I'd like to consider two quotes that I've been thinking about tonight, both about the problem of forgetfulness. The first is by the Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who writes in his The Heart of Islam:
"If the great sin of Christianity is disobedience, which has warped the will, the great sin in Islam is forgetfulness and the resulting inability of the intelligence to function in the way God created it as the means to know the one. That is why the greatest sin in Islam, and the only one God does not forgive is "shirk", or taking a partner unto God, which means denying the oneness of God. This direct address from God, the one, to each human being in its primordial state requires the total surrender to the Majesty of the absolute..."(Nasr 7).
Then, take this statement by Nietzsche in Human, All-Too-Human, in aphorism 92:
"Justice ultimately derives from prudent concern with self-preservation...In accordance with their intellectual habits, men have forgotten the original purpose of so-called just, fair actions...Hence, it has gradually come to appear as if just action were unegoistic...How little the world would appear moral without forgetfulness! A poet might say that god made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity."
Nietzsche argues that all concepts relating to morality and justice arise out of the self-interest of a particular group; henceforth, these incidentally useful rules become tradition, and are eventually presented by followers of a tradition as necessary, universal truths.
In the above excerpt from Nasr's work, he seems, in speaking a truth about Islam in particular, but also about religious and moral doctrine in general, to demonstrate Nietzsche's argument through a contrary use of the term "forgetfulness". From the perspective of Muslim doctrine, to be forgetful is to neglect one's long-established commitments to the religious community, which are of cosmic importance.
In pointing to this "forgetfulness", the Quran ignores the greater forgetfulness necessary to remain true to these afore-mentioned commitments--forgetfulness of the the mundane and and maybe inglorious origins of the incidental values upon which the community and tradition were established. These values are not universal, necessary, backed by divine imperative--these values are (or were) merely useful to a particular group of individuals.
Maybe a profound forgetfulness is necessary for the functioning of the social order.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Liberalism and Liberty
The term "liberal" was originally applied to individuals similar to today's "libertarians". Since the turn of the 19th century, the term "liberal" has gradually been warped in meaning, so that it now signifies a sort of soft socialist who clings to a few elements of classical liberalism.
But because of their common roots, libertarians and liberals agree on a number of issues. Or, to be more exact, they agree on several conclusions, but rarely to they agree in full on the underlying premises. And through these underlying disagreements we can observe how the modern liberal's rejection of property rights prevents principled defense of traditional rights.
This can be seen most clearly in the debate over gay marriage. As is not atypical, the liberals and the libertarians come to the same conclusion: gays have a right to marry. How does the libertarian arrive at this conclusion? Through the application of a correlative of the right to property--the right of contract. The argument goes as follows: All mutual agreements between property holders, provided that an agreement does not involve the enslavement of one to another, are valid and inviolable. Marriage is an economic contract. Thus, all consensual marriages are legitimate.
The liberal, by contrast, does not recognize the right of contract. Instead he says that gay marriage is permissible because homosexuality is innate, and that, because of this, to deny gays marriage rights would be discriminatory. Sometimes, they will say that any two consenting adults have the right to marry each other, but he will mean the term "right" in a very different way from the way in which the libertarian means it.
"Why," you might ask the liberal, "does the individual have a right to marry someone of same sex? I suppose that the homosexual drive is something people can't change about themselves, but certainly the drive to enter into a particular type of economic agreement with another individual, under which property and tax obligations are shared, is not innate or immutable."
"Well," the liberal might say next, "Everybody has the right to be herself, to live one's own lifestyle, in a liberal society".
"Very well, so bigamous marriage is protected as a matter of right as well?"
"No, that's different"
And here we see that the "right" that the liberals defend is a very flimsy one. As we have seen, it is poorly substantiated and apparently does not apply to all individuals. I believe that this weakness in liberal thought is caused by the liberal rejection of the right to property, to which all rights are subsidiary.
Take also the issue of abortion.
Liberal: "A woman has a right to choose whether to give birth."
"But a fetus is a human being, its life a human life"
"Life doesn't begin at conception, you evangelical wacko."
"Well, at the point of conception, the cells of the human organism begin to differentiate, which is by definition the beginning of life."
"Yeah , but i just don't feel like its a human being."
"Well, seeing as you haven't proven that, I'm curious whether you can defend abortion on the condition that the fetus is a human being."
"A woman can't be free if she doesn't have control over her own body"
"But surely she doesn't have the right to kill an individual in pursuit of freedom?"
"Yeah, but a fetus isn't a human being, you religious fanatic"
...I think we've heard enough.
What is the libertarian answer to this problem? Well, all humans being born self-owners (the axiom of libertarianism), they all have a right to property in their own body and in the fruits of their labor. The fetus, by residing in the mother against her will, is an invader of her property and can thus be repelled by force. Again, we see that the liberal is incoherent, because he attempts to establish libertarian opinions on weak, non-libertarian premises.
More ranting later...
But because of their common roots, libertarians and liberals agree on a number of issues. Or, to be more exact, they agree on several conclusions, but rarely to they agree in full on the underlying premises. And through these underlying disagreements we can observe how the modern liberal's rejection of property rights prevents principled defense of traditional rights.
This can be seen most clearly in the debate over gay marriage. As is not atypical, the liberals and the libertarians come to the same conclusion: gays have a right to marry. How does the libertarian arrive at this conclusion? Through the application of a correlative of the right to property--the right of contract. The argument goes as follows: All mutual agreements between property holders, provided that an agreement does not involve the enslavement of one to another, are valid and inviolable. Marriage is an economic contract. Thus, all consensual marriages are legitimate.
The liberal, by contrast, does not recognize the right of contract. Instead he says that gay marriage is permissible because homosexuality is innate, and that, because of this, to deny gays marriage rights would be discriminatory. Sometimes, they will say that any two consenting adults have the right to marry each other, but he will mean the term "right" in a very different way from the way in which the libertarian means it.
"Why," you might ask the liberal, "does the individual have a right to marry someone of same sex? I suppose that the homosexual drive is something people can't change about themselves, but certainly the drive to enter into a particular type of economic agreement with another individual, under which property and tax obligations are shared, is not innate or immutable."
"Well," the liberal might say next, "Everybody has the right to be herself, to live one's own lifestyle, in a liberal society".
"Very well, so bigamous marriage is protected as a matter of right as well?"
"No, that's different"
And here we see that the "right" that the liberals defend is a very flimsy one. As we have seen, it is poorly substantiated and apparently does not apply to all individuals. I believe that this weakness in liberal thought is caused by the liberal rejection of the right to property, to which all rights are subsidiary.
Take also the issue of abortion.
Liberal: "A woman has a right to choose whether to give birth."
"But a fetus is a human being, its life a human life"
"Life doesn't begin at conception, you evangelical wacko."
"Well, at the point of conception, the cells of the human organism begin to differentiate, which is by definition the beginning of life."
"Yeah , but i just don't feel like its a human being."
"Well, seeing as you haven't proven that, I'm curious whether you can defend abortion on the condition that the fetus is a human being."
"A woman can't be free if she doesn't have control over her own body"
"But surely she doesn't have the right to kill an individual in pursuit of freedom?"
"Yeah, but a fetus isn't a human being, you religious fanatic"
...I think we've heard enough.
What is the libertarian answer to this problem? Well, all humans being born self-owners (the axiom of libertarianism), they all have a right to property in their own body and in the fruits of their labor. The fetus, by residing in the mother against her will, is an invader of her property and can thus be repelled by force. Again, we see that the liberal is incoherent, because he attempts to establish libertarian opinions on weak, non-libertarian premises.
More ranting later...
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Medical licensure
"A scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted." -Mikhail Bakunin
Before constructing a national healthcare system as a means of solving the current American healthcare crisis, it may be wise for United States policy makers to look more closely at the typically neglected issue of medical licensure. State governments regulate over 1,000 occupations through mandatory licensing, professions as different as hair braiding, funeral directing, fortune telling, reptile catching, law, social work, truck driving, and real estate brokering (Summers 42). Regulations establish entry requirements for an occupation, which may include, for example, educational credentials, prior experience, satisfactory performance on an entrance exam, or residency in the state of practice. Further licensing regulations control business practice, among other ways, by placing restrictions on advertising, or by forbidding participation in certain types of commercial firms (Young 29). Proponents of mandatory licensing argue that licensing requirements for certain occupations improve the general quality of service provided by preventing incompetents and frauds from practicing. These arguments are employed most frequently in defense of licensing in the medical occupations, which are among the only thirty-three occupations for which licensing is mandated in all fifty states.
Contrary to this common defense, the bulk of economic research seems to indicate that mandatory licensing does not tend to improve the quality of service received by consumers, and this turns out to be remarkably true for medical services. This is so because of the anticompetitive effects of mandatory licensing, which by design restrict the quantity of professionals and the diversity of services offered; because of the harmful effects of the “Cadillac standard” employed through the practice of mandatory licensure; and because of the monopolistic “club mentality” typical of state licensing boards. In this paper, I intend to outline the economic data relating to medical licensure; to critique both the form and content of the arguments of proponents of the state licensing system; and to advocate superior methods for protecting consumers of medical services from fraudulent doctors, and for increasing the general quality of medical service received.
In studying the effects of mandatory state licensing in the medical professions on the quality of medical services, one needs to distinguish between quality of service supplied and quality of service received. When I speak of the average quality of medical service supplied, I am referring to the quality of the product, healthcare, offered by medical professionals, while ignoring the average quality of healthcare actually consumed by the general population. These two measures of quality are not necessarily equal, as professionals may offer a high-quality service not affordable to much of the population, who will as a result turn to low quality substitutes for professional medical care or forego healthcare altogether.
Carolyn Cox and Susan Foster in a 1990 FTC report titled “The Costs and Benefits of Occupational Regulation,” synthesize the work of major researchers on the correlation between licensing restrictions and the quality of medical service supplied. Cox and Foster conclude that effects are largely neutral or negative, with few exceptions. They report that optometry most likely experienced neutral or negative effect on quality ; the quality of service by laboratory personnel neutral effect, pharmacistry mostly neutral effect (with the possible exception of citizenship and reciprocity requirements), physician’s services neutral effect, and dentistry positive effect.
Cox and Foster judge the effect of licensing regulations on quality of product supplied. To judge the quality of medical services received, I turn to Carroll and Gaston’s 1981 paper on the subject. In this paper, the authors attempt to determine the effect of licensing regulations on the quality of service received in nine different occupations by observing the frequency with which consumers turn to low-quality do-it-yourself substitutes for professional services in areas with different levels of restrictiveness in licensing regulations. Carroll and Gaston determine that there exists an unambiguous negative association between the strictness of licensing restrictions and the quality of service received. Among the occupations they sampled in order to come to this conclusion were optometry and dentistry, both of which showed this result.
The reason that licensure drives consumers to make use of do-it-yourself substitutes is that licensing restrictions drastically increase the cost of services by restricting the supply of medical professionals. For example, a typical eye exam is 35% more expensive in cities with strict licensing regulations. In states with stricter licensing laws for the dentistry profession, 92% of ordinary dental procedures are more expensive, and dental fees are on average 14-16% higher. In 1982, restrictions associated with licensure in dentistry cost consumers $700 million, and in 1983, such restrictions in optometry cost $500 million (Summers 16).
By severely limiting competition through restrictions on the number of medical professionals and by making it illegal for consumers to choose doctors of lower quality for less money, licensing regulations prevent many people from satisfying basic medical needs, thus significantly lowering the average quality of service received. To borrow an analogy from Milton Friedman, establishing mandatory licensing requirements for the purpose of ensuring that everyone receives high quality medical care is like illegalizing the distribution of any car of lesser quality than a Cadillac in order to prevent individuals from driving low-quality automobiles; the result of minimum quality standards like these is to deprive everyone who cannot afford the highest quality good or service from purchasing that good or service at all, or to drive consumers to use crude substitutes. Presumably in large part as a result this “Cadillac standard” in medicine, twenty million Americans have never visited a dentist and one third of Americans haven’t in two years or more (Cox and Foster 35).
If it is true that licensing restrictions, at best, have neutral effect on quality of service received, and at worst negative effect, while at the same time dramatically increasing prices, licensing regulation cannot be said to be enforced for the benefit of consumers. If not for the benefit of consumers, for whose benefit does licensure exist? To answer this question, a brief review of the history of medical licensure in the United States will be necessary.
Between the late colonial period and the early 1800’s, licensing restrictions were gradually established by state governments (Young 12). During the laissez-faire movement of the the1830’s and 1840’s, reformers fought to repeal licensing laws. (Of particular focus were licensing laws restricting the founding and operating of proprietary medical schools.) By the middle of the 1800’s, licensing regulations were largely eliminated, resulting in dramatically low prices for medical services and the proliferation of doctors until the United States had by far the largest number of doctors per capita of any country in the world, offering an impressive diversity of services (Hamowy 73).
In the 19th century, there were three major forms of medical practice. Regular medicine (also called allopathy ) consisted primarily of bloodletting, blistering, and the prescription of what came to be called the “heroic regimen”: large quantities of various poisons such as mercury, antimony, and arsenic compounds. Homeopathy, founded by Samuel Hahnemann, was the primary threat to the allopathic profession. Hahnemann believed that one could effectively treat an illness by administering a drug that simulated the symptoms of a disease. He also criticized mainstream doctors for their conviction that the effectiveness of medicine always increased with increased dosage; he argued instead that small doses were often safer and more effective. Homeopaths also placed much emphasis on proper diet, sufficient rest, and good personal hygiene. Another alternative form of medicine, eclecticism, rejected the heroic regimen, and instead employed herbal remedies and steam baths to cure ailments (Hamowy 74).
In 1847, a group of allopathic doctors whose incomes were depressed by competition with homeopaths and eclectics, established the American Medical Association in Philadelphia. The AMA, as the representative organization of mainstream medicine, aimed to relax the highly competitive atmosphere in the medical industry by restricting entry into the profession, decreasing the number of proprietary medical schools, and eliminating alternative medical sects. Representatives at the meeting complained of “the large number of Medical Colleges throughout the country, and the facility with which the degree is obtained”. For the next two decades, efforts to restrict competition through voluntary means failed utterly. As a result, at an 1867 meeting in Cincinnati, the AMA commenced a campaign to lobby state governments in order to influence them to create state licensing boards managed by AMA members (Hamowy 75-77).
Around the turn of the century, the AMA’s efforts had tremendous success and by 1913, organized medicine had gained control over state licensing boards in all fifty states, through which they established minimum entry requirements for individuals entering the profession, and gained the power to decide which medical schools would be allowed to operate and which would be terminated. Around the time of the climax of the AMA lobbying movement, another threat to organized medicine, lodge practice, came into conflict with state licensing boards. Lodge practice was a method of medical insurance used by working class fraternal societies , whereby a local society would hire a doctor with a small contribution from each member (usually one or two dollars a year). These “lodge doctors”, who worked for low fees in comparison to what most mainstream doctors earned, were called upon to treat insured members of societies whenever members fell ill. Despite the fact that positions as lodge doctors were coveted by many practitioners, orthodox practitioners despised lodge practice both because of the competitive fees lodge doctors worked for and because of the perceived dishonor of a doctor stooping to treat working class patients for low fees (Long 1-2). The newly-found powers of licensure were exercised to eliminate doctors who participated in lodge practice; this was done by, for example, pressuring hospitals to deny service to lodge members and sanctioning lodge doctors through licensing boards (Beito 231). Licensing boards were also used to purge doctors who practiced heterodox medical methods and to restrict the supply of doctors generally (Hamowy 77-82).
What does this history illuminate about the motivations behind medical licensure? The licensing regime established in the fifty states at the turn of the century by organized medicine remains in place to this day. We have already noted the dramatic revolution in medical fees over the last century. Additionally, in accordance with the AMA’s stated intention, even while the U.S. population has nearly tripled in size since 1900, the number of medical schools has decreased (Steinreich 2). Both of these facts, combined with apparent reality that medical licensure has always been lobbied for by professional doctors, and never by consumers, and with the demonstrated fact that medical licensure does not increase the general quality of medical service consumed, seem to indicate the medical licensure serves the interests of doctors at the expense of consumers.
Before establishing this conclusion, however, it will be necessary to counter the most articulate defense of medical licensure, put forth by Hayne E. Leland. Leland’s study is particularly notable because the bulk of available studies (and all of the studies that I have cited) evaluate the effect of medical licensure on product quality by comparing the medical markets in less-regulated states to the markets in more-regulated states; Leland, by contrast, attempts to describe a medical market entirely free of licensing restrictions, and to compare this theoretical market to one regulated through licensure.
Leland describes the medical industry as characterized by informational asymmetry, meaning that the producers of the service, medical care, know more about their product than the consumer, who lacks a medical degree. In the case of the market for health care, Leland says, not only does the consumer not know all he needs to know in order to assess the competence of a medical professional before receiving treatment, but the consumer also lacks the knowledge necessary to evaluate the quality of the service he has received after he has received it. Because the consumer is incapable of distinguishing good medical service from bad medical service, in a free market for medical services, the services of all medical professionals will be priced at the level at which the lowest-quality service is priced, thus driving all of the more competent professionals out of the market. For this reason, Leland says, medical licensure is necessary (Leland 1979; 1980).
There is certainly some truth to Leland’s observation of informational asymmetry in the market for medical services, as medical professionals typically are more knowledgeable about their product than is the buyer, who may in some circumstances be ignorant of relevant information. Nevertheless, his argument fails both because his economic model is unrealistic and because, even if one accepts his premises, the conclusion of his argument does not follow. For one thing, as Leland himself notes in passing, consumers are at least not entirely without information. Much of the time, if an individual visits a doctor after noticing an ailment, presumably, the patient will be able to tell if the medical procedure applied has relieved him of his ailment. Besides this, physician referral and recommendation from friends and relatives serves as a valuable source of information. Additionally, one can obtain information relevant to medical purchases through consumer reports, or by referring to such readable volumes as the Merck Manual, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, books which are becoming increasingly popular among consumers.
But, for argument’s sake, let us assume that the knowledge of a professional is essential for evaluating medical services, and that the above-mentioned sources of information are entirely inadequate. In other words, the consumer of medical services is without relevant information, and so professional doctors approved by the AMA have to identify good and bad doctors for him through licensure. If this were true, as Leland’s model implies, the most obvious solution would be for professional doctors to provide consumers with information, by giving good doctors the AMA stamp of approval. Mandatory licensing goes one step further, by compelling consumers to choose doctors approved of by state licensing boards. The former approach, voluntary certification, provides the benefit supposedly provided by mandatory licensing, product information, without the losses to consumers associated with mandatory licensure .
One of these losses, as we have noted, is increased costs. Besides this, obtaining a license under a regime of mandatory licensure is an arduous and expensive process for aspiring doctors, and as such prevents many qualified doctors, especially those who are not wealthy, from practicing medicine (Summers 29). Voluntary certification, by contrast, has been shown to produce higher numbers of licensed professionals (Summers 35). Voluntary certification by the AMA and by other competing certification organizations, would allow for a greater quantity of doctors, while at the same providing consumers with vital information about product quality. Furthermore, in an atmosphere of competitive voluntary certification, market competition would put the reputation of various certification organizations to the test, preventing abuses of power harmful to consumers that are inherent in the operation of a monopolist licensing authority like a state licensing board.
Among these abuses of power by state licensing boards is the over-restriction of the quantity of doctors at the expense of product diversity. As I have shown, in the early days of medical licensure, orthodox practitioners, presumably to inflate their own incomes, used state licensing boards to eliminate heterodox methods of practice that offered potentially beneficial alternatives to standard care. As in those days, modern medical licensing boards are almost entirely dominated by practicing medical professionals, who face no competition in the issuance of licenses (Summers 18). Undoubtedly as a result of this fact, the modern medical profession often overuses certain medical methods, like surgery, when other, cheaper methods are more appropriate. According to a Rand study, almost half of bypass operations are unnecessary, and some researchers argue that spinal fusion therapy is employed much more often than is required. Additionally, gynecologist Michael Broder, M.D., has found that seventy percent of hysterectomies are performed without prior investigation of their necessity or of alternative treatments, and that one in seven hysterectomies performed is evidently unnecessary (Steinreich 3-4). As Bradley Hennenfent demonstrates in Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery, eighty percent of men with prostate cancer undergo unnecessary surgery, which exposes them to a variety of risks and unpleasant side effects (Hennenfent 21-22).
The economic evidence indicates that medical licensure is harmful to consumers, and that eliminating mandatory licensing requirements may be an effective means of increasing public access to medical services. If this is true, then pursuing this deregulatory path will be distinctly superior to currently proposed statist reforms in healthcare. These reforms will at best accomplish the same result (increased access to medical care) as deregulation with more government interference in civil society, and at worst exacerbate and complicate the present healthcare crisis by adding more arbitrary controls into the medical industry. As I have shown, the more prudent approach is to address the most outstanding cause of high prices and low general quality of service received—medical licensure.
Beito, David. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Carroll, S.L. and R.J. Gaston. 1981. “Occupational Restrictions and the Quality of Service Received: Some Evidence,” Southern Economic Journal 47(4): 959-976
Hamowy, Ronald. 1979. “The Early Development of Medical Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875-1900’” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 3(1): 73-119.
Hennenfent, Bradley. Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery. Roseville Books, 2005.
Leland, Hayne E. 1979. “Quacks, Lemons, and Licensing: A Theory of Minimum Quality Standards,” Journal of Political Economy 87(6): 1328-1343.
Leland, Hayne E. 1980. “Minimum Quality Standards and Licensing in Markets with Asymmetric Information,” Occupational Licensure and Regulation, pp 264-284.
Long, Roderick T. "How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis," Libertarian Nation Foundation. 1993. 20 May 2009.
Miller, J. C., III. (1985). "The FTC and Voluntary Standards: Maximizing the Net Benefits of Self-Regulation," Cato Journal 4(3):897-903.
Steinreich, Dale. “One Hundred Years of Medical robbery,” Ludwig Von Mises Institute. 2004. 12 May 2009. http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1547
Summers, A.B. 2007. “Occupational Licensing: Ranking the States and Exploring the Alternatives,” Policy Study 361, Reason Public Policy Institute.
Svorney, Shirley. August 2004. “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion? Medical Licensing,”Econ Journal Watch 1(2): 279-304.
United States. Federal Trade Commission. The Costs and Benefits of Occupational Regulation. October 1990.
Before constructing a national healthcare system as a means of solving the current American healthcare crisis, it may be wise for United States policy makers to look more closely at the typically neglected issue of medical licensure. State governments regulate over 1,000 occupations through mandatory licensing, professions as different as hair braiding, funeral directing, fortune telling, reptile catching, law, social work, truck driving, and real estate brokering (Summers 42). Regulations establish entry requirements for an occupation, which may include, for example, educational credentials, prior experience, satisfactory performance on an entrance exam, or residency in the state of practice. Further licensing regulations control business practice, among other ways, by placing restrictions on advertising, or by forbidding participation in certain types of commercial firms (Young 29). Proponents of mandatory licensing argue that licensing requirements for certain occupations improve the general quality of service provided by preventing incompetents and frauds from practicing. These arguments are employed most frequently in defense of licensing in the medical occupations, which are among the only thirty-three occupations for which licensing is mandated in all fifty states.
Contrary to this common defense, the bulk of economic research seems to indicate that mandatory licensing does not tend to improve the quality of service received by consumers, and this turns out to be remarkably true for medical services. This is so because of the anticompetitive effects of mandatory licensing, which by design restrict the quantity of professionals and the diversity of services offered; because of the harmful effects of the “Cadillac standard” employed through the practice of mandatory licensure; and because of the monopolistic “club mentality” typical of state licensing boards. In this paper, I intend to outline the economic data relating to medical licensure; to critique both the form and content of the arguments of proponents of the state licensing system; and to advocate superior methods for protecting consumers of medical services from fraudulent doctors, and for increasing the general quality of medical service received.
In studying the effects of mandatory state licensing in the medical professions on the quality of medical services, one needs to distinguish between quality of service supplied and quality of service received. When I speak of the average quality of medical service supplied, I am referring to the quality of the product, healthcare, offered by medical professionals, while ignoring the average quality of healthcare actually consumed by the general population. These two measures of quality are not necessarily equal, as professionals may offer a high-quality service not affordable to much of the population, who will as a result turn to low quality substitutes for professional medical care or forego healthcare altogether.
Carolyn Cox and Susan Foster in a 1990 FTC report titled “The Costs and Benefits of Occupational Regulation,” synthesize the work of major researchers on the correlation between licensing restrictions and the quality of medical service supplied. Cox and Foster conclude that effects are largely neutral or negative, with few exceptions. They report that optometry most likely experienced neutral or negative effect on quality ; the quality of service by laboratory personnel neutral effect, pharmacistry mostly neutral effect (with the possible exception of citizenship and reciprocity requirements), physician’s services neutral effect, and dentistry positive effect.
Cox and Foster judge the effect of licensing regulations on quality of product supplied. To judge the quality of medical services received, I turn to Carroll and Gaston’s 1981 paper on the subject. In this paper, the authors attempt to determine the effect of licensing regulations on the quality of service received in nine different occupations by observing the frequency with which consumers turn to low-quality do-it-yourself substitutes for professional services in areas with different levels of restrictiveness in licensing regulations. Carroll and Gaston determine that there exists an unambiguous negative association between the strictness of licensing restrictions and the quality of service received. Among the occupations they sampled in order to come to this conclusion were optometry and dentistry, both of which showed this result.
The reason that licensure drives consumers to make use of do-it-yourself substitutes is that licensing restrictions drastically increase the cost of services by restricting the supply of medical professionals. For example, a typical eye exam is 35% more expensive in cities with strict licensing regulations. In states with stricter licensing laws for the dentistry profession, 92% of ordinary dental procedures are more expensive, and dental fees are on average 14-16% higher. In 1982, restrictions associated with licensure in dentistry cost consumers $700 million, and in 1983, such restrictions in optometry cost $500 million (Summers 16).
By severely limiting competition through restrictions on the number of medical professionals and by making it illegal for consumers to choose doctors of lower quality for less money, licensing regulations prevent many people from satisfying basic medical needs, thus significantly lowering the average quality of service received. To borrow an analogy from Milton Friedman, establishing mandatory licensing requirements for the purpose of ensuring that everyone receives high quality medical care is like illegalizing the distribution of any car of lesser quality than a Cadillac in order to prevent individuals from driving low-quality automobiles; the result of minimum quality standards like these is to deprive everyone who cannot afford the highest quality good or service from purchasing that good or service at all, or to drive consumers to use crude substitutes. Presumably in large part as a result this “Cadillac standard” in medicine, twenty million Americans have never visited a dentist and one third of Americans haven’t in two years or more (Cox and Foster 35).
If it is true that licensing restrictions, at best, have neutral effect on quality of service received, and at worst negative effect, while at the same time dramatically increasing prices, licensing regulation cannot be said to be enforced for the benefit of consumers. If not for the benefit of consumers, for whose benefit does licensure exist? To answer this question, a brief review of the history of medical licensure in the United States will be necessary.
Between the late colonial period and the early 1800’s, licensing restrictions were gradually established by state governments (Young 12). During the laissez-faire movement of the the1830’s and 1840’s, reformers fought to repeal licensing laws. (Of particular focus were licensing laws restricting the founding and operating of proprietary medical schools.) By the middle of the 1800’s, licensing regulations were largely eliminated, resulting in dramatically low prices for medical services and the proliferation of doctors until the United States had by far the largest number of doctors per capita of any country in the world, offering an impressive diversity of services (Hamowy 73).
In the 19th century, there were three major forms of medical practice. Regular medicine (also called allopathy ) consisted primarily of bloodletting, blistering, and the prescription of what came to be called the “heroic regimen”: large quantities of various poisons such as mercury, antimony, and arsenic compounds. Homeopathy, founded by Samuel Hahnemann, was the primary threat to the allopathic profession. Hahnemann believed that one could effectively treat an illness by administering a drug that simulated the symptoms of a disease. He also criticized mainstream doctors for their conviction that the effectiveness of medicine always increased with increased dosage; he argued instead that small doses were often safer and more effective. Homeopaths also placed much emphasis on proper diet, sufficient rest, and good personal hygiene. Another alternative form of medicine, eclecticism, rejected the heroic regimen, and instead employed herbal remedies and steam baths to cure ailments (Hamowy 74).
In 1847, a group of allopathic doctors whose incomes were depressed by competition with homeopaths and eclectics, established the American Medical Association in Philadelphia. The AMA, as the representative organization of mainstream medicine, aimed to relax the highly competitive atmosphere in the medical industry by restricting entry into the profession, decreasing the number of proprietary medical schools, and eliminating alternative medical sects. Representatives at the meeting complained of “the large number of Medical Colleges throughout the country, and the facility with which the degree is obtained”. For the next two decades, efforts to restrict competition through voluntary means failed utterly. As a result, at an 1867 meeting in Cincinnati, the AMA commenced a campaign to lobby state governments in order to influence them to create state licensing boards managed by AMA members (Hamowy 75-77).
Around the turn of the century, the AMA’s efforts had tremendous success and by 1913, organized medicine had gained control over state licensing boards in all fifty states, through which they established minimum entry requirements for individuals entering the profession, and gained the power to decide which medical schools would be allowed to operate and which would be terminated. Around the time of the climax of the AMA lobbying movement, another threat to organized medicine, lodge practice, came into conflict with state licensing boards. Lodge practice was a method of medical insurance used by working class fraternal societies , whereby a local society would hire a doctor with a small contribution from each member (usually one or two dollars a year). These “lodge doctors”, who worked for low fees in comparison to what most mainstream doctors earned, were called upon to treat insured members of societies whenever members fell ill. Despite the fact that positions as lodge doctors were coveted by many practitioners, orthodox practitioners despised lodge practice both because of the competitive fees lodge doctors worked for and because of the perceived dishonor of a doctor stooping to treat working class patients for low fees (Long 1-2). The newly-found powers of licensure were exercised to eliminate doctors who participated in lodge practice; this was done by, for example, pressuring hospitals to deny service to lodge members and sanctioning lodge doctors through licensing boards (Beito 231). Licensing boards were also used to purge doctors who practiced heterodox medical methods and to restrict the supply of doctors generally (Hamowy 77-82).
What does this history illuminate about the motivations behind medical licensure? The licensing regime established in the fifty states at the turn of the century by organized medicine remains in place to this day. We have already noted the dramatic revolution in medical fees over the last century. Additionally, in accordance with the AMA’s stated intention, even while the U.S. population has nearly tripled in size since 1900, the number of medical schools has decreased (Steinreich 2). Both of these facts, combined with apparent reality that medical licensure has always been lobbied for by professional doctors, and never by consumers, and with the demonstrated fact that medical licensure does not increase the general quality of medical service consumed, seem to indicate the medical licensure serves the interests of doctors at the expense of consumers.
Before establishing this conclusion, however, it will be necessary to counter the most articulate defense of medical licensure, put forth by Hayne E. Leland. Leland’s study is particularly notable because the bulk of available studies (and all of the studies that I have cited) evaluate the effect of medical licensure on product quality by comparing the medical markets in less-regulated states to the markets in more-regulated states; Leland, by contrast, attempts to describe a medical market entirely free of licensing restrictions, and to compare this theoretical market to one regulated through licensure.
Leland describes the medical industry as characterized by informational asymmetry, meaning that the producers of the service, medical care, know more about their product than the consumer, who lacks a medical degree. In the case of the market for health care, Leland says, not only does the consumer not know all he needs to know in order to assess the competence of a medical professional before receiving treatment, but the consumer also lacks the knowledge necessary to evaluate the quality of the service he has received after he has received it. Because the consumer is incapable of distinguishing good medical service from bad medical service, in a free market for medical services, the services of all medical professionals will be priced at the level at which the lowest-quality service is priced, thus driving all of the more competent professionals out of the market. For this reason, Leland says, medical licensure is necessary (Leland 1979; 1980).
There is certainly some truth to Leland’s observation of informational asymmetry in the market for medical services, as medical professionals typically are more knowledgeable about their product than is the buyer, who may in some circumstances be ignorant of relevant information. Nevertheless, his argument fails both because his economic model is unrealistic and because, even if one accepts his premises, the conclusion of his argument does not follow. For one thing, as Leland himself notes in passing, consumers are at least not entirely without information. Much of the time, if an individual visits a doctor after noticing an ailment, presumably, the patient will be able to tell if the medical procedure applied has relieved him of his ailment. Besides this, physician referral and recommendation from friends and relatives serves as a valuable source of information. Additionally, one can obtain information relevant to medical purchases through consumer reports, or by referring to such readable volumes as the Merck Manual, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, books which are becoming increasingly popular among consumers.
But, for argument’s sake, let us assume that the knowledge of a professional is essential for evaluating medical services, and that the above-mentioned sources of information are entirely inadequate. In other words, the consumer of medical services is without relevant information, and so professional doctors approved by the AMA have to identify good and bad doctors for him through licensure. If this were true, as Leland’s model implies, the most obvious solution would be for professional doctors to provide consumers with information, by giving good doctors the AMA stamp of approval. Mandatory licensing goes one step further, by compelling consumers to choose doctors approved of by state licensing boards. The former approach, voluntary certification, provides the benefit supposedly provided by mandatory licensing, product information, without the losses to consumers associated with mandatory licensure .
One of these losses, as we have noted, is increased costs. Besides this, obtaining a license under a regime of mandatory licensure is an arduous and expensive process for aspiring doctors, and as such prevents many qualified doctors, especially those who are not wealthy, from practicing medicine (Summers 29). Voluntary certification, by contrast, has been shown to produce higher numbers of licensed professionals (Summers 35). Voluntary certification by the AMA and by other competing certification organizations, would allow for a greater quantity of doctors, while at the same providing consumers with vital information about product quality. Furthermore, in an atmosphere of competitive voluntary certification, market competition would put the reputation of various certification organizations to the test, preventing abuses of power harmful to consumers that are inherent in the operation of a monopolist licensing authority like a state licensing board.
Among these abuses of power by state licensing boards is the over-restriction of the quantity of doctors at the expense of product diversity. As I have shown, in the early days of medical licensure, orthodox practitioners, presumably to inflate their own incomes, used state licensing boards to eliminate heterodox methods of practice that offered potentially beneficial alternatives to standard care. As in those days, modern medical licensing boards are almost entirely dominated by practicing medical professionals, who face no competition in the issuance of licenses (Summers 18). Undoubtedly as a result of this fact, the modern medical profession often overuses certain medical methods, like surgery, when other, cheaper methods are more appropriate. According to a Rand study, almost half of bypass operations are unnecessary, and some researchers argue that spinal fusion therapy is employed much more often than is required. Additionally, gynecologist Michael Broder, M.D., has found that seventy percent of hysterectomies are performed without prior investigation of their necessity or of alternative treatments, and that one in seven hysterectomies performed is evidently unnecessary (Steinreich 3-4). As Bradley Hennenfent demonstrates in Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery, eighty percent of men with prostate cancer undergo unnecessary surgery, which exposes them to a variety of risks and unpleasant side effects (Hennenfent 21-22).
The economic evidence indicates that medical licensure is harmful to consumers, and that eliminating mandatory licensing requirements may be an effective means of increasing public access to medical services. If this is true, then pursuing this deregulatory path will be distinctly superior to currently proposed statist reforms in healthcare. These reforms will at best accomplish the same result (increased access to medical care) as deregulation with more government interference in civil society, and at worst exacerbate and complicate the present healthcare crisis by adding more arbitrary controls into the medical industry. As I have shown, the more prudent approach is to address the most outstanding cause of high prices and low general quality of service received—medical licensure.
Beito, David. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Carroll, S.L. and R.J. Gaston. 1981. “Occupational Restrictions and the Quality of Service Received: Some Evidence,” Southern Economic Journal 47(4): 959-976
Hamowy, Ronald. 1979. “The Early Development of Medical Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875-1900’” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 3(1): 73-119.
Hennenfent, Bradley. Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery. Roseville Books, 2005.
Leland, Hayne E. 1979. “Quacks, Lemons, and Licensing: A Theory of Minimum Quality Standards,” Journal of Political Economy 87(6): 1328-1343.
Leland, Hayne E. 1980. “Minimum Quality Standards and Licensing in Markets with Asymmetric Information,” Occupational Licensure and Regulation, pp 264-284.
Long, Roderick T. "How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis," Libertarian Nation Foundation. 1993. 20 May 2009
Miller, J. C., III. (1985). "The FTC and Voluntary Standards: Maximizing the Net Benefits of Self-Regulation," Cato Journal 4(3):897-903.
Steinreich, Dale. “One Hundred Years of Medical robbery,” Ludwig Von Mises Institute. 2004. 12 May 2009. http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1547
Summers, A.B. 2007. “Occupational Licensing: Ranking the States and Exploring the Alternatives,” Policy Study 361, Reason Public Policy Institute.
Svorney, Shirley. August 2004. “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion? Medical Licensing,”Econ Journal Watch 1(2): 279-304.
United States. Federal Trade Commission. The Costs and Benefits of Occupational Regulation. October 1990.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Why rights must be absolute or not exist at all
When i debate the theory of rights with people, I always run into the same deadlock. I will argue for an absolutist conception of rights (the rights being the right to life and property), and my opponent will say, "But rights don't have to be absolute. Sometimes, we should limit people's rights for the common good".
The problem with this theory is that in the very act of setting limits on an individual's rights for a reason other than the protection of other individual's rights, one is abandoning rights altogether.
The theory of rights is a deontological (rules-based) rather than a consequentialist (consequence based) politico-ethical theory. When I say that someone has a "right" to autonomy in some sphere, I am establishing a rule that is intended to exist regardless of the immediate consequences of obeying this rule. By contrast, a consequentialist might say, one should violate the autonomy of others whenever doing so has positive consequences for everyone living the area.
The reason I would establish a right, a political guarantee of autonomy in one's choices, would be to shelter an individual from the consequentialist calculations of other individuals, whether these individuals comprise a government or are fellow civilians. In establishing this right, I am declaring that, as matter of principle, every individual should be able to develop his creative faculties, because doing so is what gives meaning to a human life; what follows from this is that individual A may not infringe on individual B's ability to develop his creative faculties in order to produce some consequence that individual A has deemed desirable.
The relative freedom of a society can be judged by the degree to which individual members are able to develop free from the consequentialist calculations of others; in other words, the more people's rights are respected, the freer a society is.
When I judge that I am entitled to "limit" another person's rights in order to produce some desirable consequence, I am not really placing a "limitation" on the framework of rights; rather, I am denying the existence of this framework altogether. Because the sole purpose of a right is to protect an individual from the consequentialist calculations of others, one can not establish the principle that rights should be respected insofar as respecting them yields a beneficial social consequence.
In order to counter an absolutist--that is, consistent theory of rights, one must deny that rights exist at all.
One possible consequentialist objection to my absolutist theory of rights might be the following:
"As a consequentialist, I believe that there are two different ways to calculate consequences. First, I can say that executing a particular action is justified because in a particular circumstance, the consequences will positive. Second, I can say that executing a particular action is justified because doing so contributes to the stability of a system of rules that in the long run generates positive consequences.
"So, for example, a government official might censor the press during a war that threatens to destroy all human life within a given geographical unit, because doing so will bring about the positive consequence of keeping most inhabitants of the area alive. however, that same government official should not censor the press during less extreme times for such short term consequentialist reasons, because in the long run, having free and open debate sustains a democratic culture. In these two situations, the government official employs two different types of consequentialist reasoning; the second type is conducive to the long-term freedom secured by your system of rights, since freedom, operating in the context of a democratic society, produces beneficial consequences in the long run.
Thus, your stated goal of preserving freedom "to develop one's creative faculties" can be accomplished with a consequentialist framework. However, consequentialism is superior because it prevents individual freedom from upsetting the very framework of society, by, for example, leading to the destruction of society during war due to unbridled exercise of free speech."
I would first object to this counter-argument by asking, by what standard do you judge the long-run consequences of the maintenance of a particular system of rules in to be good? What's so great about a Democratic culture? Advocates of Divine Right absolutism used to say that murdering political dissidents was a good idea because, in the long run, doing so maintained the hierarchical monarchical order, in which due place was given to the glory of the monarch and to the obedient nature of every one else.
The democratic system you defend maintains one view of the good society, that in which people elect fellow citizens to serve the public interest and; on the other hand, the divine right absolutist claims that a good society is one in which a strong dynamic of subservience and dominance is preserved.
The formulation of these differing social theories is itself an act of creativity. You are giving expression to your creative impulses by creating society in order that it mirror your subjective whim--you have a non-rational desire for egalitarianism, and your opponent a non-rational desire for hierarchy. I can't rationally choose between these two preferences, which do not have rational foundation, but I can identify an implicit point of agreement between you two, by which i can come to a rational conclusion about what type of political order both of you ought to accept.
As I argued in my previous post on libertarian ethics, the fact that people possess fundamentally incompatible values is itself a justification for libertarian rights. Just as the parties in disagreement must respect each other's argumentative sovereignty in order to engage in formal debate,the two parties must respect each other's sovereignty of action when they persuade each other by the example of their differing actions, which are themselves arguments regarding the best way to live one's life.
In orderto guarantee that the monarchist, who lives according to his value of the greatness of dominance and obedience(which he might do by, for instance, organizing a private organization in a hierarchical manner) can live side by side with the democrat, who lives his life according the the values of democracy (social equality and and popular sovereignty), there must exist a framework of rights. These rights guarantee the absolute freedom of all to develop their creative potential and live how they choose, free from the consequentialist calculations of others, which are always without ultimate rational justification, but rather based on subjective whim.
The problem with this theory is that in the very act of setting limits on an individual's rights for a reason other than the protection of other individual's rights, one is abandoning rights altogether.
The theory of rights is a deontological (rules-based) rather than a consequentialist (consequence based) politico-ethical theory. When I say that someone has a "right" to autonomy in some sphere, I am establishing a rule that is intended to exist regardless of the immediate consequences of obeying this rule. By contrast, a consequentialist might say, one should violate the autonomy of others whenever doing so has positive consequences for everyone living the area.
The reason I would establish a right, a political guarantee of autonomy in one's choices, would be to shelter an individual from the consequentialist calculations of other individuals, whether these individuals comprise a government or are fellow civilians. In establishing this right, I am declaring that, as matter of principle, every individual should be able to develop his creative faculties, because doing so is what gives meaning to a human life; what follows from this is that individual A may not infringe on individual B's ability to develop his creative faculties in order to produce some consequence that individual A has deemed desirable.
The relative freedom of a society can be judged by the degree to which individual members are able to develop free from the consequentialist calculations of others; in other words, the more people's rights are respected, the freer a society is.
When I judge that I am entitled to "limit" another person's rights in order to produce some desirable consequence, I am not really placing a "limitation" on the framework of rights; rather, I am denying the existence of this framework altogether. Because the sole purpose of a right is to protect an individual from the consequentialist calculations of others, one can not establish the principle that rights should be respected insofar as respecting them yields a beneficial social consequence.
In order to counter an absolutist--that is, consistent theory of rights, one must deny that rights exist at all.
One possible consequentialist objection to my absolutist theory of rights might be the following:
"As a consequentialist, I believe that there are two different ways to calculate consequences. First, I can say that executing a particular action is justified because in a particular circumstance, the consequences will positive. Second, I can say that executing a particular action is justified because doing so contributes to the stability of a system of rules that in the long run generates positive consequences.
"So, for example, a government official might censor the press during a war that threatens to destroy all human life within a given geographical unit, because doing so will bring about the positive consequence of keeping most inhabitants of the area alive. however, that same government official should not censor the press during less extreme times for such short term consequentialist reasons, because in the long run, having free and open debate sustains a democratic culture. In these two situations, the government official employs two different types of consequentialist reasoning; the second type is conducive to the long-term freedom secured by your system of rights, since freedom, operating in the context of a democratic society, produces beneficial consequences in the long run.
Thus, your stated goal of preserving freedom "to develop one's creative faculties" can be accomplished with a consequentialist framework. However, consequentialism is superior because it prevents individual freedom from upsetting the very framework of society, by, for example, leading to the destruction of society during war due to unbridled exercise of free speech."
I would first object to this counter-argument by asking, by what standard do you judge the long-run consequences of the maintenance of a particular system of rules in to be good? What's so great about a Democratic culture? Advocates of Divine Right absolutism used to say that murdering political dissidents was a good idea because, in the long run, doing so maintained the hierarchical monarchical order, in which due place was given to the glory of the monarch and to the obedient nature of every one else.
The democratic system you defend maintains one view of the good society, that in which people elect fellow citizens to serve the public interest and; on the other hand, the divine right absolutist claims that a good society is one in which a strong dynamic of subservience and dominance is preserved.
The formulation of these differing social theories is itself an act of creativity. You are giving expression to your creative impulses by creating society in order that it mirror your subjective whim--you have a non-rational desire for egalitarianism, and your opponent a non-rational desire for hierarchy. I can't rationally choose between these two preferences, which do not have rational foundation, but I can identify an implicit point of agreement between you two, by which i can come to a rational conclusion about what type of political order both of you ought to accept.
As I argued in my previous post on libertarian ethics, the fact that people possess fundamentally incompatible values is itself a justification for libertarian rights. Just as the parties in disagreement must respect each other's argumentative sovereignty in order to engage in formal debate,the two parties must respect each other's sovereignty of action when they persuade each other by the example of their differing actions, which are themselves arguments regarding the best way to live one's life.
In orderto guarantee that the monarchist, who lives according to his value of the greatness of dominance and obedience(which he might do by, for instance, organizing a private organization in a hierarchical manner) can live side by side with the democrat, who lives his life according the the values of democracy (social equality and and popular sovereignty), there must exist a framework of rights. These rights guarantee the absolute freedom of all to develop their creative potential and live how they choose, free from the consequentialist calculations of others, which are always without ultimate rational justification, but rather based on subjective whim.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Libertarian Ethics
As I see it, libertarian ethics is founded upon a single principle, freedom of action.
What makes an action an action, as opposed to a reflex, is that an action is purposeful. When the individual acts, he has chosen to pursue one goal above all alternative goals. The actor imagines himself addressing a universe of individuals, and advocates the decision he has made to all other actors. The actor says to humankind, "This is the way to live one's life, by pursuing the goal I am pursuing". In order to choose this single goal above all others, the individual must, in a sense, make an argument, that the goal he pursues is best.
If we picture the universe of individuals' actions as a debate among individuals with different conceptions of the good life, we should also apply a fundamental rule of argument to the sphere of human action--that one must persuade one's opponent in debate, rather than forcing the opponent to one's side. In other words, the point of an argument is to convince your opponent to choose your point of view. If I wield a firearm in an auditorium during a debate, and demand the prize for winning the debate, I haven't actually won over my opponent or my audience.
If we equate the argument in the debate hall with the argument implied in the differing actions of two individuals, then it follows that neither of those individuals should be able to force the other to abandon his course of action in order to pursue a different one. I can express disapproval of a Satan worshipper's religious practices, castigate a Nazi pamphleteer, or scold a cigarette smoker, but I can't employ force against any of these people in order to change their ways. This is the case whether or not these individuals have good reason for living the way they do; even if the Nazi pamphleteer only authors anti-Semitic pamphlets because he believes that Hitler didn't perpetrate the Holocaust, so long as the anti-Nazi can't convince the pamphleteer of his error, or can't convince him that he shouldn't determine his life purpose according to a contrived history of twentieth century Europe, the anti-Nazi will have to tolerate the Nazi's actions.
One may however, counter violence with violence. If the Nazi pamphleteer murders a political opponent or throws his neighbor in a concentration camp, then the Nazi has exhausted his right to action by violating the right to action of his opponents in debate (the political opponent or the neighbor). For the same reason that one would be justified in removing the above-mentioned gun-wielder from the debate hall, one can deny the aggressive Nazi his right to act if he acts violently.
In establishing "freedom of action" as the core principle of libertarianism, I differ slightly with many libertarians. Libertarians, in an attempt to sustain the tradition of John Locke, usually state "self-ownership" as the founding principle of libertarianism, but I find the term problematic because ownership of the self is an impossibility. I can't own myself because I am not external to my self; I am my self. John Locke probably understood this contradiction, and in trying to resolve it, invoked another contradiction: while claiming the principle of self-ownership, he also claimed that all individuals were owned by God. From this, said Locke, it follows that no one ought to initiate force against another individual, since God doesn't want his property damaged. Locke also concluded that individuals should have an absolute right to be free from violence against their property in external goods, since God owns the individuals who established the property in external goods, and hence owns the property in external goods. (I'm getting ahead of myself in talking about property in external goods, which I'll get to in a minute.)
Putting aside the glaring oxymoron of all individuals being slaves of God, while at the same time being free, I don't like Locke's divine ownership argument because it takes as its foundation two factual statements that aren't proven: that God exists and that his nature is analogous to a human's (i.e. he acts, owns property, and cares what happens to his property).
Nevertheless, the term "freedom of action" seems to capture the essence of the idea of "self-ownership". When libertarians speak of "self-ownership," they tend to mean "the freedom to pursue one's goals without violent interference", which I believe my debate metaphor argument justifies.
Nearly every end the individual pursues, ranging from the satisfaction of basic bodily needs to various forms of creative expression, requires the purposeful transformation of things found in nature: if I wish to feed myself, i need to use crops that someone has grown for food; if I want a place to live, I need to use timber produced by a lumberjack; if I want clothes to keep warm, I need cloth created by a textile producer; if I desire to publish a newspaper, I need to use a printing press built from various materials; etc...
From this, we can determine that use of external goods, or things that have been purposely transformed by humans from their natural state, is essential to the exercise of the "freedom of action" I established above.
Because external goods are of such vital importance, in order to prevent conflict among individuals with competing claims to the same good, there must be a well-defined system of justice that determines the who gets to use different goods. In pondering this question, John Locke concluded that one acquires an exclusive right to use a good however own chooses, by "mixing one's labor" with something previously unused by anyone, in order to produce the good. So, for example, I come to acquire an exclusive right of use of the wood on a tree by turning the tree into lumber, or I acquire a right to a piece of land by turning that land into grazing ground for my cattle. To have an exclusive right to some good is to allowed to do whatever one desires with the good, and implied in this right is a passive obligation not to violate others' right to their goods. The good one has a right to is one's property, and one's exclusive right to this good is referred to is the "right to property". Because one has this right, one can choose to exchange the good with another individual; in so doing, one transfers his right to that good to someone else.
But is this the best way to deal with the problem of competing claims to external goods, or are there superior alternatives?
In exploring alternative methods of property allocation, I will require that the system of property allocation meet two basic criteria:
1)That this method apply the same rules to all individuals subjected to it
2)That the consistent application of this method not lead to certain and immediate death of everyone subjected to it. I require this second point because I am justified in assuming that everyone concerned about the issue we are discussing is alive, and thus has chosen to be alive rather than dead.
So, what are our choices?
1) The libertarian option--every individual has an inviolable right to goods he has produced through his own effort.
This is a desirable option because it meets both criteria: the same rule regarding property acquisition is applied to all individuals, and the application of this rule does not condemn everyone to certain death.
2) The feudal option--one group of individuals owns all the goods produced by another group of individuals.
This won't lead to certain death for all those involved, but it violates the first criterion by granting the group of owners a right to the goods they produce and to the goods the other group produces, while granting neither of those rights to the other group.
3) The communist option--everyone owns an equal share of everything.
This choice is appealing because it applies the same rule to all those involved. Unfortunately, it is impossible for everyone to keep track of the property acquisitions of everyone else; if every individual needed the approval of every other individual in society before using any good he produced, all action would be impossible, and all would perish. Besides this, in practice, managing resources in this way would require a powerful centralized bureaucracy, which becomes the ownership class mentioned in option two.
Hence, the libertarian option is best.
But what if we allow everyone to own their property, but just take a little bit from people with a lot of property to give a little to people with less property?
Although one might be able to say that the holders of more property should give some away to the less fortunate, one can not establish a right of some to force the wealthier group to surrender income, for one human cannot justly claim a right to goods produced by someone else, without employing the corrupt method of property justice in option two.
But what if we just take a little bit from everybody to pursue projects that are in everybody's interest?
There is no general interest but the sum of individual interests. Since only the individual can determine his own interests, if the taker of property can't convince the holder of property that his interests are other than he believes them to be, then the taker is out of luck. In establishing a right to employ others' property according to the taker's interpretation of the "general interest," the taker is using the unjust method of property distribution in option two.
What if we give everyone a little plot of land of equal size to start with?
This begs the question: how did the granter of property acquire the property in the first place? Thus, this method doesn't address the issue of how goods are to be justly acquired. If the granter acquired all that property through his own effort or received it in voluntary exchange with someone who did, then great. Otherwise, he's got some explaining to do.
Thus, we have established the core principle of libertarianism, freedom of action, and it's corollary, the right to property.
(I would like to make an etymological note about the word "property". Writers in John Locke's time used the term "property" in a much different way than modern English-speakers use the term. In English in Locke's time, "property" was synonymous with the modern term "right". Thus, Locke never spoke of a "right to property", but rather of a "property to" various things--life, goods found in nature, etc...)
What makes an action an action, as opposed to a reflex, is that an action is purposeful. When the individual acts, he has chosen to pursue one goal above all alternative goals. The actor imagines himself addressing a universe of individuals, and advocates the decision he has made to all other actors. The actor says to humankind, "This is the way to live one's life, by pursuing the goal I am pursuing". In order to choose this single goal above all others, the individual must, in a sense, make an argument, that the goal he pursues is best.
If we picture the universe of individuals' actions as a debate among individuals with different conceptions of the good life, we should also apply a fundamental rule of argument to the sphere of human action--that one must persuade one's opponent in debate, rather than forcing the opponent to one's side. In other words, the point of an argument is to convince your opponent to choose your point of view. If I wield a firearm in an auditorium during a debate, and demand the prize for winning the debate, I haven't actually won over my opponent or my audience.
If we equate the argument in the debate hall with the argument implied in the differing actions of two individuals, then it follows that neither of those individuals should be able to force the other to abandon his course of action in order to pursue a different one. I can express disapproval of a Satan worshipper's religious practices, castigate a Nazi pamphleteer, or scold a cigarette smoker, but I can't employ force against any of these people in order to change their ways. This is the case whether or not these individuals have good reason for living the way they do; even if the Nazi pamphleteer only authors anti-Semitic pamphlets because he believes that Hitler didn't perpetrate the Holocaust, so long as the anti-Nazi can't convince the pamphleteer of his error, or can't convince him that he shouldn't determine his life purpose according to a contrived history of twentieth century Europe, the anti-Nazi will have to tolerate the Nazi's actions.
One may however, counter violence with violence. If the Nazi pamphleteer murders a political opponent or throws his neighbor in a concentration camp, then the Nazi has exhausted his right to action by violating the right to action of his opponents in debate (the political opponent or the neighbor). For the same reason that one would be justified in removing the above-mentioned gun-wielder from the debate hall, one can deny the aggressive Nazi his right to act if he acts violently.
In establishing "freedom of action" as the core principle of libertarianism, I differ slightly with many libertarians. Libertarians, in an attempt to sustain the tradition of John Locke, usually state "self-ownership" as the founding principle of libertarianism, but I find the term problematic because ownership of the self is an impossibility. I can't own myself because I am not external to my self; I am my self. John Locke probably understood this contradiction, and in trying to resolve it, invoked another contradiction: while claiming the principle of self-ownership, he also claimed that all individuals were owned by God. From this, said Locke, it follows that no one ought to initiate force against another individual, since God doesn't want his property damaged. Locke also concluded that individuals should have an absolute right to be free from violence against their property in external goods, since God owns the individuals who established the property in external goods, and hence owns the property in external goods. (I'm getting ahead of myself in talking about property in external goods, which I'll get to in a minute.)
Putting aside the glaring oxymoron of all individuals being slaves of God, while at the same time being free, I don't like Locke's divine ownership argument because it takes as its foundation two factual statements that aren't proven: that God exists and that his nature is analogous to a human's (i.e. he acts, owns property, and cares what happens to his property).
Nevertheless, the term "freedom of action" seems to capture the essence of the idea of "self-ownership". When libertarians speak of "self-ownership," they tend to mean "the freedom to pursue one's goals without violent interference", which I believe my debate metaphor argument justifies.
Nearly every end the individual pursues, ranging from the satisfaction of basic bodily needs to various forms of creative expression, requires the purposeful transformation of things found in nature: if I wish to feed myself, i need to use crops that someone has grown for food; if I want a place to live, I need to use timber produced by a lumberjack; if I want clothes to keep warm, I need cloth created by a textile producer; if I desire to publish a newspaper, I need to use a printing press built from various materials; etc...
From this, we can determine that use of external goods, or things that have been purposely transformed by humans from their natural state, is essential to the exercise of the "freedom of action" I established above.
Because external goods are of such vital importance, in order to prevent conflict among individuals with competing claims to the same good, there must be a well-defined system of justice that determines the who gets to use different goods. In pondering this question, John Locke concluded that one acquires an exclusive right to use a good however own chooses, by "mixing one's labor" with something previously unused by anyone, in order to produce the good. So, for example, I come to acquire an exclusive right of use of the wood on a tree by turning the tree into lumber, or I acquire a right to a piece of land by turning that land into grazing ground for my cattle. To have an exclusive right to some good is to allowed to do whatever one desires with the good, and implied in this right is a passive obligation not to violate others' right to their goods. The good one has a right to is one's property, and one's exclusive right to this good is referred to is the "right to property". Because one has this right, one can choose to exchange the good with another individual; in so doing, one transfers his right to that good to someone else.
But is this the best way to deal with the problem of competing claims to external goods, or are there superior alternatives?
In exploring alternative methods of property allocation, I will require that the system of property allocation meet two basic criteria:
1)That this method apply the same rules to all individuals subjected to it
2)That the consistent application of this method not lead to certain and immediate death of everyone subjected to it. I require this second point because I am justified in assuming that everyone concerned about the issue we are discussing is alive, and thus has chosen to be alive rather than dead.
So, what are our choices?
1) The libertarian option--every individual has an inviolable right to goods he has produced through his own effort.
This is a desirable option because it meets both criteria: the same rule regarding property acquisition is applied to all individuals, and the application of this rule does not condemn everyone to certain death.
2) The feudal option--one group of individuals owns all the goods produced by another group of individuals.
This won't lead to certain death for all those involved, but it violates the first criterion by granting the group of owners a right to the goods they produce and to the goods the other group produces, while granting neither of those rights to the other group.
3) The communist option--everyone owns an equal share of everything.
This choice is appealing because it applies the same rule to all those involved. Unfortunately, it is impossible for everyone to keep track of the property acquisitions of everyone else; if every individual needed the approval of every other individual in society before using any good he produced, all action would be impossible, and all would perish. Besides this, in practice, managing resources in this way would require a powerful centralized bureaucracy, which becomes the ownership class mentioned in option two.
Hence, the libertarian option is best.
But what if we allow everyone to own their property, but just take a little bit from people with a lot of property to give a little to people with less property?
Although one might be able to say that the holders of more property should give some away to the less fortunate, one can not establish a right of some to force the wealthier group to surrender income, for one human cannot justly claim a right to goods produced by someone else, without employing the corrupt method of property justice in option two.
But what if we just take a little bit from everybody to pursue projects that are in everybody's interest?
There is no general interest but the sum of individual interests. Since only the individual can determine his own interests, if the taker of property can't convince the holder of property that his interests are other than he believes them to be, then the taker is out of luck. In establishing a right to employ others' property according to the taker's interpretation of the "general interest," the taker is using the unjust method of property distribution in option two.
What if we give everyone a little plot of land of equal size to start with?
This begs the question: how did the granter of property acquire the property in the first place? Thus, this method doesn't address the issue of how goods are to be justly acquired. If the granter acquired all that property through his own effort or received it in voluntary exchange with someone who did, then great. Otherwise, he's got some explaining to do.
Thus, we have established the core principle of libertarianism, freedom of action, and it's corollary, the right to property.
(I would like to make an etymological note about the word "property". Writers in John Locke's time used the term "property" in a much different way than modern English-speakers use the term. In English in Locke's time, "property" was synonymous with the modern term "right". Thus, Locke never spoke of a "right to property", but rather of a "property to" various things--life, goods found in nature, etc...)
Monday, January 12, 2009
Defending Pacifism
In September 2001, the actor, writer, and businessman Kevin Delaney wrote an article in Capitalism Magazine entitled "Debunking the Cliches of Pacifism". In this article, he denounces the opponents of the invasion of Afghanistan, and attempts to refute their antiwar creed.
It is a moronic article, but I would to take some time to refute the arguments he puts forward because they are a good, brief summary of the modern pro-war position. Below is a link to the article.
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1157
He starts the article with the following statement: "The philosophy of pacifism can be expressed in a single principle: 'The use of force is morally wrong.' This means that ALL force - any kind of force - is out of the question and must be opposed." Then, he refutes what he sees to be the central tenet of pacifism by pointing out that there is a difference between force as "aggression" and force as "self-defense"; he believes that pacifists don't understand this distinction, and that if they did, they would understand why the invasion of Afghanistan is just.
As is immediately clear to anyone familiar with pacifist theory, Delaney confounds two different types of pacifism. One type of pacifism, accurately described by his definition, is the one championed by Jesus of Nazareth, Ghandi, and the Quakers, which concerns interactions among individuals. According to this type of pacifist, the use of force is morally unjustifiable even in self-defense.
However, the term pacifist also refers to those who are opposed to inter-state violence. This type of pacifist is not necessarily opposed to the use of force in self-defense. In fact, prior to the Vietnam War the pacifist movement in the United States was primarily led by libertarians, who are ardent defenders of the right to defend one's person and property through violence. Libertarian pacifists like William Graham Sumner, Edward Atkinson, H.L. Mencken, and Albert Nock, did not prescribe to the type of pacifism Delaney describes in his article, but were devoted pacifists in the second sense.
Many pacifists, such as Noam Chomsky, are simply consistent advocates of the "just war" theory, which has been used misleadingly by hawks to justify every unjust intervention since World War II. According to the political philosopher Bethke Elshtain, the use of military force is justified if it "protects the innocent from certain harm"(her only example is when a country has ‘certain knowledge that genocide will commence on a certain date’ and the victims have no means of self-defense); is "openly declared or otherwise authorized by a legitimate authority’; "begins with the right intentions”; and is last resort, turned to after all other (non-violent) possibilities for the redress and defense of the values at stake have been exhausted. It is on these grounds that many American pacifists have rightly opposed military interventions by the United States government, which almost never meet these qualifications.
Anti-war pacifism arises from different ethical convictions than pacifism concerning human interactions on the individual level, because violence employed by states is fundamentally different from violence employed by individuals. For one thing, in order for the state to use military force, it must accumulate money through taxation, which in the eyes of someone who values the right to property, is an unconscionable act of coercion. What is the moral justification for forcing an individual who does not wish to support a war to pay the military to carry it out?
Secondly, any time the state is used for the purpose of self-defense, the state's ambitions for expanding it's power become involved in the effort of self-defense, usually with undesirable consequences. For example, when the Soviet government employed force to repel the Nazi army, the Kremlin took advantage of the opportunity to expand its territorial holdings and to subject Eastern Europe to imperialist rule that would last for several decades.
When the United States government was given the chance to employ its military in self-defense in Afghanistan, it proceeded to extend its military to Iraq (and, likely also to Iran, Pakistan or Syria in the upcoming years), and is now attempting to monopolize the oil in Central Asia and and the Persian Gulf. The U.S.'s increased military activity since Afghanistan has proved to be counter-productive in combating terrorism (causing global terrorism to multiply by several times), largely because its primary purpose was not countering the threat of Jihadism but expanding state power. Because of the complications that arise when a government entrusted with the task of national defense pursues it's own ambitions for increased power, any civilian considering the justness of a military intervention must take into account the consequences of the inevitable expression of this drive by their state throughout the course of its military adventure, and must consider the fact that the stated goal of self-defense may be accomplished horribly inefficiently or not at all.
In addition, because of the nature of modern technological warfare, any military action of significant size involves the mass murder of civilians, and usually the deliberate targeting of civilians. (In the medieval times, by contrast, war was usually fought only between competing armies, and it was not uncommon for non-combatants to observe military engagements passively from castle walls). Because the use of force by states in modern times, even in self-defense, involves the murder of large numbers of non-combatants, the ethical issues involved in national self-defense are more complex that the ethical issues involved in individual self-defense.
Kevin Delaney counters the pacifist complaints of civilian casualties with an analogy:
"Say that an airplane full of passengers has been hijacked and is headed at full speed toward a major city. You know with certainty that the hijackers are going to take it into the side of a building - and you have the means to shoot down the plane before it reaches the city, and crash it into an empty field. Do you do so, even though it will mean the death of everyone on board? Won't doing so make you a mass murderer?
Of course not: the murderers are the hijackers; they are the initiators of force who, while not directly killing the passengers, have forced them into a situation where they are sure to be killed - by you, the moral person with the means of thwarting the hijackers' scheme for mass destruction."
The analogy he uses is inadequate in two ways. First, in the case of the airplane, the act of self-defense occurs before, and with the aim of preventing, a particular act of violence by an aggressor; in the case of the war on Afghanistan, the question of military self-defense arose after the fact of terrorist aggression. This distinction is relevant because, in contrast to a situation in which military self-defense were being considered in order to prevent an impending attack on the World Trade Center, the situation after 9-11 was one in which the primary concern from the point of view of the people of United States should not have been the danger of a particular impending attack, but rather the general danger of terrorism from the Muslim world, and the effect that a military invasion would have on the propensity of people in that region to support Islamist terrorism.
Secondly, in the case of the airplane, all non-violent alternatives were impossible (the third component of the just war), as the plane was soon to hit its target. On the other hand, the United States government had a number of non-violent options, including criminal prosecution of Osama Bin Laden (something the Taliban government consented to, on the condition that the U.S. government produce evidence linking Osama to the bombings), putting international pressure on the government of Afghanistan and and making use of international police work, and improving the quality of U.S. national defense in order to prevent further attacks. In fact, police work, and not military action, has proved to be the most effective tool in combating terrorism since 9-11, particularly in Germany, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Furthermore, the military principle used by the United States government to justify the invasion of Afghanistan fails to pass the most basic moral test--the test of universality. According to principle of universality, in order for a principle to be ethical, one has to be able to apply it to all people in all times without contradiction. For a person or government to argue that it is morally justified in committing some action in a particular circumstance, but to refuse to grant the right to act this way to other people or governments, is to be a hypocrite.
The military principle that the United States government used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan is that one government may invade the country of another government if the latter government gives refuge to a person or organization that committed violence against the former government. In this case, this meant that the United states could invade Afghanistan to punish the government of Afghanistan for harboring Al-Queda and Bin Laden within its borders. If the United States government were to universalize this rule, Haiti would be justified in invading the United States or calling on an international military force to do so, since the U.S. government gives refuge to Emmanuel Constant, a terrorist who ravaged Haiti in the the 1990's with his organization FRAPH, with U.S. support. In addition, a number of Latin American countries, especially Cuba, would be entitled to invade the United States as punishment for the U.S. government's protection of the international terrorists Juan Posada and Orlando Bosch, terrorists responsible for atrocities in Latin America at least as terrible as those of Osama Bin Laden. The United States government can not universalize this principle, and therefore can not justify its invasion of Afghanistan.
In addition, there remained two outstanding moral reasons not to invade Afghanistan. Firstly, such an invasion is not an effective act of self defense, because it amplifies jihadist sentiments throughout the Muslim world and thus increases the threat of terrorism against the United States. (This was especially true of the invasion of Iraq--Washington was told by virtually every reputable intelligence expert that an invasion of Iraq would amplify the volume of terrorism directed at the United States and the threat of a nuclear attack on the United States. These predictions came true after the invasion.)
Secondly, there is a great injustice in punishing the people of Afghanistan for living under an Islamist dictatorship that The United States government helped erect in the first place.
After the 1978 Communist coup in Afghanistan, the U.S. government began to support the movement of the Mujahideen against the Communists. The purpose of doing this, as Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski explained, was to lure the Soviets into an "Afghan trap"--in other words, to use the civilian population of Afghanistan as bait in the Cold War struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In the ensuing Soviet invasion, approximately 60% of the population of Afghanistan was either killed or forced to flee from the country.
Throughout this period, the U.S. government funded the most radical factions of the Islamist resistance movement in Afghanistan with drug money, and brought in 100,000 radical jihadists from 40 different countries. After the Soviets left, the United States withdrew all aid for the Islamist groups and a civil war ensued. The civil war ended when the Taliban came to power with U.S. support. Now, after the people of Afghanistan have lived through constant violence and unbearable repression for decades, The U.S. government has increased their suffering through military violence and occupation.
The government of Hamid Karzai is a facade--Karzai is a former CIA agent temporarily serving as a puppet of the U.S. military. His domestic support derives from the Northern Alliance, a group of heroine-dealing Islamic fundamentalists comprised of various factions of the Mujahideen that were sponsored by the U.S in the 80's. As soon as the U.S. military exits, which it eventually must, Karzai's power will disintegrate, and a battle will ensue between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance; one of these groups will prevail and rule Afghanistan, and neither is clearly preferable to the other.
Now, apologists for the invasion have invented another false justification--we must bring liberalism, secularism, and women's rights to Afghanistan. The problem with this idea is that it makes very little sense. The people of Afghanistan associate the champions of secularism, feminism, and liberalism with the Communists who destroyed the country in the 70's and 80's, because the people who espoused these ideologies supported the Communist government of Afghanistan and sided with the Soviet invaders. Islamic fundamentalism and the right-wing religious atmosphere that predominates in modern Afghanistan is largely a reaction to the destruction caused by the atheist Communists. Now, the same feminists, secularists,and liberals who sided with the Soviets are alone in supporting the U.S. occupation. Obviously, Afghanistan will not embrace these people's ideologies any time soon.
I have criticized government military action, but have yet offered no alternatives. Ultimately, the best and most just alternative is the abolition of the cumbersome and destructive system of government-provided security, and its replacement by market-provided security, in which private companies satisfy the diverse demands of individual and collective defense. Such a system has been described in detail by Murray Rothbard, in his For a New Liberty, and in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's The Myth of National Defense. (I will discuss this alternative in a later post.)
In the mean time, the most sensible military policy is one of non-intervention, in which funds are directed toward defense rather than toward military aggression, whether this aggression be justified by politicians in terms of "national interest", "self-defense", or, by our more frightening government bureaucrats, as "a battle against the forces of evil".
It is a moronic article, but I would to take some time to refute the arguments he puts forward because they are a good, brief summary of the modern pro-war position. Below is a link to the article.
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1157
He starts the article with the following statement: "The philosophy of pacifism can be expressed in a single principle: 'The use of force is morally wrong.' This means that ALL force - any kind of force - is out of the question and must be opposed." Then, he refutes what he sees to be the central tenet of pacifism by pointing out that there is a difference between force as "aggression" and force as "self-defense"; he believes that pacifists don't understand this distinction, and that if they did, they would understand why the invasion of Afghanistan is just.
As is immediately clear to anyone familiar with pacifist theory, Delaney confounds two different types of pacifism. One type of pacifism, accurately described by his definition, is the one championed by Jesus of Nazareth, Ghandi, and the Quakers, which concerns interactions among individuals. According to this type of pacifist, the use of force is morally unjustifiable even in self-defense.
However, the term pacifist also refers to those who are opposed to inter-state violence. This type of pacifist is not necessarily opposed to the use of force in self-defense. In fact, prior to the Vietnam War the pacifist movement in the United States was primarily led by libertarians, who are ardent defenders of the right to defend one's person and property through violence. Libertarian pacifists like William Graham Sumner, Edward Atkinson, H.L. Mencken, and Albert Nock, did not prescribe to the type of pacifism Delaney describes in his article, but were devoted pacifists in the second sense.
Many pacifists, such as Noam Chomsky, are simply consistent advocates of the "just war" theory, which has been used misleadingly by hawks to justify every unjust intervention since World War II. According to the political philosopher Bethke Elshtain, the use of military force is justified if it "protects the innocent from certain harm"(her only example is when a country has ‘certain knowledge that genocide will commence on a certain date’ and the victims have no means of self-defense); is "openly declared or otherwise authorized by a legitimate authority’; "begins with the right intentions”; and is last resort, turned to after all other (non-violent) possibilities for the redress and defense of the values at stake have been exhausted. It is on these grounds that many American pacifists have rightly opposed military interventions by the United States government, which almost never meet these qualifications.
Anti-war pacifism arises from different ethical convictions than pacifism concerning human interactions on the individual level, because violence employed by states is fundamentally different from violence employed by individuals. For one thing, in order for the state to use military force, it must accumulate money through taxation, which in the eyes of someone who values the right to property, is an unconscionable act of coercion. What is the moral justification for forcing an individual who does not wish to support a war to pay the military to carry it out?
Secondly, any time the state is used for the purpose of self-defense, the state's ambitions for expanding it's power become involved in the effort of self-defense, usually with undesirable consequences. For example, when the Soviet government employed force to repel the Nazi army, the Kremlin took advantage of the opportunity to expand its territorial holdings and to subject Eastern Europe to imperialist rule that would last for several decades.
When the United States government was given the chance to employ its military in self-defense in Afghanistan, it proceeded to extend its military to Iraq (and, likely also to Iran, Pakistan or Syria in the upcoming years), and is now attempting to monopolize the oil in Central Asia and and the Persian Gulf. The U.S.'s increased military activity since Afghanistan has proved to be counter-productive in combating terrorism (causing global terrorism to multiply by several times), largely because its primary purpose was not countering the threat of Jihadism but expanding state power. Because of the complications that arise when a government entrusted with the task of national defense pursues it's own ambitions for increased power, any civilian considering the justness of a military intervention must take into account the consequences of the inevitable expression of this drive by their state throughout the course of its military adventure, and must consider the fact that the stated goal of self-defense may be accomplished horribly inefficiently or not at all.
In addition, because of the nature of modern technological warfare, any military action of significant size involves the mass murder of civilians, and usually the deliberate targeting of civilians. (In the medieval times, by contrast, war was usually fought only between competing armies, and it was not uncommon for non-combatants to observe military engagements passively from castle walls). Because the use of force by states in modern times, even in self-defense, involves the murder of large numbers of non-combatants, the ethical issues involved in national self-defense are more complex that the ethical issues involved in individual self-defense.
Kevin Delaney counters the pacifist complaints of civilian casualties with an analogy:
"Say that an airplane full of passengers has been hijacked and is headed at full speed toward a major city. You know with certainty that the hijackers are going to take it into the side of a building - and you have the means to shoot down the plane before it reaches the city, and crash it into an empty field. Do you do so, even though it will mean the death of everyone on board? Won't doing so make you a mass murderer?
Of course not: the murderers are the hijackers; they are the initiators of force who, while not directly killing the passengers, have forced them into a situation where they are sure to be killed - by you, the moral person with the means of thwarting the hijackers' scheme for mass destruction."
The analogy he uses is inadequate in two ways. First, in the case of the airplane, the act of self-defense occurs before, and with the aim of preventing, a particular act of violence by an aggressor; in the case of the war on Afghanistan, the question of military self-defense arose after the fact of terrorist aggression. This distinction is relevant because, in contrast to a situation in which military self-defense were being considered in order to prevent an impending attack on the World Trade Center, the situation after 9-11 was one in which the primary concern from the point of view of the people of United States should not have been the danger of a particular impending attack, but rather the general danger of terrorism from the Muslim world, and the effect that a military invasion would have on the propensity of people in that region to support Islamist terrorism.
Secondly, in the case of the airplane, all non-violent alternatives were impossible (the third component of the just war), as the plane was soon to hit its target. On the other hand, the United States government had a number of non-violent options, including criminal prosecution of Osama Bin Laden (something the Taliban government consented to, on the condition that the U.S. government produce evidence linking Osama to the bombings), putting international pressure on the government of Afghanistan and and making use of international police work, and improving the quality of U.S. national defense in order to prevent further attacks. In fact, police work, and not military action, has proved to be the most effective tool in combating terrorism since 9-11, particularly in Germany, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Furthermore, the military principle used by the United States government to justify the invasion of Afghanistan fails to pass the most basic moral test--the test of universality. According to principle of universality, in order for a principle to be ethical, one has to be able to apply it to all people in all times without contradiction. For a person or government to argue that it is morally justified in committing some action in a particular circumstance, but to refuse to grant the right to act this way to other people or governments, is to be a hypocrite.
The military principle that the United States government used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan is that one government may invade the country of another government if the latter government gives refuge to a person or organization that committed violence against the former government. In this case, this meant that the United states could invade Afghanistan to punish the government of Afghanistan for harboring Al-Queda and Bin Laden within its borders. If the United States government were to universalize this rule, Haiti would be justified in invading the United States or calling on an international military force to do so, since the U.S. government gives refuge to Emmanuel Constant, a terrorist who ravaged Haiti in the the 1990's with his organization FRAPH, with U.S. support. In addition, a number of Latin American countries, especially Cuba, would be entitled to invade the United States as punishment for the U.S. government's protection of the international terrorists Juan Posada and Orlando Bosch, terrorists responsible for atrocities in Latin America at least as terrible as those of Osama Bin Laden. The United States government can not universalize this principle, and therefore can not justify its invasion of Afghanistan.
In addition, there remained two outstanding moral reasons not to invade Afghanistan. Firstly, such an invasion is not an effective act of self defense, because it amplifies jihadist sentiments throughout the Muslim world and thus increases the threat of terrorism against the United States. (This was especially true of the invasion of Iraq--Washington was told by virtually every reputable intelligence expert that an invasion of Iraq would amplify the volume of terrorism directed at the United States and the threat of a nuclear attack on the United States. These predictions came true after the invasion.)
Secondly, there is a great injustice in punishing the people of Afghanistan for living under an Islamist dictatorship that The United States government helped erect in the first place.
After the 1978 Communist coup in Afghanistan, the U.S. government began to support the movement of the Mujahideen against the Communists. The purpose of doing this, as Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski explained, was to lure the Soviets into an "Afghan trap"--in other words, to use the civilian population of Afghanistan as bait in the Cold War struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In the ensuing Soviet invasion, approximately 60% of the population of Afghanistan was either killed or forced to flee from the country.
Throughout this period, the U.S. government funded the most radical factions of the Islamist resistance movement in Afghanistan with drug money, and brought in 100,000 radical jihadists from 40 different countries. After the Soviets left, the United States withdrew all aid for the Islamist groups and a civil war ensued. The civil war ended when the Taliban came to power with U.S. support. Now, after the people of Afghanistan have lived through constant violence and unbearable repression for decades, The U.S. government has increased their suffering through military violence and occupation.
The government of Hamid Karzai is a facade--Karzai is a former CIA agent temporarily serving as a puppet of the U.S. military. His domestic support derives from the Northern Alliance, a group of heroine-dealing Islamic fundamentalists comprised of various factions of the Mujahideen that were sponsored by the U.S in the 80's. As soon as the U.S. military exits, which it eventually must, Karzai's power will disintegrate, and a battle will ensue between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance; one of these groups will prevail and rule Afghanistan, and neither is clearly preferable to the other.
Now, apologists for the invasion have invented another false justification--we must bring liberalism, secularism, and women's rights to Afghanistan. The problem with this idea is that it makes very little sense. The people of Afghanistan associate the champions of secularism, feminism, and liberalism with the Communists who destroyed the country in the 70's and 80's, because the people who espoused these ideologies supported the Communist government of Afghanistan and sided with the Soviet invaders. Islamic fundamentalism and the right-wing religious atmosphere that predominates in modern Afghanistan is largely a reaction to the destruction caused by the atheist Communists. Now, the same feminists, secularists,and liberals who sided with the Soviets are alone in supporting the U.S. occupation. Obviously, Afghanistan will not embrace these people's ideologies any time soon.
I have criticized government military action, but have yet offered no alternatives. Ultimately, the best and most just alternative is the abolition of the cumbersome and destructive system of government-provided security, and its replacement by market-provided security, in which private companies satisfy the diverse demands of individual and collective defense. Such a system has been described in detail by Murray Rothbard, in his For a New Liberty, and in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's The Myth of National Defense. (I will discuss this alternative in a later post.)
In the mean time, the most sensible military policy is one of non-intervention, in which funds are directed toward defense rather than toward military aggression, whether this aggression be justified by politicians in terms of "national interest", "self-defense", or, by our more frightening government bureaucrats, as "a battle against the forces of evil".
Friday, January 2, 2009
Is overpopulation a problem?
The environmentalist movement has inherited the agenda of the old conservative movement. While in the 19th century, it was the monarchists and neo-monarchist American conservatives who lamented the rise of cities and the horrific offenses against the environment committed by industrialists, today, the so-called liberal environmentalists have taken up these complaints.
"The world can't hold any more people!" they exclaim. They claim that if industrial growth continues at the current rate, mass starvation, environmental degradation, poverty and chaos will ensue. According to the overpopulationists, the world will soon resemble the portrait of the Earth depicted in the movie Soilent Green, starring Charleton Heston (great movie), in which there is universal poverty and the only thing left to eat is little square pieces of processed human beings.
I open my Environmental Science textbook, and at the beginning of its eighth chapter, entitled Human Population, there is printed a quote by the Senior Editor of the libertarian Cato institute, Sheldon Richman: "There is no population problem". This quote is displayed most likely in order to parody libertarian economists who refuse to buy environmentalist myths about population growth. Then, the authors of the textbook proceed to depict the Chinese dictatorship's one-child policy sympathetically, and follow this by describing the impending doom that faces the human race if we continue to breed.
So, is overpopulation really a problem, as the monarchists and their successors, the environmentalists claim? Demographic and scientific evidence suggests otherwise.
Physical space certainly is not a limiting factor: the entire population of the world could fit in Jacksonville Florida, with standing room for everybody.
Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that we will run out of natural resources as our population grows. Actually the term "natural resources" is misleading; nature doesn't provide us with resources, but only with the material for humans to manipulate in order to produce resources. As our methods of producing resources become more advanced and efficient, the number of human beings the Earth can support and the quality of life of Earth's citizens increases. In addition to being the result of increased productivity, population growth is also the cause of further increases is productivity, as the more humans there are, the more producers there are.
For these reasons, between 1776 and 1975, the world population increased by 6 times, while the gross world product multiplied by 80 times. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, world food production has outpaced population growth since 1948. Food prices are falling rapidly, and food costs about 1/3 of what it did 50 years ago. Human life expectancy in the developing world has increased from 31 to 65 in recent years, and the percentage of malnourished poor on Earth has decreased from 35% to 18%. Famine, poverty, and disease are in decline, and quality of life and life expectancy are on the rise. Despite 200 years of heavy industry, 80% of the world's forests remain.
Is it true that if humans continue at their current pace of production, catastrophe will result? Not at all. Trends show increasing food production and life expectancy, and declining pollution and poverty, and there is no evidence that this trend will reverse in the foreseeable future. The highly esteemed scientist and scholar Roger Revelle, who was one of the first people to study global warming, estimates that just by using water more efficiently, Asia, Latin America, and Africa could feed 35-40 billion people. The current world population is around 6 billion.
Recent history has shown us that the leading causes of the kind of human suffering the environmentalists warn us of are political, and not natural. For example, the African countries that currently suffer the most from famine are Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, some of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. They suffer from famine not because those countries don't have enough natural resources to sustain life, but because civil war prevents productive economic activity.
Russia hasn't suffered tremendous humanitarian catastrophes (poverty, starvation, disease) because of its shortage of natural resources, but rather because of the incompetence and obtrusiveness of the totalitarian Russian state and its irrational economic policies. During the 20th century, the Russian government led a campaign to prevent any productive private development of Russia's land.
Today, we could greatly increase world productivity by eliminating farm subsidies. Farm lobbies around the world lobby their governments to hold food supplies down and food prices up. Currently, Western governments are forcing Latin American economies to serve Western corporations, but have forbidden Latin Americans from selling their products in the West. If Washington were to put an end to subsidies and protectionism in US agribusiness and remove restrictions on Latin American imports, not only would much more food be produced, but Latin American agribusiness would be likely to out-compete North American agribusiness, significantly enriching the poor of Central and South America (provided that Latin American dictators don't keep the extra wealth for themselves).
As former Greenpeace activist turned skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg notes in describing the environmentalist shtick, "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring...[yet]it does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."
Beware of the environmentalist shtick, for it is a disguise for statist ambitions. Just us the early champions of liberty and industrial progress had to combat their conservative political opponents, who used pro-environment rhetoric to push for the imposition of crippling restrictions on the market and for increases the power of political elites, modern champions of liberty, of whom the most fervent are the anarchists, must combat environmentalist nonsense.
"The world can't hold any more people!" they exclaim. They claim that if industrial growth continues at the current rate, mass starvation, environmental degradation, poverty and chaos will ensue. According to the overpopulationists, the world will soon resemble the portrait of the Earth depicted in the movie Soilent Green, starring Charleton Heston (great movie), in which there is universal poverty and the only thing left to eat is little square pieces of processed human beings.
I open my Environmental Science textbook, and at the beginning of its eighth chapter, entitled Human Population, there is printed a quote by the Senior Editor of the libertarian Cato institute, Sheldon Richman: "There is no population problem". This quote is displayed most likely in order to parody libertarian economists who refuse to buy environmentalist myths about population growth. Then, the authors of the textbook proceed to depict the Chinese dictatorship's one-child policy sympathetically, and follow this by describing the impending doom that faces the human race if we continue to breed.
So, is overpopulation really a problem, as the monarchists and their successors, the environmentalists claim? Demographic and scientific evidence suggests otherwise.
Physical space certainly is not a limiting factor: the entire population of the world could fit in Jacksonville Florida, with standing room for everybody.
Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that we will run out of natural resources as our population grows. Actually the term "natural resources" is misleading; nature doesn't provide us with resources, but only with the material for humans to manipulate in order to produce resources. As our methods of producing resources become more advanced and efficient, the number of human beings the Earth can support and the quality of life of Earth's citizens increases. In addition to being the result of increased productivity, population growth is also the cause of further increases is productivity, as the more humans there are, the more producers there are.
For these reasons, between 1776 and 1975, the world population increased by 6 times, while the gross world product multiplied by 80 times. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, world food production has outpaced population growth since 1948. Food prices are falling rapidly, and food costs about 1/3 of what it did 50 years ago. Human life expectancy in the developing world has increased from 31 to 65 in recent years, and the percentage of malnourished poor on Earth has decreased from 35% to 18%. Famine, poverty, and disease are in decline, and quality of life and life expectancy are on the rise. Despite 200 years of heavy industry, 80% of the world's forests remain.
Is it true that if humans continue at their current pace of production, catastrophe will result? Not at all. Trends show increasing food production and life expectancy, and declining pollution and poverty, and there is no evidence that this trend will reverse in the foreseeable future. The highly esteemed scientist and scholar Roger Revelle, who was one of the first people to study global warming, estimates that just by using water more efficiently, Asia, Latin America, and Africa could feed 35-40 billion people. The current world population is around 6 billion.
Recent history has shown us that the leading causes of the kind of human suffering the environmentalists warn us of are political, and not natural. For example, the African countries that currently suffer the most from famine are Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, some of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. They suffer from famine not because those countries don't have enough natural resources to sustain life, but because civil war prevents productive economic activity.
Russia hasn't suffered tremendous humanitarian catastrophes (poverty, starvation, disease) because of its shortage of natural resources, but rather because of the incompetence and obtrusiveness of the totalitarian Russian state and its irrational economic policies. During the 20th century, the Russian government led a campaign to prevent any productive private development of Russia's land.
Today, we could greatly increase world productivity by eliminating farm subsidies. Farm lobbies around the world lobby their governments to hold food supplies down and food prices up. Currently, Western governments are forcing Latin American economies to serve Western corporations, but have forbidden Latin Americans from selling their products in the West. If Washington were to put an end to subsidies and protectionism in US agribusiness and remove restrictions on Latin American imports, not only would much more food be produced, but Latin American agribusiness would be likely to out-compete North American agribusiness, significantly enriching the poor of Central and South America (provided that Latin American dictators don't keep the extra wealth for themselves).
As former Greenpeace activist turned skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg notes in describing the environmentalist shtick, "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring...[yet]it does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."
Beware of the environmentalist shtick, for it is a disguise for statist ambitions. Just us the early champions of liberty and industrial progress had to combat their conservative political opponents, who used pro-environment rhetoric to push for the imposition of crippling restrictions on the market and for increases the power of political elites, modern champions of liberty, of whom the most fervent are the anarchists, must combat environmentalist nonsense.
Monday, November 24, 2008
The Progressive Era
In high school textbooks, the so-called "Progressive Era" is presented as a period in which benevolent government planners and sections of the business elite worked together to regulate the market for public benefit, through various measures such as the the creation of the FDA and the Federal Reserve. This Era is packaged as the "first time the government really stepped in to fight poverty". Simply put, this is a crock of shit, as is everything else we learn in state schools.
In the following piece, the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard analyzes the real motives for the Progressive Era reforms, and for the creation of the Federal Reserve. In short, Rothbard demonstrates that all of the Progressive reforms were really efforts by big business leaders to monopolize their respective industries and by big bankers to secure their power to engage in economically destructive activities that they could never get away with without the government protection offered by the Progressive Era reforms.
PUTTING CARTELIZATION ACROSS: THE PROGRESSIVE LINE
The origin of the Federal Reserve has been deliberately
shrouded in myth spread by pro-Fed apologists. The official
legend holds that the idea of a Central Bank in America
originated after thePanic of 1907, when thebanks, stungby the
financial panic, concluded that drastic reform, highlighted
by the establishment of a lender of last resort, was desper-
ately necessary.
All this isrubbish. The Panic of 1907 provided a conven-
ient handle to stir up the public and spread pro-Central Bank
propaganda. In actuality, the banker agitation for a Central
Bank began as soon as the 1896 McKinley victory over Bryan
was secured.
The second crucial part of the official legend claims that
a Central Bank is necessary to curb the commercial banks
unfortunate tendency to over-expand, such booms giving
rise to subsequent busts.An "impartial" Central Bank, on the
other hand, driven as it is by the public interest, could and
would restrain the banks from their natural narrow and
selfish tendency to make profits at the expense of the public
weal.Thestark fact that it wasbankers themselves who were
making thisargument was supposed to attest totheir nobility
and altruism.
In fact, as we have seen, the banks desperately desired
a Central Bank, not to place fetters on their own natural
tendency to inflate, but, on the contrary, to enable them to
inflate and expand together without incurring the penalties
of market competition. As a lender of last resort, the Central
Bank could permit and encourage them to inflate when they
would ordinarily have to contract their loans in order to save
themselves. In short, the real reason for the adoption of the
Federal Reserve, and its promotion by the large banks, was
the exact opposite of their loudly trumpeted motivations.
Rather than create an institution to curb their own profits on
behalf of the public interest, the banks sought a Central Bank
to enhance their profits by permitting them to inflate far
beyond the bounds set by free-market competition.
The bankers,however, faced a big public relations prob-
lem. What they wanted was the federal government creating
and enforcing a banking cartel by means of a Central Bank.
Yet they faced a political climate that was hostile to monop-
oly and centralization, and favored free competition. They
also faced a public opinion hostile to Wall Street and to what
they perceptively but inchoately saw as the "money power."
Thebankers also confronted a nation with a long traditionof
opposing Central Banking. How then, could they put a Cen-
tral Bank across?
It is important to realize that the problem faced by the
big bankers was only one facet of a larger problem. Finance
capital, led once again and not coincidentally by the Morgan
Bank, had been trying without success to cartelize the econ-
omy on the free market. First, in the 1860s and 1870s, the
Morgans, as the major financiers and underwriters of Amer-
ica's first big business, the railroads, tried desperately and
repeatedly to cartelize railroads: to arrange railroad "pools"
to restrict shipments, allocate shipments among themselves,
and raise freight rates, in order to increase profits in the
railroad industry. Despite the Morgan clout and a ready
willingness by most of the railroad magnates, the attempts
kept floundering, shattered on the rock of market competi-
tion, as individual railroads cheated on the agreement in
order to pick up quick profits, and new venture capital built
competing railroads to take advantage of the high cartel
prices. Finally, the Morgan-led railroads turned to the federal
government to regulate railroads and thereby to enforce the
cartel that they could not achieve on the free market. Hence
the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887.
In general, manufacturing firms did not become large
enough to incorporate until the 1890s, and at that point the
investment bankers financing the corporations, again led by
the Morgans, organized a large series of giant mergers, cov-
ering literally hundreds of industries. Mergers would avoid
the problem of cheating by separate individual firms, and
monopoly firms could then proceed peacefully to restrict
production, raise prices, and increase profits for all the
merged firms and stockholders. The mighty merger move-
ment peaked from 1898-1902. Unfortunately, once again,
virtually all of these mergers flopped badly, failing to estab-
lish monopolies or monopoly prices, and in some cases
steadily losing market shares from then on and even plung-
ing into bankruptcy. Again the problem was new venture
capital entering the industry and, armed with up-to-date
equipment, outcompeting the cartel at the artificially high
price. And once again, the Morgan financial interests, joined
by other financial and bigbusiness groups,decided that they
needed the government, in particular the federal govern-
ment, to be their surrogate in establishing and, better yet,
enforcing the cartel.
The famed Progressive Era, an era of a Great Leap For-
ward in massive regulation of business by state and federal
government, stretched approximately from 1900 or the late
1890s through World War I. The Progressive Era was essen-
tially put through by the Morgans and their allies in order to
cartelize American business and industry, to take up more
effectively where the cartel and merger movements had left
off. It should be clear that the Federal Reserve System, estab-
lished in 1913, was part and parcel of that Progressive move-
ment:just as the large meat packers managed to put through
costly federal inspection of meat in 1906, in order to place
cripplingly high costs on competing small meat packers, so
the big bankers cartelized banking through the Federal Re-
serve System seven years later.
Just as the big bankers, in trying to set up a Central Bank,
had to face a public opinion suspicious of Wall Street and
hostile to Central Banking, so the financiers and industrial-
ists faced a public steeped in a tradition and ideology of free
competition and hostility to monopoly. How could they get
the public and legislators to go along with the fundamental
transformation of the American economy toward cartels and
monopoly?
Theanswer was the same inboth cases: thebigbusiness-
men and financiers had to form an alliance with the opinion-
molding classes in society, in order to engineer the consent
of the public by means of crafty and persuasive propaganda.
The opinion-molding classes, in previous centuries the
Church, but now consisting of media people, journalists,
intellectuals,economists and other academics, professionals,
educators as wellas ministers, had tobeenlisted inthis cause.
For their part the intellectuals and opinion-molders were all
too ready for such an alliance. In the first place, most of the
academics,economists, historians, social scientists, had gone
to Germany in the late nineteenth century to earn their
Ph.D.s, which were not yet being granted widely in theU.S.
There they had become imbued with the ideals of Bismar-
ckian statism, organicism, collectivism, and State molding
and governing of society, with bureaucrats and other plan-
ners benignly ruling over a cartelized economy in partner-
ship with organized big business.
There was also a more direct economic reason for the
intellectuals' eagerness for this new statist coalition. The late
nineteenth century had seen an enormous expansion and
professionalization of the various segments of intellectuals
and technocrats. Suddenly, tool-and-die men had become
graduate engineers; gentlemen with bachelor's degrees had
proliferated into specialized doctorates; physicians, social
workers, psychiatrists, all these groups had formed them-
selvesinto guilding and professional associations. What they
wanted from the State was plush and prestigious jobs and
grants (a) to help run and plan the new statist system; and
(b) to apologize for the new order. These guilds were also
anxious to have the State license or otherwise restrict entry
into their professions and occupations, in order to raise the
incomes of each guildsman.
Hence the new alliance of State and Opinion-Molder, an
old-fashioned union of Throne and Altar recycled and up-
dated into a partnership of government, business leader,
intellectual, and expert. During the Progressive Era, by far
the most important forum established by Big Business and
Finance which drew together all the leaders of these groups,
hammered out a common ideology and policy program, and
actually drafted and lobbied for the leading new Progressive
measures of state and federal intervention, was the National
Civic Federation; other similar and more specialized groups
followed.
It was not enough, however, for the new statist alliance
of Big Business and Big Intellectuals to be formed; they had
to agree, propound, and push for a common ideological line,
a linethat would persuade the majority of thepublic to adopt
thenew program and even greet itwith enthusiasm.The new
line was brilliantly successful if deceptive: that the new
Progressive measures and regulations werenecessary tosave
thepublic interest from sinister and exploitative Big Business
monopoly, which business was achieving on the free market.
Government policy, led by intellectuals, academics and dis-
interested experts in behalf of the public weal, was to "save"
capitalism, and correct the faults and failures of the free
market by establishing government control and planning in
the public interest. In other words, policies, such as the
Interstate Commerce Act, drafted and operated to try to
enforce railroad cartels, were to be advocated in terms of
bringing the Big Bad Railroads to heel by means of demo-
cratic government action.
Throughout this successful "corporate liberal" impos-
ture, beginning in the Progressive Era and continuing ever
since, one glaring public relations problem has confronted
this big business-intellectual coalition. If these policies are
designed to tame and curb rapacious Big Business, how is it
that so many Big Businessmen, so many Morgan partners
and Rockefellers and Harrimans, have been so conspicuous
in promoting these programs? The answer, though seem-
ingly naive, has managed to persuade the public with little
difficulty: that these men are Enlightened, educated, public-
spirited businessmen, filled with the aristocratic spirit of
noblesse oblige, whose seemingly quasi-suicidal activities
and programs are performed in the noble spirit of sacrifice
for the good of humanity. Educated in the spirit of service,
they have been able to rise above the mere narrow and
selfish grasp for profit that had marked their own forefa-
thers.
And then, should any maverick skeptic arise, who re-
fuses to fall for this hokum and tries to dig more deeply into
the economic motivations at work, he will be quickly and
brusquely dismissed as an "extremist" (whether of Left or
Right), a malcontent, and, most damning of all, a "believer
in the conspiracy theory of history." The question here, how-
ever, is not some sort of "theory of history," but a willingness
to use one's common sense. All that the analyst or historian
need do is to assume, as an hypothesis, that people in gov-
ernment or lobbying for government policies may be at least
as self-interested and profit-motivated as people in business
or everyday life, and then to investigate the significant and
revealing patterns that he will see before his eyes.
Central Banking, in short, was designed to "do for" the
banks what the ICC had "done for" the railroads, the Meat
Inspection Act had done for the big meatpackers, etc. In the
case of Central Banking, the Line that had to be pushed was
a variant of the "anti-Big Business" shell game being perpe-
trated on behalf of Big Business throughout the Progressive
Era. In banking, the line was that a Central Bank was neces-
sary to curb the inflationary excesses of unregulated banks
on the free market. And if Big Bankers were rather con-
spicuous and early in advocating such a measure, why this
only showed that they were more educated, more Enlight-
ened, and more nobly public-spirited than the rest of their
banking brethren.
In the following piece, the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard analyzes the real motives for the Progressive Era reforms, and for the creation of the Federal Reserve. In short, Rothbard demonstrates that all of the Progressive reforms were really efforts by big business leaders to monopolize their respective industries and by big bankers to secure their power to engage in economically destructive activities that they could never get away with without the government protection offered by the Progressive Era reforms.
PUTTING CARTELIZATION ACROSS: THE PROGRESSIVE LINE
The origin of the Federal Reserve has been deliberately
shrouded in myth spread by pro-Fed apologists. The official
legend holds that the idea of a Central Bank in America
originated after thePanic of 1907, when thebanks, stungby the
financial panic, concluded that drastic reform, highlighted
by the establishment of a lender of last resort, was desper-
ately necessary.
All this isrubbish. The Panic of 1907 provided a conven-
ient handle to stir up the public and spread pro-Central Bank
propaganda. In actuality, the banker agitation for a Central
Bank began as soon as the 1896 McKinley victory over Bryan
was secured.
The second crucial part of the official legend claims that
a Central Bank is necessary to curb the commercial banks
unfortunate tendency to over-expand, such booms giving
rise to subsequent busts.An "impartial" Central Bank, on the
other hand, driven as it is by the public interest, could and
would restrain the banks from their natural narrow and
selfish tendency to make profits at the expense of the public
weal.Thestark fact that it wasbankers themselves who were
making thisargument was supposed to attest totheir nobility
and altruism.
In fact, as we have seen, the banks desperately desired
a Central Bank, not to place fetters on their own natural
tendency to inflate, but, on the contrary, to enable them to
inflate and expand together without incurring the penalties
of market competition. As a lender of last resort, the Central
Bank could permit and encourage them to inflate when they
would ordinarily have to contract their loans in order to save
themselves. In short, the real reason for the adoption of the
Federal Reserve, and its promotion by the large banks, was
the exact opposite of their loudly trumpeted motivations.
Rather than create an institution to curb their own profits on
behalf of the public interest, the banks sought a Central Bank
to enhance their profits by permitting them to inflate far
beyond the bounds set by free-market competition.
The bankers,however, faced a big public relations prob-
lem. What they wanted was the federal government creating
and enforcing a banking cartel by means of a Central Bank.
Yet they faced a political climate that was hostile to monop-
oly and centralization, and favored free competition. They
also faced a public opinion hostile to Wall Street and to what
they perceptively but inchoately saw as the "money power."
Thebankers also confronted a nation with a long traditionof
opposing Central Banking. How then, could they put a Cen-
tral Bank across?
It is important to realize that the problem faced by the
big bankers was only one facet of a larger problem. Finance
capital, led once again and not coincidentally by the Morgan
Bank, had been trying without success to cartelize the econ-
omy on the free market. First, in the 1860s and 1870s, the
Morgans, as the major financiers and underwriters of Amer-
ica's first big business, the railroads, tried desperately and
repeatedly to cartelize railroads: to arrange railroad "pools"
to restrict shipments, allocate shipments among themselves,
and raise freight rates, in order to increase profits in the
railroad industry. Despite the Morgan clout and a ready
willingness by most of the railroad magnates, the attempts
kept floundering, shattered on the rock of market competi-
tion, as individual railroads cheated on the agreement in
order to pick up quick profits, and new venture capital built
competing railroads to take advantage of the high cartel
prices. Finally, the Morgan-led railroads turned to the federal
government to regulate railroads and thereby to enforce the
cartel that they could not achieve on the free market. Hence
the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887.
In general, manufacturing firms did not become large
enough to incorporate until the 1890s, and at that point the
investment bankers financing the corporations, again led by
the Morgans, organized a large series of giant mergers, cov-
ering literally hundreds of industries. Mergers would avoid
the problem of cheating by separate individual firms, and
monopoly firms could then proceed peacefully to restrict
production, raise prices, and increase profits for all the
merged firms and stockholders. The mighty merger move-
ment peaked from 1898-1902. Unfortunately, once again,
virtually all of these mergers flopped badly, failing to estab-
lish monopolies or monopoly prices, and in some cases
steadily losing market shares from then on and even plung-
ing into bankruptcy. Again the problem was new venture
capital entering the industry and, armed with up-to-date
equipment, outcompeting the cartel at the artificially high
price. And once again, the Morgan financial interests, joined
by other financial and bigbusiness groups,decided that they
needed the government, in particular the federal govern-
ment, to be their surrogate in establishing and, better yet,
enforcing the cartel.
The famed Progressive Era, an era of a Great Leap For-
ward in massive regulation of business by state and federal
government, stretched approximately from 1900 or the late
1890s through World War I. The Progressive Era was essen-
tially put through by the Morgans and their allies in order to
cartelize American business and industry, to take up more
effectively where the cartel and merger movements had left
off. It should be clear that the Federal Reserve System, estab-
lished in 1913, was part and parcel of that Progressive move-
ment:just as the large meat packers managed to put through
costly federal inspection of meat in 1906, in order to place
cripplingly high costs on competing small meat packers, so
the big bankers cartelized banking through the Federal Re-
serve System seven years later.
Just as the big bankers, in trying to set up a Central Bank,
had to face a public opinion suspicious of Wall Street and
hostile to Central Banking, so the financiers and industrial-
ists faced a public steeped in a tradition and ideology of free
competition and hostility to monopoly. How could they get
the public and legislators to go along with the fundamental
transformation of the American economy toward cartels and
monopoly?
Theanswer was the same inboth cases: thebigbusiness-
men and financiers had to form an alliance with the opinion-
molding classes in society, in order to engineer the consent
of the public by means of crafty and persuasive propaganda.
The opinion-molding classes, in previous centuries the
Church, but now consisting of media people, journalists,
intellectuals,economists and other academics, professionals,
educators as wellas ministers, had tobeenlisted inthis cause.
For their part the intellectuals and opinion-molders were all
too ready for such an alliance. In the first place, most of the
academics,economists, historians, social scientists, had gone
to Germany in the late nineteenth century to earn their
Ph.D.s, which were not yet being granted widely in theU.S.
There they had become imbued with the ideals of Bismar-
ckian statism, organicism, collectivism, and State molding
and governing of society, with bureaucrats and other plan-
ners benignly ruling over a cartelized economy in partner-
ship with organized big business.
There was also a more direct economic reason for the
intellectuals' eagerness for this new statist coalition. The late
nineteenth century had seen an enormous expansion and
professionalization of the various segments of intellectuals
and technocrats. Suddenly, tool-and-die men had become
graduate engineers; gentlemen with bachelor's degrees had
proliferated into specialized doctorates; physicians, social
workers, psychiatrists, all these groups had formed them-
selvesinto guilding and professional associations. What they
wanted from the State was plush and prestigious jobs and
grants (a) to help run and plan the new statist system; and
(b) to apologize for the new order. These guilds were also
anxious to have the State license or otherwise restrict entry
into their professions and occupations, in order to raise the
incomes of each guildsman.
Hence the new alliance of State and Opinion-Molder, an
old-fashioned union of Throne and Altar recycled and up-
dated into a partnership of government, business leader,
intellectual, and expert. During the Progressive Era, by far
the most important forum established by Big Business and
Finance which drew together all the leaders of these groups,
hammered out a common ideology and policy program, and
actually drafted and lobbied for the leading new Progressive
measures of state and federal intervention, was the National
Civic Federation; other similar and more specialized groups
followed.
It was not enough, however, for the new statist alliance
of Big Business and Big Intellectuals to be formed; they had
to agree, propound, and push for a common ideological line,
a linethat would persuade the majority of thepublic to adopt
thenew program and even greet itwith enthusiasm.The new
line was brilliantly successful if deceptive: that the new
Progressive measures and regulations werenecessary tosave
thepublic interest from sinister and exploitative Big Business
monopoly, which business was achieving on the free market.
Government policy, led by intellectuals, academics and dis-
interested experts in behalf of the public weal, was to "save"
capitalism, and correct the faults and failures of the free
market by establishing government control and planning in
the public interest. In other words, policies, such as the
Interstate Commerce Act, drafted and operated to try to
enforce railroad cartels, were to be advocated in terms of
bringing the Big Bad Railroads to heel by means of demo-
cratic government action.
Throughout this successful "corporate liberal" impos-
ture, beginning in the Progressive Era and continuing ever
since, one glaring public relations problem has confronted
this big business-intellectual coalition. If these policies are
designed to tame and curb rapacious Big Business, how is it
that so many Big Businessmen, so many Morgan partners
and Rockefellers and Harrimans, have been so conspicuous
in promoting these programs? The answer, though seem-
ingly naive, has managed to persuade the public with little
difficulty: that these men are Enlightened, educated, public-
spirited businessmen, filled with the aristocratic spirit of
noblesse oblige, whose seemingly quasi-suicidal activities
and programs are performed in the noble spirit of sacrifice
for the good of humanity. Educated in the spirit of service,
they have been able to rise above the mere narrow and
selfish grasp for profit that had marked their own forefa-
thers.
And then, should any maverick skeptic arise, who re-
fuses to fall for this hokum and tries to dig more deeply into
the economic motivations at work, he will be quickly and
brusquely dismissed as an "extremist" (whether of Left or
Right), a malcontent, and, most damning of all, a "believer
in the conspiracy theory of history." The question here, how-
ever, is not some sort of "theory of history," but a willingness
to use one's common sense. All that the analyst or historian
need do is to assume, as an hypothesis, that people in gov-
ernment or lobbying for government policies may be at least
as self-interested and profit-motivated as people in business
or everyday life, and then to investigate the significant and
revealing patterns that he will see before his eyes.
Central Banking, in short, was designed to "do for" the
banks what the ICC had "done for" the railroads, the Meat
Inspection Act had done for the big meatpackers, etc. In the
case of Central Banking, the Line that had to be pushed was
a variant of the "anti-Big Business" shell game being perpe-
trated on behalf of Big Business throughout the Progressive
Era. In banking, the line was that a Central Bank was neces-
sary to curb the inflationary excesses of unregulated banks
on the free market. And if Big Bankers were rather con-
spicuous and early in advocating such a measure, why this
only showed that they were more educated, more Enlight-
ened, and more nobly public-spirited than the rest of their
banking brethren.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Victory for Greek prisoners!
The people of Greece just held massive protests in order to pressure the government to reform Greek prisons. Prisoners participated in a hunger strike and non-prisoners expressed their solidarity through marches, concerts, and other means.
The Greek government has just given into the prisoners' demands. Take a look at what the prisoners won! (Source-libcom.org)
1) All persons convicted to a sentence up to five years for any offense including drug related crimes can tranform their sentence into a monetary penalty. This will not be allowed in the case the jury decides that the payment is not enough to deter the convict from commiting punishable acts in the future.
2) The minimum sum for tranforming one day of prison sentence to monetary penanlty is reduced from 10 euros to 3, with the provision of being reduced to 1 euro by decision of the jury.
3) All people who have served 1/5 of their prison sentence for 2 year sentences and 1/3 for sentences longer than 2 years are to be released, with no exceptions.
4) The minimum limit of served sentence is reduced to 3/5 for conditional release and for convicts for drug related crimes. Those condemned under conditions of law Ν. 3459/2006 (articles 23 και 23Α) are excepmpted.
5) The maximum limit of pre-trial impironment is reduced from 18 to 12 months, with the excemption of crimes puniched by liife or 20year sentence.
6) The annual time of days-off prison is increased by one day. Tougher conditions for days-off are limited for those convicted for drug related crimes under Ν. 3459/2006.
7) Disciplinary penalties are to be integrated.
8) Integration after 4 years into national law of the European Council decision of drug trafficking (2004/757).
9) Expansion of implementation of conditional release of convicts suffering from AIDS, kidney failure, persistent TB, and tetraplegics.
What the Ministry failed to answer with regard to the prisoners' demands include:
1) Monetary exchange of prison sentences longer than 5 years, especially for 6.700 prisoners presently convicted for non-criminal offenses.
2) Abolition of juvenile prisons
3) Abolition of accumulative disciplinary penalties
4) Abolition of 18 months pre-trial imprisonment for a large number of offenses.
5) Satisfactory expansion of days off, despite the fact that the application of present liberties has been tested as succesfull during the last 18 years.
6) Immediate improvement of relocation conditions of convicts
7) Holding a meeting between the minister of justice and the prisoners' committee
The Greek government has just given into the prisoners' demands. Take a look at what the prisoners won! (Source-libcom.org)
1) All persons convicted to a sentence up to five years for any offense including drug related crimes can tranform their sentence into a monetary penalty. This will not be allowed in the case the jury decides that the payment is not enough to deter the convict from commiting punishable acts in the future.
2) The minimum sum for tranforming one day of prison sentence to monetary penanlty is reduced from 10 euros to 3, with the provision of being reduced to 1 euro by decision of the jury.
3) All people who have served 1/5 of their prison sentence for 2 year sentences and 1/3 for sentences longer than 2 years are to be released, with no exceptions.
4) The minimum limit of served sentence is reduced to 3/5 for conditional release and for convicts for drug related crimes. Those condemned under conditions of law Ν. 3459/2006 (articles 23 και 23Α) are excepmpted.
5) The maximum limit of pre-trial impironment is reduced from 18 to 12 months, with the excemption of crimes puniched by liife or 20year sentence.
6) The annual time of days-off prison is increased by one day. Tougher conditions for days-off are limited for those convicted for drug related crimes under Ν. 3459/2006.
7) Disciplinary penalties are to be integrated.
8) Integration after 4 years into national law of the European Council decision of drug trafficking (2004/757).
9) Expansion of implementation of conditional release of convicts suffering from AIDS, kidney failure, persistent TB, and tetraplegics.
What the Ministry failed to answer with regard to the prisoners' demands include:
1) Monetary exchange of prison sentences longer than 5 years, especially for 6.700 prisoners presently convicted for non-criminal offenses.
2) Abolition of juvenile prisons
3) Abolition of accumulative disciplinary penalties
4) Abolition of 18 months pre-trial imprisonment for a large number of offenses.
5) Satisfactory expansion of days off, despite the fact that the application of present liberties has been tested as succesfull during the last 18 years.
6) Immediate improvement of relocation conditions of convicts
7) Holding a meeting between the minister of justice and the prisoners' committee
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Spanish Catholic cover-up of Catholic atrocities
The New York Times' Victoria Burnett reported today that the Spanish government has just blocked an attempt by the judge Baltasar Garzon to investigate the mass killings by Franco and his Catholic fascist government during the Spanish Civil war
(1936-1939) and during the fascist regime between the 40's and the 70's. Garzon wished to investigate 114,000 murders and 19 mass graves attributable to the Catholic fascists.
This cover-up, I assume, is the result of pressure from Spanish Catholics, who want to forget about the evils committed by the institution they belong to, and who want to continue to place undue blame on the Spanish anarchists for the violence of the
1930's. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish anarchists among the peasantry and the urban Spanish developed anarchist consciousness and practice for 60 years. Finally, after the fascists, led by Franco, conducted a coup against the liberal Spanish government, the anarchists launched a war first against the fascists and then against all centralized institutions in Spain.
The anarchists lost because every powerful government on the planet did its part to repress the anarchist uprising. The Communist Russian government withheld aid from the anarchists, instigated Spanish communists to undermine the anarchist effort through violence and sabotage, and instructed Communist parties around the world to distance themselves from the anarchists. The liberal Spanish government refused to give information to anarchists about the location of the fascists, and denied arms to anarchist soldiers. The liberal governments of the West refused to support the anarchist effort (in effect lending its support to the fascists) and the the subservient Western media neglected to report on the most significant events of the conflict, instead depicting it in vague terms, as a struggle between liberal democracy and fascism.
At the time of fascist dominance in Europe, the Vatican, under pope Pius XI and XII, of course, lent its support to the European fascists and emphatically supported the Holocaust. Franco, unlike the other major fascists dictators, who were merely endorsed by the Catholic Church and raised Catholic, ran a distinctly Catholic dictatorship. During the civil war and during his reign, he purged tens of thousands of gays, gypsies, and political dissidents, and massacred entire city populations in Northern Spain. One of the cities levelled and depopulated by Franco and his German friends was Guernica; this gruesome destruction was depicted in Pablo Picasso's famous painting, La Guernica.
Why am I talking about the Spanish government/Catholic Church cover-up of fascist atrocities? For two reasons:
1) Everyone must understand that the effort by the Spanish government to cover-up the real events of the 1930's is mirrored by similar efforts by all Western governments. Governement in the Western world have, since, the beginning of the Spanish struggle of the 30's, conducted a determined effort to purge the memory of the Spanish anarchist movement from history. When the civil war is brought up in a history texbook (which it often isn't), the only mention of anarchists (if there is any it all) is of the murders of clergymen by anarchist peasants in the 1930's. We hear nothing of sympathy for fascism by Western governments, and even less about the 60-year struggle of anarchists against government and Church domination. And we are not invited to blame the fundemental structure of the Catholic Church for Spanish fascism...which brings us to my second reason.
2) We ought to remember the key role played by religion not just in the European fascist movement, but in all government oppression throughout history. All throughout the history of human civilization, the institution of government has been closely tied to the institution of religion. Government and God have a close relationship because both are founded on the same assumptions: humans are naturally stupid and violent, and are thus incapable of running their own affairs free from the control of higher powers; justice and goodness are abstract ideas separate from and superior to material human existence.
The former idea implies the necessity of permanent entities that are above human error--in a word, superhuman entities. In order for government to exist, its subjects must be tricked by the fallacious argument that government, though controlled by human individuals, somehow is not sullied by the any of the negative qualities attributed to its subjects (greed, aggressiveness, stupidity, immorality). In other words, in order for government to exist, it must be assumed to be a superhuman entity. Similarly, God, though merely an idea created by fallible human minds, is thought to be somehow above the material functions of the concrete structure of the human brain. The concept of "God", the entity representing the ultimate expression of superhuman, otherworldly perfection, has tended to have a close relationship with the concept of the state, which represents superhuman worldly perfection.
The latter idea, a religious idea with its roots in Platonism, is essential to the existance of government because government claims legitimacy on the ground that it, as an entity elevated above human material existence, deserves to have a monopoly on the interpretation of justice and goodness. Implicit in this claim is the traditional religious idea that goodness and justice are incomprehensible, ethereal ideas that emanate from superhuman sources.
This connection between God and the State is indestructible, and is absolutely essential to all absolutist governments, even absolutist governments ruled by self-described atheists like Hitler and Mussolini. When the figure "God" is not allowed to exist, he must be replaced by some roughly equivalent entity that also represents infinite goodness and justice, like the "Nation".
The libertarian Catholic Lord Acton once pointed out that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Similarly, absolutist notions of the infinite Goodness of the divine father accompany the infinitely corrupt institution of absolutist state, and somewhat less absolutist Deistic notions of the subtle but still infinitely Good and Just God accompany the modern corrupt liberal republic.
How about an end to all delusions about perfect superhuman moral entities, and accompanying this advance, an end to government?
(1936-1939) and during the fascist regime between the 40's and the 70's. Garzon wished to investigate 114,000 murders and 19 mass graves attributable to the Catholic fascists.
This cover-up, I assume, is the result of pressure from Spanish Catholics, who want to forget about the evils committed by the institution they belong to, and who want to continue to place undue blame on the Spanish anarchists for the violence of the
1930's. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish anarchists among the peasantry and the urban Spanish developed anarchist consciousness and practice for 60 years. Finally, after the fascists, led by Franco, conducted a coup against the liberal Spanish government, the anarchists launched a war first against the fascists and then against all centralized institutions in Spain.
The anarchists lost because every powerful government on the planet did its part to repress the anarchist uprising. The Communist Russian government withheld aid from the anarchists, instigated Spanish communists to undermine the anarchist effort through violence and sabotage, and instructed Communist parties around the world to distance themselves from the anarchists. The liberal Spanish government refused to give information to anarchists about the location of the fascists, and denied arms to anarchist soldiers. The liberal governments of the West refused to support the anarchist effort (in effect lending its support to the fascists) and the the subservient Western media neglected to report on the most significant events of the conflict, instead depicting it in vague terms, as a struggle between liberal democracy and fascism.
At the time of fascist dominance in Europe, the Vatican, under pope Pius XI and XII, of course, lent its support to the European fascists and emphatically supported the Holocaust. Franco, unlike the other major fascists dictators, who were merely endorsed by the Catholic Church and raised Catholic, ran a distinctly Catholic dictatorship. During the civil war and during his reign, he purged tens of thousands of gays, gypsies, and political dissidents, and massacred entire city populations in Northern Spain. One of the cities levelled and depopulated by Franco and his German friends was Guernica; this gruesome destruction was depicted in Pablo Picasso's famous painting, La Guernica.
Why am I talking about the Spanish government/Catholic Church cover-up of fascist atrocities? For two reasons:
1) Everyone must understand that the effort by the Spanish government to cover-up the real events of the 1930's is mirrored by similar efforts by all Western governments. Governement in the Western world have, since, the beginning of the Spanish struggle of the 30's, conducted a determined effort to purge the memory of the Spanish anarchist movement from history. When the civil war is brought up in a history texbook (which it often isn't), the only mention of anarchists (if there is any it all) is of the murders of clergymen by anarchist peasants in the 1930's. We hear nothing of sympathy for fascism by Western governments, and even less about the 60-year struggle of anarchists against government and Church domination. And we are not invited to blame the fundemental structure of the Catholic Church for Spanish fascism...which brings us to my second reason.
2) We ought to remember the key role played by religion not just in the European fascist movement, but in all government oppression throughout history. All throughout the history of human civilization, the institution of government has been closely tied to the institution of religion. Government and God have a close relationship because both are founded on the same assumptions: humans are naturally stupid and violent, and are thus incapable of running their own affairs free from the control of higher powers; justice and goodness are abstract ideas separate from and superior to material human existence.
The former idea implies the necessity of permanent entities that are above human error--in a word, superhuman entities. In order for government to exist, its subjects must be tricked by the fallacious argument that government, though controlled by human individuals, somehow is not sullied by the any of the negative qualities attributed to its subjects (greed, aggressiveness, stupidity, immorality). In other words, in order for government to exist, it must be assumed to be a superhuman entity. Similarly, God, though merely an idea created by fallible human minds, is thought to be somehow above the material functions of the concrete structure of the human brain. The concept of "God", the entity representing the ultimate expression of superhuman, otherworldly perfection, has tended to have a close relationship with the concept of the state, which represents superhuman worldly perfection.
The latter idea, a religious idea with its roots in Platonism, is essential to the existance of government because government claims legitimacy on the ground that it, as an entity elevated above human material existence, deserves to have a monopoly on the interpretation of justice and goodness. Implicit in this claim is the traditional religious idea that goodness and justice are incomprehensible, ethereal ideas that emanate from superhuman sources.
This connection between God and the State is indestructible, and is absolutely essential to all absolutist governments, even absolutist governments ruled by self-described atheists like Hitler and Mussolini. When the figure "God" is not allowed to exist, he must be replaced by some roughly equivalent entity that also represents infinite goodness and justice, like the "Nation".
The libertarian Catholic Lord Acton once pointed out that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Similarly, absolutist notions of the infinite Goodness of the divine father accompany the infinitely corrupt institution of absolutist state, and somewhat less absolutist Deistic notions of the subtle but still infinitely Good and Just God accompany the modern corrupt liberal republic.
How about an end to all delusions about perfect superhuman moral entities, and accompanying this advance, an end to government?
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Words of wisdom from Murray Rothbard
I'd like to adress the issue of war, which will undoubtedly present itself under the presumably hawkish Obama administration.
This is an excerpt from an article entitled "Myths of the Cold War," written by the Anarcho-capitalist, Murray Rothbard, in 1966, in the the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought. In this article, Rothbard, the ultimate enemy of Communism, denounces the anti-Communist Hawks. Let his words give strength to those of us who despise war as much as we do Islamic fundementalism:
"There is, indeed, something exceedingly odd about the argument that Americans should be cremated in a nuclear holocaust, because this is necessary to "preserve their Honor" by trying to liberate the slaves of communism. There are, let us say, 800 million people living behind the Iron Curtain. The very fact that all these people are still alive testifies to the fact that they, every one, prefer life under communism to death, with or without Honor. But if all the 800 millions prefer life under communism to death, prefer "slavery" to death, who are we to have the unmitigated gall to advocate murdering millions of Americans and Russians in order to free these slaves? If the Russian muzhik prefers his slavery to death, this is a choice which he has the right to make, and an anti-Communist who sends missiles to murder him to make sure that he dies Honorably is, simply… committing murder. And this – murder – mass murder – is what all the fancy and high moral slogans about Death With Honor boil down to.
Many Americans may each, individually, prefer death to life under communism. And that is their privilege. But they have no right, and as professed libertarians they have certainly no right, to murder countless millions of people because of this choice. In short, they have no right to cremate other people: Americans, Russians, or what have you, who would make the opposite choice, who would opt for survival. The War Hawks like to talk of their noble disregard for human life, on behalf of the spiritual ideals of honor, etc., and of their opponents’ miserable atheistic regard for life as a supreme value. But what is there noble, what is there spiritual, what in fact is there Christian, about mass murder of those innocents who do not share these values? Surely, it would be both more libertarian, more courageous, and more Christian for such conservatives quietly to commit suicide and insure their martyrdom that way, rather than drag millions upon millions of innocents to their death along with them.
If, then, the new crusaders are itching to liberate the slaves who look askance at liberation, their only truly honorable course would be to outfit themselves individually and corporately, without involving the rest of us Americans, or Americans officially as a nation, and go winging their way to fight the Russians on their own. With this kind of war, Americans can only be the gainer, whoever wins: if by some quirk the crusaders win, then those Russians left alive will be free (if they don’t die of radiation poisoning before they can enjoy their freedom), and if the crusaders lose, then they will have had their coveted Death With Honor, and the rest of us will be left alone to conclude peaceful agreements with the Russians."
This is an excerpt from an article entitled "Myths of the Cold War," written by the Anarcho-capitalist, Murray Rothbard, in 1966, in the the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought. In this article, Rothbard, the ultimate enemy of Communism, denounces the anti-Communist Hawks. Let his words give strength to those of us who despise war as much as we do Islamic fundementalism:
"There is, indeed, something exceedingly odd about the argument that Americans should be cremated in a nuclear holocaust, because this is necessary to "preserve their Honor" by trying to liberate the slaves of communism. There are, let us say, 800 million people living behind the Iron Curtain. The very fact that all these people are still alive testifies to the fact that they, every one, prefer life under communism to death, with or without Honor. But if all the 800 millions prefer life under communism to death, prefer "slavery" to death, who are we to have the unmitigated gall to advocate murdering millions of Americans and Russians in order to free these slaves? If the Russian muzhik prefers his slavery to death, this is a choice which he has the right to make, and an anti-Communist who sends missiles to murder him to make sure that he dies Honorably is, simply… committing murder. And this – murder – mass murder – is what all the fancy and high moral slogans about Death With Honor boil down to.
Many Americans may each, individually, prefer death to life under communism. And that is their privilege. But they have no right, and as professed libertarians they have certainly no right, to murder countless millions of people because of this choice. In short, they have no right to cremate other people: Americans, Russians, or what have you, who would make the opposite choice, who would opt for survival. The War Hawks like to talk of their noble disregard for human life, on behalf of the spiritual ideals of honor, etc., and of their opponents’ miserable atheistic regard for life as a supreme value. But what is there noble, what is there spiritual, what in fact is there Christian, about mass murder of those innocents who do not share these values? Surely, it would be both more libertarian, more courageous, and more Christian for such conservatives quietly to commit suicide and insure their martyrdom that way, rather than drag millions upon millions of innocents to their death along with them.
If, then, the new crusaders are itching to liberate the slaves who look askance at liberation, their only truly honorable course would be to outfit themselves individually and corporately, without involving the rest of us Americans, or Americans officially as a nation, and go winging their way to fight the Russians on their own. With this kind of war, Americans can only be the gainer, whoever wins: if by some quirk the crusaders win, then those Russians left alive will be free (if they don’t die of radiation poisoning before they can enjoy their freedom), and if the crusaders lose, then they will have had their coveted Death With Honor, and the rest of us will be left alone to conclude peaceful agreements with the Russians."
Monday, November 10, 2008
Stand up for John Stagliano!
The HIV victim and successful pornographer John Stagliano is currently standing before the Supreme court to face obscenity charges for producing two mainstream films and one film trailer found to be "obscene".
Below is a link to the indictment:
http://www.xbiz.com/docs/xbiz/news/92236_Stagliano%20indictment%20as%20filed.pdf
Here's a link of his interview with the right-wing libertarian publication, Reason Magazine:
http://reason.tv/video/show/517.html
A Little Background
The 1973 Supreme Court Case Miller v. California reestablished that the First Amendment does not cover what the Supreme court has referred to (but failed to define too well) "obscenity." To be considered obscene, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, a work had to appeal to the prurient[lustful] interest as determined by "the average person, applying contemporary community standards"; it had to depict or describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way; and, taken as a whole, it had to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
(Source: http://www.reason.com/news/show/29138.html)
Below is a link to the indictment:
http://www.xbiz.com/docs/xbiz/news/92236_Stagliano%20indictment%20as%20filed.pdf
Here's a link of his interview with the right-wing libertarian publication, Reason Magazine:
http://reason.tv/video/show/517.html
A Little Background
The 1973 Supreme Court Case Miller v. California reestablished that the First Amendment does not cover what the Supreme court has referred to (but failed to define too well) "obscenity." To be considered obscene, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, a work had to appeal to the prurient[lustful] interest as determined by "the average person, applying contemporary community standards"; it had to depict or describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way; and, taken as a whole, it had to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
(Source: http://www.reason.com/news/show/29138.html)
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Academic Freedom
The other day, I watched a debate between David Horowitz and a radical professor at Reed named Steinberger on the issue of academic freedom--something which, for obvious reasons, is important to university professors, but for stranger reasons is thought to be something students should care about. The two debators went back and forth, arguing about what kind of material teachers ought to be teaching in order to make students think critically. Horowitz said the students should hear more conservative views to counterbalance liberal views; Seinberger said Liberals are smarter, so the students will be better off hearing mostly Liberal views.
The problem with the debate was that neither of them examined the assumption underlying both of their positions: that students need the institution of the school and its agents of authority, the teachers, in order to learn. The issue of the individual freedom of the student, his right to develop free from intellectual control by the school, never came up. As Max Stirner wrote, any time that the word "freedom" is brought up without explicit reference to people, the word "control" should be substituted for freedom. Political freedom is freedom of the state (over individuals); religious freedom is the freedom of religious institutions (over their subjects), freedom of conscience is the freedom of moral systems over people's intelects. Likewise, academic freedom is nothing more than the freedom of the academic institutions to discretion in determining the way in which citizens learn.
In order to be meaningful, any discussion about freedom in education should focus on the freedom of the people pursuing knowledge, and not on the freedom of institutions. Institutions, in particular the school, should be viewed as obstacles, or, more optimistically, as tools to be used for student benefit. "Academic freedom" is something I, as a student, have no reason to care about.
The problem with the debate was that neither of them examined the assumption underlying both of their positions: that students need the institution of the school and its agents of authority, the teachers, in order to learn. The issue of the individual freedom of the student, his right to develop free from intellectual control by the school, never came up. As Max Stirner wrote, any time that the word "freedom" is brought up without explicit reference to people, the word "control" should be substituted for freedom. Political freedom is freedom of the state (over individuals); religious freedom is the freedom of religious institutions (over their subjects), freedom of conscience is the freedom of moral systems over people's intelects. Likewise, academic freedom is nothing more than the freedom of the academic institutions to discretion in determining the way in which citizens learn.
In order to be meaningful, any discussion about freedom in education should focus on the freedom of the people pursuing knowledge, and not on the freedom of institutions. Institutions, in particular the school, should be viewed as obstacles, or, more optimistically, as tools to be used for student benefit. "Academic freedom" is something I, as a student, have no reason to care about.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Schools
"What is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life -- to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this -- a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one." -Herbert Spencer
Schooling is the process by which centers of authority, with their own interests in mind, mold individuals into certain forms.
The origins of universal mandatory state schooling are in the 16th century Protestant movement for government-run education. Luther, the leading figure in this movement, argued that the government ought to assume control over schools and enforce universal attendance in order to fight "a war with devil". By this, he meant the state schools could be used to purge society of demonic religious beliefs, particularly Judaism and Catholicism. In early America, Calvinist Puritans seeking to establish a Calvinist theocracy in the New World established public schools with the intention of suppressing religious dissent. Early on, Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted their supremacy over the schooling system by forbidding Quakers to establish their own schools. Later, Connecticut forbad the "New Light" evangelicals to establish evangelical schools. It is notable that the most free and tolerant colony in colonial America was Rhode Island, which had no public schooling.
Aside from enforcing religious conformity, state schools were also established for the purpose of creating cultural and linguistic conformity. In Asia and much of Central and and Eastern Europe, as well as in colonial Quebec, public schooling was instituted with the purpose of crushing the national and cultural identities of linguistic minorities or of colonized peoples, by forcing students to conform to the dominant culture of their nation or to the culture of an occupying nation.
Similarly, the early advocates of public schooling in America saw their mission as that of eliminating the cultural particularities of the numerous waves of new immigrants to the United States. Through public schooling, these reformers thought, the government could mold the various cultural and ethnic groups in the United States into "one people".
Other educational reformers, like Horace Mann, saw the mission of public schooling as that of suppressing the irrational impulses of the "mobocracy", by which he meant the popular Democratic movement of poor farmers in the 19th century, who challenged state power and American political and economic elites, and advocated economic and political decentralization. A central function of the state school, as it is run by the state, must necessarily be to keep the masses in line.
In general, proponents of universal state schooling have argued that, by creating a consensus of political and social views among the masses, state schooling will create stability and ensure the subservience of citizens to the nation-state. I will trust the word of the crusaders for public schooling, and assume that state schools are nothing more than instruments used by the government to ensure conformity and inculcate in citizens the virtue of obedience.
Unfortunately, as the British philosopher William Godwin recognized, subordinating people's intellects and consciences to the agenda of established authority has disastrous consequences for the moral and intellectual development of subjects of this authority. As the movement for state schooling accelerated in the 1800's, Godwin lamented, "Destroy us if you please; but do not endeavor, by a national education, to destroy in our understandings the discernment of justice and injustice". Meanwhile, Johann Fichte of Prussia argued that nation-states ought to spend large sums on education because, "The state which introduced universally the national education proposed by us, from the moment that a new generation of youths passed through it, would need no special army at all, but would have in them an army such as no age has yet seen".
For children, all creative progress, moral, intellectual, or otherwise, is made in spite of the attempts by educational authorities to direct students' diverse creative impulses into rigid mechanical processes. That this anti-creativity is characteristic of all centers of authority is the fundamental tenet of anarchism, and I hold this tenet to be true both because of empirical evidence and because of necessary truths about the nature of authority.
As Nietzsche pointed out, throughout history, the periods of greatest periods of creative development have been periods of political decline. I find this to be particularly true in the case of intellectual development. For example, during the English Civil war, when the power of the monarchy and the feudal lords were weakened, uneducated homeless people and soldiers developed brilliant political and theological ideas through open discussion. In doing so, they produced some of the most profound analyses of democratic theory in history, and also many anti-authoritarian theological doctrines, which involved examination of such things as the political purpose of the ideas of hell and salvation. During the political chaos of the French Revolution, pioneer analyses of the predicaments of women, gays, slaves, and Jews were developed simultaneously, and laid the groundwork for much future Western thought.
The reason that the state and other centers of authority restrict human creativity is that by their very function, permanent structures of authority are not designed to cope with the vicissitudes of the creative passions of their subjects. As Machiavelli wisely pointed out, governments are by their very nature reactionary, because their primary goal is always the maintenance and expansion of power, a goal which tends to be at odds with the progressive interests of the subjects of government, who are controlled and repressed by power-seeking institutions.
The school, which is in a sense an educational government, exhibits the goals of government as interpreted by Machiavelli. Teachers who teach counter-culture views can not free students from intellectual repression, because the source of such repression is not the attitude of the teacher, but the school itself.
It is not primarily the content of a curriculum that gives it its purpose as a tool for controlling students, but the method and the context in which the information and ideological analyses are delivered. In the school environment, the student must consciously or unconsciously mold his psychological habits to suit the demands of the permanent classroom setting and of the authority of the teacher, who operates within an academic institution not prone to continuous alterations in its fundamental structure through direct democratic means.
Because the school, as traditionally understood, suppresses intellectual creativity, the school is an obstruction to the educational process rather than an essential component of education. The student is an object of the education process, and a tool of the school, which is not only a form of government in and of itself, but also, when state-run, an organ of the national government.
In The False Principle of Our Education, the individualist anarchist Max Stirner distinguished between the "free man" and the "educated man." The latter is the type produced through schooling and the type suitable for academic life. The former can only be produced through individual intellectual effort. The free man, Stirner explained, is one who knows how to inspect and deconstruct the "wheels in his head," or the ideas and intellectual habits fostered in him by the powerful. A liberatory approach to education seeks to figure out ways in which to allow individuals to become more free, and not ways of reforming educational institutions so that they educate more efficiently.
Schooling is the process by which centers of authority, with their own interests in mind, mold individuals into certain forms.
The origins of universal mandatory state schooling are in the 16th century Protestant movement for government-run education. Luther, the leading figure in this movement, argued that the government ought to assume control over schools and enforce universal attendance in order to fight "a war with devil". By this, he meant the state schools could be used to purge society of demonic religious beliefs, particularly Judaism and Catholicism. In early America, Calvinist Puritans seeking to establish a Calvinist theocracy in the New World established public schools with the intention of suppressing religious dissent. Early on, Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted their supremacy over the schooling system by forbidding Quakers to establish their own schools. Later, Connecticut forbad the "New Light" evangelicals to establish evangelical schools. It is notable that the most free and tolerant colony in colonial America was Rhode Island, which had no public schooling.
Aside from enforcing religious conformity, state schools were also established for the purpose of creating cultural and linguistic conformity. In Asia and much of Central and and Eastern Europe, as well as in colonial Quebec, public schooling was instituted with the purpose of crushing the national and cultural identities of linguistic minorities or of colonized peoples, by forcing students to conform to the dominant culture of their nation or to the culture of an occupying nation.
Similarly, the early advocates of public schooling in America saw their mission as that of eliminating the cultural particularities of the numerous waves of new immigrants to the United States. Through public schooling, these reformers thought, the government could mold the various cultural and ethnic groups in the United States into "one people".
Other educational reformers, like Horace Mann, saw the mission of public schooling as that of suppressing the irrational impulses of the "mobocracy", by which he meant the popular Democratic movement of poor farmers in the 19th century, who challenged state power and American political and economic elites, and advocated economic and political decentralization. A central function of the state school, as it is run by the state, must necessarily be to keep the masses in line.
In general, proponents of universal state schooling have argued that, by creating a consensus of political and social views among the masses, state schooling will create stability and ensure the subservience of citizens to the nation-state. I will trust the word of the crusaders for public schooling, and assume that state schools are nothing more than instruments used by the government to ensure conformity and inculcate in citizens the virtue of obedience.
Unfortunately, as the British philosopher William Godwin recognized, subordinating people's intellects and consciences to the agenda of established authority has disastrous consequences for the moral and intellectual development of subjects of this authority. As the movement for state schooling accelerated in the 1800's, Godwin lamented, "Destroy us if you please; but do not endeavor, by a national education, to destroy in our understandings the discernment of justice and injustice". Meanwhile, Johann Fichte of Prussia argued that nation-states ought to spend large sums on education because, "The state which introduced universally the national education proposed by us, from the moment that a new generation of youths passed through it, would need no special army at all, but would have in them an army such as no age has yet seen".
For children, all creative progress, moral, intellectual, or otherwise, is made in spite of the attempts by educational authorities to direct students' diverse creative impulses into rigid mechanical processes. That this anti-creativity is characteristic of all centers of authority is the fundamental tenet of anarchism, and I hold this tenet to be true both because of empirical evidence and because of necessary truths about the nature of authority.
As Nietzsche pointed out, throughout history, the periods of greatest periods of creative development have been periods of political decline. I find this to be particularly true in the case of intellectual development. For example, during the English Civil war, when the power of the monarchy and the feudal lords were weakened, uneducated homeless people and soldiers developed brilliant political and theological ideas through open discussion. In doing so, they produced some of the most profound analyses of democratic theory in history, and also many anti-authoritarian theological doctrines, which involved examination of such things as the political purpose of the ideas of hell and salvation. During the political chaos of the French Revolution, pioneer analyses of the predicaments of women, gays, slaves, and Jews were developed simultaneously, and laid the groundwork for much future Western thought.
The reason that the state and other centers of authority restrict human creativity is that by their very function, permanent structures of authority are not designed to cope with the vicissitudes of the creative passions of their subjects. As Machiavelli wisely pointed out, governments are by their very nature reactionary, because their primary goal is always the maintenance and expansion of power, a goal which tends to be at odds with the progressive interests of the subjects of government, who are controlled and repressed by power-seeking institutions.
The school, which is in a sense an educational government, exhibits the goals of government as interpreted by Machiavelli. Teachers who teach counter-culture views can not free students from intellectual repression, because the source of such repression is not the attitude of the teacher, but the school itself.
It is not primarily the content of a curriculum that gives it its purpose as a tool for controlling students, but the method and the context in which the information and ideological analyses are delivered. In the school environment, the student must consciously or unconsciously mold his psychological habits to suit the demands of the permanent classroom setting and of the authority of the teacher, who operates within an academic institution not prone to continuous alterations in its fundamental structure through direct democratic means.
Because the school, as traditionally understood, suppresses intellectual creativity, the school is an obstruction to the educational process rather than an essential component of education. The student is an object of the education process, and a tool of the school, which is not only a form of government in and of itself, but also, when state-run, an organ of the national government.
In The False Principle of Our Education, the individualist anarchist Max Stirner distinguished between the "free man" and the "educated man." The latter is the type produced through schooling and the type suitable for academic life. The former can only be produced through individual intellectual effort. The free man, Stirner explained, is one who knows how to inspect and deconstruct the "wheels in his head," or the ideas and intellectual habits fostered in him by the powerful. A liberatory approach to education seeks to figure out ways in which to allow individuals to become more free, and not ways of reforming educational institutions so that they educate more efficiently.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
