dennis,

We all have dirty hands if the standard is one of absolute market purity….

This seems like it’s completely missing the point. The Facebook-using anti-corporate protesters and the government-roads-using libertarians are being accused of a particular vice — hypocrisy. And you’re quite right to question whether “dirty hands” is really the appropriate standard here, i.e., whether “clean hands” are really necessary to avoid the charge of hypocrisy.

But state-capitalist CEOs are not being accused of hypocrisy in the first place. They are being accused of exploitation. The charge against them (most of them, at least) has nothing to do with a claim that they benefit from a system they claim to protest; it has to do (more or less) with them unethically taking advantage of other people’s material desperation. This is not a matter of whose hands are clean or dirty; it’s a matter of who’s in a social position to do that, and who is not.

dennis,

The degree of blame one deserves should be based on their attempts to perpetuate the non-market aspects of our system or to thwart moves toward real laissez faire …

I’m not convinced that that’s true. (Certainly, doing those things is blameworthy in a distinctive way — it involves direct violations of rights, or direct efforts to get rights violated by third parties. But violating somebody’s rights is not the only way that you can wrong them.)

But let’s bracket that for the moment and pretend that the only thing we should care about, ethically speaking, is how actively the corporations try to maintain the privileges that they profit from. Well, OK. So what’s the claim here? If the claim is that Sony, Alcoa, and Dow don’t actively attempt to perpetuate the non-market aspects of our system or thwart moves towards real laissez-faire, then that claim is obviously false. If the claim is that somebody, somewhere just wanted to open an ice cream stand and took some money from the local development agency to do it, well, maybe that is importantly different and maybe it is not. But in any case it doesn’t seem to me like that kind of business is the primary target of the Occupy Wall Street protests (or of the typical left-libertarian critique). The much more likely targets are folks like the Fortune 500, who certainly are doing a hell of a lot more than that when it comes to lobbying and suing and otherwise actively striving to entrench or expand their political privileges.

Cal:

It’s positing a legal, historical, and current operational difference, expanded in the following sentences of that paragraph. I’m not trying to “prove” anything.

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that you have “posited” this, and I agree that it doesn’t “prove” anything. But you know if your interlocutor asks you to describe the criteria that make it reasonable for institution A to be considered, from an analytical and critical standpoint, as part of the state, while unreasonable for institution B to be so considered — and then the answer you give your interlocutor is “Well, obviously, you can tell that they are different, because I posit that institution A is part of the state, and institution B is not,” then your “posit” is under-argued.

In fact it’s not argued at all. Or even so much as adequately characterized. You can insist on this “posit” all you like, but if you intended it as an answer to Roderick’s question, then it’s not just that you haven’t offered anything that would motivate Roderick to accept that there is an important difference. You haven’t even described what that difference would be. You’ve just re-stated the claim that there is one. It is exactly as if he asked “Well, what’s the difference between taxation and theft?” and you answered by “positing:” “Well, one of them is theft. And the other is taxation.”

No, that’s the empirical definition of the state, meaning it’s the one arrived at by … social scientists … who study state formation and state power empirically and make admittedly theory-laden definitions of the state subject to empirical scrutiny, as opposed to the moral or armchair philosophy about the nature of the state …

Man, it sounds like you’ve got a whole argument in your head ready to go about social philosophy and the (apparently unsavory?) practice of “moralizing.” But I didn’t ask you a question about social philosophy or about moralizing; I asked you in what sense your argument was supposed to be an empirical one when it seemed to be based entirely on definitional appeals. Maybe you think the definitions you appeal to are importantly rooted in a background empirical research. OK; if they are, great, but it seems to me that when Roderick points out all the actually-existing, empirically-observed linkages between the business model of some real-world giant corporation (Dow or Sony, for instance) and the real-world practice of state power, and your response is to start talking about the extent to which this entanglement is or is not a matter of “necessary and sufficient cause” or “unnecessary and partial effects,” etc. then it seems to me that Roderick is the one offering an empirically-rooted argument, and you are the one responding with an attempt at making and insisting on apriori reasoning from a set of conceptual distinctions.

(Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making or insisting on apriori reasoning from a set of conceptual distinctions. But if you’re going to do it, you ought to be out and proud about that, not pretending that it really is an empirical argument after all.)

… the state is just force, the state is just hierarchy, the state is just authority, the state is just society, the state is just the limitation of choice, the state is just a large private property claim, the state is an instrument of the bourgeoise or the capitalists, etc. etc.

I have literally no idea what or who you mean to talk about here. You seem to be confusing particular substantive claims that some people have made about the state (e.g. that it “is an instrument of the bourgeoisie or the capitalists”) and the definitions of the state that they give (nobody in the world has ever tried to define the state as “an instrument of the bourgoisie or the capitalists”); and you also seem to have mixed in a number of claims that aren’t actually about the state, but rather about anarchism (e.g. that anarchism is opposed to all hierarchies, all authority or all use of force in social relations, not merely to political power, coercively-entrenched authority or territorial monopolies on the use of legal force). In any case, I’d like to hear a concrete example of a left-libertarian who defines the state in any of the “is just…” terms that you list here.

Plauche:

Don’t fall into the left-libertarian mistake of treating all big corporations as necessarily a part of the state.

Long:

Can you state a criterion that will have state universities and the post office turn out to be part of the state, and Walmart not?

Cal:

Um yes. Walmart is a private corporation operating in a statist market whereas the post office and state universities are state agencies.

Well, you know, that’s stating (or re-stating) the conclusion that you’re supposed to be proving. It’s not stating the criterion by which you can prove it.

Cal:

… the empirical distinction between …

You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

If your case rests on repeatedly recurring to the definition of the state per se, and the definition of the corporation per se, and how one of them is in-principle compatible with the norms of a freed market (which do not actually exist as an object of experience, although they can be imagined counterfactually); and the other is not (as it necessarily involves the legitimation of centralized force etc. etc.), then what you’ve got here — for good or for ill — looks a lot more like a conceptual distinction than something empirical. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Or if I’ve misunderstood what you meant to say when you called this distinction an “empirical distinction,” then what work did you mean the term “empirical” to be doing?

anarchyvenderblog:

… do still rely on voluntary exchange for their continued existence.

Some do and some don’t. Lockheed-Martin and General Dynamics and Halliburton, for example, don’t. They rely largely on tax-funded government contracts. Time-Warner, to take a different example, largely does not, either: they rely largely on payments extorted through copyright law. Of course, you could say, “Well, but you don’t have to listen to the music or watch the movies that Time-Warner controls.” But that seems a lot like saying “Well, you see the sales tax is voluntary, because if you don’t like it, you can avoid it by not buying anything.”

But isn’t opposing corporations on principle, even if they themselves oppose the corporatist-state structure,

Which corporations would those be?

… similar to blaming libertarians for accepting government healthcare in a single payer system? There is no alternative….

Well of course there is an alternative. Nobody is morally or prudentially obliged to try to run a Fortune 500 company.

It’s one thing to say, “Look, I don’t like this, but I still have to get healthcare somehow or another if I intend to stay alive.” It’s quite another thing, ethically, to say, “Look, I don’t like this, but I still have to get massive amounts of free land and international trade subsidies somehow or another if I intend to keep my company’s profits above of $16,000,000,000 this year.” Of course, you might point out that a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who did not take that attitude would probably not stay the CEO of that Fortune 500 company for very long. And you’d be right about that. But of course there is a smidge of a difference between the consequence “Well, I cannot get adequate healthcare for love or money, so I will die of a preventable disease” and the consequence, “Well, I guess I may have to look for work in some field other than being one of the most economically privileged people in the world.”

The main focus should be corporations that actively lobby for state benefits, don’t you think?

Maybe that should be the main focus; I don’t know. But I don’t see why it should be the exclusive focus. When corporations profit from state privileges — even if they did not lobby for them — I think it’s worth remarking that those business models are a creature of the political regime forced upon us, not an example of voluntary social relationships. Whoever is or is not to blame for the forcing, force it remains.

Be that as it may, what makes you think that isn’t the main focus, anyway? If the claim is that companies like Alcoa (!), Sony (!!), and Dow (!!@$#!) don’t actively lobby for state benefits, then that claim is false. And obviously so.

You know, it strikes me that if your aim is to use visual rhetoric to lodge a criticism of the people at Occupy Wall Street, then an image whose upshot is, roughly, “the activities of giant corporations inescapably pervade absolutely every aspect of your everyday life” … may not actually be as effective a criticism as you think it is.

The Boy Who Could Not Shiver And Shake is great, but it does involve some fairly intense ghostly things towards the end of the story. On the other hand, the main way that Our Hero wins out in the end is indeed by managing to be completely insensitive to absolutely any horror the supernatural can throw at him. If there is aesthetic work being done, Our Hero's great virtue is apparently supposed to be that he is completely unworked-upon by it.

It's a weird story.

all-left.net is run by Roderick, not by me.

For what it’s worth, I certainly agree that our essay should not be the only thing cited in a discussion of libertarian feminism.

The “Libertarian Feminism” essay was not written in ignorance of ALF or the work that y’all have done. It would not be too much to say that if it weren’t for ALF I probably never would have become a libertarian — it was specifically a couple of essays by you, Sharon, and some others by Joan Kennedy Taylor, which really opened me up to the possibilities of radical individualism, and taught me my first and most important lessons on libertarian and market anarchist approaches to social justice. (It’s the libertarian part that I needed convincing on. As a man I am come to feminism with a certain distance that women don’t have — but I’m not exactly writing from the outside looking in, either. While I’ve seen my share of ivory towers, I am not a professional academic, and I actually came to libertarian thought by way of years of prior work within local feminist groups, GLBT groups, and anti-rape/anti-battery activism — work which started for some pretty heavy personal as well as political reasons — and which eventually lead to anarcha-feminist organizing efforts, which lead…..)

It is true that men writing critical assessments of women’s work, including (especially?) in the feminist movement, are necessarily in a tricky position, and we are prone to all kinds of dumb moves and bad faith. No doubt in that essay and elsewhere I’ve neglected a lot that oughtn’t have been neglected and said things that are off-kilter or mistaken. But I don’t think it’s fair to infer from a failure to talk about something in the essay that we are oblivious, or don’t think that it’s important; lots of things we wanted to talk about, we didn’t get the chance to. I don’t think we claimed that no 20th/21st century libertarian feminists ever drew a connection between patriarchy and statism, or that Wendy McElroy is the only voice of “libertarian feminism” out there. Certainly the discussion (in section 2) of a number of common libertarian errors about feminism wasn’t intended to suggest that there aren’t any libertarian feminists who have pointed out and corrected those errors. If what we wrote, or what we neglected to write, does suggest that, then that’s absolutely a mistake, and I’ll publicly retract it.

For whatever it’s worth, in the essay we do allude to ALF and discuss an article by Joan Kennedy Taylor which appeared in the ALF News — but unfortunately, the format of the paper being what it is, we spend much more time (including in that section) talking about the points on which we disagree rather than the points where we agree. Similarly, we hardly canvass the whole range (as if we could!) of non-libertarian radical feminist thought (we only deal at length with one major instance — Catharine MacKinnon’s discussion of formal consent under patriarchy — and briefly mention a handful of other figures); and we hardly talk about any concrete examples of antifeminist libertarians by name (Hans Hoppe is in there, I guess). All I can plead is that the essay was presented live and so subject to limitations of time and the audience’s attention, never intended to be a comprehensive overview of anything, only an elucidation of a few conceptual issues that we see as especially important in finding the most promising strands of thought and action — by doing some totally incomplete and regrettably selective engagements on a handful of points that might help bring those conceptual issues out as clearly as possible. It’s certainly not intended either to be the first or the last thing that anyone reads on the subject of libertarian feminism — if it’s of any use at all, it will only be as something read alongside a lot of other broader, deeper, and more comprehensive material (which absolutely includes a lot of the work by Sharon Presley and other women in ALF, and I’m sorry if anything we said or anything we left out ever suggested otherwise). If the essay has been taken as an attempt at a comprehensive statement rather than a brief attempt to engage in a much, much wider conversation, then I can only say that I’m sorry for that, and the bit about pointing back and onward to the foundational works in the feminist tradition is really seriously meant — and work like “Government is Women’s Enemy” is as foundational as anything else I could mention.

dsatyglesias writes: “If you oppose universal health care, you by definition support letting people who can’t afford health care die.”

Maybe so. (Certainly, there are plenty of conservatives who are all too comfortable with — or even enthusiastic about — a lot of needless suffering in the world.)

But I hope that you realize that not everyone who supports universal healthcare supports government healthcare, and not everyone who opposes government healthcare opposes universal healthcare. The one might follow from the other if the only way to get universal coverage were by means of a political guarantee of coverage. But that’s not so: there are folks who oppose government healthcare because they think corporate healthcare is awesome and they don’t mind if people die; but there are also folks who oppose government healthcare because they support non-governmental, non-corporate universal coverage through grassroots social organization and community mutual aid. (See for example http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/10/25/radical_healthcare/ or the closing sections of http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/health-care-debate-meaningful/ .)

Of course, that leaves open the question of whether they (we — I’m one of ’em) are right about the best means for getting universal coverage. Maybe social means are inadequate; or maybe there is some reason, which has yet to be mentioned, why governmental control is preferable, as a means for getting it, to voluntary associations for mutual aid. But whether the position is right or wrong, it’s certainly not one that can be answered simply by defining it out of existence, as you do when you pretend that the only alternatives available are (1) corporate coverage of only those who can afford it; or else (2) universal coverage by means of government mandates; as if there were no (3) universal coverage by non-governmental means.

I can confirm that this did indeed get mentioned — in more or less exactly those words — at least a couple times in the thread.

Of course, the apparent criticism there really is just bizarre. If you’re supposed to answer the question of what happens to the guy right now, while taking the entire political-economic status quo for granted, then the answer to “Who will pay for his care?” is presumably either that he’ll be left to die, or that taxpayers will pick up the tab, depending on where he is hospitalized and on the particulars of his case. But presumably the point of asking the question was supposed to be that you’re interested in the question of who ought to pay for his care, and what might happen if you changed the statist quo in at least some respects?

But if you’re allowed to consider one way in which the statist quo might change (e.g. by zeroing out tax subsidies for care or coverage), then it seems odd to slam someone for saying that what really ought to happen is that the statist quo might change in some other way (e.g. by zeroing out subsidies, monopolies and cartels that ratchet up the costs of medical care). It’s exactly as if some Progressive had answered the same question by talking about single-payer and Roderick started yelling, “Don’t be irrelevant! We don’t have single-payer and the guy is in a coma right now. What are you going to do about that, whiz kid?”

This robbing at gun point metaphor is always trotted out by libertarians
but it is never accurate. The government is democratically elected, and
the robber is not.

Well, great: they haven't got your consent; but they have got majority support.

So before you just had a robber; and now the robber has a posse.

This means that the government has validity even when you do not agree with it.

That conclusion does not follow from the premises that you've listed. You will at least need an auxiliary premise that democratic elections are sufficient confer legitimacy on the use of legal force. But of course there's no reason why a libertarian need believe that that's true. Most libertarians believe that there are at least some limits on what any government can legitimately force you to do, no matter how popular that government or that policy may be.

So ask your 8 year old son this: "if a duly and constitutionally elected
body of government pass a constitutionally valid law, but you disagree
with it, do you still have to comply?"

Good Lord. If I had an 8 year old son, I'd hope that I would have brought him up better than to think that constitutions or majority votes ought to be treated as a veto on your conscience. As a notable Baptist minister once pointed out, "One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"