Comments Elsewhere

Phelps: “Justified or not, I intend to win any war we are in, the same that I intend to win any fight I am in, whether I started it or not.”

If you honestly think that a war is unjustified, what possible moral grounds could you have for trying to stick through and win it?

Obviously you do think that war is justified—that’s why you keep fighting to win.

Oh, a more substantive difference that I neglected: orthodox Objectivists hold that libertarianism, as a political movement, is premature. The official line from Rand and from the ARI has been that philosophical and cultural change needs to precede any serious or lasting political shift towards a free society, and that therefore libertarian political organizing amounts to time wasted pushing on a string.

“While we’re on the topic, could someone explain why Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff hate libertarianism? I remember reading an essay by Peikoff on the subject a few years ago, but most of it sounded like objecto-babble.”

The official orthodox reason for refusing to identify with “libertarianism” is, roughly, that “libertarianism” is claimed to involve an uncritical alliance with anyone who happens to share your views about political outcomes, without concern for why they hold those views. I.E., “libertarianism” can encompass not only an Objectivist theory of politics founded on an Objectivist theory of morality founded on Objectivist theories of knowledge, reality, and human nature; but also consequentialists, anarchists, Rothbardians, constitutionalists, pot-smoking hippies, and other ne’er-do-wells that Miss Rand wouldn’t want to be caught dead associating with. Peter Schwartz has a ridiculous essay (“Libertarianism: the perversion of liberty” or somesuch) in which he expounds the theory in much more polemical terms than even Rand ever mustered, which goes on at length about how libertarians broadly, and Murray Rothbard especially, are a bunch of whim-worshipping nihilists held together by nothing but the urge to destroy.

I think the real reasons have more to do with the antagonism between Rand and Rothbard, and with Objectivists’ revulsions at the aforementioned post-smoking hippies.

Kennedy: “No, it’s a contract for specific performance.”

Let’s say I sign a contract with you, selling myself into bondage as a farm worker for the rest of my life (in return, say, for an annuity given to my children). After a few weeks I realize that this really sucks, refuse to work, and when you threaten to whip me, I run away.

If human rights are inalienable (and they are), there’s no legitimate basis for you to send out the hounds and force me to come back. Most people would say that what you are doing is using force to keep me in slavery—even though I signed a contract for specific performance.

Is this relevantly different from the situation of a soldier being forced not to “desert” if he decides that he’s not going to fight anymore, such that one is slavery and the other is not? If it is, then how?

Kinsella: “it seems simply to express the view that political units have a right to secede; which of course was also Calhoun’s view.” Except for the “political units” that happen to be made up of Black people, of course. Oops!

Fulwiler: ‘Re: Calhoun’s views. Well, he obviously did not consider the master /slave relationship to be a “political” association.’ False. Here’s Calhoun, defending the freedom to beat, whip, or kill Negroes if they don’t do what you tell them to in “Slavery a Positive Good”: “But I will not dwell on this aspect of the question; I turn to the political; and here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact. There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.” (Bonus points for endorsing the Marxist theory of class when it comes to the Yankees!)

Fulwiler: ‘Do you? I don’t see that it is.’ Of course it was; slavery was a creature of the law—defended and enforced by agents of the government. Slavery as a political institution in the South was based on the claim that Black slaves were not citizens of the several states, and so not entitled to self-defense or help from the government in defending against abduction, assault, robbery, rape, murder, etc. The subordinate political status was the essential part of Southern slavery; without it, there could be no legal basis whatever for holding others in bondage.

(In fact there was no legal basis whatever, since there is no such thing as legitimate authority to make a law that enslaves other human beings. But it should be quite clear that Southern slavers claimed a political basis for their ability to keep black Southerners enslaved.)

… although Tom DiLorenzo and I would say the Southerners were right to defend themselves …

Throughout the Civil War, the Confederates were actually fighting a two-front war: about 1/3 of all Confederate military forces were continually held behind the lines in order to capture fugitive slaves and suppress slave revolts (which had been escalating for decades, and erupted across the South during the war).

I agree that Southerners had a right to defend themselves against aggression. Including the Black ones. Describing the Confederate war effort (1/3 of which was directed against Black Southerners seceding from their slave pens) as self-defense seems dubious at best.

I’m a bit baffled by the film, since, while it is an apparent attempt to rag on Michael Moore, it provides a much more devastating critique of the war and its supporters than it does Michael Moore.

If George Bush were personally going into battle to lead the fight against an army of vile, inhuman goblins directed by the unholy power of a Dark Lord bent on the desolation and domination of the whole of the Earth, and in the process of launching a massive assault on all the strongholds of the civilized world, then I don’t doubt that Michael Moore would not have had quite the same objections to his policies.

Do warhawks actually see the world like this? Much of their rhetoric outside of this silly little film seems to suggest it. If so, it would be funny, except for all of the people who have died because of their childish conception of the world.

This is good stuff. A couple of questions, though. You claim that “With all its warts, copyright was a system that filled an important role at a particular time and in the context of particular technological and social systems around the production and and consumption of a particular intellectual good: eighteenth century printed books.” This is a pretty common way that people arguing for a rollback on intellectual property restrictions talk about the history of IP. But I actually think it’s more rosy than IP deserves.

Here’s why. You argue: “Patronage was simply not an optimum compensation system for the production of the types of work that were demanded. Copyright stepped in because it worked to support publishers and authors in the production of content that was desired but that was not being produced in adequate quantities under patronage, etc.” But in fact copyrights (and patents, too, for what it’s worth) originated protected markets granted by royal mandates—a given printing house would be given a “copyright” in a particular region, which allowed that house and only that house to print books and newspapers in the area. There was no presumption that copyright originated from the perogatives of the author of a work (which could be copied freely by anyone the King authorized to print).

Second: I think you make a really important point, which ought to be underlined, when you say ‘Quite reasonably, people want to know what this replacement or parallel system will be before we rush off eliminating the companies currently paying the people making the music most of us have in our CD players. This is where I start sounding a lot less prepared. Ultimately, I don’t have the “this is the system we’re looking for” answer that people want. Unlike most people I talk to, I’m alright with not having that answer.’

I think there is a certain amount that we can say about how the world will look with certain changes (e.g., without copyright restrictions). But one thing that a lot of people don’t seem to get about freedom is that you don’t have to have everything worked out ahead of time. Five Year Plans are for Stalinists and corporations; if your goal is just to let people decide what it is best for them to do, then you can usually trust them to come up with something creative, worthwhile, and powerful. Not always, of course—people are anything but perfect—but you can get it a lot more often from many people working freely than from one person’s grand scheme for how to organize society.

So while I’m interested in talking about ways the world might turn out without copyright protectionism, or suburban zoning laws, or corporate union-busting, or any number of other things, I’m quite happy to leave a lot of spaces open. The ethical issues are clear enough: people should be free wherever they can be. And the practical issues of what people will do with their freedom are interesting and difficult, but I don’t need to know the answers to all of them. Musicians can figure out how to make music; authors can figure out how to write books; and I’m sure that they’ll come up with much better answers than I will.

“The Daily Kos has suggested this web page may be a hoax. If it is, it is a cruel one; no 19 year old woman deserves to be made the center of a political controversy not of her making. If it is not a hoax, and Maya is gay, I understand Alan Keyes even less than I previously thought.”

How is this controversy not cruel, even if she is, in fact, a lesbian? Does she deserve to be made the center of a political controversy if she is really gay? Does soliciting shock about her (real or fictional) sexuality serve any purpose other than reinforcing gay-baiting?

JimBob, in reply to claim that he is both supporting, and benefiting from, immigrant labor every time he shops at the grocery store, objects: “Most if not all agriculture harvesting can be done by machines today.”

Of course, most if not all agricultural harvesting can be done by tech industry CEOs—you just have to pay them enough. But there’s the rub: the reason that so much agricultural labor is done by migrant farmworkers—many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America—is that it’s more cost-effective for farmers to get their tomatos picked that way than to automate the process.

That’s not to say that farm labor is great for the immigrants. It’s hard work and the bosses usually treat you like shit. But workers do it because they are willing to put themselves through a lot in order to improve their lives. Also because, thanks to anti-immigrant blowhards like you, it’s often very hard to find work in any other field.

I’ll leave the question of historical food price trends to those who have spent more time researching it; I’d only like to point out here that the issue is not whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef in 1960, but rather whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef would be now if fewer Mexican and Central American immigrants (documented and undocumented) agreed to work at the prevailing wages in the industry. (And as for privatizing profits—I’m all for it. Would that more profits were privatized.)

What about the claim that immigrant labor “socializes the costs” of the labor? It’s hard to see how—and hard to see how it would matter if it did. Documented immigrants pay much the same taxes that you do. Roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes, which everyone who drives on a road pays. Schools, local law enforcement, and state law enforcement are all funded primarily by property taxes and sales taxes, which immigrants (documented or undocumented) pay whenever they buy anything and whenever they live anywhere (either directly, or through their landlord). Nor would it matter very much if these things were funded primarily through taxes that immigrants don’t pay: in that case, the fault lies on the government that imposes the taxes and uses the money to provide the services—not on the peaceful immigrants who come here to work.

As usual, people who favor assaulting peaceful immigrants neglect the obvious. The overwhelming reason that Mexican immigrants come to the United States is to work. They benefit from work; and they can find it because employers benefit from hiring them. When employers can produce goods at a lower cost, it helps you, because they will make more of the goods and/or lower the price at which they sell it. The laws of economics are not repealed just because the people involved happen to speak Spanish. Markets work.