Kevin,

Zopa did shut down their U.S. operations back in October, but they apparently made the decision because of economic conditions, not because of regulatory pressure. Unlike Zopa’s U.K. site, the U.S. operation wasn’t a true peer-to-peer lending site; when they paired up a saver and a borrower, what actually happened was that one of Zopa’s credit union partners issued a CD to the saver and a consumer loan to the borrower, with the interest rate on the borrower’s loan reduced proportionally to the amount of the CD. (The saver could also choose to receive a lower rate of return on the CD, in order to further reduce the interest rate on the borrower’s loan.) Since the loans were all mediated by regulated and insured securities issued by an established credit union, the credit union rather than the saver bears the risk of default, but, correspondingly, the return for the savers wasn’t much above the market average for CDs. (And would be less, if you chose to “help” your partner by lowering the interest rate on their loan.)

The case that you’re more likely thinking of is Prosper.com, which the S.E.C. did force to shut down back in October. (With several state regulatory agencies nipping at their heels.) The charge was that they were selling unregulated securities, while Prosper maintained that they were just acting as a broker between individual lenders and borrowers.

Interestingly, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they came back online just last week, and are apparently resuming at least some of their operations, even though the S.E.C. is still hanging the sword of Damocles over their heads. (Right now they are apparently using an agreement with California regulators to raise money within the state of California, and then loan it out to wherever someone is willing to borrow.)

Jerry: “Many of us would associate words like ‘conscious’ and ‘systematic’ and ‘socially’ as buttressing either an overt or covert conspiracy.

“Systematic” and “socially” only suggest a conspiracy if you believe that the only ways in which large-scale social coordination can come about is by a process of crafting and consciously following a common plan. But that just is to claim that there are no spontaneous orders. In which case your problem is with Hayek, not with Brownmiller or with me.

“Conscious” only suggests a conspiracy if the word “conscious” is being used to apply to participation in the form of social coordination in question. But Brownmiller doesn’t say that the “conscious process of intimidation” is something that all men participate in (if you think it is, re-read the sentence, paying particular attention to which clause “all men” is the subject of). In a “conscious process of intimidation,” presumably the person who would be either conscious or unconscious is the intimidator, which in this case means the rapist. We know from elsewhere in the book (especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory) that Brownmiller isn’t claiming that all men are rapists (after all, part of what she’s explicitly interested in analyzing is how the actions of men who rape affect the status of women vis-a-vis men who do not rape). So we don’t yet have any reason to believe that Brownmiller is claiming that anyone other than the rapist alone is consciously intending to intimidate women (maybe all women as such; maybe some group of women; maybe the one particular woman he has targeted for attack; Brownmiller doesn’t make it explicit which, and not much turns on it in this discussion). Which is true enough; if he weren’t intending to intimidate, he wouldn’t be a rapist.

So then what’s the function of that clause about “by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”, if not to say that all men are somehow consciously trying to intimidate women? Well, again, looking at the rest of the book, and especially the passages on the Myrmidon theory, one interpretation that suggests itself is that Brownmiller is making a statement in that clause about the political effects of rape — that all women are kept in a state of fear by all mean, as an effect of the conscious process of intimidation carried out by some but not all men—an effect which not all of the men in question, or perhaps even none of the men in question, may have consciously intended.

If Brownmiller doesn’t mean to use the word “conscious” to suggest conscious intent by all men to keep all women in a state of fear, but only to say that rapists consciously intend to intimidate women, then why include the word at all? Can’t it just be taken for granted? Well, no, it can’t be. I’d argue that Brownmiller includes the word “conscious” because it has to do with a distinct claim made in the book, which is not directly discussed in my original post — that rapists are motivated in part by the desire to intimidate and control women, not just by some uncontrollable lust or the lack of consensual sexual “outlets.”

Maybe you disagree with Brownmiller on that point; if so, fine, but that’s a different disagreement, which has to do with what a rapist’s conscious intent in committing rape is, rather than with Brownmiller’s effect of the social effects of rape.

Jerry: “I also like how all wars and social ills are laid out an men’s feet, apparently women had nothing to do with this.”

Who are you arguing with here? I can’t find anything in either the Brownmiller quote or the MacKinnon quote that you single out that would suggest anything of the sort, or anything at all about some kind of universal theory of who’s responsible for all wars and social ills.

Richard Garner:

I wonder, though, if your example of a world owning alien gains its intuitively objectionable nature, though, not from the fact that the alien hasn’t been back for millions of years, but from the objectionable problems of complete world ownership. If he had come and mixed his labour with a square mile of desert in a Nevadan desert (pretending Nevada existed then), and then went away and didn’t come back for millions of years, would your example be as objectionable?

I think you picked the wrong patch of land to consider for your example.

I don’t think that the problem in the Galaktron thought-experiment has to do with whole-world-ownership. It has to do with the fact that he left for several million years and in the meantime rival claimants have come along who re-homesteaded the land that he left. So I agree with you that there wouldn’t be much objectionable in Galaktron’s reclaiming a patch of desert land that nobody else is currently using. Where there is no rivalry, there is no question of abandonment to arise.

But the isolating case is not a patch of currently desert land; it’s a patch of land currently occupied and used by new-comers while Galaktron was away. So, for example, suppose that Galaktron weren’t claiming ownership of the whole world. Suppose that he did some homesteading on an island, went away for a few million years, and came back, only to find that his old garden plot now happened to be Manhattan. Does he have the right to say, “Out, squatters!” and demand eviction or restitution? Or do those currently occupying the island get to maintain ownership, given that the land was not in use when the meddling hyoo-mons first came to it, and hadn’t been in use for millions of years?

Richard Garner:

If I were to leave my bike outside a shop whilst I go in to buy groceries, I would not be using or occupying it, but it is still mine. If somebody else were to use it, it would still be mine.

Well, there’s leaving and then there’s leaving. If there is some reasonable expectation that you will return to pick up your bike at a definite point in the near future, that surely does not amount to abandoning you bike. If you leave your bike sitting out there for a month, in rain and shine, never make any kind of arrangement about storage or maintenance with a third party, etc., then sooner or later I think any reasonable system of property rights would take that as constructive abandonment of the bike even without any express performative act on your part of saying “I abandon my bike forthwith.”

Mutualist views on real estate aren’t that different in this regard: the reason that occupancy-and-use mutualists don’t accept that, for example, leaving your house to pick up some milk or even for a long vacation would count as opening up the land for someone else to occupy and use, is because in those cases your lower-level action of leaving is part of a higher-level project which involves your returning at some more or less definite date in the not-too-distant future. The kind of leaving which would open up the property to other claimants is generally held to require a leaving that’s long-term and open-ended, among other things.

wombatron,

Thank you for the kind notice. I agree that there’s an important distinction to be made between the likely short-run results of freeing markets and the long-term results that you could expect as we move deeper into the anarchic future. (On the other hand, I’m also much less confident predicting anything specific about what deep anarchy would look like, because the far future is hard to predict in general, and in particular because predictions about short-run results can hook into your knowledge of how coercion is pushing things in the actually-existing world, whereas predictions about deep anarchy depend on feedback loops and developments that get increasingly unpredictable because they increasingly involve innovations rather than just repairing existing damage.)

I will say that, while I expect global forms of organization to proliferate and flourish as communication gets better, and State barriers to communication and interaction are knocked down, that needn’t necessarily imply “large-scale” voluntary organizations, if “large” refers to the number of people involved rather than the geographical expanse. One of the things I expect to see is a lot more little voluntary associations with global reach. As we get deeper into anarchy, people may develop more in the way of federations and “associations of associations” out of these small pieces loosely joined; on the other hand, I also expect that a lot of coordination will fall back on massive global spontaneous orders, more than it will on massive global organizations, even if the latter are decentralized and full of caucuses and scrupulously federative in structure.

freeman:

Glocalism, y’all. Glocalism.

I first heard the word “glocal” back in 2001 as part of a delegation from Auburn heading up to SURGE, a counter-globalization conference in Chapel Hill, No’ Carolina. At the time, I thought that was the pug-ugliest bit of political neologism I’d ever heard from someone whose project I was broadly sympathetic to. 8 years have passed, and I still don’t think I’ve heard anything more ill-constructed. (Although “heteronormativity” comes close.)

Shouldn’t that read “TEH strand.” Isn’t liberty the point of all commitments?

Some people might hold that view, but I don’t. (I don’t think Roderick does either, but he can speak for himself.)

The stuff on the varieties of thickness explains why I think that libertarians have at least some specifically libertarian reasons for committing to other projects such as radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-racism, wildcat unionism, internationalism, gay liberation, etc. So the commitments don’t just run alongside each other in parallel; part of your reason to be both a libertarian and a feminist is that the insights of (what I take to be) the most plausible versions of feminism play a substantial role in coming to what I take to be the best understanding of libertarian theory and practice. (And vice versa; there are specifically feminist reasons for feminists also to be libertarians, and specifically anarchists. I have a thick conception of feminism as well as a thick conception of libertarianism.)

However, to say that libertarians have some libertarian reasons for commitments to feminism is not to say that libertarian reasons are the only reasons for a commitment to feminism, or even the primary reasons. I think the primary reason for committing to feminism is that feminism is right, and not just on those things that can be cashed out as having some effect on questions as to the role of force in social relationships; and it’s worth pursuing on its own merits, and would be so even if it had no impact whatever on the advance of libertarian politics.

Anonymous,

1. When your grandparents came to the United States in 1900, there were no immigration quotas, and hardly any immigration laws at all. There was no INS, no visa system, and no green cards. It’s a bit disingenuous to say, “Well, they should do it just like my grandparents did,” because, what your grandparents actually did in 1900 was just to enter without any visa at the most convenient entry point (most Mexican immigrants just walked across the border in the middle of town; European immigrants usually came in through a port of call in a major city), and anyone who does that now gets spit on as an “illegal,” chased, and, if caught, exiled from their new home.

2. Undocumented immigrants are taxpayers. All undocumented immigrants pay most or all of the state and local taxes that cover the costs of government-run hospitals and government-run schools. (Sales taxes, cigarette taxes, room taxes, property taxes — either directly, or indirectly through the rent their landlord charges — etc. In a state like Nevada, which has no state income tax, they pay all the state taxes that documented immigrants and citizens do.) And, in fact, the numerical majority of undocumented immigrants also pay federal income taxes, as well. (Either through an ITN they requested from the IRS, which you can get without disclosing immigration status, or through W-4 withholding at a job they got using a false Social Security Number.)

Are there some undocumented immigrants who evade income taxes? Well, sure. So what? I hear some citizens do that too. Do you not know anybody who cheats on their taxes? Really?

1. You write: “If they don’t like that designation, they can go back to their country of origin. They are not welcome here.”

You ought to speak for yourself, dude. You may not welcome undocumented immigrants. I welcome anyone who’s peaceful and productive, regardless of what country they came from, and regardless of whether or not they got a permission slip for existing from the U.S. government. Since we disagree on this, it seems to me like the question is, whose welcoming should matter? And I think the answer is, that we should agree to disagree: you can welcome or not welcome whoever you want on your own property; and I can welcome or not welcome whoever I want on my own property. That’s how people handle disagreements like this in a civilized society, rather than by fighting to try and force a one-size-fits-all policy on everybody.

But if that’s the rule we adopt, then your home may be your personal property; if you own your own business, your workplace may be too. But the entire territorial expanse of the United States of America certainly is not. You have no business telling me who to welcome or not to welcome into my own home or workplace.

Bianca,

Thanks for the welcome, and for the reply.

I found your post through the links on the April 19 “Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday” at feministe. I’m a regular reader there and occasionally Shamelessly Self-Promote my articles, when they’re relevant.(I listed a couple that week.)

In answer to your question, yes, I was involved in organizing and participating in Tax Day protests (of course, they weren’t called “Tea Parties” until this year) during the late, unlamented Bush administration, most actively when I was living in Auburn, Alabama, with much the same focus and for much the same reasons. (E.g. opposition to my being forced to pay for Mr. Bush’s wars, torture camps, death squad training camps like the School of the Americas, etc.) I was also, for whatever it’s worth, heavily involved in organizing local protests (as a founding member of the Auburn Peace Project) against the Iraq war and occupation, and in organizing protests against a personal appearance by the Warmonger-in-Chief on the Auburn University campus (he was stumping for a local GOP Congressional candidate at the time). Most of my activism these days is focused on opposing all forms of government violence, focusing especially on this government’s wars, the criminalization of immigrants, and police brutality.

Hope this helps explain where I’m coming from.

Peter:

The “strategic-thickness,” “consequence-thickness,” “application-thickness,” and “grounds-thickness” arguments strike me as pretty insubstantial, to the extent I understand them. The grounds-thickness argument, for example — “Sure, private hierarchy is logically consistent with libertarianism, but it’s weird!” — seems like an assertion, not an argument.

Peter, are you referring here to the paragraph on authoritarianism in Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, under the heading of “Thickness from grounds”, which begins “Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. …”?

If so, I’m not surprising you find the argument unsatisfying, because that’s an extremely elliptical capsule version of the argument. It’s intended to illustrate the kind of argument that you would make for a commitment from grounds, not to give a full-on account of the argument for libertarian concern with non-coercive authoritarianism. A fuller version, with the details tricked out, would require a lot more space than I had available in that part of that particular article (which was written for print in The Freeman, and hence subject to constraints of length, and which was primarily about the varieties of thickness, not primarily about making the case for all the details of my own particular thick conception of libertarianism).

There’s a bit longer discussion of the same topic in my “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity” essay in the Long/Machan Anarchism/Minarchism anthology (particularly if you include, as background, the section on equality), which you may or may not find more satisfying.

Whether or not you find it more satisfying, though, what I’m more interested in is whether or not you accept the form of argument discussed. Specifically, an argument in which the arguer demonstrates 1. that the best reason to be a libertarian is some foundational principle X (Aristotelian natural law, rational egoism, Jeffersonian political equality, whatever your view may be); 2. that principle X implies not only that libertarianism is true, but also some other consequent, Y; and, therefore, 3. a libertarian, qua libertarian, has reason to believe in Y as well as libertarianism, even though denying Y is not inconsistent with libertarianism per se, because denying Y would be inconsistent with the reasons that justify libertarianism. (Hence, as I say, libertarians can reject Y without being inconsistent but they can’t reject it without being unreasonable.)

So, do you accept that form of argument as a legitimate one? If so, then great; that was the main purpose of the discussion, and presumably also the main purpose of Roderick’s link to my essay. If not, then what’s the problem with it?

Well, I’m sure it depends on what you mean by “promote business investment.” If you spell out what you mean by that, then we may perhaps agree, but as it stands, that kind of terminology is often used to represent something which has proven wholly toxic throughout the formerly colonized world.

In the political context of international development politics, especially as it is typically applied to sub-Saharan Africa, there are lots and lots of active schemes to “promote business investment.” The problem is that these schemes are typically driven by large inter-state governmental agencies like the IMF and World Bank; in substance, they typically involved large tax-funded government-to-government loans, packaged with stipulations that the local government bring certain key legislation (notably, Intellectual Property monopolies) into line with the requirements of large business interests, that they implement bureaucratic professionalization of local government (in the name of “good government” and rooting out “corruption”), and that they channel the money into big government forced-modernization boondoggles (e.g. large-scale government infrastructure projects), incentives for large projects by a handful of large multinational corporations, and large-scale privateering commissions for government-backed monopolies on natural resource extraction, utilities, etc.

All of which is to say that these kind of schemes “promote business investment” by means of large-scale government privilege and government-to-government transfers — when what is really needed is not that kind of political scheming, but rather for international politicos to back off and leave Somalia the hell alone, so as to allow a genuine, spontaneous forms of development to emerge. These may well involve various sorts of domestic and foreign “business investment,” but if so, they ought to be attracted to the investments by the prospects for peaceful cooperation, not by the prospects for rent-seeking and the efforts of political bodies to “promote” them.