“Net Neutrality”

“Net neutrality” is a dumb idea, on a par with “buy local.”

The logic of net neutrality is as follows: All autos must be black Model-Ts. It’s not “fair” if someone offers to make a Mustang for those who want something better. It’s not “fair” if Mustang owners can get from place to place faster than Model-T owners. We must all be the same. No more of this male or female nonsense, or allowing batters to hit more than their “share” of home runs, etc.

Almost everything that one can buy comes in different gradations of quality: automobiles, shoes, bread, haircuts, computers, internet service, and on and on. Those gradations of quality enable each of us to buy goods and services that meet our particular needs, given our income constraints and preferences.

Why should I object if certain producers of web content get better service (faster delivery of their content) if they pay a fee for that better service? They’re paying a fee for a service, just as I’m paying a higher fee for my high-speed DSL service than are many other consumers who can’t afford or choose not to pay as much for their internet service as I do. My higher fee enables me to obtain web content faster than those other consumers. Should I be forced to accept a slower speed so that they won’t be relegated to “second class” status? What about those consumers who pay even more than I do and, in return, get even faster DSL or cable service? What about those consumers who buy big Lexuses when others can only afford Honda Civics? What about those consumers who buy tailored suits when others can only afford to buy their clothes at Wal-Mart?

You can see the end of it can’t you? By the “logic” of net neutrality, everyone would be forced to accept goods and services of the same quality. That quality would be poor because there would be no incentive to produce better goods and services to earn more money in order to buy better goods and services — because they couldn’t be bought. Reminds me of the USSR.

But it’s “different” for providers of web content. Or so say the proponents of net neutrality. The providers of web content aren’t consumers, they’re producers. (Aren’t we all, in one way or another?) If they’re able to deliver their content faster than other producers, they’ll have an “unfair” advantage over those other providers. To which I say balderdash. Here’s why:

1. A demand for faster delivery of web content will be met by a supply of greater internet capacity, as supliers of internet capacity upgrade their networks in their competitive efforts to meet the demand for faster delivery. That is, the loss of net neutrality is unlikely to have any effect on other content providers. But there’s more to it . . .

2. Faster delivery will command a premium, just as a Lexus commands a premium over a Honda Civic.

3. Content providers will demand faster delivery and pay the premium for it only to the extent that it yields a positive return (i.e., greater profit).

4. Faster delivery will yield a positive return only to the extent that consumers actually respond to the products and services offered by buying sufficiently more of them.

5. Those consumers, therefore, will pay the premium for the faster delivery of web content.

End of discussion.

P.S. Well, almost the end of the discussion. A friend responded to the first paragraph of this post, which I put on my Facebook wall. He wrote:

Logic is all roads must be open to all. The vehicles you drive may range from Model A Fords to $300,000 race cars. But we all have access to the same highways. NN is very similar to Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway program of the 50s. Don’t confuse product using Net with the Net itself.

To which I replied:

The “road” is open, but it has some toll lanes. Moreover, the “road” is privately owned. Don’t confuse someone else’s property and business with your own.

And…NN says that even if you own a race car, you can’t go faster than a Model A. NN is like the Interstate Highway program would have been if government had commandeered privately built highways and dictated the terms of their use. NN is like telling you that your restaurant can serve only grilled cheese sandwiches because there are customers who can’t afford steak.

He does own a restaurant, and you might think that he would not favor big government. But he does, out of long habit and “religious” fervor. The restaurant is a post-retirement extravagance. He continues to believe (as lefties do) that government is a precision instrument, which can and will be applied only to those ends that they favor. And yet (as lefties do) he complains when government is controlled by Republicans and does things of which he disapproves.

The Federal Pay Freeze

BHO supports a measure that would freeze the pay of federal employees for two years. That won’t do much to trim the deficit, but it might do some good things for the economy:

First, it would drive some competent federal employees into the private sector, where they would produce real things instead of messing around with the people and businesses who do.

Second, a freeze would slow the transfer of resources from people who do productive things in the private sector to people who do unproductive and counterproductive things in the public sector. If there were such a thing as social justice, that would be an example of it.

The next best thing would be to freeze the pay of civilian federal employees until their quit rate rises to the quit rate in the private sector. Then, pay parity will have been achieved.

After that? Get serious and eliminate all federal departments that perform unconstitutional functions, that is, most of them. Now we’re talking real money.

Our Enemy, the State

I have written much about the economic and social damage wrought by state action. In this post, I step back from particular instances of state action to explain, in general terms, how it damages the economic and social infrastructure that it is supposed to protect, in a so-called free nation.

I begin with tutorials about economic and social behavior and their intertwining. When I have laid that groundwork, I explain the destructiveness of state action when it goes beyond the protection of life, liberty, and property.

ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR AND “ECONOMICS”

There is more to economic behavior than production and exchange, at arm’s length. But it is those aspects of economic behavior that usually come to mind when one refers to “economics.” In the narrow view, economic behavior has five facets:

Buyers allocate their disposable (after-tax) incomes among various goods (products and services, including forms of saving), according to their individual tastes and preferences, which are influenced by many things (e.g., socioeconomic status, family status, and cultural heritage).

Sellers choose the quantities and prices of goods that they offer to buyers, given the factors that affect their production costs and possibilities (e.g., resource prices, innovation, government intervention).

Buyers and sellers act — through the mechanism known as “the market,” which usually is not a physical place — to determine the mix of goods that changes hands.

The mix of goods exchanged varies across time, as tastes and preferences change; goods change because of invention, innovation, and variations in resource prices; and government intervention varies in type and intensity (usually waxing rather than waning).

The general level of goods exchanged — as measured roughly by their aggregate monetary value — is affected by the foregoing.

All of these actions occur simultaneously and dynamically.

Aggregation has no validity unless it is grounded in an understanding and valid description of the disaggregated behavior of buyers and sellers. Even then, aggregation fails to depict the totality of economic activity because (a) much of it is unmeasured (e.g., so-called household production); (b) not all activity moves in the same direction at the same time; (c) tastes, preferences, and production possibilities are constantly changing; and, most importantly, (d) there is no valid way of aggregating the satisfaction, pleasure, happiness, or utility (call it what you will) that the fruits of economic activity impart to the unique individuals who partake of it.

In any event, the underlying characteristic of economic behavior is its transactional nature. Two or more parties agree to exchange things (goods, money, other stores of value) in an effort by each party to gain satisfaction, pleasure, happiness, or utility (call it what you will). Transactional behavior is a manifestation of social behavior, in that it is cooperative.

ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR AS SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

The kinds of economic behavior listed above typically are studied as “economics,” which — until recent decades — was limited mainly to the explicit exchange of goods for goods or goods for money. But such transactions are not the whole of economic behavior, and are far from the whole of social behavior.

Some kinds of transactional behavior are considered deeply personal — and they are deeply personal — but they involve exchange, nonetheless. One such behavior is friendship; another is sex; a third is loyalty:

Friendship is mutual, so its economic nature should need no explanation.

So is sex mutual, when it is consensual. It may be given for many reasons other than monetary gain, but its essential character is transactional: parties giving each other pleasure.

Loyalty arises from a kind of tacit exchange; that is, loyalty-inducing acts yield loyalty, which can be drawn upon (or not) at the behest of the person who commits loyalty-inducing acts. Loyalty may accompany friendship, but it also may exist apart from friendship.

These and other kinds of “personal” acts are not usually considered to be economic in nature, for three reasons: (a) the medium of exchange is far removed from money (or anything like it); (b) the transactions are so idiosyncratic as to defy the usual statistical-mathematical reductionism of economics; and (c) the transactions are far removed in character from, say, the buying and selling of potatoes.

The distinction between economic and social behavior has almost vanished in recent decades, with the rise of behavioral economics. This brand of economics focuses on the psychological determinants of economic behavior. There is much research and speculation about how and why individuals choose as they do, not only in the spending of money but also it other, more “personal,” types of social interaction.

Formal economics aside, the essential character of economic behavior is, as I have said, transactional. Economic transactions — even those that are deeply personal — are cooperative. But not all social behavior is transactional. In that subtle distinction lies the difference between economic behavior and “pure” social behavior.

“PURE” SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

What is “pure” social behavior? A good example can be found in religion. Certainly, religion has transactional aspects, as in the “giving” of one’s belief in the hope of a heavenly afterlife. But religion, for billions of persons, is much more than that. So is sex in a loving marriage. So friendship can be.

What is this deeper aspect of “pure,” non-transactional (non-economic) social behavior? It is rooted in the capacity of humans for self-generated emotional satisfaction. This can manifest itself as a uni-directional attachment to another person or being, an attachment that does not depend on the actions of its subject. A mundane but not all-encompassing term for it is “unconditional love.” A perhaps more apt term is “needing to belong” to someone or something.

A uni-directional attachment becomes a “pure” social relationship when individuals join to celebrate an attachment in common. To offer a short list of examples, the attachment may be to a family (nuclear or extended) as a family, apart from mutual attachments between individuals; religion; club; patriotic organization; or even a neighborhood, where the attachment is to the neighborhood itself, instead of or in addition to neighborly friendships. Membership in such organizations — the feeling of belonging to something “bigger” than oneself — can complement and heighten the underlying uni-directional attachment felt by each member.

POLITICS

Politics, as I use the term here, is simply an aspect of social behavior. It is the working out of the rules (signals, customs, taboos) and roles that individuals will follow and adopt in transactional and “pure” social relationships. Some rules may be confined to particular relationships; others may spread widely through emulation and necessity. Necessity arises when there is a network of transactional and “pure” social relationships that comprises disparate local sub-groups. Common rules, in such a case, help to ensure that members are recognized, and that their behavior is consistent with the purpose of the social network.

Rules range from the use of secret handshakes (to signal membership in a particular organization) to shunning (as a signal that the target has been ejected from a particular social organization). In between, there are things like the religious symbolism (e.g., the way in which the Sign of the Cross is made), deportment (stiff upper lip, and all that), the use of drugs (or not), and myriad other tokens of membership in the overlapping social groupings that comprise humanity. Such groupings include the fraternity of individualists, who despite their individualism, share an allegiance to it and variations on themes that justify it.

Roles denote one’s standing in a social group. Roles are determined by rules and signaled by the observance of certain of them. The role of a wife in many cultures, for example, was (and remains) overt subservience to the edicts of the husband. Subservience is signaled by the observance of rules that include, for example, standing while the husband eats his meal, and eating only when he has finished. The extent to which a particular wife is truly subservient to her husband — bowing to his political judgments or, alternatively, influencing them — is a political matter that lies between them and depends very much on the individuals involved.

Here, I must digress about the difference between voluntarily evolved social distinctions and dominance by force. Busybodies are quick to adopt the view that outward signs of subservience — and similar social phenomena that seem to create classes of individuals — indicate the forceful imposition of rules and roles. Busybodies, in other words, cannot (or do not wish to) tell the difference between something as abhorrent as slavery and a time-honored rule or role that, by facilitating social behavior, saves time and effort and reduces the likelihood of conflict. The role of a busybody is to question and challenge everything that is not done the way he would do it; a busybody, in other words, is a person of limited empathy and imagination. (For more about the proper role of the state with respect to social behavior, see “The Principles of Actionable Harm.”)

THE INDIVISIBILITY OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR

Everything I have discussed to this point involves real politics: transactions for mutual benefit, within a framework of voluntarily evolved rules and roles, without the imposition or threat of force by the state.

For example, the dietary laws of Judaism, when observed strictly (as they are in certain sects) affect the kinds of foodstuffs that observant Jews will grow, raise, or buy. Those of us who are old enough to remember when the three top-selling makes of automobile in the U.S. were Ford, Chevrolet, and Plymouth will also remember that the choice of which to buy was (in certain socioeconomic circles and age groups) a sign of membership in a loose affiliation of kindred auto owners. More generally, the demand for certain kinds of clothing, electronic equipment, beverages, automobiles, and so on is determined to some extent by socioeconomic status and group membership. Outsiders may mimic insiders in an effort to increase their standing with peers, to signal an aspiration to belong to a certain group, or as a sign of membership in an auxiliary group (e.g., a fan club, or whatever it is called now).

Thus we have real politics as the lubricant of social behavior. And we have economic behavior as an aspect of social behavior.

There is nevertheless a widely held view that economic behavior is distinct from social behavior. But when the state taxes or regulates “economic” activity, it shapes and channels related “social” activity. For example, the family that pays 25 percent of its income in taxes is that much less able to join and support organizations of its choice, to own and exhibit tokens of its socioeconomic status, to afford better education for its children, and so on. The immediate rejoinder will be that nothing has been changed if everyone is affected equally. But because of the complexity of tax laws and regulations, everyone is not affected equally. Moreover, even if everyone were deprived equally of the same kind of thing — a superior education, say — everyone would be that much worse off by having been deprived of opportunities to acquire remunerative knowledge and skills, productive relationships, and mental stimulation. Similarly, everyone would be that much worse off by being less well clothed, less well housed, and so on. Taxes and regulations, even if they could be applied in some absolutely neutral way (which they can’t be), have an inevitably deleterious effect on individuals.

In sum, there is no dividing line between economic and social behavior. What we call social and economic behavior are indivisible aspects of human striving to fulfill wants, both material and spiritual. The attempt to isolate and restrict one type of behavior is futile. It is all social behavior.

“POWER POLITICS”: OR, ENTER THE STATE

The activity that we usually call “politics” is not politics at all. Real politics, as I have said, is the voluntary working out of rules and roles, in the context of social behavior, which encompasses so-called economic behavior. With voice and exit, those who are unhappy with their lot can try to persuade the other members of their voluntary association to adopt different rules. If they fail, they can choose a more congenial social set (if one is available to them), which may involve moving to a different place. The ability to “vote with one’s feet” is an instrument of persuasion, as well, for it signals the group that one leaves (or credibly threatens to leave) of a defect that may cause others to leave, thus endangering the attainment of the group’s common objective.

What we usually call “politics” is entirely different from true politics. I call it “power politics.” It amounts to this:

A state is established, either by force alone or through a combination of consent, by limited to certain social and/or interest groups, and force, imposed on dissenting and uninvolved persons.

The state enjoys a monopoly of force, which it may — in the beginning, at least — apply to limited purposes, usually the defense of its citizens from aggression, intimidation, fraud, and theft.

There is a constant struggle for control of the state, either by force or by the kind of “politics” endemic to the state. The “politics” amounts to non-violent contests between and among various social and/or interest groups. The contests are conducted according to formal rules established under the aegis of the state, not a working-out of a modus vivendi in the normal course of real politics.

Control of the state enables the winners to override the rules that arise voluntarily through social cooperation. Rules imposed by the state come in the form of statutes, regulations, executive orders, judicial decrees, and administrative decisions (which may take a life of their own).

The effects of the various statutes, etc., are long-lasting because they often are not repealed when power changes hands. Instead, they remain in place, with the result that state power accrues and expands, while — as a result — the scope of social behavior shrinks and becomes less potent.

In other words, power in the hands of the state — and those who control it — is anti-social. Acts of the state are not acts of “society” or “community.” Those terms properly refer to consenting relationships among individuals — relationships that are shaped by real politics.

The state, in its ideal form, upholds and defends “society” and “community.” But when it oversteps its legitimate bounds, it commits the very acts of aggression, intimidation, fraud, and theft that it is supposed to deter and prevent. Moreover, it undoes the fabric of “society” and “community” by unraveling the voluntarily evolved social rules that bind them and guide them in peaceful cooperation.

I Want My Country Back

When a Tea Partier says something like “I want my county back,” leftists reliably label the sentiment as racist, sexist, homophobic, mean-spirited, and a lot of other things that are meant to be uncomplimentary. Well, I’m not an active member of the Tea Party movement, but I am sympathetic to it. And if I were to say “I want my country back,” here’s what I would mean by it:

Let’s start with the unlawfulness of government. The Constitution of the United States creates a “national” government of limited and enumerated powers, to act on behalf of the States and their citizens in certain matters. This “national” government has nevertheless blatantly and persistently exceeded its rightful powers. Moreover, much of what is done by all governments — not just the “national” government — is in fact unlawful at its core. There is a fundamental tenet of law — one that precedes and informs the Constitution — which is that “law” is law only when it serves the general welfare, regardless of its official status as an legislative, executive, or judicial act. Therefore, it is truly unlawful for the “national” government or any other government in the United States to interfere with the lives, liberty, or property of Americans for the purpose of promoting special interests, however laudable those interests may seem. And yet, the “laws” under which Americans labor are, in the main, enactments that serve special interests and the power-lust of politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. In sum, I want my country (and its various parts) to return to the true “rule of law,” which is to promote the general welfare by

protecting all Americans from their enemies within and without

ensuring the free movement of all Americans

ensuring the free exchange of goods and services

and nothing more.

One of the most insidious ways in which government interferes with our liberty is by exercising a subtle but powerful form of thought control. It is not the business of government to tell us what to believe or how we must arrive at our beliefs. But government — which puts it imprimatur on the vast majority of educational institutions and much of the “factual” information in many fields of endeavor — does all of those things. Thus, contrary to the intentions of the Founders, we have become a nation imbued with official beliefs about matters ranging from the origins of the universe to the goodness of our enemies to the climatic effects of (puny) human endeavors.

One of the key beliefs instilled by government — directly and through those who are in its thrall — is its beneficent role in our economic and social affairs. It never seems to occur to the proponents of governmental interference — or to its relatively few of its opponents — that there is a living, breathing case study which disproves the beneficence of economic meddling. When government spending and regulation played a tiny role in the economic affairs of the United States — from the 1790s to around 1900 — GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.2 percent. Now, with the regulatory-welfare state fully upon us, GDP grows at an annual rate of 3.1 percent (and falling). The difference between those two rates — when compounded over a generation, a lifetime, or a century — ranges from significantly large to enormous. The road to economic lassitude is paved by the good intentions of regulation and spending by government. Liberty — part of which is the right to make mistakes and benefit from the resulting lessons — is a collateral victim of regulatory zeal. Liberty is a victim of government spending, as well, because it deprives individuals of some portion of the rewards for their labor and capital, and the full enjoyment of those rewards.

With respect to social matters, there is only one way to put it: Government is an enemy of society. Its main mission, when you think about it for more than a minute, is to supplant voluntary and beneficial social arrangements with schemes hatched in the vacuum of intellectualism. It is as if there were nothing to the eons-long learning that is expressed in the Ten Commandments and Golden Rule, and embodied in churches, clubs, and other voluntary, private associations. We must, instead, take our social marching orders from elites, who have their own peculiar views of what is right and just: serial polygamy, pederasty, and infanticide, to name just a few things. The social engineering favored by intellectualoids arises not from the wisdom of tradition, which fosters stable, trusting, and supportive social relationships, but from idle theorizing and a large dose of adolescent and post-adolescent rebellion.

Now, after a more than a century of “progressive” destruction of the Constitution and its restraints on government, Americans no longer enjoy the protection of government and the self-policing restraints of social custom. Instead, Americans suffer the fads and whims of the self-anointed, whose legacy lingers after their departure from the scene.

Now, after more than a century of “progressive” interference in the economic affairs of Americans, our progeny face unaffordable financial commitments, which they will be expected to honor even as their standard of living withers under the assault of taxation and regulation.

Now, after more than a century of social experimentation in which anti-social behavior has been exalted and long-standing voluntary social arrangements and institutions have been stripped of their authority, too many of our progeny are hooked on hard drugs, casual sex, and gratuitous violence as forms of “entertainment” and as “lifestyles.”

I want my country back.

Democrat Office-Holders = Faithful Nazis?

You may not be old enough to remember Adolf Eichmann, so here’s a thumbnail history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Otto Adolf Eichmann … , sometimes referred to as “the architect of the Holocaust”, was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel). Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, he was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.

After the war, he fled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross and lived there under a false identity working for Mercedes-Benz until 1960. He was captured by Israeli Mossad operatives in Argentina and abducted to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.

Eichmann’s defense:

Eichmann, speaking in his own defense, said that he did not dispute the facts of what happened during the Holocaust. During the whole trial, Eichmann insisted that he was only “following orders”—the same Nuremberg Defense used by some of the Nazi war criminals during the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials. He explicitly declared that he had abdicated his conscience in order to follow the Führerprinzip. Eichmann claimed that he was merely a “transmitter” with very little power. He testified that: “I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.”

The “only following orders” defense reminds me of the meme that’s popular in “progressive” circles. A commenter at Daily Kos captures it well:

If you believe “A job worth doing is worth doing well,” you probably also believe a job that’s not worth doing is not worth doing well. A classic conservative belief is that the government that governs least governs best, and it seems a lot of Republicans honestly believe that some things our government does it shouldn’t be doing at all….

If you’re a top-level Republican patronage recipient, you probably got a job doing something you still think the government should do. But if you’re a B team talent who took a political patronage job, there’s a good chance it’s in a program or agency you don’t even think should exist. If it’s a program you’d like to cancel but you know cancellation is a legislative impossibility, it almost makes sense to do the worst possible job you can get away with….

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the function is constitutional. Nor does it matter that you took an oath of office in which you swore to uphold the Constitution. What matters is following orders. And if your job is to follow the “orders” enshrined in unconstitutional laws, regulations, and executive edicts, you’d better follow those “orders,” by gum.

S*** H***!

(I have replaced the letters i-e-g and e-i-l with asterisks because it seems that the filters on some public computers blocked this blog because it contained the verboten words. It is beyond the ability of filtering software to put the words in context. The mock salute is to the fascisti in D.C.; it is by no means an homage to one of the most evil regimes of the twentieth century.)

Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty

Here’s my position:

The econometric evidence is there, for those who are open to it: Capital punishment does deter homicide. See, for example, the careful analysis by Hashem Dezhbaksh, Paul Robin, and Joanna Shepherd, “Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect? New evidence from post-moratorium panel data,” American Law and Economics Review 5(2): 344–376 (available in PDF format here). Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd argue that each execution deters eighteen murders. That number may be high, but the analysis is rigorous and it accounts for relevant variables, such as income, age, race, gender, population density, and use of the death penalty where it is legal. It’s hard to read that analysis and believe that capital punishment doesn’t deter homicide — unless you want to believe it. I certainly wouldn’t take “Ouija Board” Goertzel’s opinion over that of careful econometricians like Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd.

Now, I must say that I don’t care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain — as it was for a long time after World War II — crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property.

John McAdams, a professor of political science at Marquette University, makes a succinct case for the death penalty, regardless of its deterrent effect:

I’m a bit surprised . . . [by the] claim that “the burden of empirical proof would seem to lie with the pro-death penalty scholar.” If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call.

I wish I’d said that.

The Mind of a Paternalist, Revisited

If there was any doubt that Richard Thaler is not a “libertarian,” even though he implies that he is one when he calls himself a “libertarian paternalist,” read this:

There is another possible argument for including the rich in these tax cuts, one based on “fairness.” By this reasoning, the wealthy are entitled to low tax rates because they have temporarily had them, and it would now be unfair to take them back.

But by that same argument, unemployment insurance should never expire, and every day should be your birthday. “Temporary” has no meaning if it bestows a permanent right.

By Thaler’s convoluted logic, the money one earns is a gift from government, and those who pay taxes have no greater claim on their own money than those to whom the government hands it. How is this “libertarian,” by any reasonable interpretation of that word?

As I have said in various ways, Thaler is a paternalist but not a libertarian. One cannot be both.

The Divine Right of the Majority

From “Fun For Clio,” an essay in Hilaire Belloc’s The Silence of the Sea (1941):

An older generation marvelled that men should unquestioningly obey a King, who claimed absolute Divine authority for his mandates. To-day you find men falling into exactly that state of mind in the presence of what they call a majority. All sorts of evidence is shouting at them to show them that this word “majority” has no meaning because it may be of any kind whatsoever — a majority of men or a majority of women or a majority of men and women combined, or a majority of those who care, or a majority of those who want to express an opinion, or a majority of those who are bored stiff with having to express an opinion, or a majority of those who don’t express an opinion but simly make a mark on a bit of paper. It may mean a majority of a thousand and one to a thousand, or a majority of nine out of ten, a majority of citizens or a majority of professional politicians, a majority of murderers, a majority of savages, a majority of lunatics, a majority which changes in a few hours or a majority which is fixed — it is all one, majority is worshipped as of Divine Right. (p. 88, Glendalough Press edition)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

A Conversation with Uncle Sam

Uncle Sam graciously granted me a telephone interview. Here is a complete transcript of the conversation between Uncle Sam (S) and me (T):

S: Sam here.

T: Hello, uncle, it’s Thomas.

S: It’s good to hear your voice, Mr. Jefferson.

T: Sorry, not that Thomas. I’m just a humble blogger. Do you know about blogs?

S: Oh, yes. I follow all the blogs about politics and economics. It’s quite a chore, but very enlightening. The things some people think about me are shocking.

T: How so?

S: Well, there are a lot of people out there who think that I hold the solution to all economic and social problems.

T: Don’t you?

S: Of course not. People are responsible for solving their own problems. All I can do is try to create a safe environment in which they can get on with the business of life.

T: Before we explore that idea further, tell me about yourself. How did you get your job?

S: I was hired by nine of the original States in 1788, when the Constitution was ratified. The other four soon joined them, and others came along later.

T: What was your job description when you were hired?

S: Pretty much what I said a minute ago: to keep the people safe, which includes refereeing squabbles among the States and ensuring that they don’t erect barriers to keep out people and goods from other States.

T: But you seem to have acquired a lot of additional duties since 1788.

S: Sad, but true. And it’s wearing me down. I have to pretend to be a lot wiser and more capable than any one person can be. I wish the States would get together and pare my job description down to its original specifications.

T: It seems unlikely, though. A lot of people have come to depend on you to do things they could do for themselves.

S: And it’s getting very expensive — like having 300 million dependents. The only way I’ll be able to support them all is to raise their taxes. I could borrow money from foreigners, but the more I borrow, the more expensive it will become. Eventually, foreigners will look at my balance sheet and cut me off.

T: So what it boils down to is this: In the end, your dependents must pay for the things that you do for them. Correct?

S: That’s exactly right. I’m just running a big Ponzi scheme. And most of the people who sign up for it are fools who believe that they’re getting something for nothing.

T: What’s in it for you?

S: Well, I must admit that I get a cut of the action.

T: So, when all the dust settles, your dependents don’t even get all of their money back from you?

S: Are you kidding? Of course they don’t. If they want me to do all of this extra work, they have to pay me for my trouble.

T: Do you think it’s possible to cut your job back to its original size?

S: Only if a lot more people get wise to me. Most of them seem to think I’m Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

T: But the politicians who give you your orders don’t believe such things, do they?

S: Some of them do. Most of them are just using me to make things work the way they want them to. It’s called “control.” I’ve seen all the presidents, members of Congress, and Supreme Court jutices — from great to mediocre — and almost every one of them was, or is, a control freak. Washington had to be one in order to get things off the ground. Without him, I wouldn’t have a job. Ditto Lincoln, who had to be a control freak in order to save the Union. Not that that was a bad thing, mind you, especially because it brought an end to slavery. But how many presidents since Lincoln have tried to stuff the genie (me) back in the bottle? Cleveland, Coolidge, and Reagan — that’s about it. And whatever success they enjoyed was only temporary. The people are good at fooling themselves, and politicians excel at helping them along.

T: You seem pessimistic.

S: I am. What’s needed is another Revolution, but a peaceful one. Those are hard to come by.

T: I’ll end our conversation on that note. Thanks very much, Sam.

S: Thank you for listening. And give my best wishes to the Tea Party.

Today Is Constitution Day

The members of the Constitutional Convention approved the new Constitution on this day in 1787. The Constitution then went to the old Confederation Congress, which approved the submission of the Constitution to conventions of the States.

The Constitution took effect on June 21, 1788, when it was ratified by a ninth State (New Hampshire), though it bound only the nine States that had thus far ratified it. The other four States followed suit, but the Constitution was not ratified by — and did not become binding on — all thirteen States until Rhode Island joined the Union on May 29, 1790. By then, more than a year had passed since the first Congress of the United States had assembled and George Washington had been inaugurated.

In honor of the original Constitution — which has been shredded by generations of legislative, executive, and judicial malfeasance — I refer you to these posts:

A New, New Constitution
The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience
A Declaration of Independence
First Principles
The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration

A Belated Labor Day Message

The good news:

Why is this good news? Read on: “The Truth about Labor Day,” from the Ludwig von Mises Institute; “Toward a Capital Theory of Value,” “A Very Politically Incorrect Labor Day Post,” and “Your Labor Day Reading,” by me. (NB: Some of the links in these old posts may be broken, and some of the quoted Wikipedia articles may have been revised by “contributors” eager to whitewash the labor-union movement.)

Line-Drawing and Liberty

The controversy about the ground-zero mosque illustrates an important aspect of liberty, namely, that its preservation requires line-drawing. There are times when government intervention in private matters is required to preserve liberty, in its fullest sense: life and the pursuit of happiness.

A libertarian purist would disagree. He would say that property rights are property rights, period. The owners of the land on which the mosque is to be situated have the right to decide what to build on their land. Further, if that right is compromised by government intervention, then it is possible for government to dictate how anyone may use his land.

Ignoring that fact that government already dictates how land may be used — through zoning laws, building codes, environmental restrictions, and other forms of regulation — I concede readily that the purist is correct, in principle. We know from long experience that as politicians and bureaucrats acquire the power to intervene in private transactions, they will apply that power in arbitrary and capricious ways.

Does that mean government should never intervene in private transactions? Imagine the following situation: A convicted car thief, having served his sentence, buys a defunct auto-repair shop with backing from some unsavory friends. If the police get word of this setup, what should happen?

1. Nothing, because the shop hasn’t begun to operate, and so there is no evidence that it will be used for criminal activity.

2. Keep watch on the shop, on the reasonable suspicion that the convicted felon and his unsavory associates are setting up a front for a stolen-car operation.

3. Find a legal pretext for closing down the shop.

What are the likely consequences of the three options?

1. The ex-convict will set up a stolen-car operation, and many cars will be stolen, causing great inconvenience to the owners of the stolen cars and higher insurance premiums for the owners of all cars in the area. Justice may prevail, but much harm has been done.

2. The stolen-car operation will be detected quickly, and shut down quickly, thus preventing most of the harm that would arise under option 1. Further, prison terms for the ex-convict and his unsavory associates will prevent them from doing further harm — for a while at least.

3. Allowing the police to shut down the shop without evidence of wrong-doing will encourage the police to persecute legitimate businesses and innocent individuals who happen to incur their disapproval.

If you are a libertarian purist (or a reflexive, anti-police “liberal”), you will prefer option 1; you are a one-day-at-a-time rationalist who adopts a pose of studied agnosticism. If you are a reflexive, law-and-order “conservative” you will prefer option 3. Option 2 is reserved for those who are willing to acknowledge the ex-convict’s history and its implications for his future behavior, but who want to preserve the bulwark of due process against the power of the state.

The question of where to draw the line around the authority of the state should not be decided by simplistic rules. Libertarian purists want to draw the line in the wrong place because their focus in on narrow issues — such as privacy and property rights — and not on the broader issue of liberty.

The Meaning of the Mosque Controversy

The controversy about the ground-zero mosque — which is summarized here — reminds me of an old post of mine, “Losing Sight of the Objective”:

Those who are so keen to bestow constitutional rights on terrorists have lost sight of a key purpose — perhaps the key purpose — of the Constitution: to provide for the common defense. Of Americans. Against their enemies: foreign and domestic, overt and covert.

Whether the mosque will serve as a front for terrorist activity remains to be seen. But there is good reason to suspect that it will. And if it does, it will be further evidence that America’s “leaders” have lost sight of the objective in their rush to display “tolerance” for everyone — well, tolerance for everyone but heterosexual, white Christians and Jews; for example:

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which once sat right across the street from the World Trade Center, was crushed under the weight of the collapse of Tower Two on September 11, 2001. St. Nicholas was the only church to be lost in the attacks, and nine years later, while City of New York officials are busy removing every impediment to the building of the Cordoba mosque two blocks from the site, St. Nicholas’ future remains unclear.

The last bit of hopeful news for St. Nicholas came two years ago, in July 2008, when church officials and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced a deal which would have allowed the church to be rebuilt about two blocks from its original location….

Trouble emerged after St. Nicholas announced its plans to build a traditional Greek Orthodox church building, 24,000 square feet in size, topped with a grand dome. Port Authority officials told the church to cut back the size of the building and the height of the proposed dome, limiting it to rising no higher than the World Trade Center memorial. The deal fell apart for good in March 2009, when the Port Authority abruptly ended the talks after refusing to allow church officials to review plans for the garage and screening area underneath. Sixteen months later, the two sides have still not met to resume negotiations.

St. Nicholas Church’s difficulty in getting approvals to rebuild stands in stark contrast to the treatment that the developers of the proposed Cordoba mosque have received. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, state Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo, and a raft of city officials have all come out publicly in favor of building the mosque, and the city’s Landmarks and Preservation Commission recently voted unanimously to deny protection to the building currently occupying the site where the mosque is to be built.

The mosque is proposed to rise 13 stories, far above the height of the World Trade Center memorial, with no height restrictions imposed. (Mark Imponemi, “Mosque Moves Forward, Yet Church in Limbo“)

The case of the ground-zero mosque is only a symptom of the larger problem, which is denial and appeasement. Bill Whittle spells it out in a 13-minute video, “Ground Zero Mosque Reality Check.” Denial and appeasement arise from what Thomas Sowell calls one-day-at-a-time rationalism:

One-day-at-a-time rationalism [addresses] the immediate implications of each issue as it arises, missing wider implications of a decision…. A classic example was a French intellectual’s response to the Czechoslovakian crisis that led to the Munich conference of 1938:

…Joseph Barthélemy, who taught constitutional law at the University of Paris and was French representative at the League of Nations, asked in Le Temps the question French leaders had to answer: “Is it worthwhile setting fire to the world in order to save the Czechoslovak state… ? Is it necessary that three million Frenchman …. would be sacrificed to maintain three million Germans under Czech sovereignty?

Since it was not France that was threatening to set fire to the world, but Hitler, the larger question was whether someone who was threatening to set fire to the world if he didn’t get his way was someone who should be appeased in this one-day-at-a time approach, without regard to what this appeasement could do to encourage a never-ending series of escalating demands. By Contrast, Winston Churchill had pointed out, six years earlier, that “every concession which has been made” to Germany “has been followed immediately by a fresh demand.” Churchill clearly rejected one-day-at-a-time rationalism. (Intellectuals and Society, p. 31)

Leftists will embrace the cause of the ground-zero mosque because it is in their nature to embrace anything that undermines civil society. Libertarian purists will embrace it because they embrace one-day-at-a-time rationalism (e.g., this blogger).

As a libertarian realist, I am prepared to say that the mosque should not rise if it is likely to become a front for terrorist activity. I am keeping my eyes on the objective, which is the defense of Americans’ lives, liberty, and property: against their enemies foreign and domestic, overt and covert.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Due Process, and Equal Protection

The decision of federal district judge Vaughn Walker in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger finds California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Judge Walker’s decision is notable for two things:

It affirms substantive due process.

It stands in the tradition of circular reasoning with respect to equal protection.

With respect to due process, Judge Walker says:

The Due Process Clause provides that no “State [shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” … Due process protects individuals against arbitrary governmental intrusion into life, liberty or property….

The freedom to marry is recognized as a fundamental right protected by the Due Process Clause….

To determine whether a right is fundamental under the Due Process Clause, the court inquires into whether the right is rooted “in our Nation’s history, legal traditions, and practices.”

Judge Walker thereby adopts the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York (1905), a case that upheld the right of private parties to enter into employment agreements that run contrary to the labor laws of a State. Lochner, in a roundabout way, upheld liberty of contract, which is a right specifically recognized in the Constitution of the United States (Article I, Section 10).

Lochner epitomizes substantive due process, a juridical concept that has been in bad odor for decades, but which ought not to be. The essence of Lochner — and substantive due process — is exactly as stated by Judge Walker: “Due process protects individuals against arbitrary governmental intrusion into life, liberty or property.” (For more about Lochner, see my post, “Substantive Due Process, Liberty of Contract, and the States’ Police Power.”)

Judge Walker goes on to address equal protection:

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”…

Proposition 8 targets gays and lesbians in a manner specific to their sexual orientation and, because of their relationship to one another, Proposition 8 targets them specifically due to sex. Having considered the evidence, the relationship between sex and sexual orientation and the fact that Proposition 8 eliminates a right only a gay man or a lesbian would exercise, the court determines that plaintiffs’ equal protection claim is based on sexual orientation, but this claim is equivalent to a claim of discrimination based on sex.

The circularity of Judge Walker’s reasoning with respect to equal protection begins much earlier in his decision, where he writes that

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.

But the right to marry, historically, has been the right to choose a spouse of the opposite sex, not merely to choose a spouse. Judge Walker even acknowledges that fact, inadvertently, when he puts aside “relative gender composition,” as if it were a mere trifle and not central to a social tradition that dates back millennia and should not be swept aside casually by a judge because he finds it “irrational,” on the basis of spurious social science. Walker then says that “gender is not relevant,” thus circularly assuming that which is to be proved. As if in support of that assertion he asserts, laughably, that “gender restrictions … were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage.”

In sum, Judge Walker approaches the constitutional matter of equal protection by assuming that gays have the right to marry. Given that assumption, it is easy to assert that Proposition 8 amounts to a denial of equal protection for gays who seek to marry. (For more about the perversion of the Equal Protection Clause through circular reasoning, see my post, “‘Equal Protection” and Homosexual Marriage.”)

The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Special Interests, Good and Bad

I am indebted to my son for suggesting the theme of this post. Any failures of execution are mine alone.

There is a tendency to think of special-interest groups as “bad” things. But that isn’t necessarily so. As I pointed out in “The National Psyche and Foreign Wars,”

[t]wo, relatively small, interlocking groups of strong-willed individuals were responsible for the Revolution and the Constitution, and those groups were bound by two special interests (at least): independence from Britain (not a universally popular idea at the time) and freedom from Britain’s interference in the colonies’ commerce. (The second interest is a “bad thing” only if one view commercial interests as a “bad thing.” Unlike the historians of the Beard school, I do not.)

In sum, Americans — even those who disdain “dead white men” — owe what liberty they still enjoy to those “dead white men” who founded this nation and wrote its Constitution. The Constitution is not a perfect document because it the product of fallible human beings, and to assert that it should have done thus-and-such is to indulge in the Nirvana fallacy.

The Constitution represents compromises among special interests, some of them bent on preserving the institution of slavery in their own States. But, thanks to the framers’ understanding that the world changes, the Constitution could be changed — and eventually was changed — to codify the abolition of slavery.

Only a wise (and rare) élite could have done what the framers did in 1787. That the citizens of the United States, for a time, enjoyed the fruits of the framers’ efforts was due not only to those efforts but also to luck. The right élite appeared on the stage of history at just about the right time, and that élite’s wisdom managed to prevail for a while.

The framers’ work has been largely undone by a succession of special interests — Progressives, Populists, and their progeny — whose work continues unto this very day. Their stated aims are laudable, of course, but so were many of the stated aims of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Politicians and political movements should not be judged by what they promise, but by what they deliver. What has been delivered to Americans in the past century? The answer — less liberty and economic privation — is detailed in many of the posts linked below.

It is long past time for a new special-interest group to seize the levers of power and revive the Constitution.

On Liberty
Parsing Political Philosophy
The Indivisibility of Economic and Social Liberty
Greed, Cosmic Justice, and Social Welfare
Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice
Fascism and the Future of America
Inventing “Liberalism”
Utilitarianism, “Liberalism,” and Omniscience
Utilitarianism vs. Liberty
Beware of Libertarian Paternalists
Secession
Secession Redux
Negative Rights, Social Norms, and the Constitution
Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and the Legitimate State
The Mind of a Paternalist
Accountants of the Soul
Rawls Meets Bentham
Is Liberty Possible?
The Left
The National Psyche and Foreign Wars
The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration

The Commandeered Economy
The Price of Government
The Mega-Depression
Does the CPI Understate Inflation?
Ricardian Equivalence Reconsidered
The Real Burden of Government
The Rahn Curve at Work

More about Consequentialism

In “‘Natural Rights’ and Consquentialism” I attacked (with logic) the concept of natural rights, and observed that

rights — when properly understood as man-made bargains — are consequentialist to their core, arising as they do (in part) from empathy and (in part) from self-interestedness.

This observation squares with something I said in “Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and the Legitimate State“:

Liberty — rightly understood as the universal application of negative rights — is possible only when the Golden Rule is, in fact, the rule. The Golden Rule, which is the quintessential social norm, encapsulates a lesson learned over the eons of human coexistence. That lesson? If I desist from harming others, they (for the most part) will desist from harming me.

It seems that these observations, which I have made in one way or another in many posts, put me in good company. Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek, notes that

Adam Smith … [i]n The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) … wrote that “Our continual observations upon the conduct of others insensibly lead us to form to ourselves certain general rules concerning what is fit and proper either to be done or to be avoided.”

Just as workable economic arrangements are not, and cannot be, designed and imposed by a higher power, so too, Smith explained, workable morality itself is the product not of any grand design but of the everyday actions, reactions, observations, and practical assessments of ordinary people going about their daily business.

Which is not to say that I am necessarily right just because I am on the same wavelength as Adam Smith (in this and other respects). For, as The New Rambler says,

we have a chicken-and-egg problem. We must measure consequentialism against some value outside itself to see if the results we get are what we want. At the same time, any ideal must be tested by everyday experience to see if it is worth pursuing or in what way we can best attain it.

I admit that when I argue in favor of consequentialism, I am arguing for it (in part) because I believe — with justification (e.g., here, here, and here) — that the consequences of ordered liberty are superior to those of its alternatives: statism (even the statism of our supposedly benign “soft despotism”) and anarchy (which necessarily devolves into something worse than “soft despotism”). But, at the same time, liberty is a value unto itself (an ideal), which can be attained only under a political system with the following characteristics:

the general observance of evolved and evolving social norms and, accordingly, their enforcement through social censure

an accountable, minimal state, dedicated to the protection of its citizens and the enforcement of those social norms — and only those norms — that rise to the level of statutory law (e.g., acts that are generally recognized as fraudulent, coercive, and aggressive)

voice, the opportunity for dissent from social norms and laws (though not the right to have one’s dissent honored)

exit, the right to leave without penalty.

Those, of course, are the characteristics of civil society operating freely under the aegis of a minimal state, which is what I mean by ordered liberty. Whether rights are pre-existing entities or social bargains unshaped by the state (but sometimes enforced by it), they will emerge and flourish under ordered liberty.

In sum, The New Rambler‘s “chicken and egg” comment has led me to a reconciliation of natural rights and consequentialism. Liberty is to be sought for its own sake and because of its consequences, among which is the emergence of rights — whatever their source — whose exercise redounds to the benefit of the people who share in those rights.

Is Obama a Racist?

Obama, by his own standards, is a racist:

By the standard of “disparate impact,” Obama is a racist because the effect of his soak-the-rich economics is to punish high-income individuals for the sin of making a lot of money. It should go without saying that whites are disproportionately represented among high-income individuals. Q.E.D., Obama’s soak-the-rich policy is racist.

But, but… haven’t I said many times that the ultimate effect of soak-the-rich schemes is to harm the poor, because soak-the-rich schemes hamper economic growth and job creation? True. But what counts in Obama’s world of justice is not the effect of one’s actions but the motives behind them. (“Hate crimes” anyone?) If Obama hates “the rich” — as he evidently does — it must be because they are overwhelmingly white. Q.E.D. Obama is a racist.

The Left

The “left” of the title refers, specifically, to left-statists or (usually) leftists.

I describe statism in “Parsing Political Philosophy“:

Statism boils down to one thing: the use of government’s power to direct resources and people toward outcomes dictated by government….

The particular set of outcomes toward which government should strive depends on the statist…. But all of them are essentially alike in their desire to control the destiny of others….

“Hard” statists thrive on the idea of a powerful state; control is their religion, pure and simple. “Soft” statists profess offense at the size, scope, and cost of government, but will go on to say “government should do such-and-such,” where “such-and such” usually consists of:

government grants of particular positive rights, either to the statist, to an entity or group to which he is beholden, or to a group with which he sympathizes

government interventions in business and personal affairs, in the belief that government can do certain things better than private actors, or simply should do [certain] things….

I continue by saying that left-statists (L-S)

prefer such things as income redistribution, affirmative action, and the legitimation of gay marriage….L-S prefer government intervention in the economy, not only for the purpose of redistributing income but also to provide goods and services that can be provided more efficiently by the private sector, to regulate what remains of the private sector, and to engage aggressively in monetary and fiscal measures to maintain “full employment.” It should be evident that L-S have no respect for property rights, given their willingness to allow government to tax and regulate at will….

L-S tend toward leniency and forgiveness of criminals (unless the L-S or those close to him are the victims)…. On defense, L-S act as if they prefer Chamberlain to Churchill, their protestations to the contrary….

L-S have no room in their minds for civil society; government is their idea of “community.”…

It is no wonder that most “liberals” (L) and “progressives” (P) try to evade the “leftist” label. (I enclose “liberal,” “progressive,” and forms thereof in quotation marks because L are anything but liberal, in the core meaning of the word, and the policies favored by P are regressive in their effects on economic and social liberty.) L and P usually succeed in their evasion because the center of American politics has shifted so far to the left that Franklin Roosevelt — a leftist by any reasonable standard — would stand at the center of today’s political spectrum.

Indeed, the growing dominance of leftism can be seen in the history of the U.S. presidency. It all started with Crazy Teddy Roosevelt, the first president to dedicate himself to the use of state power to advance his cause du jour. (I do not credit the anti-Lincoln zealotry of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.) TR’s leftism was evident in his “activist” approach to the presidency. No issue, it seems, was beneath TR’s notice or beyond the reach of the extra-constitutional powers he arrogated to himself. TR, in other words, was the role model for Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover (yes, Hoover the “do nothing” whose post-Crash activism helped to bring on the Great Depression), Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. (For more about American presidents and their predilections, see this, this, and this.) Countless members of Congress and State and local officials have been, and are, “activists” in the image of TR.

In sum, the problem with America — and it boils down to a single problem — is the left’s success in advancing its agenda. What is that agenda, and how does the left advance it?

The left advances its agenda in many ways, for example, by demonizing its opponents (small-government opponents are simply “mean”), appealing to envy (various forms of redistribution), sanctifying an ever-growing list of “victimized” groups (various protected “minorities”), making a virtue of mediocrity (various kinds of risk-avoiding regulations), and taking a slice at a time (e.g., Social Security set the stage for Medicare which set for Obamacare).

The left’s essential agenda is the repudiation of ordered liberty of the kind that arises from evolved social norms, and the replacement of that liberty by sugar-coated oppression. The bread and circuses of imperial Rome have nothing on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and the many other forms of personal and corporate welfare that are draining America of its wealth and élan. All of that “welfare” has been bought at the price of economic and social liberty (which are indivisible). (For a broad enumeration, see this post.)

Leftists like to say that there is a difference between opposition and disloyalty. But, in the case of the left, opposition arises from a fundamental kind of disloyalty. For, at bottom, the left pursues its agenda because it hates the idea of what America used to stand for: liberty with responsibility, strength against foreign and domestic enemies.

Most leftists are simply shallow-minded trend-followers, who believe in the power of government to do things that are “good,” “fair,” or “compassionate,” with no regard for the costs and consequences of those things. Shallow leftists know not what they do. But they do it. And their shallowness does not excuse them for having been accessories to the diminution of America. A rabid dog may not know that it is rabid, but its bite is no less lethal for that.

The leaders of the left — the office-holders, pundits, and intelligentsia — usually pay lip-service to “goodness,” “fairness,” and “compassion.” But their lip-service fails to conceal their brutal betrayal of liberty. Their subtle and not-so-subtle treason is despicable almost beyond words. But not quite…

On Liberty
Parsing Political Philosophy
The Indivisibility of Economic and Social Liberty
Greed, Cosmic Justice, and Social Welfare
Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice
Fascism and the Future of America
Inventing “Liberalism”
Utilitarianism, “Liberalism,” and Omniscience
Utilitarianism vs. Liberty
Beware of Libertarian Paternalists
Negative Rights, Social Norms, and the Constitution
Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and the Legitimate State
The Mind of a Paternalist
Accountants of the Soul
Rawls Meets Bentham
Is Liberty Possible?

The Commandeered Economy
The Price of Government
The Mega-Depression
Does the CPI Understate Inflation?
Ricardian Equivalence Reconsidered
The Real Burden of Government
The Rahn Curve at Work

Defining Treasonous Speech

Eugene Volokh, writing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Aid Project, digs into his archive for a list of five alternative ways of defining treasonous speech. The alternatives range from restrictive (#1) to lenient (#5).

My archive includes a five-year-old post in which I comment on Volokh’s five alternatives. In that post, I state a preference for this option:

2. Speech is unprotected only when the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy, and is paid for such speech. This, though, would be an odd distinction in U.S. constitutional law, given that speech is routinely protected despite being done for money. Most writers, filmmakers, journalists, and other speakers are paid for their speech.

Now, five years later, I lean toward Volokh’s least lenient alternative:

1. Speech is unprotected whenever the speaker has the purpose of aiding the enemy (and perhaps there’s some evidence that the speech is indeed likely to provide some at least modest aid). That seemed to be the court’s view in Gillars: “The First Amendment does not protect one from accountability for words as such. It depends upon their use. It protects the free expression of thought and belief as a part of the liberty of the individual as a human personality. But words which reasonably viewed constitute acts in furtherance of a program of an enemy to which the speaker adheres and to which he gives aid with intent to betray his own country, are not rid of criminal character merely because they are words.” This exception would justify punishing any speech that falls within the statutory and constitutional definition of “treason.”

How can I be so hard on speech that aids a foreign enemy and yet so supportive of free speech in the context of domestic affairs (e.g., see this post)? The terms “foreign enemy” and “domestic affairs” ought to be a clue. As I say here, in the context of illegal immigration, “the United States exists primarily for the purpose of protecting its citizens and their liberty rights.”

We must not give foreign enemies the same rights as American citizens. If we do, we run the grave risk of losing our own rights.

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