Comments Elsewhere

r@d@r: … high drug costs can be attributed to the cost of advertising.

High drug costs can be attributed to many things. But among the most important factors are certainly the government-created, government-enforced patent monopolies on new drugs. When the government forcibly suppresses market competition from generics, this unsurprisingly tends to create monopoly pricing.

Myca: … our current system is abso-fucking lutely sadistic and nonsensical.

This is certainly true. But what has it got to do with “how the free market works”?

There is no free market for healthcare in the United States. The systems whose merits are being compared and debated are two different styles for government regimentation of the practice of medicine, one of them state-socialist and the other state-corporatist. In the former, the State directly controls payment and administration in every aspect of healthcare. In the latter, select cartels, heavily privileged, heavily regulated, and heavily insulated from competition, controls much or all of the work of payment and administration.

Maybe something more like the former system is better for many people than something more like the latter system. But there are specific historical reasons why, for example, and why most people depend on their bosses for health insurance. But these reasons have a lot to do with specific government actions (wage controls during World War II, for example, and ongoing tax incentives for employer-provided health insurance plans) and not much to do with market dynamics. Whether State-regimented healthcare is better on a corporatist model or better on a socialist model, none of it says much about the virtues or vices of a free market in healthcare, since that is not yet one of the options that has been brought up for consideration.

Jill,

It’s not just me, personally. I may be an ultra who enjoys quibbling about definitions and calling out other libertarians on questions of doctrinal purity, but the views that Coulter spends her time endorsing are outside of, indeed directly contrary to, the views espoused by anything that could plausibly count as a mainstream of American libertarianism. I can’t find much love for Ann Coulter at Reason, or from Radley Balko, or from the Libertarian Party. (Fun fact: back in 2000, Coulter briefly tried to use the Connecticut LP as a platform from which to run as a spoiler candidate against liberal Republican Chris Shays. The state party rejected her candidacy, on the grounds that, well, she wasn’t a libertarian, and refused to endorse either libertarian positions or LP candidates. Coulter responded by writing a nasty little screed against libertarianism. This was back when she was mainly just grousing about the Clinton impeachment and the Evil Liberal Media, before she had even launched into doing the bomb-the-world/Ihre Papiere Bitte shtick full-time.) Based on my experience with quite a few libertarians, I think it would be pretty accurate to say that the typical American libertarian finds Coulter to be perfectly despicable.

There may very well be some people calling themselves “libertarians” who like Ann Coulter, or who endorse the views that she expresses in her columns. There may even be “hundreds” or “thousands” of them, what with 300,000,000 people in the country. (Although, again, it would help to name names and point to specific views.) But in any case there are also probably hundreds or thousands of people who call themselves “feminists” and embrace Christina Hoff Sommers. But we know something about what “feminism” actually means, and about what the feminist movement has historically stood for, and what the mainstream of people in the feminist movement actually think. It would be grossly unfair to make blanket claims about feminism simpliciter on the basis of what Christina Hoff Sommers-embracing, self-declared “equity feminists” go around saying and doing.

I don’t think people who nod along with squarely anti-libertarian positions usually count as libertarian. They may call themselves that; hell, Glenn Reynolds thinks he’s a libertarian. But calling yourself a libertarian is not the same thing as being one. And those who, like Coulter, rabidly endorse imperial wars, a domestic police state, Berlin border-crossing policies, and the rest, are pretty far outside the mainstream of libertarianism.

Similarly, when Phyllis Chesler blogs at Pajamas Media or publishes tracts with endorsements from David Horowitz, I don’t take this as a reason to make blanket claims that Coulter or Horowitz or the rest of the bomb-the-world crowd are saying what a lot of feminists think, deep down.

I also don’t think that libertarianism is a branch of conservatism. If one actually tries espousing libertarian positions at a conservative event (e.g. decriminalizing drugs, completely open immigration, abortion on demand), one will find out pretty quickly how much libertarians get embraced by conservatives.

Have you seen Jackson Katz’s documentary Tough Guise? He has a really powerful scene about this, with a big patchwork of professional blowhards from the TV news shows talking about how there’s “no pattern” to who does the shootings. Meanwhile photos of each of the teenage males behind the major school shooting incidents (as of 1999) stare out at the audience.

As nuts as she is, Coulter is embraced by mainstream conservatives. She is regularly invited to speak at conservative conferences, and she goes on TV representing her movement. It’s easy to write her off as a fringe wacko — and she is a wacko — but she’s saying what a whole lot of Republicans and Libertarians are thinking.

Did you have any particular libertarian in mind when you wrote this?

Most libertarians that I know don’t often find themselves nodding along with anti-choice, anti-immigration, war-mongering, police statist demagogues.

Constant: My description was adequate to my own purpose, which was to explain what it was about Randall’s statement that made it slippery. If you take “law and order type” one way, then you can conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard. But at the same time, the membership of the “law and order type” would be very, very small. If you took “law and order type” another way, then the membership would be quite a bit larger, but then you could not conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard.

Yes, and I gave some specific reasons why this “another way” in which “law and order type” might be understood failed to do the argumentative work that you would like it to do. These reasons specifically had to do with its being underspecified in such a way that it either (a) misrepresented what self-described “law and order types” mean by the phrase “law and order type,” by redefining the term so as to lump in many people with diametrically opposed views; or else (b) failed to demonstrate any equivocation by Randall and failed to give any reasons to doubt Randall’s conclusions as stated by him.

You are, of course, free to engage with or not to engage with any given criticism of your argument. However, it seems to me that if you want to introduce a distinction for the purpose of analysis and criticism, then it is your responsibility to actually make sure that the terms you distinguish are at least precise enough to do the work you want them to do. Since you have resolutely evaded rather than engaged with a set of reasons given to think that you have failed to do this, even when directly asked to clarify the intended meaning of terms that you set out to introduce, it severely undermines your attempt to use this delineation in order to make any kind of point against Randall.

Incidentally, I can find no textual support for your claim here that Randall would “conclude that a law and order type would tend to side with the school guard.” What he said is that “many conservatives” (apparently because they are “law and order types,” as he, not you, understands that term) “might not want to break a poor black kid’s wrist themselves but who can look the other way if it happens once in a while,” “wish we would stop making a fuss,” and express an attitude that “gets you the Gestapo.” Lots of people, including self-identified “law and order types,” may wring their hands about obvious abuses of police power. But if they still support the attitudes and practices that make those abuses well-nigh inevitable, then so what?

Constant: That’s absurd. I’ve already explained why and you did not address my explanation, merely denied it.

A bald claim that so-and-so’s statements “imply” some comparative claim, different from the claim that he or she actually stated, is not the same thing as an “explanation” of how they imply it. You provided only the former, not the latter. Until you actually present a case for this position, I’m under no obligation to refute one.

One way that you could test whether such a comparison is indeed implied is by bringing up the comparative case and asking about it. As, for example, you did, when you mentioned the role that liberals have played in the history of public schooling. Since Randall then promptly agreed with your statement about liberals, it seems to me that it is uncharitable, if not simply dense, of you to go on imputing a comparative claim to him when he did not explicitly make that claim in the first place, and since he agreed with you when you presented a contrary comparative claim.

Constant: That’s also absurd. There is an obvious distinction between an argument that has some merit as a prima facie case which deserves a response, and a statement that is merely provocative.

Yes, and you have manifested in your actions that you consider Randall’s remarks to be the former, not the latter, since you responded to them. Turning around now to huff and puff about how the remarks that you responded to don’t really merit a response is just rhetorical bluster.

I stated six points on which I think that my views, and the views of many other libertarians, differ from those who are likely to call themselves “law and order types.” The comments from a single Freeper which you quoted above touch on at most one of those points (#6, if that is what he means by “I object to the double standard of justice,” which is by no means clear). So, again, I do not see what this has to do with my objections to the way you have drawn the categories.

If you intend your categories to lump together (A) people who believe in breaking the vast majority of existing laws, who believe that cops should refuse orders to enforce the vast majority of existing laws, who believe that in many cases law-breakers should feel free to evade or forcibly resist cops’ efforts to enforce the law when and if it’s prudent to do so, etc., with (B) those who believe that people should generally follow laws even if those laws are unjust, that cops should generally enforce the laws even if those laws are unjust, and that people have a duty to submit to cops even when the laws are unjust, then I submit that your categorization is bogus. I further submit that your categorization does not accurately reflect what Randall meant when he said that most conservatives are “law and order types.” I further submit that the way that most conservative “law and order types” actually think. If you think your quotation does something to dislodge this claim then you need to make clearer how it does so.

If you don’t intend your categories to lump these two together, but only to include group (B) and not group (A), then I submit that your attempt to delineate categories is not bogus, but also is not responsive to Randall’s claims about conservatives or “law and order types.” He claimed (1) that “many” conservatives make excuses for, or attempt to minimize worry over, police brutality — which is an true empirical generalization not overturned by pointing out a single counterexample on the Internet — and (2) that most conservatives are “law and order types” in some sense that should be objectionable to libertarians as such — which is not disproved by pointing out the distinction between those who commit certain errors, and those who commit those same errors while also being raving sociopaths.

Incidentally, it would help discussion if you’d actually respond to the dilemma presented. What do you mean by “genuine law and order types”? Do you mean it in the first sense, which I characterize as uselessly broad, or the second sense, which I characterize as non-responsive to Randall’s claim? Until you actually make it more clear what you mean when you say “genuine law and order types,” it remains rather mysterious what you mean when you try to argue that being a “law and order type” isn’t something objectionable.

Constant: Randall singled out conservatives. That implies a comparison.

No, it doesn’t. You may have imputed that comparative claim to him, but he didn’t make it and I think your imputation goes beyond anything he actually implied.

Nor did he “single out conservatives” in the first place. He (1) made a statement about conservatives which had nothing to do with the category of “law and order types”, to which (2) you replied with a remark about liberals, with which (3) Randall agreed, and to which he added a further observation that most conservatives where what he called “law and order types.” At this point, (5) you replied with some remarks about “genuine law and order types” as against “cop worshipers,” at which point (6) I objected to your discussion of “genuine law and order types” as non-responsive to Randall’s point.

The only comparative statements that were at issue in this exchange were the ones that you made, in which you suggested that modern liberals were more to blame for the historical development of public education than conservatives were. A statement with which Randall agreed. And which had nothing to do with the latter discussion of “law and order types.”

Constant: Frankly such tripe doesn’t even deserve the dignity of a response.

Don’t be disingenuous. If you didn’t think it deserved a response then you would hardly be spending your time responding to it.