A Thinking Reed

Category: Libertarianism

  • Kucinich/Paul in ’08!

    In the – ahem – unlikely event that he secures his party’s nomination, Dennis Kucinich has suggested that – wait for it – Ron Paul might make a good running mate.

    “I’m thinking about Ron Paul” as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country,” Kucinich said.

    The Paul campaign has demurred, however.

    Unlikely as it sounds, I’ve long thought that a left-right fusion movement based around opposition to global interventionism, a defense of civil liberties, and a genuine populist critique of government and corporate elites could provide a healthy counterpoint to our current bipartisan consensus. And who better to lead it than these two gadflies?

  • As we go marching or It’s the war, stupid!

    Ross Douthat offers the logical response to this Jonah Goldberg column wondering why mainstream Republicans and conservatives are down on Ron Paul (who, after all, believes most of the things conservatives are supposed to stand for) and not Mike Huckabee, who exhibits many more deviations from conservative ideology:

    [T]he reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what’s increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn’t. Full stop, end of story.

    I think he’s right and it shows to what extent the war (and attendant issues) have crowded out traditional conservative concerns. The popularity of Rudy Giuliani is another example of this phenomenon at work.

    It’s illuminating to recall that during World War II there were people with impeccable progressive credentials who opposed the entry into the war and were castigated by FDR and his supporters as reactionaries. Two notable men of letters, Oswald Garrison Villard and John T. Flynn, were liberals who ended up on the wrong side of FDR and became victims of a seismic political realignment..

    Villard wrote for the Nation, was a founder of the anti-imperialist league, and advocate of civil rights. Flynn was a left-wing populist who wrote for The New Republic. Both men opposed U.S. entry into World War II and were associated with the America First committe. And both ended up breaking with their erstwhile allies who supported the war (Villard stopped writing for the Nation and Flynn was fired from his regular spot at the New Republic). They found themselves with new allies on the Right who opposed foreign intervention and both became harsh critics of FDR and his policies.

    What’s interesting is that both Villard and Flynn apparently underwent an ideological evoultion, becoming more right-wing in domestic as well as foreign policy (at least as right-wing was understood at the time). Both became sharply critical of the New Deal, calling it a precursor to an American form of fascism.

    This suggests that war has a way of bringing about political realignments. If “the Right” continues to be defined by a preference for preemptive war, the unitary executive, and “harsh interrogation techniques,” critics of these policies will find themselves to be on the Left de facto if not de jure. But it also raises the intriguing possibility of an ideological metamorphosis on domestic questions too, a la Villard and Flynn. Ron Paul, for instance, while clearly having libertarian leanings, couches a lot of his arguments in rhetoric drawn from the populist tradition. You see this when he talks about returning to the Constitution, about U.S. sovereignty, in his criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, and so on. And this kind of rhetoric has a lot in common with Left-wing populism.

    This doesn’t mean that I agree with conservative critics of Ron Paul that he’s a “leftist,” but once one raises the kinds of questions someone like Paul raises not just about the Iraq war, but the very premises of “conservative” foreign policy, it opens the door to further questions about the foundations of American capitalism as it’s currently practiced, about police powers, about the military-industrial complex and other traditionally “left-wing” issues.

    Personally speaking, I considered myself a fairly conventional conservative in 2000 and voted (reluctantly) for Bush, but became increasingly appalled at the conduct of the administration and the support it received from organized conservatism beginning around the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. But this eventually led me to re-think the entire panoply of conservative positions and abandon many of them. If conservatives could virtually en masse be so disastrously wrong, I thought, about foreign policy and issues like torture and executive power, what else were they wrong about? Since then I’ve departed from conservative orthodoxy on enough points that I would be hard-pressed to self-idenify that way anymore (politically I’m registered as an independent). But it was the increasing self-definition of conservatism in terms of the positions connected to the war that initially pushed me into the other camp.

  • Rev. Paul

    Turns out Ron Paul’s older brother David is an ELCA pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the Paul family originally hails from Pittsburgh. Who knew?

    David Paul is proud of Ron Paul, but he is enough of a realist to understand that his brother’s candidacy is a long shot. Some of his stands—for example, he favors repeal of most federal drug laws—put him on the political fringe. He barely registers in national polls.

    But on the whole, David Paul thinks his brother is on the right side where it counts. “On Iraq, I am in total agreement with him. We shouldn’t have been there. We should get out of there.”

  • Moneybags Paul

    Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in Internet contributions in a 24-hour period yesterday as part of a concerted fundraising campaign. Wow!

    Paul’s total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, who raised nearly $6.2 million on June 30, and Barack Obama.

  • Libertarians as social parasites?

    George Monbiot writes a scathing column about a British scientist-turned-businessman who used biological research to argue for laissez-faire but then turned to the gummint for a bailout when his business failed.

    The charge of hypocrisy seems accurate in this particular case, but applied to libertarians as a whole this column is a cheap shot, especially as Monbiot rather breezily skirts over the issue that motivates a lot of libertarian thinkng, viz. that if humans are essentially self-seeking (a point he concedes) then restraining the State becomes of paramount importance:

    Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people’s resources, they will dump their waste in other people’s habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

    The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

    Now surely Monbiot realizes that “treat[ing] the state like a member of the hominid clan and punish[ing it] when it acts against the common good” is easier said than done! This is where Hobbes’ argument for an all-powerful Leviathan runs into trouble. Hobbes says that, in order to guarantee social cooperation and avoid the war of each against all we need Leviathan to keep things in check. But who will keep Leviathan in check? Especially if, per Hobbes’ scheme, it’s invested with nigh-absolute power.

    Indeed, as some anarchists have argued, on those terms you’re better off staying in the state of nature since your chances of surviving the depredations of your fellow human beings seem better when vast power isn’t concentrated in a single entity. It’s this drastic imbalance of power that makes the subject’s position vis a vis the State so precarious.

    I’m not disagreeing with the need for regulation of business; Monbiot makes a good point when he says that globalization makes it easier for businesses to skirt responsibility to the communities it does business in or with. But I’ve always thought that progressives tend to overestimate the ability of governments to wisely and disinterestedly regulate things. If humans are fundamentally self-interested, then that goes for lawmakers and bureaucrats too.

    The trick, it seems to me, is to make both business and government accountable to the people whom their actions affect. I’ve become convinced that small-d democracy needs to extend to the economic sphere as well as the political sphere. But I wonder if there’s a way of doing that without concentrating more power in the national state (or, worse, a kind of global superstate). The libertarian critique of state power can’t be so easily dismissed.

  • Is Ron Paul crazy?

    Well, maybe. But he also manages to combine uncompromising rhetoric with political savvy, according to Jeremy Lott (via). This may help explain why Paul is doing better than anyone expected (his campaign reportedly now with more cash on hand than John McCain’s, for instance).

    One of the interesting thing about Paul is that he’s able to attract a variety of people who would otherwise likely be at odds with one another: libertarians, American nationalists skeptical of free trade and the “New World Order,” Christian homeschoolers, anti-war conservatives, and at least a few people on the left. The Republican base, however, remains steadfastly opposed to Paul’s anti-war stance and he’s probably too much of a libertarian for the mainstream Christian right, but it now looks like he at least has a chance of having a significant impact on the race, rather than simply being a gadfly.

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here.

    As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for protecting animals (and ecosystems) that arises out of liberal/libertarian ethic.

    We’ve already seen that Clark is something of an anarcho-conservative, and here he takes the tack of showing that a concern for libertarian style rights is by no means incompatible with concern for animal rights.

    What Clark suggests is, in essence, that we can’t assume that the differences between humans and animals are so great that the former always have a full complement of rights while the latter have none:

    First, it is implausible to claim that the only evil done in imprisoning, tormenting and killing even a rational agent is that we thereby interfere with her moral choices: much of the evil is simply that we do what she does not want done. That evil is also done if our victim is non-rational, not morally autonomous. What difference does it really make whether or not she has or could have a principled objection to our behaviour? If she has no will in the matter I do not violate her will, but I clearly violate her wishes.

    Secondly, what ground have we got to make so radical a distinction between wishes and the will, between the desires and projects of a nonhuman or sub-normal human and the principled will of a rational agent? Why should it be supposed that I make my claims upon the world as a carefully moral being, in some way that a non-rational being could not manage? “A cat who is being hurt will struggle, scratch and try to bite. Why is not this a claiming of its rights?” (Sprigge 1984 p. 442). Why isn’t a blackbird claiming his rights when he proclaims his territorial possession? What is lacking in too much discussion of these questions is any serious attention to what ‘animals’ are like, and what evidence there is for the vast difference in nature that humanists like [H.J.] McCloskey must conceive. It is quite inadequate to appeal to current English linguistic usage, as if that settled the question. If it is wrong (not merely imprudent) to batter human infants this may be partly because it seems likely to interfere with their future projects, but it is chiefly wrong because they do not like it, nor would they like its further consequences if they knew of them. The same wrong is done in battering baboons: who could imagine that baboons don’t mind?

    It follows, if the abstract argument for natural human rights must be extended to allow similar rights to other agents (even if not strictly ‘moral’ agents), that our property rights in non-human animals must often be suspect. A right that licenses the violation of a right is no right at all, and ‘self-owning’ is a category more widely extended than we had thought. A being ‘owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies (see Clark 1981). This, I take it, is [Tom] Regan’s concept of what it is to be ‘the subject of a life’, not merely living (1983 p. 243). Such self-owners are, in the relevant sense, equals, and a just, liberal society cannot allow them to be owned by others, even if it allows them to be employed on terms not strictly of their own making.

    The libertarian argument is that “self-owners” have the right not to be arbitrarily subjected to the will of another. Clark’s contention is that “self-owner” covers a wider range of creatures than just human beings. This is essentially a version of the so-called argument from marginal cases: it’s very difficult to specify a set of criteria for whatever morally important category you like (self-owner, person, rational agent, etc.) that includes all and only human beings. Either it will be drawn so narrowly as to exclude some classes of humans, or it will be drawn so widely that at least some non-human animals count.

    What’s noteworthy is that a lot of libertarians seem to want to maintain the traditional status of human beings as sole rights-bearers without the metaphysics to back it up. An Aristotelian worldview that insisted on big bright distinctions between natural kinds might be able to provide support for this view, as might some religious views. But a world of evolutionary development where living things exist along a continuum without sharp breaks seems to sit more comfortably with the idea of a continuum of moral rights.

    Clark’s distinction between animals being “owned” and being “employed on terms not strictly of their own making” injects some fuzziness into thinking about what might actually be entailed by all this. Is there a sense in which animals could be said to “consent” to at least some of the relationships that have evolved between them and human beings? Could domestication be understood as somehow analogous to the entering into of a partnership? Wherever we draw that line, though, some forms of wanton cruelty would seem to be easily ruled out. Also, I might add, would things like factory farming: an arrangement which is extremely difficult to see any animal “consenting” to in however attenuated a sense we can come up with.

  • The “Progs for Paul” myth redux

    I’ve never bought into the “Progressives for Paul” myth – the idea that there was a burgeoning groundswell of support on the anti-war Left for maverick GOP congressman Ron Paul.

    Gaius links to this rather silly piece saying that Paul’s “support” on the Left may be shot now that he’s “revealed” his radical small-government views.

    Look, Ron Paul is a staunch decentralist, small-government libertarian (paleo division). He hasn’t exactly kept that a secret and talks about his desire to drastically reduce the size and scope of the federal government at pretty much every available opportunity.

    Now, sure, some anti-war writers on the Left have given Paul some good press. And for good reason: he’s a voice of sanity in the la-la land inhabited by the rest of the GOP field. Progressives and other anti-war types ought to be glad whenever Paul gets some attention paid to his “extremist” views on foreign policy (extreme outside of the DC “bipartisan consensus” that is).

    But how likely was it that lefties were ever going to vote en masse for Paul? There is a perfectly good progressive anti-war candidate running for the Democratic ticket. His name’s Dennis Kucinich. Though not exactly a progressive myself, or a registered Democrat for that matter, I think there’s a lot to like about him. And, there’s also the curmudgeonly Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson as options for the liberal anti-war voter.

    Ron Paul is against the war in Iraq and our imperialist foreign policy more generally. And he’s also shares certain other positions with liberals: he’s against the drug war, for instance. And the post-9/11 expansion of the national security state. But he’s not a liberal or a progressive, and I imagine folks on the Left are smart enough to know that.