MBH: Is it not an instance of fraud?

The answer is still “No.”

All together now…

o/~ Come on you all gotta listen to me: / Lay off that Scaife; leave that Koch-aine be… o/~

MBH:

The threat of force is merely “disingenuous political rhetoric” now? Not coercion?

Oh, come on. You’re equivocating on the term “threat.” There’s “threatening” in the sense of a promising to inflict harm yourself, and “threatening” in the sense of merely frightening. Merely frightening someone with the prospect that an unrelated third party will harm them (without your direction, and indeed quite against your will) may be founded or unfounded, and it may be honest or dishonest, but even if dishonest it is not coercive in the sense of violating someone’s rights. There is quite obviously a difference between threatening Gramma that if she votes for X, you are going to bash her head in with a hammer (that’s coercive), and warning Gramma that if she votes for X, then Obama is going to bash her head in with a hammer. The latter is no more coercion than any other sort of false prediction — about hurricanes, say, or financial catastrophes, or an apocalypse or whatever other dangers people make unfounded predictions about.

Of course, again, if the warning is unfounded, but you spread it anyway due to carelessness, willful ignorance, or dishonesty, then you’re violating your ethical and intellectual obligations to deal with Gramma honestly. But you are not threatening to invade her rights (or to direct anyone else to invade her rights, either). There is absolutely no plausibly libertarian theory of justice which would allow for forcible suppressing mere specious warnings, on the grounds that they are somehow equivalent to actionable threats.

MBH:

Don’t the elderly have the right to not be fooled into believing someone is out to kill them who isn’t?

A “right” in what sense? I certainly don’t think anybody has an enforceable right to be free of disingenuous political rhetoric. Everyone has an ethical obligation to be honest, so the elderly (like everyone else) have legitimate grounds for complaint if people are deceiving them. But not everything that’s unethical is morally criminal.

Hypocrisy is nothing compared to …

Well, whatever, but the Rachel Maddow segment you asked me about was a segment about the Kochs’ alleged hypocrisy. So my response was about the complaint that was being made in the segment you asked me about, not about some other complaint that you think is more important.

James Madison Fan: You act as if there was a superior alternative when there wasn’t.

I said nothing at all about “superior alternatives.” I said that it’s disingenuous to claim that the ratification process gave “the people” subjected to the U.S. Constitution a meaningful opportunity to accept or reject the obligations being imposed on them. What actually happened is that a small, privileged minority of the population unilaterally imposed open-ended, non-negotiable political obligations on a disenfranchised and oppressed majority of the population. Whether or not that strikes you as the best that could be hoped for under the circumstances is a separate question.

That said, I’d also note that (1) you seem to be talking a lot about the Revolution, but my comments weren’t about the Revolution. They were about the adoption of the Constitution, which was a separate event, carried out years later, mostly by a different group of men, and which many of the Revolutionaries were actively opposed to. Maybe you think that without the Constitution, the Revolution would have failed; but if so, that’s a strong historical claim that you’d need to argue for. (2) I don’t know what evidence you think you have for believing that American Indians or black slaves would have been worse off under the English monarchy (slavery was abolished in British colonies decades before it was abolished in independent America; the English monarchy’s attempts to curb white land-grabs west of the Appalachians was one of the white Revolutionaries complaints). My attitude towards the American Revolution is generally positive, but it’s mixed and complicated (revolutions are big, complicated things), and I think honest observers ought to acknowledge the real faults and vices of the revolutionaries — let alone the much more conservative and centralist regime that overtook them in 1789.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand I know he was a radical abolitionist that was exceedingly naïve if he thought the South was going to tolerate legislation that threatened their social order.

He believed nothing of the sort.

What he believed is that the military invasion and reconquest of the Southern states was not an justifiable way to deal with the situation. He believed that slavery should be abolished by other means. (Spooner’s attitude towards the war, as expressed in No Treason No. 2, was that “The result – and a natural one – has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth.”)

James Madison Fan: What did he expect? Southern land owners were going to admit they were equal to Blacks and embrace them as brothers?

No, he believed that Southern whites would remain unrepentant slavers. His published Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858) was for black Southerners and poor white Southerners to ally with each other to abolish slavery by means of escape, slave uprisings, and guerilla warfare against white slaveholders, with moral and material support from sympathetic Northern abolitionists. I don’t know whether Spooner wrote anything on the topic before the outbreak of the Civil War, but many radical abolitionists believed (rightly, I think) that it would actually be far easier to destabilize slavery in the South after secession than before it, since enforcement of the slave system depended, in the last resort, on Federal force, in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act and the use of the U.S. Army to suppress slave uprisings. (If you’re interested in the topic, for a good overview of the radical abolitionist support for Disunionism, I’d recommend either Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s _Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men_, or _All On Fire_, Henry Mayer’s excellent biography of William Lloyd Garrison.)

But, anyway, whether or not Spooner is correct about all this has nothing to do with whether or not people were free to “dispel” their political obligations to the U.S. government when Spooner wrote his pamphlet. Manifestly, they were not — whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing — and many of them had just recently been forced to submit to those obligations at bayonet-point, in spite of their explicit refusal of the obligations and their concerted efforts to opt out of them. I’m not insisting that you agree with Spooner’s argument; what I’m objecting to is the attempt to make the argument look silly by disregarding basic facts about the historical situation.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand the change the South feared the most was the abolition of Slavery which is a moral imperative especially in a nation the purports to be the “Land of the Free.”

Well, “the South” didn’t fear abolition. Southern slaveholders did. Enslaved Southerners (who were, remember, a numerical majority of the population in many parts of “the South”) generally welcomed the prospect. Of course you are right that Southern slaveholders were terrified of abolition, and that that was a large part of their reason for seceding and for fighting the Feds’ attempts to regain political control. You’re also right that the abolition of slavery is a moral imperative. But I don’t see how that makes the Civil War a “conundrum,” unless you think that the invasion and occupation of the South was the only way in which slavery might have been abolished. I don’t think that it’s the only way slavery might have been abolished; if there are other means by which abolition might have been accomplished just as well or better, without a war of reconquest and a military occupation of the South, then abolition doesn’t lend much moral weight to the Feds’ cause.

**MBH,**

1. On the Maddow clip: mostly, I don’t care. Koch Industries is like any other mega-conglomerate: a consummate political-capitalist player, and destined to be eviscerated by free competition and informal and mutualistic alternatives in a freed market. Of all the corporate-welfare schemes that they benefit from, I’m far more concerned with those that they lobby for (e.g. Georgia-Pacific’s use of government land monopolies to secure tax-funded access roads and privileged access to timber) than those that they lobby against. As for the latter, I’ll say briefly that when government policies impose direct mandates on companies in order to force them into providing corporate insurance for their employees, seeking a government subsidy for the corporate insurance the company is being forced to buy is not the same thing is not the same thing as tacitly approving of the policy. Whether Koch Industries should or should not sign up for the policy (I don’t care much myself; as far as I’m concerned, the main thing that they should do is go out of business, like all the other dinosaurs of state capitalism), the charge of hypocrisy is cheap political rhetoric, not a serious moral argument.

I know that they started Reason.

They did no such thing. Reason started as a shoestring-budget staple zine put out by Lannie Friedlander in 1968. In 1970 it was sold to Bob Poole, Tibor Machan and Manuel Klausner. It’s now published by a 501(c)3, the Reason Foundation. The Kochs played no significant role in funding it, and in fact went to some length to start national magazine projects of their own due to the fact that Reason was outside of their control. You may be thinking of one of these — either Inquiry, which was a publication of the Cato Institute, or Roy Childs’s Libertarian Review, which was independent, but bankrolled almost entirely by the Kochs.

They still continue to fund it?

They donate money to the Reason Foundation and the Reason Public Policy Institute. They are not particularly big funders — from the reports I’ve seen, the Koch Family Foundations have given about $2.4 million dollars in grants to the Reason Foundation over the past 24 years, i.e. just about $100K a year. For comparison, the Reason Foundation’s annual operating expenses are between $6,000,000 and $7,000,000 a year. David K. also constitutes about 4% of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Neither of them exercise any editorial control whatsoever, and if they pulled the plug, Reason would lose about 1% of their annual budget. This is hardly the same thing as “owning” the magazine, and nothing like the kind of control that they exercised over Inquiry or Libertarian Review. To suggest that Jesse Walker — as a writer and editor working for a magazine which is published by a 501(c)3 to which the Kochs are sometime donors — is “bought and paid for” by the Kochs is both underhanded, and a ridiculous misrepresentation of the facts.

You’re not also bought and paid for by the Kochs are you?

I do not currently have, and never have had, any academic or financial relationship with the Koch foundations, or with any of the Kochtopus institutions. (*) Not that it would be any of your goddamned business if I had. If I had benefited at some point from a Kochtopus institution, that would not make it any more difficult for you to evaluate my arguments on their own merits. Or make the circumstantial form of argumentum ad hominem any less fallacious as a response.

(*) E.g. Cato, IHS, etc. I have been paid for some articles I wrote for the Freeman, and for all I know, it is very likely the case that the Kochs gave some money to FEE at some point — most of the libertarian business philanthropists gave money to FEE at some point or another. But FEE long predated the Koch brothers’ funding, and they never exercised significant influence over FEE in the way that they did over Cato or the IHS or Libertarian Review.

... Jeff, Well, I'm pretty sure that the reasons *don't* have much to do with the representational features of the game, such as they are. If chess were

... Dan, Well, I think the plausible response here is simply to say that novels and plays are not always like chess. Of course, there are cases in which

MBH:

Which is not to say that they haven’t done a fine job running it.

From what I understand, it’s mainly Charles K. who “runs” the company. David has a big ownership stake, and a pro forma Veep title, but he’s not particularly involved in day-to-day operations.

James Madison Fan: There was plenty of time for people to voice their concerns.

As Spooner makes clear in the text, a large majority of the people subjected to the U.S. Constitution (black slaves, women, propertyless whites, Indians not taxed, etc.) had plenty of time to “voice their concerns,” but no politically meaningful venue for doing so. Even if a majority of people actually had signed on for the Constitution, that would provide no grounds for binding the minority that had not signed on; but in fact a large majority of people were never even asked.

James Madison Fan: They didn’t [make it obligatory on their children]. “Their children” can alter or dispel it any time we want to. That’s what “freedom” is all about. The “problem” is very few of us want to because no one has offered a better alternative.

Spooner wrote and published No Treason over a period of three years from 1867-1870. As you may be aware, in the 1860s a large group of people had recently tried to alter or dispel their political obligations to the United States government, in favor of a proposed alternative, and they were subjected to a military invasion and occupation in order to force the obligation on them, the meaning of “freedom” notwithstanding. (The title of “No Treason” comes from the fact that Spooner intended it as a legal defense for secessionists should the federal government attempt to try them on charges of treason.) You may think whatever you like of Spooner’s argument, but this dropping of obvious historical context in your attempted criticism is careless reading at best.