Comments Elsewhere

dukemeiser:

Where the hell did we go from ILLEGAL ALIENS … to Islamic terrorists? Anyway the original discussion was about illegal aliens.

You’re mistaken. Here’s a quotation from the original post:

Two things conservatives like to say: … (2) Illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects don’t have constitutional rights …

dukemeiser:

And it has everything to do with other people’s money. MY money as a taxpayer. When illegal aliens come to America and take advantage of our social safety net.

That sounds like a problem with the “social safety net.” Not a problem with undocumented immigration. In any case, the “rights” that American conservatives typically want to deny to undocumented immigrants go way beyond access to the welfare state. If the proposal were merely “undocumented immigrants don’t have a right to get money through welfare state programs,” I would have a problem with that. I don’t think anyone has a right to get money through welfare state programs. I’m rather more concerned about claims that undocumented immigrants don’t have the right to be left the hell alone in their own homes or to work for a living with a willing employer.

And because they are plentiful there is no competition from American workers at a fair wage.

You know, when you go around claiming that “American workers” have a right to a “fair wage” (as determined by you), whether or not other workers are willing to compete at lower wages, and that, if those other workers would be willing to take jobs at lower wages, this is a reason to round them up and force them out of the country, that sounds a lot like you’re saying that “American workers” have a “right to access other people’s money.” My view is that nobody has a right to any wage at all; wages should be the result of free agreements in an open market, not the result of political protectionism.

As for Islamic terrorists, did you expect for planes to be hijacked on 9/11?

Nope. But what has any of that got to do with whether or not people have a natural right not to be tortured, or locked in prison forever without charges?

The rest of the paragraph is just a bunch of conservative talking points about how bad terrorists are. Well, so what? If that’s supposed to be a reason for denying that people have individual natural rights not to be tortured, or not to be locked in prison forever without charges, then you can go ahead and believe that. But, again, that does seem to suggest rather strongly that you don’t believe in any meaningful set of natural God-given rights. (Because, if those rights don’t qualify, again, what the hell does?)

We have to play be the rules even though they don’t?

I don’t know about you, ese, but I never tortured anyone or locked anyone in prison forever without charges. Maybe you have, but if so you ought to speak only for yourself. If not, then I guess by “we” you really mean “them” — that is, the United States government. And, yes, I do believe that that government, like all governments, should be held to strict standards of respect for the rights of the individual. No matter what’s going on. If you don’t believe that, fine, but then you may as well stop pretending like you believe in God-given unalienable rights. The “unalienable” is supposed to mean something in that phrase.

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.

Joe,

Do you think that the right not to be tortured by the government or the right not to be locked in a cage forever without charges are “not natural rights”? If those don’t qualify, what the hell do you think DOES?

dukemeiser: God’s rights don’t include access to other people’s money.

I agree.

So what’s that got to do with the rights of suspected terrorists or undocumented immigrants? Did you think that expecting not to be tortured, not to be locked in a cage forever without charges, not to be stopped at government checkpoints for the “Ihre Papiere, bitte” treatment, or not to be rousted out of your home and disappeared into some hellhole detention center, is somehow a matter of expecting “access to other people’s money”? If so, how?

apolitical,

To “OWN LAND” is a civil not a natural right? Really? The traditional constitutional theory that conservatives claim to want to uphold has typically held the right to own and be secure in your own property is a natural right — in fact, one of the paradigmatic natural rights, alongside “LIFE” and “LIBERTY.” If you beg to differ with the view, and make basic security in one’s own property contingent on government recognition of status, well, OK, but you ought to say something about why.

I also would suggest that it’s an odd sort of theory that would make some of the rights that warhawk conservatives wish to deny to terrorist suspects (e.g. the right NOT TO BE TORTURED, the right NOT TO BE LOCKED IN PRISON FOREVER WITHOUT CHARGES, etc.) civil rather than natural rights. In fact, the latter seems an obvious and immediate application of the natural right of liberty; nominally acknowledging the right while allowing people to be locked in prison forever without charges would make the right of liberty completely vacuous. Again, if you beg to differ with the view, OK, but you’re diverging pretty radically from what people have traditionally wanted to say about natural rights, and you ought to say something about why.

If, on the other hand, natural rights do include the right to own land, the right not to be tortured, the right not to be locked in a cage forever without charges, etc., then it seems like that ought to substantially affect what supposedly pro-natural-rights conservatives can consistently endorse as government policy against undocumented immigrants and foreigners suspected of terrorist connections. Either the view strips down the scope of natural rights to the point of being indistinguishable from totalitarianism, or else it is inconsistent (as per Roderick), or, well, there’s always the theo-nationalist Synthesis.

It may seem to be a contradiction, but this is really a matter for dialectic.

Thesis: Our constitutional rights aren’t granted to us by government. Our rights come from God, and the Constitution simply recognises them.

Antithesis: Illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects don’t have constitutional rights because they’re not American citizens.

Synthesis: Only American citizens were created equal, because God only cares about Americans.

You might worry that this is an uncharitable reconstruction of the argument. But I think that the Synthesis does seem to be a pretty accurate representation of common American conservative views.

I think it’s possible that algorithms and computability are simply the wrong framework for understanding human intelligence or creating artificial intelligence.

They probably are the wrong framework. But I don’t see how that helps you with the halting problem. The issue with the halting problem isn’t that a solution is really hard, or that it’s ill-suited to the methods of computer programming. It’s that the notion of a correct general solution to the problem is, provably, internally contradictory. There’s nothing that could count as a correct general solution to the problem.

Here’s why. The halting problem is provably unsolvable because if it were solvable by any means, its output could be used to construct at least one algorithm which would be logically incompatible with the correctness of the solution to the halting problem. For a brief discussion why, see here. Basically, any proposed solution to the halting problem could be used to construct a “fink” function, which will do the reverse of what the halting problem says a given function will do when given itself as an input (so that, when you call FINK(FUNC), execution will halt if FUNC(FUNC) would loop forever, and will loop forever if FUNC(FUNC) would halt.) But then, when FINK(FUNC) gets itself as an input — FINK(FINK) — there is literally no possible answer to the question of what it will do. If it halts, then it doesn’t halt; if it doesn’t halt, then it halts. Hence, whatever your solution to the halting problem said it will do, it won’t do that. Hence, whatever your solution to the halting problem is, it’s wrong in at least one edge case.

Note that it does not matter whether the solution to the halting problem is accomplished within a Turing machine, or whether it is accomplished by some other means. Suppose the method for solving it is to print out a copy on a human being’s printer, and then wait for the human being to input TRUE or FALSE, and send the human being’s response back to the function to use as the return value for the halting function. Even so, you can still construct the fink function using that external input, which means that there just is no right answer that the human being could possibly return: whatever answer she returns, the program will do the reverse of what she said it would do.

The problem is not that finding a method to solve the halting problem is really hard, or limited by available resources or conventional computer architectures; it’s that the mere existence of a solution would necessarily entail an edge case where the solution cannot possibly be correct. A human being can’t do it any better than a computer can.

[Google Reader comment on shared article Nick Hogan Jailed for 6 Months.]

It is certainly evil to imprison a man for allowing smoking on his own damn property. However, I certainly don’t know why I am supposed to wax indignant at either of the following cases in which people who did real damage were acquitted:

“Two anti-nuclear protesters who entered a dockyard planning to disarm one of Britain’s Trident submarines with an axe were yesterday cleared of conspiracy to cause criminal damage.”

“Four women walked free from Liverpool Crown Court yesterday after a jury found them not guilty of criminal charges despite their admission that they did more than pounds 1.5m worth of damage to a Hawk warplane.”

Well. Good for them. I’m glad they are free. Nobody should be imprisoned for damaging the war machines of government militaries. Those war machines are used to threaten or inflict death on innocent people throughout the world, and the government militaries that purchase and maintain them are hyperviolent criminal organizations, funded by coercion and habitually dealing out destruction. Government militaries have no legitimate property rights to anything, and where there’s no property rights there are no identifiable victims. Where there’s no victim, there’s no crime.

The people who engaged in these direct actions against government “property” (property in name only, derived entirely from coercive taxation) — these people, I say, are heroes, not criminals, and shouldn’t be locked up for even a minute. The more people can get away with disabling or destroying the State’s hideous war machines, the better.

@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?