with wealth itself or the idea of people having it. If that makes you “anti-wealth,” in the sense you’re trying to push, well, then what’s wrong with being “anti-wealth?”

Matt: A related test might be to ask whether they basically see all of society as “in this together” or if they frame everything in terms of oppressors vs oppressed.

Are you claiming here that any claim to the effect that one social class oppresses another reflects “resentment” of the people identified as oppressors? Or do you mean to make some more limited claim?

Matt: … this was composed with modern political landscapes in mind, so applying it to past eras may not yield coherent mapping.

Any “mapping” that doesn’t count Marx or Proudhon as a leftist is, I’d submit, a bad mapping, regardless of what you were aiming at. The term has a perfectly good meaning already, which includes a bunch of people from the past couple centuries in addition to OCAP or some dude writing comments on Arianna Huffington’s website, and if you meant to specifically gripe about ascetics or the envious or player-haters or whatever then you should probably find a term that better matches what it is you want to discuss.

Matt,

If you want to claim that leftists are all anti-propertarian and liberals aren’t, I think you’re mistaken (for some reasons I’ll mention below). But whether that claim is mistaken or not, being opposed to private property is not the same thing as being opposed to wealth per se. The technically correct term for what you’re trying to capture is “communist,” not “leftist.”

There are leftists out there who have been opposed to wealth as such, or who claimed to view wealth as such as morally corrosive. (Tolstoy, in his old age, claimed to be one such thinker; although the preferences manifest in his actions were rather different from the preferences expressed in his writing.) But most of the thinkers identified as paradigmatic leftists didn’t think this or anything like it. They have usually thought that material wealth (comfort, health, good food, rewarding work, enjoyable leisure, etc.) was a good thing and professed a desire that everybody should have it as far as it’s possible.

It’s true that Marx and Trotsky and Chomsky oppose private property, or at least private property in land and the means of production. But they don’t oppose wealth. Their complaint against private property is that they (wrongly) think that it stands in the way of ensuring wealth for everybody and (wrongly) conclude that forcible collectivization of land and the means of production is a just way to solve this alleged problem. The idea is that this would end the artificial scarcity allegedly endemic to capitalist forms of production, and bring about an era of unprecedented prosperity.

As for Proudhon, he was not against private property. He was against one conception of private property based on grants of state privilege, and in favor of another based on possession and use. Benjamin Tucker, to take another example, also defended private property (while condemning state-granted monopoly).

And as for whether or not somebody has “enmity” against the actually existing wealthy, well, who cares? I take it that the issue here is philosophical principles, not loyalty or affection towards any particular group of people.

Right or wrong, all the folks I named, when they expressed enmity towards wealthy people, expressed it not because they were wealthy, but because they concluded that those people obtained their wealth illicitly, and did so in a way that unfairly hindered other people from gaining wealth. Depending on a thinker, their conclusion may be wise or foolish (I think Proudhon’s understanding of matters was much sounder than Marx’s), but in either case they aren’t coming down on wealth as such, just on what they (rightly or wrongly) regard as wealth acquired through injustice.