38 posts tagged “libertarian”
Ms. Karen De Coster links to her wonderful 2002 article “Since When Is 'Private Property' Not Self-Explanatory?” in this recent LRC blog entry.
Excerpt:
Libertarian guru Murray Rothbard called them "modal libertarians." They are an assemblage of leftover Marxists, 60s-70s drug users, cultural leftists, assorted members of the Arts-and-Croissant crowd, and Christian-hating atheists. They latch onto the libertarian name because, somehow, they think "libertarian" means "do-whatever-the-heck-you-want" in the name of freedom. ...
Read the entire article here.
She expands on the topic of discrimination, immigration, and political correctness. I echo her views in the article.
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Brainstorm to What's Coming Up (Tentative) on The Paleo Blog:
I do want to do a summary on Chodorov's Rise and Fall of Society. Maybe at the end of the week I will type it up. The same goes for The Market for Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill. There are a lot of other things I would like to touch on in next couple of weeks or so: From Anti-Trust Laws to Rothbard on Feminism...
Sean Gabb gives a report on the second meeting of Hans Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society. You can read it here. (Hat Tip: My Internet buddy ‘paleolibertarian.’)
The Property and Freedom Society stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises had identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government." (“Observations on Professor Hayek’s Plan,” typewritten memorandum dated 31 December 1946; Grove City Archive: MPS files; unpublished.)
As culturally conservative libertarians, we are convinced that the process of de-civilization has again reached a crisis point and that it is our moral and intellectual duty to once again undertake a serious effort to rebuild a free, prosperous, and moral society. It is our emphatic belief that an approach embracing intransigent political radicalism is, in the long run, the surest path to our cherished goal of a regime of totally unfettered individual liberty and private property. In thus seeking a fresh and radical new beginning, we are heeding the old but frequently forgotten advice of Friedrich Hayek's: "We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty..., which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. ... Unless we can make the philosophical foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."
Mr. Stefan Molyneux has a good article at Strike-The-Root.com.
Read it here.
Difficult Truths:
* Going to Iraq to shoot Iraqis is murder, since it is not violence for the sake of immediate self-defense.
* US foreign aggression is responsible for the hatred that foreigners bear towards the US.
* Muslims do not "hate America for its freedom." Americans were far freer in the 19th Century, and suffered no Muslim attacks. Switzerland is also free – and far closer – yet suffers no Muslim attacks, because the Swiss keep their guns inside their own borders
* The US government is by far the world's largest arms seller. The idea that your government exists to protect you from foreign enemies, while assiduously arming foreigners, is too ridiculous to be believable.
* Like the institution of slavery, the state is an agency of violence, evil to the core. It cannot be reformed, but must be abolished.
* Almost everything you were told about society in public schools is propaganda, directly detrimental to your own self-interest.
* Policemen are not primarily there to protect you, but to threaten you if you do not pay your taxes.
* Our existing system is utterly unsustainable, and will collapse within 10 to 15 years at the outside.
* There is nothing accidental about the fact that you were – and are – told all these lies.
Good article...Only one general comment: Will our current system collapse within 10 to 15 years? The empire will bankrupt itself. I do agree. But I do not think one can so easily put a date on it. Will it happen in those years? Maybe...maybe not. (Too many variables. Too many unknowns. And so on.) Will the entire governmental system go down in flames? I do not know. Perhaps only the federal government would. One thing to keep in mind is that statism has so corrupted us as a people. Under such a scenario, people too will (might?) be “going down in flames,” for lack of a better expression. Statism kills and so we have a morally dying and corrupt people. If only the brightest would rise above such a situation, then maybe there would be hope to embrace anarcho-capitalism. ... Well, sadly I am not so sure even that would happen.
Prior to the bloodbath of Statism that we have today, the shift from an ideology of (relative) individual liberty to collective slavery required a change in the ideology of the majority of people. Contra some paleo beliefs in the supposed goodness of "populism," which I relatively find more wickedness than goodness in terms of the politics thereof, shifts in ideology arise out of elites and intellectuals. Society is hierarchical (more or less), even in a stateless society. The great mass of people chase inline the ideological trends of the establishment. They parrot what the leaders (elites, intellectuals, and/or government officials) say. It is a rare man who truly thinks of something genuinely new and/or revolutionary. The pondering man who philosophically questions the status quo is a rare man. Most men do not think about such things and just live their life in the status quo.
Man is born unequal to each other. Man grows and develops unequal vis-à-vis each other. Some men will accomplish much and some little in their lives. Out of these men what will arrive are natural elites and intellectuals, but they are the rare breed. Equality is a myth and is antagonistic towards human nature. It is these natural elites and intellectuals that play a primary role in mending minds. Those "higher on top," so to speak, can help bring about ideological changes. Change is therefore more of a top-down thing than a bottom-up thing, at least at the beginning of any revolutionary change in society.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his essay "Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State" that exogenous origins of governments is faulty. Instead Bertrand de Jouvenel shows that governments came about, says Dr. Hoppe, through "the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker" from naturally arriving noble families. Private property is hierarchical; family is patriarchal. It is understandable how natural elites could form into monarchies, if they, as they could, institutionalize the idea that it would be better for the people to only come to one noble family for protection and resolution of disputes. Thus this given family elite would shun out all the other family elites with the (necessary) support of the majority of the people. This began the march towards statism.
All of this can shed light on how to move to freedom. To quote Hans Hoppe:
The mass of people, as La Boetie and Mises recognized, always and everywhere consists of "brutes," "dullards," and "fools," easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission. Thus today, inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people. Even if they can see through this deception, most still unquestioningly accept democratic government on account of the fact that it provides them with a multitude of goods and benefits. Such "fools," observed La Boetie, do not realize that they are "merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them." Thus, every social revolution will necessarily have to begin with just a few uncommon men: the natural elite. [Democracy - The God That Failed, p 92]
Hoppe recommends that one withdraw oneself, as much as possible, from any connection to or support of government----especially the federal government. Libertarian intellectual elites (or libertarian elites in the business world) must pursue not only uncompromising intellectual radicalism but also must live morally upstanding lives. The institutionalization of libertarian ideas must get to the public. He suggests that such spreading of ideas must be radical and simple for the message to get out:
In fact, there must never be even the slightest wavering in one's commitment to uncompromising ideological radicalism ("extremism"). Not only anything less be counterproductive, but more importantly, only radical----indeed, radically simple----ideas can possibly stir the emotions of the dull and indolent masses. And nothing is more effective in persuading the masses to cease cooperating with government than the constant and relentless exposure, desanctification, and ridicule of government and its representatives as moral and economic frauds and impostors: as emperors without clothes subject to contempt and the butt of all jokes. [p 94]
Classical Liberalism
Leaving aside the question of how classical liberalism was born, it was institutionalized. In North America it was "institutionalized" in the Declaration of Independence, and also in the culture: writings, plays, music, and so on. Some men have called this liberal ethic the "Protestant Ethic."
But how did classical liberalism decline?
"Mr. Libertarian," the great Murray N. Rothbard, has addressed this topic in-depth. The answer is that it lost its radicalism. It started to seek power in the Leviathan State. Liberalism became pragmatic and hence utilitarian. It lost its natural rights tradition.
Losing its radicalism made it permissible for socialism to take over as the new ideal of hope----the new radical ideology. Liberalism then started to associate itself with conservatism and defending the status quo. The switching of the ideological terms "conservative" and "liberal" occurred. The aims "liberalism" were morphed into the aims of the new statist left-liberalism, where collectivism would supposedly "free" man. "[I]t tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means," wrote Rothbard.
Now the "basic reason," wrote Rothbard, for the decline of liberalism
was an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore, their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of natural rights and "higher law" theory for utilitarianism, for only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on he other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order. [Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature, pp 25-6]
The second basic reason, said Rothbard, was Social Darwinist Theory. It saw the future as always progressing forward. For this reason, liberal ideas would manifest themselves through time by default. Consequently it established a Whig Theory of history as truth in intellectual and ideological development as always evolving, in the long run, towards progress. Of course, using history as a guide, anything but progress has occurred in the struggle between chaining and unchaining man.
Errors of Classical Liberalism
Perhaps even more deadly to classical liberalism was that some of the thoughts it held were erroneous and for that very reason doomed to failure. The only exception, that I am aware, of a classical liberal being a full libertarian was Gustave de Molinari (1819-1911). Beyond him the acceptance of a State to provide law and order was universally accepted without question.
However, as people like Rothbard and Hoppe have shown, a coercive monopolist providing law and order will not lead to the ideals of classical liberalism or libertarianism. Being that a government is in the position of being the monopolist of law making and adjudication, it can make laws that are beneficial to it, at the expense of everyone else. It will distort law and justice for its own benefit. No outside party, in a "vertical" or "horizontal" sense, exists to keep government in check! And monopolists, after all, work without any direct pressure, from competitors, to produce low cost and high quality goods/services. They can work at high costs and produce low quality stuff. The very incentive structure of government is to do such. Additionally, the allocation of government's protective and judicial functions will be uncoordinated and distorted because there are no profits-and-losses. There are no market price signals, which require free and private markets, which tell them how and where they should allocate their operations (or when to allocate to "where"). It can only be arbitrary and chaotic in terms of the various and diverse needs of consumers. The same is true for what, and how much of that "what," to input into their operations. Even more fundamentally, the very idea of a State to be a protective institution is in error. It exists contradictory to protecting the lives, properties, and pursuit of happiness of individuals. Governments do not exist as institutions of defensive protection but of exploitation and aggression. In order to "protect" someone, a government must first act in violation of its goal of protecting people from aggression! That is, by first involuntarily robbing men, and then calling it "taxation."
And, as Hoppe has written extensively about, democracy was accepted as an improvement over classical monarchy. This is yet another error. Instead of entry into government being restricted only to a single noble family, it was opened up theoretically to anyone and everyone. What this has done is lessened the public's resistance to government expansion. The public then sees the government and the people as one and the same. It produces (bad) competition over who rules and operates governmental functions. It stirs up openly competing groups in who obtains power to rule over others. As a result, it makes living under democracy worse than living under monarchy. Secondly, democracy is akin to a publicly owned government. Its aggressive actions will be less calculating than a privately owned government. It will take the short-term look versus the long-term look. A monarchy, on the other hand, is not a temporary ruler and wants to preserve the family rule for the future. That is to say, a monarchy owns the government in a private way. It not only owns the present use, but also the future. It can derive income in the present and in a couple of decades from now. It accordingly must keep in mind its capital stock. Democracy, instead, is filled with temporary politicians who do not own the capital. Thus they will derive present income despite its effect on capital. A monarchy, in a way, really owns "its" property and can even sell it. All of this gives a monarchy, unlike a democratic government, the incentive to be more conservative. Thus, under democracy, government's control of individuals will invariably explode. The market place will be severely distorted and will throw man into becoming a habitual political animal.
Social Environmentalism and Egalitarianism
Government has an interest in institutionalizing its existence. It obviously must; otherwise it would be out of business. To expand, it must continue to institutionalize the idea that government is a necessary to life and that it is the most important organization to civilization. Democracy compounds this process.
The ideology of egalitarianism is partly to blame. But, as paleoconservative Sam Francis suggested, it is not so much that egalitarians themselves subscribe to their philosophy in its totality, but use it to lure the unthinking masses. They use it as a political weapon.
Hand-in-hand with this ideology is social environmentalism.
This ideology says that the individual is but a product of his environment, nothing more. That little to no free will exists and that there are no inborn (hereditary) traits in the individual. Naturally, this thought gives rise to the inspiration of socially engineering men with the power of the government. It says that all problems one individual may have, is not his doing but that of "society." (How much better is it for one to blame others for one's problems than to blame oneself!? Democracy is a great way for men to express these infantile emotions.) Frank Chodorov called this the "Freudian Ethic." To iterate, this ethic denies any inborn traits. It says that we are all "equal." And any inequality or differences is due to society and its environment. It is this environment that, the statists claim, can be molded by scientific calculation to bring about "equality."
"[T]he whole thrust of environmentalism is toward relativism, the denial of moral absolutes, and behaviorism," wrote Francis. This is particularly pronounced in the court system. Lawyers use it to try to excuse, for example, murderers by saying that they are only the product of their environment. And hence claim that punishment would be cruel. But as Francis so correctly stated: "it does not seem to have occurred to him [the given lawyer] that their executioners could equally claim to be merely their victims of their own environments."
Egalitarianism played a central role in the Progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early twentieth century was that of "environmentalism"----not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their souls, or their innate mental and physical natures. Egalitarianism was implicit in environmentalist ideology. If the natural or inborn traits of human beings according to class, race, sexuality, nationality, culture, etc. is rooted in social environments rather than nature, then human beings are conceptually reduced to a set of identical reflexes and may be said to be "equal." [Shots Fired, p 209]
This ideology has been used to justify statist interventions at all times and places.
The welfare state, one of this ideology's products, has created a class of people that are dependent, who have lost all independence in reason and action, and has moved man to become increasingly political than productive. It has turned man into an inferior person intellectually and morally. As the welfare sate rewards failure and unproduction, it punishes success and production. Proliferation of the former role will increase, as it has today.
By politics and this environmental ideology, says Chodorov, we now see handouts as due:
Society----that indefinite something that is more than the sum of its parts, and has an existence quite apart from that of the individuals, who compose it----owns us all a living. . . . If a man is provided with all the comforts of life, with little or no effort on his part, his psyche will demand more of these comforts----free gratis, and he will lose that independence of spirit that comes only through the exercise of will in overcoming obstacles to the satisfaction of his desires. He is likely to become like an animal waiting for the food that is thrown to him, unable to forage for himself. He is likely to become a malinger. [Out of Step, pp 20, 22-23]
Embracing Freedom
To come back to the beginning of this entry to The Paleo Blog, one must take Hans Hoppe's advice and distant oneself from political institutions. Libertarianism must be radical and embrace complete Rothbardism, least it becomes less radical and deteriorates any more than it has. It must be anti-establishment.
One must recognize that the State is not an institution of peace or order, but war and chaos. Free markets bring peace and order; States destroy them. One must also embrace the "intermediate institutions" of society: family, kinship, church, covenant, community, etc. These things bring order and a moral society. The State detaches and atomizes the individual from these naturally arising market institutions. By doing this, the government destroys order and takes away social-cultural restraints, which then allow anti-natural and destructive behavior of men to proliferate. Hence, the State is not only an institution of war and chaos but also moral degeneration.
Only
groups and institutions that support dismantling the States should be
supported. There is no way to reform governments. (E.g., "fair" tax
proposals, social security reforms, etc. must all be rejected.) One
must only support ideas that actually eliminate government functions.
Decentralization and all secession groups must be supported.
It must be an Ayn Rand thing with libertarians. (?)
In some ways, I am a “moderate”: Like Dr. Walter Block, I will tell you that libertarianism is not a philosophy of life. So you can be an atheist. Fine. But you atheists cannot tell us of faith that it is incompatible with libertarianism. It, obviously, is compatible as long as it does not violate the non-aggression axiom. Secondly, I am a “big-tent” kind of a guy. Nor do I (or would I) ever harass principled libertarians (or anyone else for that matter) on points of disagreement. I am not that kind of person. (And, boy, do some libertarians nitpick, without giving a fellow libertarian the credit of the doubt---ever.)
In other ways, I am an “extremist”: Like Dr. Hans Hoppe, I will tell you that cultural conservatism is the “outcome” of a truly free market and cultural lefitsm is the result of statism. Thus, promoting leftist culture is the wrong way to go for true libertarians (libertarian 'anarchists'). To quote Hoppe: “conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, ... libertarians must be [cultural] conservatives.” (He goes through an extensive economic analysis of government interventionism into the cultural life. In a true libertarian society, many leftists would not be pleased.) So I am weary of libertarians that excessively promote cultural leftism.
Well, there is a thing about many libertarians when it comes to atheism. Believe me, I am tolerant and so forth. But, sometimes, it is hard to say for that for the militant atheist libertarians.
Take a look at Mr. Joe Sobran’s latest article: “The Sanctimony of the Atheists”
"Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of "rights" for such "human" rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary the concept of "rights" only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard..."
Read Here. (Excerpted from chapter 15 of The Ethics of Liberty.)
Listen to it on MP3 by Jeff Riggenbach here.
Academics have two different liberties in mind to confuse the masses. Bet you probably could guess which of the two actually describes real liberty.
“Positive liberty” is the “freedom” you have when it is taken away from you by the government. That is what this term means in a nutshell. It sure is a positive thing, eh!?
Say government takes away my choice of investing my own money. (Of course, the government pretty much already does this.) They call this “positive liberty” because I am now “free” from the, oh so difficult process of making choices. All of those choices and decisions are so confusing, you know. I wish Daddy government would pick for me and tell me what to do all the time. (I need ”freedom” from making choices, after all.) Besides, government always knows best, as I am sure you know.
“Positive liberty” is also the “freedom from want.” ...Huh? Wants are unlimited. There is no end to a person’s wants. You know, I would love a beach house at that exclusive location. Only problem is, land there is limited. But, who knows? Government is so powerful that it might be able to pop everything in existence in superabundance. It can get rid of scarcity. All we need to do is just give the state more of our money! And give it more dictatorial power. That should solve that! (While government solves that problem --- here is another: I hate this thing called gravity. Maybe it will overturn the laws of physics as well. All we need to do is give it more power, right? . . . Economics? Physics? How are these things a match for government?)
But it is good to start out small. “Freedom from want” becomes the “freedom” to have a living wage, food, and a house. Yes, these things the former Soviet Union provided so well. (Don’t you remember? The reporters and intellectuals told us that their visits over there showed it was paradise.) And, hey, government’s record in providing these things is so good. (The war on poverty has increased it, but it is the intention counts, right?) But, before government can bring about paradise from all conceivable wants and necessitates (and the invented “necessities” of tomorrow) it needs more money and control of our lives to accomplish them. After all, that is what it boils down to.
“Negative liberty” is awful --- just awful and evil. As the state’s intellectuals teach us, this liberty is the freedom of being selfish, bigoted, and all-around evil. It is the liberty that let’s the individual control himself. (That is, everyone owns himself. Only you own you. The property you obtain through homesteading and/or voluntary exchange you also own. You control it.) But, we all know, this should not be because the government is much more wise in telling us how to live. We the people do not own our respected selfs. We are the slaves to the masters, our government rulers. And look at how they, the politicians, live. Can’t top that for the best example of a moral and virtuous life.
Who wants that “negative liberty,” anyway? “Positive liberty” is the liberty I can have to rob you. (Or have the government rob you to give to me.) I want what you have. This “liberty” takes away all want, after all. “Negative liberty” is too restrictive. Living by the gun is the way.
When I take, with my “positive liberty,” something that you have and you take back what I took, then what? Both are justified under this arrangement. Well, we will deal with that when the time comes. This just comes to show, no doubt, that respect for person and property are non-existent. Violence is always justified and has no constraints to natural laws or morals.
All satire and joking aside. Politicians use this “positive liberty” rhetoric to justify all encroachments to our individual liberties. James Bovard says in his book Freedom in Chains, “Once freedom is equated with a certain material standard of living, confiscation becomes the path to liberation.” He says that it becomes a “license for politicians, rather than a declaration of rights of citizens.” There is no justification of the mystical creation of “positive liberty.” To justify it requires the justification that property rights do not exist, violence against non-aggressors is tolerable, and “positive liberty’s” contradictions in ownership of a specific property title is as “logical” that one equals two.
Take a look at the a couple of case studies of politicians using this rhetoric. Former President Bill Clinton referred to “freedom from fear” as the ”most important” freedom. And, of course, to accomplish this, the government needs to have the ability to break into your own house and steal your guns. It was then justified to kick down doors in Chicago's housing complexes to find drugs and weapons. (If was living at one of those places, I myself would want a gun under my pillow.) FDR gets the crown for coming up with the idea of “freedom from fear,” one of many invented freedoms by him. This was his justification for establishing the welfare state and put together an almost Soviet system government during the war.
Reference: Freedom in Chains by James Bovard
According to many libertarians, we as libertarians (and paleolibertarians) cannot look or talk about any kind of generalization of “a group” because it violates individualist thinking. (It seems to be a semi-egalitarian sentiment.) This logic tells us that we cannot talk about differences between the sexes, for example. It tells us that we cannot talk about racial differences or cultural differences. And, maybe, we cannot talk about life style differences. (They are “all equal.”) Why not? Are you telling me that general differences do not exist? Am I violating the non-aggression axiom? Am I automatically, by default, rejecting the libertarian creed to look at people as individuals?
Libertarians may be individualists, but one thing we know better then most is that, as Murray Rothbard said, “egalitarianism is a revolt against nature.” We would not be human if differences did not exist. It is what makes the world go around for the civilization of mankind. A division of labor would not exist. Oh, you say, this is only the individual but not the “group”...? That is a strange statement because we can scientifically or biologically divide people into groups. It tells us that general differences exist and are real. There is nothing wrong with that or un-libertarian. Just as, maybe, if I stated that individuals (a group of individuals) with very low IQs will generally not get as far ahead in life relative to people with very high IQs.
Please do not get me wrong. I think judging people as individuals is of paramount importance. And, with no doubt about it, all individuals should have the same liberty to person and property as anyone else. Nor is anyone above these laws of private property (including governments). But this does not make everyone equal in terms of ability or whatever other variable you wish to throw in. (And, yes, we can group people to look at the differences.) Libertarianism is about Liberty. Equality is incompatible with libertarianism. It is also destructive because it goes against the very being of man. Attempts at equality can only be attempted to be brought about through authoritarian methods.
Here is an illustration... I am not sure if it will get the point across, but it is a try or an attempt at that.
Let’s say that a murder took place. This man got away from the police. He is on the run. But we know approximately what he looks like. Imagine that I work for a private free-market airport. Reports are going up about this dangerous criminal. The reports tell us the basics: skin color, height, weight, etc. Naturally I am conscious of this. Obviously I will act more discriminatorily on the group of people that fit this characteristic. So I might not let someone with these characteristics on the airplane unless I have someone check him out to see if he is the criminal that the police are after. Now if we follow the logic of some of these libertarians this would probably be wrong of me. In this kind of situation I would not be looking at people as just individuals because I would also be determining if they fit into this collective group of people that share the parameters and characteristics of people that are most probable to be this given criminal.
A quick browse through some of the VOX blogs reveals (yawn) that Earth Day came and went. (Commie red.) The thing that no one mentioned, that I am aware, is the fact that the State is the greatest living enemy to the environment. ... And to mankind in general: Nothing exceeds the mass deaths and destruction caused by the State's wars.
This includes the State's "soft" wars. One example is its fight for the "protection" of the environment, which the environmental and green movement is apart.
Take, for example, the great role model of these environmentalists: The former Soviet Union. Government owned the natural resources. (This is, after all, what they want.) The "dirty" and "dishonest" free market did not. What was the result? In short: Disaster. Severe pollution in forests to rivers.
Want another example of the environmentalists regulating the world? DDT. The unimaginable death toll is beyond human comprehension. As usual, the "solutions" from these people is by putting them in power to rule over mankind. No, thank you! These people clearly should not be trusted. I do not want to be ruled by the authoritarians of the Bush administration anymore then these environmentalist authoritarians. Frankly, I do not want to be ruled by any man (or to be politically correct, "pc," man or women or unisex or ...whatever ludicrousness the pc crowd demands of us next).
Here is what Mr. Lew Rockwell says in "Our Own Silent Spring":
The politics of the environmentalists are increasingly predictable and obvious. They oppose all forms of capitalistic innovation. Indeed, they represent a special kind of danger to the human race that socialism never did. At least the socialists favored human progress, or at least said they did. These greens are against all that. They claim that we should be happy to live amidst disease, filth, and death, if only the bugs and birds can be left alone to thrive and kill us.
The “environmentalists” that look to the State are puppets. They dare not attack government (they want to give it more power!), but the market place, on the other hand, is fair game. Of course, many in the extreme-green environmental movement take their myopic vision of what they view as the "natural" state of the environment and place it above man. But before I reflect on this, let me go to some of the wisdom of Dr. Butler Shaffer.
Governments live and thrive on, as Butler Shaffer points out, bogeymen. There is always some bogyman that the government needs to fight. It needs the masses to see that the State and its “intellectuals” are doing their job by taking care of these bogymen. The State needs some excuse to expand. What better way then to create bogeymen? One of them is the environment. But if it were not for statist interventionism in the first place, then liability laws (that defend private property) would exist. But if it were not for (government created) public property, market incentives to preserve these properties would exist.
With that said, this is giving too much credit to today's environmentalists and their ideas. This is because the private property law just mentioned is not enough for many of these environmentalist. They want to go above and beyond. (Near the end, with the help of the late and great Murray Rothbard, I will attempt to address the issue of how the free market handles natural resources and why the market can be trusted to deal with environmental issues ---- whereas government has just been a complete flop and will always be.)
Libertarians are not apologists for those that damage the properties of others in the name of “capitalism” or the “free market.” Capitalism and the free market are defined by voluntary relationships. From this it follows that no one may aggress or threaten to aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This is exactly what a true free market of capitalism is. It is not more complicated then that.
In today’s world big business is in the business to unite itself with the State. It is with the State that big business tramples on the property rights of others. This is not capitalism or the free market at work. Quite the opposite in fact. This is mercantilism, economic fascism, or whatever name or terminology you want to give to today’s market statism. The only point I am trying to get across is that there is a difference between a free market and one that is, as it is profoundly today, a statist market. I must emphasize this because this point is lost on too many people.
Nature worshipers do not care about such things, however. They see nature as something that has some form of intrinsic value. The natural law of private property is not enough for them. Coercion is required.
There are of course many problems with this nature worshiping. One being that man is a part of nature. Viewing man as some kind of polluter entity is truly anti-human. Man is not alien to Earth. A second being that nature and its beauty are truly subjective. Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. It does not arrive intrinsically from the rocks or the birds. It arrives from man. One cannot thus talk about some kind of absolute beauty. Man is apart of nature. To live he uses it. He learns to transform it. He must transform it to live! This brings about a process of civilization. The logic of the nature worshipers and their religion, if you take it to its logic, is ultimately anti-human and perverse.
It is man that is an after thought to nature worshiping environmentalists. He enters the picture afterwards. One who produces life and well-being through nature is hence considered evil. This imaginary and invented evil then must be stopped by coercion; the human right to person and property be damned by the force of the shotgun. The target aim of their point of the gun is always the same, be it one bogeyman or another: free market capitalism. They give the gun to the State, which is the very opposite of the free market.
To quote Shaffer:
To understand the roots of this new religion, one need only go back to the earlier gospel from whence these true believers migrated. It is no coincidence, I believe, that the environmental cult arose at about the same time that the earlier faith in state economic planning was unable to withstand the pragmatic power of the marketplace as the generator of material well-being. Environmentalism provided an alternative vehicle for those whose principal ambition lay in controlling the lives and property of their fellow humans. There was some initial uncertainty expressed over whether we faced an incipient global “cooling” or “warming,” but there was no absence of faith in their underlying cause: to extend coercive control over all of humanity. If you doubt this assessment, consider the common interventionist mindset that has driven both socialist and environmental planners.
Natural Resources in the Free Market: Murray Rothbard in "Conservation in the Free Market"
[T]here is the common argument that any time a natural resource is used, any time a tree is chopped down, we are depriving future generations of its use. ... For if we are to be prohibited from felling a tree because some future generation is deprived of doing so, then this future generation, when it becomes "present," also cannot use the tree for fear of its future generation, and so on to prove that the resource can never be used by man at all----surely a profoundly "antihuman" thesis, since man in general is kept in subservience to a resource which he can never use.
Rothbard goes over an example of the market place when it comes to natural resources:
Let us consider, for example, a typical copper mine. We do not find copper miners, once they have found and opened a vein of ore, rushing to mine all the copper immediately; instead, the copper mine is conserved and used gradually, from year to year.
The reason is straight-forward. In private ownership one does not only own the current use-value of the land but also the future-value. Private ownership has a monetary-capital value of temporal present-future existence. It is reflected in the selling value of the property in question and also in "individual shares of [the] mining stock." [For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard]
A couple of examples are given by Rothbard. Suppose a new metal was discovered to replace copper. Under this condition the value of copper will be higher in the present relative to the future. To satisfy this higher value the miners will correspondingly produce more copper. The other example is a shortage of copper was coming. Under this scenario the obvious reaction would be to conserve. The price would rise. This would sent a wave into the market place. In For a New Liberty, here is what Murray Rothbard wrote:
Moreover, the greater cost of copper will stimulate (a) a rush to find new copper ores; and (b) a search for less expensive substitutes, perhaps by new technological discoveries. Higher prices for copper will also stimulate campaigns for saving and recycling the metal. This price mechanism of the free market is precisely the reason that copper, and other natural resources, have not disappeared long ago.
It is where the market is not allowed to function, says Rothbard, where we see the problems:
We find, in fact, no one complaining about capitalism's "ravaging" of copper or iron resources. What, then, is the problem in such cases as forests? Why are the forests or the fisheries "ravaged" but not minerals? The problem is that the areas where overproduction does exist are precisely those where the built-in market mechanism had been prevented from operating by the force of government. Specifically, these are the areas where private property has not been allowed in the resource itself, but only in their daily or annual use. [Emphasis mine.]
What happens if the government is to rent out public land to private developers? The incentive becomes to get the maximum out of its present use because the future does not factor into the evaluation. The same thing is true with the ocean. Government disallows private developers to privately owns sections of oceans or lakes (etc.). Another example are the areas of the most litter. They obviously are higher in public property versus private.
They also fail to see what capitalism is all about when it comes to the use of natural resources. To quote Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo from his book How Capitalism Saved America: "But the fundamental premise on which environmentalism is based is mistaken. Capitalism does not deplete a finite amount of resources; human intelligence in a capitalist economy has always been the key to creating economically usable natural resources." This is the very point of the market place. Beyond that, it has adaptability to the changing conditions of the world. One cannot say that of the State.
Environment & Liberty: (An Introduction with Murray Rothbard as the guide.)
How about the pollution of water and air? This is a complex issue. There is no doubt. Governments, as Rothbard mentions in his For a New Liberty, have not solved these kinds of problems. It does and could only ever do is make them worse. Government treats water and air as "public" (with its usual perversities that comes with "public"). It has allowed big business to visibly and directly pollute into another's property. A society that respects private property rights would not allow this. The answer is to be found in the free market. In the start of this entry I mentioned liability laws. Here is where they would come in, in a truly free anarcho-capitalist society...
Rivers and oceans are publicly owned (or not owned at all ---- which is of little differentiation when we talk of public). As typically with public property, the incentive to conserve and protect is bottom low to non-existent. On the other hand, if these things were private, then just as you should not be able to dumb stuff into my front lawn, you would not be able to do it in my river.
For example, pretend that I own a farm and you own a factory. There is a river that runs through both of our properties. If you dump things into it and it flows to me, then I suffer and my property is damaged. These kinds of things are real. Government is the one that allows it. But if the river were private, anything you dump into the river that ends up in my property would be (and should be) forbidden. Another example could be that your air pollution directly harms and kills my plants in my farm. And I can show this correlation. This would be in violation of my property.
Here is Rothbard on the subject of air pollution (being probably the more difficult case):
In the case of air pollution we are dealing not so much with private property in the air as with protecting private property in one's lungs, fields, and orchards. The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants----from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides----through the air and into the lungs of innocent victims, as well onto their material property. All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the private property of the victims. Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggress as committing arson against another's property or injuring him physically. Air pollution that injures others is aggression pure and simple. The major function of government----of courts and police----is to stop aggression; instead, the government has failed in this task and has failed grievously to exercise its defense function against air pollution.
Continued in this excerpt:
It is important to realize that this failure has not been a question purely of ignorance, a simple time lag between recognizing a new technological problem and facing up to it. For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known to the extent that the American courts, during the late----and as far back as the early-nineteenth century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to----and did----systematically change and weaken the defense of private property rights embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law.
People have to reject the religion of environmentalism and nature worship. We must not place it somehow above man and man’s private property rights. It is private property rights which are the only thing that can be argumentatively justified as justice. Property and the natural outgrowths thereof is the very life of mankind and civilization.
Nature is something to be used to better man. This is where its value come from.
At the same time----and this is very important for me to highlight----we have to reject Ayn Rand’s idea that free enterprise is somehow ‘above’ private property rights when it comes to environmental damages. It’s not. No one has a right to violate anyone’s property rights.
Some Reading Material:
- "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution" by Murray Rothbard
- For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard --- See Chapter 13: Conservation, Ecology, and Growth [Text & MP3 Audio]
- "Solar and Celestial Causes of Global Warming" by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
- "Rockwell's Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
- "My Vice: Hating the Environment" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
- "Standards of Environmental Good and Evil: Why Environmentalism Is Misanthropic" by George Reisman
- "Global Warming Is Not a Threat But the Environmentalist Response to It Is" by George Reisman
- "Recycling: What a Waste!" by Jim Fedako
- Junk Science.com
