Thursday, February 28, 2019

Libertarianism: The Crazytown Where Far Right And Far Left Meet

Welcome friends!

I know I’ve commented upon the hopelessly confused and unhelpful doctrine of “libertarianism” a number of times now but I recently saw another article in the paper touching on that unfortunate ideology so I thought that might be a good excuse to spend a few more minutes on the issue.  Not the sort of thing I want to do very often mind you.  Once in a blue moon seems more than sufficient.  But good to cover all the bases every once in a while.

The article in question involved a young American man going by the name John Galton, which is apparently also the name of a character in some old Ayn Rand novel.  You remember Ayn Rand don’t you?  The anti-social novelist, folk philosopher, and enabler and cheerleader of the egocentric and self obsessed?  Darling of conservative Republican politicians such as Rand Paul from the great state of Kentucky?  Yes, Mr. Paul once said he was so enthralled by Ms. Rand’s writings as a young man they were the main reason he got into politics in the first place.  More recently he was in the papers walking that back as they say.  Of course, Republican politicians are famously dishonest so who knows what his story may be next week.  Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.  He’s not the only one by any means.  But to return to our story, it seems Mr. Galton (the real one; not the fictitious one) had recently fled drug charges here in the USA along with his girlfriend to set up house in Acapulco, Mexico and was shortly thereafter shot and killed by what one can only presume were members of some rival Mexican drug operation.  According to the article, Mr. Galton envisioned himself as a sort of prophet of entrepreneurship freed from the constraints of the nation-state.  He opined in an interview taxation was theft and bristled at the notion of obeying the law.  As far as the nature of his entrepreneurial business activities, he apparently ran what the papers described as a “marijuana laboratory.”  However, he also taught classes on “cryptocurrencies,” which I read somewhere is the preferred means of exchange among such people.  He noted in an interview “he had always had libertarian leanings” but got excited about anarchism per se while in prison, which suggests he at least had some sort of distinction in his mind between the two philosophies although what it may have been is anyone’s guess as I’ll discuss a little later.  His girlfriend on the other hand was described in the article as having been raised by anti-government “hippie” parents ironically dependent on food stamps.  She became interested in politics while in college but realized politics “weren’t changing anything,” so she dropped out and took up with Mr. Galton.  Young people are funny that way, aren’t they?  I wonder what her timeline for politics to change things was anyway?  Sometime between the summer and fall semesters? After the beach weekend but before the big campus beer bash?  Some of us have been trying to change things for decades and still haven’t given up.  Anyway, that was the whole story really.  Not all that unique if you think about it.  Basically some people wanted to live outside the law and got their wish but ended up being what law-abiding citizens would call murdered by criminals.  Happens all the time.  But I suppose these people talked it up a bit more than usual, so maybe that’s why it’s a little more interesting than when a local teen from the wrong side of the tracks joins a drug gang and ends up getting shot behind the old liquor store or something like that.

So let me just deliver my customary commentary on this so-called “libertarianism.”  It seems to me there are two forms of libertarianism or maybe three if one wants to count the indistinct region between the two separately.  First, we have the libertarianism that is really just plain old economic conservatism just not explained very well.  Economic conservatism of course is the notion that government should only do certain things, address certain functions, and if it does those things and those things only then everyone and everything will be just fine.  These functions turn out to be the things that benefit people who make out well under our current version of a market system, so things like property rights, law enforcement, national defense, and maybe a few other things.  The idea comes from either the conviction our existing distributional system is ideal and any potential departure immoral or the notion that all manner of unfortunate unintended consequences will occur if anyone tampers with our existing system so even though it may have a few flaws we need to maintain it as though our lives depended upon it.  It’s fine as far as it goes.  I consider it hopelessly simplistic and indeed ignorant in the sense that it is sometimes presented as following from or implied by economic theory, which if one looks into it is not the case at all.  (Check out my tab on Economics with Hansel if you’re interested in how that happens.)  But that’s not my issue here today.  If you’re an out and proud conservative you’re ahead of the game as far as my thesis in this post goes.  No, what I’m interested in here is what happens when people who don’t really understand the basis of economic conservatism take the extra step of proclaiming themselves “libertarians.”

One thing that tends to happen when people start talking in terms of libertarianism rather than conservatism is they begin to have difficulty perceiving the nature of distributional issues, that is, in the issue of how to resolve conflicts of desires between different people.  The way a sensible person looks at such things is to say if two people have conflicting wants or needs or desires then we need some way to resolve that conflict so we make laws that govern distributions: property rights, market institutions, etc.  If someone comes along and points out what he or she feels are ethical issues then of course we’re certainly willing to entertain their ideas and potentially revise the rules.  What happens when so-called libertarians look at these issues is that they are so thoroughly committed or convinced of the rectitude of existing distributional arrangements they see the issue as whether whoever currently has the legal right to do something should have the “liberty” to carry on or whether some scoundrel will interfere with their liberty to do so.  For example if we imagine a little two person world where let’s say we distribute all resources by who is shorter and the taller of the two consequently kicks the bucket from want most of us would sit down and say maybe we need to rethink that particular distributional system.  We wouldn’t think of it in terms of liberty per se.  When a libertarian looks at this issue he or she will think something like look we’ve already decided the shorter person gets all the resources so the only thing left to talk about is whether the shorter person will have the liberty to use those resources as he or she feels fit or whether the taller person or his or her agents will be able to unfairly interfere with the short person’s liberty.  Basically it does something akin to assuming the conclusion of the discussion we’re meant to be having.  In other words, this form of libertarianism is intellectually empty.  It doesn’t actually add anything to the conversation.  It just passes issues along.  The justification for the underlying distribution assumed as a given within the libertarian system isn’t being derived within libertarianism.  The justification has nothing to do with liberty in the abstract.  They don’t present arguments showing we would have more total liberty if one person got the resources than if the other person got those resources.  To discuss the underlying distributional issues sensibly you’d have to ignore the “libertarian” red herring entirely and move on to the conventionally conservative element, that is, what’s so great about the distributional mechanism we have right now anyway?  Why is the claim of one person for whatever it is ethically stronger than the other fellow’s?  How do markets really distribute goods and services and does it really correspond to what we consider ethical?

Where libertarianism as confused conservatism begins to devolve into anarchism is when libertarians sidestep not only the moral issues involved in addressing and resolving distributional issues but also the role of government power in enforcing those arrangements.  In some ways this might again be thought of as a confused or not very well explained form of conservatism.  Conservatives after all are famous for saying things like they want to “minimize government” despite the fact they want government to fulfill certain important functions they find important such as enforcing property rights.  It’s an inherently confusing way of talking.  What they should say is they feel government should be restricted to those functions they support.  Because when one says minimize of course there’s no real reason we can’t minimize government entirely and create anarchy.  Indeed, the essential difference in this context between conventional conservatives and libertarians is that conservatives recognize when they talk about “minimizing” government they’re simply talking rhetorically and what they really mean is minimize to the extent consistent with government fulfilling the functions they want it to fulfill.  And those aren’t small or minor functions by any measure.  Having government power enforcing property rights implies government involvement of a sort in every transaction and of course the entire mechanism of enforcing those relationships: police, judicial systems, prisons, etc.  With libertarianism these important government functions recede so far into the background and become so invisible and taken for granted and unrecognized and so immune to discussion that many libertarians lose sight of them altogether and start talking about really minimizing government to the greatest extent possible, that is, eliminating it.  In other words they become indistinguishable from anarchists.  Why don’t conservatives express the notion of “minimizing government” differently to avoid the sort of confusion that leads to the sort of libertarianism that equates to anarchism?  Probably because everyone thinks government should be “minimized” to those functions they think are important.  Liberals and leftists think that every bit as much as conservatives.  It’s not really a distinctive position.  All the substance, the contentious bit, is a step back from that and involves what those functions are and why one thinks or doesn’t think government has a role.  The whole libertarian canard appears most likely the result of a rhetorical ploy meant to exaggerate the differences between conservatives and liberals, avoid discussing the real issues, and avoid drawing attention to the role of government power in the conservative view of the ideal society.  Libertarianism is basically the unholy offspring of the unfortunate underhanded way some conservatives choose to disguise and defend their values.

And what’s the inevitable and entirely predictable result of some conservatives’ inability to talk straight and possibly even to think straight about distributional issues and the resulting bit of confusion known as libertarianism?  We get people like the recently deceased John Galton: conservatives who become attracted to “libertarian” claptrap and from there are drawn inexorably into the anti-social pie-in-the-sky nonsense of anarchism formerly associated mainly with the most unrealistic and utopian of what in the past anyway was conventionally considered leftist hippiedom.  Sad to think how much harm mainstream conservatives are willing to inflict on other people rather than do what liberals and leftists have always done: argue honestly and transparently for their values.

References

An American ‘crypto-anarchist’ fled the country.  He was just killed in Mexico’s ‘Murder Capital.’  Isaac Stanley-Becker.  The Washington Post.  February 4, 2019.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/04/an-american-crypto-anarchist-fled-country-he-was-just-killed-mexicos-murder-capital/?utm_term=.0fa91cdafd3a.

Thursday, February 14, 2019

On Love And Money

Welcome friends!

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!  Ah yes, good old Valentine’s Day.  One of my favorite holidays.  What’s not to like?  A holiday celebrating romantic love or I suppose more broadly any sort of love, surely one of the noblest of human emotions.  Or is that a matter of debate?  How sad to read in the papers today an opinion piece lamenting what the author of the article suggested was an increasing absence of romantic love here in the USA particularly among young people, formerly and traditionally most susceptible to such things.  Searching for answers the article touched on our addiction to the mind numbing plague of social media and our possibly consequent ignorant and ill-tempered public discourse before settling on what the author felt was the most likely culprit: an increasingly fear-based culture in which the goal of all parents is to shield their very special progeny from any potential setback or harm be it physical, psychological, or emotional.  Seems somewhat plausible to me.  People do seem to fret and worry about things a lot more than I remember from my own childhood but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.  Has been known to happen now and then.  And of course under the still dominant conservative perspective the prevailing attitude for several decades now has been everyone is very, very special indeed and the main goal in life is to prevent other people interfering with the majestic display of one’s own remarkable ego.  Not exactly the sort of attitude that would make one sympathetic to romantic love, which inevitably involves allowing someone else to play such a prominent role in the story of one’s own life.  However, I would like to throw my hat in the ring and suggest another likely culprit also emanating from the same conservative cultural currents: greed.

Why makes me think that?  A night at the theater.  A little while ago now I was watching a play entitled The Heiress by Ruth and Augustus Goetz based on the short novel Washington Square by Henry James.  It’s been around a while.  A revival of a play from 1947 based on a novel from 1880.  A sort of classic I suppose, but I don’t meant that in the stodgy negative way.  Sometimes classics become so for very sound reasons, don’t you find?  Well, I thought so in this case anyway.  It made me think, which I suppose must be one of the few acceptable reasons to spend a night at the theater.  The story involved a plain and socially awkward but very rich young lady who could not or would not reconcile herself to the fact that her wealth was one of her most attractive assets and indeed perhaps her only asset as far as prospective suitors are concerned.  She turns on her father when he basically tells her so rather too bluntly perhaps while trying to protect her or her fortune at least from a probable gold digger of a suitor and then turns on the suitor who left abruptly when he thought she might not get a large chunk of her inheritance but returns to pick up where he left off when it turns out she does.  After repudiating both father and suitor the young woman apparently resolves to fulfill her own prophecy that she will never find or indeed apparently again even seek true love.  The chilling ending has her rejecting the suitor in no uncertain terms and comfortably ensconced in her mansion ascending the stairs to her bedroom alone, pausing at the top flight to bid her aunt (and the audience) good night, then blowing out the candle leaving herself (and the theater) in utter darkness. I found it tragic but also thought provoking.  Was the young lady right to renounce romantic love unless entirely free from material considerations?  Or was she as her aunt suggested unnecessarily consigning herself to a life without romance by simply expecting too much of other people?  Was consideration of her fortune really any more egregious than consideration of another’s ephemeral good looks or unreliable popularity or what have you?  Was she right to hate her father because he told her what he believed to be the truth?  That she had little to attract suitors beyond her fortune?  Or was she too easily convinced by her father and this one suitor no love would ever be proffered were it not for her fortune?  Or is that wishful thinking on my part?  Grasping for straws? 

Seemed to me some pretty serious stuff going on at the denouement but to my surprise a good portion of the audience burst into laughter.  It took a while but eventually it dawned on me what they saw was probably a simple revenge story with a timely girl power twist.  Some men were mean to a young woman and she got mean in return.  She told men to take a hike.  Get outta here!  And she kept all the money.  A happy ending for all.  Seems the question of true love never entered the equation or if it did then in the age old battle of money or love money won handily this time around.  No contest really.  Was it always so?  Certainly seems a traditional theme, right?  That material wealth is real.  It’s tangible.  It’s what any sensible person wants.  Love is a fantasy.  It’s not real.  It’s  ephemeral.  It’s strictly for fools or simpletons.  According to the old song a diamond, not another person, is a girl’s best friend.  I guess I’m just an old softy at heart because I don’t think so.  Indeed, I’d put it the other way round.  For me, love is ultimately what’s most important and valuable in life.  Receiving love is always nice to be sure but what’s more crucial by far in terms of bringing meaning to life is the bestowing of love.  And when you give your love to another person you inevitably give up something, you put something in jeopardy, you can no longer live as though you were the only person in the world.  Your finances may take a hit.  In direct contradiction to the conservative credo greed no longer appears so good.  But it’s not only that.  Your waistline may take a hit.  Your busy schedule may take a hit.  Your habits of a lifetime may take a hit.  That’s what must happen when you attach significance to another person.  It’s no longer all about the Great I but the Great We.  Love strikes me as the true basis of human society and inevitably the first casualty when one adopts the inhuman anti-social egotism and greed of conservative ideology.

So going back to the play and funny reactions it occurs to me now perhaps all I was witnessing was a difference in perspectives between the conservatives and the liberals in the audience.  Between those doggedly devoted to their own financial situation and those who while perhaps having their share of self regard also appreciated the power and beauty of true love.  Don’t really know for sure.  Just some random thoughts on this most romantic of holidays.  I suppose we could investigate.  I could hardly ask anyone to repudiate love; that would be immoral.  But we could try the other tack.  So let me throw down a challenge.  If you consider yourself a conservative declare your love for another and really mean it.  Act accordingly.  See if it changes your perspective at all.  I’m banking it will.  Let’s see the play again next year.  Will you laugh and cheer at the amusing spectacle of a young woman renouncing love to protect her fortune?  Or will you see a horrible human tragedy instead?  Will you perhaps detect the ultimate basis of liberalism and leftism in a concern for others, or will you remain forever obsessed with your own situation and view others as only a threat to one’s fortune?  Devoted to the unfettered freedom of the Great I?  Greed as the ultimate good?  Only time will tell.  But I like my chances.  

References

The U.S. is in a crisis of love.  Arthur Brooks.  The Washington Post.  February 13, 2019.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-is-in-a-crisis-of-love/2019/02/13/06b92e3e-2ef1-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html?utm_term=.5dcfdba5a3cb.