Kennedy,

Here’s the article from the Ron Paul Political Report. The passage about the Rodney King beating in particular starts about a third of the way down: Los Angeles Racial Terrorism.

Along the way the Mystery Writer also tries to poison the well by mentioning that a couple months later the cops caught Rodney King picking up a prostitute (so what?) and that when he tried to get away, he allegedly came close to running down one of the poor ol’ vice cops who so righteously “intervened.”

One of my favorite parts of the article, along the way, is when we’re referred to the testimony of “expert Burt Blumert” as to the role of commie splinter sects in the rioting. Not an “expert” on anything in particular, mind you; just an “expert,” ’cause he’s Burt Blumert. Goes to show that, in some ways, the LRC writing style hasn’t changed much in lo these many years.

Taylor:

However, if I remember right, he tried to argue that racism isn’t really congruent with libertarianism because it violates the NAP somehow.

This is certainly not Roderick Long’s position.

His position is that racism is (1) objectionable in its own right (as irrational and collectivist), and also (2) objectionable from a libertarian standpoint. (1) is a good enough reason to criticize racism; something doesn’t have to be criminal for it to be open to criticism as foolish or vicious. But he also argues (2), not because racism per se violates the nonaggression principle, but rather because of tensions between the two on levels other than that of logical entailment.

Specifically, Long thinks that racist collectivism tends to interfere with the correct application of the non-aggression principle, that racist ideology will tend to causally undermine the implementation of libertarianism in the real world, and also that racism is logically incompatible with the broader underlying principles that justify the libertarian theory of justice. So the claim is that a libertarian could be a nonviolent racist without being inconsistent; but she could not do so reasonably, which is something different.

For details, cf. Politics Against Politics, in both the post and in the comments.

Racism per se is not incompatible with libertarian principles, but a police state is. Which is what the Mystery Writer happened to be promoting, at least as far as the Negroes are concerned. More or less all of the nastiest remarks directed against black folks in the late-80s/early-90s race-baiting articles were made in the context of articles directly calling for more aggressive and violent tactics by urban police forces.

If I recall correctly, the article from 1992 that’s attracted so much notoriety (for the crack about welfare checks, and for the estimation that 95% of black men in D.C. can be considered “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” whatever that means) also included, amongst other things, a charming extended passage defending the police beating the hell out of Rodney King.

Mainardi,

If you say so. I’m actually more sympathetic to Rothbard’s appraoch than to Friedman’s, and more a fan of Lysander Spooner than I am of Rothbard. But whatevs.

It’s good of you to acknowledge your error.

Mainardi,

Again, if you don’t know that he’s an anarchist then you haven’t read (or don’t remember) enough of “what he writes” to make an informed judgment about him or his work.

In The Machinery of Freedom he declares himself an anarchist on the first page of the introduction (“I hold that there are no proper functions of government. In that sense I am an anarchist. All things that governments do can be divided into two categories—those we could do away with today and those we hope to be able to do away with tomorrow.”) You might also consult Part III, “Anarchy is Not Chaos,” in which he spends over 50 pages (about a quarter of the length of the book) on the topic.

Reasonable people admit when they do not know enough about someone to tell whether somebody’s ill-conceived argument makes (say) a surprisingly boneheaded gaffe, or whether it’s indicative of being a moron, or whether it’s indicative of some other trait. What you have been doing, on the other hand, is pure bullshitting on the basis of clearly inadequate knowledge.

Lopez,

I can’t see where I complained about name-calling as such.

What I’m saying is that Mainardi evidently does not know enough about Friedman’s work to have any idea whether he is a “moron” or not. If you don’t know enough about Friedman to recall that he is an anarchist, then you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to David Friedman or his work. That’s not a problem, but turning around and talking about him when you have no idea what you’re talking about, is.

My complaint has to do not with name-calling, but with loud-mouthed ignorance.

Hellen,

I didn’t claim that The Machinery of Freedom “touches the more profound question of rights theory.” Nor did I deny that Friedman takes a utilitarian rather than a natural rights approach to the question.

What I did say is that Friedman is an anarchist, not a minarchist, and that his most famous work is a detailed explanation and defense of the institutional-economic structure of an anarcho-capitalist society, especially (“Anarchy Is Not Chaos”), which directly and explicitly defends stateless institutions over so-called “limited government.”

Whether it is a good book or a bad book or a book that’s good at some things and bad at others, it is clearly not a book by “a soft-core, utilitarian minarchist with not enough guts to take his premises to their logical conclusion, i.e. anarchism.” There’s nothing wrong with being ignorant about a particular writer’s work; but there is something wrong with loudly proclaiming baseless opinions about it when you don’t know what you’re talking about. That was a stupid mistake, and you ought to be embarrassed that you made it.

Whether Friedman is a moron or not depends on what he’s capable of, not on whether one quotation does or does not make a boneheaded mistake. You know something about the one quotation, but you apparently know very little about anything else that David Friedman has ever written. You can hardly expect your judgments about his capabilities to be taken seriously when you have no basis for knowing what you are talking about.

Hellen Mainardi:

Until now, I thought him to be a soft-core, utilitarian minarchist with not enough guts to take his premises to their logical conclusion, i.e. anarchism.

David Friedman is an anarchist. He is very well known as such. His most famous book, The Machinery of Freedom, is one of the first and most detailed works on the economic / institutional structure of an anarcho-capitalist society. In point of fact, if there is one thing that David Friedman is known for amongst libertarians, it is being an anarcho-capitalist.

I think that Friedman’s complaints against the use of “statist,” “collectivist,” etc. are silly and should have been thought through more carefully. But he’s certainly nothing like a “moron,” and in any case it seems that you have not paid enough attention to even the most basic facts about his views or his work for you to comment intelligently on what he is or is not capable of.

Kennedy: If the Cold War isn’t over then who’s fighting against collectivism? Collectivism is nearly universally embraced by Americans.

Well, sure, but of course that was true during the height of the Cold War, too. The anti-Communist mainstream weren’t fighting collectivism, they were just fighting for their own brand of managerial collectivism over the Soviet style.

If anything, blind deference to State prerogatives and identification with the established order of power are arguably much weaker forces now than they were around, say, 1962.

Holmes:

I think that your central argument — that consent to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any child that results — is dead wrong, but I’d rather give my explanation why a post to itself. For now, a couple questions about the view expressed later in your post:

1. If you believe this, then why did you bother to argue in the first place that consenting to sex entails accepting responsibility for bearing any children that result? Since you go on to argue that abortion is still illegitimate even for pregnancies that resulted from rape, you apparently think that consent is irrelevant, and that women bear responsibility for bearing children whether they accepted that responsibility or not. If the lack of consent to sex is irrelevant to a woman’s duties toward a fetus resulting from rape, then I don’t see how the presence of consent to sex becomes relevant to a woman’s duties towards a fetus resulting from consensual sex.

2. Since you apparently do think that consent to sex is irrelevant, and that the needs for a fetus’s life outweigh the unwilling mother’s claims to her own bodily organs, in what sense is Thomson’s Famous Violist case a bad analogy for you? Doesn’t the position you defend in the second part of your post commit you to saying that the cases are analogous, and simply drawing the opposite conclusion from Thomson?

After all, you can’t point to the fact that you didn’t volunteer your bodily organs for the use of the Famous Violinist as a point of disanalogy. You’ve explicitly denied that a fetus’s claim on its mother’s internal organs depends on her having consented. So it looks like the conclusion you ought to draw is that the cases are analogous in all the morally relevant respects, the Famous Violinist has a right to keep on using your body against your will, and if you disconnect her, that’s a form of criminal homicide.

If you’re willing to draw that conclusion, then your position is at least internally consistent. God only knows how you intend to reconcile it with anything recognizable as a libertarian theory of rights to person and property, though.

Starr,

Criticism of Barnett’s work should of course focus on the position advocated, not a misunderstanding of the position. But if Barnett tells us that he is deliberately obscuring or downplaying his real position in some forums, then he does bear some of the responsibility for misunderstandings of his work, even if he makes his position more clear in other forums. Particularly when Barnett knows that large portions of the intended audience of his book aren’t familiar with those other forums.

Kennedy,

Note that in his exchange in JLS 19.4, Barnett also more or less stated openly that he knowingly obscured his anarchism out of considerations of audience:

… While there is much that I disagree with in Huebert’s review, in this Reply I will focus on one crucial respect in which he misunderstands my thesis. This concerns the concept of constitutional legitimacy I develop and defend in my book.

Part of the fault for this misunderstanding may be mine. Although I fully expected some libertarians to make this mistake, because my book was aimed at a more general audience, I nevertheless did not address it explicitly. For this reason, I am sincerely grateful to Mr. Huebert for putting this misconception into print and thereby providing me with the perfect forum in which to rectify it …. (71, emphasis added).

… So when Mr. Huebert observes that I “do not address how a government may legitimately have a monopoly on the use of force and the provision of defense” (p. 105), he reveals his misunderstanding of both my project and my argument. It should not be clear that I do not address this question because I continue to deny that “government may legitimately have such a monopoly,” although I would now substitute the word “justly” in place of “legitimately” in this particular context. (75)

I do wonder why he thinks it wouldn’t matter to his “general audience” (including the general run of Con Law scholars) whether he is defending (1) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as one legal system among many in an anarchistic social order, or rather (2) the legitimacy of the “lost” Constitution as the basis for a monopoly State. In any case, it should hardly be surprising that the many, who do not read JLS, misunderstand his point.