One more thing.

“There’s another way in which classical liberals are strangely Stalinist. They seem to want to over-ride the huge public demand for state intervention.”

How is this argumentative maneuver any different from, say, deriding the civil rights movement in the American South, on the grounds that it’s “strangely Stalinist” to want to over-ride the demands of the large majority of the population of the Southern states for white supremacy and the public humiliation and political control of black and mixed-race Southerners?

Popular demands are not always legitimate. The mere fact that great numbers of people will vote for something is no guarantee whatsoever that they have any right to it.

“To justify inequalities of property, you must demonstrate that the poor have a duty to respect the rich’s property. How can this be done?”

Because it’s their property.

The claim is a specific application of the general principle that any given person is obliged not to take the fruits of another person’s labor from her. To do that is to treat her as if you had a right to force her to labor for your own profit. That is treating her as if she were your slave. But slavery is illegitimate. The proper question is not where she got a right to her property, but rather where you would get a right to live off her labor.

Note that this applies not only to the immediate wage or product of labor, but also to the things that she buys with them: helping yourself to someone’s larder, without her permission, is effectively forcing her to work for your benefit as much as taking her money directly is. After all, it is only for what she could buy with it that she was interested in the wages to begin with.

You might complain that not all property is gained by labor: sometimes people just have the good fortune of having natural resources or other valuable commodities on their land. But finding and gathering these resources are a form of labor like any other, and the land is a possession like any other. You cannot claim the right to exploit another person’s land without claiming a right to the labor she put into acquiring, using, and maintaining that land. And you cannot claim the right to take the windfalls without claiming the right to live off the labor involved in discovering and gathering them.

Further, this applies to gifts and inheritances, too. You cannot take a gift from someone without living off the labor of the gift-giver. If I want my friend to have a wrist-watch, and she wants to have it, then I have every right to give it to her for her to enjoy. She may not have received it through any labor of hers, but I acquired it through my own labor, and part of enjoying the fruits of my labor is being able to transfer them to other people as I see fit. Robbing from my beneficiaries means treating me as your milk-cow.

You might, finally, object that riches do not always come from any legitimate form of labor at all, but rather from conquest or plunder. Why should poor people respect the property claims of people who have accumulated their fortunes through gangsterism, or—what is no better, but far more common and more socially “respectable” in this day and age—through expropriating wealth in the form of tax subsidies, or “eminent domain” seizures and transfers, or by forcing would-be competitors out of business through government-backed monopoly privileges. Well, they shouldn’t. There is no duty whatsoever to respect the piratical titles of freelance or government-approved robber barons. And many libertarians (e.g. Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, etc.) have openly recognized and argued for exactly this point.

I should note in passing that the Saudi “princes,” whose claim to the petrochemicals of Saudi Arabia rests entirely on conquest and shameless seizure, are clearly in this last class. (For what it’s worth, I am anti-copyright and anti-patent, so I regard both Bill Gates and Paul McCartney as being at least partial members of this last class as well. Whatever portion of their immense wealth is derived from the fruits of their honest labor is dwarfed by the wealth they have extracted through government grants of monopoly privilege over the use and distribution of software and music.)

“A cornerstone of Nozick’s libertarianism is the principle that we own ourselves, so that any effort to tell us what to do is a form of slavery. This principle, though, doesn’t justify inequalities of income, because incomes are jointly produced by individual talents and social circumstances. Thierry Henry’s skills as a footballer, Bill Gates’ as a software developer or Paul McCartney’s as a songwriter would have earned them little 100 years ago. Even if they own their talents, they’ve no right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive.”

This is a bizarre red herring. Since when did Nozick or anybody else claim that Henry, Gates, or McCartney does have a “right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive”? The claim is only that they have a right to enjoy such fruits as they can earn by those talents under social conditions as they are, not that they have some kind of right to force other people to sustain the conditions they enjoy.

Maybe you could explain a bit more what you mean here?

“These market failures are another case for redistribution as insurance. The trick is to design the redistribution so as to minimize the disruption to markets that work well.”

I think that the claims you make are economically absurd, and ignore a great deal of important left-libertarian work on the effects of government constraints on market economies. (Just as one example, the New Left historian Gabriel Kolko extensively documented how the “robber baron” capitalism of late 19th and early 20th century America promoted “Progressive” regulation as a means of gaining and controlling monopolies. The tendency of free markets at the time was towards greater decentralization and competition, not towards amalgamation and monopoly. Murray Rothbard, in “Left and Right,” Roy Childs, in “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” and Kevin Carson, in “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,” have talked at length about this within the libertarian tradition.)

But suppose for a moment that these claims were true: suppose it were true that free markets sometimes tended towards inefficient centralization or greater overall poverty or greater precarity in most people’s economic prospects or whatever. Still, so what? Would that then give you the right to use violence to make other people dispose of their property differently, so as to get the better results? Since when did you get the right to coerce other people in order to secure a more comfortable standard of living for yourself, your family, your friends, or your neighbors?

“WHAT THE HELL ARE CHURCHES DOING IN THE WEST BANK?”

They are there because about 10% of Palestinians are Christians, and Christians tend to build and attend Christian churches.

Also because the territory West Bank includes some minor points of interest to Christians, such as, oh, Bethlehem.

Mark,

I think a large part of the popularity of NC licenses derives from an entry-level confusion in principles. People pushing for “free content” still mostly haven’t gotten the distinction between “free speech” and “free beer.” “Noncommercial” restrictions sound like a good idea if you think that the issue is whether the price of obtaining the content is or is not $0.00. They sound like an awful idea if you think the issue is what you can or cannot do with the content once you’ve obtained it. Many people who are choosing free content licenses are aware that big commercialized copy-monopolists are the problem, but make the mistake of identifying the commerce as the problem rather than the monopolistic privileges. Since people who consider themselves culturally and politically progressive tend to be at least suspicious of commercialism anyway, they’re quite likely to miss the more subtle but more important point about the means by which the copy-monopolists have extorted their money. In any case as long as the two different issues aren’t clearly distinguished, there won’t be a clear set of first principles behind “free content” communities.

Kurtiss,

This brings me to what I view as the CC philosophy, which is not “let’s be slightly less evil,” or to be “open source,” but to give the creator a choice! That choice is precisely what’s needed to create a rich ecosystem of commoners that can interact with existing copyright systems.

If CC is not aiming at providing open (free-as-in-speech) content, but rather in giving creative types more control over specifying the permission profile on their works, then they need a less misleading name. They should not be calling themselves “Creative Commons” or talking about “free culture,” if what they mean is “creative control” or “machine-readable general licensing syntax and semantics.” They should decide just what they are promoting (whether this is freeing content, or just minting new data structures for creative types to express the restrictions they do or do not place on licensed use), and then work from the clearer set of first principles.

Starr,

Criticism of Barnett’s work should of course focus on the position advocated, not a misunderstanding of the position. But if Barnett tells us that he is deliberately obscuring or downplaying his real position in some forums, then he does bear some of the responsibility for misunderstandings of his work, even if he makes his position more clear in other forums. Particularly when Barnett knows that large portions of the intended audience of his book aren’t familiar with those other forums.

Kennedy,

Note that in his exchange in JLS 19.4, Barnett also more or less stated openly that he knowingly obscured his anarchism out of considerations of audience:

… While there is much that I disagree with in Huebert’s review, in this Reply I will focus on one crucial respect in which he misunderstands my thesis. This concerns the concept of constitutional legitimacy I develop and defend in my book.

Part of the fault for this misunderstanding may be mine. Although I fully expected some libertarians to make this mistake, because my book was aimed at a more general audience, I nevertheless did not address it explicitly. For this reason, I am sincerely grateful to Mr. Huebert for putting this misconception into print and thereby providing me with the perfect forum in which to rectify it …. (71, emphasis added).

… So when Mr. Huebert observes that I “do not address how a government may legitimately have a monopoly on the use of force and the provision of defense” (p. 105), he reveals his misunderstanding of both my project and my argument. It should not be clear that I do not address this question because I continue to deny that “government may legitimately have such a monopoly,” although I would now substitute the word “justly” in place of “legitimately” in this particular context. (75)

I do wonder why he thinks it wouldn’t matter to his “general audience” (including the general run of Con Law scholars) whether he is defending (1) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as one legal system among many in an anarchistic social order, or rather (2) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as the basis for a monopoly State. In any case, it should hardly be surprising that the many, who do not read JLS, misunderstand his point.

Bithead:

So, you needed to buy Sudafed in BULK? Musta been one hell of a cold.

What the fuck business is it of yours whether she needed to buy sudafed in bulk or not?

What business is it of the government’s?

For what it’s worth, I’ve written before about Kinsella’s taxpayer-ownership argument and the claims about ownership of roads in comments at No Treason.

I think the funniest thing about the whole thing is the spectacle of a mad dog defender of Thomas DiLorenzo and Hans Hermann Hoppe coming out for centralist nationalism and majoritarian popular sovereignty in determining ownership claims over government property.

Do you seriously mean to suggest that Bush the Younger’s presidency is worse than that of James Buchanan (1857-1861), the useless doughface who actively collaborated in the perpetuation of Southern race slavery, who applauded the court for the Dred Scott, enforced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, threw his political prestige behind the slavers’ constitution in Kansas, stormed Harper’s Ferry, and presided over the careening of the country towards sectional war? That Buchanan ought to be excused on the grounds that the times on the eve of the American Civil War were less troubled than in 2001-present? That seems factually false; and if the issues were less complex—slavery being obviously inhuman and the Slave Power being a manifest power for evil—that speaks against Buchanan, not for him. Idiocy and incompetance are one thing; open complicity with evil is another.

One might also mention presidents like Andrew Jackson—an active slaveholder and a successful genocidaire)—or Woodrow Wilson—a militant white supremacist who instituted Jim Crow throughout the Executive branch and fought against women’s suffrage, and who, after running for re-election as the peace candidate, deceived the United States into what may have been the single most pointless bloodbath in world history, instituted a military draft to rustle up a slave army to fight it, and repressed the intense opposition to it through the expedient of throwing political dissidents in prison under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Perspective, please.

It may not need saying how romanticism for guerrillas is ultimately an expression of the cult of redemptive violence, which is simply the cult of violent masculinity. By treating the armed faction as if it were identical with, or at least representative of, the common run of the people, the romantics get their morality on the cheap: they get to protest their compassion for innocent bystanders while holding on to a visible, organized, armed, and active force in the war to side with. Not having a side to cling to is, by comparison, terrifying, because it means really thinking about the helpless (i.e. the people who have neither mobile rocket launchers nor bomber jets) and having little more than your moral convictions with which to confront suffering.

And thanks to the moral laziness of the rally-‘round-the-flag crowd within the Left, armed factions like Hizbullah will continue to be applauded for acts of indiscriminate retaliatory violence (because, hey, they’re “doing something,” “resisting,” blah blah blah), all while they continue to demonstrate incredible callousness to the likely effects of their actions on the neighbors they are supposedly defending.

“There are so few wars of people’s liberation, for the people have so seldom risen–-only the armed faction. Listen-–the armed faction lies; they recreate the state through their action. When the people rise, it is not they, but the state which dies.” – Utah Phillips

I’m afraid Alison Bechdel already beat you to the joke:

Mo: Sydney? Sydney! Are you there?
Sydney: Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I was googling myself.
Mo: Is that what we’re calling it now?