We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The little things Perhaps it is the little things that gradually turn people against the priggish, curtain twitching statists who cannot bare the idea of people doing as they please.
People generally shrug wearily at the annoying impositions and regulations that grow by the year but that is why it is important that folks like us and journalists like Tom Utley let it be known that it is not alright that these things happen. We also need to convince people that those who enforce and apologise for the endless regulations are not alright either, they are psychologically twisted by compulsions to impose their will on others. Perhaps it will be when enough of society see the idea of prohibiting people from doing peaceably doing consensual things as the psychologically disordered behaviour that it is will real progress be possible.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
But it is that kind of rhetoric that ensures people simply won’t listen to you.
EG
Well of course you would think that, Euan. I would not expect (or care) that people like you will not listen because I am talking about people like you.
So it is that, nibble by nibble, our freedoms are eaten away, life becomes that little bit less enjoyable and politicians assume responsibility for aspects of our lives that should have absolutely nothing to do with them.
Exactly.
Hi Euan!
I think the process is called death by a thousand cuts.
It’s perfectly in order to complain about the excessive impositions of regulation, but characterising the would-be regulators as mentally diseased is not calculated to encourage people to take you seriously.
EG
…or ‘boiling the frog’?
The desire to micro manage every aspect of a complete stranger’s life is not just a sign, it is the very definition of megalomania. That is a fundemental personality disorder or, to put it into simple terms, a mental disease. What euphemism would you prefer Euan?
Mentally diseased might seem a bit harsh, I’ll agree with that. Having said all of which, one has to remember that one of the biggest mass addictions in our society, arguably worse than tobacco, booze or drugs, is the addiction to power over other people, to bossing them around. The drug of power is more dangerous than crack.
Only if you view the world through the polarising lens of ideological absolutism.
EG
I think being an argumentative git with delusions of absolute wisdom is a mental disease too.
What is “absolutist” about taking a dim view of the political desire to regulate every tiny aspect of our existence, Euan?
Note that requiring a separate seat for each child is also an incentive to get one of those big evil cars.
I would be interested to know what sort of healthy mind believes it can understand the life of any other person enough to make informed decisions on that person’s behalf. Who is arrogant enough to believe their own decisions are so perfect that others must be compelled to follow the same decisions in living their own lives?
I was referring to the characterisation of a regulatory mindset as mental illness.
EG
Thanks Perry,
I have always wondered why so many people wanted to do things for other people’s “own good”. I always assumed that they were misguided. That never really explained it enough for me. A mental illness. Hmm… That plays well with me. But, of course, it’s lacking something. It needs a name. “Blunkett’s syndrome by proxy” or something, preferably something better.
Once upon a time, there was a country which mobilised the people to understand political theory. So assiduously did they spread their theory that soon enough it became orthodoxy, and people seemed no longer to believe the lies and hypocrisy that underpinned the ancien regime, but seemed to give themselves wholly to the new orthodoxy.
People who opposed the orthodoxy were clearly disturbed. After all, it was proven logically that the orthodox politics and morality were correct, were in fact the only possible correct answers. It seemed only natural that those who questioned should be considered worthy of treatment, and soon enough they were assessed and found to be mentally ill. Naturally, for public safety and to stop their noxious ideas spreading, they had to be confined to asylums, as is only right and proper for the mentally diseased.
You know what country I’m talking about.
Don’t go down the road of trying to denigrate as mentally ill those who happen to disagree with you, for we all know what happens then.
EG
Of course it is a mental disease – a regulatory mindset is a symptom of ‘delusional superiority’, which is definitely a mental disorder.
Socialists seem particularly prone to it, as do most poorly educated Britons…as exemplified by traffic wardens, at the lowest level, and by Prime ministers at the highest level…(Blair and Major, being two excellent examples).
Euan,
Your point is well made, but I’m afraid you won’t get much of a hearing. You would have thought that pleading for tolerance for those who disagree with an orthodoxy (which on Samizdata is that of Libertarianism, often quite radically expressed) would play well here.
But it doesn’t, because zealots for any cause hate middle-grounders even more than they hate the notional opposition.
I think Euan is right – describing the behaviour as a sickness is missing the point.
This behaviour is not congenital, or a disease, it is learned, it is a choice.
I think “vicious” or “evil” describes it better.
Don’t go down the road of trying to denigrate as mentally ill those who happen to disagree with you, for we all know what happens then.
And it is denigrating the genuinely mentally ill, too, to class evil ideas as disease.
The other thing about considering opposition as a mental disease is that many diseases can be cured. This of course requires “treatment centres.”
Such is the way by which even the most well-meaning ideology when in a position of influence can so easily descend into barbarism and brutality. If you think you can prove that you are right, you by definition think you can prove those who disagree are wrong, and the temptation inevitably exists to re-educate those benighted souls in error.
EG
I too greatly enjoyed Tom Utley’s column in the Telegraph today. It made me think along the lines of ridiculous aspects of state control.
As an example, what if it was suggested that eating bananas supported terrorism, and should therefore be made illegal. If this was suggested, what would happen?
Would the whole world rise up against the banning of bananas?
No they would not. The vast majority of the world would view it as a silly idea that would go away.
What then happens with an idea that is less barmy, which does some good, but for which the good done is very small? This is especially when compared with the imposition on the majority of the population, who do not suffer from the small bad effect of not doing the good thing, but are only slightly and rarely inconvenienced by having to do the good thing (or abstain from the bad thing).
Most people would not climb onto their horse and ride to their MP (or whoever), nor write to the Times or Telegraph. They all have more important things to do. They will ignore the issue, or assume that its enforcement will be totally impractical and so will fade away with time.
There may well be a problem currently, with an excess of trivial suggestions for state control of the people. However, I feel that there are other problems associated with this.
First taxpayers’ money is wasted, as is the time of Government staff, police, courts, etc. More worthwhile things are not done, which is perhaps an even bigger “crime”.
Next, what is Parliament doing, wasting its time on this stuff. Surely Parliament should be doing important things, like making important laws and holding the executive to account. … … Ah! Surely not?
Best regards
Euan has a point here. The tendency to impose one’s vision upon everybody else is in fact widespread among the population. You just have to ask any pedestrian what his opinion is on X subject, and sooner or later he will tell you that “the government should do something about it.” It shows you that Nietzsche was right all along.
However, that tendency is not a mental illness. Please don’t dignify that conduct by just labelling it a mental disorder. If it is a mental disorder, then the individual in question is not really responsible for it, but his “illness” is. That is simply not the case.
The tendency to impose one’s view of the world upon others is not a disease, it is plain evil.
It’s plain human nature, neither evil nor good – it’s just the way people are.
EG
Yep! I think you are absolutely correct…..this is a mental disease.
Samizdata folk are not really interested in action, they just want to feel morally and mentally superior to the common run of humanity. That’s why they hurl Soviet-style smears and insults, or boast that some dissident has been banned from their ‘private property’.
They clothe themselves in the little brief authority of their bandwidth and accuse millions of others of being authoritarian lunatics or the dupes thereof. And then they wonder why the world doesn’t fall in gratitude at their feet.
Ayn Rand was much the same, an apostle of freedom who ran a private tyranny of cultists.
Libertarianism, the autism of politics.
Nigel Sedgwick writes,
Next, what is Parliament doing, wasting its time on this stuff. Surely Parliament should be doing important things, like making important laws and holding the executive to account.
Sad to say, many people think that this is what parliament is for, and worry if it is not actively doing something about everything they personally see as a problem. As I have remarked before on Samizdata, parliament, even under its new unversally guillotined procedure, simply cannot produce law and regulation fast enough to satisfy the demand from departments, quangos and pressure groups, and this is a probable motive for the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
You could see this as a cognate of Powell’s Law. The demand for regulation paid for by someone else is, in effect, infinite.
Andrew McGuinness writes
“I think Euan is right – describing the behaviour as a sickness is missing the point.
This behaviour is not congenital, or a disease, it is learned, it is a choice.”
You are both wrong. Go and read something by B.F. Skinner, or any of his disciples – even Aaron Beck, if you really must.
Perry de Havilland’s description is perfectly reasonable.
Tidiness is a common human trait – carried to extremes, reinforced by a variety of mechanisms, it becomes OCD.
Societies can have widespread mental illnesses and this one pretty certainly has.
Samizdata folk are not really interested in action, they just want to feel morally and mentally superior to the common run of humanity. That’s why they hurl Soviet-style smears and insults, or boast that some dissident has been banned from their ‘private property’.
You sound very bitter, what’s the matter, love?
Memetics. Yeah, you heard me right. Dawkins might be an hectoring git at times, but sometimes he hits the bull. If you believe the problems of the world (from climate change to childhood obesity) are something that the government should do something about – i.e. pass laws about, and you teach your kids this as the gospel truth then regulation becomes self-perpetuating. Ah, you ask, “where’s the percentage for these people?” Simple, they get cushy jobs working for the government.
The English are the bossiest people in the world. They are never happy unless they are regulating their fellow citizens. No one enforces regulations with such verve as the English. I wonder why this is. One doesn’t encounter this enthusiasm for bossing one’s fellow man around in other parts of the world (although I do have a feeling, for some reason, that Scandinavia might be similar).
Verity,
I think you’ve got the cart and horse the wrong way round. It isn’t that the English are bossy, it’s that we’re compliant. That’s why we properly implement various EU regulations while our French chums pass the laws and then ignore them as they see fit.
What would Heterodox have as do as a form of action? Take to the streets in impose our will by sheer force?
The most powerful movements that exist in the world are those that change society from the bottom up, not those that impose change from the top.
For my part, every day, I talk to collegues, friends and sometimes even strangers and explain why I have the beliefs I do.
I get involved in issues locally where I can. I suspect many of us here do the same. And I am winning converts, slowly but surely. Scarcely a week goes by when I do not get at least a serious reconsideration from someone on the validity of what is currently accepted orthodoxy.
This is action by any definition of the word you choose. And yet, because I choose not to shout it from the rooftops I am a mere Demagogue with a superiority complex. A sweeping statement indeed. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts, otherwise attack the person.
The world will not change overnight. Short of a huge poltical unheaval, which will have much unintended and undesirable fallout, the liberties we have lost as a society will be regained in the very same way they were lost, a single little step at a time.
I would rather change the stance of 100 people who vote than change 1 politician. It is the difference between the long and the short game.
Earl.
I’d argue that all transcendental beliefs are rooted in a mild form of non-organic mental disease. The problem really is even mild superstitions, once melded with the incredible power of the State is damaging. Each individual is welcome to whatever logical disengagements they can muster in the conduct of their own lives. I’ve always felt that there is too much to life to examine with the exactness of the scientific method, so we have to take some things nearly unexamined. But I certainly resist turning my gut notions into public policy. I’d ask that others do the same.
Unfortunately the masses ARE superstitious, by and large, and while there is no universal agreement about which black cats are the ones to be avoided, the grinding give and take between various forms of superstition have outputted the leviathans we exist under today. Illogic has become rooted public policy.
I guess it never has been really ever very different. I guess what peeves me the most is the New Order sweeps in and truly believes THEY are the purveyors of progress when they are merely ushering in a different shade of the Dark Age.
In the immortal words of Pete Townshend – “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”
Don’t feed the troll.
Maybe, but my personal vote goes for the Germans. You simply would not believe the kinds of trivial, harmless things they are not allowed to do. Briefly touching the outside of the bike lane with your front tire regularly occasions shrieks of condemnation from old women waiting for the bus. It must be seen to be believed.
Euan Gray takes exception to characterising statists and collectivists as mentally ill.
I pause only to remark that characterising their opponents as mentally ill/downright evil has yielded considerable dividends for the Left.
Personally I don’t view it as a tactic so much as an outright truth. But we can agree to differ on that. The point is, whatever the intention of thus characterising your opponents, politically it works.
No, I take exception to labelling anyone as mentally ill simply because they have a differing opinion on something. I don’t care what that opinion may be.
EG
Well I think you rather finesse the point made by P de H.
He is more than capable of defending himself. However it seems to me that he was not labelling anyone as mentally ill because they disagreed with him, so much as he identified a pathology specific to the statist mentality: the desire/need to impose your will on others. A Napoleon complex, if you will, and the greatest single cause of societal atomisation. Now, a society which is atomised is ipso facto a very ill society.
Euan,
I disagree with David Icke’s opinion that the world is being run by a millenia-old cabal of 10-foot tall lizards with Jewish names who like to drink the blood of blond-haired, blue-eyed children.
What is your opinion of his views and sanity?
I should add that I view statists as evil, rather than ill – their moral deficiency in wishing to impose their views on others is (imo) similar to the desire to steal, rape and murder – but I don’t believe anyone here is simply labelling anyone they disagree with as insane; rather, they view statists as insane, which is why they disagree with them.
I’m with Thomas Szasz; there is no such thing as mental illness.
Nah, I only think the statists are stupid. Not mentally diseased. Unless you regard stupidity as a mental disease. To some extent, that’s true as it may be acquired through inadequate education or just plain bad luck through the genetic draw. BF Skinner, behaviorism, Mendel, and all that.
Some people are born stupid, they can’t help themselves. Some have the potential to be more than stupid, but never do so because they never had the opportunity to realise that potential, so they end up stupid as well. Are they to be faulted for being what they are?
The best cure for stupidity is education, though the next question would be: ‘What kind of education?’ And education is hardly a 100% cure. Just witness all the highly educated figures in academia on the left.
Come to think of it, the fact that even educated, supposedly very smart people can be statists tells me that something might be wrong with our definition of stupidity… or Perry could be right.
TWG
Perry asserts that statists are “psychologically twisted.” I disagree with this. I disagree not because he is attaching the label to a specific group, but because I think as a general principle that it is wrong to label people mentally ill just because you happen not to agree with them. I wouldn’t care if it was Perry saying it about statists or statists saying it about Perry. As a general principle, I think it is wrong. There’s no finessing there.
And the benighted century of ideology has shown us what happens when that sort of mindset gains power – dissenters condemned to mental hospitals, re-education camps for those who can’t see the logically proven truth, and so on. It’s not a road anyone should be going down.
EG
I have a ten foot tall lizard with a Jewish name. I call him “Dave”. He’s a sweet pet and very relaxing to stroke.
And no, not stroke in that way.
I’m glad someone mentioned the Ickester. He is absolutely bonkers in the nut. Look at his website, he’s finger-painting-the-walls-in-his-own-feces mental. He’s managed (hats off to him for it) to suture all the madcap conspiracy theories of the last thousand years into on (in)coherent whole. But what do you expect of a mediocre goalie with a turquoise fetish.
David Icke come to save the world. He saved fuck all for Coventry City.
Good ol’ Euan. Of Perry’s statement that statist control freaks are “psychologically twisted” he writes:
but apparently thinks that people are keen to listen to him when he says:
That sounds very much to me like calling Perry a closet nazi. But I guess the key here is that if you do not clearly say what you mean (as Perry did) but dress it up in fancy words instead you get a free pass?
Whatever.
It amazes me that some people still respond Euan Gray’s posts. Why? He offers nothing but circular drivel, and when he realises he’s trapped, he shifts his position ever so slightly.
I don’t think for-their-own-good statism is so much a mental disease as plain old vanity. It is a failing, a terrible
failing. It should not be rewarded with votes.
I may agree with the general ideology of Samizdata, but EG’s been chewing you jokers up and spitting you out recently.
– Josh
A great American liberty-lover is dead:
http://tinyurl.com/m4cvb
But you won’t mind too much, because he opposed the Iraq War.
“But it is that kind of rhetoric that ensures people simply won’t listen to you.”
The fact that these people will not listen to start with is part of the psychosis,they know best,from the Dome to ID cards,it is no use telling them,their minds are made up,do not try to confuse the issue with facts or a contrary point of view.
Nice smear, but it doesn’t work.
For the record, I may disagree – sometimes quite strongly – with many of Perry’s suggestions, but I am absolutely convinced that he is genuinely and sincerely committed to the idea of maximising the individual liberties of all people, and I applaud him for it. I don’t for a moment think he’s a Nazi, closet or otherwise. He even extends to me thus far the liberty of commenting on this blog, which isn’t exactly a terribly Nazi-esque thing to do.
That, of course, doesn’t mean I think he’s right about everything.
Hmm. You’d deny these things happened? You’d deny they happened in regimes driven by messianic ideologies? You’d deny that ideology which pretends it can prove the truth sometimes winds up, however much it wasn’t intended to, dumping people in asylums simply for having the temerity to disagree with the logically proven “truth” of the ideologues? All those things happened, and they all happened in ideologically-driven states.
EG
Joshua: Just love your German cyclist story. They don’t live in England & have their own way of doing things which, for the most part, suits them just fine because that is the way they have chosen.
A few years ago I had a slight altercation with a very well-known academic & prolific book-reviewer whose German experience was to have lived for a while in Berlin-Kreuzberg, (well!) In a press article he disparaged the Germans for waiting (at the red light) at a pedestrian crossing when there was no traffic in sight. In true Brit fashion he had dashed across shouting “Verpisst Dich” (sic)….”Euch” might have been better for this man-of-letters…..at the murmering burghers. His vast experience was unable to take in that very, very few Germans will cross a red-lighted pedestrian crossing if there are CHILDREN in the group.
But then, that’s academe English style, is it not?
Euan,
No comment on David Icke’s views and sanity?
It is in the nature of human beings that some are instigators and some are followers. Just watch children in a playground and you will see the ones who are learning that they can influence/control/manipulate others. You see the whole range of personalities, the assertive, the docile etc etc. Grown up human relationships are no different except in the way we all learn to justify/explain our actions.
It may well be that the only way to ensure a base level of freedoms is to have a written constitution that is impossible for politicians to alter without at very large majority of the voting public saying it is ok.
The problem is that the political system we have at the present allows the bossy and egotistical to do practically anything they feel like because it is almost impossible for there to be an effective opposition.
I do not think that statists are mentally ill, neither do I think they are stupid, far from it.
Idiotic? yes. Vain? yes. Pompous and sanctimonious? yes. Disingenuous? Absolutely!
I’ll support Euan here.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t really matter if you think someone is mentally insane for the ideas that they put forward.
What matters is that you can show why their ideas are wrong.
Describing someone as insane falls into the same stupid name calling as calling Blair “Bliar” or Microsoft as Micro$oft. By doing so, you are doing nothing but preaching to the converted.
If we actually want a more libertarian world, we won’t get there by writing about the insanity of people. We have to go out and take the arguments to people.
I assumed it wasn’t a serious point. However, if you insist:
Icke might be charitably described as eccentric. As far as I’m aware, though, he is a harmless eccentric. He appears to think Prince Philip is a 10 foot tall Jewish Freemason shapeshifting lizard who drinks the blood of babies. At the risk of committing lese majeste, I say let him carry on – the biggest risk to public safety he appears to represent is that of causing sore sides from excessive laughter. As far as his views are concerned, then like everyone else he has the right to them and like everyone else as long as he causes no actual harm he’s allowed to voice them.
Whether he’s insane or not I am not qualified to judge, but he certainly doesn’t seem to be culpably mad. Unless he posed a real threat to people, possibly by trying to drive a garlic-impregnated stake through their reptilian hearts (or, for the humour impaired, by inciting others to do the same), I can’t see any justification for locking him up.
Having said that, I don’t see the relevance of the Turquoise One to the concept of declaring political opponents mentally ill.
EG
Matt, I will mourn Harry Browne because I am a great fan of his book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
And I very much doubt that HB had a lot of time for bunk like “collective genetic interests” or such blather.
I think it’s better to say “you can show why *you think* their ideas are wrong.” They can, after all, show you why they think your ideas are wrong, and just as yuo won’t necessarily accept their logic, so they won’t necessarily accept yours. Slanging matches about who can *prove* which ideas are right don’t get us anywhere.
Apologies if you had that qualification in mind.
EG
The problem is that the political system we have at the present allows the bossy and egotistical to do practically anything they feel like because it is almost impossible for there to be an effective opposition.
Precisely the problem, they do not discuss or debate – they just bully their way through. The plea to discuss only comes when the boot is on the other foot, and it their ideas that are derided and ignored.
Discussion with the enemy never won a war…
It’s not about their beliefs, Euan. Blair and his beggars’ army of failed barristers, over-promoted social workers and buttinskis-without-portfolio are welcome to believe anything they like. No, the problem is that they act on their beliefs to the detriment and inconvenience of those who don’t share them.
I think you’ll find that Perry’s characterisation of this sort of behavioural pattern as a mental illness is entirely consistent with the DSM criteria(Link) for diagnosing a personality disorder. (You’ll note that cognition is one of those criteria; IOW clinicians working from DSM are entirely prepared to “label people mentally ill” on the grounds of disagreement).
Perhaps “Controlling Personality Disorder” would be a good name for this tragic condition that Perry has identified. I imagine the final DSM definition will also capture other kinds of controlling personalities, such as abusive spouses and possibly sadists.
Joshua: Incidentally, many German river banks have cyclist/pedestrian tracks where both species, for the most part, happily coexist. That said, IMHO, cyclists are, tax free, the most blatant & irresponsible offenders against good behaviour in traffic. Ecofriendliness is the excuse for outrageous boorishness.
By the way. in the interests of better traffic flow, it is permissable in most German cities to park your car with two wheels on the pavement, with the obvious proviso that there is sufficient space (offenders are fined) for pedestrians. Try that one in the Septic Isle.
As for the current thread, I object very strongly to being “regulated”, especially by those who (as in Brussels) have never been elected……..and even if! Each of us has an opinion but, let it be said, only a fool will not revise his opinion in the light of better information.
EG: PUH-lease no quibbles about the meaning of “better”.
No, xj, it isn’t at all consistent. That’s because psychiatric assessment of cognitive ability is carried out to more-or-less-objective clinical standards by trained professionals, whereas the categorisation of a political opponent as mentally ill is entirely subjective and carried out by people committed to a specific narrow ideology.
It’s really the same thing as declaring an inconvenient person to be a witch or heretic, as was done in earlier times – they don’t agree with you, you can prove you’re right, therefore they are insane. It’s certainly no more compelling.
EG
Perhaps “Controlling Personality Disorder” would be a good name for this tragic condition that Perry has identified.
I might well suit the authors of the DSM schemata, who seem intent on psychopathologising every quirk of human life. (It isn’t completely one-way, though, they famously began to phase out homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, and nowadays it is seldom regarded as an illness by mainstream psychiatrists in the west.)
permanent expat-
I have no quarrels with German culture being what it is – it has many admirable qualities (though it is nothing for me personally).
I was merely pointing out that they are bossy – at least in Wuerzburg (which is where I lived). There didn’t seem to be a problem with pedestrians walking in the bike lane, incidentally – no one ever yelled at me for doing that. But they certainly did for even minor violations of the sacred white line when I was on a bicycle. It wasn’t just this – they seem to generally enjoy yelling at people for minor violations of public order rules. I saw many minor traffic violations end in yelling (though never in fist fights, as was frequently the case in South Korea – which has no traffic laws that I am aware of…). This being the first foreign country I had ever lived in, and being from North Carolina (which is about as nearly opposite on this issue as it gets), it took a bit of getting used to! 🙂
Oh, but I think you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have declined to comment on his sanity.
I have no hesitation in saying that I think Icke is barking mad. It is not because I disagree with him, but because he appears to be insane.
And I’m not proposing to lock him up, either.
Harry Browne will be sadly missed. He never told us anything new; he simply reminded us of truths we had forgotten. A small tragedy is that he neglected to follow his own advice against joining groups. His association with the American Libertarian Party was a disaster. “How I found Freedom……”, though not too well written, should still be required reading for those who really believe in personal freedom.
Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, hmm? Nice try, but that one didn’t work either.
I think any reasonable person would have seen the question of Icke as nothing more than light relief in a thread discussing the characterisation of *political opponents* as mentally ill. There’s nothing sinister or evasive about not commenting on what appears to be a comic interlude.
EG
Showing someone why you think your ideas are right is the same thing as attempting to prove it to them. Anything less is either an appeal to emotion or authority. You are right that the two people in the conversation may not accept the other’s logical conclusions, but logical standards themselves are the same for all humans. This is why logic is really the only acceptable standard for public discourse in most cases. (A possible exception would be if two people shared exactly the same religious beliefs – but that is rare, even in theocratic societies.)
Joshua: Lovely city Würzburg……….
………..and on one of your points, as I’m sure you experienced, even Germans will complain about themselves in that every German is his own policeman. Yes, it’s comic……….even to Germans;-))
Or premises & axioms. Of course logic is logic for all people, but it doesn’t work if there’s fundamental disagreement on the validity of the starting assumptions.
EG
Is EG a spoof?
Is EG a spoof, permanent expat? Are you serious? He’s either a spoof or tragic.
Tim Almond says: “it doesn’t really matter if you think someone is mentally insane”. What if you think they’re insane, but not mentally? Is the tautology redundant?
EG is not a spoof, mut he should be declared mentally inane.
Maybe it’s bad form to try to lead the thread back toward the specific topic, but …
In California, at least, there have been similar regulations for baby seats, booster seats, etc. for some years. When this legislation (or DMV regulation) was being proposed, I suggested that the government’s role ought to be limited to advertising the test data and accident statistics (from NHTSA, the federal highway safety agency). The responses were generally of the form “well, that’s fine for *you*. You read stuff, you can do the math, you can make up your own mind to do the Right Thing. But what about the great unwashed masses? Don’t you agree they need to be *told* what to do?”
Er……………yes; get washed.
permanent expat – V good!
xj writes:
“I think you’ll find that Perry’s characterisation of this sort of behavioural pattern as a mental illness is entirely consistent with the DSM criteria(Link) for diagnosing a personality disorder.
You’re thinking along entirely the right lines, xj. DSM is a work in progress and it’s right that it should be.
There’s always room for debate as to where what we regard as normal human behaviour ends and a personality disorder begins. It’s a ragabag diagnosis, certainly – but that doesn’t mean it is without use.
There are people around one would regard as quite seriously ‘disturbed’ yet who can’t be classified in any other way – politicians certainly not excepted.
I quite like your ‘controlling personality disorder’, by the way. It seems to cover the subject rather nicely. It would be good to see society evolving the concept as way of weeeding-out the dangerous personalities who end-up becoming dictators. Or even prime ministers – where there is a distinction to be made.
There is one significant component of this syndrome,the ideas enforced never apply to the enforcers,a good example comprehensive education,perfect for the great unwashed,not for the Bossy Tendency.
Am I just getting paranoid or does anyone else notice the benign Stasi tactics of our overseers? No sooner does the government anounce a new initiative to save money than the BBC turns out some ready made documentary to get the public all indignant. Witness the recent initiatives against benefit fraud and now tax dodging. They then assault us with adverts to encourage us to become Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or IMs (unofficial collaborators) by snitching on those who we think are screwing the system. I know our governors may have good intentions but they should perhaps bear in mind what the proverbial
was paved with.
A little clarification for the spoofs above:
Unlike the busybody lefty statists Perry referred to as “mentally ill”, Libertarians do NOT support Soviet-style legal sanction against those with whom we disagree. That is the habit of busybody lefty statists.
We’ll argue, resist, ridicule, and insult freely, but we will NOT advocate or support anti free speech laws. Libertarians want to revoke idiotic legislation like “hate crime” laws, not pass more to save the “feelings” of every infantile twit who gets “offended” by disagreement or disapproval.
Implying totalitarian intent by Libertarians is a blatant example of projection.
BTW, I vote for “evil” and “stupid” to describe lefty statists.
F
What the righteous Dissident Frogman said, and double it!
Nigel Sedgwick writes:
As an example, what if it was suggested that eating bananas supported terrorism, and should therefore be made illegal. If this was suggested, what would happen?
Well the US government ran TV ads trying to suggest that smoking pot supported terrorism. Equally as daft I think.
Uh, oh. I was afraid that would happen. Verity, I’m not the Dissident Frogman. I chose my handle before I knew of that excellent Frenchman.
My own choice of handle merely reflects my fondness for sitting on the bottom of the ocean and watching . . . whatever . . . swim past.
I’ll have to think up another handle.
And thanks for the support!
F
Well the US government ran TV ads trying to suggest that smoking pot supported terrorism. Equally as daft I think.
We can top that. Local authorities in London – who run so many officious, bullying ads, I’ve almost been tempted to buya a camera to record them – have posters suggesting that giving money to beggars finances terrorism.
The whole idea that terrorism, or other crime, is very expensive and requires great intelligence and sophisticated finance to do (beggars running it all to the contrary), is a product of the statist midset, where there’s no return, people don’t act without procedure and orders, and someone else provides large amounts of cash for you to set up a steering group and a procurement programme before you start. Bureaucrats attempting to restage 9/11 would begin by arranging to tour the Airbus and Boeing plants to see what sort of aircraft they needed to buy.
As I at least made perfectly clear, it is not a question of implying totalitarian intent. It is the case, though, that messianic ideologies which believe they can prove they are right do have a distressing tendency to end up “proving” others wrong, and this sometimes results in dissenters in lunatic asylums or re-education camps.
It doesn’t matter so much whether the belief is that God justifies the action, whether some supposed collective racial conscience does it, or whether the socio-economic theory posited can be proven logically – at least to the proponents’ satisfaction – to be objectively true.
It’s not intent. It’s more an unintended consequence.
EG
Euan:
“BTW, I vote for “evil” and “stupid” to describe lefty statists.
Is it ok to call those people evil and stupid but wrong to call them “mentally disordered” ? What’s the difference ?
On the other hand – you call “mentally ill” people who deviate fron a norm, or normal behaviour. That’s certainly not the case here – it’s rather we the libertarians who are deviant – we love to look indifferently on people who kill themselves smoking, and do nothing to save them !
On the third hand – whenever I think about those 176 heads of states that signed the Kyoto portocol back in 1996 I can’t abstain from murmuring: “stark crazy”.
A fascinating question, and although simplistic answers can be given I suggest it’s worth thinking about it more deeply. Verity or Query, whatever she calls herself today, can probably skip the rest of this.
“Evil” implies an absolute moral standard against which the action or thought may be objectively judged. No such thing exists outside a religious or quasi-religious context, and therefore to describe someone as objectively evil is itself a subjective opinion. One can, of course, described someone as subjectively evil if they do something that violates one’s personal moral code.
This runs into a difficulty when we consider people like Hitler or Stalin since the vast majority of people would consider it evil to murder for the sake of an ideology. On the other hand, the tradition which culminated in certain areas in violent anti-semitism is the same tradition that produced the liberal democracies of the west. Appeals to tradition are distinctly dubious, because the liberal democrat can make appeal to the same tradition as the racist demagogue. Much non-Arab anti-Semitism derives from the idea, once extremely common amongst Christians, of the Jews as “Christ-killers,” which has a certain perverse logic. Equally, the message of Christ – who actually was Jewish – in this respect is possibly best summed up in the Beatitudes, specifically Matthew c5v38 to 48. So depending on which way you wish to interpret this tradition, anti-Semitism is either justified or condemned and it’s possible to derive an internally consistent morality either way.
Personally, I find the message of Christ rather more compelling that the message of those who choose to subjectively reinterpret it for narrow socio-political ends.
“Stupid” does not directly depend upon but does connote a separate absolute, a standard of truth and wisdom. It’s as well to separate here “stupid” in the sense of an inability to reason from the sense of not sharing the same premises in the reasoning process: let’s consider only those who are capable of reason.
If we take as valid the notion that humans are deeply flawed creatures liable to make very stupid decisions now and again, such decisions having the ability to produce seriously adverse outcomes both for the individual and for others; and if we also assume as valid the idea, backed as it is by all of recorded history, that society in its concrete expression as the state is not acting unreasonably in forcibly restricting such excess since such restriction is necessary for an orderly functioning society to exist, then if we reason logically from that position, there is nothing inherently stupid in proposing a system of moderate regulation.
However, if we do not accept the second premise, then we cannot reason that a system of state regulation is justifiable. I think this is the fundamental distinction between some strands of libertarian thought and the vast majority of social, economic and political thought – some libertarians do not accept that premise. This, incidentally, is at the root of most of my objection to libertarianism: that type of libertarianism is in flat contradiction to our pragmatic knowledge of human nature over all of recorded history.
The secondary question, if we accept both these premises, is what degree of regulation is necessary and reasonable. I would argue that there is no fixed answer to the question, since the particular circumstances of culture, society, technology, population and so on all have major influences.
Numerous examples are possible, but we might consider the one cited in the linked Telegraph article. Requiring the use of child seats in cars is arguably a bad regulation since even on the most utilitarian calculation the cost and effort saved in reduced casualties is outweighed by the cost and effort of enforcing the regulation. However, a precursor regulation in this case is an example of reasonable regulation – the law requiring car drivers and passengers to wear seatbelts. There is as always a cost involved in enforcing the law, but in this case it is greatly outweighed by the cost saving in significantly reduced deaths and serious injuries.
There is also a handy illustration here of the impact of culture and technology. If in Britain there were only a few motorists, the cost of a seatbelt regulation would outweigh the benefits quite considerably, but if there were a large number of motorists the savings would easily outweigh the costs.
Excessive regulation is patently counterproductive since it results in some regulations not being enforced if they are seen as less important than others, and it is well enough known that law honoured more in the breach than in the observance has a tendency to bring into disrepute the whole body of law, which weakens the rule of law – especially when the regulation is selectively enforced, which is in flat contradiction of the principle of the rule of law. There are, therefore, good practical reasons for having regulation but there are also good practical reasons for not having too much regulation.
What I consider to be the sensible course of action, therefore, is to accept the need for regulation but to implement regulation only where it is needed, only where it can be enforced, and only where the benefits of the regulation outweigh the cost of enforcement and/or the cost of not regulating.
Libertarians of course will not agree, because they do not accept the second premise in the reasoning process. This raises the primary question, which is whether or not the premises of the argument are valid. To castigate somone as stupid simply because he does not share your ideological preconceptions is again a subjective view. Someone who believes most strongly that our second premise is invalid is unlikely to agree with someone who holds that it is valid, but accusations of stupidity being flung back and forth won’t advance the argument at all.
In sum, I say one should not describe “statists” as either mentally diseased (leads to the gulag), or evil (assumes an unjustified moral superiority) or stupid (assumes an unjustifed greater wisdom). It is better by far, I think, to say instead “I think you are wrong, and the reason I disagree is X. Let’s talk about X.”
EG
Jesus!
Good, innit?
🙂
EG
EG: Takin’ the piss, innit?………….. ;-))
EG,
“as the state is not acting unreasonably in forcibly restricting such excess since such restriction is necessary for an orderly functioning society to exist…”
This assumption of your’s (that you accept, and say libertarians don’t) needs to be broken down into two distinct cases.
The first is where excesses cause harm to others – in which case the state must indeed act to forcibly restrict them.
The second is the case where the excesses cause harm only to the perpetrator, and not to others. In this case – libertarians maintain – there is no need for intervention. It is this second principle that was the subject of this thread.
EG,
Excessive regulation is patently counterproductive since it results in some regulations not being enforced if they are seen as less important than others.
Or less easily enforced.
Euan Gray is not a spoof, alas. He’s the product of the magnificent British education system. Articulate, but invariably misses the wood for the trees.
Now I AM dissapointed………..but articulate? Do you mean like a rattler is articulated? EG…. 😉
I should also learn how to spell “disappointed”
I constantly encountered an error message when I tried to post yesterday (and today). I signed myself Query and did a row of xxxxxes to test whether posts were being posted despite the error message. I did this in tandem with sending a query to samizdata.net and a query to the webmaster@samizdata. It wasn’t a pseudonym or an attempt at cleverness, Euan Dull-and-Gray. What a sad person you are to occupying checking out email addresses.
I didn’t bother to read the rest of your Phd dissertation.
Verity: I had, and am still having, the same problem when posting and have reported it to the Webmaster.
Don’t mind too much about EG; verbal diarrhoea or logorrhoea (as he would doubtless prefer) is, once contracted, quite incurable.
Upon pondering this, I think that it is not the politics or the political philosphy even which is the mental disorder but rather it is a manifestation of one. In other words the need to control other people when they are not trying to hit you over the head or otherwise unreasonably impinge on your life, is the mental disorder, one any one of any political philosophy might suffer from (I know some pretty unpleasent libertarians when it comes to their private lives).
But things like regulatory statism or fascism or communism or imposed fundimentalist [insert religion here] could not happen without this psychological disorder being manifest in the people who push it.
I suspect many people do not really think their politics through and so the notion that passing laws to regulate things really is imposing something by force does not occur to them. I have often asked people why they think their views should be imposed by force and frequently get the reply “Oh no, I don’t want to impose anything by force, I just want their to be a law to stop people smoking near me in the pub”. This person does not ‘get’ the connection between laws and force, it was as if laws were just polite suggestions. Yet many clearly take delight in using political power to make people do things even though they are not being threatened with force themselves (even abstractly) and understand well what is happening… these people really do strike me as disordered.
That said, I do not therefore favour locking up such disordered people as we are all ‘disordered’ in some manner. I just wish the control freaks would realise that they do indeed have a ‘problem’ and it is others who pay the price for it, like most mental disordered.
Well, yes, but I addressed that.
I don’t think anyone suggested it was.
It’s just human nature, Perry. Any practical political, social or economic system needs to take account of this aspect of humanity.
Indeed they don’t, because most people are not interested in politics or political questions, or indeed economics beyond “have I got enough money for my needs/desires?”
They simply have a different set of assumptions than you, and in all likelihood would suggest that it is in fact you who have the problem because you cannot see the obvious “truth” of their point of view. This is why describing people as mentally ill, stupid or evil just because you don’t agree with their world-view is unproductive, because they’ll just say exactly the same about you and how far does that advance anything?
EG
PdH – I’m not in favour of locking them up either. But your wish that control freaks would realise they do indeed have a problem. Well, they don’t and won’t. What I wish is, that other people would be stronger in the face of these people. As in, more use of the magnificent word, “No.”
I see one of Britain’s prime, not to say stellar, interferers, the Minister of Culture, Sport and Whatever is getting a divorce. Nothing like standing by your man, eh?
Perry, you are right that there is a lot to learn from psychology about why people hold the views they do. One could argue that a certain “type” of mentality is drawn to fascim, communism or fundamentalist religions, while other types are drawn to more liberal, individualistic world views.
But I think we need to be a little careful, though. I have met many delightful, well-adjusted folk who are socialists and there are some libertarians who, frankly, I would not pee on them if they were on fire.
most people are not interested in politics or political questions, or indeed economics beyond “have I got enough money for my needs/desires?”
Possibly. The trouble with that point of view, of course, is that it means a relatively small section of the population get to impose their wills on the apathetic majority. This is not exactly a good thing, unless you like the idea of imposing your views on people.
Perhaps not, but that’s the reality of it. People AREN’T generally interested in politics.
EG
–W. B. Yeats, speech to the Irish Senate in Free State days
Perry writes:
To which Euan responds:
Which is, amazingly enough, a concise defense of Libertarianism. Euan is right – many people do seem naturally to want to control people. In a state of anarchy they do it with physical force. In a statist society, they do it by making endless regulations. Only Libertarianism addresses both concerns – by retaining the police to enforce bans on physical violence while simulatenously confining government to well-defined boundaries. Indeed, Libertarianism exists to give individuals the maximum amount of freedom from the coersion of others while still maintaining an ordered society; it is defined in terms of what demands may not be made.
What about non-physical force? Economic force and coercion such as cartel, for example – very common in the real world, but rarely acknowledged in libertarian thought. What happens if some company wants to erect a huge advertising hoarding on its own property, but the bloody thing’s an eyesore and all the neighbours complain because it destroys their view of the lovely state buildings? Is that force? Is it reasonable? Have people no valid objection?
Who gets to define the boundaries of government, why are they right, what happens if it turns out they are not right, and what happens if the people want to expand those limits?
Libertarianism of this type is far too simplistic in its view of the world to provide a reasonable and practical system of government.
You must be a heretic, Joshua – everyone else evades a definition or says that such a thing cannot be done.
Please enlighten us all by defining, with coherent justification, what demands cannot be made.
EG
In an idle moment between thinking up statist conspiracies to destroy liberty and install myself as global dictator for life, I had a look at David Icke’s website.
As someone pointed out above, Icke is clearly barking, so perhaps his ideas shouldn’t be taken all that seriously. The Turquoise One:
Disapproves of state education;
Thinks the EU is a conspiracy to destroy liberty;
Thinks we all pay far too much tax;
Doesn’t like the Patriot Act;
Says the BBC is just an arm of the government;
Thinks the state is going to microchip us all;
And so very tediously but often amusingly on. I like the ad for a product that detoxes you by removing the poisons via your feet. Possibly the best part is Reg Presley’s article on “monatomic gold.”
EG
Thought you might still be lurking about!
Just ribbing you.
I’m not sure we have space here to go into all the demands that cannot be made – but I can respond to your specific example.
Libertarianism leaves pursuit of happiness up to individual people, believing strongly that the people in question are in the best position to decide what makes them happy. To that end, government interference is limited to cases involving protection of rights.
In your specific example, it’s not clear what rights are violated. Is there a “right” not to be confronted with ugliness? I can’t see that it would be a good thing to define such a right politically since what is “ugly” is a very subjective sort of thing, to say the least.
Then I suppose the company erects the huge advertising boarding since it’s not clear how blocking someone’s view of a building should be a matter for the police? (???) Um…I mean, you really want to threaten people with state violence for putting up signs??? Surely not…
No.
I would say no. Generally speaking, it’s bad policy for companies wishing to sell things to put up signs that annoy prospective customers. That isn’t to say that they don’t do it, but the market generally reflects customer disatisfaction with ruthless efficiency. If the sign is generally unpopular, the company will get feedback about it very rapidly and take it down if it wishes to remain profitable. If, on the other hand, the sign generates revenue, then it’s fair to say that the greater majority doesn’t mind it.
Of course they have a valid objection. But calling on the police to solve this particular problem is an inappropriate way of voicing it. In the neighborhood where I grew up, to cite an example, there are certain aesthetic regulations that are enforced by general voluntary agreement. For example, because the neighborhood was originally designed to look like a park, people are not allowed to put fences up in their front yards. Also, people are strongly encouraged only to use white lights on their Christmas trees. Neither of these regulations have the force of law – they are merely strongly encouraged by the local homeowners’ association. Everyone who has a house in the neighborhood and pays their dues (which are trivial, actually) can vote on these things. So it’s a matter of general consensus. The occasional house flouts the regulations, but when that happens the homeowners’ association simply buys it from the inhabitants when they move and then imposes terms on the next inhabitants.
This kind of solution can easily be applied to the example you cite and is wholly protected in a Libertarian society. Homeowners’ associations have been immensely successful in the US in keeping neighborhoods looking attractive.
The point is that we should avoid police and jails and all that nasty business if at all possible, and in situations like this it is clearly possible. Not only that, but this method also has the side effect of allowing the people who actually live in the neighborhood to make their own decisions and impose their own regulations according to their own tastes (and not those of, e.g. city council or “the wider community.”). So it’s a preferable solution on almost every count. Certainly it’s better than elevating personal taste to the level of rights.
Feel free to continue by email if you like. Some sort of definition of libertarianism, even if it is a negative definition, is of interest to me since few if any others around here seem willing to commit to anything.
I sometimes get “fan mail” for my contributions here, believe it or not, so the odd one not entirely on my side would be good to redress the balance 🙂
I don’t think it should be, either. But I think it’s not unreasonable that someone could take an interest. The question here is when does the company’s right to do what it wants on its own property collide with the rights of those on other property not to be affected? It’s not as clear cut as many seem to assume. This is why we have planning permission, zoning, and so on. The police aren’t necessarily the ones involved.
I really dislike the use of the term “state violence” in this context. Libertarian apologists are often rather free with using the word when it comes to things they don’t like – they often say it’s violence and the initiation of force for the state to send “men with guns” (always it’s those tedious “men with guns”) to collect unpaid tax. It’s not – the tax-dodger has initiated the “violence” by breaking the law, and the state is merely enforcing the law. It is not violence to enforce the law – the “violence” consists in breaking the law in the first place. It’s simply emotive rhetoric and it’s unpersuasive as well as disingenuous.
Suppose the sign said “Joshua is a very silly man” – or soemthing less pleasant the filters here would probably block. Is that force? Suppose it said something that was merely a statement of opinion that could not be shown to cause any quantifiable harm but was annoying – is it force? How do you seek redress if there’s no harm? If you can seek redress for this, on what basis?
To be fair, things like neigbourhood aesthetics can indeed, at least in principle, be dealt with on a voluntary basis in the manner you describe, but I think the position in Britain – with a vastly higher population density – means there are more times when it cannot, and perhaps something else is needed. We generally don’t have the suburban sprawl common in America, and whilst the US has some 30 people per square kilometre, in Britain the figure is over 240.
I’d quibble with your disparagement of “the wider community” – all that is at issue here is the scale of the community.
I’m also interested in your view of economic coercion.
EG
Gets really windy in here, doesn’t it?
CF
I’ve just come in drunk, still bummed about the Duke/Carolina game, so let me beg off on this for now. Happy to talk about it later tomorrow.
But I did want to respond to this:
Yes, technically you’re right that anyone who breaks the law deserves the penalty. I don’t generally condone lawbreaking. But that wasn’t the issue here. What I meant was that people should ask themselves, before making a law, whether the law they propose is worth police violence. Because it simply is a fact that when people break the law they are also likely to resist arrest and the chance obtains that they will have to be forcibly subdued. We want to avoid that as much as possible. Save that for situations that are really worth it. For example – from another thread – in case of child molestation, I’m all for the police forcibly subduing the offender. But for putting up a sign? I think this is not something that’s worth cuffing people and dragging them away. It’s not really even worth stiff fines.
We can probably agree that in as much as possible, the state should be left out of things. This seems to be one of those things that the state simply doesn’t need to be involved in; citizens are perfectly capable of managing on their own.
I can’t comment on Britain since I’ve never been there for more than four days at a stretch. But in the US (and in Canada, I guess) it’s worked out pretty well.
No, it isn’t. It’s unpleasant for me – but society is not here to protect me from unpleasantness. In so far as possible, of course, I would retaliate. THey have a right to put up such a sign — and so do I… But I think one point should be stressed – and that’s that no system, no kind of government, can promise you freedom from this sort of discomfort. Nor should it. Life simply involves sometimes dealing with things that are unpleasant, that you don’t necessarily want to face. If you’re looking for a society where everything always runs smoothly for everyone, I can tell you right now you’re not going to find it.
Perhaps so, but once it is made law, the initiation of violence is in the breach of the law, not its enforcement.
EG
Again, no one is disagreeing with that point. In fact, most Libertarians wholeheartedly support that idea. We very much believe that the (civilian) police should not act until an actual crime is in the process of being committed. People should not be arrested for their thoughts or their intentions – ever. They should only be arrested for their actions – i.e. after they have, as you say, initiated the use of violence.
The point that is being made is that a good yardstick for whether or not a law should exist is whether it seems fair to use physical force to enforce it — and enforcement always involves at least the credible threat of violence. Ban on molesting children? Violence to enforce this law is absolutely justified. Ban on robbing people at gunpoint? Again, absolutely. Ban on putting up an ugly sign? (???) I really, really don’t think violence is an appropriate way to solve that “problem.” Insofar as the law exists, I suppose the police should enforce it (providing they have nothing better to do – and I’m fairly certain they always have something better to do than tear down signs) – but the point of the thought experiment is to pump our intuitions about whether bans on ugly signs are appropriate in a free society. It’s pretty clear to me on this basis that they are not.
Again this revolves around the use of “violence.” It is not an appropriate word for describing the use of state compulsion in the enforcement of democratically created law, since it is loaded with preconceptions. The connotation of the word is that the use of state force is unjustified, when in fact it is (generally) not if that force is used to require obedience to an agreed law.
It’s like calling gun control “victim disarmament.” In a certain light, but ONLY in that certain light, it is technically 100% accurate, but the phrase is chosen precisely because of the particular connotations it has, not for its technical meaning. This kind of thing makes it difficult to have a reasoned debate on the issue, because judgments are clouded with in this case ideological preconceptions and the holder of a contrary opinion is presented as unreasonable before he’s even said a word. I’m quite sure that this is EXACTLY why certain ideologues call gun control “victim disarmament” and describe the use of legitmate state force to require obedience to the law as violence, or more tiresomely “men with guns” – the intent is to twist the grounds for debate in the libertarian’s favour. That is unfair and unreasonable, and I’m not playing that game.
I know that others do the same thing – for example, describing state expenditure on public services as “investment” because that sounds more positive and businesslike. Some would say that describing an American attempt to secure strategic advantage while the country still has the power to do it as “spreading democracy and liberty” is another example, from a different persepctive. It isn’t fair when they do it either. Let’s try to use neutral words.
EG
OK – I said I would respond to this after the whiskey had run its course, so here goes:
This is a broad topic and not one that I think I can cover in a single comment post. I’ll give some outlines and an example and you can ask after whatever points you were interested in.
Libertarianism is not a utopian vision; it’s important to understand this. Human happiness is a matter for individuals to resolve for themselves. It is crucially NOT a political question. In pursuing their individual goals, people will invariably come into conflict. Libertarianism does not seek to deny that such conflicts will happen or even to resolve them when they do. For Libertarians, the point of a system of government is more to establish certain universal rules that apply to everyone and then let people work out their own conflicts to their own satisfaction within this framework.
For the most part, this means that economic “coercion” will fall outside the political sphere. The government draws barriers at private property. Ownership means that a person can do what he likes with his property provided he does not damage the property of others. This barrier should be nearly absolute, forcing people to negotiate with each other when they want to obtain the property of another or influence how he uses it.
Now for the example – again from my childhood. A certain shopping mall was built in a rural area in the mid 1970s. The mall (this was pre-Kelo of course) fairly bought up all the property it needed – but one homeowner refused to sell. So the mall happily built around that house. That house stood there for 25 years until the owners died – blocking what would have been a natural entrance to the mall and making it difficult for the mall to expand its parking space (indeed, there is currently a parking deck where the house used to stand).
Was there coercion involved? Well, it’s fair to say that the presence of the mall decimated the homeowner’s property value. No one is likely to buy his house with a shopping mall on two sides of it (a street on another, a gas station on the final) except the mall itself. I’m sure they got it for a steal from his heirs when he died. So I guess in some broad sense of the word “coercion” you could say that the mall was “coercing” him to sell by changing the living conditions on his property.
But the point for me is that the man didn’t buy all the surrounding lots – he only bought the lot his house was on.
Another point for me is that the mall was unable to force him to sell the house – as evidenced by the fact that he never did.
Property rights enforce a barrier. The mall may not tell this man what to do with his house and lot, and the man may not tell his neighbors what to do with their houses and lots. All the mall can do is offer him a price it thinks he will accept. If he refuses, too damn bad. Likewise, all the man can do is ask his neighbors not to sell. If the majority of them decide to sell anyway, again, too bad.
There is a tradeoff here, and Libertarianism’s answer to the question is to guarantee nothing beyond your property line but everything within it. Engaging in economic activity that is likely to change the value or suitability of another person’s property may be a form of coercion in some broadly defined sense, but it is not politically banned coercion. This distinction is important.
If you do not want malls encroaching on your neighborhood, you will have to find like-minded neighbors. If you want to build a mall in a particular place, you will have to persude the current owners to sell. Likewise, if you do not want to look at colored Christmas tree lights (as many of my parents neighbors apparently do not), then you will simply have to persuade your neighbors not to use them. If you buy a property because it has a nice view, you need to understand that, short of buying the view (that is, the property that makes it up), you are taking a risk that the view will not change.
And so on. I’m not sure this answers your question, but then I’m also not sure that I have enough space here to answer it properly. I’ll leave off here and you can tell me what was unclear or left out. But the bottom line is that what I understand economic coercion to be is engaging in activities that will change the value/suitability of another person’s property, and this would not be banned in a Libertarian society. Actual damage to the property, however, would be.
Just saw your latest post.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue. I agree with you that calling “gun control” “victim disarmament” is manipulative – a tactic rather than an argument. I myself do not use that term, though I might chuckle at it when I hear it at an NRA rally.
In the case of talking about violence in law enforcement, I’m afraid I can’t accomodate you, however, because I really do see the issues in precisely those terms. I’m not just fencing with you in bringing up the thought experiment I outlined – I actually apply that standard in my own life when deciding whether or not I support a piece of legislation. I think it is important to ask of any law whether it is worth arresting people over – and yes, that crucially involves imaging people being haulted off to jail, separated from their families, etc.
It’s the same way that before going to war, one must really ask whether it is worth the human suffering it causes. I myself support the Iraq War, for example, but I do not begrudge anti-war protestors the right to show posters of carnage when making their case because I consider it to be relevant to the issue. It would be unfair of me to support the war and ask them not to bother me with uncomfortable details about that support. Ditto abortion. I support a woman’s right to choose, but I have never asked abortion opponents to leave their pictures of aborted foetuses at home. This is relevant to the issue – if I truly believe in a woman’s right to chose (as I do), then I should be able to answer these questions. The same is true with animal experiments. I would like to minimize unnecesary cruelty to animals. When I see pictures of animals being hurt I feel sympathy pangs. Neverhteless, I firmly believe that human progress trumps animal rights, and so I think these experiments should go ahead if they are necessary to medical science. I do NOT ask animal rights protestors to put the gory pictures away because for them that is the whole point. They can scarcely argue their side without these emotional appeals because to them the animals have the same rights as you and I.
The idea that violence is involved in enforcing the law – violence with real human consequences – is crucial to my political philosophy. So no, I’m afraid I can’t talk about it in other terms. I am not being manipulative in using the terms I use but rather giving you an accurate picture of how I arrive at the conclusions I reach.
PS – I will not be back online until much later today as I have lots of work and have already used up enough space here, I think, for one day. I will be sure and respond to whatever you put up here tomorrow, however.
That isn’t to say that they don’t do it, but the market generally reflects customer disatisfaction with ruthless efficiency. If the sign is generally unpopular, the company will get feedback about it very rapidly and take it down if it wishes to remain profitable.
This illustrates the incredible naivete of libertarians. They believe coporations will always act in the public’s (their customers’) best interest, in order to keep them as customers. This is disproven every day, from Bhopal to Love Canal to slavery to employing children 12 hours a day. Corporations will do what ever they can get away with, including annoying neighbors with signs. It is the ugly statists and unions who have sacrificed much to enable libertarians to sit on their asses and complain about the gov’t in relative comfort.
Union Carbide was not at fault over Bhopal.
They had chased those people away from putting up their tent city for months. They had security guards chasing them away. But they heard there were jobs and money and they kept coming and setting up their little cooking facilities. They came with the best of intentions: to find work and support themselves and their families. But I am afraid they died and were maimed because they would not listen to what the company was telling them. Sadly, in a tragedy, the fault was their own and should not be used by lefties and one-worlders to calcumny and beat up on a big corporation that had done everything in its power to make these people go away.
Verity, you raise blame-the-victim to new heights, or lows. How much is Union Carbide paying you? Would you let Union Carbide build a chemical plant next door to you?
Libertarianism is not a utopian vision; it’s important to understand this. Human happiness is a matter for individuals to resolve for themselves. It is crucially NOT a political question. In pursuing their individual goals, people will invariably come into conflict. Libertarianism does not seek to deny that such conflicts will happen or even to resolve them when they do. For Libertarians, the point of a system of government is more to establish certain universal rules that apply to everyone and then let people work out their own conflicts to their own satisfaction within this framework
Very nifty summary, Joshua. You cannot have been that drunk!
Thanks! Although, if you scroll up to the top of that post you’ll see that I had slept it off by the time I wrote that.
What about cartel? This is very common, but libertarians often seem in denial about it, not least because it undermines some of their popular economic theories. Some libertarians seem to deny it even exists, which is absurd, and others assert that it only happens because the state facilitates it, which is simply untrue – companies don’t need regulations in order to come up with price-fixing and market allocation deals between themselves.
A further thing is that needs consideration is the scale of corporation and market law necessary to keep a free market functioning, and it is not confined to property rights. If you want limited liability corporations to function, you of course need property rights in the money invested and shares owned. However, the whole point of the LLC is that stockholders invest with limited liability and hence limited risk, which is good because it encourages investment that otherwise wouldn’t happen. But in order for that to work, you need a clearly defined limitation of the liabilities the stockholder faces, and for that you need an agreed law on the nature, liability and structure of the corporation. Corporation law is a complex area, and although it can arguably be made simpler than it is right now, it’s not realistically possible to dispense with it altogether.
The alternative is the unlimited liability partnership, but this massively increases the liability of the investor and hence increases the risk of the investment, and hence decreases the probability of that investment made, to the overall deteriment of economic performance.
In order to keep the market free, you need to ensure honest competition between companies. This requires regulation against cartel and the numerous other restrictive practices corporations indulge in given half a chance.
Then you have things like pollution. Sometimes it’s obvious who is doing the pollution, other times it is not. The record clearly shows that corporations will quite happily pollute where it is cheaper than not polluting and the risk of getting caught is not great enough, or where they can relatively cheaply buy their way out of punishment. What’s the libertarian solution? Sue? Certainly, the world would greatly benefit from an increase in the number of lawyers and the incidence of class action and tort litigation. It’s all very well to moan about pollution regulation in the nice clean west, but perhaps you should spend some time in parts of the world where these rules don’t exist and the only remedy is litigation – I’ve done that, and I can assure you these are not pleasant places. I doubt very much you’d like to live in the sort of country your philosophy would produce.
The other problem with litigation as the remedy is that it is post facto. Sure, people can simply not buy tickets on an airline that saves money on maintenance and kills people when the plane crashes. This doesn’t help the people who are dead, however. It is generally considered better to avoid the circumstance arising in the first place, rather than litigating afterwards. Hence safety regulations for airlines. I’d rather live and pay a slightly more expensive ticket price than die safe in the knowledge that my family can sue the airline.
Ever wonder why American health care is so expensive? Litigation insurance. Ever wonder why manufacturers spend money on absurd safety features and documentation, such as an iron with a warning label “Do not use whilst bathing”? Litigation. Once you start encouraging litigation as an alternative to regulation, it will spread. Lawyers need money, like anyone else, and being often quite smart and well-educated people they are extremely good at finding new ways to get it. This is why lawyers used to be prohibited from advertising their services – excess litigation is extremely corrosive of society. The libertarian order will encourage more litigation.
In reality, the free market works at all because state regulation keeps it free and forcibly prevents companies taking the easy path of collusion. In reality, the state imposed limitation of liability in the corporation is a massive impetus to economic development. In reality, the uniform enforcement of regulation ensures that the incidence of pollution is vastly reduced & hence the need for litigation is vastly diminished, and indeed the need for all the individual citizens to waste their time and effort tracking pollution back so they know who to sue is avoided. In reality, a litigious economy is more expensive and often more restrictive than a moderately regulated one.
Libertarianism may not be Utopian – although I do think it is based on a Panglossian view of human nature and thus pretty much is Utopian – but it is far too naive and simplistic to ever work. A phrase often used around here is “unintended consequences,” generally used to show up the stupidity of state regulation.
I wonder how many libertarians consider the unintended consequences of their philosophy?
EG
EG,
It was evasive in the extreme. Carry on trolling.
How is it evasive to not respond to a joke?
EG
What about them?
Libertarians are not in denial about them at all. We are very specific about the kinds of cartels we do not like: state-backed cartels. Private cartels are subject to market realities like everyone else. The market will either bear their prices or it won’t. The concept of “overcharging” didn’t come into existence with Soviet price-fixing, Euan. If you charge more than a thing is worth, you will end up with less money in your pockets in the long run because people will be forced to find alternatives. Cartels are, in fact, a well-studied economic phenomenon, and it is known that they generally do not last longer than five years for exactly the reason that they overcharge. There is huge incentive among the members to cheat on their agreement – and this invariably happens without state backing. Only state backing can allow a groups of corporate allies to defy market reality indefinitely.
Ah, but is it wise investment? You’re taking here as a given that LLCs have been a net good for the world economy, but that assertion will have to be proven. One thing that is certain about LLCs is that the practice came very late to the US, but absence of LLCs didn’t dampen enthusiasm for investment there – so there’s a real sense in which this argument of yours is ahistorical.
That’s half the story. The other half is that the American healthcare system is far indeed from being a private system. It’s more private than any other nation’s perhaps, but it’s not the kind of healthcare system Libertarians advocate – a fact I’m sure you’re aware of, so I’m sort of curious why you’re brining up healthcare?
Skimping on maintenence is bad for airlines whether or not people sue them, Euan. Replacing a whole plane is a hell of a lot more expensive than keeping it in good shape. Not to mention replacing the pilots, soothing customer panic, etc. It is never in an airline’s economic interest to skimp on safety regs. What encourages them to skimp, in fact, is the knowledge that the government will pick up their tab when things go wrong, as it did after 9/11, for example. Government backing encourages half-assed safety standards, not the free market.
Oh please. The reason this is possible is becuase the government is too involved in people’s lives – doesn’t consider them responsible for their own actions. It is common knowledge that using an iron in the bathtub is a very dangerous thing to do. Only the government ensures that the law protects the idiots who do it. In a Libertarian society, people would be responsible for a lot more than knowing not to use irons in the bathtub or balance hot coffee on the dashboard or whatever other example you’d like to dredge up.
I see – so if we have an EPA, then corporations magically become good and don’t pollute where it is cheaper to pollute? Wave your magic wand and it’s clear who’s doing what polluting? The enchanted government stamp ensures that they do not buy their way out of polluting? C’mon, Euan, you can do better than this. These problems will exist in a Libertarian world just as they exist in this world. There is nothing in the Libertarian philosophy that rules out environmental regulation. Damaging someone else’s property is cause for incarceration in a Libertarian system more than it is under our present system – because private property is more absolutely protected. You will be no freer to dump your pollutants in my back yard under Libertarianism than you are now, perhaps, in fact, even less so.
This is a straw man. You’re confusing Libertarianism with Anarchy. No Libertarian has ever said that there will be no economic regulations whatever – merely that there would be far fewer, and that such regulations as existed would be based on a respect for individual property rights. No more corporate welfare, no more government monopolies – just free people freely associating in a free economy. I think you’ll find if you do your homework that government interference in the economy causes all the problems you have outlined here to a far greater degree than the individual players themselves.
A greater percentage, I suspect, than the adherents of any other political philosophy.
Not necesarily. Cartel is especially common in industries where the natural barrier to market entry is high and where the product of the industry is essential or near essential. Cement and plastics are major examples – without them, modern civilisation would disintegrate rapidly, and it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build a cement manufacturing plant or a petrochemical processing plant. It’s not at all difficult for the players to rig the market, but it is quite difficult for a would-be white knight to charge to the rescue. In such cases, cartels can last quite a while and can be very profitable. This isn’t theory, either – it actually happens, and it happens a lot. Cartels in cement (cement powder, not mixed concrete), for example, are widespread in every region of the world.
Much of the libertarian assessment of cartel seems to focus on smaller industries and services, where the market entry barrier is naturally low and where cartel is indeed only possible – if at all – in the shortest term. That logic simply doesn’t apply on the larger scale.
Companies generally don’t look for “indefinitely.” Most companies have a short term outlook. The average corporate lifespan is about a decade, so five years is a hefty chunk of corporate life.
Doesn’t matter. You won’t know if it’s wise or not until you try it. The thing is to get the money going into the economy in the form of investment, and the limited liability corporation does this very well.
Not really. The concept of a company with a distinct legal personality and limited personal liability for its members is very old, and goes back to at least Roman times. The American idea of the corporation is basically the English idea, dating from the colonial period, and the American state has been granting permission to incorporate pretty much since its inception. Industrialisation with its attendant need for relatively large amounts of capital was the major boost – in England as well as in America – precisely because limited liability is a better way of getting more money invested.
Your comments on the corporation intrigue me. You don’t seem too keen on the established limited liability company, so what legal form do you prefer?
Because it is very expensive and the less regulated, more private American system one of the most expensive. Much of this comes from litigation insurance, which is lamentably necessary given that litigation seeks ridiculous sums and is a substitute for the regulation that would apply in other jurisdictions. I cannot see that if you removed much of the regulation the cost of healthcare would do anything but increase, because litigation insurance cost would increase, because even more litigation would take place.
So why does this happen even in jurisdictions where the government *doesn’t* pick up the tab when it all goes wrong? Could it possibly be that the owners or directors of the airline want to make a quick buck and don’t particularly care about the consequences for others when they’re no longer involved?
According to your logic, with no government intervention airlines would be safer and the aircraft better maintained. Why is it that the contrary is in fact true?
No, it’s because people will sue because nobody told them not to use the iron on the bath. Not using an iron in the bath is indeed common sense, but common sense is a remarkably uncommon thing.
Well, it’s the tort system and avaricious trial lawyers that enable this kind of insane litigation. In the absence of much regulation, however, such litigation is often the remedy. There is, of course, a tradeoff here and just as excess litigation is a bad thing, so is excess regulation. Instead of a dogmatic approach, I think it’s better to take it case by case.
No, but pollution becomes less common and hence less of a problem. Amazingly enough, this happens – pollution regulation results, mirabile dictu, in less pollution.
Hardly. But a system of reasonable regulation DOES result in less pollution, an adherence to the rule of law and sufficient penalties does ensure less frequent corrupt avoidance of penalty, and so on.
What if it’s the polluter’s own property? What if the stuff he’s dumping is ok now, and will be okay for 10 years, but will be a problem for others through leaching or something in 20 when the current polluter is no longer in business? Is it ok to let him pollute because it’s his property and he hasn’t damaged anyone else’s yet, or should he be prevented from causing problems in the future by ending the pollution now?
As has been pointed out by many others of far greater ability than me, it isn’t as simple as that. What constitutes an infringement of property rights? If you take an absolutist propertarian view of that question you can quickly come up with absurd answers. Property rights cannot be absolute, so to what extent and in what manner are they restricted?
I suspect the contrary. However, since few people seem to write about the downsides of their philosophies, it’s hard to tell for sure.
EG
That may be true, but if it’s going to make your case you’re going to have to go into more detail. There are Libertarian governments nowhere in the world at present, and I suspect that in many of the cases you are talking about there would be government involvement. In Japan and Korea this is certainly true, for example.
No, but they do look to “the end of agreement x.” Cartels rarely last as long as originally planned becasue the partners tend to renege on the original agreement. Further, the argument made in a good chunk of the economic literature on cartels is that the time it takes the state to come in and bust them up is rarely significantly shorter than the average lifespan of a cartel generally. That is, it’s still an open empirical question whether state intervention here withstands a cost-benefit analysis. Certainly it doesn’t in moral terms, but in practical terms also the question is far from settled.
Poor investment most certianly does matter to an economy as a whole, especially when the costs are not borne solely by the people making the investment decisions.
It sounds like you’re trying to set up a continuum here – that is, the more private a healthcare system is, the more expensive it will be. This isn’t going to work for two reasons: (1) Some countries with less statist systems spend less per capita on heathcare than others with more statist systems. Compare, for example, almost anyone to Canada (both statist and expensive) and you will instantly find examples. The truth is that the US is simply an outlier. The system is so complicated that it is difficult to say what it is, exactly, that makes it so expensive. (Certainly litigation is a huge part of it – but the question is how far government enables this litigation. Quite a bit, according to most experts.) So there is really no argument here that there is any kind of proportion of the amount of privatization in a semi-private system to cost. (2) This kind of analysis leaves out questions of quality, which are nontrivial, especially in this industry.
As stated, the US system is not the kind advocated by Libertarians anyway. You will find plenty of arguments in Libertarian literature against just the kind of system that currently exists in US healthcare and in some aspects of the “privatized” US energy market. I.e. you may well argue that the US heathcare system is not a good system, but you’re unlikely to find many Libertarians who disagree with you.
No, it is not OK. This would be a weakness in a Libertarian systm, I admit. However, I think you will need to come up with a concrete example all the same. If the pollution is obvious, he will have difficulty selling his property – and it is fair to assume that people will generally not deliberately devalue their own property. However, I can well imagine that there might be cases where the pollution is non-obvious, and in those cases there might be call for regulation, yes. Again, I would need to hear a specific example before I could tell you my opinion on whether regulation is necessary.
Sure it does, but there is an open question whether it is better in the long term. In fact, most of the reduction in pollution that we have experienced in our lifetimes has come from innovations in industry that would likely have happened anyway and would arguably have happened faster without the kinds of tax burdens and artificial expenses we currently live under.
I’m unaware of where any Libertarian has taken a dogmatic approach to litigation. Certainly no Libertarian has ever supported the amount and scope of litigation you are implying we support in your previous post. This entirely line of argument you are taking actually ignores the not insignificant role that government regulation plays in enabling litigation. I notice, for example, that you have chosen not to respond to my earlier comment that in a Libertarian system there would be less legal basis for suing someone over something that is clearly the fault of one’s own lack of common sense. Indeed, one of the major tenents of Libertarianism is increased personal responsibility in just this regard.
I’m not aware that “the contrary is in fact true.” And yes, I am making the assertion that with no government intervention airlines would be safer and the aircraft better maintained.
The consequences are dire when they are involved. It is difficult to make money when your company is not profitable, and difficult to sell a low-quality company that is expensive to upgrade. A good deal of the “fast bucks” made today are made because the people involved are unlikely to be held fully responsible for negative side effects thanks to government help.