Covid killed the left/right spectrum

Political Loyalties Have Been Blown Up | Brownstone Institue - Jeffrey A. Tucker: 

April 18, 2022 - "Before lockdowns of Spring 2020, media rhetoric had divided the American population into two camps: pro- and anti-Trump. It was an easy way to think even if it came nowhere near describing me, my friends, or most people. Then came the virus. It made an enormous mess out of this simple outlook. 

"[President Donald] Trump kept changing his position not only on the threat level but also what to do about it. He went from comparing the virus to the annual flu in January 2020 to calling for a nationwide lockdown at a March 16 press conference, before changing his mind again a few months later and urging everyone to move on. Of that lockdown order, center-left publication Vox, which had been firmly in the anti-Trump camp for the previous five years, immediately praised the press conference. For the astute, this should have been a sign that something fishy was going on. 

"But this praise for panic – and the use of despotic power without precedent to wield against a virus – was itself very strange. For the previous two months, the center left and left in the media were very clearly downplaying the virus and nowhere calling for lockdowns. In other words, they were saying in January and February what Trump was saying at the time. 

"Here are some examples of what people have entirely forgotten.... 

• January 30, 2020, MSNBC... 'Americans are too worried about the new coronavirus that’s spreading rapidly across China,” former White House health advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told CNBC on Thursday. 'Everyone in America should take a very big breath, slow down, and stop panicking and being hysterical,' said Emanuel, who served during Barack Obama’s presidency. “We are having a little too much histrionics on this'....
• Slate ... March 4, 2020. "There are many compelling reasons to conclude that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is not nearly as deadly as is currently feared. But COVID-19 panic has set in nonetheless ... which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent.... Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold. The true case fatality rate, known as CFR, of this virus is likely to be far lower.... Even some lower estimates, such as the 1 percent death rate recently mentioned by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likely substantially overstate the case'.... COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported'.... 
• Psychology Today: "The coronaviruses are cold viruses.... We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness.... Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know….It’s scary to think that an invisible enemy is out there to make you sick. But your doctor is not panicking, and you don’t need to'....
• Or we can look to Fauci himself, writing on February 28, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine, in an article co-signed by Charles Lane (of junket fame) and CDC head Robert Redfield: "If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS'....

"Whatever you think about these predictions, and there is still vast uncertainty about many aspects of this virus (thanks to testing inaccuracies and the degree of death misclassification), these voices were clearly counseling calm. Two weeks later, all hell broke loose, and this same ideological camp spent the next two years in a state of panicked meltdown and an attempt to keep the public living in fear for as long as possible. This was followed by a demonization campaign against the unvaccinated, from the very people who all swore that the 'Trump vaccine' would surely be dangerously corrupt.... What changed and why? It wasn’t the data,,,, Something else was going on. The entire pandemic became politicized....

"Two years later, with Trump out of power, the same public voices have again defaulted to dividing the population by the old terms: “liberals” vs “conservatives.” It’s become tremendously annoying not to mention wildly inaccurate. Oddly, most of the views attributed to the 'liberals' are essentially illiberal: opposed to free speech, against choice on vaccination[;] supportive of lockdowns and restrictions, segregating the population, making fun of people who want freedom and resent how it has been stolen from people in the guise of pandemic planning....

"Meanwhile, there is nothing about the people labeled 'conservative' who favor conserving anything about the current-day operation about politics. Quite the opposite: they are defending free speech against censorship, angry at elite management of life, and for toppling the administrative states’ power to rule the country and world without democratic consent. And this group is also more likely to favor diplomacy over saber rattling in foreign affairs. 

"I can’t imagine how confusing this must be for people whose English is a second language, much less those who have only a passing familiarity with American political culture.... From your own experience and conversations, you know what hardly anyone wants to admit. There has been a massive scrambling of political and ideological loyalties throughout the population over these past two years, as trust in so many institutions has dramatically fallen. There is no longer a predictable way to discern the friends of freedom from its enemies based on past loyalties and opinions.

"The last two years have confounded everyone who believed in the stability of American law, politics, public opinion, and the ideological attachments of both pundits and the general population. It’s all been turned upside down and inside out several times over. Anyone who thinks that we’ve all settled back into some mythical comfort bubbles of 'liberals' vs 'conservatives' is refusing to face post-pandemic politico-cultural realities.  

"Similarly, terms like left and right, and even independent and libertarian, have proven almost useless in predicting people’s responses to a respiratory virus and hence attitudes toward pandemic policy. The last two years have challenged political and ideological conventions like no other force in our lifetimes, and will likely lead to a rethinking and realignment, same as war and depression have in the past."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/political-loyalties-have-been-blown-up/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Libertarian Party must connect with its voters

Political scientist finds disconnect in Libertarian Party platform, voters | University of Dayton - News:

May 1, 2020 - "University of Dayton political scientist Christopher Devine has written the definitive academic study of the Libertarian Party — America’s third largest political party. He documents a growing disconnect between the party’s radical platform and the more mainstream, 'fiscally conservative and socially liberal' policy preferences of its rank-and-file supporters....

'Devine examines the Libertarian Party’s history, electoral performance and prospects for growth in the future. In addition, he conducts the first-ever survey-based analysis of party voters’ and  members’ policy views for Beyond Donkeys and Elephants: Minor Political Parties in Contemporary American Politics. The book, released this spring, is the 'most comprehensive account ever written of contemporary minor political parties in the United States,' according to publisher University Press of Kansas.

"The Libertarian Party 'portrays itself as the third choice for Americans who find themselves dissatisfied with the two-party system — not a fringe group of small-government radicals but a mainstream alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties with broad electoral appeal and the potential to emerge as a major party in its own right,' Devine writes.

"Devine’s analysis shows that Libertarian Party voters and members are fiscally conservative and socially liberal — but not radically so. Essentially, they agree with Republicans on economic policy and Democrats on social policy. However, Libertarians are less likely than Democrats or Republicans to support the use of military force. 'Yet they hardly qualify as extreme in this regard — or even "noninterventionist," really,' Devine writes.

“'Libertarians, it would seem, are not nearly as radical as their party platform,' he writes. For instance, only 12% of Libertarian Party voters agree that taxes should never be increased....

"[I]n 2016, ... presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on all 50 state ballots and won 3.3% of the national popular vote — three times more than the nearest competitor ... and more than any other minor-party candidate since 1996. Devine also notes that in 2016, the Libertarian Party had more registered voters (approximately 500,000) than any other minor party, and won a higher percentage of the vote in U.S. Senate races than at any other point in party history.

"To succeed in 2020 and beyond, Devine argues, the Libertarian Party must focus less on ideological purity and more on appealing to the broader electorate with its 'fiscally conservative and socially liberal' message. It could do so by moderating the party’s radical platform, and by nominating a credible presidential candidate, such as Congressman [Justin] Amash -- even if doing so may upset the party’s ideological base."

Read more: https://udayton.edu/news/articles/2020/05/libertarian_party.php 

Iowa, New Hampshire, and soft libertarians

by George J. Dance

As a political junkie, I eagerly turned to the news this morning to see the New Hampshire primary results. Not for the winners: I expected Trump and Sanders to win. (They both had won the earlier  Iowa caucuses.) I was looking further down, to see how the 'soft libertarian' candidates in the major parties would perform.

What is a 'soft libertarian'?, I hear you ask. I can best explain that term by pointing to the Nolan Chart [pictured at right], that classifies voters into four quadrants: liberal (or progressive), conservative, libertarian, and statist (authoritarian or, at the very bottom point, totalitarian). A 'hard' voter is totally committed to one of those four ideologies; a 'hard libertarian,' for example, is someone whose political beliefs put them up at the top point of the diamond. A 'soft libertarian' would be anyone else, whose political beliefs are less extreme (or less consistent, or more independent) but still land them inside the libertarian quadrant.

Depending on how they are measured, soft libertarians make up as much as 25% of voters. Traditionally the Republican Party has owned that vote: since the 1970s at least, soft libertarians have been voting GOP, by margins as high as 75%. However, Ross Perot's candidacies cracked that party's hold on many of those voters; and while George W. Bush brought them back, he didn't hold them long. A large number of soft libertarians voted Democratic in 2006 - I don't know the number, but it was a big factor in the Dems taking both houses of Congress that year. Obama's two terms, and the Tea Party movement, brought many back to the GOP, but whether they'll stay with it this time is frankly questionable.

In 2012 and 2016, the only candidate appealing to soft libertarians was Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. And, to the extent he was heard, they responded. Johnson got the LP its two highest vote totals, over 1 million in 2012 and over 4 million in 2016. After that, one would think, the larger parties would have tried to capture those voters by offering them something. Instead, both parties have tacked toward one or another variety of statism: Democrats have flirted with socialism, the Sanders wins being enough said. Meanwhile, the GOP is shedding its libertarianism, replacing the Reaganist ideology of fusionism (which specifically included and appealed to libertarians) with corporatism, or as some call it, "economic nationalism".

As this month's featured post (from the London School of Economics' US Centre) explains, soft libertarians could be kingmakers this year. However, rather than attract soft libertarians, both Democrats and Republicans seem intent on driving them away. 

Hence the importance of the New Hampshire results, as the first test of where the soft libertarian vote would go. Because of the Free State Project, that state has an outsize proportion of libertarians both hard and soft. New Hampshire also has an open primary, where anyone - Democrat, Republican, other party, independent, or even a habitual non-voter - can vote in either the Democratic or the GOP primary.

There was a soft libertarian, Bill Weld and Tulsi Gabbard, running in either party. Both are strong opponents of interventionism, the surveillance state, the drug war, and the imperial presidency; while both also have held non-libertarian positions, most notably on gun control. Both were counting on soft libertarian support in New Hampshire. So how did they do?

Gabbard's campaign, with its strong opposition to an interventist foreign policy, was endorsed by libertarians from Ron Paul to Gary Johnson. She ended up with under 4% of the vote, nowhere enough to make her a contender. She will be gone from the race in a month, and with her will go most of her party's appeal to soft libertarians.

Weld's campaign is more problematic. He beat expectations, but fell short of the 10% he was hoping for. (He received 9%.) He is wealthy enough to fund his own limited campaign, so he will stay in and hope for a breakthrough somewhere else. But, so far, his campaign is not resonating with soft libertarian voters, either.

That leaves a better-than-ever opportunity for the Libertarian Party, if they cared to reach out to those voters with another 'soft libertarian' campaign like the Johnson ones. However, many LP members seem determined to run anything but. Libertarians didn't vote in New Hampshire yesterday; but based on last weekend's Iowa caucus vote, a plurality just shy of a majority is backing Jacob Hornberger, a thinktank founder and director, who wants to run to 'educate' Americans with a hard libertarian message.

To repeat, the soft libertarian vote could be key to deciding this election. If faced with the alternatives of statism (either the more progressive variety of socialism or the more conservative variety of corporatism) versus hard libertarianism, where will they turn?
   

LP 2020: Ends and means

by George J. Dance

This May, 1,000 or so Libertarian Party delegates will gather in Austin, Texas, to pick the party's nominee for President. It promises to be a contentious convention. LP members were divided as never before by Gary Johnson's two runs as nominee, and remain divided on whether the party should continue to run campaigns like that, or radically change direction.

On paper, the party had its most successful presidential campaign ever in 2012, and an even more successful one in 2016. Only once before 2012 had a candidate for POTUS even come close to a million votes (in 1980, the year David Koch financed the campaign from his own pocket). Gary Johnson's campaigns both topped a million votes, and the 2016 campaign - despite the most bipolarized election of this century - topped 4 million.

Yet, to many, the 2016 Johnson campaign was a disaster. In their view, Johnson was the least libertarian candidate for the nomination, and his campaign platform the least libertarian message the party could project. Delegates will be seriously questioning where the LP should go from here. That should include even revisiting the question of what a Libertarian Party is. What is it for? Why even have one?

My definition: The LP is a vehicle for accomplishing libertarian political ends by democratic means. While each libertarian has their own preferred "political ends", there is substantial agreement on those, which the LP has used to create its Platform and Statement of Principles. By democratic means, I mean attracting members and donors, and running candidates and campaigns, in order to gain sufficient votes to influence public policy. Perhaps the LP will never gain enough votes to win; but one does not need to win to change policy.

In the words of Libertarian strategist Tom Knapp:

“Winning elections” or “maximizing vote totals” are the LP’s means, not the LP’s ends.
The LP’s ends are about changing policy to match the party’s platform and Statement of Principles.

The end is not the Platform itself, but changing policy to align with it. Policy change could be either an immediate matchup (absolutism) or one of a series of incremental moves toward it (gradualism). Sometimes an absolutist policy may be best to adopt, sometimes a gradualist one. One consideration is the end: which option is closest to the platform? The other is the means: which option will let the party gain and keep the votes needed to actually influence policy?

David Bergland ran probably the most absolutist campaign in party history: great on all the ends. But he attracted just 250,000 votes: bad on the means. Gary Johnson's campaign was absolutist on maybe 3 issues, gradualist on most, and even contradicted the platform on an issue (private discrimination by race or sexual orientation): not as good on the ends. But he attracted 4 million voters: much better on the means.

It is important in 2020 that the Libertarian candidate's campaign be consistent with the ends: changing policies in line with the Platform and the Statement of Principles. But it is also important that the party keep the 4 million people who voted for it, and do all that it can to attract more. The LP delegates need to consider both the ends and the means.

Understanding the Overton Window

The Overton Window – Mackinac Center:

"The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window.

"But the Overton Window can both shift and expand, either increasing or shrinking the number of ideas politicians can support without unduly risking their electoral support. Sometimes politicians can move the Overton Window themselves by courageously endorsing a policy lying outside the window, but this is rare. More often, the window moves based on a much more complex and dynamic phenomenon ... the slow evolution of societal values and norms."
Read more: https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow

How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream - The New York Times - Maggie Astor:

February 26, 2019 - "Joseph P. Overton introduced the concept in the 1990s as an executive at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Michigan. He never expected it to gain widespread recognition, said Joseph G. Lehman, president of the Mackinac Center, and it didn’t until after Mr. Overton died in 2003....

"'Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,' Mr. Lehman said in an interview. 'They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.'

"Grass-roots mobilization can shift the window. So can think tanks, which was Mr. Overton’s point. But despite a misconception driven by Glenn Beck’s novel The Overton Window, the window is a description, not a tactic: Shifting it doesn’t mean proposing extreme ideas to make somewhat less extreme ideas seem reasonable. 'It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth,' Mr. Lehman said....

"The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise."
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/us/politics/overton-window-democrats.html?login=facebook&auth=login-facebook

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See also: Libertarians have shifted the Overton Window

Libertarians have shifted the Overton Window

How David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality | The New Republic - Adam Eichen:

August 27, 2019 - "Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch ... will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth [by whom? - ed.].... Ronald Reagan may have uttered the famous words 'Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem' back in 1981 — but it was David Koch, along with his elder brother Charles and a cabal of other ultrarich individuals, who truly reframed the popular view of government. Once [seen  as] a democratic tool used to shape the country’s future, government became seen as something intrusive and inefficient — indeed, something to be feared.

"David Koch was particularly instrumental in legitimizing anti-government ideology — one the GOP now holds as gospel. In 1980, the younger Koch ran as the vice-presidential nominee for the nascent Libertarian Party. And ... Koch personally donated more than $2 million to the party — an astounding amount for the time — to promote the Ed Clark–David Koch ticket.... In fact, according to [Lisa] Graves, 'The Koch-funded Libertarian Party helped spur on Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, free-market-solves-all agenda as president.'

"Even by contemporary standards, the 1980 Libertarian Party platform was extreme. It called for the abolition of a wide swath of federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Election Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Trade Commission, and 'all government agencies concerned with transportation.' It railed against campaign finance and consumer protection laws, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, any regulations of the firearm industry (including tear gas), and government intervention in labor negotiations. And the platform demanded the repeal of all taxation, and sought amnesty for those convicted of tax 'resistance.'

"Koch and his libertarian allies moreover advocated for the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. They wanted to abolish federally mandated speed limits. They opposed occupational licensure, antitrust laws, labor laws protecting women and children, and 'all controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production, and interest rates.' And in true libertarian fashion, the platform urged the privatization of all schools (with an end to compulsory education laws), the railroad system, public roads and the national highway system, inland waterways, water distribution systems, public lands, and dam sites.

"The Libertarian Party never made much of a splash in the election — though it did garner almost 12 percent of the vote in Alaska — but doing so was never the point. Rather, the Kochs were engaged in a long-term effort to normalize the aforementioned ideas and mainstream them into American politics. Building off the Libertarian campaign, Graves explained, 'David and Charles then used their front groups to pull the Reagan Administration further to the right with their push to privatize across the board.' With their army of think tanks, front groups, lobbyists, and media ties, this multimillion dollar effort to shift the Overton Window grew for nearly four decades, culminating in the takeover of many core political institutions, federally and in key states. The duo additionally capitalized on the anti-government Tea Party movement, which they greatly helped along by bankrolling the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

"The Koch’s Ayn Rand–inspired hellscape has yet to completely come to fruition, but the ideas the duo promoted are now part of the regular discourse — and have been for a while."

Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/154849/david-koch-1980-fantasy
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See also: Understanding the Overton Window

Conservatism vs. classical liberalism

Conservatism and Classical Liberalism Don’t Share the Same Values - James Peron, The Radical Centre:

November 3, 2018 - "Too many sympathizers to libertarian ideas think the core of liberalism is free markets and thus they fall for the delusion that conservatives are some variant of 'classical liberal,' because they claim to support markets.

"But, a classical liberal holds to individual rights as his core value, not markets. Markets are derivatives of rights theory ... intertwined with the liberal theory of rights. Conservatives tend to oppose individual rights for collectivist concepts. The 'common good' comes before individual rights to them.... It is no different with the illiberal Left, who make similar arguments.

"Individual rights means individualism  —  something for which conservatives don’t care. They are advocates of the herd, they preach social conformity in the name of tradition. They are happy for you to be free regarding which toothpaste to buy, just not thrilled if you assert the right to pick which person to marry....

"Economics, while individualistic at its core, is also very herd oriented.... Human economic needs are global, pervasive, and common to all ... what Abraham Maslow called lower order needs....

"Economic needs are not particularly individualistic. Thus conservatives don’t immediately oppose this freedom in the short term. I do think they oppose it in the long term, and there were plenty of times in history when conservatives opposed it in the short term as well.... Conservatives have not been friends of free markets overall. Economic rights just aren’t seen as automatically threatening to the conservative herd identity.

"What really gets the conservative’s back up is social freedom [or] freedom in the ... non-market realm. It is linked to markets but it is heavily about individualistic wants and needs, or what Maslow called self-actualization needs. Lower order needs tend to be relatively similar for all. Higher order needs are strongly individualized.

"The conservative is happy with freedom for the herd  —  that is in those areas where everyone has roughly similar needs — just not freedom for the individual  —  where needs and wants are unique, individualistic, perhaps even idiosyncratic or eccentric....

"The smaller the minority the more likely, I suggest, the conservative is to attack it. The closer it gets to the unique individual, the further it drifts from the herd, and conservative values are ultimately herd values. Theirs were values fit for a world where food was scarce and life was primitive....

"For the conservative mind it is easy to be 'liberal' when it comes to property rights, difficult when it comes to gender identity, same-sex marriage, religious skepticism, etc.... Given the consensus in favor of markets — impure ones perhaps, but still markets — it is much more telling to discover how much social freedom one is willing to grant. Where they stand on rights for LGBT people, or 'illegal' drugs, or censorship of erotica, is more indicative as to whether they are a classical liberal than their position on price controls or lower taxes."

Read more: https://medium.com/the-radical-center/conservatism-and-classical-liberalism-dont-share-the-same-values-25d80dd8b902
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Limited government as framework for utopia

Why Robert Nozick was a libertarian | Big Think - Scotty Hendricks:

August 13, 2018 - "Robert Nozick ... was a philosopher at Harvard.... After the publication of his colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which brilliantly argues for social democracy, Nozick was inspired to use similar arguments to promote his political positions. Appearing three years later, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) was Nozick’s only political philosophy book.

"He begins by advancing a straightforward premise, 'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)'.... Nozick’s idea of rights are protections against harm to us or our property. In this way they are negative rights; they assure us that other people won’t bother us and that we can claim compensation when they do, but they don’t obligate anybody else to do anything for us....

"Our having these rights means that it is wrong to hurt people or take their property for any reason unless they consent to such action, excepting when we are correcting for a previous violation of rights. Nozick argues that this premise leaves us with only one option when we’re deciding what kind of state is justified. He calls it a 'minimal state' or the 'night watchman state' and it is much, much, smaller than any functioning state is today.

"Nozick explains that the night watchman state is 'limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on.' There would also not be any taxes in this state, as that would be forcing people to hand over their property with or without their consent. It also would not be able to enact laws preventing people from making their own life choices or that force people to make ones that they don't want to make....

"Nozick ... asks how we can build a society that works for a very diverse group of people.... [H]is stance is that you can only build a 'meta-framework' that allows for a variety of people to pursue a variety of life plans. Because of this, the 'utopia' that Nozick alludes to in the title is not one but many.

"In the minimalist state, it will be possible for people to form utopian communities on their own without outside interference. Nozick claims that this is one of the greatest perks of a minimalist state, as it will allow people to choose communities that fit their lifestyle, create new ones, leave ones they don’t like, or avoid utopian dreams altogether without hassle.

"Such utopian communities could be puritanical, hedonist, communist, capitalist, dedicated to eating cheese, or whatever else people think will make them happy. The minimalist state only assures that nobody is forced into these living situations, that nobody is forced to pay for these communities other than the people living in them, that any contracts signed are adhered to, and that nobody tries to harm or defraud the members of such groups."

Read more: https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/why-robert-nozick-was-a-libertarian
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Bastiat on The Law and its limits

Bastiat Knew the Proper Limits of Government Force - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world - Frank Hollenbeck:

February 18, 2018 - "High school students in the United States are usually required to take a course in government. They learn about the structure of government but rarely discover the appropriate role of government.... If they did, one of their required readings would be Frédéric Bastiat’s treatise The Law, a seminal mid-nineteenth-century work....

"Bastiat states that individuals are born with the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. From this notion, the only proper function of the use of force or the law is the collective organization of the natural right to self-defense of these rights....

"He then defines any illegitimate use of force or of the law as legal plunder. This is an all-encompassing term which includes any unjustified violation of the life, liberty, or property of others. Many examples abound today with regulations on labor (e.g. minimum wage laws), products (e.g. subsidies and tariffs), health care, education, or even the use of marijuana or any other drugs....

"The problem with legal plunder is that it creates hatred and discord and eats at the very fabric of society. The US Civil War was fought primarily for two reasons: slavery and tariffs. The first was a violation of liberty, the second was a violation of property....

"The law should be a viewed as a negation; if you don’t violate the life, liberty, or property of someone else, you should not see the arm of the law or care much about the role of government.... If the law were properly defined, you would not blame the government for your misfortunes nor would you credit it with your successes.... Bastiat wrote:

[I]f you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, literary, or artistic — you will then be lost in an uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it upon you. This is true because fraternity and philanthropy, unlike justice, do not have precise limits. Once started, where will you stop? And where will the law stop itself?

"More important than left or right is the concept of liberty. The solution to the problem of human relationships is freedom, and it thrives most when the role of government is limited, the use of force is constrained, and the law is confined to the administration of universal justice, or, more precisely, the law is exclusively used as a roadblock to injustice."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/bastiat-knew-the-proper-limits-of-government-force/
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The contractarian libertarian

Libertarianism and contractarianism - The Washington Post - John Thrasher, The Volokh Conspiracy:

September 20, 2017 - "Liberalism (in the classical sense) and its more austere cousin libertarianism, are fundamentally doctrines that put personal and political freedom at the heart of things ... typically understood as freedom from government and social interference so that one can exercise one’s freedom to live the life of one’s choosing. Equality is crucial in securing freedom insofar as we understand equality as equality of fundamental rights to non-interference....

"It is a commonplace to argue, as Thomas Nagel did in an early review of Robert Nozick’s epoch-making Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that the libertarian and classical liberal focus on rights is 'without foundations.' Although this criticism is fundamentally mistaken, it is an unsurprising allegation given the preferred intuitionistic method of many of the most important philosophical libertarians....

"I argue that libertarians and liberals should embrace a contractual method of justification.... The core rights that define the freedom and equality of members of a free society are or would be, on this view, the result of an agreement between rational individuals for the purpose of mutual benefit....

"[T]he state of nature and contractual consent are not accurate descriptions of the history of political organization. This criticism, however, misunderstands the basic idea behind social contract theory: to model how a genuinely voluntary and mutually beneficial society would be structured.... The social contract acts as a tool to evaluate existing and possible social rules and institutions.

"Contractual theory, pursued this way, aims to bring the mutually beneficial power of market exchange to social governance. But ... David Gauthier notes in Morals by Agreement, 'before Smith’s invisible hand can do its beneficent work, Hobbes’s war of every man against every man must first be exorcized' (85). Markets require a foundation in basic norms of trust and the assurance that one’s rights are secure. This requires, at least initially, credible enforcement and governance mechanisms. This governance can be achieved in any number of ways, however, not all of which require explicit political institutions.... Indeed, the long-term project of the libertarian contractarian should be to investigate how forms of genuine self-government can realize, in modern societies, the contractarian goals of voluntariness and mutual benefit....

""The contractual approach helps to solve two perennial problems in libertarian and liberal theory ... the foundational problem of whether to base libertarian conclusions on some deontological basis (e.g., natural rights) or to adopt a consequentialist justification [and] how to adjudicate between the anarchist and minimal government strands in libertarian thought....

"[T]he contractual approach preserves a focus on the consequences of political institutions that many find appealing in consequentialist or utilitarian theory....  Similarly, the contractual method, based on rational agreement, provides a justification for rights that doesn’t rely on controversial foundations. This, as I argue more fully in Social Contractarianism, makes the contractual approach uniquely attractive....

"I also argue that the contractual approach can dissolve another traditional dispute between classical liberals and libertarians; whether ... libertarians are really committed to anarchism.... The contractual libertarian can admit that there is no moral obligation or duty to obey the state, but that in a free and open society with institutions that can meet the contractual test, there are good reasons to endorse the laws and social norms of such a society....

"Agreement is the only basis of a free society. These agreements must be voluntary and reflect our perceived interests. A society built on this model would be as close to a truly voluntary society as we could ever hope."

Read more: http://gdspoliticalanimal.blogspot.ca/2017/10/libertarianism-and-contractarianism.html
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Rethinking the Lockean Proviso

Libertarian property rights and the Lockean sufficiency proviso - The Washington Post - Fabian Wendt, Volokh Conspiracy:

September 22, 2017 - "John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) contains a defense of private property that makes use of the idea of labor-mixing. In §27, Locke writes: ‘[…] for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.’ The ‘at least’ clause has become known as the ‘Lockean proviso’. It is usually understood as specifying a limit to labor-based acquisition of private property.

"Since libertarians care a lot about private property and its justification, the Lockean proviso has been an important tenet in libertarian theories of justice....  Right-libertarians either reject the Lockean proviso or endorse very weak interpretations of it, while left-libertarians endorse some egalitarian interpretation of the Lockean proviso (which allows appropriation until one has one’s equal share of natural resources or as long as the appropriation is compatible with equality of opportunity for welfare).

"In between right- and left-libertarianism, there is room for moderate interpretations of the proviso, and in particular for a sufficientarian interpretation, a sufficiency proviso. It is remarkable that this option has rarely been defended. The resulting theory of justice can be called ‘moderate libertarianism’.... [M]oderate libertarianism has advantages over both left- and right-libertarianism because it better coheres with the most plausible rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice in the first place.

"What is this rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice? It starts with the rather trivial fact that persons are purposive beings. They have the capacity to pursue all kinds of projects. Almost all projects require external resources, and they require being able to count on one’s resources. For that reason, persons as project-pursuers need the opportunity to acquire private property in external resources in one way or another. Following Eric Mack, one can take this to establish a ‘natural right to the practice of private property’. Together with the idea of self-ownership, this natural right can be regarded as the core of a libertarian theory of justice. Note that the project pursuit rationale for libertarianism does not rely on the moral force of Lockean labor-mixing. Rather, private property as a practice is justified as being responsive to persons as project pursuers....

"[I]f one embraces a libertarian theory of justice due to the project pursuit rationale, then one should also embrace a sufficientarian proviso. The basic idea is simple: Without sufficient resources, people are unable to live their lives as project pursuers. Because this is so, a libertarian who advances a libertarian theory of justice because s/he cares about people as project pursuers must also care about everyone actually having sufficient resources for living a life as a project-pursuer. This is why some sort of sufficientarian proviso should be incorporated into a libertarian theory of justice....

"First of all, my sufficiency proviso does not apply to specific acts of appropriation, but to the practice of private property as a whole. The practice of private property is justified because private property is necessary for living as a project pursuer, but it can only be justified under condition that it actually enables everyone to live as a project pursuer.

"Second, the sufficiency proviso does not unconditionally require us to bring everyone above the sufficiency threshold. The proviso only prescribes that the practice of private property should be designed in a way that makes sure that everyone has sufficient resources to live as a project pursuer, if this is possible without undermining the point of having a practice of private property in the first place."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/22/libertarian-property-rights-and-lockes-sufficiency-proviso/?utm_term=.47439424a2b7
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Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism published

The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism - The Washington Post - Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy:

August 29, 2017 - "The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism  (edited by Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz), has just been published. This book is the most wide-ranging analysis of libertarianism, its strengths and weaknesses, and its applications to a wide range of political issues, to be published in a long time.

"In addition to the editors, contributors include a wide range of prominent libertarian scholars and critics of libertarianism, including Peter Boettke, Geoffrey Brennan, Sarah Conley, Jessica Flanigan, Samuel Freeman, Gerald Gaus,  Michael Huemer, Peter Jaworski,  Anna Stilz, Fernando R. Tesón, Kevin Vallier, and others....

"Here is the publisher’s summary of the book:

Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right. The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism helps readers fully examine this alternative without preaching it to them, exploring the contours of libertarian (sometimes also called classical liberal) thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. The 31 chapters – all written specifically for this volume – are organized into five parts. Part I asks, what should libertarianism learn from other theories of justice, and what should defenders of other theories of justice learn from libertarianism? Part II asks, what are some of the deepest problems facing libertarian theories? Part III asks, what is the right way to think about property rights and the market? Part IV asks, how should we think about the state? Finally, part V asks, how well (or badly) can libertarianism deal with some of the major policy challenges of our day, such as immigration, trade, religion in politics, and paternalism in a free market. Among the Handbook’s chapters are those from critics who write about what they believe libertarians get right as well as others from leading libertarian theorists who identify what they think libertarians get wrong. As a whole, the Handbook provides a comprehensive, clear-eyed look at what libertarianism has been and could be, and why it matters.

"Sadly, the price [$171. on Amazon - gd] may well be too high ... to buy the book ... for anyone but libraries, the very wealthy, and academics with expense accounts. But if you’re at all interested in the subject, you should definitely at least take a look at it and check out some of the chapters."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/29/the-routledge-handbook-of-libertarianism/?utm_term=.ef6fc0504a5e
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Fascists and progressives

by George J. Dance

Alt.right author James Miller believes that "Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation." In his view: "Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology." He goes on to offer the following definition:

Fascism is an economic system in which a nation’s government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding and advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whole and the people of the nation — this is the axiom which determines everything under Fascism.[1]

Interestingly, this definition of fascism (which looks correct) also looks like a correct definition of progressivism, the economic philosophy of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and every Democratic president since (save perhaps Truman and Clinton), and some Republican presidents as well (Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush).

Like socialism, fascism and progressivism are variants of statism: the belief that state control of society and the economy is necessary to bring about and maintain a good society. But while socialists try to achieve that control directly, through government ownership and increased government spending, progressives and fascists try to achieve it indirectly through regulation, oversight, and management of nominally private businesses and workers.

As the historical record shows, the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, and the progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were composed of mutual admirers, who followed a similar politico-economic agenda. As David Gordon of the Mises Institue has documented:

• The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
• Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20)....
• Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"(pp. 23-24)....
• Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32)[2]

Because (unlike socialism), fascism and progressivism do not directly challenge a country's economic status quo, they can appeal to the conservative as well as the totalitarian biases that I have argued exist in modern political societies.[3] However, like socialism, fascism and progressivism imply a radical restructuring of society, with state power vastly increased at the expense of individual rights and liberties.

This ideological symmetry can lead to tactical symmetries: for instance, historical fascism relied on tactics of political violence copied from those on the radical left (the anarchists and Bolsheviks).[4] Progressives, on the other hand, initially rejected those methods; one fundamental difference between progressives and fascists. That was because radical leftism and fascism were populist, bottom-up movements, while progressivism began as a thoroughly top-down, establishment movement. However, the mass-based, bottom-up progressivism that began in North America in the 1960s has increasingly also adopted political violence tactics from the radical left, further blurring the difference between the fascist and progressive ideologies.

Notes

[1] James Miller, "What is Fascism," Kevin Alfred Strong blog, August 13, 2012.  http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2012/08/what-is-fascism/

[2] David Gordon, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR" (review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Metropolitan Books, 2006). Mises Daily, September 22, 2006, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr

[3] George J. Dance, "Why are there no libertarian countries?", Nolan Chart, April 29, 2017.
https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries

[4] Ludwig von Mises, "The Argument of Fascism," Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (translated by Ralph Raico). Foundation for Economic Education, 1985, 29. Books / Digital Texts, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition/html/p/29 

Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives

The case for libertarianism in American politics | TheHill - David D'Amato:

June 8, 2017 - "Libertarianism is not conservatism, nor is it an offshoot of conservatism, a subset, or even a relative of common extraction ... because libertarian political philosophy is best understood as a radicalization of traditional liberalism.... The radical, going as she does to the root, hopes to provoke change at the deepest sub strata of society, motivated by the conviction that the political and economic status quo is fundamentally unjust.

"Libertarians believe that the best is yet to come, that history has been the bloodstained story of unscrupulous ruling thugs and their many misdeeds, their constant crimes against law, order, and justice....

"Historian Larry Siedentop goes so far as to argue that ... many of the concepts and modes of argument long credited to socialism were in fact 'introduced by liberal thinkers'.... For example, libertarians have been quick to call attention to the fact that early French liberals developed a pre-socialist (or perhaps proto-socialist) class theory, embedded in which was an argument for radical laissez-faire....

"In America, individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker explicitly identified themselves as socialists even as they advocated 'a perfectly free market,' in which only force or fraud would be out of bounds.... The capitalist, for Tucker, was 'guilty of criminal invasion,' of violating the central libertarian law against the use of aggression against the non-invasive individual. He worried that many of those employing what seemed libertarian-sounding language had actually become the mouthpieces of 'the capitalistic class.' That class had achieved wealth and power not by competing for consumers’ hard-earned dollars, but 'by abolishing the free market,' by using the coercive power of the state to artificially limit the range of competition.

"Throughout the 20th century, some stalwart proponents of the peaceful, cosmopolitan order produced by free trade and respect for private property rights have continued to identify as liberals.... Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, with whom modern libertarianism is so often associated, were such committed liberals, dependably opposed to conservatism and, in Hayek’s works, its 'propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge.'.... As a philosophy of universal individual rights, libertarian[ism] contemplates a deep break with centuries-old orders of power and privilege, in which a handful of political and ecclesiastical authorities made the rules and reaped the rewards....

"Because the dominance of today’s corporate powerhouses rests largely on government privilege, and thus violence — not voluntary, mutually beneficial trade — the anti-corporate rhetoric of progressives rings hollow; they emphasize wealth inequality and economic justice, yet they would expand the very power on which corporate abuses now rest. American political history finds self-described progressives among the most reliable guardians of corporate welfare.

"Libertarianism is a principled alternative to conservatism and progressivism, both of which, at base, represent authority against liberty."

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/336992-the-case-for-libertarianism-in-american-politics
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This year's evil libertarian: James M. Buchanan

Book Review: 'Democracy In Chains,' By Nancy MacLean : NPR - Genevieve Valentine:

June 18, 2017 - "[E]conomist James Buchanan — an early herald of libertarianism — began to cultivate a group of like-minded thinkers with the goal of changing government.... This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains....

"Buchanan headed a group of radical thinkers (he told his allies 'conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential'), who worked to centralize power in states like Virginia.... As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive."

Read more: http://www.npr.org/2017/06/18/531929217/democracy-in-chains-traces-the-rise-of-american-libertarianism


James M. Buchanan, Economic Scholar, Dies at 93 - New York Times - Robert D. McFadden:

January 9, 2013 -  "James M. Buchanan, a scholar and author whose analyses of economic and political decision-making won the 1986 Nobel in economic sciences ... was a leading proponent of public choice theory, which assumes that politicians and government officials, like everyone else, are motivated by self-interest — getting re-elected or gaining more power — and do not necessarily act in the public interest.

"He argued that their actions could be analyzed, and even predicted, by applying the tools of economics to political science in ways that yield insights into the tendencies of governments to grow, increase spending, borrow money, run large deficits and let regulations proliferate....

"Buchanan contended that the pursuit of self-interest by modern politicians often led to harmful public results. Courting voters at election time, for example, legislators will approve tax cuts and spending increases for projects and entitlements favored by the electorate. This combination can lead to ever-rising deficits, public debt burdens and increasingly large governments to conduct the public’s business.

"In lectures, articles and more than 30 books, Dr. Buchanan amplified on the theory of public choice and argued for smaller government, lower deficits and fewer regulations — a spectrum of policy objectives that were ascendant in the 1980s conservative agenda of President Ronald Reagan.

"Over the years since Dr. Buchanan won the Nobel, much of what he predicted has played out. Government is bigger than ever. Tax revenue has fallen far short of public programs’ needs. Public and private borrowing has become a way of life. Politicians still act in their own interests while espousing the public good, and national deficits have soared into the trillions."

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/business/economy/james-m-buchanan-economic-scholar-dies-at-93.html
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A brief account of property

by George J. Dance

Property is a relation between some people ('owners'), some things ('goods' or 'resources'), and, by implication, other people. Property rights are either liberty or claim negative rights that include rights (1) to appropriate things, or acquire them as property, (2) to use them as goods (usus), and therefore (3) to use them as resources to create new goods, which are also the creator's property (fructus). They comprise both basic property rights (to acquire and use things at all), which look inalienable, and derivative ownership rights to specific things, which are fully alienable. Because ownership rights are alienable, they include rights (4) to get rid of the property, either by destroying it, including consuming it or using it up to make something else (abusus), or by giving ownership rights to it to someone else.

Everyone has the basic property rights needed to be an owner, but only owners have derivative ownership rights. Because the latter are rights of owners only, it follows that there is an owner's right to exclude non-owners from using those specific things if she wants to.

Back in 1689, John Locke theorized that "Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself."[1, 27] In other words, while basic rights to negative liberty were held by everyone, only one person had the derivative rights over her own person (which both explains and justifies the idea of asymmetrical ownership rights).

Since people have to eat to live, their rights must include a right to eat, and therefore a right to gather food to feed oneself: "And will any one say, he had no right to those acorns or apples, he thus appropriated, because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him."[1, 28] Since a right to feed oneself is a right to consume specific goods (meaning both to acquire, use, and destroy them, and to exclude everyone else from using them), it is a property right, which shows the necessity of property rights to some goods.

Locke did place four conditions on appropriation of things. The first three were necessary: The thing had to be "in the common state nature provided it," in other words not already owned;[1, 27] the owner had to have "mixed his labour with" (used) it;[1, 27] and no one could appropriate more than she could use.[1, 33] Without satisfying those conditions with respect to appropriating any specific thing, one could not become its owner.

The fourth, when added to the above, looks instead like a sufficient condition: if one's appropriation of a good satisfied it, one would be unquestionably an owner; "for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others."[1, 27]
 
Since people have been eating, and letting others eat, since the dawn of time, one can place the first implicit property rights that far back. However, the first explicit property rights were probably communal. Robert Lefevre theorizes that, in primitive tribes, the food "would have been for the use of the entire tribe."[2, 13.] Tribal ownership persisted when hunters became nomads: Tribes followed their herds, a property right they enforced against outsiders; kills were probably divided among the whole tribe by its patriarch.[3, 16] It probably was the first type of property during the agricultural revolution (10,000 B.C.) as well; but given evidence that recognizing individual rights to a crop leads to higher productivity,[4] and given the enormous increase in productivity during the revolution, it is reasonable to think that individual or family ownership began to catch on then.

The increasing prosperity attracted the notice of the nomads, who began raiding and plundering agricultural sentiments. Beginning around 5,000 BC, some got the idea of conquering agricultural lands and settling down as rulers, managing the inhabitants like a herd. Von Rustow calls this process "superstratification," and sees it as the emergence of the first states:

Superstratification produced, for the first time in history, human social groupings that, in their inner structure, were based on bloodshed and violence.... For the first time outer morality, the morality of violence, penetrates, domineeringly and determinedly, into the interior of a social body.... [As Nietzche wrote:] 'The state originates in the cruelest way, through conquest, through the production of a race of drones.'"[3, 35-36]  

Not surprisingly, violence and blooshed invaded the sphere of property rights as well. First, the conquerors took over existing property by force and became the new owners. Second, they established property laws backed by a police power.

This historical sequence shows that ownership rights do not necessarily imply a right to use violence and bloodshed (since the first has existed without the second). Before the coming of the state, as Lefevre notes, whatever enforcement of property rights there was, played little if any role in their protection: "as properties multiplied, opportunity for theft far exceeded the ability of physical defenders, both in time and numbers." Property rights were mainly supported by religions: "Non-trespass of private property became one of the earliest taboos, substituted for still earlier taboos against tribal trespass. Here is the early root of the Golden Rule, and even of the late development of the Decalogue."[2, 7].

Religions are still the major support for private property rights in some communities, the pacifist Amish communities being a good example. Even where the state does enforce property rights, as Lefevre also points out, its violence and bloodshed play but a minor role in protecting them:

What is not easily grasped is the fact that ownership of property and its retention in private hands are dependent on understanding and belief, and not upon force. The only real protection we have arises from the unwillingness of individuals to commit trespass, and not upon the willingness of certain men, hired as a constabulary, to pursue those who have violated property rights, in order to bring restitution, or to punish the offenders, or both.[2, 9]

Notes

[1] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (edited by C.B. McPherson). Indianapolis, IN, & Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 1980. Print.

[2] Robert Lefevre, The Philosophy of Ownership. Rampart College, 1974. Print.

[3] Alexander Rustow, Freedom and Domination (translated by Salvator Attanasio; edited by Dankwart A. Rustow). Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Print.

[4] Gary Galles, "Private Property and the first U.S. Thanksgiving," GD's Political Animal, November 27, 2016, Blogspot, Web, June 7, 2017. http://gdspoliticalanimal.blogspot.ca/2016/11/private-property-and-first-us.html

dbzer0 on the NAP

dbzer0 on the NAP - George J. Dance, Nolan Chart:

May 15, 2017 - "Last week I wrote an article dealing with two claims that the non-aggression principle (or NAP) was useless. In return I received not one but two requests to deal with another such claim: this one on an anonymous blog called A Division by Zer0, which also argues that 'the Non-Aggression principle is useless as a moral guideline.'

"The blog author (dbzer0 for short) defines NAP as the principle that 'no human should aggress over another human. This is meant to mean the initial use of coercive force as well as the threat of such'.... This is fine, as long as 'aggress over another human' is interpreted as 'initiate force against other people or their property' (which does not say anything about what property is, or if there is any, much less who owns what property, so no question is begged).

"Using this principle, a libertarian can derive moral axioms (like 'Rape is wrong, because rape is aggression' or 'It is not wrong to forcibly prevent a rape, because forcibly preventing aggression is not aggression') and make moral judgments (like 'I shouldn’t rape Mary' or 'I should stop John from raping Mary'). That looks pretty useful to me; so why does dbzer0 claim it is useless?

Is NAP unnecessary?
dbzer0’s first argument is that it is unnecessary to have NAP as a rule, because 'other moral systems … already encompass such rules (with stipulation) as a natural consequence of their suggestions.' But one cannot simply follow 'other moral systems' in general instead of NAP; moral systems disagree both in 'rules' and 'stipulations', and where they do disagree one would have to follow one or another. That means either deciding which system to follow, or deciding on a principle that tells one which system to follow in which case. How does one decide that?

dbzer0 claims that every non-libertarian moral system ('anything else') is distinguished 'by the absence of the NAP,' but gives no reason to think that must be. Logically, a moral system can either (1) contain or 'encompass' NAP; (2) partly contain NAP, or (3) not contain NAP at all. Following NAP might indeed be useless if following any one of those systems resulted in making the exact same moral judgments as following NAP. But ... systems that would result in the same judgments would be type (1) systems; but how would following a type (1) system not be following NAP?

To make this clear, let us look at the specific alternatives dbZer0 discusses. One is Christianity, which as he points out has NAP-like rules such as 'Thou shalt not kill'. But, as he also points out, 'Thou shalt not kill' 'can lead to worse results (such as foregoing killing in self-defence)', precisely the result that NAP does not lead to. So that example is no evidence that NAP is useless, but the opposite: that NAP is a better rule than some alternatives."

Read more: https://web.archive.org/web/20200115004026/https://www.nolanchart.com/dbzero-on-the-nap
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The non-ideological Trump presidency

Trump Isn’t a Pragmatist. He Doesn’t Understand Ideology - Jonathan Chait, New York magazine:

May 3, 2017 - "Amid a flurry of strange statements by President Trump, an especially peculiar one he made recently largely passed by unnoticed. Asked about his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, Trump told Bloomberg News, 'Bannon’s more of a libertarian than anything else, if you want to know the truth.'

"That is a bizarre description. While certain libertarian-friendly notions — lower taxes, spending, regulation — serve as baseline-level beliefs shared by every Republican, Bannon might be the least libertarian member of the party of any stature. The ideas that excite Bannon the most are opposition to immigration and trade, on which he is pushing positions diametrically opposed to libertarianism. He has excitedly proposed a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. He has publicly criticized the party for its fealty to libertarianism. ('The Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world,' he told Robert Draper recently.) And libertarians generally distrust Bannon in return.

"Trump has no clear motive to miscategorize his chief strategist. Several more attractive, and also more plausible, terms are available: conservative, populist, nationalist. Trump simply does not grasp either Bannon’s thinking or libertarianism.....

"Trump — whose political profile over the decades has vacillated from liberal to conservative to moderate to populist, and supported and opposed abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, and universal health care — does not care very much about political ideas.... The president also does not know very much about political ideas.... He does not understand which kinds of ideas imply support for which kinds of policies, nor why political figures tend to believe what they do, nor why they agree or disagree with one another. He is capable of forming strongly held beliefs about people in politics, but he does so in entirely personal terms....

"Many Americans share Trump’s lack of ideological sophistication. High-information voters tend to clump at the ends of the political spectrum. They may not have sophisticated beliefs, but their identification with one of the party coalitions is a tool they use to make sense of individual issues. Low-information voters tend to have a weak understanding of what the political parties stand for and how those positions relate to each other. These voters can be roughly categorized as 'centrist' because they don’t line up neatly with one party platform or the other. But, rather than a consistently moderate outlook, they share a mishmash of extreme and frequently uninformed beliefs. Because they don’t understand the philosophical basis for disagreements, they assume the two parties ought to naturally cooperate, and tend to see partisan bickering as a failure and an indication of personal fault by politicians.

"Trump thinks about politics like a low-information voter, which enabled him to speak their language naturally. His stated belief during the campaign that he could expertly craft a series of popular deals — 'it’s going to be so easy' — appealed to low-information voters because it earnestly described the political world as they see it....

"Politics is a strange institution that forces committed professionals who have coherent philosophical beliefs to persuade voters who mostly do not.... Trump accomplishes it in lowbrow style, by literally not understanding the source of the disagreement."

Read more: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trump-isnt-a-pragmatist-he-doesnt-understand-ideology.html
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Why are there no libertarian countries?

Why are there no libertarian countries? - George J. Dance, Nolan Chart:

April 29, 2017 - "'Libertarians and anarchists often get challenged with an annoying question,' Warren Redlich, the CEO of Independent Political Report and a former Libertarian Party candidate, recently wrote:  'If libertarianism is so great, why hasn’t any country tried it?'

"There is no doubt that the question has been asked often, and that it is meant to be annoying. Consider the source: Michael Lind. Lind, for those who have never heard of him, is a writer for the New America Foundation who has achieved some online notoriety as a professional anti-libertarian. (A google search on 'Lind libertarianism' turns up more than 100,000 hits.)

"Lind first came to my attention when he proclaimed 'the collapse of libertarianism as a political force' back in November 2007 – just in time for the birth of the Ron Paul Revolution. In fact, though, he was heralding 'the utter and final defeat of … the libertarian counter-revolution.' before that, and he has continued to do so since: most recently in 2015, when he pontificated that 'the libertarian moment [Rand Paul] symbolized is over.' (To be fair, he also pontificated in his 2015 article that 'There was never a libertarian moment in the United States' – which gets one wondering just what keeps collapsing.)

"But constantly heralding the end of something that never existed in the first place must get boring after a while; so in 2013 Lind came up with a new angle: the above question, smugly packaged as 'The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer.' That had such a great reception that he followed it up within days with two more articles, with equally-revealing titles, 'Why Libertarians are Basically Cult Members,' and 'Grow Up, Libertarians!'

Given this genesis, there is no wonder that anti-libertarians ask the question often, and that they do so mainly to annoy libertarians. But there is really nothing annoying about the question itself. The absence of libertarian countries is a phenomenon in need of an explanation, and trying to provide one could shed some light on little-explored areas of political theory. So it is worth attempting an answer."

Read more: https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries
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Who was Frederic Bastiat's successor?

Remembering Bastiat's Successor | Foundation for Economic Education- Gary M. Galles:

March 3, 2017 - "I have met very few people committed to liberty who are not fans of Frederic Bastiat.... How much do those desirous of freedom to the fullest extent possible know about the person that Bastiat described as his successor from his deathbed in 1850? They know far too little of Belgian economist and philosopher, Gustave de Molinari, who David Hart termed 'the leading representative of the laissez-faire school of classical liberalism in France' in the ensuing period. As we pass Molinari’s March 3 birthday, his work, which Wikipedia accurately summarized as 'defend[ing] peace, free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and liberty in all its forms,' merits far closer attention.

"Joseph Stromberg noted the thoroughness of his belief in the power of liberty, in that 'He appears to have been the first writer to draw the conclusion that government could, in effect, be replaced by competing companies or agencies offering to provide security and protection.' He saw that government as it has always existed — as an abuser of people’s natural rights — could be supplanted by an agency that had no mandate other than providing security for life, liberty and property.

"Molinari focused on sovereignty. He recognized the problems of government sovereignty, and argued for individual sovereignty as a far superior replacement from the perspective of justice and respect for natural rights, as well as that of effective social cooperation. It is worth revisiting his inspiring vision of the appealing consequences of self-ownership, applied far more broadly than it has been....

• Government has abused its unlimited power over individual life and property....
• The progressive rise in taxation and expenditure which has occurred in every State …must continue indefinitely for just so long as governments, charged with guaranteeing national security, maintain their right of unlimited requisition upon the life, liberty, and property of the individual....
• What is the interest of the individual? It is to remain the absolute proprietor of his person and property and to retain the power to dispose of them at will... It is, in a word, to possess “individual sovereignty” in the fullest. Nevertheless … His property and liberty are limited by the property and liberty of others. Each individual sovereignty has its natural frontiers within which it may operate and outside of which it may not pass without violating other sovereignties. These natural limits must be recognized and guaranteed … such is the purpose of 'government'.
• The sovereignty of the individual will … be the basis of the political system of the future community.… It will belong to the individual himself, no more a subject but proper master and sovereign of his person…. He will dispose, as he pleases, of the forces and materials which minister to his physical, intellectual, and moral needs.

"Molinari learned of 'the destructive apparatus of the civilized State' from the French Revolution.... He saw the far better alternative of vastly expanded liberty, enabling an explosion of human potential and human spirit. Our age needs to be inspired toward that recognition, as well."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/remembering-bastiats-successor/
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