Comments Elsewhere

… And then Andrea Dworkin and other insane feminists go back in time and become publicly associated with the suffrage movement: “All men are evil, all sex is rape, all women are virtuous and no man can ever be.”

I know that this is tangential to the point that you were trying to make, but Andrea Dworkin never actually said this or anything like it. (Neither did Catharine MacKinnon, for what that’s worth.) In fact Dworkin rather angrily denounced the last two notions in her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. Whether you agree or disagree with Dworkin’s positions, these descriptions of her views are exposed fabrications, and should not be repeated.

Now, the substantive point:

Suppose that in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement wasn’t associated with nice peaceful ministers like MLK, but only with the “kill whitey” Black Panther types. Do you think legal segregation would have ended sooner or later, had that been the case? I’d say much later.

Just so we’re clear, Martin Luther King was certainly not very widely thought of as a “nice peaceful minister!” On the contrary, he was repeatedly slammed as an “extremist,” a reckless agitator, and a Communist, both by his open enemies and also by white liberals and “moderates” within the black clergy. He wrote about this in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, concluding “So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? … So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

I’d make similar comments about the principled radicals who were instrumental in the victory of the suffrage movement (Alice Paul, the Pankhursts), the abortion rights movement (NARAL, Redstockings), the abolitionist movement (Garrison, Douglass, John Brown), the gay liberation movement (the Stonewall rioters, GLF, Lavender Menace), etc. Broadly speaking, I think that social respectability and coming off as pleasing to either your open enemies or the stifling “moderates” and “centrists” means precisely nothing to the prospects for a social movement’s success. The people who move the world are very often treated by mainstream opinion as stupid, blinkered, reckless, over-zealous, or simply insane. The important thing is not diplomacy but honesty and tenacity; the problem with Mussolinists who sometimes pose as libertarians is not that they make libertarianism look crazy to the statists (who cares?) but rather because they make us look too “reasonable” to Power. If they make us look crazy to some people, the problem is that they make us look crazy for the wrong reasons; their belligerent bellowing drowns out the “crazy” ideas from genuine radicals who the mainstream dismisses as lunatics for all the right ones.

Jennifer,

I think that the basic problem with professional libertarians is that they accept the legitimacy of the State. And in order to keep their positions as policy wonks, instead of looking for an honest line of work, they have to continuously act and speak on the presumptions that written Constitutions can authorize government powers over non-consenting third parties, that there are “compelling State interests” that the government can legitimately pursue, etc. Once you’ve already signed on for governmentally organized, coercively monopolized, collectivist rot in the name of continent-spanning “National Defense,” you’ve already accepted the principle that governments can go around bulldozing individual people’s rights for the higher purposes of military strategy and power politics, in the form of foreign spying, war, diplomatic collective-bargaining, domestic repression, etc. From there on out, the rest—domestic spying, torture, Star Chamber courts, internment camps, world empire, etc.—is just haggling over the price.

Incidentally, Medved also rehashed the same material in a longer whitepaper for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [sic], which he co-authored with Michael Lackner, entitled “The Betrayal of Captain America.” (I’m surprised they didn’t go for a title like “Subversion of the Innocent.”) Lackner is especially outraged by the suggestion that U.S. intelligence agencies would ever be involved in drug-running, and Medved is up in arms at the “blame-America logic” involved in stories about the use of African-American G.I.s for life-destroying medical experimentation.

God knows that could never happen here.

Brandon, this:

To this end, the attempt to move farmer’s markets into poorer neighborhoods seems good, as does the idea that opposition to big grocery stores in urban neighborhoods should be dropped.

… is not a description of a “market failure,” at least not in the sense that you’re thinking of. The first part entertains one form of entrepreneurship within the free market (moving where you set up your market). The second part is a description of government obstruction through zoning and planning authorities. It may very well be true that a free market in groceries in urban areas still wouldn’t result in American-born poor people buying a lot of fresh produce. But the ability to calculate whether it would or would not is hampered by the fact that there isn’t a free market process in place right now, since (among other things) larger grocers are often forcibly excluded from the market.

Captain America was a Red.

George Allen is a white supreamcist creep to be sure, but there’s no need to compare him to the neo-Nazis. White supremacist creeps have filled out the political classes of Virginia since 1619. The NSDAP — let alone the Reich revivalists — are a bunch of johnny-come-latelies by comparison.

Egads. I scheduled the post for later in the night, so as not to crowd out another post for the morning, and look what I get for it: you scoop me on my own news!

Here’s another good Who said this? quotation from pinko, anti-property social anarchist Proudhon:

From each according to his capacity;
To each according to his needs.

Equality demands this, according to Louis Blanc.

Let us pity those whose revolutionary capacity reduces itself to this casuistry. But let not that prevent us from refuting them, for the Kingdom of Innocents is theirs.

Let us recall the principle once more. Association is then, as Louis Blanc defines it, a contract which wholly or partially (General and Special Associations, Civil Code, Art. 1835) places the contracting parties on a level, subordinates their liberty to social duty, depersonalizes them, treats them almost as M. Humann would treat taxpayers when he laid down this axiom: Make them pay all the taxes they can! How much does a man produce? How much does it cost to feed him? That is the supreme question which springs from the, what shall I call it? declension formula—From each… To each… in which Louis Blanc sums up the rights and duties of an associate.

Who then shall determine the capacity? who shall be the judge of the needs?

You say that my capacity is 100: I maintain that it is only 90. You add that my needs are 90: I affirm that they are 100. There is a difference between us of twenty upon needs and capacity. It is, in other words, the well-known debate between demand and supply. Who shall judge between the society and me?

If the society persists, despite my protests, I resign from it, and that is all there is to it. The society comes to an end from lack of associates.

If, having recourse to force, the society undertakes to compel me; if it demands from me sacrifice and devotion, I say to it: Hypocrite! you promised to deliver me from being plundered by capital and power; and now, in the name of equality and fraternity, in your turn, you plunder me. Formerly, in order to rob me, they exaggerated my capacity and minimized my needs. They said that products cost me so little, that I needed so little to live! You are doing the same thing. What difference is there then between fraternity and the wage system?

It is one of two things: either association is compulsory, and in that case it is slavery; or it is voluntary, and then we ask what guaranty the society will have that the member will work according to his capacity and what guaranty the member will have that the association will reward him according to his needs? Is it not evident that such a discussion can have but one solution—that the product and the need be regarded as correlated expressions, which leads us to the rule of liberty, pure and simple?

— Third Study, ¶¶ 109-117

I was thinking of following up with Confessions of a Revolutionary, but I’m having a deuced time finding anything in English anywhere. (I could get a French edition from Amazon.fr for € 24 plus shipping, for all the good that it would do me. Which would at least be better than the $100-$300 price range on copies in French from Alibris). Anyway, know of any translations anywhere?

Daniel,

The use of the terms “utility” and “utilitarianism” in ethical philosophy are a bit different from the use of those terms in modern economics. Here’s how John Stuart Mill defined “utilitarianism” in his book, Utilitarianism:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded — namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (Ch. 2 ¶ 2)

“Utility” is typically used by utilitarians to mean “conduciveness to pleasure” or “conduciveness to happiness,” not economic preference-satisfaction, and “utilitarianism” (sometimes “classical utilitarianism”) is broadly used to refer to any theory of ethics that answers all questions of ethical value, either directly or indirectly, in terms of what maximizes total pleasure (or total felt happiness) for everyone. Thus Francis Hutcheson, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, etc. are all classical utilitarians; philosophers such as G. E. Moore, who answer all questions of ethical value by reference to effects, but deny either that pleasure is always good as an end, or the only thing good as an end, or both, are consequentialists but not utilitarians. Since classical utilitarianism, unlike consequentialism broadly, entails ethical hedonism, you can refute classical utilitarianism by demonstrating that hedonism is false.

Henry,

As a response to Hayek, your statement suffers from having misunderstood Hayek’s central point, which has nothing to do with maximizing or sustaining the current quantitative output of literary works or inventions. What he said was this:

Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. … Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.

Both his discussion of copyright and his discussion of patents have to do with not only the quantity but the quality of the output. Just pointing to some folks who happen to be writing right now, or who happen to be inventing things right now, and saying “Without patents or copyrights these folks wouldn’t be inventing or writing!” does not even begin to answer his objection. In fact he’s quite explicit in the case of patents that he thinks a lot of the actually existing work encouraged by patent restrictions is misdirected or less than optimal. Thus your complaint about his focus on “great works of literature,” etc. is misguided. If you think that maximizing quantity of output, or maximizing quantity of output from a particular group of people (e.g. “working folks with a need to remunerate themselves”) then you would have some grounds to object to Hayek’s maneuver. But you would need to give some argument for that position, which so far you have not.

It is, however, disingenuous of you to claim that you are discussing only Hayek, and not patents or copyrights in general. In the case of copyrights at least you made quite specific claims about the global economic effects that (for example) abolishing copyrights would have, which are independent of anything in particular that Hayek addressed.

Without going any further in this direction, all I’m trying to say is that putting or taking money from peoples’ pockets isn’t as easy an issue as you’re trying to make it.

This is tendentious, to say the very least. I deny that allowing for a free market, and thus refusing to recognize arbitrary demands for monopoly rights, is appropriately described as “putting or taking money from people’s pockets.” And protectionist appeals to the poor working folks who will have to actually do the work of competing on price and quality are hardly going to move anyone who is serious about free market economics.

Lifting patent protections means giving more benefit to those organizations which can sell commodities most effectively.

To be precise, it does not mean “giving more benefit” to anyone. Free markets are opportunities, not gifts; what it means is stepping back and allowing those who can best sell the product to benefit from their own honest labor. (I think it’s interesting, for one thing, that you treat “pure out-and-out execution,” i.e. manufacturing and distributing and selling commodities, as something which doesn’t require “brains.” Ha ha ha.)

Now, I think that as a matter of economics, you are begging the question when you presume that “media conglomerates” or other “multi-billion-dollar” corporations are likely to be better than other companies at producing and distributing creative or inventive works. Since they have so much money and existing distribution channels, they may very well profit in the short term. (On the other hand, you need to keep in mind that there are several conglomerates in competition with each other, and their biggest sales opportunities would be in distributing copies of each other’s products — thus undermining the margins for all.) But in the long term, there is no reason to suppose that other players might not develop more efficient distribution channels, or that large-scale distributors will get products to local markets more cheaply than small-scale distributors. I think the long-run effects of abolishing IP restrictions would be to undermine the titans in the field, since today they (Disney, WB, BMG, Sony, Pfizer, GSK, etc.) depend on zealously guarded copyright and patent portfolios in order to generate those fat margins. There is no evidence at all that their product line or their internal culture is fit for competing in a market unencumbered by patent and copyright.

I also think it is gravely mistaken to suppose that abolishing patents or copyrights would reduce creative and technological fields into “a manufacturing economy,” in which the dominant activity is simply manufacturing and distributing commodities based on other people’s creation or invention. There are many ways for creative types to make a living other than exploiting grants of intellectual monopoly. I should hope if you ever hope to go into writing, for one, that you’ll figure some of them out, because most writers have a very difficult time eating on the royalties (if any) from their writing. Some people pursue creative/inventive/whatever endeavors as a hobby while making their living at a day job. Others go into a line of work that supports their writing/research/whatever by other means (for example, by entering the academy). One can easily imagine that under a free market these strategies would continue to exist, and would indeed expand.

But all of this to one side, the more important point to me has little to do with economics, and a lot to do with ethics. Even if it turned out that a free market resulted in overwhelming market dominance by a few large manufacturers and distributors, that would be no reason to sustain copyrights or patents even one hour longer. Neither I nor you nor anybody else has the right to stop other people from making a living through honest labor — i.e. rendering goods or services without employing force or fraud — just so that we can guarantee a particular set of market arrangements or a particular standard of living for ourselves. Since both patents and copyrights depend on suppressing other people’s right to make and sell copies of information they have freely obtained for an arbitrarily dictated length of time, they depend on just such an injustice. And I should hope that you, too, would rather work in a factory than do injustice to innocent people.

Constant:

If “you should not do this” means only, “this is wrong”, then I don’t deny that certain things are wrong, but I’ve given an explanation of what a wrong is which is the very conditional statement which you are uncomfortable with.

This is a very odd maneuver. Scheule’s point was to contest your explanation of what a wrong is, so of course if he means to say “this is wrong,” there is no reason for him to accept the conditionalized explanation of wrongs that you offered.

Scheule:

I don’t think I need a God to back up that command, anymore than I need a God to back up the law of gravity.

Constant:

A command logically entails a commander: a command is something commanded, and “to command” is a transitive verb with a subject (the commander) and an object (the recipient of the command).

Yes, but there’s no requirement that the commander and the recipient of the command be different people (let alone beings on different planes of existence). Some people, in fact, have thought it quite important to the nature of morality that the imperatives which issue from it are, first and foremost, self-regarding. I’m not a fan of centering the notion of “command” within ethics, for various reasons, but the theory hardly entails theism, let alone Divine Command theory, in the way you suggest.

Constant:

One rule of thumb I use is that law (and morality) is (normally) about prohibition. … If you find yourself talking about what we should do, there’s a chance you’re not talking about law or morality any more and are talking about recommendation.

I think that the point about law depends on little more than linguistic gerrymandering. (Should you say “You shouldn’t steal,” or “You should make an honest living?” Well, who cares?) And I think the point about morality is plainly absurd. While there is a sense in which all legitimate legal obligations are negative (since all libertarian rights are in some sense negative, and the only legitimate legal obligations consist in respect for libertarian rights), morality includes plenty of positive obligations. Charity is a duty, and so is gratitude; as are courage, kindness, faithfulness, honesty, etc. All of these virtues involve positive obligations, and some could not even be expressed non-trivially in negative terms. (You could give someone the rule, “Don’t be ungrateful.” But that’s at most a rebuke; the only way to actually spell out what not-being-ungrateful entails is to give some positive notion of what sorts of acts you should do in order to express gratitude.) Libertarians of all people should be careful not to conflate law and morality: justice is the only virtue which is legitimately enforceable, but it is very far from being the only virtue.