David T. Beito
Hat tip to Scott Horton at The Stress Blog.
Anthony Gregory
Sheldon Richman
The U.S. government could be violating our freedom a lot more than it is now. During World War I, Eugene Debs was jailed for making a speech defending war opponents. This doesn't happen today. The main reason freedom of speech is more secure than it used to be is that the ACLU and other civil-liberties groups have for years promoted the idea to the public that free speech is a good thing. Moreover, whenever the state makes a move against it, these groups spring into action. That is, they act as private defense agencies. Interestingly, they are nonprofit and unarmed. Their weapons are ideas, which Hummel emphasizes are always the ultimate defenses against tyranny. As he says,"Force doesn't rule the world. Ideas rule the world because ideas determine in which direction people point their guns."
On the other side, Hummel pointed out, our freedom to own guns is to some extent protected by another set of private organizations, most prominently (if highly imperfectly), the National Rifle Association. Again, their weapons are ideas, not (ironically) guns.
This is not to say the protection is flawless -- far from it. But it is not insignificant. Think how much worse the U.S. government could be. If we want private protection to work better, we need to win people over to a set of ideas not as riddled by contradictions and compromises as the current set is.
But the point stands. Private organizations can defend liberty against tyranny. If they can do it with respect to the the U.S. government, they can do it with respect to any government.
Cross-posted at Free Association.
Aeon J. Skoble
Keith Halderman
Sheldon Richman
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Steven Horwitz
The one comment I'd make off the top of my head is that his rhetorical strategy of invoking, in a positive way, the Founders and the Constitution and suggesting that their general vision was right even though it was corrupted by slavery, will lead some to (rightly I think) compare this talk to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. King's use of Biblical imagery as well as references to the Founders gave that document much of its rhetorical power by calling whites to account by their own value systems.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is the equivalent of King's Letter, just that this rhetorical element may bring forward those comparisons.
Obama's explicit comparisons between the anger of Wright's generation and how it plays out in African-American churches and the anger of white Americans about ongoing economic change (which Obama has misdiagnosed, but that's another story) or perceptions of reverse discrimination seem to come from a similar sort of place: I understand why you are angry and you need to understand why we are angry and, by your own ideals, you should want to recognize the source of our anger and join in addressing it.
In any case, the speech will continue to get talked about and we'll see if my prediction about comparisons to King's Letter hold up.
Aeon J. Skoble
Aeon J. Skoble
UPDATE: Longer obit here.
Mark Brady
For the answer go here.
Who said"The only position for women in the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone"?
For the answer go here.
I was reminded of these two quotations by Gary Younge's thoughtful essay in Monday's Guardian.
Sudha Shenoy
Federal Reserve officials twisted J P Morgan’s arms -- which was why the latter ‘agreed’ to buy. Officials had to provide Morgan’s with a loan & a guarantee against the weakest ‘investments’ -- bad mortgages -- in the Bear Stearns portfolio. These dubious liabilities amount to some $US 33,000 million -- or some 138% of its total purchase price. Thus its unsound investments are one reason for the very very low price that Bear Stearns’ shareholders received -- even from J P Morgan’s & even after a Federal loan + guarantee.
In the absence of Federal Reserve intervention & arm-twisting, Bear Stearns would undoubtedly have had to cease trading. And no doubt it would’ve been taken over, eventually -- at an even lower price. All that govt officials could do was to shorten this time period, & possibly prevent Bear Stearns’ value from falling even further. But even the almighty Federal Reserve -- the world’s largest & most powerful central bank -- could not prevent the huge capital losses that Bear Stearns’ shareholders suffered. In short, even the Fed could not stop the de facto failure of one of the world’s largest investment companies.
What does all this signify? Even the US govt -- the world’s largest & most frightening -- is not & cannot be, omnipotent. True, the Fed’s officials did their best to paper over the cracks -- but that was all they could do.
--------------
The Guardian [London] 17th March 2008: ‘Fed takes emergency steps to prop up bank funding and calm nerves on Wall Street’
The Times [London] 17th March 2008: ‘Bear Stearns sold to JP Morgan Chase under Federal Bank pressure’
David T. Beito
A post by Jesse Walker this morning brought me the sad news that L and P blogger, Kenneth R. Gregg, passed away of congestive heart failure on Friday. He was dogged by more than his share of health problems and personal tragedies.
In the first year after L and P was launched, Ken made frequent comments on our posts. His observations were always thoughtful and showed considerable knowledge of history. I was so impressed that I asked him to be a permanent member.
Ken was initially reluctant. With characteristic modesty, he wondered whether he would be out of his element on an academically-oriented blog. Fortunately, he relented. It was very much our gain.
Until his recent health problems, Ken was one of the most active members of L and P. His posts centered on the forgotten contributions of past libertarians, but he also weighed in on other issues when he felt a need to speak out on injustices.
Although Ken was not a professor himself, nobody was his equal as a champion for academic freedom. If vulnerable professors and students, regardless of their views, needed help, Ken always took the time to make phone calls or send emails defending their free speech.
While I did not have the pleasure of meeting Ken, he was obviously a kind-hearted soul. I never heard anyone utter a negative word about him.
For a good sampling of Ken's posts, visit his own blog, CLASSical Liberalism.
His presence will be sorely missed here.
David T. Beito
Mississippi Black Code, 1865. Quoted in Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 108.
Roderick T. Long
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Who (probably) said this, in 1957?
The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. ... [T]he South’s premises are correct ... It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
Keith Halderman
Steven Horwitz
Here's an excerpt from the story:
For nearly an hour, Detective Joseph Brousseau had grilled the boy about accusations that he and his autistic sister had been sexually molested by their father.
No, the boy insisted, he'd seen nothing to support the detective's lurid suspicions. Three times, he offered to take a lie detector test.
But Brousseau hammered away, challenging the boy's honesty, his manliness, his loyalty to his disabled sister.
Again and again, the detective told the boy his body language betrayed the burden of a terrible secret.
"What if I told you that one of those videotapes confiscated from your parents' house had you in it?" the detective asked suddenly.
The 13-year-old straightened."Was it me doing something sexually?"
"I don't think I'd be bringing it up if it wasn't," Brousseau answered."That's what I'm trying to tell you -- it's going to come out."
If it were merely what it purported to be -- the disclosure of a deviant father's treachery -- the videotaped exchange would be excruciating enough to watch.
But the truth is a good deal uglier than that.
Charges have been dropped. In fact, prosecutors now concede, much of what Brousseau told the boy during his Dec. 4 interrogation was a fabrication.
There were no videotapes depicting the boy in sexual situations with his father or sister. There was no new crime lab evidence confirming his sister's allegations, despite Brousseau's repeated assertions to the contrary.
and let's not forget this part:
The father had spent 80 days in jail without bond on three counts of first-degree sexual assault. His wife, whom prosecutors had charged with abetting her husband's alleged crimes, had been confined by an electronic tether, and their children had been dispatched to separate foster homes.
So a 14 year old girl who cannot speak is manipulated into providing graphic claims about sexual abuse which were enough to jail the father and tether the mother and send the kids to separate foster homes, and then a 13 year old boy is psychologically abused by cops trying to save the evidence-less case.
The police are the good guys, right? The government is here to help us, right?
This is just a toxic brew of paranoia about sexual abuse lurking behind every closed door, out of control and publicity hunting prosecutors (see Mike Nifong), power-hungry cops, and public schools that all-too-quickly seem to be willing to turn every moment of childhood angst into evidence of parental abuse.
It is stories like this that activate my strongest anarchist inclinations: why would we want to give ANY power to the state when its agents are willing to destroy the lives of a family, including 2 children with psychological problems, over a non-existent case? Stories like this also suggest how important it is to set the bar as high as possible in our current world if one believes that the state does have a responsibility to protect innocent children from abusive parents. We better be a lot more certain than THIS before we start busting families apart to save the children.
It's the state we need to be saving them from.
Sheldon Richman
The subprime problem has its roots in pro-business government intervention; the policies at fault were designed to help the housing industry and the lenders who write mortgages. Now the other shoe is falling. Big lenders and investors handling securitized mortgages who are in over their heads will get their promised bailout under the"too big to fail" doctrine. And the rescue will set the table for the next round of bad business decisions and the next bailout. It's called moral hazard.
What does this have to do with the free market? As Kevin Carson likes to say, if this is the free market, then I'm against it. Of course, it is not the free market. The free market is a profit and loss system void of privilege. When businesses fail, they are supposed to actually fail, not turn to the taxpayers. What we really have is (state or political) capitalism, corporatism, or fascism. An essential characteristic of this system is that while profits are private, losses are socialized, i.e., ultimately covered by the mass of people without political clout.
Unfortunately, potential allies of libertarians won't catch the distinction and will thus be further alienated from true free-market thinking. They won't realize that the free market is the system that would deliver what they want, particularly much of what they call"social justice."
Now is the time for us to draw the distinctions as sharply as possible. Down with "vulgar libertarianism"!
Cross-posted at Free Association.
Gus diZerega
In one of his earlier posts that he cited in his recent article, Steve referenced Jonah Goldberg's citing an Australian environmentalist suggesting democracy might have to give way to political authoritarianism. This supposedly evidenced a strong authoritarian streak in environmentalism.
Steve - given that you personally know many environmentalists, this is a bit below the belt don't you think. To recapitulate several points I have made before on this blog, first, 'environmentalism' encompasses a wide variety of political positions because it refers to issues of concern, not to an ideology. There is no “environmentalism” but there are “environmentalists” who think we need to take far better care of the natural world than we currently do.
Second, the authoritarians among that group are hardly new - consider Ophuls' work for example. They have been OVERWHELMINGLY rejected by nearly everyone involved with environmental issues. You are beating the deadest of dead horses and you and Goldberg didn’t have to go all the way to Australia to find one. But Goldberg’s scholarship on fascism is competitive to his scholarship on environmentalism.
Third, ironically, you are echoing the anarcho-marxo left ideologues like Murray Bookchin who, with his acolytes, has for years and years made the same argument. It is no more accurate coming from the lunatic left than it is from the right libertarian end of things. For one of my responses to the Bookchinites, see http://www.dizerega.com/?p=110
Fourth, in any group unbalanced people will be found, even unbalanced people with Ph.D.s. For many years the man who last year said the following on his blog was listed as a classical liberal and he was invited to all the right gatherings. For all I know, he still is. Some of his writings are recommended by libertarians:
“ When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”
The spirit of Pinochet is alive and well at Hoover, AEI, and at Goldberg’s beloved NRO.
You can read Thomas Sowell in his own words here
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmU0NGQ0ZTQzZTU4Zjk4MjdjZWMzYTM4Nzk2MzQ0MGI
Is classical liberalism and even libertarianism strongly authoritarian and even religious? By Steve’s logic it would seem to be, in which case do we have a pot calling the kettle black? Or maybe this approach is simply a dead end intellectually and ethically.
Roderick T. Long
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
I’m saddened to learn (from Tibor Machan) that libertarian philosopher J. Roger Lee has died.
Roger was one of the commentators at my very first APA presentation (Pacific Division, Los Angeles, 29 March 1990). More recently Roger contributed an essay to Tibor’s and my Anarchism/Minarchism anthology.
