Materialism, Neuhaus, and More

For all the talk you hear of English being a language with a large number of words, I think we still end up wasting a lot of time because we have too few when it matters, causing confusion — as in the case of using “liberty” in about twelve different ways or “liberal” in eight or “libertarian” in two and a half. How different some of our political arguments would be (and how much clearer) if we had completely different-sounding words for different and easily confused senses of what are now identical words (likewise, I recently lamented that we don’t have carefully-stratified language for referring separately to things that are bad tastewise, bad morally, bad enough to warrant legal action, bad for some people but not others, etc.).

Likewise, terrible misunderstandings are bound to happen if you say you have a “materialist” worldview, as I certainly do — in some sense. With Father Richard Neuhaus’s memorial service taking place here in New York City yesterday, it wouldn’t have been a good time to gain sympathetic listeners in some quarters by calling oneself a materialist — but I think this is in large part because people lump the term together with ideas like those connoted by terms such as “materialistic” (in the sense of greedy — as if that weren’t itself a dangerous, loaded term) not to mention “reductionist.”

But one can see the world as material, physically-explicable, and devoid of supernatural elements of any kind without “caring only about shallow things and possessions” — and one can technically be a reductionist while taking the very reasonable Hofstadterian view that the interesting things in human mental life tend to happen at the level of abstraction, not the level of the atom.

And on a purely aesthetic level, I’ve written before that I agree, for instance, something is lost when vampires and werewolves — monsters born of our deepest fears about death and bodily integrity, which ought rightly to remain confusing and awe-inspiring — are revealed to be mere products of two virus strains, as is the case in the Underworld movies (but I’ll see Rise of the Lycans next week or so anyway). I’m not the sort of geek parodied in the great song “Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton, recently mentioned in a comment thread on this site by my friend Chuck Blake. The “Future Soon” geek eschews psychological richness and conventional self-improvement in favor of thinking that sometime soon, through a few mere techno-fixes, “everything that makes me weak and strange will be engineered away.” At the same time, I do think genetic enhancement, cybernetics, and all that good stuff will prove helpful.

By contrast, the one time I ever spoke to Father Neuhaus, ironically, he was explaining to me — in my capacity as an associate producer for John Stossel, working on the last show of his I was part of, Tampering with Nature — why he was opposed to life-extending technologies, thinking that life should end with natural death, just as it should begin and be seen to begin, he said, with natural conception. (Strangely, as my then-co-worker Debbie Colloton and I have repeatedly noted over the years, a lot of people we talked to or did full interviews with at the Stossel Unit seemed to pass away a short time afterwards, from tiny car-airbag-mandate-resenting Violet Cosgrove to Atlantic editor Michael Kelly.)

•••

I may have disagreed with Neuhaus somewhat about life-extending technology, but I admired his speaking ability (and felt stupid after first thinking “He’s a great speaker!” when I later remembered “Oh, right, he’s a priest — that’s his job”), both in an appearance I saw him do with Ramesh Ponnuru after First Things’ controversial “End of Democracy?” symposium and at a gathering of the Phillips Fellows (a few of whom I’m still hoping will grace our Feb. 19 Debate at Lolita Bar with their presences — but we’ll get someone to do it).

I was also entertained by the story of how Neuhaus came to fission off from the Rockford Institute, over their magazine Chronicles’ mounting opposition to immigration. Apparently, the Rockford Institute actually had the locks changed on Neuhaus’s offices at one point, not planning to let pro-immigration staffers in to do their cosmopolitan dirty work (jobs that could go to real, immigration-fearing, native-born Americans, I suppose). Eventually, the two factions just amicably parted, I gather, and Neuhaus edited First Things for years thereafter.

And I remain sufficiently tolerant of the Rockford Institute that when I was in Rockford, IL years ago for the wedding of Stossel producer Kristi Kendall, I tried to find out if the Institute had any activities going on that I could attend during downtime — and only after a disappointing, futile search for such activities did I remember the town is right near Chicago, where friends of mine lived and could easily be visited. This gives you some idea how nerdily I prioritize.

(Incidentally, I notice girlfriend Helen blogs about someone who hopes to meet Neuhaus someday in the afterlife — and Helen’s noted that she does not think there are now ghostly people wandering around in the afterlife but rather that a full, fleshy bodily resurrection of the dead will occur at some point in the future, which may well be standard Catholic theology but struck me as odd — then again, all y’all people who believe in the supernatural pretty much look the same to me.)

•••

In one small way, if I wanted to be generous about it, I suppose I could concede that my materialism leads to wanting a minimal law code via a sort of indifference, but only in this sense:

Basically, I think people who are troubled to the point of legislation by what’s in other people’s heads (and thus want to censor or use law for culture-war ends) are whining about nothing — culture and symbolism is largely just neural firings that can be ignored or paid attention to at your leisure (look away from the porn, etc.). But once I’m threatened with arrest, it’s a different story. Hate me all you like, but only in so far as that hate leads to a likely risk of fisticuffs or gunplay does it really impinge on my freedom.

Thus my focus on econ, not cultural symbolism. Guns, not presidential speeches. Taxes, not our “conceptualization of the Other.” Regulations, not popular attitudes. (Also, though this is a slightly separate and more subtle point: policies that affect 300 million people in big ways, not so much policies — wrong though they might be — that affect only 1% of the populace, or just three artists, or just 300 terrorists in Guantanamo. I’m not saying those things don’t matter, but some attempt at a utility calculus in prioritizing these things is morally obligatory.)

Science and econ put us on the surest footing and affect the most lives, in real and visible ways. A lot of the rest is smoke and mirrors — and goes away the moment we change the conversation or shift our attention elsewhere. Presto! I have just reconceptualized my relationship to the Other, to Nature, and to the institutions of the patriarchy. Presto! Back to normal again. See, it doesn’t really matter without some resulting change in the physical world, does it?

•••

And by the way, if I think the material world matters, is it really so strange (as Jesse Walker [CORRECTION: I may be thinking of another writer -- more tomorrow] seemed to find it in a recent article) that libertarians of my sort have tended to prefer the business-friendly right over the business-bashing left? At the end of the day, we need to eat, wear clothing, live in shelter, etc. Companies make these things. Government merely takes money away from the people who make these things — and no amount of blather about who inherited which aspect of the Enlightenment, which party is most hypocritical, and what Rawls would do if his head were stuck up his veil of ignorance any farther, etc., etc. can change that fundamental pro-business/anti-business dichotomy, which the right tended for a long time to be roughly, sorta, more or less on the correct side of, their largely-symbolic religious posturings notwithstanding.

But Jesse [unless it wasn't him in the first place, of course] is forgiven because of (1) this great piece bashing Thomas Frank, about whom I’ve complained a couple times on this blog recently, and because of (2) his previously-noted radio show at WCBN.org, which is moving to Tuesdays at noon Eastern, he says. Thanks to the miracle of radio, I will continue to listen in.

Culture Wars Revisited

Given the bare-bones description of property I gave in my blog entry two days ago — and given just how extensive the range of social interactions affected by that vision of property would be — you can now perhaps understand why I was aghast, during (and just before) last month’s “Month of Feminism” sparring with Wilkinson and Howley, by the suggestion that libertarianism (the legal and policy implications of which most libertarians take to be generated by a vision of property more or less like the one I was describing) should have various cultural side issues imported into it such as a certain take on gender.

It would be a bit like if Plato’s Guardians (much as I hate to use an authoritarian metaphor) had added to their very basic list of duties to the polis the arbitrary and faddish command “and ensure the populace always buys its groceries at Stuckey’s.” The Guardians are welcome to have their opinions — likely varying ones — about who has the best buys on produce, but somehow the very basic rules they are charged with enforcing and promulgating were meant to be something more neutral and potentially universally-respected. (And you understand intuitively what I mean even if in point of fact Plato envisioned a precise diet for all good Greeks — rework the analogy using the Bill of Rights and the insertion of a specific sports regimen if you like.)

Libertarians, irrelevant as we may often seem, have a big philosophical responsibility so long as no one else gets this bare-bones property idea, and it doesn’t help if we try to smuggle partisan culture-warrior positions into our ostensibly truce-like and unbiased philosophy.

•••

Anything not violating property rights, including one’s right to one’s own body, is permitted — legally, that is. That doesn’t at all mean anyone’s obliged to consider it morally, aesthetically, or psychologically acceptable, of course, including libertarians themselves. Their diverse opinions on subtle ethical and aesthetic matters will be generated from places other than libertarianism itself or law itself, these things being by design limited in scope. That’s why conservatives (in particular) who talk as if libertarians are merely nihilists are either deliberately misrepresenting us or are too dense to grasp the difference between law and culture — essentially making them socialists or some other form of totalitarian.

I suspect a combination of misrepresentation and denseness, or rather the intellectually dishonest strategic deployment of a willful refusal to understand — selective denseness, if you will — of the sort that enables people to say (but never fully, honestly believe): “You’re not a Methodist like me? Well, then, I’m sorry to hear you love evil and depravity and misery so much.”

A property regime’s open-ended legal “neutrality” does mean, though, that I would do well to exhibit now — even overemphasize — the sort of diplomacy that would be required of everyone in a world where all but property violations must be tolerated — in the sense of tolerance that merely means not responding violently, as opposed to the sort of tolerance that means theatre critics must stop writing harsh reviews, priests cannot issue moral denunciations, and protesters must put down their picket signs. So in some limited sense, yes, all philosophies that do not explicitly call for property violations are compatible with libertarianism, and it might be intellectually worthwhile, like a game of Tetris, to see what their areas of fit and disjunction are.

I don’t think many present-day feminists embrace a feminism devoid of anti-libertarian legal ramifications, but, all right, ask what one might look like. Likewise, remind socialists of their non-statist voluntary-communalist roots in the early nineteenth century, if you wish. Ask yourself, too, just how puritanical a religious-fundamentalist society could be fostered without the use of law (beyond the libertarian laws against assault, theft, and fraud). But let’s not get so mesmerized in the process of these thought experiments that we think a newfound chumminess with such philosophies requires or even permits going back and altering the property rights groundrules — or changes the property rights focus of libertarianism proper.

•••

Take that Cowgirl Hall of Fame bar gathering I mentioned going to in yesterday’s entry — that bar no doubt contained some gun aficionados (at least, it had me in it, reading Brian Doherty’s Gun Control on Trial), some who hate gun culture, some lesbians, people indifferent to lesbians, and as it happens a few people who go to the annual Burning Man art festival and call themselves part of a Freedom Community that prides itself on quietly and civilly talking itself out of all inhibitions, interpersonal conflicts, and insecurities. But none of these things were necessary for legal entry into the “neutral” space of the bar — and for that matter, much as I like some of the Freedom Community members, I wouldn’t say that getting rid of inhibitions is a necessary component of freedom, as I understand freedom.

Certainly, people being inhibited about taking stuff without permission, we’d all agree, would be beneficial whether they’re under my envisioned property laws or the resources-strapped confines of a Burning Man camp. Beyond that, my cultural allegiance to (or at least strong aesthetic preference for) even very strong inhibitions — the kind that keep fat guys from taking their shirts off in fancy restaurants — is perfectly compatible with freedom in the libertarian, property-respecting sense, and it’s very important to let people know that, so that they don’t think they have to abandon their existing cultural allegiances — their thick, local, traditional ties or their universalist anarchic or liberal principles — in order to sign onto this thing called property rights, which is unpopular enough as it is. (Girlfriend Helen and I differ slightly in our reasons for liking punk — me seeing it as individualistic and her seeing it as rigidly rule-bound and tribalistic — but it would be insane to think we need to resolve that dispute, or that anyone else even needs to care about it, before agreeing on a system of laws.)

•••

To put it another way, I would hate to make people think that libertarianism is getting mushy or downright juvenile in such a way that concrete axioms such as “Cut the budget” and “Eliminate taxes to the greatest extent possible” were going to be replaced by vaguer, attitudinal axioms that might rub plenty of decent, property-respecting people the wrong way, such as “Just do it” or “You gotta be you” or “You’re not the boss of me!”

We are fans of economist Walter Williams, so to speak, not necessarily Walt Whitman (and all right, technically not necessarily even Williams, much as I love the guy). None of this means we have to be stodgy either. My libertarian novelist friend Katherine Taylor is plenty hip but still likes the slogan “Sassiness doesn’t pay” more than “You’re not the boss of me.” Stick that in your “Just do it,” if you see what I mean.

I just want budget cuts and deregulation, I often say — but in truth I’d also like better sci-fi movies and more New Wave-like music. I just recognize that the latter two items are not part of a serious legal philosophy.

Book Selection: Lawyers, Guns, and Money (and Dick)

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection(s) of the Month (January 2009)

My friend Dave Whitney had a column called “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” in the Brown Daily Herald when we were in college, and we went to see a Warren Zevon performance back then, too, including his song by that title. Two decades later, I find some of the most interesting books on the market (admittedly written by acquaintances of mine or, in the case of Philip K. Howard, the employer of an acquaintance) address those three important themes (after describing those books, I will take a look at two works by Philip K. Dick, the first sci-fi author in what I’ve vowed to make a year of sci-fi Book Selections, since reality is simply not living up to my expectations):

I. LAWYERS

Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law by Philip K. Howard. Philip K. Howard (not to be confused with Philip K. Dick) also wrote my February 2007 Book Selection, The Death of Common Sense. In that book, he criticized the insanity of our ever-growing and often Catch-22-causing web of regulations. In the new book, out today, he explains how fear of lawsuits and laws has led to the cowardly American culture we now inhabit…in which teachers fear disciplining students for real misbehavior but send them to sex abuse counseling or call in the cops over everyday playground interactions…in which the world is festooned with so many warning labels that people simply ignore them…and in which most of us fear to embark upon any project so big that it may lead to litigation. The solution, I’d suggest, is to simply repeal virtually every regulation we have and restore the concept of reasonable assumption of risk — thicker skins and a higher threshold for entering court. But to see what one of our best legal minds has to say about it all, you’ll have to read this book.

II. GUNS

Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment by Brian Doherty. If this book from a Reason editor, published by the Cato Institute, doesn’t leave you thinking at least somewhat like a libertarian (on one issue), I dare say you’re a stubborn, blinkered ideologue (and most likely grew up in a big city, unlike us rural folk who took guns for granted and had fewer crime problems). Yet the book is by no means a polemic. It’s a short, reportorial overview of the legal and political history that led to the recent yet historic Supreme Court decision affirming an individual right to bear arms and knocking down Washington, DC’s onerous gun ban. Along the way, we meet the actual plaintiffs who took DC’s local government to court for impinging on their right to own handguns for self-defense, a group wisely calculated to avoid looking like just an ornery group of white hunters (not that that should matter for legal purposes), including two gay men who’d fended off a mugger and a group of would-be gay-bashers, respectively, and a black woman in need of a deterrent in a neighborhood of (vocally) life-threatening gang members. We also learn just how psychedelically detached the anti-gun crowd’s depiction of America’s gun history is from reality. Far from being something meant only to augment government-run militias, guns were clearly intended to be things easily used by any citizen, even against an overweening government if necessary — and several states even mandated gun ownership prior to the anti-gun trend of the twentieth century. A heroic group, including Cato staff members themselves, brought the case to the Supreme Court, won, and left us all a bit freer — able more easily to exercise the most basic right, the right to self-defense (without which even something as simple as property would be impossible).

Fittingly, I finished reading the Doherty book two nights ago at the gun-culture-inspired Cowgirl Hall of Fame bar in Manhattan’s West Village — at a birthday gathering for young Jasmine Goldman, who has one strange thing in common with my girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer and perhaps others in their age bracket: an inordinate love of the Jim Henson fantasy film Labyrinth, featuring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. Helen and I found ourselves at a Rocky Horror-like Labyrinth singalong event just one night prior to the Cowgirl gathering, in fact, yet I — ostensibly a fan of fantasy films, Muppets, and Bowie — had not even recalled that there was more than one song in the film. For me, it was as strange as if someone told me that all the young people these days are memorizing and performing the dialogue of Hardcastle and McCormick episodes.

III. MONEY

The Urban Hermit by Sam MacDonald. Speaking of hard-partying Yale alums, Sam MacDonald once led a life of excess and has turned the story of his recovery into a book. My fellow Phillips Foundation Fellows are an amazingly talented and unpredictable bunch of writers — some of whom I hope you’ll see debate at Lolita Bar on Feb. 19 about the state of the conservative movement. Most of them write about politics, though. By contrast, Sam MacDonald wrote a book about finding himself simultaneously (1) greatly overweight and (2) badly strapped for cash. Turning necessity into a virtue, he decided to hunker down and cut his expenses by whittling his daily diet to roughly a can of tuna. Thinner and less broke, he then turned his experience into a strange but pragmatic tale of poverty and dieting (one that critics have been praising).

IV. AND NOW THE SCI-FI

Solar Lottery and The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick. As legal battles and bouts of economic turmoil suggest, life has the game-like element of chance about it — a theme addressed in two early Dick novels (both given to me, like my upcoming February and March sci-fi Selections and one of last month’s Selections, by Dawn Eden, who more recently also informed me of the existence of a sci-fi-writing archbishop).

Solar Lottery is no great shakes, sounding a bit too much like a half-hearted attempt to do mid-century space opera, albeit with a nice Dickian twist about a robot assassin that cycles randomly through multiple personalities as several different human controllers telepathically/remotely control it. However, Dick does play with the interesting idea of a lottery that determines nearly every social outcome, whether personal, economic, or political.

In the vastly superior The Game-Players of Titan, he revisits that idea in a form that is initially humorous and eventually convincingly nightmarish, even alarming. The handful of surviving humans in an era in which fertility rates have plummeted are left with boundless real estate and abandoned cities on their hands, essentially playing continent-sized games of Monopoly, aided by flying, talking, sometimes cranky cars — and confounded by memory-altering amoeboid aliens who induce something akin to schizophrenia in the frightened, confused human players — all of which makes me wonder whether Ridley Scott, who we know read Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and turned it into Blade Runner, read this Dick novel too, since he has reportedly attached himself to a movie version of the boardgame Monopoly. Is there more Dick-related cinematic eclecticism on the way from Scott?

There are two far more promising-sounding Scott projects on the way, though. He may direct a movie of Joe Haldeman’s epic, relativistic-speeds-themed spacewar novel Forever War (in which each military excursion leads to the soldiers returning to a vastly-changed society on Earth due to Einsteinian aging effects), which could easily be the coolest thing ever. And he is reportedly talking to Sigourney Weaver about doing a movie with her fighting space aliens again — but without using the actual Aliens aliens.

That would be interesting, since another veteran of that franchise, James Cameron, will be pulling the same maneuver late this year, pitting Weaver against aliens in the 3D spectacular Avatar. And who needs the actual Aliens aliens, after all, beautifully designed though they are? Let them run amok in their increasingly trashy franchise. I just want Weaver, Cameron, and Scott — so say we all.

EPILOGUE: ONE OTHER SCI-FI NOTE FOR THE WEEK

The next few months bring the long-delayed purchase of the final comic books I will ever read, in the form of the Geoff Johns-written miniseries Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds (featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes and the villainous Time Trapper, about whom I’ve written before, all drawn by George Perez, who drew the first superhero comic I recall reading). But Johns has also written a pivotal episode of Smallville, airing this Thursday (Jan. 15) at 8pm Eastern and depicting a live-action version of the Legion of Super-Heroes for the first time — reason enough for me to watch and celebrate with cocktail weenies and the consumption of that one bottle of beer that’s been in my refrigerator for something like a year now.

Johns is a comics-writing machine (and great at nerd-pleasing plotting, though he still needs work on subtlety and emotion) who was writing something approaching seven comics titles per month at one point during DC’s “Infinite Crisis” storyline in 2005 — and who will be writing five monthlies, I think, this summer, in the form of Green Lantern, Blackest Night, Flash: Rebirth, Superman: Secret Origin, and Adventure (at least, I assume he’s the writer on Adventure, which is slated to depict the newest version of the Legion).

After that, he has said, he’ll go back to writing “only” three monthly titles — but which ones, I wonder? He presumably is popular enough to have his pick these days, barring veto from DC Executive Editor Dan Didio. I’ll guess (1) Green Lantern, (2) a new Flash ongoing series, and (3) Adventure — though I could just as easily imagine him concluding that “his work is done” on reviving all three of those franchises.

Maybe he should be the next regular writer of Justice League of America. Let him be the backbone of DC’s main Earth and let writer Grant Morrison control the rest of the multiverse…

Property Defined, Defended

Since I said I would try to blog this month as if for new readers unacquainted with my take on property rights, I should give a quick definition of property and a checklist of reasons to prefer property to its opposite, things held in common. I’d say property could be roughly defined as things (whether physical or abstract, such as contractual obligations) over which specific owners have control (the ability to use, trade, give away, destroy, alter, improve, etc.) that is (or ought to be) legally-enforceable and cannot be (or ought not to be) compromised by physical or fraudulent seizure by other parties, including ones calling themselves “government.”

More basically, I ought to say that there is an ambiguous yet important distinction (even when one is not talking about or advocating property rights) between the moral/political system that exists and the one that ought to exist (to my mind, the system of sustainable rules most conducive to long-term maximum happiness for all moral agents) — and thus that I am not willing merely to defer to the existing legal system or latest whim of Congress to define property, any more than I’d defer to a burglar who entered my apartment on the question of who really owns my TV.

•••

As a philosophy buff, I fear I often underestimate the extent to which lots of intelligent but (for lack of a better word) unphilosophical people take it for granted that property is whatever the law says it is — and indeed that morality and rights are whatever the law (or commonly-held opinion) say they are. Nuts to that. It is entirely possible for the whole world to be wrong, in so far as the whole world may be pursuing some system that decreases rather than increases human happiness (e.g., communism or fascism — not to mention government in general, in my more-radical opinion). So in a moral rather than mere legal sense, I can meaningfully assert that I own something even if in point of fact it’s being taken from me by non-property-respecting agents, including an insufficiently property-respecting legal system (via, say, eminent domain, taxes, fines for victimless crimes, etc.).

It’s not just authoritarian statists (or unphilosophical people) who sometimes display the almost might-makes-right belief that rights don’t exist unless they are routinely enforced, though. My friends in London’s left-wing-but-libertarian-friendly Spiked-Online/Institute of Ideas crowd, to my mind, revealed a bit of their social-democratic tendencies in a conversation I had with some of them seven years ago (!) in which they dismissed the idea of animal rights, not on utilitarian or metaphysical grounds, but on the realpolitik grounds that animals cannot form parliaments or enact laws and thus have no rights.

To American ears, this sounds disturbingly like claiming that a lone frontiersman in an ungoverned land cannot complain of being morally mistreated since he is not part of a political system, which is surely a dangerous attitude and not conducive to maximum happiness. Similarly, the anarchist Max Stirner was of the opinion that property is whatever you manage to seize and hold, even if someone else continues claiming it as his own. This way lies not freedom or mere realism but brutality, I think.

•••

By contrast, one of the great things about property is its radically depoliticizing effects. Taken to its logical conclusion — the privatization of every atom in the universe, as I like to put it — property leaves us without government, without collective (public) “property,” without regulations, without taxes, and without any need to think of some human beings as “politicians” and others as “the governed” — a distinction that should repel us as much as the distinction between aristocrat and peasant, master and slave, or kidnapper and hostage.

(The question of how purely-private entities make and enforce law is a complex one that I know is painfully counter-intuitive for many people, but it isn’t an insurmountable problem and has been written about in great detail by David Friedman, Randy Barnett, and others. If people insist that the complete absence of government is impossible, though, I once more urge you at least to think of strict property adherence as the default or starting position, adding only as much government as is necessary to sustain the system — perhaps merely a legislature and courts for resolving cases of theft, fraud, and physical assault, nothing more.)

But property has other virtues besides depoliticization (though that in itself would do wonders to decrease violence, time-consuming intellectual combat, and general hostility in this world):

•Unlike government-mandated interactions, strict property rights create a matrix within which each interaction, each trade, is a mutually-beneficial one in the eyes of those choosing to engage in the trade (I give Jones five dollars and receive a meal because each of us prefers the post-trade state of affairs to the one that existed before the exchange; we do not trade because someone told us to make the exchange on pain of imprisonment or because one of has “exploited” the other by some chicanery, as Marx-influenced leftists would have you believe). So no matter how awful things may start out in a strict property regime, they are constantly improving thereafter with each interaction, which certainly cannot be said of a world of government-mandated actions, which may well please no one or merely please half the population in a lesser-of-two-evils way.

•Property tends to create radical decentralization, giving each of us shields against the will of the mob — and the ability to peacefully ignore often-insane collective fads or just routine public deliberations gone awry.

•Property means being able to say “no” to the will of the mob, no matter how convincing the mob or its leaders think their latest cause is. Nothing improves discourse and diminishes bullying like knowing that your audience has the power to simply walk away.

•Property, by enabling people to function in markets, tends to move resources efficiently toward their most-valued uses — as opposed to the uses people (or some highly-influential or rhetorically skilled people) merely say are the most valuable. Talk is cheap. Markets reveal real preferences, without which allocation is always a rhetoric-driven, politicized shot in the dark that no sane person should assume increases overall happiness.

•Property creates the security that enables people to engage in rational long-term planning and thus to make investments (which can go awry, obviously, but the relevant question is whether they would go awry less often if our rulers chose for us, and there is no evidence of that; when asked if stock markets should be more heavily regulated, Warren Buffett rightly noted that the government already had hundreds of regulators tasked specifically to watch Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — and gave them clean bills of health right up until the financial meltdown, a reminder that regulators should not simply be assumed to be some sort of superhuman beings who know better than the rest of us).

•Property and markets create constant feedback loops, a system of incentives in which you gain (i.e., profit) by making others happy — not, as in politics (or warfare), merely by defeating others.

By contrast, the more property rights are eroded or limited:

•the more we see the withering of competition (and thus progress),

•the more we see the controllers of collectivized resources (the roughly one third of our income taxed away each year) engage in uplifting rhetorical flourishes about their desire to help the rest of us even while they serve their own selfish ends,

•the more we see vast wealth vanish into hard-to-trace public boondoggles — while private projects most of us have not even imagined (but might have drastically improved the world) are lost to us due to lack of funding — even as crucial voting blocks are ostentatiously presented with a few crumbs back from the public till, designed to make the government appear “magnanimous” (while all its wealth comes ultimately only from its predations upon the private sector),

•and the more we see what economists rightly call “the tragedy of the commons,” in which everyone (and diverse interest groups) race to use up resources before the next individual or group gets to them, thinking like parasites falling upon a carcass, looters at a broken shop window, or pigs at a trough instead of potentially-productive individuals wondering how best to invest or produce over the long haul.

To the extent property rights are weak, humans become lazy parasites and political influence-seekers instead of productive, creative, rational, beneficial agents — and no amount of rhetoric about public covenants, compassion, change, solidarity, or what have you can dispel this reality. Production or pillage — choose sides, and choose the sort of world that you want to live in (and that you think humanity can best live in).

Naturally, we find ourselves living in a world that mixes production and pillage in endless varieties — with exaggeratedly apocalyptic arguments made about minor variations in the balance between the two (a dime’s worth of difference often being made to sound like a choice between night and day). To some, this mushy middle may seem the safe, reasonable place to remain — but consider the possibility that the muddle lends itself to manipulation of the apathetic public by a handful of interested intellectuals and political players, and that we’d be far better off in a world of simple rules easily understood by the general population and thus easily enforced, to the general freedom and prosperity of all. (This is but the broadest overview, hardly an answer to every hard case or objection, but it’s where we ought to start.)

Richard Epstein Will Compensate You All (plus: Glue and 90210)

Any sufficiently coldblooded ideologue, like me, knows that even your worst enemies will occasionally “agree” with you — when your arguments happen to produce a few conclusions that they like.  Tempting as it is to relish these short-term victories — even to try building coalitions out of them — I think we’d do well to admit how feeble and shallow such victories are and press on to frankly address more divisive (yet important and foundational, not merely contentious) issues.  (I think virtually any time you hear libertarians celebrating some point of agreement with the left — and thus, at this juncture in history, virtually any cultural or legislative victory for liberty — it falls into this shallow-victory category, alas.  The left hates tradition, so they like medical marijuana, for instance — but wouldn’t if it were loved mainly by blunderbuss-wielding Republicans instead of hippies, etc.)

Still, even if the left doesn’t care about property rights per se, I am pleased any time the left displays skepticism about eminent domain, which is little more than legalized theft and right up there with burglary and taxation among things property-adherents should despise.

New York governor Paterson has expressed skepticism about eminent domain, perhaps in part because as a black man he’s more conscious than most on the left of the fact that poor black neighborhoods tend to be the ones bulldozed when the government decides to transfer land to itself or to well-connected businesses.  Right now in New York, two respected but hopelessly left-wing institutions, the New York Times and Columbia University, are in the midst of using eminent domain for selfish purposes, enlightened Columbia taking homes and businesses from unwilling Harlem residents (a good example of a case where leftists suddenly resent property violations — would that they still did when middle-class whites were the victims).

•••

Interestingly, with libertarians as divided as the rest of the world on the Israelis/Palestinians issue, some libertarians who sympathize more with the Palestinians see the issue almost as one of eminent domain abuse, citing the seizure by Israel of Palestinian land.  One past Lolita Bar debater casts the issue in property rights terms — and this summer we may well revisit the Palestinian question at Lolita with him as one of the debaters.  Meanwhile, my Iranian-descended friend Soraya e-mails to note that libertarian Republican Ron Paul has weighed in against Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, calling for an end to U.S. support of Israel.  Their arguments aren’t exactly false, but given the sticky political situation over there and the high cost of provoking either military or terrorist action, even an ideologue like me is inclined to think that compromise might serve both sides better than standing on strict principle (go ahead and call me a moderate if you want — I can take it).

In similar fashion, one audience member after our last debate asked me whether my strict-property-adherence view might lead to inefficient outcomes such as the quiet, stealthy buying-up by one rich man of a strip of land stretching east-west across North America, so that overnight he could start charging people exorbitant amounts to cross the strip of land and visit people on the northern or southern side of his land.  Now, there are countless economic reasons why this scenario is unlikely, including the fact that it would take a vast amount of wealth and covert business activity by one entity to pull off this odd act of sadism — and even in a fantasy world of absolutely inviolable property rights, the strip would still be surmountable by sea and air, and people might well respond by simply buying back bits of the land.

But if we go ahead and bite the bullet and say that situations like that might arise and endure, I think it’s worth noting that even in a regime in which property rights are the whole of the law, people aren’t complete morons, and they know that property rights can still, in the end, be violated (I’m not the only anarchist in this world).  What would help maintain the moral and legal authority of property-as-the-default, though, would be if everyone agreed that property owners still deserve compensation when their property rights are violated (and that such violations should only occur in extreme emergencies) — and the compensation needn’t be much if the owners really weren’t much aggrieved other than having their strip-of-land sadism projects ruined.

One can consistently argue that property rights are central, for instance, and think that a man who’s freezing to death in the wilderness can be forgiven for borrowing a snowmobile without permission (assuming he knows it isn’t needed by others and that it’s his only means of survival), especially if the law compels him to pay the owner for its use afterwards, which means everyone is made whole when all is said and done.

•••

A colleague of Cass Sunstein (about whom I blogged skeptically yesterday), U. of Chicago law prof Richard Epstein, is the authority on this idea of compensating people (at market rates, not just judges’ or politicians’ whims) for “takings” of their property, in keeping with the takings clause of the Constitution — and, he would argue, in keeping with the concept of eminent domain, properly understood and strictly limited (Epstein is a libertarian but not an anarchist like me).  In any case, this seems to me an example of how even the most strict-sounding property regime can be moderated to achieve the freedom and prosperity that markets bring while avoiding the (extraordinarily rare and thus not highly systemically-relevant) worst-case scenarios that people love to leap to in philosophical conversations.

Even girlfriend Helen asked me recently whether the possibility of a foe buying all the land around me to starve me constitutes coercion, if I’m for strict property rights, and I pooh-poohed the likelihood of the hypothetical — but the next day, as it happens, I heard the boss’s assistant where I work loudly freaking out at workmen in the hall who, with the permission of our building owners, were planning (in effect) to trap us inside the ACSH office for an hour while they spread super-strong glue all over the corridor — without advance warning — for construction purposes.  Is that coercion on their part?  (As it was, the boss’s assistant badgered the workmen into abandoning their project until after the workday, so we weren’t trapped — and no government involvement was necessary.)

I suppose, of course, one could simply argue that our implied contract with the building owner included ease of access/exit, though for the sake of my property-respecting principles, I might have chosen to defer to the owners and endure our captivity without complaint — though it might have necessitated urinating in the kitchen sink, since the bathroom would have become inaccessible.  I have to admit I feel a bit “freer” for having avoided that scenario — especially given the coffee I’d just consumed.  I hope we can all agree, though, that this unusual dilemma, however we frame it, does not somehow justify or necessitate the welfare state.  Start from strict property and zero government and tweak if necessary — don’t go looking for excuses to leap to socialism based on what Ayn Rand rightly condemned as rare, barely-relevant “lifeboat scenarios” from philosophy class.

P.S. I might as well note now, since it is unlikely to be any more relevant at any future point, that a libertarian friend of mine dreamt he was having an affair with Tiffani Thiessen from 90210 but had to hide under her bed during her tryst with her other lover, none other than Richard Epstein, who had blue skin in the dream.

Another libertarian I know said she envied my friend the dream, since she is attracted to both Epstein and Thiessen, not something you hear many people admit.  It may be best I avoid the naming both the male dreamer and the female fantasizer.

Cass Sunstein Will Nudge You All

Obama is making Cass Sunstein his regulatory czar. This should prove an interesting test of whether personal connections trump political principle for some libertarians, since Sunstein has guest-blogged at the libertarian site Volokh.com (where they’re apparently happy with his appointment), taught law at the University of Chicago (where Jacob Levy knew him while teaching polisci there), probably got to know my old philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum’s libertarian daughter back when he was dating Nussbaum, and was spoken of as a great open-minded guy by Critical Review editor Jeffrey Friedman (as will presumably be seen in the transcript of CR’s fall 2008 Boston conference, which will reportedly appear in CR Vol. 22, issue 3, immediately after the passage in the transcript where I, in my capacity as a mere audience member at the conference, refer to Sunstein as a “statist monster”).

As suggested in some of my “Month of Feminism” and “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” blog entries (and, in more muted fashion, in my Reason.com article about “liberaltarians” that preceded both), I think it’s important to remember that people being willing to talk to you — even in an exhilaratingly highbrow, academic, and respectful fashion — is no substitute at all for getting good changes made in the law. Having liberal friends is nice, but it’s more important to cut the government’s budget and deregulate (more important to humanity at large, I mean, regardless of what benefits me most on a personal level).

Just as the ACLU’s Nadine Strossen is perfectly capable of talking in what almost sounds like a libertarian fashion about individual rights and free speech but then coming down on the non-libertarian, non-property-respecting side of an issue — as by saying that shopping malls must allow activists to speak or distribute literature on their property — so too does Sunstein talk, at times, like one of us (and talk to us, which is always appreciated) but then produce books explicitly arguing that (1) FDR’s statist revolution is an improvement upon or replacement of the original Bill of Rights, (2) property is a fiction disguising the fact that everything really belongs to the state in the first place, (3) we should “nudge” people with insidious and psychologically-tailored regulations to do the more-rational thing, (4) strict liability is preferable to caveat emptor and assumption of risk, etc., etc. And that’s just for starters.

Even the hated Bush administration has plainly been more friendly to real libertarian appointees, if you want to use that low standard. Indeed, Sunstein, for whom the Volokh Conspirators have found kind words, will be filling a post that was held under Bush by a full-fledged libertarian from the Mercatus Center, affiliated with the fine folks at the Institute for Humane Studies who I mentioned in yesterday’s entry. And though few noticed, we had a libertarian Acting Secretary of the Interior who came from the Reason Foundation for a while under Bush.

Ah, but Sunstein talks the brainy talk of academia, so that’s supposed to be some consolation to me when he commences oppressing me in a couple weeks. I’ll be watching him and his fans closely. That recent entry in which I said it’d be hard to turn libertarians into statists may have been overly optimistic. (And I am reminded that the split within conservative ranks that gave rise to the paleoconservative movement, for all its philosophical roots and anti-statist rhetoric, began in the 1980s not with the Cold War’s end but with an embarrassing apparatchik dispute: disagreement over whether to make retrograde Mel Bradford or neocon and future Culture11 co-founder William Bennett head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Intellectual Property Update

Man, it’s like IP Daily around here this week!

And the big news from last night is that the audience voted no on the question “Is Intellectual Property Theft?” — but narrowly.  It remains a contentious topic — and one I’m torn about myself.  I mentioned some IP-related stories that amuse me in last night’s closing comments, though, including:

•Libertarian (and for now humble Institute for Humane Studies staffer) Anne Fortier is at the center of some exciting IP news: She sold the film rights to her not-even-out-yet novel Juliet, and it already has director James Mangold, the writer/director of Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line, attached to it.

Her novel’s a natural for Hollywood, though: a woman in Italy discovers that her ancestor may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Yeah, now you almost wish you wrote it, don’t you?  Congratulations, Anne.  (Here’s hoping she urges Mangold to talk his old colleague Angelina Jolie  from Girl, Interrupted into finally getting around to playing Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged.)

•Popeye is now public domain in Europe.  Well, blow me down!

•Without IP, many worry, someone like George Lucas might not have gone to the effort to make Star Wars — but then again, his original desire was to remake Flash Gordon anyway, and he only did Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to Flash (and if you want to feel old, by the way, try asking people under thirty if they know who Flash Gordon is).

•Maori tribes tried to sue Lego’s Bionicles robot toy line because the robot backstory is based on Maori legend.  Think of the traditionalistic constraints upon creative people everywhere if the Maori’d won that strange fight.  (Would Juliet be possible?  Would the actual Romeo and Juliet have been written in the first place, given that Shakespeare rarely came up with his own original plots?)

•Should I feel guilty enjoying another Underworld movie in two weeks, given that it’s pretty likely the producer of the films ripped off the idea of a vampire-werewolf war from a role-playing game?  And should nerds resent him even more for being married to Kate Beckinsale in addition?  Or does that, combined with the films, make him more god than man (at least some sort of unnatural hybrid)…and thus above your earthly laws?

And if you don’t think Kate Beckinsale herself has unnatural powers, you’ve plainly forgotten this photo I linked to about six months, six days, and six hours or so ago, of her trick or treating with her daughter.  But enough Satanism — let’s get back to statism, the real threat, by which I mean Obama advisor Cass Sunstein, about whom, more tomorrow.

Bailouts and the Undead

If property rights (though not necessarily intellectual property rights, for reasons we’ll discuss at tonight’s 8pm debate) allow resources to flow in an efficient, voluntary fashion to their most-valued uses (as suggested in my Monday entry), while government causes resources to flow in an inefficient, coerced, and arbitrary fashion (as suggested in yesterday’s entry), we should constantly be on guard for legal changes that blur the line between the private (that is, private-property) sector and the public (that is, government-controlled) sector. Every dime transferred from the private to the public sector is a tragedy, another instance of waste and lost opportunity — lost human happiness and potential.

Needless to say, then, any decent-but-misguided person (some libertarians among them) who voted for Obama should be feeling great chagrin now as the president-elect (after picking Leon Panetta to run the CIA and reportedly CNN medical reporter Sanjay Gupta to be Surgeon General, which should at least irk his old sparring partner Michael Moore) readies a $1 trillion “stimulus” package of government spending — every dime of it, of course, having to be yanked out of the private sector at some point, like all of government’s stolen — and then “magnanimously” doled-out — loot. The Wall Street Journal estimates that the stimulus package alone costs twice what FDR’s entire New Deal did, in inflation-adjusted dollars. This is the end of something.

On the bright side, rhetorically, I have to love the fact that the term “zombies” has been used in recent months for propped-up, government-subsidized, bailed-out firms that aren’t really functional. Clearly, this highly pejorative term was not focus-grouped by government spin teams. It’s simply too accurate — and well-timed, since this is a month of the undead at the cinema (witness the abominable and David Goyer-discrediting The Unborn, as well as the vampire movies Let the Right One In, Twilight, and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, this last being the story of an actress named Kate Beckinsale being replaced by an eerie duplicate named Rhona Mitra — and in the more distant future lies the apocalyptic all-out zombie armageddon film World War Z, from the director of Quantum of Solace and the writer of Babylon 5 and The Changeling).

I wonder, though — to touch on a major controversy among horror nerds — will these “zombies” be the fast-moving kind or the slow-moving kind? I suspect they will start out fast and get slower and slower, and stupider and stupider.

P.S. On another bright rhetoric note, though, I like the fact that even amidst America’s Obamania, cynical, weary, derisive headlines like this are becoming the norm:

“Bailout du jour: U.S. government unveils plan to rescue Citigroup”

The Reason Foundation notes that the main bailout bill contains a $94 million U. of Miami parking garage among other things. You know, I don’t care if they say the world’s going to end, I think the strict-anarchist position that they can’t be trusted to spend a dime looks increasingly reasonable. Wanna end poverty? Find a way to do it without my money. Business in dire need? Close it and try starting another someday. Wanna liberate Iraq? Hire mercenaries, etc., etc.

Instead, we find ourselves in the bizarre, historic position of wondering whether the nice left-wing black man will give money to desperate, needy investment bankers. Strange. Stranger still, there’s talk of bailing out credit card companies — and bailing out credit card companies while taxpayers pay their taxes using credit cards seems oddly circular somehow…

But then, as economist Don Boudreaux has noted, way back during the first New Deal some journalists had already figured out that bankrupting industries was a clever first step by the government on the road to socializing them. So at least there’s a plan at work.

Sleepwalking Toward Destruction

There was some controversy last month (perhaps not as exciting as our Debate at Lolita Bar tomorrow night, of course) over a new Washington, DC visitors center that heaps praise on federal government, complete with a big inscribed quote from nineteenth-century lawyer Rufus Choate that struck some religious conservatives as bordering on idolatry: “We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.”

What was not mentioned amid the controversy is that Rufus Choate was also the first lawyer in American history to successfully defend a client against a murder charge by arguing that his client had been sleepwalking. That may be an even greater outrage.

There are certain parallels, of course, between death-by-sleepwalking and the slow, inexorable increase in the size of the government (and the corollary waning of the private sector, that is, the portion of life in which individuals control their own property and interact through voluntary market exchanges instead of at politicians’ commands).

The bigger government gets, the dumber it gets — and at this late stage in history, anyone who talks about government as an engine of reform instead of an institution that (for example) buys entire ships filled with golfballs in order to burn through department budgets, to “justify” getting just as much money next year, is not merely a liberal or a government-friendly necocon but a dupe (or outright, deliberate villain, though I trust those are relatively few outside government itself, since people outside government, friend and foe alike, still think of it in such idealized, philosophical ways).

We can likely count on government — but also deficits — to get bigger under Obama, as they both did under Bush, since it seems increasingly likely he’s going to use the same basic formula for short-term happiness that Bush attempted: more government spending plus some tax cuts.

Seeing how inefficient and stupid — and uncaring and unresponsive, I think it’s important to add — government is compared to most competitive, private-sector enterprises, I’m struck that a commenter on my Sunday blog entry, who said that the most efficient mechanism for policing will inevitably be a big “monopoly on force” (i.e., a government or at least monarch), is likely wrong. Monopolies get lazy, and I see no more reason to assume (as Robert Nozick admittedly did as well) that policing would inevitably tend toward one efficient monopoly in a pure, anarcho-capitalist, governmentless market than to assume that moviemaking should be expected to tend toward the rise of one dominant studio.

Government is the ultimate lazy monopoly, and we can generally trust markets to exhibit diversity and choice — by comparison, at least. No one who loves diversity and freedom — and fears homogeneity and central authority — should countenance the continued existence of government or regard it as a natural outcome.

Property Basics

In a hypothetical world without secure property rights, if you loaned a friend $40,000 — and he was universally seen as having a perfect right, legally and morally, to keep some of it if he thought he could put it to better use than you would — do you think your friend could come up with plausible reasons for keeping some of the money?  Maybe even all the money?

And what makes you think that we aren’t living in this disturbing world already, with the government (and all the activists with excuses for using government) simply serving as the conduit for the endlessly-rationalized relocations of cash?

I was accused during last month’s online spat about feminism of passing up the chance to build a “thicker” libertarianism that does not solely focus on property but on cultural issues.  I was reluctant to pick sides in the thick/thin divide, though.  That’s basically because in some sense I’m all for “thickening” libertarianism by fostering a culture conducive to liberty — but by that I mean surrounding property rights with the cultural cues necessary to property rights’ maintenance (encouraging the paying of one’s debts, etc.), not weighing the cause of property rights down with numerous tangential cultural side projects.

I can accept a thick libertarianism, in other words, but not the specific thick libertarianism that raises a certain vision of gender relations to the same level of significance as foundational property issues, nor any other form of thickness that treats dubious and endlessly-debatable cultural issues — about which even hardcore libertarians can easily differ without anyone violating anyone’s rights — as if they were basic rights issues.  That endless political wrangle is the statists’ way.

(That’s not to say there won’t be vigorous debate even among those focused on property rights — witness the debate I’m hosting this coming Wednesday, 8pm, at Lolita Bar.)

•••

In this brief and somewhat tense Bush-Obama interregnum, with the financial fate of the world looking precarious, a period of robust dialogue about countless non-econ issues might be good for academics and welfare-statists, but I dare say it would not be so beneficial for humanity at large.  They can only be rescued from millennia of bloodshed and exploitation by the strong, unambiguous shield of property rights.  We have already seen where vaguer social-democratic dialogue and dialectical meanderings lead.

There is also the danger that endless philosophical dialogue and reformulations almost inevitably lead to welfare-statism.  Full-fledged socialists — as I warned in a Liberty article sixteen long years ago — need an ideology.  The welfare state does not, though.  The mixed economy does not.  If — as has been hastily announced in prior decades — we’ve reached a post-ideological age of sorts, or at least a period in which even the ideologues aren’t very ideological, aside from the Islamists, then the slow stagnation of the bureaucratic welfare state wins by default.

It may also win simply due to those who ought to be pro-property partisans being overly fascinated by ways in which their philosophy could be “blended” with countless variations upon welfare-statism and leftism.  Resist that “creative” temptation — or mush be our destiny.

You Will Know Us from the Trail of Dead Philosophies

People can philosophize until they’re blue in the face, like Guardians of the Universe, but as I suggested in my two entries on January 1, I think property rights matter more than philosophy and politics.

It may not be possible to build a strict property rights regime without the complex scaffolding of philosophy and politics, but that scaffolding is mainly of interest only to elites and intellectuals.  What the bulk of humanity desperately needs, for navigating their daily lives, improving their lot, and getting a handle on reality without taking graduate courses in political science, is the knowledge that they can use objects, make contracts, invest money, and build futures without fear of arbitrary forces from above seizing control of them and their livelihoods, regardless of the noble-sounding rationales deployed to excuse the acts of pillage.

Thus, though I may have sounded very defensive of the definitional borders of libertarianism in my “Month of Feminism” entries — and sounded saddened in last week’s Barry Goldwater centenary entry about the possible failure of conservative-libertarian fusionism — I should say this clearly: I WILL LEAVE ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THE DUST, DEAD AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, WITHOUT PITY IF IT IS NO LONGER ADVANCING THE CAUSE OF PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Should libertarians ever lose interest in property rights and laissez-faire capitalism (though they’ll likely be the last people on the planet to do so, if it ever comes to that), they will not by any means be the first philosophical movement to start out fighting against government and/or promoting markets and end up losing interest in those causes, gradually and without even realizing what was being lost.

We needn’t restrict that story of recurring failure to the recent spending spree by the now-ousted Republican establishment.

•We could include the gradual growth of the early-modern state itself, superseding local authority and village life, gradually drawing to itself older national and cultural allegiances that had not always translated into loyalty to government.

•One could perhaps include monarchism in the story of decline into statism, given that it was not always an absolutist affair but became one (though this is perhaps stretching things a bit).

•Certainly, though, liberalism, which succeeded the era of monarchs and aristocrats, started out quite libertarian (Adam Smith, the Constitution, nineteenth-century capitalism, utilitarianism, etc.) and became enamored of the state as a reformist tool about a hundred years ago, since then piling up ever more reasons to tax, regulate, and criticize markets, until the average citizen of Western democracies can no longer imagine a time when government was only about 8% of the economy — without assuming, Soviet-style, that government’s small role back then must explain why life was so hard.

(•And speaking of the Soviets, of course, the early socialists envisioned a withering away of the state but rarely speak credibly of such a thing now.)

•Given the wild-eyed and often violent enthusiasm of today’s most visible “anarchists” for anti-trade legislation and tariffs (for surely that is the only logical outcome to be expected from their constant “antiglobalization” protests and anti-corporate “culture-jamming” performances), I think it’s safe to say anarchism, which displayed a confused indifference to markets vs. socialism from its earliest days, has become (as a movement if not as a coherent philosophy) little more than a strange adjunct to the state and hindrance to free trade among free individuals.

•It took about a hundred years longer for American-style conservatism (as opposed to just-plain European or Latin American nostalgia for aristocracy and monarchism) to submit to the governmental yoke than it took liberalism, but after Bush II — and the often shocking pro-government cheerleading of pundits like David Brooks and William Kristol — I think it’s safe to say conservatism’s vague mix of religion, militarism, patriotism, law-and-order, and oh yeah maybe occasionally individual liberty has led to it becoming one more flavor of statism at long last.  A 2008 presidential candidate with a clear, consistent, anti-statist message, especially if he won, might conceivably have achieved an eleventh-hour victory for pro-freedom conservatism, but, oh, well.

•It would be very difficult to turn libertarianism into a government-friendly philosophy — though some people like sophistical Obama advisor Cass Sunstein might like to try — but I think libertarianism runs the milder risk, which I’ve mentioned often before, of simply becoming distracted from its most valuable (and most philosophically-coherent) mission, property protection, due to fascination with numerous (usually divisive and therefore dangerously intriguing) side issues: immigration, Constitutional nuances, attitudinally-left culture issues, attitudinally-right lamentations for the Old Republic, antiwar (and sometimes pro-war) stances, religious or anti-religious stances, and various psychological suggestions a la Rand (or pro-sex feminists).

I’ll stick to property — especially in this month’s blog entries — because I see property as the only sure and objective thread amidst all this other, near-subjective hot air and confusion.  And people can attach to me what labels they please — or not.

P.S. Some of this, luckily, we can hammer out over drinks this Wednesday at our Debate at Lolita Bar about intellectual property rights.  Please join us.  It’s a start.  Or an ending.

Brighton, MI: Where It's Illegal to Be Annoying

Yesterday was a dark day for liberty (the theme of this month’s blog entries), if the reports were true about that being the day that a new law was scheduled to go into effect in the town of Brighton, Michigan, making it illegal to be annoying in public (whether through words or physical motions).  Property rights, properly defined, include your right to use your own body as you choose so long as you do not physically harm others or their property, so wildly subjective criteria like “being annoying” should not even be remotely involved in legislation.

If people counter that public property such as sidewalks come with greater restrictions on behavior, I say abolish all public “property.”  There are plenty of well-maintained private roads around, and malls seem to maintain their walkways better than the government manages sidewalks.  The fewer things held in common — and thus controlled by the mob or its “representatives” — the freer we are.  But the world remains full of socialists to whom collective crushing of individual freedom sounds like cozy togetherness.

The idiots running Brighton reportedly acknowledged that the anti-annoyance law may create free speech objections (the vaguer fallback safeguard of a society without secure property rights), but they say such objections can always be handled on a case by case basis.  How reassuring!  Likewise, a law calling for killing the firstborn could be reviewed on a case by case basis and thus should not cause alarm.

What happens if people are annoyed by seeing Brighton politicians walking around in public, though?

Aimee Mann's Christmas Tradition and Yogurt Sponsorship: Conservatism for the Punk-Influenced

One odd thing Helen and I did over the holidays (though not as odd as the Seavey family dog, Jaycie, falling down the cellar stairs last weekend, luckily without injury) was see Aimee Mann’s annual live Christmas show. She may be versatile enough to have sounded New Wave in ’Til Tuesday back in the mid-80s, haunting as the backing vocalist on the brawny-but-poignant Rush song “Time Stand Still” (the only thing my math-geek pal Chuck Blake knew her from), and sort of alt-country-sensitive in her subsequent solo material (no doubt influenced by co-writers like Elvis Costello and her marriage to folky-sounding Michael Penn, awesome in his own right — and one of the few people besides Prince who can boast of having written a cool song for Wendy and Lisa, “Mother of Pearl”), but you wouldn’t expect her to do comedy. Moping maybe, but not comedy.

Yet the Christmas show — which you can probably catch next year, too — is done as a big, sarcastic variety show, with plenty of songs but also videotaped guest appearances by the aforementioned Michael Penn (as the ghost of Christmas Past), John C. Reilly (as the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come, who tells Mann, reasonably enough, that she should not feel guilty about her tour being sponsored by a yogurt company and that perhaps she should even stop to appreciate the beauty of a Corvette once in a while), and Michael Cera (as himself refusing to play Tiny Tim).

Cera is also apparently, in real life, resisting doing the planned Arrested Development movie, the bum, yet, as if to twist the knife, is reportedly likely to star in the movie version of goddam Gilligan’s Island. If that project comes to fruition, I just hope they use the song “I Am Gilligan” by Furious George, the punk band founded by my old New York Press colleague George Tabb — which has lines like “I wear the white hat/ I wear the red shirt/ They all think I’m stupid/ One day I’ll kill them/ I am Gilligan.” In fact, if memory serves, those are the only lines.

The best thing about “the Mann show,” though, may have been comedian Paul F. Tompkins, who did a great bit about New Yorkers who are traveling always bragging about all the things they could be doing at odd hours if they were still back in the City That Never Sleeps, climaxing with absurdities like “10:30am? In Manhattan, we’d be unraveling a mummy right now!”

Kudos to Mann for trying something fun and weird and old-fashioned at the same time — and something that plainly makes her a bit nervous — instead of just singing her greatest hits over and over again (though I wouldn’t mind hearing “Telescope” live — and my favorite line in it is “the stars were just phosphorous sparks on long strings”).

Incidentally, I have a rather insane ex-friend who says that when she was at Harvard in the late 80s, she was friends with a guy in the Boston area who spurned Mann’s romantic advances. I wonder what that dumbass has to show for himself today. I also know a woman whose ex-boyfriend ended up with Tina Fey, come to think of it. Do not underestimate your mates, people.

AuH2O 100: The Centenary of Barry Goldwater's Birth

Today marks not only the first day of the year and of this blog’s “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” but, fittingly, the 100th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s birth.

If, as I suspect, the defense of property (being a rather abstract thing) must sometimes be yoked to broader and more popular political movements, the attempt over the past fifty years or so to make capitalism a fundamental principle of conservatism and of the Republican Party was a very reasonable one, even if the effort may now be fizzled. An early high point in the history of that gambit was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

That year the Republican platform was so explicitly pro-free enterprise and anti-big government you’d think Ayn Rand wrote most of it. Goldwater lost bigtime to the architect of much of our subsequent big-government despair — Lyndon Johnson — but inspired a generation of later activists, to whom much of the credit goes for whatever success America’s had in avoiding European-style social democracy, at least until roughly now. (Would that the “Barry” taking office as President in less than three weeks were as skeptical of government as Goldwater — and that the outgoing president were as well.)

Goldwater was so free-market that it may not even be fair to call him a “fusionist,” the term for those who try to blend traditionalism and markets in order to broaden the Republican coalition. Despite some odd recent attempts (including a National Review Online article) to make Goldwater out to be a twenty-first-century-style “social conservative,” Goldwater was concerned almost exclusively with shrinking government at home and battling communism abroad. When he lamented declining public morals, he wasn’t talking about some imagined excess of anal sex or what have you but rather the more practical sorts of problems — such as burglary — that make it difficult for people to function in the marketplace (crime went up about eightfold in the 60s and several cities were set afire by rioters, though now they’d have us believe it was a groovy, groovy decade). Crime-fighting is, of course, a kind of social conservatism (if you want to call it that) that any good free-marketeer can respect, especially when it means preventing property crimes and physical attacks on other’s bodies rather than, say, using SWAT teams to attack pot growers.

Anyone who thinks of Goldwater as a social conservative in the current, moralistic sense must at the very least explain why he talked so proudly of his family’s connections to bootlegging.

But lest we get too misty-eyed with reverence, it’s worth noting the story of one veteran of that 1964 campaign I know, anarchist law professor Butler Shaffer. Looking to the future with optimism back then, he asked a prominent campaign advisor which government departments he thought Goldwater would likely eliminate first, to which the advisor replied, approximately, “You don’t think he’ll really do those things, do you? That’s just stuff you say to fire up the troops.”

Shaffer gave up on the Republican Party — and eventually even on voting — forty-five years ago. Was that too soon or was he ahead of his time, sparing himself decades of frustration? Discuss!

And luckily, as if having lunch with Dawn Eden and a priest (among others) today weren’t conservative enough, I’m scheduled to dine with someone tomorrow who’ll be the perfect person with whom to discuss such questions: not the author of Conscience of a Conservative (which was ghostwritten for Goldwater by L. Brent Bozell Jr., while some of his writing was ghosted by the anarchist left-libertarian Karl Hess, not that you heard the confused neocons mention that too often over the past eight years) but rather Don Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy (a title that sounds a bit poignant these days). For this opportunity, I must give thanks to my visiting medieval historian friend Christine Caldwell Ames, herself the author of the Inquisition analysis Righteous Persecution…and perhaps the least conservative person mentioned in this blog entry (despite her mind being full of medieval Catholic history), which may tell you something about my acquaintances, at least on alternating days.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Is Intellectual Property Theft?"

Arguing yes: entrepreneur Mitch Golden.

Arguing no: lawyer Raymond Dowd.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Wednesday, Jan. 7, 8pm.

Basement level, 266 Broome St. at Allen St. on the Lower East Side, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F J M Z subway stop.

And January is this blog’s “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property),” exploring similar issues and making the case for the centrality of property rights to politics, morals, and civilization — though the debate question itself is a divisive and tricky one (even among my libertarian kind), I have to admit.

Ambiguities notwithstanding though, this month I hope to show why my ultimate affiliation is to property rights as the greatest social problem-solver, not to any particular political tribe or cultural package deal. Compared to property rights (carefully defined, broadly applied, and consistently enforced), everything else is either a distraction, a source of division, or a bracketable less-urgent issue.