Comments Elsewhere

Jeremy:

It goes beyond power; when a voluntary society stands up for a common end, that has authority to it.

O.K., I’m lost. I don’t think the Roman occupation of Palestine was an example of a voluntary society. It’s certainly true that in a voluntary society, consensus on a goal confers authority to pursue that goal. But do you intend to also transfer that claim about numbers and authority over to involuntary societies, like the American or Roman Empires? If so, what justifies the extension? If not, doesn’t that entail the existence of some principle constraining claims of authority, and undermining all claims of nonconsensual authority over others?

But they’re YOUR principles; in the end, they’re just preferences, opinions.

Well, I know you’re claiming this, but what’s the basis for claiming it?

And do you really mean to try and connect a radical form of moral relativism and a theory of majoritarian authority with Christian moral teachings?

smally:

I was under the impression that many state apologists will readily admit the government is a band of thugs, but that it is the “lesser evil”.

I don’t think that most liberal “lesser-evil” theories of the State recognize government as criminal. They recognize it as “an evil,” in the sense that it restrains liberty, but they generally go to some length to try to demonstrate the justice of nonconsensual political obligation (e.g., via a social contract, whether historical, tacit, or imaginary; or via non-contractual theories, such as Nozick’s procedural-rights account), and construe government as a service provided to citizens. Almost nobody defends the claim that government expropriation is no different in kind from brigandry, while also defending the claim that government expropriation should on (in order that even worse brigandry might be stopped. Maybe that’s what Hobbes believes, but not many followed him down quite that road.

So the upshot of lesser-evilist arguments is usually not that government is itself evil (in the contemporary sense of active wrongdoing), but rather that it’s bad relative to a utopian baseline, i.e., not as good a state of affairs as an anarchy composed of more or less ideal people. Since they rule out the ideal anarchy (for whatever reasons), you fall back to plan B. So government on this view is much more like fire insurance than like Mafia “protection”; something that, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to deal with, but which is morally permissible and which, in this vale of tears, you’re better off having, even at some cost.

I think these kind of arguments necessarily involve both (1) a lot of historical howlers in order to justify the claim that the single most deadly institution in the history of the world is actually defending people against chaos and destruction, and also (2) a lot of precisely the kind of mystification I’m talking about, in order to justify or at least excuse actively perpetrating evil against innocent people. (The cult of political compromise, the myth that democratic elections constitute mass consent to majoritarian or “representative” government, and the fabrication of tacit or imaginary social contracts to justify the legitimacy of government are all cases in point.)

You’re right that many if not most statists today like to fall back on utilitarian arguments in order to avoid arguments made on moral principle. Partly because forms of utilitarianism are very popular right now in both our intellectual and our mass culture; and partly also because it’s very handy to be able to abstract away any tricky questions about personal obligations, rights, virtues, vices, responsibility, complicity, defiance, etc. etc. etc. in order to zoom out to a depersonalized, God’s-eye-view calculation of aggregate outcomes. But I think that’s precisely because utilitarians start out by mystifying the issue and supposing that any question about the permissibility or legitimacy of coercing innocents has already been answered, when in fact it has merely been waved off as a necessary precondition of the utilitarian standpoint.

TGGP:

The trespass is across the border which is said to be collectively owned by the citizens of the U.S. You can say such a notion is unlibertarian and I’ll agree. My opposition to open-borders is unlibertarian and results from my belief that libertarianism by itself is insufficient …

Well, yes, I suppose that if one of your goals is to violently control who can or cannot pass through land that you’ve never even seen and that you’ve never done a damned thing in your life to earn a real title to, you will eventually find that libertarianism isn’t “sufficient” to meet those goals.

Well, I certainly agree that the Romans had the power to crucify Jesus.

Is that all you mean when you say that superior numbers confer authority?

It should be about what is possible, leaving the question of what possibility we pursue to the individuals

Would it be wrong for me not to “leave the question of what possibility we pursue to the individuals?”

If so, then isn’t that, in itself, a claim about what it is (or is not) “right” or “moral” to do?

If not, then why should you care whether I leave it up to the individuals or not, since there’s nothing wrong with my not doing so?

It is not as if this has never been tried before.

When the First Intifada broke out, the PLO was in exile in Tunis, and in the absence of their militaristic posturing, the small-scale, freestanding popular committees that coordinated most of the anti-Occupation activism spent the first few years of the Intifada focusing overwhelmingly on nonviolent forms of resistance, among them burning identification cards, opening schools in defiance of military curfews, boycotts, general strikes, and refusal to pay taxes. The response from the IDF was relentless and punitive, with many of the committee leaders thrown in prison on sentences of up to ten years, and their money, land, and property confiscated. (Not surprisingly, the attacks on tax resisters, such as the committees based out of Beit Sahour, were especially harsh.) And, at the end of it all, here we are.

I think that the virtues of nonviolent resistance are very often underestimated or flatly ignored, while the effectiveness of violent resistance is all too often overestimated, and its terrible costs either ignored or, worse, romanticized. I think that more focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action would probably make a worthwhile contribution to the Palestinian freedom struggle. But we should certainly remember that these strategies have already been used in the past, on a mass scale, and they didn’t make victory actual, let alone undeniable, then. We should not not pretend that nonviolent strategies would make even moderate success undeniable now, either.

Spooner:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Polzkill:

In a perfect world, in a world of the theoretical, of course he is correct.

Actually, part of Spooner’s point, if you’re paying attention, is that here in the real world, the strategy of using paper constitutions to limit the invasiveness of governments is demonstrably impractical. There’s little if any evidence that his views on the theoretical, in-principle relationship between the natural law and the U.S. Constitution changed substantially between The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and No Treason No. 6. (For details, see Roderick Long’s paper.) What did change was that he became convinced, in light of the recent triumph of bayonet-point Unionism, that it was practically useless to go on citing the Constitution as a basis for attacking tyrannical laws, and that a new strategy was called for. Hence the shift to arguments explicitly based on natural law and directed against all forms of government authority, including governments based on paper constitutions.

Polzkill:

Far better for us all if these great men would have ENGAGED more and FOUGHT more than they did.

Frederick Douglass:

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? … The time for such argument is past. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Polzkill:

I can’t prove it, but I’d wager you anything you like, at any odds, that If we took a plebiscite on whether people wished to live under the Constitution or not, that they would vote in the affirmative, and so would the rest of the world.

Well, so?

I can’t for the life of me see what this has to do with Spooner’s explanation of the criminality of government legislators, judges, executives, etc. My point is precisely that Spooner’s argument have nothing at all to do with the outcome of majoritarian voting games.

As for your claim that the same cabal of usurpers who, under the auspices of the United States Constitution, claimed the right to pass fugitive slave laws and crush the Whiskey Rebellion by force of arms, somehow believed that the Constitution allowed for a right of individual dissenters to freely withdraw from the political obligations that they sought to impose (!), I guess your understanding of the Constitutionalists is different from mine. As it is from the understanding of Spooner, who never made such a risible claim about the motives or expectations of the minority faction who wrote and signed off on the Constitution. (He did believe that the legal meaning of the text sometimes conflicted with their motives and expectations in writing it; but that’s an entirely different claim.)

Me:

Yeah, [enslaving hundreds of people] was pretty shitty of Jefferson. He was also a hypocrite, a rapist, and President of the United States, all of which I think were pretty shitty of him. What’s your point?

Polzkill:

As much as any single man in history, he was the force, a goddamned genius of liberty, the POWERHOUSE behind what freedoms we DO have today.

Maybe so. Certainly, if the dude is the best there is on offer by way of concrete historical achievements towards liberty, then I guess that could help explain why we’re in such a sorry state today.

In any case, my point is that the presumption that anarchists would just have to recognize and respect the obvious merit of a slaver, rapist, hypocrite, and President is a pretty weird presumption from which to start your argument.

Me:

You seem to be presuming that trying to get somebody elected President of the United States is the only way to get “things [to] improve”. But it’s not the only way. It’s not the best way, either, or even a particularly plausible way. Or, at least, if you think that it is, that’s certainly not a self-evident truth that you can just presuppose. It’s a tendentious claim that you’ll have to justify with some kind of argument.

Polzkill:

At least you qualified this with the words “seem & “presuming”, otherwise that’s exactly what you would have been doing. The argument you suggested for me; that WOULD be a pretty stupid argument I made, eh?

I charitably suggested that you might be presupposing that premise, or something like it, because if you’re not presupposing that getting Ron Paul elected President is the only way to improve the situation, all you have the following argument:

1. These folks here aren’t contributing to efforts to get Ron Paul elected President. (given)
2. Therefore, these folks here aren’t contributing to improving the political situation. (conclusion)

… which is a flat non sequitur. As yet there’s no reason at all to suppose that (2) follows from (1). If you add the extra premise I suggested, then you’ll have:

1. Getting Ron Paul elected President is the only way to improve the political situation. (implicit)
2. These folks here aren’t contributing to efforts to get Ron Paul elected President. (given)
3. Therefore, these folks here aren’t contributing to improving the political situation. (conclusion)

Not all of these premises are true (the implicit premise 0 is clearly false), but it is at least formally valid; if all the premises were true, the conclusion would have to follow.

If I was being too charitable, well, I’m sorry. I take it back. If you’re not actually presuming what I said you seem to be presuming, then your conclusion isn’t supported by question-begging premises; it’s not supported by anything at all.

Polzkill:

Doctor Paul, inspired THOUSANDS of people like me to go out and fight these degenerates.

Yep. Let’s all measure the inputs to the allocation process instead of measuring the outputs.

But, well, I guess when you’ve got a prior commitment to methods that require enlisting tens of millions of other people and harnessing tens of millions of dollars, which don’t even operate but for a few months out of every four-year cycle, and which operate on winner-take-all rules that require you to win just about everything before you can win just about anything — methods which, in short, have no plausible hope of even minor progress on the margins for decades to come — measuring the inputs is about all you can do. There are no outputs to measure, and there won’t be in the forseeable future.

Tracy,

Well, then it definitely sounds like electoral mission creep to me. “Well, we got in here to do A, but that failed, so let’s stay in here and do B instead.” Again, perhaps it’s time to cut your losses and find a better strategy, rather than just keeping in electoral politics because that’s where you started out?

Anthony,

I’m glad that Ron Paul and his boosters have gotten people excited about libertarian ideas. I wish that there had been more thought (especially by the boosters, since I take it that Ron Paul was busy doing other things) put into what to do with all these excited, activated people after the close of the campaign. I don’t think there has been much thought about that, and to the extent that there hasn’t been, that means that a lot of time and energy and tens of millions of dollars are going to go straight down the toilet, as the Paulitarians either burn out and wander away, what with the end of their groups’ raison d’etre, or else pitch themselves into the next “educational” failing electoral campaign, either as marginalized Republicans or as members of the LP. A project like “transforming the Republican Party” is more or less guaranteed to be a tar-baby for this putative “Revolution.”

I predict that, unless something quite unusual happens over the next couple of months, in the direction of redirecting former Paulitarians toward some other concrete project outside of electoral politics, then, four years from today, Ron Paul’s campaign will have made no more difference to the political consensus than Howard Dean’s in 2004, or Pat Buchanan’s in 1992.

Matt Polzkill:

Of course Spooner greatly respected the Constitution, that’s why he devoted a large chunk of his life to studying it & writing about it (his treatise on how chattel slavery is unconstitutional is genius). His MAIN problem with it is that no one follows it.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority:

Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

That’s some kind of respect he’s got there.

Matt Polzkill:

He correctly explains that paper can’t magically create a just society & that the people calling themselves “the government” are in fact the greatest criminals because they ignore or subvert it.

That is certainly not Spooner’s explanation of why the people calling themselves “the government” are the greatest criminals.

His explanation of why they are the greatest criminals is that they impose binding political obligations on free and independent people without the latter’s genuine individual consent.

Matt Polzkill:

Yeah, and Jefferson had slaves and…my god, what a way to go about things!

Yeah, that was pretty shitty of Jefferson. He was also a hypocrite, a rapist, and President of the United States, all of which I think were pretty shitty of him. What’s your point?

Matt Polzkill:

I’m sure liberty will just drop in your laps someday, or maybe Jesus Christ will come down. Have a nice wait, if things improve, the rest of us will know who NOT to thank.

You seem to be presuming that trying to get somebody elected President of the United States is the only way to get “things [to] improve”. But it’s not the only way. It’s not the best way, either, or even a particularly plausible way. Or, at least, if you think that it is, that’s certainly not a self-evident truth that you can just presuppose. It’s a tendentious claim that you’ll have to justify with some kind of argument.

The Ron Paul Revolution of transforming the Republican Party won’t end with Dr Paul.

Is that the “Revolution’s” goal now?

I thought the goal was to elect Ron Paul President of the United States, or at least get him the Republican nomination for President. But I guess if at first you don’t succeed, you can always move the goalposts.

This sounds like electioneering mission creep to me. In order to do A (get libertarian, anti-war policies) you decided to do B (get Ron Paul elected). To do B you’d have to do C and D (raise money and convince Republican primary/caucus voters). To do D you found out you’d have to do E (either recruit and register new Republicans or convince enough influentials within the Republican party and the media to get your message to the existing Republicans). But now you’ve found out that to do E effectively you have to do F (“transform the Republican Party” (!)). To do F, you’re planning to do G (run a bunch of Pauliticians in other, lower-level Republican primary races). But to do G, you’ve got to go back to C and D. And around and around we go.

Maybe it’s just time to cut your losses and look for other ways to do A without getting sucked even further into the quagmire of electoral politics.

I’m not sure that Ron Paul supporters ever believed Paul was the Messiah.

Maybe not. But at least one does think he’s “The Greatest American ever” Another thinks that he’s a light that shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended him not.

piny,

I didn’t mean to suggest that adolescents never consider or make a physical transition, or to attribute to Michelle the claim that there ought to be therapeutic intervention to “correct” GID in young kids because a failure to do so would lead to them ending up gay. I didn’t infer from her mention of the “outcome” statistics that that’s what she believes. If I did inadvertently suggest that, I apologize for being unclear.

The point I was trying to make about age is that, as I understand it, an issue that’s unlikely to come up at the age of 7 or 8 in a case like this one. A few years later, closer to adolescence, sure, but at that point we’re moving rapidly away from the diagnostic territory of “GID in Children” anyway, and towards “GID in Adolescents and Adults.” My understanding may be mistaken; if so I retract that claim, but I’d still make the more specific claim that it doesn’t have much to do with what this particular kid and her mother say they’re concerned about at this particular moment, or with the details of how the school is dealing with them. And I’d also fall back on the other argument against the basic problem with the way that the medical establishment holds medical aids to transition hostage to medicalized labels and “disorder” diagnoses.

The stuff about “outcome” statistics wasn’t meant to suggest that Michelle personally believed that there was something wrong with adolescents being gay. Rather that if one believes that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, nothing wrong with not being gay, nothing wrong with being trans, and nothing wrong with not being trans (which for all I know is what Michelle believes; otherwise I would have been arguing about that rather than just asserting it), then that correspondingly undermines the claim that there’s anything that ought to be called “disordered” or of “clinical interest” here, and to that extent it’s unclear why you’d need a diagnostic category for it, let alone a diagnostic category that’s used to justify psychotherapeutic intervention (at least not for children who don’t actively seek it out for themselves, rather than being shoved into it by anxious adults), let alone a diagnostic category that’s counted as a mental “disability” for legal purposes.

If I had to guess at Michelle’s motives I’d be very unlikely to guess that it had to do with personal attitudes of homophobia or transphobia, and much more likely to guess that they have to do with the tendency in our culture to elevate professionalized psychiatry and medicine as the primary or only way to understand the things that are most important to our lives, and the “mission creep” for medicalized labels that this inevitably leads to, no matter how ill-founded or inappopriate that model may be in a given area. But that’s just speculation, and I’ll happily take it all back if I’m wrong.

And this is a great example of why I think we’re diverging even as we state many similar principles. If concentrated power is the enemy, not the abrogation of rights, then there’s a lot that happens at the local, familial, and small group level that falls outside of the strict boundaries of libertarian concerns. So it’s natural that a “thick” libertarian would not approve of that kind of libertarianism.

I need to read the essay on thick and thin libertarianism again to make sure that I’m using those terms correctly; feel free to correct me or clarify muddy thinking.

Well, thin libertarianism is the position that “libertarian concerns” should be narrowly construed, as being exhausted by whatever your favorite specification of the non-aggression principle is (abrogation of individual rights, violations of equal liberty, initiation of force, whatever). Thick libertarianism is the position that “libertarian concerns” should be construed more broadly, as including a definite stance for or against at least some attitudes, practices, traditions, practices, projects, institutions, etc. that are logically consistent with, but not entailed by, the non-aggression principle. (All the forms I’ve discussed in my writing on the topic, at least, are forms of “thickness” in which the cause for concern is that the commitments that go beyond the logical entailments of a commitment to non-aggression are still linked to a commitment to non-aggression in some other, weaker, but still interesting sense — e.g. causally linked, or in application to specific cases, or in virtue of being two different conclusions of a common set of prior premises.)

Strictly speaking, if a “thin” libertarian is being consistent about the non-aggression principle, then she will still concern herself with things that happen outside the scope of the State insofar as they involve the direct use of violence — so, for example, her version of “libertarian concerns” would still properly include non-State forms of systemic coercion like race slavery or violence against women. A “thick” libertarian would agree, but take it one step further to include things other than the express acts of violence, which she takes to be importantly connected with the express acts of violence (e.g. white supremacist prejudices, patriarchal rape culture, etc.).

I don’t think the distinction lines up neatly with the question of whether the libertarian or anarchist in question focuses narrowly on anti-statism or generalizes to cases other than the State. (Cf. 1. Some “thin” libertarians do tend to write as if the State were the only significant form of systemic coercion, and “thick” libertarians may be more likely to recognize the existence of other forms of systemic coercion, but in principle a “thin” libertarian might very well recognize other forms, while a “thick” libertarian might in principle regard statism as the only significant form of systemic coercion around, and devote her time spent on “thick” concerns entirely to the stuff that she takes to be causally or conceptually supporting statism.)

So thick libertarians will probably tend to be much more interested in things like a critique of institutionalizing or otherwise concentrating social power, even without that critique cashing out at some point in references to rights-violations. Thin libertarians will tend to argue that those concerns are either uninteresting, or, if interesting, still outside the scope of libertarianism per se.

I’m not sure how far this clarifies the point that you were interested in clarifying.

… I think numbers *do* constitute authority …

Authority for what?

Do you mean to suggest that, for example, that superior numbers gave Anytus’s party the rightful authority to kill Socrates, or the Roman occupiers the rightful authority to crucify Jesus?

If so, why? If not, then what do their superior numbers give them the rightful authority to do?