John: If it was so that medical care and mutual aid was so easy to come by, then why was their a perception that the poor and elderly were dying sick in the streets?

It depends on what period this “perception” is supposed to apply to.

1. If you’re referring to the heyday of the mutual aid societies in the late 19th century through the 1910s, the answer is simply that this “perception” exists because statists often promote bogus perceptions of crisis without much supporting data, in order to put over the need for their desired programs with the politicized public. Some actual data on the circumstances faced by the poor and elderly, rather than impressionistic and sensationalistic “perceptions” would be useful here. I have some actual data on how available these arrangements were to ordinary workers, which I present briefly in the article — typically between 20% and 50% of workers in major urban areas in English-speaking countries were covered, and these numbers were rapidly rising in the 1900s, prior to the political campaigns to eradicate the associations and raise medical prices. If you want a fuller presentation of the data, I recommend David Beito’s excellent book, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, especially Ch. 6, “The ‘Lodge Practice Evil’ Reconsidered.” If you have actual countervailing data that tends to cut against the conclusion I draw, feel free to present it, but if what you’ve got is just ill-specified “perceptions,” well, so what?

2. If, on the other hand, you’re referring to the decades leading up to the passage of major government entitlement programs for the “poor and elderly” — programs like Social Security (1935) or Medicare (1965), then you need to keep in mind that these programs were introduced and rolled out decades after the non-corporate, grassroots, free-market alternatives that I discuss in the article had been deliberately dismantled by politically-driven campaigns — coordinated mainly by establishment medical guilds, using their power over government licensure of practitioners as their primary means of enforcement — to drive them out. (The blackballing campaigns against lodge-practice doctors in the U.S. ramped up in the mid-1910s and succeeded in forcing dramatic declines in lodge practice starting in the 1920s. See Beito, p. 124 et seq.) So, to the extent that government could point to a crisis of health care accessibility or affordability for the poor and elderly, just before the New Deal and Great Society transfer programs were created, it’s because government was pointing to a situation where the kind of grassroots, consensual social organizations that had made health care accessible to the poor and elderly had already been rubbed out by government in the decades prior. Once again, an example of government breaking your legs, then handing you crutches, and telling you, “See, without me you couldn’t even walk!”

Also, secondarily, because, insofar as there was a genuine crisis, it was, in no small part, the direct result of the non-corporate, grassroots, free-market alternatives that I discuss in the article having been deliberately dismantled in the decades prior. The grassroots voluntary mutual aid associations that I discuss in the article flourished in the late 19th century up until the 1910s; in the 1920s,

By the time that government programs such as Social Security (1935) and Medicare (1965) were being proposed and rolled out, the “lodge practice” arrangements and similar mutual aid associations had already

John: However I am not ready to drink the cool-aid …

I don’t want to be a dick about this, but can you not use that phrase when what you mean is “I don’t accept your delusional beliefs?” It’s an offhand jokey reference where the “punchline” is the murder of 276 children, and the senseless deaths of almost 1,000 people, just 30 years ago. Jokes like that suck.

John: … and say that we need to rid ourselves of the FDA or of medical accreditation. Kevin Trudeau is a salesmen of alternative cures for a variety of ailments [etc., etc.]

The existence of quacks and dangerous drugs today, in spite of already-existing heavy government regulation, seems like an odd argument for relying on government regulation as a means of getting rid of quacks and dangerous drugs.

In any case, the free-market position is not that we need to get rid of drug testing or medical accreditation. The free-market position is that the state should not force any particular scheme for drug safety or efficacy testing, or for medical licensure, on you or me without our consent.

The important thing, from the standpoint of individualist principle, is that, if you want to pay for snake oil without any consideration of demonstrated effects, you should be free to do so. And if I want to spend money only on drugs that scientific research has demonstrated to be safe and effective, or on doctors who have garnered the recognition of their peers as honorable and competent professionals, then I should be free to patronize only those that consensual consumer-protection outfits and professional medical institutions have approved.

In a freed market, there will certainly be both drug testing and medical accreditation; it will simply be drug testing and medical accreditation that relies on informed choice, or education and persuasion, rather than on the force of the law. How do I know that such institutions will exist? Well, of course, because they already exist, or have existed in the past. Before the modern prescriptions system was created in 1951, the role of objective watchdog for drug safety and efficacy in the U.S. was handled by the American Medical Association (which maintained a private drug-testing laboratory and published annual guidebooks of drugs that received their seal of approval). They provided a system of voluntary, independent oversight that worked — until government “fixed” it.

Similarly, nobody that I know of is proposing that existing methods of accrediting doctors or other medical practitioners be abolished. Where would you get such a ludicrous notion? There’s already plenty of non-governmental means of accrediting doctors — among them, well, the doctoral degree in medicine, which is issued by medical schools and still would be issued by medical schools in a freed market, based on standards of training and mastery. Similarly for nursing degrees, certification by professional associations like the AMA, etc. What radical individualists oppose is not accreditation, but state licensure laws, which add an unnecessary layer of politically-directed licensing restrictions on top of already-existing, voluntary professional standards and certifications within the medical profesion. The problem with this is, first, that they are coercive, and hence violate the rights of patients and practitioners; and, second, that the standards for governmental licensure are imposed through political decision-making and legislative fiat, rather than being determined through open debate and consensus over best practices within the health care market.

As a result, they often use the force of the state to shut down debate and impose requirements that have nothing to do with medical fact and everything to do with political pull — as when state licensure laws were used to attack feminist women’s health centers, midwives, or other alternative medicine providers, even without any evidence that any identifiable patients had been harmed or were even dissatisfied with the service. Or, to return to our original topic, when state licensure laws were used to blackball doctors who were providing perfectly adequate care, but who were seen as “underselling” (that is, providing competent care at costs that were affordable by ordinary working people) during the political campaign against lodge practice in th 1910s and 1920s.

John: The truth is that of all the industrialized countries, America is the only one with a private for profit system,

Didn’t you read the article? “America” doesn’t have a private health care system. It has a government-imposed health care system. The market is dominated first, by direct government control, and, second, by the operations of a handful of corporate privateers who depend entirely on a combination of government subsidy and government-imposed barriers to entry for their day-to-day operations and long-term strategy.

A freed market in health care would look completely different from the “system” that you and I face today.

John de Laubenfels: Would you give companies that research and produce new drugs NO protection from competition,

You are correct that I do not believe that protectionism for pharmaceutical corporations is an adequate argument for imposing government-granted monopolies.

If you want to “protect” pharmaceutical companies’ existing business models, do so on your own dime by boycotting competitors and directing your money to first movers. (Hey, it worked for Tolkien.) But I’m not nearly so invested in protecting current business practices in the pharmaceutical industry, and I’d rather that you don’t use government monopoly to force your protections on my pocketbook.

John de Laubenfels: starting the moment someone gets ahold of the new drug, analyzes it, and creates a knockoff? Nothing for all the money the original company has spent doing trials? I don’t think that such a system would be either fair or likely to motivate companies to produce new, life-saving drugs.

On the cost of doing drug trials, of course, in the same sentence where I advocated the abolition of patents I also specifically stated that I supported the abolition of the FDA, which would dramatically reduce the compliance costs involved in developing new drugs and bringing them to market. So I don’t know what you’re referring to here. (Of course, if companies want to do internal testing they can do so, but in voluntary independent oversight systems, the costs of running trials are typically assumed by the independent watchdog organizations themselves, as part of their institutional charter.)

However, if it turns out that it’s no longer profitable for big, for-profit corporations to do medical research, then — horrors! — it may just turn out to be the case that medical research has to be carried on by non-corporate or not-for-profit institutions. But I hear we have some of those. And I’m not typically impressed by broken-window arguments that fail to take any account of the value of the unseen alternative uses to which money might be put, if not for the coercive government intervention.

Aster: This one was merely nightmare fuel, as I said. … An ecological collapse is not a sign of our failure to be humble before nature but of our failure to be rational in regards to nature’s reality. Failing societies lose the capacity to produce to match their habitual levels of consumption, and the process of trying to hold on to effects without causes sets everything afire with debt and inflation. … I agree intensely that the only way out is forward. … But I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. … One could hope that the system will change when it realise that its disfunctionality will come at the cost of its own survival. But I’m not placing my chips on the numbers in accordance with hope, and I don’t think one needs hope to pursue happiness.

Well, maybe not, but if you’re worried about this, why not work on building an alternative for yourself and your neighbors, to the extent that you can under current conditions? I don’t know how the cost of the components varies in New Zealand, but in the U.S., you can get the basics for building out a partial off-the-grid home power system (which can be expanded out on the margin, to take over more and more capacity, as you get the money and the experience with the system) for a few hundreds of US$, and can set it all up with off-the-shelf parts with the help of a DIY manual or two. (I can point you to some resources, if you’re curious. The notion that off-the-grid home power systems cost tens of thousands of dollars is the result of the Green State trying to insist on all-at-once rather than piecemeal solutions, and, especially, on sending people to professional “certified installers” who charge thousands of dollars for the labor.)

Of course, getting up your own home energy production won’t solve the big problem just on its own. But if you’re worried about losing electricity, it will solve that part of your little end of the problem, and that’s something.

I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.

Rational modes of production begin at home….

SO,

I broadly agree with most everything you suggest. Generally speaking, with or without technological leaps in green energy, I definitely think it’s the case that decentralizing power production is both do-able for a surprising number of people under present circumstances. And that it’s certainly the best way by far to address peak-oil related concerns.

Soviet Onion: I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this kind of anthropocidal stuff as “current environmentalist fixations.” Any more than it would be fair to describe a Ra’s al-Ghul scale mass die-off of humanity as a “current Anarchist fixation,” even though I can think of some doofs who published calls for that sort of thing in Earth First! and other deep-ecology journals while self-identifying as Anarchists. The movement has a lot of different facets and shouldn’t simply be defined by its worst exponents.

Soviet: We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be.

Fortunately we apparently only need about 1,000,000 more years before we can all relocate to the Vorlon homeworld, anyway.

Marx was wrong.

There, that was easy.

It’s worth noting as well, in addition to the points that Roderick and Tracy make, that the relevant question, in this particular case, actually isn’t whether the economies of scale in online retail sales would be large or small under freed-market conditions. For all I know, they might well turn out to be considerable. (Certainly, there is a natural economy of scale involved in a lot of long-distance shipping and tightly-packed warehouse storage.)

But the real question here is what the economies of scale are, not only for potential competing retailers, but in all competing uses for the distribution center worker’s labor — since the question is not only whether the worker could make as good a living or better setting up as a competitor for Amazon, but also whether or not the worker could make as good a living or better in other lines of work outside the industry, or possibly outside of the cash-wage economy entirely. So there is not only the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon downstream in the retail market, but also the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon upstream, in the labor market.

If it is true (as Kevin has argued, and as I argued in Scratching By) that, absent the state, most ordinary workers would experience a dramatic decline in the fixed costs of living, including (among other things) considerably better access to individual ownership of small plots of land, no income or property tax to pay, and no zoning, licensing, or other government restraints on small-scale neighborhood home-based crafts, cottage industry, or light farming/heavy gardening, I think you’d see a lot more people in a position to begin edging out or to drop out of low-income wage labor entirely — in favor of making a modest living in the informal sector, by growing their own food, or both, quite apart from the question of economies of scale in the formal retail sector. If that’s the case, then, on the one hand, workers who dropped out wouldn’t have to deal with Amazon’s taskmastering at all; meanwhile, back at Amazon, in order to convince others to stay in, Amazon would have to offer them a corresponding premium to make it worth their while — whether in the form of wage increases, improvements in conditions, or both.

IOZ: Your first clause suggests you didn’t understand the post;

Well, whatever. If you didn’t have the LP in mind, maybe you could tell me what “lame, purely American third-party movement” you did have in mind.

IOZ: Self-professed libertarians are fond of this game, of course; they refuse to provide any sort of normative definition of their supposed philosophy, and then attack any criticism as being a merely idiosyncratic definition of that which they steadfastly refuse to define.

Well, no; far from refusing, I’ve written specifically about the definition of the term “libertarian” many times (for example, see the note here or the comments scattered throughout Liberty, Equality, Solidarity). I just didn’t do so again here. I have a pretty good notion of what I mean about my political philosophy when I describe it as “libertarian” (it has something to do with theories of justice based on the respect for the law of equal liberty; it’s also the opposite of “authoritarian,” and so has something to do with rejecting status-based theories of political legitimacy). There are of course other meanings to the term, with equally good historical pedigrees, which we could also discuss. But I didn’t say much about that above because in this here conversation, you’re the one trying to push a sweeping conclusion, supposedly in response to a specific article by Kerry Howley, without ever stopping to consider whether the thing you spend all your time hacking at is even the thing that Kerry Howley is talking about when she talks about “libertarianism.”

If you attempt to support a sweeping conclusion by insisting on one definite meaning for the term, among many that have historically been in common usage, without giving any reason for thinking that this is the right meaning to insist on, or that it is at least the same meaning which was being used by your conversation partner when she used the word “libertarianism” to describe what she believes, then it’s on you to supply the reasons behind your heretofore unsupported assertions.

IOZ: As for a Frenchman coining “libertarian” prior to the American Revolution,

The American Revolution was more than 115 years ago.

My point also wasn’t based solely on how the word was used in 1857. It was also being used to mean something quite other than a “third party movement” in 1967 (when it was being used by folks like Rothbard, LeFevre, Karl Hess, et al., and when the LP did not yet exist); the Libertarian Party was, after all, named after the body of ideas, and not vice versa. Many of the people at the time considered themselves libertarians but wanted nothing to do with the LP. Many of those people are still alive and still feel the same way. Many of us who came to the movement much later also came to the body of ideas, without much or any interest in the party named after it.

IOZ: do you really want to go down that road? I will see your Libertarian and raise you a Republican and a Democrat.

O.K. Are those supposed to be counterexamples to my point? If so, how? “Democrat” and “republican” each have commonly accepted meanings in political theory which are quite independent of the political parties which use those names today. If I were to talk about democratic political theories (say, the political thought of the Athenian democrats, or whatever), and you were to reply by saying that the problem with all that is that Democrats really are nothing more than a crappy, opportunistic center-left party, then you would be engaging in exactly the sort of equivocation that you’re indulging in with respect to libertarianism.

Charles F. Oxtrot,

Funny. But the translation is inaccurate, due to the fact that I wasn’t speaking Strawman.

If you knew anything about the version of libertarianism I’ve endorsed in my writing, you’d know that <a href=”http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/11/08/sprachkritik_privatization/>I’m opposed to most government “privatization” schemes (I want government abolished, not auctioned off), and that I’ve repeatedly written about the nasty and exploitative practices of large corporations and other centers of economic power (the thing is just that I advocate non-governmental means of dealing with callousness, envy, greed, and exploitation, because I see government as part of the problem on that one, not part of the solution). Of course, there’s no reason why you should have to know anything in particular about the views expressed in my writing; but if you don’t know what you’re talking about the best course would be not to talk about it.

But please do feel free to go back to arguing with the imaginary Internet libertarian buzzword bingo-card in your head.

Jeff: I have a little bit more of a social-contract view of taxation. If you live here, you’re bound somewhat by the will of the majority, and if the majority wants to deficit spend a little temporarily, you should pay the taxes to support it. This will-of-the-majority stuff is a dangerous road to tread, of course, but I’d hope a broad enough reading of the Constitution provides protection against tyrannies of the majority.

Well, since this conversation has been about setting out limits, what I’d be interested to hear from you is how far the suppression of minority preferences by the majority would have to go before you considered it “tyranny.” How gravely do my wishes have to be violated in order to satisfy the wishes of the majority, before I count as being tyrannized?

For example, do profound violations of conscience count? I ask because one of the things the Constitution clearly has not protected me from, and could not plausibly be expected to protect me from (given the basic list of enumerated powers) is being forced, by the will of the majority, to provide taxes that materially support the U.S. government’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am forced to cover the costs of these wars even though I oppose them as a matter of conscience; even though I consider what is being done with my money nothing short of an act of mass murder being carried out against innocent people. Set aside for the moment the question of whether or not you agree with me on the wars — I’m new to your blog so I wouldn’t know. But given that I believe what I believe does the fact that majoritarian politics has forced me to pay for acts that so fundamentally violate my conscience that I would die before committing or facilitating them voluntarily — from Bagram to Fallujah to Abu Ghraib — does that rise to the level of being tyrannized? If not, what would?

Jeff: … paying taxes is part of the social contract you’re in by living here. If you don’t want to have the government offer a service, fine, but if a majority of your fellow citizens do want that service offered, you’re bound to pay for it by that contract. By instituting a government, we’ve agreed to fund our collective endeavors. It’s up to the voters and their representatives to figure out what, exactly, those endeavors are.

Well, wait. Who’s the “we” here? I didn’t institute a government; I was never asked, and if asked, I would have declined. So if I’m not part of the “we” who instituted the government, how did I end up part of the “we” who allegedly agreed to the taxes and spending?

LNC Region 7,

I agree with you that law enforement is a haven for bullies and abusers. One might be tempted to call unprovoked violence the occupational disease of government police officers, if not for the fact that it is their occupation. But I haven’t seen any evidence that would convince me that this is “increasing” as of late. There was plenty of bullying and violence to go around back in the days of Bull Connor, too.

The main difference between then and now is that, thanks to shifts in both technology and civil society, people now have more means of communicating with each other than the reflexively pro-authority establishment media; and more means of documenting police abuse as it happens. So it’s not that the problem is increasing; it’s that documentation of the problem is increasing. The next question is whether, given our increasing knowledge and connections, we can now do something about it.

Tom: It also demonstrates why people who claim to be libertarians, but do not take the concerns of the black civil rights movement seriously, aren’t really libertarians at all. A policy that allows police to arrest a black man on his own property for verbally asserting his rights is not a libertarian policy; it is a radically authoritarian policy, one that would be more at home in a police state than in a liberal democracy. If the black civil rights movement is concerned about this sort of thing, while the mainstream libertarian movement is not, then it’s reasonable to ask who the real libertarians are in this country.

Hey, man, I agree with you about all that, but what makes you think that the antecedent of that last if-then statement is true? What libertarians do you have in mind who are ignoring this?

Radley Balko posted about the Gates arrest repeatedly (1, 2, 3), Randall McElroy posted about it on the same day as Balko’s first post (4), Lila Ravija posted about it on the same day (5), Sheldon Richman wrote about it yesterday (6), as did Gary Chartier (7). I posted about it just today. Of course, I’m not a “mainstream” libertarian (or much of anything else); and you couldn’t be expected to know about posts that went up Friday or today when you were posting on Thursday. But I have read plenty of libertarian commentary about this story, and just about all of it has been intensely critical of the police; moreover, I’ve read a lot of libertarian commentary on policing generally (some of which, e.g. Balko’s stuff, is incontestably part of the libertarian “mainstream,” if any such thing exists), and I can’t think of anything written in the last, say, 15 years or so, that would lead me to any kind of general conclusion that libertarians typically aren’t concerned with this sort of thing, or that they wouldn’t typically side with Gates on this issue. The libertarians I hang out with certainly are, and certainly would, and I think most recent libertarian writing on policing reflects the same trend.

stigme, quoting from the police report: As he did so, I radioed on channel 1 that I was off in the residence with someone who appeared to be a resident but very uncooperative. I then overheard Gates asking the person on the other end of his telephone call to “get the chief” and what’s the chief’s name?”. Gates was telling the person on the other end of the call that he was dealling with a racist police officer in his home. Gates then turned to me and told me that I had no idea who I was “messing” with and that I had not heard the last of it. While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence, I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me.

In other words, by Sergeant James Crowley’s own admission, even if you grant every element of his claims for the sake of argument, he no longer had any probable cause to suspect a crime or any legal reason to be there, long before he arrested Gates. “Surprising and confusing” a cop by getting upset with him is, of course, not a crime. So why didn’t Crowley just apologize for the trouble and leave?

grabe: Everywhere I’ve lived, if you raise your voice to cops when they had probable cause to suspect you of a crime, depending on their mood, they’ll raise their side of the conflict until either you back down or they slap the cuffs on you and take you ‘downtown’. It’ll happen to you regardless of color – I’ve seen it; lived it.

1. The cop’s own report makes clear that Crowley had no probable cause to suspect Gates of a crime once it became clear that he did in fact live in the house he was supposedly “burglarizing.” Crowley had concluded that it was Gates’s house by the time he radioed back; he had conclusive evidence when Gates gave him photo ID. So why didn’t he just leave, instead of leading Gates out to the front porch and then arresting him for hollering inside his own house, which is not a crime?

2. I do agree with you that police often take a domineering attitude and use the threat of arrest and jail to force people to submit to their arbitrary commands, even when it is clear that no crime has been committed. This is common when police deal with any non-police, whether black or white. But I think you’ll find that it is more common when cops deal with people who are members of certain demographic groups that are seen as being special problems for Law-n-Order — notably black people, Latinos, poor people, young people, and a few other commonly-targeted groups. And in any case, even if it has nothing to do with race at all, the fact that this sort of thing is common does not make it right. It is, in fact, a tyrannical abuse of power by legally privileged police against innocent victims who have committed no crime.

Yvonne Moultrie: both men had prejudices and chips on their shoulders. obama was right; the officers involved did act stupidly. but then again, so did dr. gates.

Maybe, maybe not, but even if this is true, only the stupidity of “the officers involved” resulted in an innocent man being rousted out of his home, handcuffed, humiliated in front of his neighbors, and thrown in jail on a bogus charge.

I’m not all that worried about foibles which, at worst, cause a man to toss off so insults which are possible unfair, at people who barged onto his property without his permission.

I tend to worry a lot more about the stupidity of people who have, and are willing to exercise, the power to jail me or shoot me even when I am neither threatening anyone’s safety nor violating anyone’s rights.

For a private person, yes. However, private persons do not investigate murders, rapes, assaults, etc… and do not need to worry about these possibilities. As I mentioned, LEOs do. They can’t act as mellow beings and still enforce the law.

Whatever you want, dude, but yelling at a cop is still not a crime. A cop who treats it as one is willfully carrying out a false arrest.

If you think that rule of law is not worth this then you are an idiot and need to study history again.

I’m sorry, what part of “the rule of law” calls for making up non-existent laws against yelling at police officers in order to ensure that people show proper deference to the position of Law Enforcement Officers? I mean, sure, I can see how that’s conducive to the Rule of Law-Enforcers, but I’m not sure that’s what advocates of “the rule of law” generally mean by the term.

In any case, if that is what “the rule of law” really calls for, then it sounds to me like “the rule of law” is as tyrannical as any other form of rule.

Countries without a respected police force are generally the lowest in the rung and generally unfit for humans.

I’m not sure what you mean by “respect” here; usually we use the term to refer to courtesy and consideration that are freely given to those who deserve them. But since you’re talking about the use of physical coercion and imprisonment, obviously this cannot be what you are talking about; you can get fear that way, and you can get submission, but you can’t get any kind of respect that is worthy of the name.

If what you mean is that citizens generally submit to the legal demands of police officers, and unhesitatingly collaborate with them in their work, well, I can think of a few places where that was pretty common. But I hear that Nazi-occupied Europe, the Soviet bloc, and Maoist China were all pretty bad places to be, too.