william:

I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. … I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs)

Well, either people have an unconditional right to possession of atomic weapons or they don’t. If they lean towards the position that you say you intuitively support, then the rights-based case is pretty easy to make out. (Right to nonviolently possess powerful tools as long as you don’t threaten to use them aggressively against any identifiable victims, etc.)

If you lean more towards a position that would allow forcible disarmament, then the challenge is to come up with a non-strictly-consequentialist argument to the effect that it doesn’t violate the rights of the person being disarmed. That’s a lot harder but I don’t think it’s impossible. (Presumably it would have something to do with the lack of possible non-aggressive uses for currently-feasible sorts of atomic weapons and some conception of a standing threat. And presumably you could make out much the same case against, say, private possession of some killer nanoplague. If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use — e.g. asteroid demolition, low-yield weapons, whatever — then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.)

For someone like Roderick, who holds that considerations about what has good or bad results can actually play a role in deliberation about what rights people have (and vice versa, in deliberation about what would count as a good or bad result), there are a lot of further nuances that I haven’t mentioned.

Either way, it seems to me like this issue is probably orthogonal to the consequentialist-natural rights debate. Or if it’s angled a bit, the angle actually would tend to tilt rightsers more towards your own expressed position than it would consequentialists.

Well, I’m sure it depends on what you mean by “promote business investment.” If you spell out what you mean by that, then we may perhaps agree, but as it stands, that kind of terminology is often used to represent something which has proven wholly toxic throughout the formerly colonized world.

In the political context of international development politics, especially as it is typically applied to sub-Saharan Africa, there are lots and lots of active schemes to “promote business investment.” The problem is that these schemes are typically driven by large inter-state governmental agencies like the IMF and World Bank; in substance, they typically involved large tax-funded government-to-government loans, packaged with stipulations that the local government bring certain key legislation (notably, Intellectual Property monopolies) into line with the requirements of large business interests, that they implement bureaucratic professionalization of local government (in the name of “good government” and rooting out “corruption”), and that they channel the money into big government forced-modernization boondoggles (e.g. large-scale government infrastructure projects), incentives for large projects by a handful of large multinational corporations, and large-scale privateering commissions for government-backed monopolies on natural resource extraction, utilities, etc.

All of which is to say that these kind of schemes “promote business investment” by means of large-scale government privilege and government-to-government transfers — when what is really needed is not that kind of political scheming, but rather for international politicos to back off and leave Somalia the hell alone, so as to allow a genuine, spontaneous forms of development to emerge. These may well involve various sorts of domestic and foreign “business investment,” but if so, they ought to be attracted to the investments by the prospects for peaceful cooperation, not by the prospects for rent-seeking and the efforts of political bodies to “promote” them.

Jason,

Thanks for the link and the reply.

I recognize that there are minarchists more radical or principled than Dale Franks, who would have refused to collaborate in a drug conviction. I have other problems with their position (after all, I’m not a minarchist), but not the problem that I have with Dale Franks. I didn’t mean to imply that every minarchist would have done what he did.

However, I do think that it’s fair for me to suggest that being a minarchist makes one systematically more likely to indulge in that kind of legalistic error than one might otherwise be. Being an anarchist has built-in intellectual safeguards against it, whereas being a minarchist doesn’t. (That’s not intended as an argument for anarchism over minarchism per se; rather it’s why I think that this case and others like it go to support my prior argument that people who have already been convinced of anarchism for other reasons should be cautious about how closely they work with smaller-government campaigns or institutions.)

As far as drug trial juries go, I would happily lie about my political views in order to get on the jury, and then, if I got on it, do everything in my power to obstruct or prevent a conviction. I think that the prosecutor in a drug case has no more moral entitlement to get the truth from me than the Gestapo would if they stopped by to ask whether I’m hiding any Jews in my attic. And while the pay scale for sitting as a juror would be shitty compared to what I could be making for my time in other pursuits, I’d be happy to give up the profits in order to help an innocent person go free.

VRB: Why is Lincoln singled out when millions of lives had been ruined under all the presidents until then, even the ones that libertarians honor …

I can’t speak for libertarians as a group, but I am a libertarian and I can’t think of a single President of the United States that I “honor.” I happen to think that all of them were perfectly repulsive, and those who preceded Lincoln deserve special contempt, both for their ongoing use of Federal bayonets to enforce fugitive slave laws and protect Southern slavers from uprisings, and also for their repeated forays into ethnic cleansing and genocide against American Indians. Other libertarians, especially those who are minarchists rather than (like me) anarchists, might be somewhat less sweepingly harsh. On the other hand, they’re also likely to be somewhat less harsh towards Lincoln in particular.

However, the reason that Lincoln’s under discussion at the moment, rather than every other President in U.S. history, is that the post is about secession and the U.S. Civil War. Since Lincoln was President during the U.S.’s largest-scale secession crisis and during the U.S. Civil War, it makes sense to discuss Lincoln, but going on about how I loathe and despise most or all of the other Presidents in U.S. history would have been somewhat off the topic.

Jason,

Just so we’re clear, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest, in setting up my hypothetical, that I was under any delusions as to the motives of Lincoln or the other Federalis in the U.S. Civil War. I’m well aware that the liberation of the slaves was not in the least a war aim, at least at the beginning of the war. Part of the point of the abstractified hypothetical was to make an a fortiori argument: if anything could justify the reconquest and occupation of the South on libertarian grounds, it would be the liberation of Southern slaves. But the liberation of Southern slaves would not in fact justify the reconquest and occupation of the South, even if (contrary to fact) that had been the cause that the Feds went to war for. Thus nothing could justify the reconquest and occupation of the South on libertarian grounds. (There might be a legitimate case for something different — such as the use of armed raids to liberate slaves, when not followed by conquest and occupation — but what it might justify is different from what actually happened in the U.S. Civil War precisely to the extent that it doesn’t involve any attempt to forcibly override white Southerners’ decisions to secede.)

To the extent that the Feds engaged in a brutal war and occupation, killing, maiming, and ruining millions of people in the process, for reasons that had nothing to do with the liberation of Southern slaves, I think that that makes the Feds’ position that much more repulsive, and obviously indefensible.

As for the rest of your discussion, it’s interesting, and deserves a careful reply, but the reply will probably take more space than I have here. Perhaps soon, on my blog.

Kuznicki: I agree with almost all of what Horwitz writes here, though I will say there’s a mighty fine line between using secession as an interesting riff in libertarian theory, and using secession as a dog whistle to draw out the neo-Confederates. On one foot: While the right to secession for a just cause is inalienable, there’s an… interesting… tendency to forget all about causes, and justice, when talking about secession in the American context.

There surely is, and where it happens, including or especially among professed radical libertarians, it should be called out in the name of historical truth. But I’m not sure whether I understand the connection between your last sentence and the previous one. Are you claiming that the right of secession is qualified or limited if the motives behind secession include the pursuit or perpetuation of “an unjust cause”? If so, why?

If A is governing B, and B is violating C’s rights, and B ends up seceding from A in order to perpetuate the violation of C’s rights, then there may be a libertarian case for A having a right to intervene, as a third party, to aid C against B. Not because B lacked the right to secede, but because A has a right to intervene even against independent rights-violators in order to rescue their victims. But if so, then the right to intervene that A enjoys is surely conditional on a number of factors (such as the availability of other means for rescuing C, whether the proposed intervention will or will not create a state of affairs that materially improves on the former situation for C, whether the proposed intervention will or will not involve sins of commission against innocent bystanders, etc.). And I can see no basis for saying that the injustice of the cause that motivates B’s secession provides any kind of basis for A to blast his way in, occupy the territory, and forcibly restore an open-ended, ongoing regime. If C’s human rights and A’s right to rescue jointly establish a right for A to intervene against B, then that right only goes as far as the actual task of rescuing C, and no further.

The statements on race and homosexuality are perfectly vile and deserve condemnation, whoever wrote them. However, I’m a bit baffled by this:

Paul’s newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society”

Well, shouldn’t it?

Most of the time, when we talk about a free society, part of what we are talking about is a society in which the powers of rulers derive from “the consent of the governed” rather than from unilateral command. But that would seem to mean that where consent has been refused or withdrawn, a right of secession must be recognized. Do you disagree?

and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. …”

Is there something wrong with this? If so, what?

Jonathan:

Now, as some have pointed out, their theology may not have been sound (do all world religions really teach the same Truth?) and the metaphysic behind the Declaration may be unprovable, but the Founders’ formulation did lay very solid ground for the Founding of liberal democracy in general, the United States in particular. Given that liberal democracies produce for those nations which embrace its ideals, an abundance of, in Allan Bloom’s words, “peace, gentleness, prosperity, productivity” and, I might add, “pluralism,” I believe such ideals, in the abstract, are worth defending with a religious zeal, as though they were the Gospel, regardless of whether they can be falsified in a scientific hypothesis as such.

Do you seriously intend to claim that a doctrine admittedly false (or “unprovable”) should be zealously defended, in the face of the evidence, if it might be politically expedient to have lots of people to believe in it?

Jason:

Peering agreements often do not, currently, require the various sorts of “neutrality” rules in how the packets are delivered once they are handed over at the peering point. get dropped for all kinds of reasons all the time, and nobody guarantees that every packet handed over to it will be delivered to its intended destination. Currently a lot of agreements offer a lot of leeway as to why packets might get dropped, or slowed down, or whatever. Craig is right that part of the reason for this is that FCC regulations controlled these agreements more tightly in the past. On the other hand, it has been years since those regulations were dropped and the companies have had plenty of time to renegotiate the arrangements if they didn’t like their network peers having that kind of leeway.

Personally, I would like it if non-slimy infrastructure providers would demand a fairly robust set of neutrality policies in their peering agreements. If such contracts were made, there would be no regulatory issue at all, since violating those neutrality policies would be a civilly actionable breach of contract. But until such a time as they do, I think there’s no justification for having the government force the kinds of peering agreements that I’d like to see on carriers that aren’t yet willing to make them. I wish I could change Comcast’s idiotic Acceptable Use Policy, too, but since I don’t own Comcast or their cable I’ve got no right to force them to provide better service.

Me:

[H]ow, exactly, does a content provider pay a carrier company for “access to the customers,” except by paying the carrier company for the use of its bandwidth? Isn’t the use of their bandwidth precisely how Internet providers provide “access to their customers”?

Craig:

The customers have already payed for the bandwidth.

Whom have they paid for whose bandwidth? We’re talking about interconnected networks here where not all of the infrastructure is owned by the same group of people.

In the scenario I sketched above, Craig is paying Nicenet for access to their bandwidth, but Craig has no agreement at all with Scumnet which would guarantee him the use of their bandwidth just by paying Nicenet what he pays them. Nicenet and Scumnet have an agreement, but the terms that they agreed to (like many actually existing peering agreements) makes no particular guarantee that Craig can expect any particular quality of service from Scumnet. There’s no apriori mandate that carriers must charge at only one point in transit; that’s often the wise thing to do, and the convenient thing for customers, but it’s not an injustice against drivers that you have to pay to drive on I-90 in Ohio, and then pay again to drive on it in New York.

What in the hell am I paying Verizon for if not access to content? Their service is useless without content.

You’re paying Verizon for access to their network. Paying them for access to their network does not entitle you to also access AT&T’s network unless AT&T has made an independent agreement (either with you or with Verizon) that would guarantee that. If there is such an independent agreement, then this is a civil matter rather than a regulatory one. If there is no such independent agreement, then you’ve done nothing which would entitle you to force one on AT&T.

Of course, it may be that part of the reason you find access to their network useful is that you also get access to AT&T’s network as part of the package, thanks to the current set of agreements between carriers. But so what? AT&T does not owe it to you not to renegotiate those agreements if they see fit. And if AT&T and Verizon agree to different terms, which makes it so that access to Verizon’s network is no longer useful to you, then the thing for you to do is to stop paying Verizon for a service that you no longer find useful.

The telecomms want to artificially degrade that already paid for service so they can charge content providers for restoring it.

You’ve paid your telecom for this month’s service, not next month’s, and if they decide to change their service or to scrap the whole damn thing at the end of your next billing cycle then you have no claim against them.

“Artificially degrading service” is, incidentally, a very nearly useless term in this discussion. Every ISP in the world has an Acceptable Use Policy that “artificially degrades service,” in the sense that it imposes restrictions on what you can and cannot do on their network, and to what degree, which have nothing to do with the technical capacity of their networks. Most broandband ISPs, for example, prohibit residential users from running servers on their network, even though the line is perfectly adequate for casual web hosting needs. They do so because they want to sell their business service, which allows for running servers. Is this “artificially degrading service”? In a sense, but so what? It’s their network and they have a right to set the rules — even if those rules turn out to be inconvenient, foolish, avaricious, etc.

Think the telecomms don’t like the FCC? You are dreaming.

Who made this claim? I’m well aware that the telecomm companies are government-backed oligopolists and that they are quite happy with restrictive regulation as long as it comes from an agency they’ve captured. But so what? That doesn’t change the fact that this:

And let me also say that while I am sympathetic to the general deregulation arguments, I am not sympathetic to those arguments when they come from industry players who are quite happy with regulation that creates artificial barriers to entry in their market — exactly like the telecomms.

… is a particularly crass example of argumentum ad hominem. The fact that big telcos, cable companies, etc. are hypocritical in putting forward an anti-regulation line does not make that line false, or the arguments for it any less capable of being assessed on their merits.

Craig:

I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your technology frightens and confuses me! So help out my primitive mind here: how, exactly, does a content provider pay a carrier company for “access to the customers,” except by paying the carrier company for the use of its bandwidth? Isn’t the use of their bandwidth precisely how Internet providers provide “access to their customers”?

Also, suppose you have the following network path:

Craig pays Nicenet for Internet access. Rad pays Scumnet for Internet access. Nicenet and Scumnet have a contractual agreement to exchange data with each other, but the agreement doesn’t specify any particular “neutrality” requirement on what each does with the packets from the other.

Now, suppose Craig wants to send data to Rad. The data goes onto Nicenet’s lines, and thence to the exchange with Scumnet. Nicenet is providing the use of its pipes to Craig, which is what Craig’s paid them to do. Craig, however, has not paid anything to Scumnet for the use of their pipes. So, Scumnet, for whatever reason, says that they won’t deliver the packets to Rad unless Craig pays them for the use of their pipes.

Now, this may very well be a foolish demand by Scumnet. But since Craig never paid them for the use of their pipes, and since Nicenet and Scumnet never made an agreement about Craig’s packets in particular, I can’t see where the “double-dipping” occurs. Where was the first “dip”? Help me out here.

Incidentally, just to be clear, I think that nearly every proposed application of non-neutrality, with the possible exception of simple tiered service, is a foolish and destructive way to run a network, and I agree with you that “Dropping neutrality also adds technical complexity to the network while lowering the value of the network to the consumer.” What I disagree with is the suggestion that it’s the government’s job to make sure that computer networks are run well. They have neither the knowledge, the virtue, nor — most importantly — the right to make those decisions.

Finally, nothing in my remarks is intended to defend the telcos, cable companies, and other government-backed oligopolists in the Internet business. They can all go hang for all I care. All that I’m suggesting is that the right way to deal with this problem is to lobby against government-imposed barriers to entry in telecommunications infrastructure, not to add yet one more government regulation in the attempt to calculate the “right” way to run an Internet service.