James Madison Fan: You act as if there was a superior alternative when there wasn’t.

I said nothing at all about “superior alternatives.” I said that it’s disingenuous to claim that the ratification process gave “the people” subjected to the U.S. Constitution a meaningful opportunity to accept or reject the obligations being imposed on them. What actually happened is that a small, privileged minority of the population unilaterally imposed open-ended, non-negotiable political obligations on a disenfranchised and oppressed majority of the population. Whether or not that strikes you as the best that could be hoped for under the circumstances is a separate question.

That said, I’d also note that (1) you seem to be talking a lot about the Revolution, but my comments weren’t about the Revolution. They were about the adoption of the Constitution, which was a separate event, carried out years later, mostly by a different group of men, and which many of the Revolutionaries were actively opposed to. Maybe you think that without the Constitution, the Revolution would have failed; but if so, that’s a strong historical claim that you’d need to argue for. (2) I don’t know what evidence you think you have for believing that American Indians or black slaves would have been worse off under the English monarchy (slavery was abolished in British colonies decades before it was abolished in independent America; the English monarchy’s attempts to curb white land-grabs west of the Appalachians was one of the white Revolutionaries complaints). My attitude towards the American Revolution is generally positive, but it’s mixed and complicated (revolutions are big, complicated things), and I think honest observers ought to acknowledge the real faults and vices of the revolutionaries — let alone the much more conservative and centralist regime that overtook them in 1789.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand I know he was a radical abolitionist that was exceedingly naïve if he thought the South was going to tolerate legislation that threatened their social order.

He believed nothing of the sort.

What he believed is that the military invasion and reconquest of the Southern states was not an justifiable way to deal with the situation. He believed that slavery should be abolished by other means. (Spooner’s attitude towards the war, as expressed in No Treason No. 2, was that “The result – and a natural one – has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth.”)

James Madison Fan: What did he expect? Southern land owners were going to admit they were equal to Blacks and embrace them as brothers?

No, he believed that Southern whites would remain unrepentant slavers. His published Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858) was for black Southerners and poor white Southerners to ally with each other to abolish slavery by means of escape, slave uprisings, and guerilla warfare against white slaveholders, with moral and material support from sympathetic Northern abolitionists. I don’t know whether Spooner wrote anything on the topic before the outbreak of the Civil War, but many radical abolitionists believed (rightly, I think) that it would actually be far easier to destabilize slavery in the South after secession than before it, since enforcement of the slave system depended, in the last resort, on Federal force, in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act and the use of the U.S. Army to suppress slave uprisings. (If you’re interested in the topic, for a good overview of the radical abolitionist support for Disunionism, I’d recommend either Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s _Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men_, or _All On Fire_, Henry Mayer’s excellent biography of William Lloyd Garrison.)

But, anyway, whether or not Spooner is correct about all this has nothing to do with whether or not people were free to “dispel” their political obligations to the U.S. government when Spooner wrote his pamphlet. Manifestly, they were not — whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing — and many of them had just recently been forced to submit to those obligations at bayonet-point, in spite of their explicit refusal of the obligations and their concerted efforts to opt out of them. I’m not insisting that you agree with Spooner’s argument; what I’m objecting to is the attempt to make the argument look silly by disregarding basic facts about the historical situation.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand the change the South feared the most was the abolition of Slavery which is a moral imperative especially in a nation the purports to be the “Land of the Free.”

Well, “the South” didn’t fear abolition. Southern slaveholders did. Enslaved Southerners (who were, remember, a numerical majority of the population in many parts of “the South”) generally welcomed the prospect. Of course you are right that Southern slaveholders were terrified of abolition, and that that was a large part of their reason for seceding and for fighting the Feds’ attempts to regain political control. You’re also right that the abolition of slavery is a moral imperative. But I don’t see how that makes the Civil War a “conundrum,” unless you think that the invasion and occupation of the South was the only way in which slavery might have been abolished. I don’t think that it’s the only way slavery might have been abolished; if there are other means by which abolition might have been accomplished just as well or better, without a war of reconquest and a military occupation of the South, then abolition doesn’t lend much moral weight to the Feds’ cause.

**MBH,**

1. On the Maddow clip: mostly, I don’t care. Koch Industries is like any other mega-conglomerate: a consummate political-capitalist player, and destined to be eviscerated by free competition and informal and mutualistic alternatives in a freed market. Of all the corporate-welfare schemes that they benefit from, I’m far more concerned with those that they lobby for (e.g. Georgia-Pacific’s use of government land monopolies to secure tax-funded access roads and privileged access to timber) than those that they lobby against. As for the latter, I’ll say briefly that when government policies impose direct mandates on companies in order to force them into providing corporate insurance for their employees, seeking a government subsidy for the corporate insurance the company is being forced to buy is not the same thing is not the same thing as tacitly approving of the policy. Whether Koch Industries should or should not sign up for the policy (I don’t care much myself; as far as I’m concerned, the main thing that they should do is go out of business, like all the other dinosaurs of state capitalism), the charge of hypocrisy is cheap political rhetoric, not a serious moral argument.

I know that they started Reason.

They did no such thing. Reason started as a shoestring-budget staple zine put out by Lannie Friedlander in 1968. In 1970 it was sold to Bob Poole, Tibor Machan and Manuel Klausner. It’s now published by a 501(c)3, the Reason Foundation. The Kochs played no significant role in funding it, and in fact went to some length to start national magazine projects of their own due to the fact that Reason was outside of their control. You may be thinking of one of these — either Inquiry, which was a publication of the Cato Institute, or Roy Childs’s Libertarian Review, which was independent, but bankrolled almost entirely by the Kochs.

They still continue to fund it?

They donate money to the Reason Foundation and the Reason Public Policy Institute. They are not particularly big funders — from the reports I’ve seen, the Koch Family Foundations have given about $2.4 million dollars in grants to the Reason Foundation over the past 24 years, i.e. just about $100K a year. For comparison, the Reason Foundation’s annual operating expenses are between $6,000,000 and $7,000,000 a year. David K. also constitutes about 4% of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Neither of them exercise any editorial control whatsoever, and if they pulled the plug, Reason would lose about 1% of their annual budget. This is hardly the same thing as “owning” the magazine, and nothing like the kind of control that they exercised over Inquiry or Libertarian Review. To suggest that Jesse Walker — as a writer and editor working for a magazine which is published by a 501(c)3 to which the Kochs are sometime donors — is “bought and paid for” by the Kochs is both underhanded, and a ridiculous misrepresentation of the facts.

You’re not also bought and paid for by the Kochs are you?

I do not currently have, and never have had, any academic or financial relationship with the Koch foundations, or with any of the Kochtopus institutions. (*) Not that it would be any of your goddamned business if I had. If I had benefited at some point from a Kochtopus institution, that would not make it any more difficult for you to evaluate my arguments on their own merits. Or make the circumstantial form of argumentum ad hominem any less fallacious as a response.

(*) E.g. Cato, IHS, etc. I have been paid for some articles I wrote for the Freeman, and for all I know, it is very likely the case that the Kochs gave some money to FEE at some point — most of the libertarian business philanthropists gave money to FEE at some point or another. But FEE long predated the Koch brothers’ funding, and they never exercised significant influence over FEE in the way that they did over Cato or the IHS or Libertarian Review.

... Jeff, Well, I'm pretty sure that the reasons *don't* have much to do with the representational features of the game, such as they are. If chess were

... Dan, Well, I think the plausible response here is simply to say that novels and plays are not always like chess. Of course, there are cases in which

MBH:

Which is not to say that they haven’t done a fine job running it.

From what I understand, it’s mainly Charles K. who “runs” the company. David has a big ownership stake, and a pro forma Veep title, but he’s not particularly involved in day-to-day operations.

James Madison Fan: There was plenty of time for people to voice their concerns.

As Spooner makes clear in the text, a large majority of the people subjected to the U.S. Constitution (black slaves, women, propertyless whites, Indians not taxed, etc.) had plenty of time to “voice their concerns,” but no politically meaningful venue for doing so. Even if a majority of people actually had signed on for the Constitution, that would provide no grounds for binding the minority that had not signed on; but in fact a large majority of people were never even asked.

James Madison Fan: They didn’t [make it obligatory on their children]. “Their children” can alter or dispel it any time we want to. That’s what “freedom” is all about. The “problem” is very few of us want to because no one has offered a better alternative.

Spooner wrote and published No Treason over a period of three years from 1867-1870. As you may be aware, in the 1860s a large group of people had recently tried to alter or dispel their political obligations to the United States government, in favor of a proposed alternative, and they were subjected to a military invasion and occupation in order to force the obligation on them, the meaning of “freedom” notwithstanding. (The title of “No Treason” comes from the fact that Spooner intended it as a legal defense for secessionists should the federal government attempt to try them on charges of treason.) You may think whatever you like of Spooner’s argument, but this dropping of obvious historical context in your attempted criticism is careless reading at best.

Chris Moore:

"Do they buy Georgia-Pacific and then demand that the US government stop building access roads for free?"

Yes, I think that a minimum they ought to stop trying to get government to build theft-funded roads for their corporate enterprises. (The roads, of course, are not free. Government forces the rest of us to pay for them.)

"What about the publicly funded access roads I use everyday to get to work? Is it hypocritical of me to advocate for private roads if I drive down I95?"

No, but don't you think there are differences between (1) passively making use of roads that have already been built, at your expense, without your consent; and (2) actively lobbying government to build new special roads at the expense of others, for the benefit of you and a handful of colleagues, without the consent of the victims providing your funding. Most people who use government roads are at best recovering a small fraction of what is forcibly extracted from their own pockets; for a political capitalist like Georgia-Pacific, however, their use of the road comes at a considerable profit, extracted from the pockets of tax victims. The issue here isn't some purist demand that people keep their hands off of unclean government "services." The suggestion is that people who profess to be libertarians shouldn't be engaged in business practices that depend on actively lobbying government to make things worse on the rest of us.

"Now, show me evidence that Koch Industries has paid lobbyists advocating for state subsidies and then we're talking a new ballgame."

Well, you can track Georgia-Pacific's reported lobbying expenditures (for federal lobbying; they also do significant lobbying at the state level in states where they have established timber interests) at https://www.fecwatch.org/lobby/firmsum.php?lname=Georgia-Pacific+Corp and https://www.fecwatch.org/lobby/firmsum.php?lname=Georgia-Pacific+LLC ; throughout the 2000s, their federal lobbying budget has generally been between half a million and a million and a half dollars per year. Of course, this is a massive pile of data about Congressional lobbying on all different issues of concern (GP spends money on a number of things -- e.g., in 2008 they were especially concerned about environmental mandates related to formaldehyde); on the one hand, it covers many issues other than timber-access roads or subsidized logging; on the other, it doesn't include state-level lobbying or, just as importantly, a lot of the company's interactions with the Executive Branch bureaucrats who make most of the actual day-to-day decisions about these things. But it might be a place to start looking.

Magnus:

Is what you describes, the infamous State Capitalism?

Sure; or close enough for government work, anyway.

Although, to be picky, “State Capitalism” may be a broader term than “Neoliberalism” of the sort criticized by the counterglobalization movment. Neoliberalism is one form of state capitalism — currently the triumphant form, if anything can be said to be — but there are others — e.g. Keynsian corporate liberalism, “Asian Tiger”-style authoritarian protectionism, old-guard Western European welfare states, etc. The term also tends to include a number of things that are more provincial or local — not just the kind of national policy or multi-state alliances that “neoliberalism” usually refers to. (E.g. “State Capitalism” includes things like state insurance cartels or local land-grab rackets, or government union-busting, as well as high finance or international aid packages.)

(Presuming throughout that the “State Capitalism” you’ve seen held in infamy is what mutualists or other left-libertarians are referring to by that term. There’s another, unrelated use of the term popular amongst Marxist intellectuals, to refer to a system that combines the appropriation of surplus value with antidemocratic state ownership of the means of production — in which the bureaucratic / managerial class would replace “private” industrialists in the role of commanding and exploiting workers. Trotskyists used to enjoy endless arguments amongst themselves about whether the USSR and the Eastern bloc under Stalin and his successors should be classified as examples of “state capitalism” in this latter sense or as “deformed workers’ states.” Which made for a lot of fun at cocktail parties.)

On which, see Shawn Wilbur’s “What ever happened to (the discourse on) Neoliberalism?” and the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade’s Free Trade is Fair Trade.

Of course, many people in the counterglobalization movement haven’t been Anarchists. And those who are Anarchists have sometimes been gradualists, or simply confused. But a lot have been, and haven’t been. And it’s worth noting that the major targets of the counterglobalization movement — the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and G8/G20/etc. — are all government conclaves, in which “free trade” and “markets” typically used (as at the IMF and World Bank) to describe a financial system based on rich governments lending millions or billions of dollars to cash-strapped governments so that the latter can either use it to manipulate forex and local money markets, or “invest” it in politically-favored corporate-welfare projects for local political capitalists and politically-connected TNCs. It’s clear what this has to do with advancing the trade interests of incumbent political capitalists, and perhaps also increasing government tax revenues in the developing world. Not so much what it has to do with free trade or market exchange.

MBH,

I’d classify “ground-zero mosque” as a noun phrase.

Did you mean to ask me something about how that noun phrase has become widespread in political talk, even though the thing allegedly picked out by it is neither at “ground zero,” nor a mosque? If so, I’d say it probably depends on the person using the term, and you probably ought to ask them how they came to settle on that phrase. I imagine you’ll find that some people use it out of ignorance, either simple or wilful; others have more or less elaborate rationalizations for why it’s an apt description; some people just don’t give much of a damn about accuracy; etc. No doubt a lot of it has to do with the kinds of intellectual vices and political abuses of language that Orwell described in “Politics and the English Language.” All of which I think will go a lot further towards explaining something worth explaining than “memes” will.

In any case, I certainly do not think that the aptness of the phrase “ground zero mosque” is the most important issue in that whole idiotic shouting match. The most important issue are (1) the direct effort to associate all Muslims, just as such, with the actions of a specific group of Islamist terrorists, for the purpose of collective blame; and (2) the substantive arguments being given to the effect that the sensitivities of American nationalists are legitimate grounds for violently suppressing other people’s private property rights and free exercise of religion. Most people who believe in belligerent nationalism, religious intolerance and overt tyranny are still going to believe in those things with or without the specific phrase “ground zero mosque,” and I think there’s a lot more to be gained by challenging the substance of the argument, rather than trying to come up with polemical explanations of people’s reasons for using and spreading the noun phrase.