Welcome to Freedom Democrats

Although I think "Joe the Plumber" is a joke, I nonetheless have to disagree a bit with this commentary by Doug Mataconis, echoed elsewhere, that "the constitution predated the ideas of communism and socialism," or that the "founders" were unaware of these ideas. As Roderick Long points out, correspondence between Jefferson and Adams addressed the ideas of communism vis a vis Plato's Republic. In "the Republic," the ideal political structure is more or less formed around the abolition of both private property and the private family unit.

Writes Adams to Jefferson:

I am very glad you have seriously read Plato, and still more rejoiced to find that your reflections upon him so perfectly harmonize with mine. Some thirty years ago, I took upon me the severe task of going through all his works. With the help of two Latin translations and one English and one French translation, and comparing some of the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I labored through the tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my astonishment was greater, and my disgust was shocking...

Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness, more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into brutes, yahoos, or demons, than a community of wives and property. Yet, in what are the writings of Rousseau and Hel- vetius wiser than those of Plato ? " The man who first fenced a tobacco yard, and said, ' this is mine,' ought instantly to have been put to death," says Rousseau. " The man who first pronounced the barbarous word Dieu, ought to have been immediately destroyed," says Diderot. In short, philosophers, ancient and modern, appear to me as mad as Hindoos, Mahometans, and Christians. No doubt they would all think me mad, and for any thing I know, this globe may be the Bedlam, le Bifetre of the universe.

After all, as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families. As long as marriage exists, knowledge, property, and influence will accumulate in families. Your and our equal partition of intestate estates, instead of preventing, will in time augment the evil, if it is one. The French revolutionists saw this, and were so far consistent. When they burned pedigrees and genealogical trees, they annihilated, as far as they could, marriages, knowing that marriage, among a thousand other tilings, was an infallible source of aristocracy. I repeat it, so sure as the idea and the existence of property is admitted and established in society, accumulations of it will be made, — the snowball will grow as it rolls. '

Ironically, Adam's son, John Quincy, didn't quite see eye to eye with his old man on this matter. It is well known that John Quincy Adams, along with the likes of President James Monroe, attended Roberts Owen's 1825 lectures for the communal utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana. Owens at the time had gained considerable international acclaim for his ideal social structure: essentially, mini Platonic Republics, consisting of no more than a couple of thousand of people on tracts of land of around 1000-2000 acres; the social structure characterized by the abolition of private property and communal raising of children, largely independent of the private family.

Interestingly, one of the participants in the New Harmony Society experiment, which of course, ultimately failed, was Josiah Warren, who would go on to later influence the rise of the American Individualist Anarchist movement--the original ideological source of American "libertarianism." Warren considered the failure of new Harmony the direct consequence of the "lack of individual sovereignty and private property."

But really, in the US, the debate has never been private property vs collective property. The debate has always been self-government vs Hierarchy, the Jefferson v Hamilton debate.

Writes Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours:

"We both love the people, but you love them as infants, whom you are afraid to trust without nurses, and I as adults, whom I freely leave to self-government."

It's been a rout in favor of "The Hamiltonians," of which Joe the Plumber is a member, along with the overwhelming majority in both parties...

Looks like Amazon has dropped it's click through affiliate program with all NC residents as a result of the NC legislature passing Senate Bill 202 to begin taxing all internet sales, including affiliate related referral sales. North Carolina, which has 11-12% unemployment rate and which currently faces a 4 billion dollar budget shortfall, seems to be moving toward the New York model in terms of attempting to tax anything that moves over the internet.

The NC legislature is certainly on a roll as of late, having recently enacted a State-wide smoking ban that extends to restaurants and bars. And Bev Perdue's tax and spend publicity campaign has caused her own approval numbers to plummet.

btw, NC residents can retain their Amazon affiliate business by simply signing up with an intermediary like Skimlinks.

Forty years ago today (Sunday, 28 June) a group of marginalized Americans stood up to police harassment, creating the Stonewall riots. According to the story at Wikipedia, these people were marginalized even within the gay community. The rioters didn't have any agenda or organization, they just got tired of living in fear of the cops and saw an opportunity to turn the tables.

Back then, they were surely seen as troublemakers by mainstream society. Ten years ago, the site of their resistance became a national historical landmark. Today, the resisters are guests at the White House. (Google also has a small memento on the results page if you search for "stonewall riots")

While there is still legal discrimination against gays, it has been greatly constrained. The mainstream recognition of the accomplishment on Christopher Street (site of the Stonewall Inn) largely reflects mainstream acceptance of gays. However, I like to think that this shift in attitude towards the event reflects a little more than just a recognition of the historical importance of the Stonewall Riots. There are probably other events that could be viewed as a symbol of progress on gay rights, but by recognizing Stonewall, Americans recognize that sometimes society benefits from having a few troublemakers.

The vote by the House of Representatives on Friday to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act may be a death blow to the liberaltarian movement. Or the chance for it to really take off. How can both be true?

The Republican attack machine went into overdrive to oppose the bill. By calling it cap and tax or a national energy tax they did everything possible to throw the word tax into the debate. Republican rhetoric is still the same as it was thirty years ago. For the most part, in watching the debate online and elsewhere, I was surprised with how easily the Republican were able to tap into the Tea Party anger. With each political battle, the possibility that the Tea Party movement could actually be an independent check on both parties fades. It is becoming increasingly apparent that they are the foot soldiers of the Republican Party and take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh.

For a while, I wasn't sure if the Tea Parties represented the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party that was liberated to speak out when Bush handed over the White House to Obama. If they really worried about the expansion of government power they should have spoken out about seven years earlier. At first, I could sympathize with the silencing impact that partisan peer pressure can have when your party occupies the White House. I'm not so sympathetic anymore. I don't doubt that there are some libertarians in the Tea Party movement that were opposed to Bush and continue to hold an independent streak. But I think they have been overwhelmed by the larger movement of Faux News followers that repeat whatever talking point is thrown at them. This is not a way for the Republican Party to reform itself. It is a strategy for the Republican Party to keep its base conservative white working class base angry at Democrats for the economic mess created by Bush.

I would add that the liberal blogosphere seems to have no problem in maintaining their independent streak in the face of Obama in the White House. I don't know if this is a product of personality; conservatives are more willing to defer to authority. The result, for me, is that I am even more encouraged to be a libertarian Democrat because I can see that even in power, the Democratic Party will continue to have a diverse group of competing factions. The GOP does not tolerate dissent, even out of power. There is no appealing faction in the Republican Party I could ally with.

The reason the rise of the Republican Tea Party movement could be a death blow to the "libertarian" movement is explained by Brink Lindsey's earlier concerns about the negative associations of the Tea Party movement:

Conservatism today has degenerated into a species of especially unattractive populism, pandering to the pro-torture-and-wiretapping, anti-gay-and-Mexican prejudices of a dwindling, increasingly sectarian, increasingly regional “base.” . . . I worry that good free-market ideas are going to get tainted by association with an increasingly brutish identity politics for angry white guys and the women who love them.

Consider the contrast. The House passed a bill to begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They were opposed by a conservative movement that continues to deny the science behind global warming. The House's bill creates a free market solution to reducing emissions, much like how the first President Bush responded to the problem of sulfur dioxide and acid rain. Opponents claimed that this was either fascism, socialism, or communism, or maybe all three. The Congressional Budget Office, the same institution that the Republicans are using for their claims that Kennedy's health care bill will bankrupt the nation, estimated a rather low cost per household once the bill is implemented by 2020. So the conservatives had to cook up their own numbers with almost no basis in reality.

From a left libertarian perspective, this is generally a good bill. I have concerns that in the early years, too many emission allowances are just given away for free. But over time this is phased out and the system moves to over 70% of the allowances being auctioned off and used to fund tax credits. It's about as close to a citizen's dividend bill as I could ask for in today's political climate. I do not sympathize with the conservatives ranting about how this will ruin America.

Down the road, I do have serious concerns about health care and what some Democrats are proposing. I continue to oppose an individual mandate and a Massachusetts model that allows for some board to decide if something qualifies as insurance or not. But I think that conservatives marginalized themselves during this fight over the energy bill with the level of discourse, or the lack thereof, they brought to the debate. And unlike the energy bill, the Republicans in the Senate are not needed for health care reform because it can be pushed through under reconciliation. In the one major area where Democrats could have benefited from a constructive dialogue, the Republicans turned a cold shoulder. Which makes it less likely they'll want to work with Republicans on health care. Thanks a lot GOP.

Libertarians suffer when good free market policies are associated with the Republican Party and its Tea Party following. My hope is that the continued demagougery of the right will scare away more rational libertarians. I don't have much in the way of evidence for this, but it's my hope.

Regarding this post post: Tank Man and Tank Commander over at Lawyers, Gun$, and Money. Noting it's post date, I imagine the subsequent event of Neda being gunned down by Iranian statist thugs makes the point that enforcers willing to shoot can de-legitimize regimes, but I also suspect that it also served to reinforce in Robert Farley's own mind why he pays taxes.

The gist of Farley's post addresses the "Hobbesian State of Nature" problem in the context of the "modern nation state as an extremely efficient killing machine." At issue is the advancement of information technology coterminous with this evolution of the State that periodically exposes the underlying brutal core of State legitimacy to a global audience. The willingness of enforcers to shoot lies at the core of the legitimacy any State, "liberal" or authoritarian. However, the very act of shooting itself, if done in the open, and not intra muros, can serve as a de-legitimizing action. Hence, the Hobbesian Catch-22.

Farley nonetheless accepts the brutal nature of the State, indeed embraces it, because he finds the coercive State necessary to solve the "State of Nature" problem and the "Collective Action" problem.

The modern nation-state is nevertheless tolerable because it substantially reduces private coercion (replacing it with less arbitrary public coercion), creates a relatively safe space in which commerce and the production of wealth can be undertaken, provides regulation necessary for the conduct of a modern (socialist or capitalist) economy, provides social services, and because it creates a sense of identity and political efficacy. Its murderous tendencies notwithstanding, I'd rather live in a nation-state than not, and would prefer a more complete and capable state to the rump that libertarians envision.

An interesting thing about those who ascribe to the "Hobbesian State of Nature" problem is that they tend to nonetheless dismiss Hobbes solution to the problem, namely the requirement of an absolute Leviathan. Hobbes rejected the idea that a constitutional government, or politics itself, resolved this problem. Frankly, if humans were actually so arbitrarily uncooperative, Hobbes would have a point. Constitutions and separation of powers would hardly constrain a naturally brutish people.

The Hobbesian State of Nature is in no small part rooted in biblical concepts of original sin and a fallen human race. We really should be progressing beyond such nonsense at this point in terms of our understanding of the human evolutionary dynamic. It should be clear that a human race consisting of psychopaths is not evolutionary stable. The ability to abstract cooperation, in the end, IMHO, lies at the heart of the explanation of human evolution. Authoritarian coercion, no doubt, can produce collective action and engender cooperation. However, given the ability of humans to reason abstractly, there may be a point of contention that violent coercion is the only way to ensure cooperation. The likes of Farley are quick to accept the "murderous tendencies" of the State, just as long, I suppose, they don't have to bear the brunt of such tendencies. If the gun turns against them, i imagine they might have a different opinion on the matter. If Farley found himself in the role of the "tank Man," I suspect he would suddenly have a higher opinion of the "libertarians."

H/T to TGGP for pointing at this post.

From the Statement from the President on Iran

The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

Too bad there isn't a State on the face of the earth which actually recognizes such rights(in the negative sense)...

Here's how the US "stands" with those who actually want to exercise such rights in conjunction. You will be subject to a DHS threat assessment, possibly penetrated by any number of three-letter acronym federal police organs, surrounded by a highly militarized security force, and will likely be cordoned off into a "free speech zone" miles away from the actual event. Eventually, some clever bureaucrat, in these tough fiscal times, is going to come up with the idea to sell corporate sponsorships for these "zones." We await the day of The NexTel Free Speech zone...

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.

No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

VDare/WND/Taki Columnist Ilana Mercer is on a quarry of sorts to discredit anarchist strains within the libertarian movement. Mercer, who calls herself a "paleolibertarian," advocates a Ron Paul-Geert Wilders type of fusionism, meaning cultural purity("We come from Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. That makes our civilization special, and certainly worth preserving"), restricted, militarized borders, and strong US support of Israel against the Palestinians, whom she considers more or less to be "savages."

Her latest screed against the "anarchists" involves a recent column by Kent McManigal at The Examiner. Mercer cites McManigal's article as an example of the type of "idiocratic, shock jockery" that threatens the legitimacy of the libertarian movement proper. Actually, McManigal has maintained a blog for a number of years that I have read from time to time. He's a solid libertarian thinker. He's no "shock jock," nor is he trying to be the Howard Stern of the libertarian movement. As a free thinker, and in a moment of self-admitted levity, McManigal posed a question of the ethicality of "cannibalism" in terms of libertarian justice. Because libertarian justice is so "thin," these types of questions often serve as an intellectual sport of sorts for free thinking libertarians.

Here's my "consistent" answer from an anarchist perspective. Obviously, homicidal cannibalism violates a "thin" NAP. Necro-cannibalism may not violate a "thin" NAP, but if we employ a "thicker" context for NAP, as we should in this case, it's not difficult to establish that Necro-cannibalism would largely be in violation. My methodology for "thickness" relies on Hayekian social theory. Human burial and "respect for the dead" dates back to 130,000 years ago. Although there have been outliers in terms of cultural acceptance of cannibalism, human social institutions and social customs for the most part have evolved to reinforce the human evolutionary trait of "respect or the dead." Anthropophagy is almost universally a taboo practice, one that finds little social acceptance. Taboo means in this instance implies that implicit contracts, if not explicit ones, would be violated by one engaging in such behavior. The social framework simply wouldn't support it. Frankly, Necro-cannibalism usually only rears it's head in survivalist situations. The movie, "Alive," documented how members of the Uruguayan Rugby team, after crashing in the Andes, made voluntary contracts with one another to have their flesh eaten if they died during the course of their 72 day stranding. Contextually, in such a case, there would be no violation of NAP, but such is really an example of a rare exception.

Since the United States is not under any threat of invasion by Necro-cannibalistic hordes, the bogeyman of cannibalism is an utter red herring. However, it's surprising how often the knee-jerk specter of cannibalism is thrown up against libertarian social theory.

The fact is that Ilana Mercer's conception of libertarianism is inconsistent, despite her claims to the contrary. Putting forth Ron Paul as the champion-bearer of consistent libertarianism is a tenuous claim. The fact is that Paul is Mr. Strict Constitutionalist, Secure-the borders guy when talking to conservatives, but is a libertarian anarchist when in the company of knowledgeable libertarians. Paul, as a follower of the Rothbard-rockwell wing of the Austrian School, is likely an anarcho-capitalist at heart. He probably leans toward the Hoppean version of it. Hoppe's property rights argument against the free flow of labor can be turned into a Reductio ad absurdum argument against the free flow of capital itself.

Arguments that a welfare state for labor necessitates a police State enforcement against the free flow of labor itself sort of implies similarly that a welfare state for corporations necessitates the need for a police state enforcement against the free flow of capital. Hmmmnnnn.....

Mercer's support of Israel as a cultural imperative sounds suspiciously like the Neocons who advocated coercive, western democracy in the Middle east for a primary reason of recognition of Israel. I'm not for any violence, systemic or otherwise, against the the jewish people, but the fact that the jews suffered great, systemic historical violence at the hands of christian europe doesn't give them the right to return the favor to the Palestinians.

Kent McManigal over Ilana Mercer...

221 Democrats voted for the 100 billion dollar war supplemental, 170 Republicans against. So that's the change apparently, Repubs and Dems merely changing uniforms. Score is still the same though...

Oh yeah, for cover, President XYZ appears on a friendly network to serve up some red meat about some other media boogeyman(just substitute Fox news for the NY Times). Water carrier on said friendly network property later that night wonders if Repub hypocrisy on "supporting the troops" can be used as a talking point. I've seen this rerun before...

That's all. Feel free to return to the regularly scheduled broadcast of the Letterman-Palin reality show...lol