Bob,

Well, then you’ve clearly never had a discussion in the WikiPedia Talk page for all topics related to anarchism.

Vince Alberta says: “We generate a return on investment of about 10 times the amount.”

If the LVCVA’s activities have such a great ROI, then why should Las Vegas taxpayers be forced to fund their budget out of tax revenues? Good investments can find private investors, and if the casinos, in particular, benefit from LVCVA’s advertising, why not ask them to foot the bill for their own good investments?

If, on the other hand, the LVCVA’s activities are not actually beneficial enough that firms wouldn’t be willing to cover the costs on their own, then why should Las Vegas taxpayers be sent the bill for such a waste of money?

In either case, I can see no reason why we need a government-funded agency doing advertising for multibillion dollar private businesses.

I can certainly think of some that are vastly better than the AFL-CIO establishmentarian unions. What about the IWW? The Coalition of Immokalee Workers?

For the record, some IWW locals make use of post-Wagner labor laws (most commonly in efforts to combat retaliatory firing of organizers for unionizing activities). I think that sucks, but the union as a whole is pretty minimally involved, and — importantly, unlike the AFL-CIO and Change to Win [sic] unions — they are largely opposed to State-mediated collective bargaining, and to the whole State regulatory apparatus, and they do have an organizing model which doesn’t depend on the use of federal labor bureaucracy.

The CIW is another can of worms. As far as I know they have never made any use whatsoever of any federal union law at all. If for no other reason than the fact that they couldn’t use it even if they wanted to. The Wagner Act explicitly excluded farmworkers’ unions (also domestic workers’ unions — the point was originally for St. Franklin to be able to count on the support of white-supremacy-forever Southern Democrats, so jobs black people took under Jim Crow weren’t included), and none of the post-Wagner amendments have changed that. Block and Huebert’s blanket assertion that all actually-existing unions either practice vigilante violence or solicit state violence or both is either breathtakingly ignorant or else dishonest. They seem to have no idea at all that several large unions have no access at all to the NLRB under existing federal labor laws, whether they want it or not.

(To be fair, I must note that the largest farmworkers’ union, the UFW, has no access to the federal NLRB, but does have access to a state government agency — the California ALRB, created in the 1970s through their lobbying efforts — in California, their main base of operations. I think this helps explains, actually, why the UFW, which was one of the most dynamic organizations in the labor movement for many years, has accomplished relatively little since the 1970s: they were bought off by the political patronage, and meanwhile the board was captured within a couple years by the big produce bosses, just like every other regulatory board in the history of the world. But as far as I know the CIW has access to nothing of the kind in Florida. Neither does FLOC in most of the states where it operates — mainly in the Southeast U.S., if I recall correctly. What they get done, they get done in spite of, or because of, the fact that they receive neither the legal benefits nor the regulatory burdens of the NLRB regime. And I think that’s a lot of the reason why farmworkers’ unions have accomplished so goddamned much in the past 40 years, while the establishmentarian labor movement has largely stagnated or collapsed.)

Adam,

I see.

Since you haven’t identified a specific comment of mine to justify your gloss of my views on land ownership, there’s only so much I can say by way of a specific response. However, as a general thing, it seems likely to me that you’ve made two serious mistakes. First, you are mistaken if you think that my views about land ownership are identical to Kevin Carson’s. They’re not; while I respect Kevin and have agreed with him about the right (just, rights-respecting) outcome in specific disputes over land ownership, I came to those conclusions for different reasons from Kevin’s. Kevin believes in a strict occupancy-and-use for persistent ownership of land, as endorsed by Benjamin Tucker; I do not. (My view is a version of what Kevin Carson would call a “sticky” view on property claims to land.)

But, second, you are also grossly misinterpreting Kevin’s views if you think that his views amount to an “argument against a property right in improved land.” Kevin explicitly argues that each of us has an individual right to improved land, in virtue either of homesteading or consensual transfer from a previous owner. In fact he has repeatedly argued that the denial of that right by the State is the root cause of many social and economic evils. His occupancy-and-use criteria have nothing at all to do with a denial of “a property right in improved land”; it has to do with a specific theory about what constitutes abandonment of land that one used to own. That is no more a denial of a property right in improved land than it is a denial of a property right in quarters if I argue that I have a right to keep a quarter I found dropped on the street. You may of course disagree with Kevin about whether the criteria he suggests for constructive abandonment of land are good criteria. (I, for one, do disagree with him.) But it is a complete distortion of his views to claim that he is somehow simply denying property rights to improved land.

As for my own views, everything that I have ever written about rights to land (see, for example, 1, 2, 3) is based on the principle that legitimate homesteaders earn an individual property right to the improved land they homestead, which cannot be nullified by the arbitrary dictates of feudal, mercantile, colonial, or other equally arbitrary state-imposed allocation of land titles. You may very well disagree with me that the homesteaders I defend are legitimate homesteaders; you may think the land that I would argue to be abandoned, unowned, or otherwise available for homesteading is not really so. Fine; but, again, to claim that I am simply denying a property right to improved land — when in fact my whole position is based upon a property right to improved land — is to grossly distort my views.

I’ll be glad to discuss in greater detail the particular points of any particular argument if you produce some particular argument to discuss.

As for the second claim, that I (repeatedly) “appeal to a supposed lack of any possibility of objective criteria for rights,” you cite p. 161 of my essay in Anarchism/Minarchism, and my endorsement of Roy Childs’s “Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” as support. For those who do not have the book, the passage in question is now available for your inspection at Fair Use Blog. In it I argue (echoing Childs) that Ayn Rand’s theory of limited government is inconsistent, because any monopoly government must either forcibly suppress competing defense agencies that have not initiated force (thus violating the “limits” to which Ayn Rand claimed legitimate governments must be subject), or else must be willing to coexist on equal terms with non-force-initiating defense agencies (thus ceasing to be a monopoly, and ceasing to be a “government” in any sense objectionable to individualist anarchists). I would like for you, Adam, if you can, to find and point out a single claim or argument in that passage which at any point “appeals to a supposed lack of any possibility of objective criteria for rights,” either as a conclusion or as part of the argument to some further conclusion. Where do I make this appeal you claim that I make?

I submit you won’t be able to find one, because I don’t believe any such thing. (Neither did Roy Childs.) In fact, the passage you cite implicitly depends on a claim that the content of individual rights (thus what counts as an “initiation of force”) must be objective and discoverable by means of human reason, independently of government dictates; in fact, as you’ll notice on pp. 165-166 of the same book, my argument takes that implicit claim and makes it explicit, in the service of an argument against government monopoly on legislative authority: “But what must be appreciated here is that the obligation to follow those laws [that command justice or forbid injustice], and the right to enforce them, derives entirely from the content of those laws and not from their source. The government is justified in enforcing those laws only because anybody would be justified in enforcing justice, whether or not self-styled legislators have signed off on a document stating ‘Murder is a crime most foul.’ The document itself is idle; it neither obliges nor authorises anyone to do anything they were not already obliged or free to do. The government is not so much making new laws that impose obligations, but (at best!) making declarations that recognise preexisting obligations–which could be objectively specified by anyone, with or without official approval from anyone. Any right to override another’s assessment would derive from objective and impersonal considerations of justice, demonstrated through argument or attested on the basis of expertise, not from political prerogatives invested in the so-called legislature.” And, in p. 165 n. 24, you will find a note indicating a portion of Childs’s essay in which Childs explicitly makes more or less the same move (cf. his replies to quotes 2, 3 and 4 from Rand’s “The Nature of Government”).

Of course, nothing I’ve said here has yet established that I am right, or that Roy Childs is right, about individualist anarchism. Or that, whoever may be right, it would be worth your time and energy to try to work on projects with anarchists who believe in what we believe in.

Speaking frankly, I’m not very interested in hashing out the former argument yet again in the space of a comments thread. And I’m just as dubious as you are about the fruitfulness of collaborative projects between anarchists and minimal-statists, although possibly for reasons that are different from yours.

But, be all that as it may, while I’m not much concerned whether or not you agree with me, I do care about being misrepresented. To take arguments like the one you mention, and then insist that the arguer is denying the possibility of objective criteria for rights — when the whole argument is based on the principle that there are objective criteria for rights — is the worst sort of up-is-down, black-is-white distortion of your interlocutor’s views.

Adam,

Would you do me the courtesy of pointing out to me just what I have written that you interpret as being (1) “[my] argument against a property right in improved land” and (2) an “appeal to a supposed lack of any possibility of objective criteria for rights”? A URL or a citation by page number to some printed work will do.

I find your characterizations of my philosophical positions puzzling.

You write: The other problem I have with the Libertarian Free Market is this. I loathe Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buys, MacDonald’s and even Piggly Wiggly. The problem there is corporations result when the market is totally free. With corporations we enjoy… offshore outsourcing of manufacturing. . . . I guess I have trouble with the totally free market, not that I have a better solution. But I’m none too thrilled by the strip malls all looking the same and owned by nameless faceless corporations.

What makes you think that the success of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, Target or Best Buy is the result of the free market? Certainly they’re prosperous in the market that we have, but as you know, the market that we have is not free.

In particular, big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy benefit massively from — in fact, they probably depend on — government hand-outs for big, centralized corporations in the name of “development” and “economic growth.” For example, in order to build those giant big box stores, they need large, contiguous blocks of land near an interstate highway exit. They often get those large blocks of well-positioned land at artificially low prices because the city government uses eminent domain to seize it, either in the process of building the highway or else as an independent project for “development” purposes. In a freed market, they wouldn’t have that.

Big chains like Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy also need big systems of warehouses, cross-country trucking, etc., and for all of that, they need big interstate highways. Which happen to be built, maintained, and subsidized by the government. In a freed market, there would be no government-subsidized highway system, and they’d actually have to pay the full cost of their shipping and distribution networks.

They also typically depend on being able to get very low-cost goods exported from textile mills, plastic factories, etc. overseas, in places like Communist China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and so on. Those goods are often cheap because labor is extremely cheap. But labor is extremely cheap because labor markets in those countries are unfree, because those governments happen to be comfortable with extreme brutality in order to keep small-time farmers and industrial workers poor, subservient, and desperate for any way to get cash. In a freed market, workers overseas would be much better off, much less desperate for cash, much more free to leave abusive or exploitative bosses to find new livelihoods, and generally able to command much higher prices for their labor. As a result, Wal-Mart’s comparative advantage in importing from developing countries would make for much less of a comparative advantage in competing with smaller, local shops — because goods from developing countries would no larger be made artificially cheap by the intervention of violently anti-worker governments.

As Roderick Long has argued (http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corporations-versus-the-market-or-whip-conflation-now/): “In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice.”

You write: As an old punk I should be all gung-ho for anarchy but anarchy is what “governs” Iraq.

Oh, come on, really? Iraq is in a state of civil war, not a state of anarchy. Civil war is what you have when a strip of land has too many governments (or would-be governments) fighting with each other over which one gets to do the governing. Anarchy is what you have when the have no governments at all. Iraq, which is currently being contested by the armed forces of the most powerful government in the world, a nominally independent puppet government propped up by those occupying armed forces, fractious provincial governments (especially in Kurdistan), occasional incursions from Turkey and Iran, roving sectarian death squads closely associated with various armed factions like SCIRI, the Sadrist movement, various tribally-based Sunni warlord-gangsters, Al-Qaeda, etc., all instituting police-state measures wherever they have strong enough control to do so, and all of them fighting with each other over who will be able to come out on top as rulers of Iraq, or–failing that–how they will be able to carve up Iraq into fiefs under their military control. That’s not anarchy; it’s just a bunch of warring states trying to get their hands on parts of the same country. No surprise: the situation there was created by a war between feuding governments and a military occupation.

Anarchy means no governments and no rulers — a consensual society based on free association, without wars, taxes, occupations, government prohibitions, government police, government curfews, or any of the rest. Maybe that’s achievable in this world, and maybe it’s not, but possible or impossible, it’s important to keep in mind what it is we’re talking about. Anarchy means lawlessness, not disorder; and it certainly doesn’t mean having so many would-be law-makers in one place that they end up fighting over who gets to make the laws!

Keith,

You’re being an asshole, and you really ought to stop.

Whether or not you think that Anonymous is in fact Aster, and whether or not you think that Anonymous or Aster has treated you unfairly, in this discussion or in other discussions, that’s absolutely no reason to respond with polemical distortions of her views, or with down-and-dirty attacks of your own. You ought to be embarassed at having made such thuggish appeals to tooth-for-a-tooth rhetorical retribution (“like I told you before, if you want to throw rocks at me, I’m going to hit back and hit hard”). If you think that you’ve been strawmanned or unfairly attacked or otherwise wronged in this conversation, I can’t see why you think it’s a good idea to reply by getting just as nasty as you wanna be yourself — as, for example, with your (really vile) attempts to exploit common prejudice against transgender people in order to score some kind of rhetorical point (as if there were anything wrong with being trans or otherwise challenging patriarchally-correct notions of gender identity; as if there were anything wrong with sex reassignment surgery; as if any of this had a damned thing to do with anything in the discussion about libertarian alliances and strategy).

If you have something worth saying about libertarian alliances and strategy (and, for the record, I think what you have to say combines some genuine insights — e.g. about the importance of populism, the importance of secessionist decentralism as way to work across traditional Culture War front lines, the classism that goes into certain Progressive attitudes about poor, rural, Southern, or otherwise marginalized white folks, etc. — with a lot that is really wrongheaded), then you can say it without resorting to this kind of garbage.

And I will hopefully have more to say about your essay later, both on some substantive points and some terminological points. (I think that you have misunderstood the meaning of the term “thick libertarianism”; “thick libertarianism” is not identical with left-libertarianism, and you’ll find thick conceptions of libertarianism not only among left-libertarians, but also among paleolibertarians, orthodox Objectivists, and, while we’re at it, your own expressed views about pluralism, and Anonymous’s expressed views, too; what we differ over is not thickness, but rather on the particular commitments that are to be bundled together with non-aggression.) But I’ll probably come around to a real response in a venue other than this already-lengthy comments thread.

Nick Manley: Am I going to throw acid in the face of a woman who chooses to stay at home and raise her children? No.

Other Nick: What about “ridiculing” or “socially ostracizing” her “patriarchal” husband?

Well, what about it?

If her husband really is acting in a domineering or patriarchal way, then why shouldn’t he be ridiculed or socially ostracized for it? He’s an asshole. Those of us who think that domineering behavior and patriarchal attitudes are ridiculous, foolish, or vicious have every right, and every reason, to withdraw our social support from, or to make fun of, people who engage in them.

Of course, I also think it would be silly to presume that you can just look at the fact that a woman chooses to spend her time on caring for children in her home and somehow automatically infer from that that it’s the result of domineering behavior or patriarchal attitudes on the part of her husband. People make all kinds of choices and there’s nothing in feminism which requires you to rag on heterosexually married women who are, for reasons of their own, working at childcare rather than in a capitalist workplace. Or on their husbands.

Other Nick: My main beef with the kind of thick libertarianism Johnson is advocating is that it seems not to respect the right of a person to voluntarily enter an inegalitarian/hierarchical lifestyle.

How so? You have the right to do whatever you please, an it coerce none. And I have the right to criticize your choices, if I think they are ill-considered, foolish, vicious, or otherwise harmful.

There may be cases where it is rude to do so; there may also be cases where it is morally wrong. (There is such a thing as a virtue of tolerance, and of minding your own business. If you think that libertarians have good reasons, qua libertarians, to cultivate those virtues, even in cases where intolerance or busybodying would have been expressed through nonviolent means like ostracism or ridicule, well, then what you’re advocating is in fact a form of thick libertarianism. A thin conception of libertarianism would have nothing to say about whether people should be tolerant or intolerant, as long as they’re non-aggressive.) But be that as it may, I can’t see that you’ve made any case for saying that it is never the right thing to do. If a husband is (nonviolently) being an asshole to his wife, and she (consensually) stays in the marriage, because she thinks his assholish behavior is basically O.K., or even that it’s the right way for him to treat her, then I certainly see no reason why I have some kind of obligation to continue associating with that asshole or providing social support to him or to hold off on calling him an asshole in conversation.

Other Nick: I’m all for battling ideas with ideas but I draw the line at using means such as “ridicule” and “social ostracism” to win the battle. . . . I don’t think it is, but that’s beside the point. The behaviors I described are a form of coercion in my opinion and therefore shouldn’t be justified even if it can be argued or proven that they serve libertarian ends.

Nick, are you seriously suggesting that ridicule and social ostracism are “a form of coercion”? If so, when you say “coercion” do you mean what libertarians normally mean by it (i.e., an invasion of the target’s liberty rights), or do you mean something else?

If you seriously mean to suggest that making fun of somebody in words or pictures, or withdrawing your social support from them (by refusing to trade with them, refusing to talk to them at parties, whatever) is unjustified because it’s somehow a violation of the target’s liberty rights, then I think this is absurd, and that it’s not recognizable as any form of libertarianism that I’m aware of, since it would require a claim to the effect that nonviolent speech or expression is invading the target’s liberty rights, or that people have a positive obligation to provide social support to people who they do not want to associate with. (And I’m supposed to be the p.c. fascist here?)

I hope that I’ve misunderstood your view. But if I have, then I do need some help in figuring out what it is. Do you think that ridicule or ostracism are not literally violations of the targets rights, but that they are objectionable on some other grounds? If so, what are those grounds, and why do they rule out any and all use of ridicule or social ostracism, just as such, as legitimate nonviolent means for libertarians to achieve their social or cultural goals?

Nick: Such an alliance would, for example, criticize mainstream feminism (or more precisely what Christina Hoff Sommers calls “gender feminism”), male chauvinism, racial supremacists, race hustlers, etc. In contrast, it would support equity feminism, men’s rights groups, “equal opportunity” anti-racism, etc.

May I suggest that if your understanding of the different factions within the feminist movement depends significantly on Christina Hoff Sommers’s worthless, more or less purely polemical distinction between “gender feminism” and “equity feminism,” then you probably need to do some more work learning about the history, theory, and practice of the feminist movement before you try to figure out whether to support or to criticize it. (For a discussion of some of what’s wrong with Sommers’s discussion of “gender” and “equity” feminism, see for example my comments about this alleged distinction over at feministe.)

Nick Manley: The French Revolution and 1968 were both complicated affairs. I don’t think there were no positive aspects to them though.

Well. I don’t think Keith was claiming that there were no positive aspects to them. I think he was claiming that the criteria that are being used to criticize his strategic views are not being consistently applied.

PFJO,

First, I notice that you haven’t answered my question. I mentioned one specific case in which people who advocate a “thick” conception of libertarianism (including Howley, myself, Roderick Long, Wendy McElroy, Hans Hoppe, Chris Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, Benjamin Tucker, Herbert Spencer, and a lot of other people from many different wings of the mvement) often stress the importance of non-coercive cultural phenomena to libertarian politics: cases in which there are important causal preconditions for a flourishing free society. Here it seems that libertarians have strategic reasons for favoring some non-coercive cultural arrangements over other non-coercive cultural arrangements, even though neither arrangement involves an initiation of force against identifiable victims. Do you disagree? If so, why? Or do you agree, but think that strategic commitments are somehow unimportant for libertarians to consider? If so, why?

Second, rather than responding to this question, at all, you have simply repeated a set of completely unsupported definitional claims. I don’t know what expertise or authority you think you have that would justify these from-the-mountaintop declarations. It certainly has nothing to do with the history of the word “libertarian” (or the French “libertaire,” from which “libertarian” was derived). The word has meant all kinds of different things throughout its history: it was originally coined by Joseph Dejacque as a euphemism for anarchistic socialism (which is still the primary use of the term in Europe); it has been used as a general contrast term for “authoritarianism”; American free marketeers and Constitutionalists started using it as a replacement term for “classical liberal” in the mid-20th century; about a decade later, a few (e.g. Murray Rothbard, later on Walter Block) started using it to specifically describe an axiomatic ethico-political system deriving from the non-aggression principle. The last of these definitions is the only one that systematically excludes consideration of any social question other than those having to do with the legitimate use of force. Some other meanings of the term (e.g. the understanding of “libertarianism” as more or less synonymous with “classical liberalism”) tend to minimize but not do away with other considerations; others (e.g. the identification of libertarianism with anti-authoritarianism or anarchism specifically) tend to put quite a bit of attention on broader questions about the desirability of different non-coercive social structures. You can find out some of the history behind these kinds of debates from books like Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Total Freedom; I already linked an article of my own (from FEE’s The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty) which discusses some of the philosophical aspects of the debate and mentions some of the history of debates within the movement along the way. Of course you’re under no obligation to agree with me on the matter (lots of libertarians don’t–Walter Block, for example, has recently written against “thick” conceptions of libertarianism) but the position is certainly out there, and has been out there for a good century and a half or so, and it’s a bit much for you to simply hand down unsupported declarations about the “definition” of libertarianism (as if there were a single uncontested definition!).

Third, you make the following specific claim about what Kery Howley has been doing in her posts on libertarianism and feminism: “her line of argument isn’t an attempt to characterize certain social pressure as immoral and to encourage libertarians to speak out against them (which is fine and I agree), rather she is simply trying to expand the definition of coercive force to fit her pet issues. It’s intellectual lazy at best, and dishonest at worst.”

As far as I can tell, this characterization of what Kerry has done in her posts is completely inaccurate. It’s an accurate description of the position Todd Seavey dishonestly attributed to her, but has nothing to do with what she says here, and nothing to do with what she says in “Libertarian Feminism versus Monarchist Anarchism,” in which she explicitly states that, while certain forms of misogyny may operate through “social pressure” rather than coercive force, “No thinking libertarian is only concerned with coercion; most of us worry just as much about conformity and passivity.” (That last sentence is, in fact, the only time in either post in which she mentions coercion at all — to deny that all of her concerns as a libertarian have to do with coercion.) For Seavey, and then you, to repeatedly claim that she is trying to describe purely verbal misogyny as “literally coercive” (Seavey) or “trying to expand the definition of coercive force to fit her pet issues” (you), when she states in so many words that her position is exactly the opposite, that she’s concerned with these so-called “pet issues” even though they do not involve the use of coercion — and then to have you, to crown all, accuse her of intellectual laziness or dishonesty on the basis of this up-is-down, black-is-white strawman of her position — is something that is utterly outrageous. I wish I could call it extraordinary, but in fact it is my experience that there is nothing extraordinary of feminists being treated with this kind of dismissive contempt and indifference as to basic accuracy about their stated positions.

PFJO:

“I think the problem here Ms. Howley, is that you seem to be mistaking libertarianism for a complete moral philosophy, which it isn’t. Libertarianism SHOULD only be concerned with coercion.”

Why?

Suppose, for example, that there are certain ideas or noncoercive social customs which will make it easier to eliminate coercion from society, and other ideas or noncoercive social customs which will make it hard or impossible to eliminate coercion from society. If so, don’t libertarians have strategic reasons to try to promote the libertarian-friendly ideas and customs, and to work (nonviolently) against the libertarian-unfriendly ideas and customs, even though both of them are non-coercive per se?

You’re setting out a thin conception of libertarianism here, as if it were obvious that anything not strictly logically entailed by the non-initiation of force is therefore completely irrelevant to libertarian politics. But I think it’s not at all obvious that this is the case. In any case, it needs much more argument than you’ve given it so far (since the rest of your comments after what I quoted merely elaborate the way you draw a distinction between “moral” and “political” questions — without an argument to justify drawing the distinction the way you draw it).

Kerry,

After reading over the recent series of posts, I think the difficulty here may have something to do with the fact that Todd Seavey can apparently read a post the explicit and entire point of which is to argue that, while nonviolent discriminatory social pressures are not coercive per se, “No thinking libertarian is only concerned with coercion,” and then immediately reply, without a hint of sarcasm, that it “seems” to him that you are claiming that social pressures are “literally coercive” (!) and that “you have a right to tax me or sue me in response” to purely verbal misogyny.

Or, to put it in other words, Todd Seavey is quite comfortable with just making shit up in the course of a conversation. He also feels free to attribute the opposite of your stated views to you, and then to treat his attack on that ridiculous strawman as a successful response to your comments, and then to go on to give you a lecture about his 20 years in This Movement Of Ours and his knowledge of movement figures and philosophy, which apparently doesn’t reach beyond the middle of the Eisenhower administration.

Or, to put it in other words, he’s lying and generally acting like a perfect jackass.

Thank you for these posts. Besides admiring your lucidity, I also admire your patience. Not because I think it’s going to do anything to change Todd Seavey’s mind; he’s hardly deserving your time. But rather because it has produced some very good posts on an important issue, in spite of the undeserving interlocutor.

You write: “That may surprise you, but it is hard for me to be totally comfortable with dropping the age to 18. You see too much of the dark side of gambling when you live here to want teenagers exercising those judgments, new credit cards in pocket. I would not have made good choices at that age.”

It doesn’t surprise me at all. That sort of discomfort is perfectly natural. It’s also unfortunately common for people to try to use their own personal discomfort with someone else’s decisions as a justification for coercing other people into acting in ways that make you feel less personally uncomfortable.

It’s good that you have the self-insight to know that you personally would not have made good choices when you were 18; and you certainly have a right to be concerned for other people’s financial well-being. You should of course feel free to express these concerns to any 18-20 year old who asks for your advice. But 18-20 year olds are, after all, young adults, who are legally and morally responsible for their own financial decisions. What do you think would give you the right to make a decision on the matter for all 18-20 year olds everywhere, and then impose that decision on them with or without their consent, rather than allowing them to make their own decisions — and their own mistakes?