Susan Hogarth wrote:
BH> a little intentional infliction of a bad thing (like pain or coercion)
can prevent a lot more of that bad thing. <BH
SH> The question, though, is - always - 'who decides?' Who decides what
citizens get the needle to spare which other citizens the worse pain? <SH
The same people who decide things like
* whether killing a full-term fetus is murder;
* the rights of children and the mentally incompetent;
* the nature of property rights in non-excludable resources,
inventions, and expression;
*
the forms of allowable judicial punishment;
*
the rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation; and
*
thresholds for reckless endangerment.
As I've told you before, no zero-aggression bumper sticker (or even Kevin
Bjornson's natural law) can mechanistically resolve these fundamental
questions of political philosophy. Anyone who claims that the the Zero
Aggression Principle sufficiently defines libertarianism is saying that
libertarianism is inadequate for defining the rules of a polity. Our polity
is founded on the principle that we the people are capable of recognizing
and agreeing on certain unalienable rights, and of securing those rights by
instituting governments with just powers derived from the consent of the
governed and resulting in the rule of law. If you're going to dispute the
principle of democratic sovereignty and the possibility of the rule of law,
then it seems odd for you pursue electoral consent for changes in our laws.
If you think that popular sovereignty can only yield a long train of abuses
and usurpations that inevitably leads to absolute despotism, then shouldn't
you be out parking Ryder trucks full of ammonium nitrate next to federal
daycare centers? (You don't have to set them off until after the last
innocent leaves the building.) Seriously -- if even the most benevolent
state you can possibly imagine is still so hopelessly and irredeemably
malevolent due to its tainting by the use of coercion, then how much more
statist would America have to get for you to take up arms against your sea
of statist troubles and by opposing end them?
BH> You apparently believe that an investment in force initiation could
never lead to a net reduction in the overall incidence of force initiation.
Do you have any actual arguments for this thesis? <BH
SH> No, but work has my keyboard (or ought to). But as you seem to have some
time and you are the one suggesting that coercion against some can be a net
good, perhaps you can explain how you can know this. <SH
We're each suggesting the negation of the other's thesis, so I don't see how
that puts the burden of proof on me. Among the electorate from whom the LP
seeks votes, your thesis is surely not believed by much more people than the
usual margin of polling error. In fact, it has apparently not even been
believed by three of libertarianism's greatest intellectuals (Mises, Hayek,
and Friedman), or by seven of the nine LP presidential nominees, since all
of these men believed that coercive taxation will be necessary indefinitely.
More importantly, you're the one asking for a complete overturning of how
this polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right
to life, liberty, and property. According to the three leading
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indices_of_freedom> indices of
freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than
America. America's constitutional republican framework has been by far the
most successful in human history. It has been increasing personal and civil
liberties almost monotonically for two centuries, and we are among the most
economically free nations in the world, with a per-capita GDP exceeded only
by Norway and Luxembourg. Our 300 million people live and work in a
continent-wide nation with a $13 trillion economy built on a twenty-first
century technological infrastructure. By contrast, anarcho-capitalists can
merely wave toward a couple of medieval island nations with populations and
population densities four orders of magnitude less than those of modern
industrialized states.
As great as America is, we have detailed, redundant, and current empirical
evidence backing up the mainstream findings of modern economic science about
how market-oriented reforms within the statist framework can make America
far more free and far more prosperous. You have nothing of the kind to
support your moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place
if we completely dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a
promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence.
Interestingly, your lack of empirical support for your prescription points
directly toward where you ZAPsolutist anarchists can find common ground with
those of us who subscribe to different (but no less principled) variants of
libertarianism. As Kevin Bjornson has been saying, we should apply our
universal principles of market competition to the provision of governance
itself. I personally don't see how Kevin's idea would work with laws bound
to people instead of geographic jurisdictions, but his basic idea of
radically decentralized federalism is exactly right. With a system of
radical federalism, any local polity could try any crazy idea it wanted:
Rothbardian natural-law anarchism, Friedmanian private-law anarchism,
Bjornsonian portable law across sub-jurisdictions, Carol Moore's idea of
personal sub-secession, Marxist communism, welfare statism, geolibertarian
minarchism -- you name it. It would be obvious which system works best, and
would be confirmed by people voting with their feet.
The best prescription for radical federalism that I've yet seen is "cellular
democracy <http://www.foldvary.net/works/auspc.pdf> " as described by the
LP's own Professor Fred Foldvary of Santa Clara University here in Silicon
Valley. He advocates "a governance structure of cellular, bottom-up,
multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the
upper levels". A more mainstream paper
<http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.22942/pub_detail.asp> with analogous
ideas was by Michael Greve of the American Enterprise Institute, stressing
that the true genius of the U.S. Constitution is not the mix of rights it
advocates, but rather the competition it created among the governmental
branches and levels and regions. Both of these papers have forever changed
my views on how government should be organized -- a question that is
orthogonal to, and in some ways more important than, what governments should
do. Unfortunately, the LP's anarchist ancestry has given it a huge blind
spot for the fascinating and important academic literature related to design
of government institutions. We're the party that best understands the
insights of economics about the production and consumption of material
goods, but we don't exhibit very much understanding of the radical and
revolutionary insights that economics has recently revealed about the
production and consumption of public policy.
Unfortunately, theory about the design of government institutions is about
as popular among the general public as it is among anti-statist anarchists
-- even though both would greatly benefit if we made public policy be more
the product of decentralized competitive forces and less the product of
centralized political forces. When you sneer at Kevin's invitation to test
and evolve and grow your utopia from a local seed of anarchy, you in effect
announce your lack of confidence that your theory of political organization
would perform well alongside the competition. Meanwhile, moderate
Libertarians have a deep fear that advocacy of radical federalism will make
the LP seem like pro-Confederacy Civil War revisionist kooks. While we do
have more than our fair share of that meme in the LP, I note that among all
the press <http://www.lpedia.org/index.php/Uses_Of_Platform_To_Attack_LP>
articles in which the the Platform has been used against the LP, there isn't
a single Google News Archive search result that mentions all three of the LP
platform, secession, and the Civil War.
SH> I would of course not concentrate on deciding who should be sacrificed
to whom, but would (1) check to see if any of my own people were in danger,
and work to save them if they were, and (2) concentrate on stopping the
train and saving all. <SH
The point of a thought experiment in the philosophy of ethics is to
constrain you into confronting a particular choice. Seeking to evade that
choice says almost as much about the strength of your ethical system as your
choice itself would say.
SH> I might even, despairing, make the choice you seem so excited about - to
kill one person rather than let five others be killed if I could imagine no
alternative. <SH
I'm of course not excited about killing innocents, but it's fascinating that
you apparently need to imagine that I am in order to rationalize my
disagreement with your political ethics. Do you also imagine that I wear a
black hat and sport a curly moustache? :-) Anyway, your reluctant choice is
the wise one, and it demonstrates that clean hands should not be the trump
principle of one's ethical system.
SH> But *most importantly of all*, I would not force someone else to pull
the switch one way or another. <SH
That claim is morally incoherent. It's trivial to construct the obvious
variant of the Trolley Problem, in which you no longer have direct access to
the switch that will save the five innocents, but instead have access only
to a switch that operates in a separate Trolley Problem and that can save
either one innocent, or another innocent who controls the original switch
and whom you are able to try to persuade (or threaten) to use her switch.
How could you possibly say you would kill an innocent in the first scenario,
but in the second scenario you wouldn't use a mere threat in order to save
the same number of innocents as before? It's morally incoherent to say you
would refuse to coerce an innocent in one case but wouldn't refuse to kill
the innocent in a comparable case.
SH> You cannot point to a believable trolley scenario <SH
Indeed! My real-world scenarios don't involve killing any innocents, but
instead consist of a much more modest proposal to generate receipts of about
5% of GDP by imposing broad but shallow taxes on things like resource use
and pollution and land rent. When our respective poster children are
twentieth-century Lochner Era America and medieval Iceland, you shouldn't be
throwing stones from inside such a glassy house.
BH> I have to call bullshit on this canard that radicals habitually trot
out. <BH
SH> Such language! <SH
BH> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullshit
SH> I was reacting to 'canard'. For some reason that word annoys the hell
out of me - and I think you used it incorrectly <SH
canard n. a groundless rumor or belief
coy adj. showing reluctance to make a definite commitment
Bob> we Libertarians stand for reducing the size of government in the near
term, AND LEAVE IT AT THAT <Bob
SH> Our platform should provide a bold vision for Americans desiring freedom
to embrace, not a timid promise of 'less government' which they *already
have* from at least one of the major parties. <SH
SH> I wasn't talking about your draft platform when I made that comment. <SH
True, as the context restored above shows, though I still don't know what it
is about Bob that makes you worry that his call for "reducing the size of
government" might be "timid". At any rate, consider yourself inoculated
against the meme infecting the frontal lobes of many radical Libertarians,
making them feign an inability to distinguish a moderate Libertarian from a
Republican. :-)
SH> I am here to discuss the platform, yes. But the platform discussion can
be as broad as the underlying principles or as narrow as specific language.
<SH
Oh good, because if there's one thing that's been missing from LP internal
discussions over the last thirty years, it's broad discussion about how
coercion is always bad. If you don't have time to take a look at the
Greatest Hits draft <http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html>
platform, then maybe someone else from lpradicals (which I've cc'd) does.
SH> Can you point me to the Socialist Party platform of 1928? I can't seem
to find it. <SH
There doesn't seem to be a complete original copy of it on the web, but my
message included a link to Milton Friedman's lengthy quoting of its 14
economic planks. Are the links I include in my messages not getting through
to your mail reader?
SH> you seem to be talking about deliberately doing bad things to people to
accomplish (what you believe to be) good for *other people*. <SH
Right, and you seem to be talking about deliberately letting bad things
happen to people to accomplish what you admit is your "selfish" goal of
keeping your hands clean.
Why the parenthetical qualification? Do you not share my belief that
protecting people from aggression is ceteris paribus always a good thing?
Is clean hands your trump principle after all?
Brian Holtz
2006 California LP Platform Committee Rep
<http://marketliberal.org/FixLP.html> http://marketliberal.org/FixLP.html
2004/6 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley)
http://marketliberal.org <http://marketliberal.org/>
blog: http://knowinghumans.net <http://knowinghumans.net/>
