BOOK NOTE: “Occupy!” (plus Todd CNBC online video!)

It is hard to make the case that the Occupy Wall Street movement is fully reasonable, I think, given some of their strange ideas about economics and their strange behavior – yet they are tolerated.  It’s worth noting there has been fighting, vandalism, rape, and even a shot taken at the White House amidst the Occupants’ activities.  You have to doubt any of this would have been tolerated if the Tea Party did it.  (Judith Weiss pointed out a recent National Review article about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s complete lack of interest in violence among the Occupants.)

Still, even Occupy has some good points, and here’s video of the fairly civil dialogue I had with a couple Occupy activists (plus less-radical CNBC and Google+ commentators) three weeks ago today (the tech wizards at Google+ finally figured out how to have me enter the dialogue at the 7 minute mark, then lost me again about fifteen minutes before the dialogue ended). 

Careful observers will notice I deploy the same cowboy hat and “V Guy” mask I wore at the beginning of last week’s Dionysium event in Williamsburg (of which I hope our videographer will have footage next week that I can link).

I don’t always talk to Occupy radicals and anarchists, though, and you can also see a photo nearby (by Doug DeMark) of me at this month’s conservative-filled Phillips Foundation gathering (flanked by Rachel Currie and Laura Vanderkam), and tonight at 7:45pm I’ll attend NYPD terror-tracker Hannah Meyers’ album release party at Fontana’s (admittedly after a quick 7pm stop at King’s Head Tavern to see a bunch of anarcho-capitalists).  I’m thanked in her liner notes. 

And speaking of liner notes, it looks like the most prolific female writer of album liner notes, Dawn Eden, will join Hannah onstage at our next Dionysium (June 21, 8pm, in Williamsburg) – but Dawn is by some measures even more conservative than Hannah and instead of rocking will in this case be discussing her new book My Peace I Give You about the Catholic saints and psychological healing.  More soon.

•••

I think I can safely say I have some handle on how the Occupants actually think after the dialogue above, a few trips to Zuccotti Park, and reading issues of the journal n+1’s spun-off Occupy! Gazette, plus the essay collection Occupy! from Verso Books, written by numerous Occupants themselves (indeed, I was the one who likely boosted the book’s sales at the release party by suggesting they make a prominent “only $5 per copy” sign, which they did). 

I’ll take a closer look at the Occupy! anthology below – but first, a final word about left-anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who is affiliated with the movement and about whose book Debt I blogged earlier this month (he is also, by the way, a former Yale anthro colleague of anarchism-sympathizing James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State and the forthcoming Two Cheers for Anarchism).

I have repeatedly complained (including in the CNBC chat above) that Graeber is not merely opposed to student loan debt or Third World debt but to all debt-recording, accounting, and in the end even math itself (gotta give him points for consistency and radicalism, though I assume he’s opposed to points-awarding as well).  I will grant him this: Constant calculation can make people cold. 

One study suggests that even being a utilitarian (as I am) – that is, someone who wants to calculate how best to maximize other people’s happiness – may be

BOOK NOTE: “Stealing You Blind” by Iain Murray (and other doses of reality)

If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the past few decades of political history, it’s that anti-government forces have been far too polite, all too willing to engage the enemy on its own terms by talking about what government ought to do under ideal, philosophy-guided circumstances, as if that were relevant. 

On every side and across the political spectrum, humans are beset by delusional intellectuals singing some variation on the siren song of acquiescence to government – from the authoritarians, Muslims, and Catholics cooing like Loki that submission to authority is humanity’s “natural” state, to the neoconservatives thinking that arguments about government ineptitude and misbehavior do not apply to the military, to the “liberal-tarians” condescendingly urging more consistent libertarians to accept just this one wafer-thin bit of the welfare state and welfare-statist rhetoric so that they (not necessarily us) will be allowed to eat in faculty lounges, that being Step 1 to human liberation, or at least a nice benefit for the liberal-tarians. 

There will always be plausible-sounding philosophical arguments for government (especially in academia, which generates plausible-sounding arguments for everything), but a horrifying look at what government really does – what it inevitably really is – will always reveal these arguments, these siren songs (ordered liberty...efficient provision of basic services...social-democratic engagement...), as complete horseshit. 

Government is crime, and talking about its reform is as deceptive as talking about how to make the Mafia behave nicely.  Start from that premise and you will, at long last, have begun to think about politics, possibly for the first time in your life.

•••

Luckily, there are books that skip most of the philosophical arguments (though we do need libertarian ones) and just survey various agencies of government, cataloguing the disastrous misallocations of resources, self-serving acts of politicians and regulators, and heartbreak-inducingly routine squelching of human hope via bureaucracy that are the real day-in and day-out of government activity, even when it isn’t engaged in outright mass murder, which of course it often is (100 million dead from socialism alone last century, and socialists still think they hold the moral high ground). 

Two such books that influenced my thinking were P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores and Philip Howard’s The Death of Common Sense.  My ex-boss John Stossel just released a book about government aptly titled No, They Can’t.  Very much in that vein is Competitive Enterprise Institute vice president Iain Murray’s Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You.  Read it (read all of these books), then spare me your next metaphysically-intuited pro-government argument.  End the nonsense.  End the lies.  End government. 

Whether paying for politicians’ expensive office furniture even in times of purported fiscal crisis, arresting people for clearing debris after storms without proper permits, or subsidizing failed industries while imposing surtaxes on innovative ones, government will always tend to do the wrong thing, for the simple reason that it isn’t the government’s money, isn’t the government’s lost decision-making power, isn’t the government’s life.  If you encourage it to continue its activities, you aren’t helping and are no friend of humanity. 

In one amusing passage, Murray notes that in World War II,

Steampunk fashion, superheroes, “Looking Backward,” and the lifespan of a DC Comics Earth

The past few weeks have been big for steampunk and superheroes (and not just because of the great Avengers movie, though that was reason enough and something I’d waited over thirty years for).

•Somewhere between fantasy and reality, I went to a steampunk fashion show in Brooklyn on April 29, and you can see my photos from it nearby – including the smiling face of my purple-haired friend Juliet Brownell, as well as an Alice in Wonderland-like blonde model who inspired a sensitive, poetically-inclined male acquaintance of mine to declare, “I’d hit that so hard, whoever pulled me out would be declared King of England” – I will only say that she reminds me a bit of Emma, the cute Australian goth from my high school. 

(I’ve also included pics from the border between Hasidic-Williamsburg and hipster-Williamsburg, since I walked that zone after the fashion show.  That pic of sidewalk eaters is from DuMont Burger, home of the decidedly non-kosher but wonderful bacon and bourbon milkshake.  The vandalized anti-vandalism sign, by contrast, is from old Lolita Bar.)

Even proudly progressive (and libertarian Canadian) rock band Rush is releasing a steampunk-themed album, Clockwork Angels, on June 12. 

•On an only-slightly more modern note, I’ve concluded that the High Line – the elevated train track turned recreational walkway on NYC’s west side – looks best if you walk south on it (my photos of that, also nearby, capture how this walk, old-timey in theory, instead ends up looking a bit like the futuristic world of Sleeper – and I threw in the Empire State Building just for the heck of it). 

•In other sci-fi-ish news, this month saw DC Comics reintroduce the multiverse to its recently-revamped comics, including Earth 23, where, for good or ill, dwells Grant Morrison’s “President Superman,” also seen below.  Given the dreamlike nature of that story, I wouldn’t assume we know anything for sure about the current multiverse aside from the existence of DC’s “main Earth” and the reconfabulated Earth 2 (from the writer also scheduled to bring us a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe miniseries in July) – and this thought led me to reflect on how long each dominant DC Earth lasted. 

In retrospect (taxonomical quibbles aside), you could argue that their respective times in the spotlight (each ending with a rewriting of the cosmos and shift in storytelling focus) break down like so:

1935-1956 (twenty-one years): Earth-Two – DC’s Golden Age, read mainly by the Greatest Generation

1956-1985 (twenty-nine years): Earth-One – DC’s Silver/Bronze Ages, read mainly by Boomers

1986-2011 (twenty-five years): Earth-0 (as a version of the hybrid post-Crisis Earth was eventually cleverly dubbed by Grant Morrison) – DC’s Dark Age, read mainly by Generation X

2011- ? (we shall see): “main Earth” – DC’s Heroic Age (as some have called it), plainly streamlined for a millennial generation of gamers and Pokemon fans

It all seems as inevitable in retrospect as the passing of generations.  Time for me to move on.

Then again, now that they’re collecting each series’ first post-2011 story arc into its own trade paperback, one series that sound like it could be read almost exactly as if nothing had happened between roughly 1987 and today is Legion of Super-Heroes, which is once more written by Paul Levitz and (almost) completely ignores the radical cosmic reboots of the series that occurred (after he left) in 1990, 1994, and 2004 (if you want to meet him, he’ll be at the 64 Fulton St. branch of Midtown Comics this Friday, May 25, from 3:30-4:30pm).

I suspect they’re even planning to get Keith Giffen back on it as artist eventually – like nothin’ ever happened, basically.  Like Reagan is still president and Duran Duran is still popular, the way it is in Heaven.

•Less conservative but definitely sci-fi: Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, arguably the most influential American book of the late nineteenth century, whence came this disturbingly naive quote that echoes to this day: “No man need care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees to provide the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of each and every citizen from the cradle to the grave.”

His equally socialist brother created the state-idolizing Pledge of Allegiance, by the way, so think of that before the next time you get all dewy with patriotism, conservatives.

•Also below (in photos that are not mine but are awesome): a coffee ad with Admiral Ackbar and (as pointed out by Drew Rushford) the Bat Vader costume.  The world can’t be all bad.  

BOOK NOTE: “Ron Paul’s Revolution” (not to mention Alex Jones, Billy Corgan, and even Sander Hicks’s “Slingshot to the Juggernaut”)

Today’s the day: the definitive book on Ron Paul, Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, is out – and I’ll host a talk with the author, Brian Doherty (as well as audience members representing various factions of the libertarian movement) live and in person at the Dionysium THIS THURSDAY, MAY 17 (8pm) at 2 Havemeyer St. in Williamsburg (on the second floor, right above the future site of the bar Muchmore’s).  First subway stop in on the L (Bedford Ave.), you cowardly Manhattanites (then just walk three blocks east, entering the building through the N. 9th St. side door). 

I. RON PAUL

This is a big week for Paul, who has made public his plan to, in essence, give up on beating Romney in the popular vote and just see how many convention delegates he can wrangle.  Ironically, given that Paul has flirted with conspiracy theorists, it’s tempting to conspiracy-theorize about what his real plan is: Actually try to get enough delegates to take over the GOP convention in August?  Play nice to keep his son Rand in the GOP’s good graces (maybe even get him on the ticket, which would please me greatly)?  Play not so nice in order to get Rand on the ticket?  Get out of the way so libertarians can migrate to newly-minted Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson? 

Even Newt Gingrich now says Mitt Romney should start imitating Ron Paul, who represents real, historic, seismic political change.

But one person who is back on cue to say Paul is done and good riddens and furthermore don’t read Brian’s book is (my fellow Phillips Foundation fellow) Jamie Kirchick, who has been periodically re-revealing to the world, at critical junctures, that Paul decades ago produced newsletters with a few racist or conspiracist passages – and who plainly has lost any ability to see Paul, or even the broader libertarian movement he represents, through any other lens.

But for the sake of argument, let’s ask: What’s so terrible about conspiracy theories? 

Don’t get me wrong, I am a rationalist, skeptic, and man who notoriously has little patience for assertions made without evidence (including the claims that there is a God, that government reduces poverty, or that U.S. military intervention abroad is usually worth it).  But given that every candidate, alas, has (or purports to have) beliefs that are unproven or irrational (Jeremiah Wright, Mormonism, Keynes, etc., etc.), shouldn’t we perhaps stop judging such things merely by how “taboo” they are and instead ask what the likely real-world consequences are? 

Paul warning about the international elites gathering at the Bilderberg conferences (as they in fact do) may sound odd, for instance, but we should be far less frightened of Paul than of, say, an average politician who claims that the Department of Commerce is a useful thing, even though the latter claim sounds too boring to be dubbed “crazy.”

II. ALEX JONES

Paul (like my ex-boss Judge Andrew Napolitano) has been criticized for appearing on the show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who is, like Paul, a

DIONYSIUM: Brian Doherty talks Ron Paul (with host Todd Seavey)

A revolution is afoot.  I mean, of course, that I will begin hosting a new series of bar events next week.  Thursday, May 17 (at 8pm), the Dionysium (sister series to the popular events by that name held in Austin, TX) begins with main speaker Brian Doherty, talking to me (your Dionysium host and moderator) about his new book Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired. 

It happens at 2 Havemeyer St. (three blocks east of Bedford Ave., the easily-reached first subway stop into Williamsburg on the L), on the second floor, directly above the space soon to house the bar Muchmore’s.  Enter through the side door on N. 9th St.

Though my libertarian views and Brian’s are well known, the Dionysium is a non-partisan crucible of skeptical analysis and varied entertainments – and Brian has a sense of humor – so join us even if you are merely bemused by the one remaining non-Romney candidate for the Republican nomination and want to know whence he came. 

For the already-initiated, though, I will try addressing some of the tough questions such as “Is it time to jump ship and root for Gary Johnson or Mitt Romney?” and “Why the conspiracy theories among Paul fans?”

One of the most important topics to the diehard Paul fans, though – one of interest as well to the CNBC viewers who saw me participate in an online video panel about Paul, Occupy Wall Street, and other political matters last week – is:

The Weirdness of Currency

One reason that, as you may know, I’ve been arguing online with the so-called “liberal-tarians” is that some of them have now begun encouraging people to argue in terms of “social justice,” but that term is not merely a synonym for “concern for the poor.”  It comes with a great deal of decidedly anti-market, anti-libertarian baggage – it’s precisely the redistributionist mode in which people who do not learn economics like to spout off about economic matters, and we are all poorer for it. 

With the possible exception of Marxism, this is about the last intellectual tradition libertarians should be encouraging if we want to educate people about economics – a bit like trying to encourage secularism through immersion in theology, or a free market in labor via the labor theory of value.

But I will confess that the Ron Paul rhetorical approach to teaching listeners about economics is not exactly the one I’d pick either.  He started out as a gold bug, and for him, as for some of his biggest fans, all of economics seems to rotate around the distinction between the Federal Reserve and gold-backed, non-inflating currency.  You can describe the economy that way – and I’m all for a free market in competing currencies – but it’s a highly idiosyncratic way of introducing people to economics, when most of them haven’t even tackled such basic concepts as mutually-beneficial exchange (the real key, in my opinion), property rights, supply and demand, regulation, and so forth. 

Furthermore, I was reminded by David Graeber’s book Debt – which, for all the negative things I said about it in my blog entry reviewing it, does a nice job of teasing apart currency’s varied, bundled-together functions – that fiat currency (that is, currency that is produced by the government and isn’t exchangeable for more basic commodities the government keeps in storage) isn’t the problem per se, inflation is.

This is an important point for the Paulite gold bugs to

BOOK NOTE: Occupy’s David Graeber on “Debt”! Todd on CNBC! Dionysium!

Catch me on CNBC’s Google+ stream as I do a video chat with John Carney and Occupy Wall Street supporters tomorrow (Thur.) at 4pm Eastern! 

And after yesterday’s historic May Day protests, it is time I examined a few books tied to the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

Taking the place of my old “Books of the Month,” entries like this one will henceforth focus on books that may relate to or help enrich the discussion at that month’s Dionysium, the Dionysium being the new series of bar events (a varying mix of debates, entertainment, and more) I’ll be hosting (and moderating!) in Williamsburg – and this being a “Month of Political Crisis” on this blog and at the Dionysium itself (followed by a June month of Revolution and Revolutionaries at our sister Dionysium in Austin, TX).

(The Williamsburg action all starts at 8pm on Thursday, May 17, on the residential second floor of 2 Havemeyer St., the building that will soon house the bar Muchmore’s, three blocks east of the Bedford Ave. subway stop – first stop into Brooklyn on the L; enter through the N. 9th St. side door just before you reach Havemeyer.  First up is BRIAN DOHERTY discussing his new book on Ron Paul – but today let us examine how the left’s most interesting insurgent movement thinks.)

•••

The Nietzschean skepticism inherent in the Dionysium demands the questioning of clichés (as does the new Jonah Goldberg book out yesterday, by the way).  Let us then question the assumption that Occupy and the Tea Party must be opposites. 

I’ve leaned toward the more free-market Tea Party, obviously, but then, some of my fellow libertarians have lately been arguing that I should think more in terms of “social justice,” the way the left and Occupy do (though I was pleased to see Jacob Levy break ranks with the other liberal-tarians for the interesting reason that he sees thinkers like Rawls as inviting people to think in closed, nationalistic, non-cosmopolitan terms – of a single, self-contained society like an idealized Greek city-state, not coincidentally – and thus to downplay the plight of immigrants and outsiders). 

I readily concede both that the basic concern for the poor emphasized by the “social justice” crowd is admirable and that Occupy makes some very good points about unfair corporate bailouts and government-banking collusion.  I will even concede that radically-skewed wealth distribution can be a warning sign (though not necessarily a sign of excessively free-market rules).

On the other hand, having a few good points doesn’t entirely absolve Occupy of the (admittedly shallow) charges made by their critics that they’re a bunch of scruffy, trespassing, Marxist loonies.  Many are.  Check out Gerard Perry’s tweets from May 1 for a bit of Zuccotti flavor.  A related photo essay (one in a series Gerard’s done about Occupy) is forthcoming on his site American-Rattlesnake.

Somewhere between the mundane, true points the movement makes and the scruffy schizophrenics sleeping in the street in the name of that movement lie the intelligent – but still sometimes bizarre – intellectuals who guide the movement, and it’s mostly them I want to talk about today (and perhaps tomorrow on Google+’s CNBC stream at 4pm Eastern, of course!). 

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

I don’t know how many of the protesters at Occupy rallies have read Debt by left-anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, but he was purportedly instrumental in guiding them toward their quasi-leaderless, General Assembly-forming, amorphously-collective, ambiguously-agendaed system. 

(Since he is a contributor to the staunchly anti-capitalist Canadian magazine Adbusters – run by a vaguely anti-Semitic-seeming Eastern European immigrant – I should probably write an article about the Occupy movement called “Occupy the World, but Blame Canada.”  One great irony of Adbusters’ involvement is that they hate advertising and commercialism, in that college Continental-theory way, but they probably did wonders to boost the Occupy movement by launching it with that truly beautiful poster of a fragile-looking ballerina atop the Wall Street Bull, with teargas and riot police looming in the background.  Who wouldn’t want to rescue the ballerina and stop the riot police?)

Graeber is full of interesting tidbits about how the accounting of debts and the use of currency arose in real history instead of the imagined/deduced scenarios of economists (as with most of history, the real story seems to have been strange, messy, brutal, and not altogether rational).  But that doesn’t make his political program wise – and if it’s shared by Occupiers in general, civilization is in big trouble. 

Graeber seems to want not just loan cancellation or

Comics and (Stupid) Identity Issues

Sci-fi and comics often have clones and evil doubles and the like that only we hardcore nerds keep track of, with my favorite stupid-reductio example being the DC Comics fight about four years ago between Power Girl from Earth-Two and (pay attention, now) Power Girl from Earth-2. 

And now, I kid you not, those worlds have been replaced in the refurbished DC multiverse by Earth 2.

So I'm amused to see a DC fan enraged that (in the first comic set on Earth 2, coming out in a few days), the character Helena Bertinelli gets a "shitty death" off-panel – by which the fan means that in the new multiverse, Helena is merely depicted as a long-dead woman, while her duplicate from Earth 2 – Helena Wayne, a.k.a. the Huntress – has been using her name all these years. 

It's comparable to the sense of betrayal you'd feel if you found out Spider-Man had been a clone for the past five years, I guess...except the current stories all take place in an entirely new multiverse anyway, so it's not clear the dead duplicate character is the same as the prior multiverse's live version of that character by the same name...who, in any case, was merely created in the late 80s as a doppelganger for the original 1970s Earth-Two version of the character...and in fact the new Earth 2 version arguably more closely resembles that Earth-Two original than the late-80s Ms. Bertinelli (who the fan feels just died off-panel) did anyway.

All these characters essentially look identical and do the same thing, by the way (that is, fight crime like Batman). 

There comes a point, in short, where caring either drives you mad or leads you inexorably to the same point as the people who didn’t care in the first place, which is probably roughly where you are right about now, gentle reader.  Yet it had to be said. 

P.S. But I promise you, somewhere out there is a fan who has not yet realized that this way lies madness and is thus rooting for a big team-up between the Helena of Earth-Two, the Helena of the late-80s Earth, the briefly-instantiated Helena of Earth-2, the cruelly-dispatched and never-seen Helena of the current main Earth, and the Helena of Earth 2, all of whom would, of course, be virtually identical. 

Vote Ron Paul (plus Superman, Rand, steampunk, rock, and Dionysium)

Four years ago, I confess, I voted for Romney in the New York primary, figuring he was by that point the biggest obstacle to throw at the even-worse John McCain.  Raising my standards considerably, today I’ll vote against Romney, regardless of how big an obstacle Ron Paul offers.  Philosophically, he is the only giant in electoral politics these days. 

Still, as I type this, prior to the day’s voting, it’s worth noting that at this point either Gingrich or Paul, to become the nominee without bizarre convention high-jinx, would have to win nearly all the remaining delegates, solo.  Romney, by contrast, automatically gets the nomination just by winning about 40% of the outstanding delegates, which he can likely do with ease.  There is still a small chance of Romney failing to get to 1,144 before the convention.  But there is now effectively no chance of Gingrich or Paul getting that many before the convention. 

It is hard, too, to imagine anyone but Romney emerging victorious even from the ugliest and weirdest imaginable divided convention (so I would prefer my fellow Ron Paul supporters not do anything nuts if it comes to that).

And so, even though there is something to be said for continuing to get Paul’s vote totals as high as possible to help spread the liberty message, libertarians should probably be asking themselves what their next move is in an Obama-vs.-Romney world: (1) Vote Romney?  (2) Vote Obama?  (3) Vote for the Libertarian Party candidate all but certain to be picked at their convention in Vegas next week, Gary Johnson?  (4) Stay home?  (5) Stick with Paul and expect something very, very improbable to happen at the GOP convention (like Romney getting run over by a bus)? 

I would love to hear from one experienced public speaker from each of these factions – who is a libertarian – at the impending May 17 Dionysium event I’m hosting.  Let me know if you’re game.  No Devil’s-advocate stuff – I want to hear five passionate cases made (for about five minutes each, in addition to our main event: Brian Doherty discussing his new book on Ron Paul). 

As for me, I suggest option #3 above, Gary Johnson (“Johnson if not Paul,” as I’ve vowed and encouraged others to vow).  I might in theory stretch that rule to include Rand Paul as a v.p. candidate, but no other Republican, Rubio or otherwise, will do as a substitute for Ron.  That is one of many complex and contentious issues we’ll have to discuss on May 17, though, at the first gathering of the Dionysium! 

It may sound like mere fantasy to think Romney might pick Rand Paul as a running mate, but Romney’s going to have to cut several deals if he really wants to keep his coalition together: socially conservative Santorumites, Hispanic and Floridian Rubio-admirers, disappointed libertarian Ron Paul fans, and more-conventional yet less-Republican libertarian Gary Johnson fans are all liable to bail on poor Mitt, and he has to be doing that strange math by now. 

He will almost certainly prevail in New York today, though – and rather than be a mopey and disappointed libertarian, I’ll just (1) spend some individualistic time reading Superman: Secrets of the Fortress of Solitude when that comes out tomorrow, (2) hear Objectivist Yaron Brook speak at NYU Thursday night at 6pm with a few of my anarcho-capitalist brethren, (3) attend a Victorian/steampunk fashion show in Brooklyn on Sunday at 3pm, and (4) hear a neoconservatively-inclined rocker, Jessica Eisenberg, perform at 8pm that same day at Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg –the same neighborhood soon to know the glory of the Dionysium. 

And I will really keep my cyber-mouth shut until May, hard as that is to believe.  Taking a page from one of my state’s beloved former senators, I will try to emerge in “listening tour” mode instead of arguing constantly – the very model of a gracious Dionysium host.  

Tricia Rose, Social Justice, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Beastie Boys, and Black Crowes

I saw a lecture by (charming, charismatic, funny) Brown professor of Africana studies Tricia Rose last night, and it was a reminder how ludicrous the task is that the “bleeding-heart libertarians” have set for themselves in wanting to incorporate “social justice” into the heart of libertarian thinking (or in Matt Zwolinski’s revisionist account, in arguing social justice has always been a major component of classical liberal thinking). 

This (mostly white, fairly moderate-seeming, very Brown University) audience was surely the kind of crowd that routinely deploys the language of social justice – and Rose deploys it in friendly, happy, anecdotal, non-threatening terms that would likely seem palatable to your average talk show audience (she has written two books on the philosophy behind hiphop). 

Yet it seemed to boil down to (or rather be a taken-for-granted synonym for) talk of wealth redistribution, fighting to preserve big-government programs like Obamacare, and, even more creepily, encouragement of people like the school teacher who says he is looking forward to teaching ninth-graders to be social justice activists themselves.  Why, that’s just bound to mean a more libertarian society, right? 

Perhaps the most condescending and authoritarian bit, though, was when Rose had the whole audience raise their right hands to recite a long, long pledge she had written about how to work toward social justice without blaming yourself for society’s past sins – and she had people begin pledging and reciting before telling them what they would be swearing to.  Sign this social contract and read it later, as it were – likely a pretty good indication of how much she (happily, cheerily, positively) thinks we can all trust her judgment.  I’m sure students love her.

These are our philosophical kin, Zwolinski (and Tomasi and Levy)?  But not those awful moderate Republican types who talk about markets and individualism all the time, of course.  Well, you go to the family reunion next time, then, because I don’t have the patience for it anymore.  Nor for any further BHL nonsense. 

If you treasure your status as intellectuals as much as you seem to, there comes a time to admit you’re wrong, and it would be impressive and admirable for the BHL faction to do so immediately after the release of the liberal-tarian manifesto Free Market Fairness.  Indeed, they are plainly morally obligated to do so, as, all joking aside, they are attempting to dilute the one philosophy that can save this society by transmuting it into the very philosophy that is rapidly destroying society, on campus and in Washington, DC. 

There is not some aspect of this that their opponents “don’t get,” “need to study more,” or are “resisting.”  BHL is false and destructive, and, as usual, I have been entirely too kind in my criticisms.  I will not continue to be if they persist in this self-indulgent,

How I’m Spending Holocaust Remembrance Day

The Nazis were, among other things, (1) anti-free-market (they controlled industry and railed against bourgeois merchants just as other socialists did), (2) unscientific, (3) racist, and yet (4) prone to fantasize that they were noble, self-sacrificing heroes. 

I am pleased that by contrast my Holocaust Remembrance Day happens to shape up like this:

(1) Hear a fine talk by Todd Zywicki of the Mercatus Center about the government’s opportunistic responses to the financial crisis (a talk that ended with him basically agreeing with one audience member who warned that our current economic system is becoming “fascist”).

(2) Visit an event this evening at the American Museum of Natural History – accompanied by two Jewish people, no less, one the founder of the new Empiricist League, which will host regular lectures on scientific topics (not so terribly unlike the broader-ranging Dionysium I’ll begin hosting on May 17, as noted here yesterday).

(3) Attend a talk later tonight by Africana Studies professor Tricia Rose from Brown about race and gender, not just for old times’ sake but to keep me well rounded after my blog posts earlier this year (a) defending one of the writers let go for racism by National Review and (b) again criticizing the BHLs, for among other things still being feminists.

(4) Be reminded what truly self-sacrificing heroism is by reading the final issue of DC Comics’ series about the (doomed, tragically short-lived) T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.

By the way, some will claim that the Nazis were inevitable once Darwin became popular and the world was seen as a competition between bloodlines, but it sounds to me like E.O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth – about group selection mattering more than kin selection to recent human evolution – might do wonders to show people how Darwinian thinking can lead to Hayek (that is, toward an understanding of competing models of benign economic cooperation) instead of to new rationales for the barbarous and biological war of all against all.  Of course, some ants will always be Marxists.

And if all that still sounds too grim and heavy – and the shadow cast by the damn fascists still seems too dark and long – tomorrow I will blog of more-celebratory topics such as the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

10 Bits of Libertarian In-Fighting and Intrigue

Yesterday was Tax Day, but on Thursday, May 17 (8pm), I’ll host the first in a new series of onstage bar events called the Dionysium (at Muchmore’s Bar, 2 Havemeyer St. near the Bedford Ave. stop in Williamsburg) – and at this inaugural one, Reason editor Brian Doherty will speak about his new book Ron Paul: The Man and the Movement He Inspired. 

More details to come soon – and the events won’t always be libertarian in nature – but here are ten bits of libertarian controversy we might want to chat about next month (and by now Brian surely knows how much the Paulites and Reasonoids fight with each other, which I hadn’t really known about until the past two years or so – though maybe some of the neoconservatives will at least let up on Paul a bit after he endorsed the idea of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem):

•An Associated Press article by Michael Hill today notes my plan (no doubt shared by many) to vote for Ron Paul in New York’s Republican primary on Tuesday – and my expectation that I’ll vote for Gary Johnson, not Romney, in November.

•Bizarre, cryptic blog entries, one by Lew Rockwell, hint at a Cato Institute scandal that will take down Ed Crane – yet heal the ancient rift between the Kochs, Cato, and the Mises Institute to boot – possibly with a crime involved.  That’s one artfully-targeted scandal.  And, no, I have no idea what they’re talking about. 

•The aforementioned Doherty quotes a recent blog entry of mine at length in his summary of the debate among and with “liberal-tarians” (hereinafter referred to by the shorter nickname BHLs, or “bleeding-heart libertarians,” which shall be deployed with shameless imprecision) on the (controversial but non-scandalous) Cato-Unbound blog.  That blog entry of mine ended up getting me criticized by both a Catholic libertarian who thought it caved completely to the BHLs and by a gay-friendly libertarian who thought I was too dismissive of transsexuals.  It’s tough keeping everyone happy.

•On Cato-Unbound, the debate has entered a Conversation phase, featuring another fine jab from David Friedman, a reply from Zwolinski and Tomasi encouraging a bit of mushiness, a still more impatient jab from Friedman, and a reply from Zwolinski that frankly leaves me worried he thinks the problem with political thinkers is that they haven’t spent enough time worrying about the poor. 

Really?  Is that the problem?  Next, you’ll tell me it’s high time someone tried thinking about economics in terms of labor for a change.  And, hey, maybe the problem with debates over resource use is that no one has thought about our impact on Mother Earth yet.  (Just stop or you’ll replicate the whole decline from nineteenth- into twentieth-century liberalism, and we did that disaster already.)

•Doherty may have supplied the best evidence that libertarians like Hayek are too mushy and unprincipled to be much of a safeguard against statism when he noted that Barney Frank quotes Hayek in defense of government.  I’m not joking when I say BHLs ought to think about that for a while before opening their mouths again (or dismissing more rigid Randian/Rothbardian-type formulations of the philosophy – as Rothbard once said in defense of anarcho-capitalism, we tried “limited government” already and it didn’t last).

•I do, however, commend John Tomasi for putting out his consensus-seeking, left-meets-right book Free Market Fairness just as Bill O’Reilly announces (on his April 11 show) that this presidential election is one between “a free-marketeer and a social justice liberal.”  America needs this book right now, clearly (dangerous as it may be to play into the hands of a President who likes to talk about “fairness”). 

I’m inclined to think, contra Tomasi and Zwolinski, though

The IRS Wasn't the Only Messy Political Development a Century Ago

While it crosses my mind (on this politically-accursed day), I owe Ron Radosh for alerting me to the work of the historian Martin J. Sklar (with whom I later corresponded a little), who has written about corporatism and Progressivism being almost the same thing, given the way big government arose in partnership with modern corporations a century ago, amidst much talk of reform, efficiency, and centralization (three things that seemed then to go together naturally).

And you almost don't wanna know how complex and counter-intuitive the business-regulations debates of that day were -- less about markets vs. government than about regulations favoring small businesses and farmers (by busting up large businesses) vs. regulations that inadvertently encouraged corporate bigness by being more lenient on a single large corporation than on multiple businesses that colluded with each other or were owned by the same person.

The daunting task of unraveling the resulting inefficient, corrupt knot -- without appearing merely to tug it rightward or leftward (and thus angering one or the other faction invested in the knot without seeing its true nature) -- is urgent these days but unlikely to be completed by pretending, for instance, that Romney and Obama are clear-cut polar opposites.  It all makes me tired.

(More tomorrow on various bits of traitorous political behavior and/or in-fighting, though.)

Come to “Detention” – and hear music – and learn anarchy!

Bucking the Whedonesque trend, I will not see young folk menaced in a Cabin in the Woods this Friday...nor will I see prisoners facing a Lockout in space...nor for that matter do I expect to watch a High School coping with drugs next week.

Instead, FRIDAY I WILL ATTEND THE MOVIE DETENTION, directed by Joseph Kahn (who’s done rock videos like “Elevation” by U2, somewhat regretted one silly motorcycle movie called Torque with scenes like this, and almost directed Neuromancer).  I got my ticket for the 7:35 at AMC Empire 25, so join me in the lobby a half-hour earlier if you like. 

Detention is reportedly a brilliant combo-parody of various nerd-pleasing genres from horror to John Hughes, as a principal sticks all the kids who might be the local serial killer in detention at the same time, and things rapidly get weirder still.  (And the director’s sister told me I gotta go – but in all seriousness, the nerd sites seem to love it.) 

Also, it stars Josh Hutcherson, who is suddenly a big deal due to playing Peeta in Hunger Games – which also involves a bunch of trapped kids and violence, so think of this as a sequel to Hunger Games.  That’s right: if you saw Hunger Games, you also have to see Detention. 

Since the principal in the movie sounds like he’s engaged in profiling, maybe he, John Derbyshire, and I should all attend the April 19 talk at the Brown Club NY by Brown professor Tricia Rose about how to address topics like race and gender sensitively.  Well, I may go, anyway.  Important to be well-rounded. 

BUT THIS WEEK: catch me at Desmond’s on Park (between 29th and 30th) if you want to hang out with anarcho-capitalists (I warned you) tonight around 7pm...and then Union Hall (702 Union St. at Fifth Ave. in Brooklyn) at 9:30pm sharp tonight to hear Nicolas Beaudoing and the Doc Marshalls do their hip country thing...plus the Suffolk on Saturday at 9:30pm to hear Robin Eisgrau and the garagier band Perp Walk [UPDATE: That Perp Walk gig Sat. April 14 has been moved to the Charleston at 174 Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg. They are slated to go on at 8:45 and the cover is $7. Crucially, you get a free small pizza with your beer at Charleston, I think]).

Neither of these bands will sound like the Black Satans doing their 1994 black metal classic “Satan of Hell.”

Since my blog entry yesterday may have just left you wondering “What the hell’s an anarcho-capitalist?” here’s the Professor Frink-like David Friedman explaining the arguments in his an-cap classic Machinery of Freedom in a brisk twenty-three minutes that might just change your life and save the world (h/t Zac Gochenour).  On the Cato-Unbound blog this week, you can find him and others continuing the debate about liberal-tarianism, libertarianism, and classical liberalism.  

W(h)ither Classical Liberalism (or libertarianism, or liberal-tarianism)?

Cato’s blog is hosting a great discussion about whether libertarianism has strayed too far from its classical liberal roots and gotten too doctrinaire (about which, more below).  I keep wanting to see broad coalitions form, but factionalism is all too tempting and fun. 

If I were more concerned about being liked, I would probably worry a great deal about tending to be perceived by each faction I encounter as being on the side of the other faction.  It’s not that I’m a contrarian or an enigma – I have pretty predictable and well-known positions (I wish I could look deep by saying they’ve changed radically over the past two decades, but they really haven’t). 

It’s just that there’s nothing like hanging out with Team A to make you see the merit in the arguments of Team Not-A, especially given all the unfair things most members of Team A are saying about them.  But then you hang out with Team Not-A and discover they’re just as unfair in the things they say about Team A (or possibly Team D), so, not wanting to encourage error, you feel obliged to put in a word for Team A – if only to keep Team Not-A’s minds limber.

(As I recently tweeted, I’m starting to feel as if feuding neoconservatives and paleoconservatives deserve each other, for instance – but let the record show I spent much of the Bush administration defending the former, or at least their good points, to the latter and now routinely have to defend the ascendant latter to the disgruntled former.  And I had started out an atheist teenager in the liberal Northeast who felt obliged to defend conservatism at left-leaning Brown.) 

The healthy form of the factionalism is robust small-d democratic debate and all that, and the more embarrassing (but highly amusing) form is vicious in-fighting among members of factions that are so minuscule to begin with that most outsiders weren’t even aware the faction existed, let alone its subdivisions (I get only twenty times as many Google hits for “anarcho-capitalism” as I do for my own name, and I’m nobody). 

But before you dismiss my impending tale of libertarians fighting with “liberal-tarians” – and anarcho-capitalists fighting with both (and with themselves) – as being about as relevant as Trotskyite factions that died out in the 1930s, do keep in mind that, for instance, the main arguments being mulled by the Supreme Court about whether to find Obamacare unconstitutional were first advanced by nearly-anarcho-capitalist Randy Barnett.

I say “nearly” because he’s technically a defender of “polycentric law” and gets annoyed if you just call him an anarchist.  Subdivisions. 

•••

By liberal-tarians here I’m sort of thinking, despite their differences and in some cases lack of self-assigned labels, of Will Wilkinson, his fiancée Kerry Howley, Brink Lindsey – and my ongoing argument with Jacob Levy since we were undergrads – plus in some sense Julian Sanchez and the like, all inclined to think that traditionalists and Republicans are as great if not greater a threat to liberty than the demi-socialist Democrats.

Declaring oneself a highly-specific thing, with lots of prefixes slapped in front (post-neo-ovo-lacto-etc.) can be narcissistic, or simply an exercise in excessive precision, as some of the aforementioned people would agree.  Will – with whom I’ve disagreed about the “liberal-tarian” outreach effort he and others made from libertarianism to the left – even argues that labeling yourself a member of one political faction might actually make you stupider.

(In that linked piece, pointed out by Ross Kenyon, Will notes that more-doctrinaire anarcho-capitalist Bryan Caplan seems to disagree that labeling and factionalism makes you stupider, and Caplan embraces several factional labels...and ironically some of my very-radical younger anarcho-capitalist pals here in NYC think Caplan isn’t anarcho-capitalist enough...and on it goes.) 

Putting the old left/right tactical question aside for a moment (without too much residual animosity, I hope), I think Will’s basically right on the stupidity point – or rather, in his observation that overly emphatic self-identification can easily become mentally limiting (a point that can even apply to thinking too narrowly of oneself as, say, “a waiter,” as was observed by Sartre – who didn’t like to be called an existentialist, by the way). 

Now, it is self-aggrandizing to insist that you can’t be labeled even when the labels clearly apply (I seem to recall Gore Vidal once saying he has sex with men and women but refuses to be called bisexual, preferring “pansexual” or something like that – whereas, out of weariness and simple deference to physical reality, I will go right on calling cross-dressing males “he” even if they claim to be named “Sheila” or something now, not that this issue arises too often...though this is New York City).  But Will’s right that people get far too attached to those labels, and it can shut down normal mental processes. 

I wasn’t expecting to startle people I was arguing with the first few times I tried responding to “Then you’re not really a libertarian [or whatever]!” by saying

Race, Rand, “Liberal-tarianism,” Stossel, and Other Blasphemy

Ten epic media events of note:

1. I think the April issue of Newsmax contains a story by me about the conservative rock band Madison Rising, who are odd men out in their industry. 

2. Yesterday was Easter, but last week saw the release of Austin Dacey’s book The Future of Blasphemy about free speech battles around the world (which I saw him speak about recently, at an event where, I’m happy to say, we got no closer to speech suppression than an atheist friend unwittingly calling religious people idiots in front of another friend who works for a cardinal – but, crucially, no one was coerced, and a good time was had by all). 

To commemorate the blasphemous occasion, this entry is decorated with pictures I took of: the World Trade Center being rebuilt (WTC 1 itself is now over 100 stories high – take that, Islamic terrorism!), a view from inside the new World Trade Center 7 (no, I saw no sign of a conspiracy inside), a band with the mocking pagan name Blonde Valhalla, and the giant ridiculous sculpture outside St. John’s Cathedral, meant to represent life itself, depicting a DNA helix made of water spawning a giant crab covered in giraffes decapitating Satan – y’know, just the way you remember it from Sunday school. 

3. John Derbyshire (himself a secularist of some sort, though he once chastised me for using the wrong label, so I won’t try) got ousted from National Review last week over his rant on TakiMag about black crime – and I for one am sad to see him go.  He may be eccentric, but he was one of NR’s best writers, and his rant is partly a side effect of a U.S. media culture that seems to enjoy every blasphemy except this one. 

Assume for the sake of argument that he’s gotten things all wrong – still, is he as wrong (or dangerous) as the naive (or you might just say admirably non-racist) assumption I grew up with in rural (and lily-white) New England: namely, that anyone who believed in important ethnic differences or differential crime rates was utterly misinformed or irrational, just like a believer in ghosts? 

Given that being accused of racism is a chronic problem in conservative and libertarian circles, it’s unfortunate I can’t bring my young self forward in time to present as evidence of just what a good – and utterly believing – p.c. trooper I actually was on this topic when young, seeing it as one more plank of my prized overall rationality. 

For all the left’s lamentations about how racist our culture supposedly is, hey, despite having been moderately conservative, I somehow made it to college (Brown) without even knowing that the black violent crime rate really is substantially higher – and not just by a few percentage points but indeed about seven times higher than that of whites per capita, meaning a subset of blacks end up accounting for about half of American crime [UPDATE: I'm told the differential is now more like over twice as high, which is a start – and I happened to be reading the stats at a circa-1990 gang violence peak, though things have not entirely evened out since].  I was unaware of this until stumbling across Justice Department crime stats in the Brown library while researching some other topic (I had a liberal girlfriend at one point who refused to believe the stats, and they may not be perfect, but they seem to be consistent with black crime victims’ own accounts of the ethnicity of their attackers and various other indicators). 

Until the library visit, I honestly would have told people that being more wary around black teenage males in “bad neighborhoods” was as irrational as being on guard for Bigfoot attacks.  Indeed, if not for seeing those stats, I probably would have sanctimoniously told my own grandmother, a few years later, not to worry about the vast increase in young black males in her quaint New Hampshire neighborhood, and probably would have kept telling her that right up until the point at which, as it happens, they started having frequent gang fights – melees involving large numbers of people – in the street outside her house, leading her – in her eighties – to petition her mayor for more police presence in the area (she’s ninety-eight now and still with us – and was pleased to see a black person elected President, by the way). 

In fact, it wasn’t until moving to New York City after college that I realized there are places where all the ethnic groups seem to make ethnicity-based observations about each other without angry protests and manifestoes ensuing.  I admit it was shocking at first (Latinos making broad generalizations about Italians at the office – and the Italians simply agreeing?!?).  Much easier to think like a liberal on these matters in places with only one ethnic group or places where everyone’s equally detached from reality thanks to politicized lectures and rallies on the green.

And if I’d gotten killed due to my naivete at some point, virtually no one in respectable circles would have said, “You know, he probably should have been warned about those high crime rates at some point.”  By contrast, the Derbyshire menace must of course be squelched.

Now, the tragic white-supremacist – yes, I’m calling it white-supremacist – history of the U.S. is likely sufficient to explain how things got this way without recourse to any hardcore-determinist genetic theories (and it can indeed be dangerous to overemphasize one explanatory element of a complex – and potentially inflammatory – historical phenomenon even if you do discover, say, mildly-probabilistic genetic factors).  I mean, for a couple centuries, a huge portion of blacks weren’t even allowed to read or keep their families intact, and they were legally marginalized and menaced in various ways for another century thereafter.  Who wouldn’t be messed up?  Indeed, traditionalists should be the first to concede that could cause decades or more of cultural fallout for a vulnerable population.

But how much clarity is likely to arise from ostracizing anyone who makes a fumbling or unorthodox attempt to discuss such taboo issues in the light of the past half-century’s decidedly different experiences (including some legitimate present-day white worries)?  On this topic, as on religion and so many others, do we prefer a combination of silence and consensual make-believe?  Aren’t the people who fear conversation likely the ones who think the truth is too horrible to handle?  I for one don’t think it is, though it ain’t necessarily altogether pretty either. 

(On a related note, I’ve repeatedly been pleased to discover black friends who, if I may rudely treat them as a demographic category for just a moment, are happy I’ve been rooting for Ron Paul, who seems to be their favorite Republican candidate, notwithstanding those infamous newsletters – about which I would not for a second have blamed them for being outraged.  It seems several of them agree we face far more serious issues.  And you know, they’ve heard worse anyway.  On Boondocks alone.)

I suspect it will be neither p.c. nor government action that solves these problems in the long run but commerce, intermarriage, and humor, lame and slapdash as that may sound to people wanting grandiose political fixes (and I say this as someone who, for instance, much like Stephen Macedo, has no objection to purely private affirmative action programs or even, say, consciously all-black businesses – and wouldn’t even be all that bothered by affirmative action laws, if they were clearly framed as compensation for past oppressive laws – and had sunset provisions – rather than being never-ending social engineering programs, now justified by the less-libertarian and presumably-eternal rationale of mandatory diversity).

In any case, I’m all for gradually making such issues irrelevant, not via p.c. taboos like the ones that prevailed at Brown – though they are themselves historically understandable – but by encouraging people to give greater attention to precisely those things that transcend ethnic, national, and tribal affiliations – such as philosophy, economics, and science, which describe the universe quite well no matter what color its inhabitants are.  Speaking of which...

4. My econ-savvy ex-boss John Stossel has another taboo-busting book out tomorrow, this one called No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails – But Individuals Succeed. 

5. And Vijay Dewan (like both Derbyshire and Dacey, a onetime Lolita Bar debater) notes that tomorrow tickets go on sale (here) for the documentary he’s been working on about the ludicrous, unscientific – and ahistorical – battles that determine the content of textbooks, called Revisionaries.  I’ll see it on the 20th.  (Speaking of classrooms, in a few days, I’ll explain why you also have to join me in seeing the hip horror-comedy Detention this month.  More on that soon.)

6. I wish I could also tell you that Iron Sky (the Finnish movie about a Sarah Palin analogue battling Nazis from the Moon, I kid you not) is also out in the U.S. this month, as I thought it would be.  It has a U.S. distributor – and was out overseas last week – but it still doesn’t have an official U.S. release date.  I look forward to it, in any case. 

7. Around October, I will also brave Atlas Shrugged Part II: Either/Or (which started filming last week), despite the weakness of last year’s installment, since they have replaced not only the director and the screenwriter but the entire cast.  So we really don’t know how much it will resemble the prior episode, but for Ayn and curiosity’s sake, I’m willing to gamble again.  The screenwriter’s big prior credits include episodes of the TV shows Walker, Texas Ranger and Mortal Kombat.  Is that a burning oil field I smell – or an Oscar?

8. If real-world crises and leviathans are more your speed, I see Robert Higgs – who I heard speak last week at the monthly libertarian gathering called the Junto – has a new book out in a few weeks, collecting past articles as Delusions of Power: New Explorations of the State, War, and Economy.  May my own new series of onstage events (starting next month!) yield speakers as insightful. 

9. If you like your libertarians just a little more mushy than most of the ones mentioned above, though, note that a neat dialogue has been going on for the past few days on the Cato Institute’s blog about what is colloquially known as “liberal-tarianism,” with a contribution from BleedingHeartLibertarians co-founder Matt Zwolinski and Free Market Fairness author (and Brown prof!) John Tomasi, followed by (what I think are pretty effective) responses from Rod Long and David Friedman, with one from Alexander McCobin and a follow-up conversation due today.  I will post my own thoughts on the liberal-tarian phenomenon on this blog tomorrow.

10. In the meantime, here again is a link to video of the aforementioned David Friedman speaking recently at Lolita Bar.  That should hold you over until the new and different Williamsburg bar events begin – or at least until tomorrow.