Holocaust denial is a pretty rough edge.

Craig Bolton: “Further, it is questionable what such a right would involve if robust property rights were otherwise defined and enforced.”

Well, O.K., but this is true of just about any other right on the books, too. (What would a freedom of the press, or free exercise of religion, or the right to keep and bear arms, involve if robust property rights were otherwise defined and enforced? Well, pretty much nothing; but I can’t see how that’s an argument against appealing to freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, or the right to keep and bear arms as principles in legal reasoning about rights.)

‘Given today’s high rate of violence against gays, and given that Roy Moore — then an Alabama state judge, and still today one of the most popular political figures in Alabama — wrote a judicial opinion urging the use of “the power of the sword,” up to and including “confinement and even execution,” against gays, the notion that gays face no threat in the current political climate strikes me as bizarre.’

Well, moreover, the society pictured in V is England under an openly fascist regime. Whatever Huebert thinks about the condition of gay men and lesbians today, historical fascist regimes have historically done things like, well, sending gay men and lesbians off to concentration camps, it seems pretty tin-eared to complain when V for Vendetta has its fictional fascist regime do the same thing.

A fascinating quote and good to hear from Sumner. For an interesting compare and contrast, though, see Benjamin Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ (1888), where Tucker makes quite a similar argument, and indeed says something nearly identical, but construes the whole debate as a debate WITHIN “socialism,” between state socialism (“which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice”) and anarchistic socialism (“which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished”). Thus Tucker:

“The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism. Whoso knows what these two schools want and how they propose to get it understands the Socialistic movement. For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism. There are, in fact, two currents steadily flowing from the center of the Socialistic forces which are concentrating them on the left and on the right; and, if Socialism is to prevail, it is among the possibilities that, after this movement of separation has been completed and the existing order have been crushed out between the two camps, the ultimate and bitterer conflict will be still to come. In that case all the eight-hour men, all the trades-unionists, all the Knights of Labor, all the land nationalizationists, all the greenbackers, and, in short, all the members of the thousand and one different battalions belonging to the great army of Labor, will have deserted their old posts, and, these being arrayed on the one side and the other, the great battle will begin. What a final victory for the State Socialists will mean, and what a final victory for the Anarchists will mean, it is the purpose of this paper to briefly state.”

Tucker, of course, hoped for victory for the Anarchists.

I’d be interested to know how far the difference between Sumner and Tucker here over “socialism” is merely terminological, and how far it’s substantive.

Three of the five men pictured in the first portrait — Washington, Jefferson, and Randolph — exercised absolute personal tyranny over more than 1,000 of their fellow human beings, and politically supported the system that extended that tyranny over some millions of their fellow Southerners. As far as I know, none of the men pictured in the second portrait hold slaves or support slavery.

Might it be the case that Leviathan has distinctly grown for some groups of people, but that it has also distinctly shrunk for others?

I think before we can get any traction on this question we need to be clear about what the competing claims are about. When you “challenge those who argue that FDR ‘saved capitalism’” to provide further information, (1) what do you think your interlocutors are using the word “capitalism” to mean? and (2) what are you using the word “capitalism” to mean?

I ask because there are several different uses of the word “capitalism,” including (1) a voluntary economic order under conditions of laissez-faire et laissez passer (“the free market”), (2) active government support for big business through forcible accumulation, monopolization, and protection of industrial capital (“state capitalism” or “the corporate State”), and (3) a particular form of labor market, in which most goods are produced by wage-laborers working for a boss who owns the means of production (“the wage labor system,” or “boss-directed labor”). But (3) is orthogonal to either (1) or (2) (it could in principle exist under either system) and (1) and (2) are in fact mutually exclusive. (1) has almost never existed in its pure form in human history; (2) and (3) have been very common, especially over the past 150-200 years. (I discuss the terminological issues in more length elsewhere, e.g. at http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/03/31/anarquistas_por.)

So it seems to me that I need to know what “capitalism” means, before I can have any idea of whether FDR saved it, destroyed it, left it untouched, or never even came upon it in the first place.

Grant Gould: “If (as the more mutualist or socialist anarchists hold) free markets led to dispersed and plural ownership of, eg, interstate highways, the scope of life would contract.”

Why’s that?

Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group Academic Blog: Positive Liberty

Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog: Abstain

Best New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group Academic Blog: Positive Liberty

Best New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog: Theory & Practice

Did Savage claim that there isn’t a right to privacy in the Constitution? As I read his column, he seemed to be saying that whether there is one or not, it’s a matter of dispute and that the dispute could be settled unambiguously by adding an explicit amendment protecting the right to privacy. And further that it would be politically advantageous for supporters of the right to privacy to do so. But of course you can believe that while fully believing that the constitution already recognizes the right to privacy.

(You could make a similar argument that the whole first section of the 14th Amendment merely makes more explicit what any reasonable reading of “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” in Article IV Section 4 would demand; but that it was helpful, ca. 1868, to pass an amendment in order to make sure to settle a particular dispute over the kinds of state governments that white Southerners could get away with imposing.)

Well, then, do you think that Paterson is right or wrong?