Shouldn’t that read “TEH strand.” Isn’t liberty the point of all commitments?

Some people might hold that view, but I don’t. (I don’t think Roderick does either, but he can speak for himself.)

The stuff on the varieties of thickness explains why I think that libertarians have at least some specifically libertarian reasons for committing to other projects such as radical feminism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-racism, wildcat unionism, internationalism, gay liberation, etc. So the commitments don’t just run alongside each other in parallel; part of your reason to be both a libertarian and a feminist is that the insights of (what I take to be) the most plausible versions of feminism play a substantial role in coming to what I take to be the best understanding of libertarian theory and practice. (And vice versa; there are specifically feminist reasons for feminists also to be libertarians, and specifically anarchists. I have a thick conception of feminism as well as a thick conception of libertarianism.)

However, to say that libertarians have some libertarian reasons for commitments to feminism is not to say that libertarian reasons are the only reasons for a commitment to feminism, or even the primary reasons. I think the primary reason for committing to feminism is that feminism is right, and not just on those things that can be cashed out as having some effect on questions as to the role of force in social relationships; and it’s worth pursuing on its own merits, and would be so even if it had no impact whatever on the advance of libertarian politics.

Anonymous,

1. When your grandparents came to the United States in 1900, there were no immigration quotas, and hardly any immigration laws at all. There was no INS, no visa system, and no green cards. It’s a bit disingenuous to say, “Well, they should do it just like my grandparents did,” because, what your grandparents actually did in 1900 was just to enter without any visa at the most convenient entry point (most Mexican immigrants just walked across the border in the middle of town; European immigrants usually came in through a port of call in a major city), and anyone who does that now gets spit on as an “illegal,” chased, and, if caught, exiled from their new home.

2. Undocumented immigrants are taxpayers. All undocumented immigrants pay most or all of the state and local taxes that cover the costs of government-run hospitals and government-run schools. (Sales taxes, cigarette taxes, room taxes, property taxes — either directly, or indirectly through the rent their landlord charges — etc. In a state like Nevada, which has no state income tax, they pay all the state taxes that documented immigrants and citizens do.) And, in fact, the numerical majority of undocumented immigrants also pay federal income taxes, as well. (Either through an ITN they requested from the IRS, which you can get without disclosing immigration status, or through W-4 withholding at a job they got using a false Social Security Number.)

Are there some undocumented immigrants who evade income taxes? Well, sure. So what? I hear some citizens do that too. Do you not know anybody who cheats on their taxes? Really?

1. You write: “If they don’t like that designation, they can go back to their country of origin. They are not welcome here.”

You ought to speak for yourself, dude. You may not welcome undocumented immigrants. I welcome anyone who’s peaceful and productive, regardless of what country they came from, and regardless of whether or not they got a permission slip for existing from the U.S. government. Since we disagree on this, it seems to me like the question is, whose welcoming should matter? And I think the answer is, that we should agree to disagree: you can welcome or not welcome whoever you want on your own property; and I can welcome or not welcome whoever I want on my own property. That’s how people handle disagreements like this in a civilized society, rather than by fighting to try and force a one-size-fits-all policy on everybody.

But if that’s the rule we adopt, then your home may be your personal property; if you own your own business, your workplace may be too. But the entire territorial expanse of the United States of America certainly is not. You have no business telling me who to welcome or not to welcome into my own home or workplace.

Bianca,

Thanks for the welcome, and for the reply.

I found your post through the links on the April 19 “Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday” at feministe. I’m a regular reader there and occasionally Shamelessly Self-Promote my articles, when they’re relevant.(I listed a couple that week.)

In answer to your question, yes, I was involved in organizing and participating in Tax Day protests (of course, they weren’t called “Tea Parties” until this year) during the late, unlamented Bush administration, most actively when I was living in Auburn, Alabama, with much the same focus and for much the same reasons. (E.g. opposition to my being forced to pay for Mr. Bush’s wars, torture camps, death squad training camps like the School of the Americas, etc.) I was also, for whatever it’s worth, heavily involved in organizing local protests (as a founding member of the Auburn Peace Project) against the Iraq war and occupation, and in organizing protests against a personal appearance by the Warmonger-in-Chief on the Auburn University campus (he was stumping for a local GOP Congressional candidate at the time). Most of my activism these days is focused on opposing all forms of government violence, focusing especially on this government’s wars, the criminalization of immigrants, and police brutality.

Hope this helps explain where I’m coming from.

Peter:

The “strategic-thickness,” “consequence-thickness,” “application-thickness,” and “grounds-thickness” arguments strike me as pretty insubstantial, to the extent I understand them. The grounds-thickness argument, for example — “Sure, private hierarchy is logically consistent with libertarianism, but it’s weird!” — seems like an assertion, not an argument.

Peter, are you referring here to the paragraph on authoritarianism in Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, under the heading of “Thickness from grounds”, which begins “Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. …”?

If so, I’m not surprising you find the argument unsatisfying, because that’s an extremely elliptical capsule version of the argument. It’s intended to illustrate the kind of argument that you would make for a commitment from grounds, not to give a full-on account of the argument for libertarian concern with non-coercive authoritarianism. A fuller version, with the details tricked out, would require a lot more space than I had available in that part of that particular article (which was written for print in The Freeman, and hence subject to constraints of length, and which was primarily about the varieties of thickness, not primarily about making the case for all the details of my own particular thick conception of libertarianism).

There’s a bit longer discussion of the same topic in my “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity” essay in the Long/Machan Anarchism/Minarchism anthology (particularly if you include, as background, the section on equality), which you may or may not find more satisfying.

Whether or not you find it more satisfying, though, what I’m more interested in is whether or not you accept the form of argument discussed. Specifically, an argument in which the arguer demonstrates 1. that the best reason to be a libertarian is some foundational principle X (Aristotelian natural law, rational egoism, Jeffersonian political equality, whatever your view may be); 2. that principle X implies not only that libertarianism is true, but also some other consequent, Y; and, therefore, 3. a libertarian, qua libertarian, has reason to believe in Y as well as libertarianism, even though denying Y is not inconsistent with libertarianism per se, because denying Y would be inconsistent with the reasons that justify libertarianism. (Hence, as I say, libertarians can reject Y without being inconsistent but they can’t reject it without being unreasonable.)

So, do you accept that form of argument as a legitimate one? If so, then great; that was the main purpose of the discussion, and presumably also the main purpose of Roderick’s link to my essay. If not, then what’s the problem with it?

Well, I’m sure it depends on what you mean by “promote business investment.” If you spell out what you mean by that, then we may perhaps agree, but as it stands, that kind of terminology is often used to represent something which has proven wholly toxic throughout the formerly colonized world.

In the political context of international development politics, especially as it is typically applied to sub-Saharan Africa, there are lots and lots of active schemes to “promote business investment.” The problem is that these schemes are typically driven by large inter-state governmental agencies like the IMF and World Bank; in substance, they typically involved large tax-funded government-to-government loans, packaged with stipulations that the local government bring certain key legislation (notably, Intellectual Property monopolies) into line with the requirements of large business interests, that they implement bureaucratic professionalization of local government (in the name of “good government” and rooting out “corruption”), and that they channel the money into big government forced-modernization boondoggles (e.g. large-scale government infrastructure projects), incentives for large projects by a handful of large multinational corporations, and large-scale privateering commissions for government-backed monopolies on natural resource extraction, utilities, etc.

All of which is to say that these kind of schemes “promote business investment” by means of large-scale government privilege and government-to-government transfers — when what is really needed is not that kind of political scheming, but rather for international politicos to back off and leave Somalia the hell alone, so as to allow a genuine, spontaneous forms of development to emerge. These may well involve various sorts of domestic and foreign “business investment,” but if so, they ought to be attracted to the investments by the prospects for peaceful cooperation, not by the prospects for rent-seeking and the efforts of political bodies to “promote” them.

Keith,

Whatever you want, dude, but in the “transitive property” quote from me, you may notice that I’m objecting to the guilt-by-association argument, not endorsing it. So your parody of a slippery slope argument (as if I were endorsing that kind of reasoning, rather than objecting to it) seems like an odd response.

Bay Area National Anarchist,

Speaking as one irrelevant subculturalist to another, I’ll mention that I have a litmus test of my own. When someone starts talking about “irrelevant intellectuals” as if it were a bad thing to be one, I know that there is probably something wrong both with their ideas about both relevance and intellect.

Me:

It doesn’t really explain the paucity of black or other non-white authors, either. I hear there’s a lot of black people in America.

Robert Paul:

But Charles, we’re talking about the West going back 3,000 years, not just America in the last few centuries.

Yeah, but in fact such lists, while containing a smattering of titles that go back that far, and that get as far out as the outer boundaries of “the West” (which apparently, given the ideological slight-of-hand that goes into defining that peripatetic bit of real estate, get out towards Iraq, except not when there are Muslims there). But in reality they tend to be slanted very heavily towards the last 400 or 500 years of literature (Great Books of the Western World samples heavily from the Hellenes, tosses in a couple of Helenistic writers and a couple of Roman writers for good measure, and then traverses almost 1,000 years of history between Volume 16 and Volume 19 with only four authors covered — Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer — so that the next 40 volumes, out of a total of 60, can be spent on covering the most recent 500 years.) Given the typically expansive coverage of modern authors, and given the typical tilt of such lists (when prepared by English-speakers) towards works in English, I think the argument that black American, or other non-white authors, simply got crowded out by all the historical and geographical expanse is correspondingly a lot weaker. If you have 40 very large volumes’ worth of space to devote to the last 500 years, and more than half of that specifically devoted to English-speaking authors, I would be very surprised if a selection based on quality or influence, did not make at least some room for some of the excellent black American authors who have written in that stretch of time and space (or Latin American authors, for that matter, or any number of other Westerners who seem to be typically missing from this kind of list).

In this case, the alleged problem is the left-wing statist criticism that the lists are “mostly” DWEM. … My problem with the criticism (not the list) is that, instead of focusing on the quality of specific works as you are suggesting, the focus is on some sort of equitable proportional representation by race and sex.

Well, maybe; that’s one way of looking at it. But I think a more charitable way of understanding the criticism (and one which happens to line up better with what radical literary critics have usually said, when I’ve encountered them) is not that they’re after some kind of statistical proportion between the authors on the list and the demographics of the general populace, but rather that they have many specific very good authors in mind, who typically don’t show up, and who the critic thinks are being excluded, in spite of the quality of their work, because the compilers of the list are blanking out large demographic groups. (Presumably that’s usually because of ignorance or indifference on the part of the critics, rather than conspiratorial bigotry; they don’t include works that they aren’t aware of or don’t care about. But what the compilers of such lists tend to make themselves aware of, and to care about, is not innocent of American racial or sexual or national politics. It may well be true that Zora Neale Hurston hasn’t had much effect on Mortimer J. Adler’s life; but the question is whether that’s because of her qualities as an author, or because of the kind of life he has led.)

On this reading of the complaint, the idea is not to force some kind of purely demographic proportion, but rather to criticize the ignorance or willing blindness which the disproportions are a symptom of.

Of course, I’m talking about serious literary critics here, not necessarily about (for example) school curriculum committees. I’m sure there are lots of those that threw Chinua Achebe onto the reading list solely in order to avoid complaints from black or white Leftist parents, without the administrators having bothered to give much a damn about how good his books are.

Me:

Children can and do administer over-the-counter and prescription drugs to themselves in homes, libraries, stores, museums, parks, and just about every single other institution that they encounter in their daily lives, with the sole exception of schools.

PG:

Homes have parents.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I was 13 years old, I was at home when my parents were not. Sometime I even took an Advil when they weren’t around, and without having checked with them first.

Children in libraries, stores, museums and parks generally are attended by parents.

I think you’re underestimating the amount of time 13 year olds spend outside of immediate parental supervision. But even if you weren’t, I don’t know what I’d be expected to infer from what you say here. If, when parents are around, 13 year olds aren’t generally subjected to zero-tolerance policies where they absolutely cannot consume prescription or even mild OTC drugs except through the mediation and supervision of their parents, then that would seem to indicate that the school’s policies are out of touch with what responsible 13 year olds are able to do, and in fact do, outside of the school. Which was my point.

Moreover, librarians, storekeepers, docents and rangers never have been deemed to stand in loco parentis. Schools have been, which is why you see this exception.

I’m aware of the legal reasons that government schools have felt compelled to adopt this kind of policy. But I think that’s an explanation of the policy, not a justification of it, and it is absolutely not a justification of using invasive and sexually humiliating methods to ensure that it is rigidly enforced.

As for standing in loco parentis, I think it’s a funny sort of justification for imposing policies that are far more invasive and busybodying than the practices of actually-existing parents. Of course, I know the legal reasons why this is so (specifically, the threat of a lawsuit), but that’s a good reason for dealing with the out-of-whack legal situation, not a good reason for anti-ibuprofen policies.

Black Bloke:

Interesting that he quotes something by Murray from his pre-anarchist days to “prove” that Murray himself knew that he wasn’t “really” and anarchist.

Brad:

Actually, if I recall correctly, Rothbard is said to have first become an anarchist in 1950 and the piece mentioned is said to be “from the 1950’s”, so it’s most likely not from before he became a complete anti-statist. That said, anarchists (like any other normal people) change their minds about stuff all of the time. By, at least, the time of the New Banner interview circa 1970(?) he was using the word anarchist to describe himself, if I recall correctly.

For what it’s worth, the article that Anarcho is citing as his critical source (“Are Libertarians ‘Anarchists’?”) is available online from Mises.org (has been for over a year now), which is almost certainly how he came across it, although, as per the usual AFAQ standards of scholarship when it comes to anarcho-capitalists, he doesn’t link to it. It’s the article in which Rothbard declares himself a “non-archist;” at the time his position was basically what Bob LeFevre was arguing for in the 1960s; that is, he had come out against the monopoly state as such (he explicitly argues against “limited government” in the article, and argues that “the pure libertarian must advocate a society where an individual may voluntarily support none or any police or judicial agency that he deems to be efficient and worthy of his custom”), but chose not to call himself an “Anarchist” because, at the time, he thought that “Anarchism” entailed either coercive collectivization, Proudhonian theories of interest, or Tolstoyan pacifism, all of which he rejected. By 1965 he had changed his mind and was speaking positively of anarchism and anarchists (see for example Liberty and the New Left, from Left and Right 1.2) as examples of libertarian politics, and by 1969 (see for example “Anarcho-Rightism” in Libertarian Forum 1.13) he was definitely using both “anarchism” simpliciter and “anarcho-capitalism” to describe his own views. Of course the big shift had partly to do with the fact that he had broken decisively from the Right and was hanging out with anarchists within the New Left; it also had partly to do with the fact that, based on the textual evidence, he seems to have read a lot more actual anarchist writing in between.

Anarcho-Mercantilist:

Tucker himself never described himself as a “mutualist.”

I don’t know off the top of my head whether or not Tucker ever specifically used the letters M-U-T-U-A-L-I-S-T as part of a description of his own views, but, just from a quick glance at materials I have on hand for electronic search, I am reminded that Tucker describes the economic principles he subscribes to (specifically, the cost principle and co-operative organization of capital) as “mutualism” and “mutualistic” in Mutualism in the Service of Capital (originally from Liberty, July 16, 1887; reprinted in Instead of a Book).

RonF:

The school has an interest in ensuring that drugs (whether OTC, prescription or illegal) are not distributed among the students outside of the control of the faculty and administration.

No it doesn’t.

No school in the United States spent a minute of its time worrying about anything of the sort until about 15 or 20 years ago, and there’s no real reason why they should, any more than they worry about whether or not students are distributing snack-packs or mechanical pencil refills outside of the control of the faculty and administration. Children can and do administer over-the-counter and prescription drugs to themselves in homes, libraries, stores, museums, parks, and just about every single other institution that they encounter in their daily lives, with the sole exception of schools. The current fixation of schools on trying to tend to every conceivable need that students might have and control every conceivable action that students might take, while on school grounds, is foolish and destructive.

It’s quite reasonable to presume that a kid might stash illicit drugs in their underwear if they don’t want to get caught holding them.

There needs to be some way of searching a kid to see if they’ve done that.

No, there absolutely does not.

If I were to grant, solely for the sake of argument, that schools ought to be concerning themselves with whether or not kids are carrying around Motrin outside of the control of the school nurse, then it would certainly not follow from that that the school has to be able to use strip searches in order to detect violations of the policies they set. Just because something is Against The Rules doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to do anything and everything in order to find out whether or not people are doing it.

Sometimes the only way to catch someone at breaking The Rules is to use procedures that would be too costly, that would interfere too much with other more important goals that the school is trying to accomplish, or that would unacceptably violate the student’s liberty, privacy, or dignity. If so, then what you have to do is just come to terms with the fact that you can’t always enforce all of your school policies all the times, and sometimes clever kids are going to manage to get away with something that the rules say they shouldn’t do — and, well, Christ, what else is new?