Derek Wittorff via Alex Strekal

April 10 at 3:32pm

‎Boinks Ayn Rand

http://anti-libertarian-libertarianism.blogspot.com/2012/04/rand-as-philosophical-fascist.html?spref=bl

Charles W. Johnson

There are many different ways to respond to Ayn Rand and her legacy. I’m not sure necrophilia is the best.

April 10 at 3:32pm

Nick Ford

“I’m not sure necrophilia is the best.”

What?

April 10 at 3:33pm

Derek Wittorff

lol

April 10 at 3:33pm

Charles W. Johnson

“Boinks” is sometimes used as if it means the same thing as “Bonks.”

It doesn’t.

April 10 at 3:33pm

Daniel Patrick â’¶

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boink

April 10 at 3:34pm

Nick Ford

Oh yeah, right I knew that but I’ve used it in the Strekelian sense so long I’d forgot about the other connotations.

April 10 at 3:35pm

Derek Wittorff

Its a great analysis.

April 10 at 3:41pm

Charles W. Johnson

I can’t say I agree. Most of the things that Alex finds troubling or flat wrong in Rand are also things that I find deeply troubling or flat wrong, but as far as the article goes, there’s not at lot of analysis there; mostly polemic. Some mention of conclusion, none of arguments, not even any quotes. If anything, what it reads most like is one of Rand’s own sweeping rhetorical assaults on, say, Kant or Plato. Those may or may not be correct on any given point, but they are certainly not the place to go to learn very much what Kant or Plato is about.

April 10 at 3:53pm

Daniel Patrick â’¶

It’s true. I have trouble being open to Kant due to exposure to Rand’s ideas at an impressionable age.

April 10 at 3:56pm

Charles W. Johnson

Utah had a story about alternative health in northern California around Nevada City: “You gotta be open to these things. If you don’t they’ll pry ya open.” Which is about how I felt about Kant after the second half of my 18th Century Philosophy course.

April 10 at 4:01pm

Derek Wittorff

‎”I can’t say I agree. Most of the things that Alex finds troubling or flat wrong in Rand are also things that I find deeply troubling or flat wrong, but as far as the article goes, there’s not at lot of analysis there; mostly polemic. Some mention of conclusion, none of arguments, not even any quotes. If anything, what it reads most like is one of Rand’s own sweeping rhetorical assaults on, say, Kant or Plato. Those may or may not be correct on any given point, but they are certainly not the place to go to learn very much what Kant or Plato is about.”

I can agree there, but it is a paper about Rand, not Kant or Plato.

April 10 at 4:09pm

Derek Wittorff

A little explanation could help, but it’s more than easy to get off track when you’re engaging in philosophical discourse.

April 10 at 4:12pm

Charles W. Johnson

This is an example of what I would take to count as an analysis of Rand and her philosophy (sometimes a good analysis, sometimes not as good, but always an analysis): http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm. The article here is not an analysis or a philosophical discourse; it’s a denunciation. Which may very well be merited, but which is something different.

Why I’m not an objectivist
home.sprynet.com

‎(2) One should always follow reason and never think or act contrary to reason. (I take this to be the meaning of “Reason is absolute.”)

April 10 at 4:12pm

Charles W. Johnson

‎Derek Wittorff: “it is a paper about Rand, not Kant or Plato.”

O.K., I’m not sure what you mean here. Is this a joke about slipping antecedents? Or do you mean to suggest there’s something about Rand that makes this kind of treatment of her more useful or less of an injustice than a similar treatment of Kant or Plato (e.g. that the latter are better or more sophisticated philosophers or something like that)? Or something else?

April 10 at 4:16pm

Derek Wittorff

I see, you think the analysis part is lacking, not the paper itself. I wouldn’t know where to start if I was gonna critique her whole philosophy.

April 10 at 4:27pm

Charles W. Johnson

I’m not sure I’m being clear. My view is that setting out to critique her whole philosophy is almost certainly the wrong goal. I think that if Rand is worth an analysis at all (and I happily leave that as an open question), then everyone involved would benefit more from a focused discussion of a single argument, from premises to conclusion, than from some kind of broadside against the totality of her thought.

April 10 at 4:34pm

Charles W. Johnson

The reason I linked the Huemer piece is because that’s a thing that he does — although he’s actually covering a fairly broad stretch of territory, at each stop he sets out specific arguments in detail and then tries to see, first, how they work on their own, and then, second, whether there’s something wrong with them and if so what a better alternative would be. That’s what I feel like I can recommend as “analysis” of a philosophical position. It is for good or for ill a different thing from assembling a hodgepodge of summaries of her conclusions, wrapping it up in a package, and denouncing that as destructive or poisonous. I mentioned the bit about Plato and Kant because Rand herself is constantly approaching other thinkers this way, and Objectivists tend to eat this stuff up, but whatever value that kind of thing may have, it’s not as analysis, because there isn’t any serious analysis of the philosopher’s arguments, only a denunciation of the perceived downstream consequences of those arguments. But to the extent that there isn’t any analysis of the philosopher’s arguments, there isn’t any analysis of the philosopher, either. Of course whether analysis is really what’s wanted in the first place, or whether something else is (denunciation, disavowal, parody, scurrilous satirical poetry, a sharp whack upside the head, whatever) is a separate question.

April 10 at 4:46pm

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.

Dan,

It’s not clear to me what level the question is supposed to be asked on. If it’s a question about moral ideals — what really ought to be done — then I think the obvious answer is complete and permanent repudiation — government debts …cannot be repaid except through government revenues, and government revenues are always extracted by force from unwilling third parties (viz., us). Those of us from whom they are extracted never consented to the debt at all, and have a perfect right to refuse to pay one damned dime. Of course, if those who did contract the debt (viz., governors at various levels) want to pay out of their own pockets, or to pass the plate and ask for donations, they should be free to do so. But I personally don’t give much of a damn whether or not U.S. or Chinese banks or petrocrat “sovereign wealth funds” ever get “their” money back. I’d be just as happy if they all starved.

If it’s supposed to be asked on a level that’s constrained in some sense by practical political possibilities, then I think the answer is still repudiation, but for a different reason. Not only are none of the possible “solutions” to the structural problem (massive spending cuts and/or tax increases to gain tax-surpluses, selling government “property” out to big buyers, etc.) even minimally just; they aren’t minimally likely, either. Nobody in government is going to do the things that they would practically need to do in order to reduce deficits or pay down government debts because they make decisions on a political, not a fiscal, basis, and face structural incentives that make permanent, sky-high-and-growing government debts not only unavoidable, but actually quite attractive. The structural constraints are such that they are almost surely never going to stop running up debts until their capacity to continue running them up breaks down completely and irreparably (either due to diminishing returns from tax increases, or due to diminishing returns from inflation, or from a complete crack-up bust of the financial system); at which point they will partially or entirely repudiate anyway. (The hope is that they will repudiate entirely because they will collapse and not get up again. But whether they do or not, I have no expectation that any politician would or could ever do anything to pay off the government’s debts, ever.)

‎@Anok: “if you read what he wrote you would understand that he uses the word “crime” for immoral behavior”

Well, no he doesn’t, not that I can see. If you see a place where he does make this identification, feel free to point it out, but he…re is what I found him saying about criminality and morality:

(1) “If there are, then you merely disagree with my particular view of what is criminal and what isn’t. You say it’s a crime to abuse someone, I say not. … Now the reasoning on my part is quite clear: there’s no physical violence involved. Crime allows for force to be used. I think the abuse is a bad thing, but cannot be countered with force.” (2) “I do not like the word morality, because it is very tainted with prejudice from older times, and also, it spreads the idea that there’s a way that people have to think. I only try to think about what people can and cannot do.” (3) “Actually, to me, as abuse is not a crime, any use of force is necessary disproportional and unjustified. I think social pressure is more adapted to this scenario.”

(1) states the view that an act is criminal only if “physical violence [is] involved,” and further that there are some bad things — in particular, abuse is “a bad thing” — which are not criminal (thus, not answerable with force). (2) states the view that he’d rather not use “morality” as the term to describe what people can and cannot do. (3) restates the view that abuse, though bad (hence, answerable with “social pressure”) is not criminal (hence, not answerable with physical force), and further that to use force against someone who is not guilty of a crime is “unjustified.

As far as I can tell, this pretty clearly suggests that he is using the term “crime” to describe a SUBSET of “bad things.” (I’d be happy say immoral actions, but I don’t agree with Marcel about (2), so.) He says, or at least strongly sugges…ts, above that all crimes are wrong (immoral, if you please), but not that everything wrong (or immoral) is a crime. But the conditional “If abuse is not a crime, then it is not an immoral behavior” would only be true if you made a claim he hasn’t made — and in fact has specifically rejected (that all immoral actions are crimes).

‎@Anok: “He further states that self defense against abuse is wrong because abuse is not a ‘crime’.”

Sure; the claim is that you shouldn’t use force against people unless they are guilty of crimes. I don’t think that’s a particularly nutty v…iew. I happen to think that he’s right about that. (I don’t know if I would agree with his reasons for it; my reason, anyway, is that I’m against all forms of hierarchy and domination. And I consider controlling people through aggressive violence to be both hierarchical and dominating. Even if those people really are terrible assholes.)

@Anok: “And regardless of how he uses the word abuse is considered both a legal crime and a moral crime by the majority of non nutter societies.”

Well, I don’t much care what the majority of societies, nutter or non-nutter, think about it. Do you? If I were basing my moral convictions on opinion polls as to what the majority of societies think, I certainly wouldn’t be an Anarchist.

@Anok: ‘Eh, anyone who uses “crime”, which is a social contract regarding law in place of the word “morality” which is a pretty universal term that applies to human behavior …”

You seem to have some pretty strong views about the meaning of the word “crime,” even though Marcel (among others) is clearly using the word in a way different from the way that you are using it. One way to deal with a situation like that is to say something like, “O.K., well, the important thing here isn’t spelling; it’s clear communication. So let’s distinguish some terms for the sake of communication — ‘moral crime,’ say, to mean what you mean, and ‘legal crime’ to mean what I mean.” Or, I guess, you could just assert that “crime” means what you’re using it to mean, and insist that the way other folks are using it is wrong, and the way you’re using it is right — which is what you seem to be doing here. But if the latter, where are you getting your intuitions about what the term “crime” obviously means? From dictionaries? From common usage? (But, in case of the latter, the fact that a lot of people use it in a different way makes it clear that the common usage is ambiguous…) Somewhere else?

@Anok: “You support abuse.”

I don’t think that’s a reasonable reading of what Marcel said at all.

He didn’t say that abuse is basically O.K.; he said it is a bad thing, but not criminal. Saying that it’s not CRIMINAL is not the same thing as saying that it’s not WRONG — there are lots of things that are vices, but not crimes. (For example, winning chess matches by cheating when your opponent’s back is turned; talking during movies at the theater; plagiarizing a college paper; cheating on your partner; refusing to visit a dying friend for no good reason; etc.) The claim isn’t that these things are O.K., or that they aren’t seriously wrong. Some vices are minor — talking at the movies, say. But some crimes — stealing a grape, say, or maliciously stomping on someone’s foot — are minor too. And some vices — dishonesty, cruelty, faithlessness, etc. — are grave. Cruelty or dishonesty are far more serious wrongs than some things that are crimes, but they are wrong in different ways, and for different reasons, from the crimes. And that that difference may make a difference for the appropriate response.

@Alex Peak: “The problem with the whole it’s-okay-to-initiate-force-against-nonviolent-assholes idea is problematic because of the slippery slope.”

I suppose that there is a slope, and maybe the slope is slippery, but is that really what you see as the problem with the judgment that “it’s Ok to use violence against people who are being major assholes”? I mean, when I read something like that, my main problem with it is that it’s a despicable sentiment, which praises thuggishness and the use of violence with the explicit purpose of domination and control. It may also have downstream consequences on other people’s behaviors in different situations which also suck, but even if it does not have those downstream consequences, it’s still a pretty sucky attempt when it comes to being a human being.

@Alex Peak: “None of this ought to be taken as a rejection of what Charles Johnson calls thick libertarianism. My understanding of (certain approaches to) thick libertarianism is that it is the view that liberty would be most easily achieved or maintained if society also adopted certain norms—e.g., rejecting racism, sexism, and homophobia—but that an embrace of these norms needs not, and ought not, be coupled with a rejection of the nonaggression axiom.”

Thanks for the nod; you’re certainly right that the thick conceptions of libertarianism that I would defend are not conceptions where the idea is to provide loopholes for justified aggressive force or fraud, or where the “thickness” erases the content of the “libertarianism” in select cases. The idea is that there are forms of oppression, abuse, social evils, etc. which are acted out by means other than physical force or fraud, and it’s important to recognize these where they exist. Not so that you can respond to them with aggression, but rather so that non-aggressive forms of oppression or abuse can be met with serious, confrontational, nonviolent resistance.

@Alex Peak: “And libertarianism, very simply, is the belief that people should be free from aggression”

@Alex Gleason: “Apparently you have cast Egoists out of the libertarian movement, Mr. Peak.”

I’m not sure how. There is nothing in most versions of philosophical egoism which require the egoist to be in favor of aggression (as Alex defines it). Indeed, egoists have generally been against that, and thought that people should be free from it; although they suggest that it’s instrumentally or strategically valuable, rather than being valuable for its own sake. That’s rather the point of Stirner’s Union of Egoists — the claim that there are egoistic reasons for free selves to abandon aggression in favor of mutual alliance.

@Jacob Vardy: “are you familiar with the Spanish term ‘acracia?'”

There is a cognate term in English-language philosophical writing, usually spelled “akrasia.” Unfortunately it already has another, mostly unrelated meaning It got picked up because the Greek moral philosophers wrote about the problem of ἀκρασία, which used to be translated “incontinence” but now is more commonly just transliterated to “akrasia.” The Greeks (and hence now English-speaking philosophers commenting on the problem) used it to refer to the predicament of people who believed in a moral principle but didn’t live up to it — who acted contrary to it. Thus Socrates seems to have argued that akrasia was impossible (if you acted contrary to the principle, he held that you must not really have believed in it in the end); Aristotle thought that it was possible but had something nuanced to say about the best way to describe the predicament; etc. Anyway, that usage also came about because of the literal meaning of “without command”; but the English-language use is meant torefer to a lack of control over yourself (the Greeks’ idea being that akratics were enslaved by their own passions or appetites), rather than a lack of control over others.

@Drew: “How about this – the state is antithetical …to individual liberty”

Isn’t that what a libertarian (at least, the kind of libertarian who would refer to the State as a criminal gang) usually means by the statement that the State is criminal?

@Anok Kropotkin: “Oh, and ‘crime’ is a general term used to define what governing bodies consider undesirable behavior.”

I don’t think that’s the only meaning of the word “crime.”

Certainly, sometimes people use “crime” just to mean “whatever the government has forbidden.” But when someone describes, say, Donald Rumsfeld as a “war criminal,” or when someone describes the Holocaust or other examples of state mass-murder as “crimes against humanity,” that they mean to claim that Pinochet or the Nazis or whoever were somehow doing something illegal. What they did was perfectly legal, according to government law, and authorized by the governing bodies (since these criminals were in charge of the governing bodies). So to describe it as “criminal” must mean something other than simply disapproval from governing bodies.

@Angela,

I’m sorry if you find the essay disappointing. I certainly didn’t co-write the essay intending to make women “grateful;” I co-wrote it intending to argue for a specific point of view. I am glad where people have found it useful for clarifying or stimulating thoughts; sorry where they haven’t.

I also don’t think the point of the essay was to “rehabilitate” much of anyone, but rather than my trying to guess here, could you let me know who “the woman who destroyed feminism” is?

@Angela: “‘left-libertarian’ is just another name for another hen’s circle of white males.”

Maybe. Most libertarian circles are predominantly white, and predominantly male. To the extent it’s true, I think that’s a problem with the movement. But that’s not an argument against the content of the paper, is it? (And the fact that I know “left-libertarians” who are not white, and left-libertarians who are not male, is not an argument for it, either.)

@Angela: “You either believe in the NAP or you don’t. All these new names for libertarianism are bullshit”

“Libertarianism,” as I understand it, is a new name for “Anarchism.” (When it’s not — e.g. among Bob Barr supporters or Constitution fundamentalists or bomb-the-world Objectivists — “libertarianism” is generally not something I want anything to do with.) I’m not sure that makes a name bullshit; it just means that language evolves and people have shifting purposes in communicating.

In any case, Roderick and I both believe in the NAP, as we wrote in that essay and have said repeatedly all over the place. But he and I also believe in some other things that not all NAP-adherents believe in — for example, about the relationship between the NAP and some other social or political commitments that I have; and about the best strategy for achieving the political goal of a non-aggressive form of society; etc. So when communicating with other NAP-adherents about why I disagree with some of the details of their approach, it’s handy to have a label to help sum up where I’m coming from, and give a quick suggestion about the differences I have with them. Hence the “left-” prefix. I could just say (using the oldest term for our approach) that I am an “individualist anarchist,” like Tucker, Spooner, or de Cleyre). But that doesn’t mean as much to people now as it did in 1892, so sometimes “left-libertarian” is the best way of clarifying what I’m on about.

@Lassiter: “There is a percentage of left-feminists, female and male genders alike, who really, truly, deeply believe that women, by their nature, need government and laws to protect them from themselves.”

It is certainly true that there are statist feminists, and statist feminists often propose statist laws in the attempt to advance their political goals. Fortunately, there are many feminists (including the radical feminists we discuss in the paper) who have provided valuable critiques questioning that approach. Some are Anarchists; others are not. Those that are not haven’t carried their critiques through to consistent anti-statism; but I don’t need for people to be 100% ideologically consistent anti-statists in order to learn something from their writing or example.

In any case: whatever other “left-feminists” may believe, Roderick and I are Anarchists. We reject the claim that statist “protective” laws are necessary, desirable, or legitimate as means to feminist goals. For reasons that we discuss at some length in the paper.

@Tyler: “Why is there something about feminism written by two men?”

Well, why not?

@Tyler: “why would you not include women in the writing process”

Because it was written to advance a specific argument that Roderick and I had already discussed, in the middle of an ongoing conversation in which we represent only two voices. It’s not a manifesto written by committee, or intended (the Good forbid) to try and say everything that there is to say about libertarian feminism, let alone feminism as such.

@Bryan: “aside from a few questionable/unfortunate comments on homosexuals”

1. Well, aside from that, I think that Hoppe’s expressed views about immigration are both despicable and anti-libertarian (in the sense that he directly proposes continuing — indeed, escalating — massive government violence against innocent victims, solely on the basis of nationality and socioeconomic class).

2. While not involving direct proposals for state aggression, I also think that his expressed views on “internal ranks of authority” within the family (as discussed in the LibFem essay), traditional authority and “natural elites” within society, his qualified praise for hereditary monarchy, and his demand that “libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind” are all absolute rot.

3. I think Hoppe’s comments about homosexuality are rather worse than “questionable” or “unfortunate.” I’m not sure what you have in mind here — do you mean his (ridiculous and insulting) comments about homosexuality and time-preference in his UNLV lectures? His bizarre series of sexuality-related personal attacks on Tom Palmer? His frankly totalitarian insistence (in D:TGTF) that “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered life-styles, such as, for instance … homosexuality … will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order”? I think these are all pretty despicable, and while you might be able to pass off the first two as personal idiocies of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s, which can be passed over in order to get at the core of his theory, the last — the stuff about his “covenant communities” — is part of the core of what his theory is, of what he thinks a free society has to look like in order to be sustainable. (Much the same goes for, e.g., his Know-Nothing views on immigration, which are also attached to the hip to his picture of “covenant communities.”)

For reference, here’s Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (p. 218): “In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. … There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They–the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism–will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

“It should be obvious then that and why libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind. The current state of moral degeneration, social disintegration and cultural rot is precisely the result of too much–and above all erroneous and misconceived–tolerance. Rather than having all habitual democrats, communists, and alternative lifestylists quickly isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization in accordance with the principles of the covenant, they were tolerated by society.”

Of course, none of this prevents one from citing Hoppe on those occasions where he is right. But may I just suggest that in a paper intended to discuss a radical form of libertarian feminism, I’ve found those occasions pretty rare?

By “this guy” do you mean Roderick Long, the author of the article? If so, then I don’t think you’ve correctly understood the “view of Christianity” he espouses. As a matter of fact, Long’s post is not about promoting any view of Christianity at all. If you’ll look more carefully at the post, you’ll see that it’s about promoting a particular view of conservatism.

Raphael,… See More

Roderick explains what he means by “Austro-Athenian” in the tagline of the blog: ‘”Austro” as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, “Athenian” as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.’ It has to do with Roderick’s interests in the joint and several insights of Viennese philosophy, the Austrian school of economics, classical philosophy, and Athenian democratic theory.

Junto,

Man, I already read Ayn Rand’s review of J.H. Randall’s /Aristotle/ a long time ago [*], and it didn’t taste any better coming back up than it did going down.

Rand was many things, but a careful scholar of antiquity she was not, and especially not when she lapsed into this kind of world-historical theorizing. Her view of Plato, and of Aristotle’s relationship to him, is so wide of the mark as to be laughable. (For starters, if you think that Plato’s point is to doubt “the cognitive efficacy of man’s [sic] mind,” or to “deny and surrender … [the human person’s] particular mode of consciousness” then I can only say that your reading of Plato is a curious one. And would perhaps benefit from actually doing some, well, reading, of what Plato has to say about reason, consciousness and cognition.)

[*] Originally appeared in the Objectivist Newsletter May 1963; reprinted in The Voice of Reason, pp. 6-12; also excerpted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon under “Aristotle,” if I’m not mistaken.

@Paul, I think that most libertarian discussion on “equality before the law,” “equality of opportunity,” “equality of outcomes,” etc. tends to be pretty confused and unproductive, for the reasons that Roderick Long talks about in “Equality: The Unknown Ideal” (http://mises.org/daily/804). For what it’s worth, while I think (as Gary says) that the really important issue is equality of political authority (equality before the law is valuable only a special case of that, and worthless in the absence of equality of authority), I also think that libertarians who rag on the ideal of equality of outcomes are missing something politically and socially important. Obviously, coercion should not be used, Harrison Bergeron-style, to somehow guarantee equality of outcomes. But I think that there is an important question, not about how to guarantee equality of outcomes, but rather where most of the actually-existing inequalities of outcomes come from. Do they largely come from free market processes? Or do they largely come from government intervention? I would argue the latter — that we don’t have free labor markets, capital markets, or land markets right now, and that most of the extent, intensity, and durability of socioeconomic inequality can be traced either to the direct effects of government coercion, or the indirect ripple effects of the rigidified and rigged markets that government coercion creates. So if you want less socioeconomic inequality, I’d say the best way to get it is through individual liberty and free markets; in any case, the inequalities of outcome that we have today are to a very large extent the result of the inequalities of authority (invasions against individual liberty) that we face.

@Gary, thanks for the kind words and for the mention. The bit about Lee’s picture of the electoral left and the electoral right’s views on majority rule was one of the more … interesting moments of the conversation. (Along with being informed that Anarchistic socialism actually started with the CNT.) I didn’t spend any time responding to it because, really, it’s just bewildering, and what can you say at that point?

For what it’s worth, the conversation was arranged on request from Mark Edge at Free Talk Live. We’d done separate interviews for FTL the previous night and Mark thought it would be interesting to get some cross-talk going.

@Angela, I don’t know precisely what he calls himself, but Doren is head of CEI’s Bureaucrash these days. (Which is a whole story in itself.) So, there’s some broad, upper-quadrant-of-the-Nolan-Chart sort of sense in which you could probably call him a “libertarian.” But that’s about as far as it goes. Which did cause some problems for figuring out how the conversation ought to go — since the debate was nominally about left and right, but really also was about a number of cross-cutting issues (e.g. anarchism vs. small-statism, radicalism vs. reformism, anti-electoralism vs. conventional political participation, revisionist vs. establishment views of history, etc. etc. etc.).

Also, thank you for the reminder of B-1 Bob. I used to watch him all the time back when I was in high school — the most entertaining act on C-SPAN this side of Minister’s Questions.

Really? That sounds like an oddly restrictive picture of “free market practices” to me. Let’s say that, in a non-communal, commercially-oriented market, I decide to go into business selling pizza with a partner. I’ll do the cooking (I like to cook); she’ll do the delivery (I hate delivery driving; she likes that kind of thing). We’ll split up the administrative and bookkeeping tasks. Under the heading of the partnership, we buy a store, an oven, a delivery van, and some other equipment. Using the equipment that we bought jointly with our pooled capital, I make pizzas; she delivers them to customers.

Now, if we have in fact formed a partnership, then I cannot just individually turn around and sell the store or the oven out from under her. I can’t set prices to be just anything I want, either, even though the pizzas I cook are the product of my individual labor. That’s a business decision which needs to be made jointly, unless we agreed to give me unilateral control over pricing, which we might well not do.

Does that make our pizza partnership something other than a “free market practices”? If so, it would seem like your conception of the free market allows for almost none of the commercial (let alone communal!) activity practiced in any modern market to be counted as “free market practice.” Which seems odd. If not, then what’s the relevant difference between the joint ownership and joint decision-making involved in my partnership, and the joint ownership and joint decision-making involved in a voluntary commune, where the members of the commune agree to joint ownership of land, shops or large-scale capital goods — with similar obligations of joint decision-making?