Micha:

Lots of intelligent redistributionist socialists argue along the same lines; it’s not that they don’t understand how markets and spontaneous orders work; they simply don’t care ….

Right, which is why they don’t provide a good example of someone who falls back on government causes of poverty by explanatory default, either. Their position is wrong, but not because they (like biological creationists) fail to understand the concept of spontaneous self-organizing systems.

Serious Marxist theory, for example, actually involves quite sophisticated use of the concept of spontaneous order in explaining the emergence, sustenance, internal conflicts, and ultimate collapse of the capitalist class structure. (The idea is certainly not that all the evil capitalists got together in a big meeting and made a big plan for taking over the world and exploiting the workers. Any serious Marxist theorist would very quickly trash a theory like that as a form of “utopian socialism” and a case study in “bourgeois individualism.”) Of course, most of serious Marxist theory (as well as Cohen’s egalitarianism) is wrong, but it’s wrong for reasons other than being somehow “creationist.”

There are lots of people who do fail to get the concept, but they’re mostly concentrated among the most vulgar of vulgar Marxists, and the usual lot of nativist pseudo-populists, economic conservatives, and Social Democrats who take up most of the space in mainstream American political debate. None of whom, as far as I can recall, have ever leaned much on the government as a supposed cause of poverty or socioeconomic inequality. (Conservatives who make the typical conservative arguments against AFDC/TANF and other forms of government welfare may be an exception; but they don’t claim that urban poverty is being caused by deliberate government efforts to create it. And they rarely say that poverty as such is caused by government action. They take urban poverty as we know it more or less for granted and then claim that government welfare programs make it worse.)

For example, if some have much more wealth than others, the socioeconomic creationist believes that this is the product of government policies specifically designed to transfer wealth from the many to the few, rather than the natural result of market transactions between people of disparate abilities and preferences.

Well. Isn’t it empirically true that there are specific government policies which, either through design or through unintended consequences, tend to profit the rich, hinder and impoverish the poor, or do both at the same time? If you doubt it, I can name some examples.

Can you think of any actual examples of people who fall back on the claim that poverty is substantially caused by government policies, rather than by voluntary market forces, who do so because they’re simply unable to understand how spontaneous orders work? Every proponent of such a claim that I can think of (Kevin Carson, Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Gabriel Kolko…) is relatively clear on the notion of spontaneous order; they get to the conclusion that government policies cause poverty not by explanatory default, but rather because they can point to a bunch of concrete examples of government policies that really do this.

In my experience, most of the real “socioeconomic creationists” with regard to wealth, tend to attribute poverty to tightly coordinated conspiracies (“international bankers” and the like), or else to the personal greed and vices of individual business people, not to structural factors like government policy.

If the average man makes more than the average woman, the socioeconomic creationist concludes that this must be due to the misogynistic oppression of women, rather than the natural outcome of men and women having different preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities.

You seem to be presupposing that “misogynistic oppression of women” and “spontaneous order” are two mutually exclusive explanations of the situation. But why make that claim? There’s nothing in the concept of a spontaneous order that requires that all spontaneous orders be benign. It may be that if certain kinds of ignorance, folly, or vice are widely distributed throughout the population, then lots of little individual acts of stupidity or evil will, without the design of the participants, add up to a large-scale, malign spontaneous order that goes beyond the intentions of the participants.

“Preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities” aren’t the only factors that can contribute to the individual decisions from which a spontaneous order emerges. And not all “preferences, opportunity costs, and/or abilities” are independent of prevalent prejudices and traditions, either.

jackson:

The standard Keynesian line is that stimulus is bad when an economy is at full employment, because any stimulus at that point must lead to inflation or asset bubbles, rather than additional output. But stimulus during a crash is sort of the textbook answer for what the government should try to do.

The “standard Keynsian line” is generally taken to have been either decisively refuted, or else shown to be in need of substantial revision, by the plain fact that a recession and massive monetary inflation coexisted for several years during the 1970s. There are cases where government monetary manipulation can create short-term bubbles in certain assets or industries, but it always comes at the expense (realized either sooner or later) of everyone else outside of those beneficiaries, and there’s no real guarantee that you won’t just end up pushing on a string, anyway.

I realize you’re not a Keynesian, but I’m not clear on what you think the appropriate (short-term) course forward is.

Repeal the government money monopoly, instead of trying to find yet another government scheme to make the world safe for finance capital. That may seem drastic to you, but the fact is that it’s quite easy to do on the margins (just stop prosecuting people who, on their own, decide to establish alternative forms of currency and who set up alternative forms of banking), and in any case anything else is just going to produce more of the same old shit.

I read through Kevin’s post on the Fed, and I don’t think he is claiming that inflation is caused by wage increases (or other price increases).

His point is that the Fed has made decisions about monetary policy partly in order to manipulate labor markets so as to keep employment rates within a particular fixed window. When employment is “too high” in their view, they have ratcheted up interest rates with the express purpose of “solving” that “problem.”

I don’t think that depends on a false theory about the causes of inflation. It just depends on reading public policy-oriented statements by Fed board members.

Mark,

Well. The scope of the debate is not actually limited to what are commonly called “lifestyle” issues, unless you mean to expand the word “lifestyle” out from its conventional meaning into something much broader (i.e. so broad as to cover absolutely any feature of social or personal life other than those immediately connected with the use of violence). For example, in addition to dealing with genuine “lifestyle” issues (e.g. what kind of sex acts and with whom you should or should not treat as worth indulging in; whether or not you participate in traditional religious rituals in your community or subculture; etc.), the debate also touches on more strictly intellectual issues (e.g. what kinds of explicit philosophical positions, or tacit worldviews, best cohere with libertarianism), and also with material and institutional structures that are larger and more formalized than any individual lifestyle choice — e.g. I believe that a free economy should have a large and vibrant network of wildcat unions and grassroots mutual aid associations; whereas some other libertarians believe that a free economy should be dominated more or less exclusively by large-scale corporations or proprietorships, with little or no unionization in the workforce. The difference between these two views is not settled by the non-aggression principle alone (presumably, we both reject, on principle, all forms of coercive social or corporate welfare, all State patronage to either big business or to organized labor, etc. etc. etc.). But it’s not really a difference over individual lifestyles, either; it’s a difference over the relative merits of certain organizing structures within social society that are much larger than any individual and which come about through deliberate, entrepreneurial social coordination, not simply from a series of uncoordinated individual lifestyle changes.

A consequence could involve being ostracized or criticized by others who live by the NAP, but should not involve being lynched or defamed by them.

You’re right about that. Thick conceptions of libertarianism aren’t intended as a way of carrying non-libertarian policies into libertarianism. The point is to make clear what kinds of things are worth criticizing, ridiculing, ostracizing, boycotting, striking, or whatever, and what kinds of things are worth praising, celebrating, materially supporting, etc. A thick conception of libertarianism holds that libertarians, as such, have some good reasons to take a definite stance on that, even where what’s being criticized, ridiculed, ostracized, boycotted, struck against, praised, celebrated, materially supported, or whatever is not directly, logically tied to the question of aggression or liberty.

Dave Holmes: We need an emergency mobilisation of society, a five- or 10-year plan to achieve a drastic reorientation of our economy ….

You know, I’ve got the funniest feeling that I’ve heard this one somewhere before.

Kevin,

I’m not actually sure that we disagree about that. Or, if we do disagree, then what we disagree about may be a bit different from what it might initially seem that we disagree about.

I actually agree with you that a dialectical understanding of the role of particular government programs in the statist social order is important. And I also agree with you that some sequences of repeal would lead to better overall results than other sequences of repeal, and I suspect that we largely agree with each other about what sequences would be preferable; for example, because of my understanding of the class dynamics of statist power, I think that abolishing the Wagner-Taft-Hartley first and then the antitrust laws later would have better overall results than abolishing the antitrust laws first and then the Wager-Taft-Hartley system later, in that the one first opens up space and time for de-regimenting organized labor and opening up space for workers to organize against exploitation by bosses, while the other opens up space and time for bosses to further consolidate and fortify their command-posts in the labor market.

Similarly, suppose you had a Sedition law, and a Hate Speech law, the first of which which banned anarchist speeches, and the second of which banned fascist speeches. Ideally, the best thing to happen would be for both laws to be struck down immediately and completely in favor of complete free speech. But if the political debate was such that it’s more or less unavoidable that one will be struck down before the other, then I suppose that the sequence of decriminalizing anarchist speeches, then decriminalizing fascist speeches would have better overall results than the sequence of decriminalizing fascist speeches, then decriminalizing anarchist speeches.

However, I don’t think that accepting either that method of social theory or those conclusions about likely results settles the question as to whether you should be a gradualist or an immediatist. I’m an immediatist, not because I deny that there’s ever an importance difference in the likely results of repealing A-before-B as versus repealing B-before-A, but rather because I think that there are things that nobody ever has the moral right to do to another human being, no matter what results you can get from it, and one of those things is coercing her in her use of her own person and property. If both A and B are genuinely coercive, then I’d argue that there’s never any justification or excuse for continuing to do either of them. Even if it would be better for A to go first and then B, rather than B to go first and then A, if the opportunity to repeal B arises before the opportunity to repeal A does, then I’d say that it’s morally obligatory to repeal B anyway, because neither you nor I nor anybody else has the right to go on coercing anybody for even a second longer, whatever our considered judgment about the likely results of their freedom may be.

Of course, if there isn’t any opportunity to repeal either A or B at the moment, then the question is what sort of strategy you ought to adopt in the effort to make the opportunity arise. And in that case, it’s perfectly reasonable for your considered judgment about likely results to determine your strategic priorities, in terms of which forms of coercion you will first and most intensely focus on making repeal-able, given your limited time and resources. And I think that we largely agree about

So I reckon that the question is this: suppose you had a rather limited version of Rothbard’s Magic Button, which would allow you to magically repeal (say) personal income tax on the top 10% of taxpayers, while leaving all other personal income tax and FICA payroll tax in place. And let’s take it for granted that we all dialectically understand the role of the State, and its different functions, within the social order of power and its relationship with the dynamics of class exploitation. Still. There’s the button. Would you push it, or would you refuse to push it, on the grounds that you need to cut taxes either from the bottom-up or else not at all?

Personally, I would push it. I would prefer the bottom-up-first sequence, if it were available (after all, that’d benefit me more personally, let alone the rest of the working class), but I don’t believe that I have the right to let other people go on being robbed, if I could stop it with nothing more than a button-push, just so that I can, or some other people that I care about can, enjoy a higher quality of life.

What about you?

You wrote: “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some American soldier in Iraq being blown up by a roadside bomb in 2010?”

Dude, this is a ridiculous cheap shot and you know it. I could just as easily go around telling those, such as Gordon, who attempt to give philosophical defenses of voting for Ron Paul, “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some woman dying in a back alley in 2010?” or “The question is are we going to be concerned about winning a philosophical argument or are we going to be concerned about some immigrant dying of dehydration in the Arizona desert in 2010?” Your argument cuts as much ice as either of these, which is to say, none at all. All the parties to this debate are arguing over issues that have real and grave human consequences in the near term.

As for radical feminist literature and action, Roderick and I discuss that at length in our essay, so it would be more productive to engage with what we said there. For what it’s worth, there’s nothing inherently unlibertarian about broad sexual harassment policies, free daycare or employer paid maternity leave (or, what radical feminists are more likely to advocate, radical transformation of the economy away from an employer-employee model and towards ownership of the means of production by working women and men). These ideas may be wise or foolish for other reasons, but libertarianism as such only comes up when we turn to the question of whether these kind of measures are to be attained through voluntary means or by means of the State. As Roderick and I explain in the essay, while there are many radical feminists who advocate State action, there are many others who distrust State action for practical reasons or even reject it entirely on principle.

You write: “I also recall prominent radical feminists arguing that sex between a man and a woman in marriage was a form of rape.”

Can you specify which radical feminist(s) you’re referring to and where she or they say this? (If you’re referring to Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of martial rape laws in Right-Wing Women, that’s not actually an accurate statement of her conclusion, but in any case you should know that even if it were, she was discussing the ramifications of a legal context has mercifully ceased to exist since the book was written.)

As for the radical feminist menace to the safety of men’s wing-wangs, the legitimacy of violence depends on whether it is aggressive or defensive. Given the radical feminist emphasis on the prevalence of violence against women, I’d suggest that even if that talk were meant literally rather than rhetorically, that wouldn’t necessarily be an objection to it.

I don’t see anything wrong with buying “shit you don’t need.” There are lots of things that I don’t need, but which I choose to buy anyway because it makes my life better to have them. E.g., books, music, tasty food, computer equipment, furniture, hot running water, trips to visit my family and friends, etc. etc. etc. Of course, I could choose to abstain from these and limit my spending only to necessities. But why should I?

Of course, there are also many activities that make your life worthwhile that do not require a purchase. To the extent that corporatism cuts people off from these forms of enjoyment, corporate capitalism should be undermined and resisted. But whether or not one chooses to personally abstain from spending on non-necessities does just about nothing to address these issues. The power of corporate capitalism to restrict alternative forms of enjoyment has very little to do with individual decisions about consumption and a lot to do with the monopolistic privileges granted by State power at the points of production and acquisition of land and resources. These are better resisted through labor organizing, targeted strikes and boycotts, resistance to State coercion, etc., rather than doing what “anti-consumerist” groups typically do, i.e. adopting an ascetic lifestyle and chiding, ridiculing or harassing those who aren’t as personally hardcore as you are.