You are aware, aren’t you,

1. … that those same labor laws which provide privileges to NLRB-recognized unions by forcing employers into collective-bargaining also heavily regulate the methods that NLRB-recognized unions can adopt, and the goals that they can achieve? That, for example, under Taft-Hartley, legally-recognized unions are forbidden from striking except under a limited range of government-approved conditions, that they are legally prohibited from establishing union hiring halls or freely negotiating a closed shop contract with employers, that in many states (under so-called “right to work” laws) they are legally prohibited from freely negotiating a union shop contract with employers, that they are legally prohibited from promoting secondary boycotts or engaging in secondary strikes (i.e. boycotts or strikes against a company for doing business with a second company workers have a grievance with; this prohibition effectively bans general strikes and mandates union scabbing), that strikes can be (and have been) broken by the arbitrary fiat of the President of the United States, etc., etc., etc.? In fact, while some factions of the labor movement (especially the AFL and the nascent CIO) actively lobbied for the Wagner Act and the system of state patronage that it created, other, more radical factions of the labor movement were stridently opposed to it, arguing (correctly) that Roosevelt’s plan was an effort to subsidize bureaucratic conservative unionism, and thus to capture and domesticate the labor movement. And predicting (accurately) that the practical consequences of the NLRB system would be to substantially hamstring the labor movement, and to benefit only a few fatcat union bosses, at the expense of rank-and-file workers.

2. … that for about half of its history (from the founding of the Knights of Labor in 1869 up to the Wagner Act in 1935), the American labor movement operated in a political and legal environment where it had no government recognition, no government privileges, and in fact was repeatedly, violently attacked by injunction-wielding judges, by the police, the military, by the U.S. Marshalls, by President Woodrow Wilson and Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover, by state militias, private “security” companies, and mobs? That radical unions like the IWW nevertheless managed to organize hundreds of thousands of workers in spite of this unrelenting violence and to win, without any use of government privilege, substantial victories in towns like Lawrence, Massachusetts and Spokane, Washington? I conclude that labor unions can be quite effective when based on free association and without government privilege.

If the conclusion you’re trying to urge here is just that the NLRB and the AFL-CIO are statist, well, sure. Who denies that? Certainly not the NLRB or the AFL-CIO, who candidly declare their allegiance to a big, interventionist government; and certainly not pro-union anarchists, either, who generally refer to establishment unionism as “labor fakirs” deserving nothing but scorn, and advocate for radical unions organized along quite different lines, and with quite different aims.

If, on the other hand, you’re trying to establish some more general conclusion, like (say) “Labor Unions and Freedom Don’t Mix,” or that “the state is the first weapon in the labor union’s arsenal to be wielded against employers and workers alike,” or that “the ultimate dream of the labor unions is to completely replace the existing state, allowing them to force their will on 100% of the people 100% of the time,” i.e., a claim about what labor unions per se do and want, rather than what a temporarily triumphant, government-subsidized faction within the labor movement does and wants, but which other, competing factions within the labor movement have repeatedly condemned, then I can’t say you’ve offered much by way of convincing evidence for that conclusion.

As for Bakunin and his followers, I certainly have my disagreements with Bakuninist collectivism. (That’s why I’m an individualist, or a mutualist, rather than a collectivist.) But you’re distorting their position. Bakunin’s idea of federated labor unions is not a replacement state. He believed that the best arrangement for society was a federated structure of workers’ and community associations. But he also believed in an absolute right to dissociate from any union or other association that one did not want to participate in or cooperate with. Thus: “[W]ithout certain absolutely essential conditions the practical realization of freedom will be forever impossible. These conditions are: . . . The internal reorganization of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognizing the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish and repudiate their alliances without regard to so-called historic rights or the convenience of their neighbors.” (Revolutionary Catechism, 1866). Etc. Bakunin’s problems, such as they are, lie elsewhere. May I gently suggest that, if you want to find out Mikhail Bakunin’s views, you might be better off reading works by Mikhail Bakunin, rather than summaries of those works by Per Bylund?

As for Joe and his workers, I certainly agree that Joe should not be forced by the government (or by any form of violence) to engage in collective bargaining with the striking workers. However, I think you’re walloping on a strawman, as far as the worker’s demands go (do you know of any strike, even under the existing statist labor bureaucracy, in which workers demanded a 400% wage increase?); and I think you’re also pretty severely overestimating the ease of replacing 25%-40% of the workers on the shop floor all at once, especially if you’re trying to accomplish this without offering substantially higher wages or improved conditions. In real-world labor struggle, being in a position where you can get 25% or more of the workforce ready to just walk off the job often puts you in a very good position for getting substantial concessions from the boss.

J. Croft,

I’m more or less entirely with you as a matter of principle. (Like you, I believe in an unconditional right to keep and bear arms; like you I believe that the Constitution was a tyrannical usurpation in its conception, and that appealing to one’s favorite interpretation of the Constitution to somehow safeguard liberty is a sucker’s bet; like you I believe that the standing army and the (increasingly overtly militarized) standing police forces are one of the most toxic political forces in America today. But there are a couple of historical claims you make along the way which utterly baffle me.

You write: See, the backbone of the nation’s defense was on each of us arising out of necessity with arms and the skills to handle them well. They certainly did rise-whether the threat came from British Empire during the Revolutionary War; Mexico when it tried to conquer the Midwest during the 1840’s; …

I’m not aware of any point during the 1840s when Mexico “tried to conquer the Midwest” or when a Mexican invasion was resisted by citizen militia. Are you referring to the U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846-1848)? If so, then what attempt to “conquer the Midwest” was there, at any point? There was fighting between Mexican and U.S. soldiers, after professional soldiers in the standing U.S. army were deliberately moved, as an act of provocation, into the disputed territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces river; at most, the Mexican end of the fighting was intended to recapture a small strip of southern Texas. In response the U.S. government–with the nakedly imperialistic President Polk at the helm–launched a massive invasion of Mexico, carried out not by militia, but by professional soldiers in the standing U.S. Army (cavalry and infantry) and Navy, which proceeded to invade Mexico, conquer it, seize its capital, and to seize 1/2 of Mexico’s territory, most notably Alta California and Nuevo Mexico (now California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, part of Colorado, etc. The radical libertarians in America at the time — William Lloyd Garrison; Henry David Thoreau — opposed the war at the time, rightly seeing it for what it was — an imperial war, orchestrated by the expansionist Slave Power. This was no militia resistance; for the U.S.’s part it was no resistance at all. It was an act of military aggression, carried out more or less explicitly for the purpose of imperial conquest, and sold to the public with a combination of lies, equivocation, and by-jingo brutality.

Secondly, you write: Immigration was encouraged; millions of Europeans were shipped in who were pig ignorant of what Freedom is. Eventually their mentalities, formed by centuries of despots wielding absolute power over them, made more radical social controls a viable option. Controls… like the banning of guns in New York with the Sullivan Act in 1916.

This strikes me as bizarre. Have you read the editorials, speeches, etc. that led up to the passage of the Sullivan Act? The people arguing for the Sullivan Act were more or less universally anti-immigrant, and justified the gun grab quite explicitly as a way of keeping guns out of the hands of immigrants. For example, here’s the New York Times in 1905, on a forerunner concealed-carry licensing law, then being mooted in the state Assembly: “Such a measure would prove corrective and salutary in a city filled with immigrants and evil communications, floating from the shores of Italy and Austria-Hungary. New York police reports frequently testify to the fact that the Italian and other south Continental gentry here are acquainted with the pocket pistol, and while drunk or merrymaking will use it quite as handily as the stiletto, and with more deadly effect. It is hoped that this treacherous and distinctly outlandish mode of settling disputes may not spread to corrupt the native good manners of the community.”

The reason the Sullivan Act was passed was not because immigrants accepted or supported it. The reason it was passed was because the immigrants targeted (mainly eastern European and Italian immigrants) generally could not vote, and had no political power in the city machines; whereas the cities nativists, whipped up by anti-immigrant rhetoric, decided that they were willing to accept an unprecedented expansion of government power, government gun-grabs, and the beginning of police-state regimentation, as the price for government control over the demonized immigrant population.

I agree with you about the tyrannical nature of so-called “gun control,” and the tyrannical nature of the system which produced it. I agree with you about what needs to be fought for. But I think that it’s very important that, historically speaking, we keep the real enemy in our sights.

Roderick:

So one can nonthickly argue that it’s not that case that we must be thicklib. But one can’t non-thickly argue that it is the case that we shouldn’t be thicklib.

Well, thick libertarianism is the claim that libertarianism as such provides good reasons for libertarians to care about other commitments besides a rigorous commitment to non-aggression. So it’s true that if, for example, a would-be thin libertarian is arguing that we should abandon a particular nonviolently held philosophical view about libertarianism (viz. the thick conception of it) for, e.g., reasons of libertarian strategy, then she is really advancing a form of thick, not thin, libertarianism.

But couldn’t a woud-be thin libertarian instead argue that we ought to abandon a particular nonviolently held philosophical view about libertarianism (viz. the thick conception of it) for other reasons distinct from and alongside our libertarian commitments? For example, that it should be abandoned for reasons of intellectual clarity, considered as desirable in itself rather than as a means to libertarian triumph or whatever else?

If so, then, while I would certainly disagree with the argument for abandoning a thick conception of libertarianism, I wouldn’t think that the argument is internally contradictory. The appeal only becomes an appeal to thickness if the reasons being given are reasons that the libertarian is supposed to have qua libertarian, rather than (for example) qua philosopher or qua clear thinker.

William:

We may not be able to directly speak of “all that really matters,” but we can get closer and closer by refusing to hold to our existing macroscopic abstractions.

Are you claiming that something like, say, the loaf of cornbread that I stuffed into my mouth earlier today is a “macroscopic abstraction,” whereas stuff like, say, up and down quarks are not abstractions, but rather concretes?

Really?

GT 2008-06-23 (trigger warning), in which a grand jury declares that the Stark Count Ohio Sheriff’s Office did nothing wrong when a gang of several male and female deputies held Hope Steffey down in a jail cell, forcibly removed her clothes over her screams of protest while wrenching her arms behind her back, and then left her completely naked in a freezing jail cell in public view for six hours. (Cf. also GT 2008-02-05: the original story (trigger warning) and follow-ups on the case, including five more women who came forward with complaints about the use of retaliatory, humiliating, unnecessary strip-searches in the Stark County jail.) Steffey is pursuing a lawsuit in federal court.

GT 2008-06-26: State ownership of the means of reproduction (#2) in which I comment on the AMA’s recently adopted resolution calling for “model legislation” to prohibit women from choosing a midwife-assisted home birth.

Characterizing something as a “rant” may seem like a handy rhetorical way of waving it off without actually engaging with its argumentative structure. But that’s really uncharitable and not especially productive of reasoned discussion.

I think that LRC is more of a mixed bag than Aster does (not because I disagree with her particularly about the criticisms she lodges against some of the content and authors that appear there, but rather because I think that it’s important to keep in mind how many different authors post there, and that they are not all marching in lockstep, either in general or on the issues Aster has in mind). But be that as it may, the kind of responses she’s gotten from Tracy Saboe and Anon73 are just silly.

If the high readership ranking of LRC is being specifically mentioned as a sign of progress, and one believes that the high readership ranking of LRC is not a sign of progress, then it makes sense to reply with criticism specific to LRC, in order to show that its being widely read is not as good a development as was originally suggested. Replying to that criticism with “If you don’t like it, go start your own” is just a non sequitur. Aster was giving counter-evidence in reply to a particular claim that had already been made; this is just a change of subject.

Replying to her argument with “at least they’re attacking the State,” on the other hand, is like a cartoon of thoughtless “shoulder-to-shoulder” Popular Front rhetoric. At least Stalin was fighting Hitler. (And vice versa.) But, really, so what?

If you think that Aster’s comments are unfair to LRC or Antiwar.com, you can try replying to that, but these kind of remarks, passed off as replies, don’t really even rise to the level of successfully replying.

GT 2008-06-11: Beating up your teenage daughter isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law. In which parents of several teenaged defendants sue for a restraining order against Justice of the Peace Gustavo “Gus” Garza, of Los Fresnos, Texas, and if possible his removal from the bench. After a 14 year old young woman was hauled into his court over skipping school, he ordered her stepfather to spank her with a heavy wooden paddle, in front of strangers in open court. Garza claims he didn’t “order” a spanking per se, and calls this a “punishment option,” because the threatened “alternative” was a $500 fine and a criminal record for the daughter if the stepfather refused to spank her. After the court-ordered spanking, Garza told the stepfather that he hadn’t hit her hard enough.

Several other parents have now come forward, including the parents of a 14-year-old boy with a muscular development disability who Garza ordered beaten as punishment for swearing at a bus driver, and have joined the lawsuit.

Tommy_Grand:

I read that, in the US, more men (usually boys) get raped than women — but the male rapes go unreported. I never understood how “unreported” statistics get tallied, but I know that the number of rapes I see cited is not the same as the number of rape convictions.

Ross Perot’s Trade Policy:

Tommy Grand, you can read lots of things on the internet. I suppose with prison rape that’s possible, but it wouldn’t make much of a dent in Brownmiller’s hypothesis if the criminal fringe that compels all women to curtail their behavior in the outside world also behaves the same way on the inside world.

This question I can help out on.

I know of no empirical data that suggests that men are raped more often than women are. It’s certainly true that very few rape survivors report what happened to them to the police, and that male rape survivors are even less likely to report it to the police than female survivors are. But there is fairly extensive research on unreported rapes, and it does not indicate that the unreported rapes against men are anywhere near numerous enough to make up the difference.

Obviously, there is no perfect way to determine the number of sexual assaults that aren’t reported to the police. However, the best ways at our disposal to get a grip on something like the rough scale of the problem are anonymous victim surveys, in which researchers randomly sample a population of men and women (most often with telephone surveys or paper surveys), ensure the anonymity of the respondents, and ask them whether certain kinds of events have ever happened to them. Victim surveys like these are the kinds of surveys that are generally being cited when writers refer to the large proportion of rapes (over 90% of rapes against women, and an even higher percentage of rapes against men) that go unreported. Since the victim surveys are anonymous, and carefully designed to be as specific and objective as possible in their questions; and since there are no legal or social consequences attached to responding to the survey, as there are for making a report to the police, these tend to give a much more accurate picture of the situation than police report statistics do.

One of the most systematic, largest, and most recent victim surveys was the National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, for the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Justice. The surveys were done in late 1995 through early 1996, with the research reports coming out from 1998 to the present, and (in spite of the name) collected a great deal of data about the incidence, prevalence, and nature of violence against both men and women, including battery, rape, and stalking. You can read a great deal about their findings on rape in their research-in-brief report (1998) (which includes a couple of pages of discussion on survey methodology, pp. 13-15), their full report (2000), and their recent research report on rape victimization (2006).

What they found is that about 3% of U.S. men (about 1 in 33), and about 18% of U.S. women (about 1 in 6), have suffered either a completed rape, or an attempted rape, in their liftimes. If you look only at completed rapes, and exclude attempted rapes, the numbers are about 15% (1 in 7) for women, and about 2% (1 in 50) for men.

If rates of rape have remained relatively stable since 1995-1996 (police statistics indicate that, if anything, they have gone up; but as noted, police statistics are hard to rely on) then about 0.3% of U.S. adult women (about 300,000 nationally) and about 0.1% of U.S. adult men (about 100,000) have been raped in the past 12 months; and that there have been about 876,000 rapes committed against women in the U.S. in the past 12 months, compared to about 111,000 rapes committed against men. (The incidence numbers are different from the prevalence numbers because female rape survivors are much more likely to have been raped repeatedly than male rape survivors.)

Thus, while it’s appallingly common for men to be raped, and more men have been raped than most people think, women are nevertheless much more likely to be raped than men are.

I have no idea if it’s accurate, but (lacking evidence) I cant discount the possibility. Assuming arguendo that it’s true (more males are raped than females) how does that affect the Brownmiller hypothesis? I mean, if perception (and therefore fear) is one thing and reality another, wouldn’t her hypothesis still be valid?

For what it’s worth, Brownmiller is certainly aware of child sexual abuse against boys and the rape of adult men in prison. She discusses the former in her discussions of child molestation and of serial killers. She discusses the later at some length in a section of Chapter 8, “Power: Institution and Authority” (pp. 257-268). Brownmiller was, in fact, one of the first writers to conclude (remember, she published in 1975) that the rape of men in prison was systematic, widespread, and an instrument of prison hierarchies of power. She believed (rightly, I think) that the phenomena tended to support her theories about the use of rape as an instrument of gendered hierarchies of power, not to undermine them.

If it were true that more men were raped than women, then no, I don’t think it would much affect her hypothesis, firstly because her hypothesis, as you note, has as much to do with the felt threat of rape as it does with the actual incidence of rape, so with men, if there were in fact widespread stranger rape, but it were never talked about much, and especially not as something that threatens all men in daily situations, you wouldn’t expect it to have the same social effects. Similarly, and just as importantly, since the threat of rape (by other men, not by women) doesn’t generally lead to men being exhorted to seek protection from women, you wouldn’t expect it to have the same dynamics for sex-class that the threat of rape by one group of men has on women, who often are exhorted to seek protection from other men. And, thirdly, what we know about the situations in which men are most often raped (it is extremely rare for men to be randomly targeted for rape by strangers, outside of some well-defined spaces like prisons; but, while most women who are raped are also raped by someone they know, not by a stranger, the existence of a significant number of men, who randomly target women for rape, in everyday situations, at large in the outside world, does create a significant threat, which Brownmiller is describing in her Myrmidon theory, and which does not generally exist for men. (If the rape of men were more common than the rape of women, then no doubt widespread rape might have other systemic effects on men; but not the effects, as discussed by Brownmiller, that the threat of random stranger-rape in the world at large has on women, since the threat profile for men would be different in character.)

But, as I said above, see the victim surveys on actual incidence and prevalence of rape. As far as I know there is no evidence that stranger rape, or intimate partner rape, or acquaintance rape is more commonly suffered by men than by women.

Thomas,

You write: “This seems like blaming the chickens for the fox’s raid on the chicken coop.”

I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t blame rank-and-file workers for the way the NLRB functions. I blame the politicos, the “Progressive” bosses, and the conservative union bosses who pushed to create the system. (Radical unions, like the I.W.W., rightly opposed the system as an effort to promote conservative unionism and to capture and domesticate unions through a combination of government patronage and government regulation.)

You write: “Rightly administered and empowered, NLRB ought to be a counterweight to moneyed and propertied interests that have no interest in worker’s rights.”

Two things.

First, I have no confidence in anyone’s ability to craft a regulatory agency that successfully resists being substantially captured by the interests that it regulates. I can’t think of any example in the history of American regulatory bodies where this has been pulled off for any length of time, and I don’t think it should be particularly surprising that, since political entities respond to political incentives, they will tend to be administered in a way that systematically benefits the wealthiest and most politically-connected people.

Second, even if the NLRB were ideally administered, the system is designed from the ground up as a means of constraining union demands and restricting unions to the most conservative and least effectual methods. (Thus, the Taft-Hartley bans on secondary strikes, secondary boycotts, union hiring halls, wildcat strikes, etc. etc. etc.; thus the emphasis on a heavily regulated process of collective bargaining, controlled by very elaborate legal requirements that are often next to impossible for rank-and-file workers to understand, in place of extremely effective and very simple to understand tactics, like work-to-rule and other forms of direct action in the workplace.)

You write: “At least for legal representation, that — in theory — is already the case, isn’t it?”

Well, not entirely — you can choose one lawyer rather than another, as long as you can afford their fees, but you can’t choose anyone as your advocate except those who have been officially approved for membership in the government-created and government-regulated lawyer’s guild. But lawyers weren’t the “experts” I was referring to; I was referring to the fact that the government forces people to take legal disputes before specific judges (with jurisdiction fixed by the issue in dispute and by accidents of geography), and excludes other no-less qualified and impartial experts from taking up the dispute simply because the privileged judge has a particular political status and the other would-be arbitrator doesn’t. If we are really talking about a form of specialized expertise here, like that of the watchmaker or of the doctor, then anyone should be able to take the case, not just a judge deemed to have that topic and that location within his bailiwick by the government.

You write: “I don’t see how to bid out for police functions, though, without that turning into yet another part of society baldly favoring the rich and privileged over the poor and disenfranchised.”

Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that already how government policing works?

Tax funding doesn’t prevent government cops from treating poor people pretty shitty, or from acting as an instrument of class power. In fact, the fact that poor neighborhoods have no real control over who provides policing in their neighborhoods, and no way of cutting off their portion of the funding for neglectful or abusive police forces, is part and parcel of the problem.

Anyway, I’m not sure what you mean by “bid out for police functions.” If you mean the government outsourcing policing to private security corporations (Wackenhut, Blackwater, whatever), I’m not for that, and I don’t consider it an example of free market self-defense. I think that all government involvement in policing (whether in-sourced or out-sourced) should be abolished.

If you mean individual people choosing to cover the costs of policing, and having a choice about who, if anyone, they get police services from, then I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the result will be (even more) plutocratic policing. It’s true that, if all policing were based on free association and not on government monopoly, there might well be some policing that is done by private goon squads for hire, and those might have an incentive to favor the rich over the poor. But (1) again, I’m not convinced that they’d have more of an incentive to do so than government cops already have; and (2) there are lots of other ways of using free association to get self-defense and neighborhood defense done. For example, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords organized historically oppressed people to arm themselves, and to patrol and defend their own neighborhoods (including defending them from the predation of abusive white cops). In any case, where there are many, competing and countervailing associations that serve defensive functions, if one association becomes especially neglectful, or, worse, predatory, against marginalized people, other associations can move in to compete, or new associations can be formed, to check the first. But when policing is monopolized by a single institution, there is no real reason for them to try to please anybody outside of their firmest base of support (in the case of political monopolies, that means the ruling class–as is confirmed by how police departments already operate today). If they don’t please marginalized people, why would they care? They stay paid anyway, and there’s no countervailing force to hold them to account for their abusiveness.

My own view is that the need for any form of professional policing at all would be dramatically less in a free society than it is in the present day. (For example, in a free society there would be no drug laws, vice laws, or border laws, and thus no narcs, no vice cops, and no La Migra. There would also be much less entrenched urban poverty, because — for reasons I discuss in the Freeman article — ghettoized urban poverty as we know it is largely a function of interlocking government interventions against poor people’s survival strategies and attemtps to flourish through creative hustling; hence much less economically motivated crime, and also much less of certain kinds of antisocial behavior. So, again, this is, to a great extent, a problem that vanishes along with the needless government laws and endless government “wars” on consensual behavior, which I already favor abolishing. But, even if the demand for specialized policing were to remain just as high as it is today, I still think that it is far, far better to have a situation in which people are free to withdraw their support from abusive agencies, and where there are many acknowledged experts to keep each other in check, than a situation in which people are forced to pay for their own abuse, and in which cops are never held to account for wrongdoing by any means other than “handling it internally” and issuing the occasional “Oops, our bad”.

PhysicistDave:

Since I am not sure whether I would consider you male or female, this seems appropriate. . . . And, even if you choose to fill us in on that, I’m still not sure which I would consider you to be.

Dave,

Who the fuck cares whether you would deign to consider Aster male or female? I can’t see how it’s any business of yours to say one way or the other. What does it matter to you?

What does matter, on the other hand, is what Aster considers herself–at least, that is, if you want to try to have a conversation with her according to basic norms of civilized politeness.

You used some language which, whatever your intent may have been, inadvertently caused her grief; she earnestly and straightforwardly explained the reasons why, and now, rather than doing something as simple and decent as apologizing for your inadvertent fuck-up, you’ve decided to get defensive about it, and back up the defensiveness with being a dick to her about it, first by repeating the same term you used earlier, and then by adding your wildly irrelevant and pointlessly presumptuous speculations on whether or not you personally would consider her female (as if anyone asked you; as if anyone other than you cares what you think about it). You could not possibly have been more rude if you were to address a black 16 year old as “boy,” and, when he asked you to choose another way to address him, you called him “boy” again and then went on to ramble about how you wouldn’t know whether to consider a 16 year old a “boy” or a “young man” or something else again.

This kind of callous rudeness is completely unacceptable and I think you ought to apologize to Aster for it.

All libertarians I know (and all non-libertarians I know, for that matter) of course recognize that freedom does include the right to sever relations with one’s biological family, and that, in some unfortunate situations, this may be the wise thing to do.

You know, I see no reason to think that Aster’s comments about the “familialism” of mainstream Chinese culture were directed against a position that countenanced the right to sever relations with one’s biological family. As far as I can tell, there is good reason to believe that failing to countenance that right is part of what she was complaining about, and part of what Natasha was complaining about after her. Has it occurred to you that when she criticized “familialism,” she was criticizing something that she identifies with that word, not necessarily what you identify with that word?

If you want to change the subject to something else — like, say, the position that custody of children ought to default to biological parents in the absence of some compelling reason for a different arrangement (which I doubt Aster or Natasha disagrees with) or perhaps the position that, although children have a right to sever ties with their parents for whatever reason, morally speaking, they owe a (non-enforceable) duty of filial obedience and morally ought to sever ties only under extreme and unusual conditions (which I know that Aster and Natasha disagree with, but which is a distinct position from the one that began this conversation), then you should feel free to discuss that, instead. But you do owe it to your readers to make clear that you are changing the subject, and not to pretend as if you are responding to Aster’s original comments.

Furthermore, a society that rejects family ties as the basis of society, as Western societies increasingly have, is unlikely to be libertarian. If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, they are likely to expect the government to step in as a substitute. It is no coincidence that unmarried mothers, for example, tend to be supporters of big government.

If people cannot rely on their family in difficult times, then they are likely to rely on somebody other than their family. That need not be the government, and historically, there have been many institutions developed that provide mutual aid and support outside of family ties. (For example, the many workers’ societies and ethnic mutual aid societies that have always flourished in working-class immigrant communities, where, as a matter of necessity, working folks couldn’t count on support from their mostly overseas families.)

If you want to ask why it is in this country, today, that there is so much less of a mutual aid infrastructure in place than there has been in times place, and why there is so little institutionalized support for, say, single mothers, outside of the government welfare and education bureaucracies, well, that’s an interesting question to ask. But once you start asking it, you may find that it complicates your picture of the real dynamics here, and it becomes a lot harder to scapegoat single mothers for welfare statism.

Families are the one natural, primordial human institution

This is either vacuous or counterhistorical nonsense, depending on what you mean by “families.” If “families” means “nuclear families,” then it’s certainly not true that human societies are “naturally,” or always, arranged around those. If “families” means “extended family,” the claim is vacuous; ties of kinship are extremely variable across human societies, in terms of who counts as family, how important distant family relationships are (as well as how comparatively important ties of kinship by blood and by marriage are, etc.), and there is no fixed cross-cultural definition of just what the hell an extended family is. In late 18th century America it was extremely common for young children and adolescents to be packed off for years to live with very distant relations or family friends, in ways that would be unthinkable in contemporary American “nuclear families.” Who counts as family, how much certain kinds of family ties matter, etc. are all culturally variable phenomena which change a lot over time and space, and the particular form of family ties that are now common in bourgeois American families are a very late development, which has nothing in particular to do with nature and everything to do with American culture and American standards of living.

Finally, as a strategic approach for the libertarian movement, condemnation of a familial orientation is simply disastrous. . . . most human beings, if forced to choose between a political ideology and their family will — thank Heavens! — choose their family. . . . Of course, in the final analysis, it is all moot, because Asia still generally adheres to traditional human values, and Asia will triumph, as much as that pains Aster.

I have no idea what logical point all this guff is supposed to establish. Even if you’re right, the popularity or the material success of an ideology has no bearing on its truth or falsity.

I mean, look, I’m already throwing in for an ideology that proclaims a universal and unconditional right to shoot up heroin and bid for private surface-to-air missiles on eBay, while you engage in consensual sodomy, for (tax-free) money, with an undocumented immigrant while you the two of you cross back and forth over the U.S.-Mexico border. Do you seriously think someone who goes in for that sort of thing ought to be swayed by complaints that their beliefs about family ties might not go over well at the next Homeowners’ Association meeting?