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.

Thanks for the mention, and for the kind words. I agree about the tone of that OC Weekly article. It’s kind of baffling, because the analysis is actually so much better than the analysis in most abusive-cop pieces, but the tone comes off as if it were written by a fugitive from a direct-to-video American Pie script.

As for self-described libertarians, what I’ve found is that they (we) are a pretty diverse lot. A lot are tools or creeps, and especially those “small government” types whose views are conventional enough to fit into the outer fringes of mainstream political discourse. But, while I don’t want much to do with those folks, radical libertarians tend to be a very different sort, and those that I get along with and try to learn from (e.g. Roderick Long, Kevin Carson, Jennifer McKitrick, Carol Moore, Anthony Gregory, Sheldon Richman, Brad Spangler ….) are generally maneuvering to out-Lef the establishment Left, in terms of exposing the class dynamics of the State and making a case for radically decentralist, grassroots approaches that achieve Leftist and feminist goals by ordinary people getting together amongst themselves, and bypassing or confronting the State, rather than collaborating with it or trying to seize control of it. Maybe that approach is the right approach, and maybe it’s the wrong approach; but in any case it’s a very different approach from the one that you’d be likely to see from the “small-government conservative” types, or at your local Libertarian Party, or in your average MeetUp for Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. And it’s an approach that more libertarians seem to be adopting lately; a tendency which I hope I might be able to encourage, in whatever small ways I can manage.

Anyway, that’s how I see it now. Does that help clarify, or does it muddy?

JOR,

The same. The original essay is available online; cf. also GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism for my responding to Honderich with a certain gesture of the hands.

Micha,

Oh come on.

Isn’t it obvious?

Libertarian outreach by whom? By me in particular or by libertarians in general?

If the former, then I would find libertarian outreach to leftists much more palatable for me to do than libertarian outreach to white supremacists, because I know how to talk to state leftists in a way that some small number of them will find convincing, whereas I don’t really know how to talk to white supremacists in general, let alone statist white supremacists in particular, and I think it would be extremely unpleasant to learn.

If the latter, then I have much weaker preferences, because I think generally if people are going to do outreach they should specialize in what they are best at. But I would suggest that outreach to state leftists may be more likely to succeed in the long term than outreach to state white supremacists, because both of them tend to share the common cognitive or moral vices of statists (majoritarianism, legalism, constitutionalism, contempt for private property rights), but the state white supremacists tend to add some peculiar vices of their own on top of that (e.g. violent racism or xenophobia). Turning state leftists in an anti-state direction tends to produce anarchists, whereas turning statist white supremacists in an anti-state direction tends to produce paleocons at best.

In either case, I’m not sure what this has to do with the question of whether racism or majoritarianism is (1) more offensive, or (2) more dangerous. I’d rather have dinner with a polite absolute-monarchist than with a very rude individualist anarchist. Not because I think that rudeness is worse than absolute monarchy, but rather because other factors enter into my decisions about who I should dine with. Similarly, decisions about who you should reach out to in your propaganda are not necessarily decided solely based on whose deviations from your position you consider to be the least dangerous or destructive.

Kennedy,

In that is it any more offensive or dangerous than a reverence for majoritarian democracy?

Maybe more offensive; probably not more dangerous. How offensive a particular view is, on the whole, depends on a lot of factors, not merely how dangerous it is to individual rights. Vices aren’t crimes, but they are vices, and sometimes a vicious attitude merits taking offense.

Nobody gets atwitter about advocacy of democracy, so why should racism be any more alarming?

I don’t know what counts as getting “atwitter” or what domain you’re quantifying over when you say “nobody.” Most libertarian writers that I know are fairly contemptuous of majoritarian democracy. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three libertarians whose criticism of Ron Paul (Micha Ghertner’s, Wendy McElroy’s, and Brad Spangler’s) has specifically revolved around how the campaign promotes the myth that freedom can come about through majoritarian democracy.

As for Long, as far as I know, his position is not that racism is somehow worse or more alarming than political majoritarianism. The claim is just that racism is objectionable from a libertarian standpoint, not that it’s more objectionable than something else.

Taylor:

However, if I remember right, he tried to argue that racism isn’t really congruent with libertarianism because it violates the NAP somehow.

This is certainly not Roderick Long’s position.

His position is that racism is (1) objectionable in its own right (as irrational and collectivist), and also (2) objectionable from a libertarian standpoint. (1) is a good enough reason to criticize racism; something doesn’t have to be criminal for it to be open to criticism as foolish or vicious. But he also argues (2), not because racism per se violates the nonaggression principle, but rather because of tensions between the two on levels other than that of logical entailment.

Specifically, Long thinks that racist collectivism tends to interfere with the correct application of the non-aggression principle, that racist ideology will tend to causally undermine the implementation of libertarianism in the real world, and also that racism is logically incompatible with the broader underlying principles that justify the libertarian theory of justice. So the claim is that a libertarian could be a nonviolent racist without being inconsistent; but she could not do so reasonably, which is something different.

For details, cf. Politics Against Politics, in both the post and in the comments.

In other words, Comrade Halderman, Roderick’s reasons for failing to whole-heartedly support Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution may be subjectively neutral and nuanced, but clearly his position is objectively pro-fascist.

I also hear he’s a member of the international Trotskyist-anarchist conspiracy.

Thank you for this excellent post. I say that not just because you make use of my favorite Edmund Burke quote, but also because this is something very important that needs to be said, and needs to be remembered at all times when people start talking about institutions of power like prisons and psychiatric “hospitals.”

For what it’s worth, on the Burke quote, the “against all three” bit sounds funny because 2/3 of the antecedent is lost in the sections that are clipped out of the excerpt. The full beginning of that second paragraph is: “I need not excuse myself to your Lordship, nor, I think, to any honest Man, for the Zeal I have shewn in this Cause; for it is an honest Zeal, and in a good Cause. I have defended Natural Religion against a Confederacy of Atheists and Divines. I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper….” The problem is that I wanted to leave the bit about pleading for Natural Reason against Politicians in, but to leave the distracting stuff about natural religion out. Hope this helps.

Burke is best known today for the rather vile conservatism and authoritarianism in his opposition to the French Revolution. But Burke’s earlier writings were much more liberal, and sometimes even radical. There is some debate over whether the Vindication of Natural Society was meant as a serious argument against government, or as a satire. See Roderick Long’s first and second posts on the Vindication for the details, if you’re interested.

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.