“You put your trust in the state because it filters out complexities of life you either cannot manage on your own or see no need to.”

I don’t know who this “you” is supposed to be. Perhaps Jason Smathers is using “you” to mean “me.” But if so, he really ought to speak for himself. I certainly do not put my trust in the State and I find that the government and its endless reams of arbitrary laws make my life much more complicated. I’d really like to know, for example, what in the world the IRS is doing to filter complexity out of my life.

“Why do people obey unjust laws? Because — for the majority, in most cases — it’d be a whole lot more problematic and chaotic without the system there. I may recognize that a war we’re involved in is unjust, but I don’t attempt to overthrow the government because the state simplifies my life in ways that more directly affect me.”

Well. I, for one, am certain that if I were an Iraqi child, I would be happy to die, in order that Jason Smathers might live a simpler life.

TGGP:

Birthright citizenship,

The fuck do you care whether or not an arbitrary gang of usurpers, thieves, and swindlers does or does not issue an Official Membership Card for the children of complete strangers living on land that you’ve never even seen and have never done anything to earn a proprietary interest in?

use of social services.

The fuck do you care whether or not they use government-monopolized “social services”? If you’re concerned about your money being taken for purposes that you disagree with, why don’t you take that up with the people that are actually robbing you, rather than complete strangers who had nothing to do with it and couldn’t have stopped it if they tried?

To me the entire of idea of “preferences that ought to have priority” doesn’t make any sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t make any sense to you.

Nevertheless, why should immigrants or anyone, really, other than yourself, give a damn about your personal preferences about whether or not they can pass through or exist on land that you’ve never seen and that you’ve never personally done anything to earn a title to? What do you think made it your business to go around telling them, or the landlord, what to do with it?

Jesse,

Thank you for calling attention to this.

For what it’s worth, a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center was instrumental in finally getting Columbia shuttered, and the report that you’re quoting from is hosted on the SPLC’s website, but the report itself wasn’t prepared by the SPLC. It was prepared by investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice, who were investigating as part of an earlier DOJ lawsuit over the treatment of child prisoners. Of course, I’d be the last person to say that being produced by federal prosecutors makes it more reliable, but in any case, that’s the provenance.

Jennifer,

Charges? Hell, none of them will even be fired. The state government’s current plan is to shut down Columbia and let all the former employees who turned it into such a hellhole torture camp transfer and metastasize throughout the rest of the Mississippi prison system.

J sub D:

I initially expected something similar from this article. Fortunately it was just physical and emotional abuse, not sexual.

Unfortunately the Department of Justice’s report isn’t the only story out of Columbia. Besides the sexual humiliation involved in guards forcing teenaged children to strip naked before they are locked in the “dark room,” and reports by girls at Columbia of a peeping-tom prison guard (both reported in the DOJ’s report), there’s also been at least one federal lawsuit filed over a male prison guard’s repeated rape of a 14 year old girl imprisoned at Columbia.

Incidentally, for reference, see also some brief remarks of mine on demythologizing the “higher law” doctrine, and the relationship between natural law and personal interest or commitment: (1), (2), (3).

Jeremy,

No; the voluntariness is key. Where did I suggest otherwise?

Well, I started this thread of conversation by asking a question about the rough handling of the few by the many in some non-consensual societies (e.g. Athens and Roman-occupied Palestine); got a response that the authority in question wasn’t necessarily rightful authority; asked if you meant mere power; and got a response that it was more than mere power that we were discussing, at which the shift over to consensual societies happened. As I said, I’m just having trouble understanding what claim you ultimately are defending about the relationship between numbers and authority, and trying to get clearer.

In a formula like “when a voluntary society stands up for a common end, that has authority to it,” there are at least three things doing conceptual work: (1) social (majority? supermajority?) consensus, (2) authority, and (3) the voluntary nature of the society (which I presume means that dissenters from the consensus have complete freedom of exit). But if (3) is doing no work in the relationship between (1) and (2), then the same claim would have to apply to non-consensual societies as well as consensual societies. If, on the other hand, (3) is doing some work, and is a necessary condition for (1) and (2) to have the claimed relationship that they have, then the question is what difference there might be between this claim about “voluntary society” (which, given freedom of association and freedom of exit, might consist of one person alone, or all rational creatures in the universe, or any size and arrangement in between) and the usual anarchist claim that all rightful authority derives from individual sovereignty and voluntary association (which again might mean one individual person, or the whole cosmopolis, or any size and arrangement in between). Maybe you meant to say something different, which I’m not grasping, in which case what I’d need to know to better understand it is how the claim about numbers and authority relates, if at all, to nonconsensual societies (where presumably the differences, if any, between these two claims would arise).

Or maybe you didn’t mean to say anything different, and just meant to restate the libertarian-individualist claim in other, panarchistic terms; but then I don’t see how that would connect with the claim libertarianism shouldn’t be about what is right or moral. Clearly, if this is the right understanding of your position, then your theory has already built in a very robust universal constraint of some kind on claims to the authority of superior numbers, which has nothing in itself to do with superior numbers, viz. the requirement of unanimous sustained consent to participation in the social project, whatever preferences or beliefs the majority faction may have. But if that requirement is an essential part of the claim you’re advancing, then it becomes increasingly hard for me to see how your claim is substantively different from mine, or how the requirement of consent is distinct from what I would call “natural law” or “inalienable natural rights.”

Admittedly, you might have a theory about the underlying status of the consent-requirement that is very different from what I would be willing to entertain — for example, you might think that while the consent-requirement is binding on every claim of authority, it’s only binding because, as a matter of taste, you prefer to hold people to a consent-requirement rather than not to hold them to it. But then, obviously, the question to ask is why anybody other than you should care about what requirements you would prefer to hold them to. I prefer that everyone drink unsweetened iced tea instead of sweet tea, but I’d never dream that these preferences give me the right to require bitter tea or resist vulgar sweetening by force. But requiring consent and resisting tyranny seem to be on quite a different footing.

As for what that footing may be, well, “sublime,” “over-arching,” “transcendent,” “Platonic,” etc. are your words, not mine. I’m not actually advancing any claim about the status of the moral constraints on claims of authority except to argue that they are not contingent on the beliefs or preferences of particular human beings. There are lots of things that are that way (e.g. the germ theory of disease) that don’t require much in the way of appeals to a separate and superior realm of Forms (or whatever) to talk about them.

My beliefs are just opinions, too. By treating them as such, I’m more likely to be able to present them in a way that others who don’t hold them find acceptable. Why? Because I understand the arbitrary nature of my beliefs, so I don’t pretend that they have some special truth that will compel somebody to acknowledge.

I don’t think that your solution, at least insofar as I’ve understood it, is nearly as eirenic as you seem to think it is. Look at it this way: my standards for consent and for the use of force against other people are either rooted in something outside of my particular preferences and tastes, which is in principle accessible to other people; or else they are not. If they are not, then I’m proposing to force other people to adhere to my own standards, whether or not those other people have any reason, even in principle, to care about the standards that I’m forcing them to hold to. This is, in the end, a proposal for trying to remake the whole world in my own image, for no reason other than the brute fact that it is my own image. If, on the other hand, they are rooted in something outside of my preferences and are in principle accessible to other people, then what I am proposing is that people other than myself do indeed have a reason to care about this stuff already, whether they’re aware of that reason or not, and my goal is not to remake them to suit my own preferences, but rather to take an interest in them as they are in their otherness, and in the things that they, as my fellow creatures, care about. That view gives me every reason to try and find the best way to communicate with those particular people and lead them from where they are now, towards a greater awareness of the reasons they already have; instead of what the other view seems to have on offer, which is a sort of talk in which “suggestion” that just amounts to bashing my no-less-but-no-more-justified preferences up against their no-more-but-no-less-justified preferences, until mine somehow win, on the basis of something other than shared reasoning.

Jeremy:

It goes beyond power; when a voluntary society stands up for a common end, that has authority to it.

O.K., I’m lost. I don’t think the Roman occupation of Palestine was an example of a voluntary society. It’s certainly true that in a voluntary society, consensus on a goal confers authority to pursue that goal. But do you intend to also transfer that claim about numbers and authority over to involuntary societies, like the American or Roman Empires? If so, what justifies the extension? If not, doesn’t that entail the existence of some principle constraining claims of authority, and undermining all claims of nonconsensual authority over others?

But they’re YOUR principles; in the end, they’re just preferences, opinions.

Well, I know you’re claiming this, but what’s the basis for claiming it?

And do you really mean to try and connect a radical form of moral relativism and a theory of majoritarian authority with Christian moral teachings?

smally:

I was under the impression that many state apologists will readily admit the government is a band of thugs, but that it is the “lesser evil”.

I don’t think that most liberal “lesser-evil” theories of the State recognize government as criminal. They recognize it as “an evil,” in the sense that it restrains liberty, but they generally go to some length to try to demonstrate the justice of nonconsensual political obligation (e.g., via a social contract, whether historical, tacit, or imaginary; or via non-contractual theories, such as Nozick’s procedural-rights account), and construe government as a service provided to citizens. Almost nobody defends the claim that government expropriation is no different in kind from brigandry, while also defending the claim that government expropriation should on (in order that even worse brigandry might be stopped. Maybe that’s what Hobbes believes, but not many followed him down quite that road.

So the upshot of lesser-evilist arguments is usually not that government is itself evil (in the contemporary sense of active wrongdoing), but rather that it’s bad relative to a utopian baseline, i.e., not as good a state of affairs as an anarchy composed of more or less ideal people. Since they rule out the ideal anarchy (for whatever reasons), you fall back to plan B. So government on this view is much more like fire insurance than like Mafia “protection”; something that, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to deal with, but which is morally permissible and which, in this vale of tears, you’re better off having, even at some cost.

I think these kind of arguments necessarily involve both (1) a lot of historical howlers in order to justify the claim that the single most deadly institution in the history of the world is actually defending people against chaos and destruction, and also (2) a lot of precisely the kind of mystification I’m talking about, in order to justify or at least excuse actively perpetrating evil against innocent people. (The cult of political compromise, the myth that democratic elections constitute mass consent to majoritarian or “representative” government, and the fabrication of tacit or imaginary social contracts to justify the legitimacy of government are all cases in point.)

You’re right that many if not most statists today like to fall back on utilitarian arguments in order to avoid arguments made on moral principle. Partly because forms of utilitarianism are very popular right now in both our intellectual and our mass culture; and partly also because it’s very handy to be able to abstract away any tricky questions about personal obligations, rights, virtues, vices, responsibility, complicity, defiance, etc. etc. etc. in order to zoom out to a depersonalized, God’s-eye-view calculation of aggregate outcomes. But I think that’s precisely because utilitarians start out by mystifying the issue and supposing that any question about the permissibility or legitimacy of coercing innocents has already been answered, when in fact it has merely been waved off as a necessary precondition of the utilitarian standpoint.

TGGP:

The trespass is across the border which is said to be collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. You can say such a notion is unlibertarian and I’ll agree. My opposition to open-borders is unlibertarian and results from my belief that libertarianism by itself is insufficient …

Well, yes, I suppose that if one of your goals is to violently control who can or cannot pass through land that you’ve never even seen and that you’ve never done a damned thing in your life to earn a real title to, you will eventually find that libertarianism isn’t “sufficient” to meet those goals.

Well, I certainly agree that the Romans had the power to crucify Jesus.

Is that all you mean when you say that superior numbers confer authority?

It should be about what is possible, leaving the question of what possibility we pursue to the individuals

Would it be wrong for me not to “leave the question of what possibility we pursue to the individuals?”

If so, then isn’t that, in itself, a claim about what it is (or is not) “right” or “moral” to do?

If not, then why should you care whether I leave it up to the individuals or not, since there’s nothing wrong with my not doing so?

It is not as if this has never been tried before.

When the First Intifada broke out, the PLO was in exile in Tunis, and in the absence of their militaristic posturing, the small-scale, freestanding popular committees that coordinated most of the anti-Occupation activism spent the first few years of the Intifada focusing overwhelmingly on nonviolent forms of resistance, among them burning identification cards, opening schools in defiance of military curfews, boycotts, general strikes, and refusal to pay taxes. The response from the IDF was relentless and punitive, with many of the committee leaders thrown in prison on sentences of up to ten years, and their money, land, and property confiscated. (Not surprisingly, the attacks on tax resisters, such as the committees based out of Beit Sahour, were especially harsh.) And, at the end of it all, here we are.

I think that the virtues of nonviolent resistance are very often underestimated or flatly ignored, while the effectiveness of violent resistance is all too often overestimated, and its terrible costs either ignored or, worse, romanticized. I think that more focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action would probably make a worthwhile contribution to the Palestinian freedom struggle. But we should certainly remember that these strategies have already been used in the past, on a mass scale, and they didn’t make victory actual, let alone undeniable, then. We should not not pretend that nonviolent strategies would make even moderate success undeniable now, either.

Spooner:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Polzkill:

In a perfect world, in a world of the theoretical, of course he is correct.

Actually, part of Spooner’s point, if you’re paying attention, is that here in the real world, the strategy of using paper constitutions to limit the invasiveness of governments is demonstrably impractical. There’s little if any evidence that his views on the theoretical, in-principle relationship between the natural law and the U.S. Constitution changed substantially between The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and No Treason No. 6. (For details, see Roderick Long’s paper.) What did change was that he became convinced, in light of the recent triumph of bayonet-point Unionism, that it was practically useless to go on citing the Constitution as a basis for attacking tyrannical laws, and that a new strategy was called for. Hence the shift to arguments explicitly based on natural law and directed against all forms of government authority, including governments based on paper constitutions.

Polzkill:

Far better for us all if these great men would have ENGAGED more and FOUGHT more than they did.

Frederick Douglass:

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? … The time for such argument is past. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Polzkill:

I can’t prove it, but I’d wager you anything you like, at any odds, that If we took a plebiscite on whether people wished to live under the Constitution or not, that they would vote in the affirmative, and so would the rest of the world.

Well, so?

I can’t for the life of me see what this has to do with Spooner’s explanation of the criminality of government legislators, judges, executives, etc. My point is precisely that Spooner’s argument have nothing at all to do with the outcome of majoritarian voting games.

As for your claim that the same cabal of usurpers who, under the auspices of the United States Constitution, claimed the right to pass fugitive slave laws and crush the Whiskey Rebellion by force of arms, somehow believed that the Constitution allowed for a right of individual dissenters to freely withdraw from the political obligations that they sought to impose (!), I guess your understanding of the Constitutionalists is different from mine. As it is from the understanding of Spooner, who never made such a risible claim about the motives or expectations of the minority faction who wrote and signed off on the Constitution. (He did believe that the legal meaning of the text sometimes conflicted with their motives and expectations in writing it; but that’s an entirely different claim.)

Me:

Yeah, [enslaving hundreds of people] was pretty shitty of Jefferson. He was also a hypocrite, a rapist, and President of the United States, all of which I think were pretty shitty of him. What’s your point?

Polzkill:

As much as any single man in history, he was the force, a goddamned genius of liberty, the POWERHOUSE behind what freedoms we DO have today.

Maybe so. Certainly, if the dude is the best there is on offer by way of concrete historical achievements towards liberty, then I guess that could help explain why we’re in such a sorry state today.

In any case, my point is that the presumption that anarchists would just have to recognize and respect the obvious merit of a slaver, rapist, hypocrite, and President is a pretty weird presumption from which to start your argument.

Me:

You seem to be presuming that trying to get somebody elected President of the United States is the only way to get “things [to] improve”. But it’s not the only way. It’s not the best way, either, or even a particularly plausible way. Or, at least, if you think that it is, that’s certainly not a self-evident truth that you can just presuppose. It’s a tendentious claim that you’ll have to justify with some kind of argument.

Polzkill:

At least you qualified this with the words “seem & “presuming”, otherwise that’s exactly what you would have been doing. The argument you suggested for me; that WOULD be a pretty stupid argument I made, eh?

I charitably suggested that you might be presupposing that premise, or something like it, because if you’re not presupposing that getting Ron Paul elected President is the only way to improve the situation, all you have the following argument:

1. These folks here aren’t contributing to efforts to get Ron Paul elected President. (given)
2. Therefore, these folks here aren’t contributing to improving the political situation. (conclusion)

… which is a flat non sequitur. As yet there’s no reason at all to suppose that (2) follows from (1). If you add the extra premise I suggested, then you’ll have:

1. Getting Ron Paul elected President is the only way to improve the political situation. (implicit)
2. These folks here aren’t contributing to efforts to get Ron Paul elected President. (given)
3. Therefore, these folks here aren’t contributing to improving the political situation. (conclusion)

Not all of these premises are true (the implicit premise 0 is clearly false), but it is at least formally valid; if all the premises were true, the conclusion would have to follow.

If I was being too charitable, well, I’m sorry. I take it back. If you’re not actually presuming what I said you seem to be presuming, then your conclusion isn’t supported by question-begging premises; it’s not supported by anything at all.

Polzkill:

Doctor Paul, inspired THOUSANDS of people like me to go out and fight these degenerates.

Yep. Let’s all measure the inputs to the allocation process instead of measuring the outputs.

But, well, I guess when you’ve got a prior commitment to methods that require enlisting tens of millions of other people and harnessing tens of millions of dollars, which don’t even operate but for a few months out of every four-year cycle, and which operate on winner-take-all rules that require you to win just about everything before you can win just about anything — methods which, in short, have no plausible hope of even minor progress on the margins for decades to come — measuring the inputs is about all you can do. There are no outputs to measure, and there won’t be in the forseeable future.