Maverick Philosopher

Makers and Takers: "You Didn't Build That!" Revisited

Robert Paul Wolff writes,

Every one of us comes into the world endowed with a material and cultural inheritance that we have not earned and can never justify.  There are no "takers" and "makers" in our society.  All of the takers are makers, and all of the makers are takers.  And quite often those who start out with, or end up with, the most stuff have worked considerably less industriously than those who start out and end up with the least.

It is this fact that constitutes the real justification for Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program slogan:  "From each according to his ability;  to each according to his need."

The first sentence expresses a conjunction of two claims.  The first is perfectly obvious.  I did not earn my good eyesight or any of the material and cultural benefits that accrued to me upon birth.  The same is true of all of us.  The second claim, however, is not obvious.  The claim that I can never "justify" unearned benefits presupposes that they need justification.  It is not at all clear that unearned benefits need justification, or even what 'justification' in this context means.   It is true that I didn't do anything to deserve my good eyesight, my intelligence, my being born in Southern California, etc.  But  I have a right to my  natural and cultural endowments despite my not having earned them.  It is my right to my two eyes that makes it wrong for the state to take one of my eyes and 'redistribute' it to a sightless person.

Wolff's first sentence, being a conjunction of a truth and what is arguably a falsehood is itself arguably a falsehood.  However his argument proceeds, it will be arguably unsound.

As for the second and third sentences, it is trivially true that all takers are makers, and vice versa.  Charles Manson is a maker and Bill Gates is a taker.  But no substantive juice can be squeezed from a trivial truth such as this.  In particular, one cannot validly infer from it the socialist "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." 

Nor can the utility of the taker-maker distinction be impugned by hammering on the trivial truth.  To put it mildly, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are much more makers than takers, whereas Manson is much more a taker than a maker.

Wolff is essentially just reiterating the Obama "You didn't build that!" riff, to which I respond:

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.Wolff is doing the same thing.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of
course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal
Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort with the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did
provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the
Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Related articles

Dems: "Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To"

Robert Paul Wolff: "The Left Has Had All the Good Songs"

Why Do Societies Ossify and Decline?

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, puts things in historical perspective.  His piece concludes:

History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

So much wisdom, insight, and erudition can be found in the conservative commentary of men like Hanson, and so little in the febrile and adolescent outbursts of Paul Krugman and his ilk.

There is no wisdom on the Left.

The philosopher in me looks forward to dusk and the owl of Minerva's spreading of her wings.  The natural man, however, hopes the end is postponed until after I make my physical exit.  Meanwhile, philosopher and natural man live on, fight on, and do what they can.

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Bread, Circuses, and Decline

The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk

Nick Gillespie on Why Youth Favor Obama and Conservatism's Contradictions

Support for Obama among 18-29 year olds exceeds that of any other age cohort.  Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie argues that Obama is in the process of "screwing them big time."  Gillespie is right.   What caught my eye, however, was Gillespie's  explanation of why conservatives fail to get the youth vote:

I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message"  resonate less among younger people is its, well, conservatism on things such as war, alternative lifestlyes, [sic] drug legalization, and immigration. Younger people are less hung up on the sorts of things that really twist conservatives' knickers. And young people then assume that many of the other things that conservatives espouse - such as generally free markets and open trade - are similarly warped. That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message - We want smaller government...except when we're talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas! - doesn't help matters, either. Most people surely don't prize consistency as much as libertarians do, but the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy are off-putting to anyone with the smallest taste for consistency.

As a philosopher, logical consistency looms large for me.  And so you will get my attention 'big time' if you can lay out for me "the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy."  But if they are obvious, then presumably all you need to do is draw my attention to them.

Unfortunately, public intellectuals, not being logically trained as most philosophers are, have an egregiously spongy notion of what a contradiction is.  This is true of even very good public intellectuals such as Nat Hentoff and Nick Gillespie.  (Hentoff, for whom I have a very high degree of respect, thinks one is being inconsistent if one is pro-life and yet supports capital punishment.  He is demonstrably wrong.)

Ignoring Gillespie's invective and hyperbole, his point seems to be that the following propositions are logically inconsistent:

1. The legitimate functions of government are limited.

2. Among the the legitimate functions of government are national defense, securing of the borders, and preservation of traditional marriage's privileged position.

Now it should be obvious that these propositions are logically consistent: they can both be true.  They are not logical contradictories of each other.

It is therefore foolish for Gillespie to accuse conservatives of inconsistency.  And to speak of obvious inconsistency is doubly foolish.  What he needs to do is argue that the governmental functions that conservatives deem necessary and legitimate are neither.  This will require a good deal of substantive argumentation and not a cheap accusation of  'inconsistency.' For example, he can mount an economic argument for open borders.  I wish him the best of luck with that. He will need it.

Curiously, Gillespie's own reasoning can be used against him.  Suppose an anarchist comes along.  Using Gillespie's own form of reasoning, he could argue that Gillespie the libertarian is being inconsistent.  For he wants smaller government . . . except when it comes to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad, I call it).    Then he wants coercive government to do its thing and come down hard on the malefactors.  He's inconsistent!  If he were consistent in his desire for limited government, he would favor no government.  His libertarianism would then collapse into anarchism.

So by his own understanding of consistency, Gillespie is not being consistent.  The same reasoning that he uses against conservatives can be used against him.  The reasoning is of course invalid in both applications.  It is invalid against the libertarian and equally so against the conservative.

But I like his black leather jacket schtick.    It is always a pleasure to see him on the O'Reilly Factor. 

Related articles

'The Wrong Side of History'

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nick Gillespie: Will Obama Tell Young People How Much He's Screwing Them?

Why Not Gun Control for the Government?

Liberals have been calling for a 'conversation' about gun control.  The call is both silly and disingenuous.  Silly, because it is not as if we haven't been talking about this for decades.  So suddenly we need to have a 'conversation'?  Disingenuous, because what liberals mean by a conversation is more like: you shut up and listen and acquiesce in our point of view or we'll shout you down! Here is Medea Benjamin of CodePink 'conversing' with Wayne LaPierre:

But suppose, contrary to fact, that our leftist pals were serious about a conversation, no scare quotes.  Then we would have to discuss not only gun control for citizens, but for government as well.  Fair is fair.

There are foolish and irresponsible and criminal individuals among the citzenry and they shouldn't have guns.  But it is equally true that there are foolish and irresponsible and criminal people in government and they shouldn't have guns either. 

Besides, quis custodiet custodies?  Who governs the government?  If we can't govern ourselves, but need government to govern us, then the government, which is composed of the same "crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) as we are, needs some entity to keep it in line.  That 'entity' is us, the armed citizenry. 

Why do we need to be kept in check, but not them?  Come on you feel-good liberals, try thinking for a change.  Do you really believe that government is inherently benevolent and composed of angels from above?  Do you really believe they can be trusted when we can't?  Do you think that they are the parents and we the children?  Then you are Chris Rock and and your brain is as 'petrified' as his.

Anthony Gregory's Why Not Gun Control for Government? is an extreme piece that I cannot endorse in toto. But it does throw the issue into relief.

Less extreme and more entertaining is Uncle Sam, Give Us Your Guns.

If you know of any more good articles on this topic, shoot me an e-mail.

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Why Would Anyone Need a Semi-Automatic Rifle?

Time to tug the ol' gun control heartstrings

Against Swedenization

An important article by William Voegli.  Excerpt:

The case against Swedenization, then, is that it threatens a soft and insidious despotism. Unlike the totalitarianism of the USSR, where the evil flowed from the top down, engulfing every aspect of society, the danger posed by social democracy is of social, political, and economic debilitations’ compounding one another. Progressivism began as, and remains, “an alliance of experts and victims,” according to Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. It gains strength as the experts assert their expertise more confidently and the victims accept their helplessness more compliantly. The kind of robust mediating structures Tocqueville thought essential to the success of democracy in America will not prevail against that alliance. If the experts determine that employer-provided health insurance must include contraception, the objections of religious organizations opposed to some or all forms of contraception are immaterial. The possibility that the republic’s free citizens could initiate financial or employment arrangements to secure contraceptives, rather than relying completely on government directives to their employers, is also ruled out of order.

To which I add:

The aim of the Left is to weaken the once robust "mediating structures" of civil society that serve as a buffer between individual and state.  Among these are the family, private charities, voluntary service organizations, private associations and clubs of all kinds, churches and parochial schools, and the private economy.  Indeed, the aim is to weaken the mediating structures to the point where the space between individual and state is hollowed out. 

The Left is totalitarian, which is why it will brook no competitors such as religion and family.

Companion post: Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

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Obama's Assault on the institutions of Civil Society

Extremism in Defense of Liberty?

This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit

The Crisis of American Self-Government

Of Six-Toed Cats and Federalism

Jonah Goldberg:

"One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work harder to persuade ideological friends and foes alike that the way to reduce partisanship and maximize happiness in America is to embrace federalism — the view that we should push as many decisions as possible to the lowest local level feasible."

Me too:

Can Federalism Save Us?

Voluntary Balkanization: Good or Bad?

Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

 

 

A Case for Voluntary Segregation

This old entry, from about a year and half ago, has gained in relevance after Obama's reelection.  Here it is again re-titled and revised.

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Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization.  Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.

I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism,  might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences.  We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues.  Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power,  and numerous others.

We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions,"  to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell.   When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. 

We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty.  Comity (social harmony) in whose terms?  On what common ground?  Peace is always possible if one side just gives in.  If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign.  But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.'  We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles.  And what would these be?

There is no point in papering over very real differences.

Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, asa good thing, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing.  Some go so far as to consider it "the greatest social evil."  The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?

The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right.  For example, as a conservative, I find it utterly absurd that there has been any fight at all over the Mojave cross, and I have utter contempt for the ACLU shysters who brought the original law suit.  Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of  that very old memorial cross on a hill  in the middle nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion.  I consider anyone who  believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.

As for whether sincere Bible study makes us better, isn't that obvious?  Will you be so bold as to maintain that someone who has taken to heart the Ten Commandments will not have been improved thereby?  If you do maintain this, then you are precisely the sort of person contact with whom would be pointless or worse, precisely the sort of person right thinking people need to  segregate themselves from, for the sake of peace.

The leftist will give opposite answers to the two questions with equal confidence.  There is no possibility of mediation here.  That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy, bien-pensant,  feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.'  Again, on what common ground?  Under the aegis of which set of shared principles?  There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views one believes are pernicious.  A man like A. C Grayling holds views that are not merely false, but pernicious.  He of course would return the 'compliment.'

If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.

Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism.  But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation.  At least for the time being.

No doubt there are disadvantages to segregation/balkanization.  Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here.  The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.

Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy  one expects from the NYT.  Less civic engagement!  The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference!  The Tea Party movement is a prime example.  The solution is less government.  As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over.  The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties. 

You may have noticed the paradox:  Civic engagement is needed to get to the point where we don't need to  engage civically with people we find repellent. 

Not Secession, Federalism

Glenn Reynolds talks sense.  My rather more academically worded federalism post.  And here is a short federalism post of mine with a link to a post by Jonah Goldberg.

The 'Bread' in 'Bread and Circuses'

According to this article, if every Food Stamp recipient voted for Obama, it would account for 75% of his total. 

As you know, it is not called Food Stamps anymore.  It has been given the snappy new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.  And it is actively promoted.

Liberals will call it part of the social safety net.  That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's death.  But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that entraps and deprives of liberty.  But liberals ignore this aspect of their favorite programs.  For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go together.  Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals,  self-reliance has to be diminished.  Part of the motivation of the liberal is to help the needy.   But another part is the lust for power which, to be retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term-- and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.

Am I opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help and cannot be helped by private charities.  But I am opposed to the current, utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons.  One is economic: the expansion is unsustainable.  The other is moral: it diminishes and degrades and infantilizes people.  "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)

Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

You say you're Catholic and you are going to vote for Obama? Are you stupid?  Apart from the fact that the Dems are the abortion party, the Obama administration's attack on civil society is at odds with Catholic social teaching which rests on the principle of subsidiarity.  David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of
subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more
complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler
organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more
decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited
government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for
centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest drift of the Obama administration, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any legitimate role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose Obama and the Left.  The argument is this:

1. The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2. Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3. If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Addendum:  This just over the transom from an old sparring partner of mine from the early days of the blogosphere, Kevin Kim:

Thank you for your recent post on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which I had never heard of despite years of dealing with Catholics.  I had a good chuckle when I read this:

"This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization."

And this from a gigantic, thoroughly hierarchized organization!

But what really burbled to the surface of my mind was the thought that, for a supposedly Catholic principle, subsidiarity sounds remarkably Protestant.  Heh.

But isn't it obvious what the Catholic response would be?  The church is in the business of mediating salvation.   What the church does cannot be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization.  Nulla salus extra ecclesiam, where the church in question is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church founded by Christ himself on St. Peter as upon a rock and presided over by the Holy Spirit.  It might also be argued that the principle of subsidiarity is a secular or temporal political principle and not one that has any bearing on soteriology.  For the same reason there is nothing Protestant about it.

Dems: "Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To"

Some say that there is no real difference between the two major parties in the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats.  The claim is breathtakingly false for so many reasons.  The latest example of difference is provided by   this DNC video.   John Hayward's response is spot on:

Even this benign-sounding apologia for “government is the only thing we all belong to” is incredibly wrong-headed.  We most certainly do not belong to the government.  We are all members of the electorate, which is a very different thing.  Each of us lives beneath several distinct governments – federal, state, city – empowered to protect our rights, not act as the almighty executor of some “collective will” that exists only in the totalitarian fantasies of liberals.  There are very few areas of government action that command anything like overwhelming majority support from Americans, let alone nearly unanimous approval.

To which I add:

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have."

The government is not us as liberals like to say. It is an entity over against most of us run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry scoundrels, for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and  extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government.  To do so is not anti-government.  Too many leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government.  It is a lie and they know it.  They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

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Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers.  In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.   

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second.  The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will.  Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies. 

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government.  We need government, limited government.

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Obama showed his true colors quite unmistakably in his 'You didn't build that" speech.  Yuval Steinitz has his number:

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

As I said before, it is a classic false alternative fallacy: either you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or government helps you.  This goes together with a straw man fallacy: Obama imputes to his opponents an absurd 'rugged individualism' that they do not espouse.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.

Disconcerting is right.  It's an all-out, totalitarian assault on the institutions of civil society.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and it can brook no competitors: not religion, not the family, not private charities and associations.

This intolerance of nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the administration’s attitude toward the institutions of civil society, especially religious institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees under Obamacare, the administration has shown an appalling contempt for the basic right of religious institutions to pursue their ends in accordance with their convictions.

It is important to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs — which of course they do have in our country. It did not even say that the government facilitate people’s access to these drugs — which it does today and has done for decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other religious entities should facilitate people’s access to contraceptive and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of civil society into active agents of the government’s ends, even in violation of their fundamental religious convictions.

The idea is to hollow out the space  between the individual and the State, to clear it of the institutions of civil society that mediate between individual and state:

Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. In May, the Obama campaign produced a Web slideshow called “The Life of Julia,” which follows a woman through the different stages of life and shows the many ways in which she benefits from public policies that the president advocates. It was an extraordinarily revealing work of propaganda, and what it revealed was just what the president showed us in Roanoke: a vision of society consisting entirely of the individual and the state. Julia’s life is the product of her individual choices enabled by public policies. She has an exceptional amount of direct contact with the federal government, yet we never meet her family. At the age of 31, we are told, “Julia decides to have a child” and “benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” She later benefits from all manner of educational, economic, and social programs, and seems to require and depend upon no one but the president.

[. . .]

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

[. . .]

To ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard the essence of American life. To clear away what stands between the state and the citizen is to extinguish the sources of American freedom. The president is right to insist that America works best when Americans work together, but government is just one of the many things we do together, and it is only rarely the most important of them.

One of the problems with Romney is that he has no clue as to what the battle is really about.  He thinks solely in economic terms.  Paul Ryan or somebody should force the affable milque-toast to study Steinitz's piece and then give him a test on it.

ButI'll give Mitt this: his pick of Ryan as running mate was courageous and intelligent.

Did the State Make You Great?

Krauthammer 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added):

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

(One quibble: Krauthammer's "product of society" is too strong. But even the great stumble on occasion.)

How can Obama be so stupid that he doesn't understand the above?  And how could we be so(collectively) stupid as to have elected  the incompetent?  (Don't blame me: I held my nose and voted for the effete and superannuated McCain.)

Obama commits a grotesque straw man fallacy when he imputes to conservatives and libertarians the view that each of us pulled himself up by his own bootstraps ex nihilo.  That goes hand-in-glove with a fallacy of false alternative: either you did it all on your own, or government did it for you.  As Krauthammer in effect points out, the institutions of civil society are neither the creation of the individual nor government agencies. 

Gun Laws and the Supposed 'Politicization' of the Aurora Massacre

Last year, when Republicans were being accused of 'politicizing' the national debt crisis I made the point that one cannot politicize that which is inherently political:

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis.  But how can you politicize what is  inherently political?  The debt in question is the debt of the federal government.  Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions.  As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political.  Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

Then I was criticizing Democrats and liberals.  But now I find that some Republicans and conservatives are making the same mistake.  They are accusing liberals of politicizing the Aurora massacre.  Example here.

But as I said, you cannot politicize what is already political.  Now guns are not political entities, but gun laws are, whether federal, state, or local.  Whether there should be gun laws at all, and what their content should be are political questions.

Now we all agree that we have to have laws regulating the manufacture, sale,  transporting, and use of firearms.  So we all agree that we have to have 'gun control.'  Gun control is not what I display or fail to display at the shooting range, but is a phrase that refers to gun control laws.  Since we all want gun control, we all want (enforceable and enforced)  gun control laws, even the dreaded NRA.

It is a liberal lie to say that conservatives are against gun control.  It is similar to the liberal lie that conservatives are anti-government.  If I am for limited government, then I am for government, whence it follows that I am not against government.    (Anarchists are anti-government, but no conservative, and few libertarians, are against government.)  Likewise, if I am for laws that prevent the sale of guns to felons, and for other such laws, then I am not against gun control. 

By the way, the preternaturally obtuse Bill Moyers got a nice and well-deserved slap-down from Bill O'Reilly the other night for his idiotic remarks about the NRA.  Bill Moyers is a one-man argument for the federal defunding of PBS and its affiliates such as NPR. (See National Public Radio Needs Your Support!)  Listen to the whole of O'Reilly's speech.  He is a moderate on gun control, too moderate perhaps.  He is moderate on many issues.   Is that why the Left can't stand him?

But I digress.  We  all agree that we need enforceable and enforced gun control laws.  But we don't all agree about the content of these laws.  Now that is a political question the answering of which presupposes a political theory, a theory of man in his relation to the state. The gun debate is political from the ground up.  It is silly so speak of 'politicizing' it.

Here is what I say.  I have a right to life, a right to defend my life, and a right to appropriate means of self-defense.  No government has the right to interfere with these rights.  This is nonnegotiable.  If you disagree, I have to put you down as morally and intellecually obtuse, as beyond the pale of rational debate.  I will do my best to make sure that you and your ilk are defeated politically.

What's an appropriate means of self-defense?  The tactical shotgun is the most effective  tool of home defense.  Holmes, the Aurora shooter, had one of those.  It looked like a Remington 1070.  He misused it for evil ends.  That is chargeable to his moral and legal account, not to the gun's.  Guns lack such 'accounts.'  No gun is a free agent.  No gun ever lilled anybody.  Killing is an action (action-type); actions are actions of agents.  Pay attention, liberals.

There will always be massacres and murders regardless of the stringency of gun laws.  Norway.

Can anything be done?  Yes.  Enforce existing gun laws.  Execute miscreants such as Holmes, after a fair trial, in a speedy manner.  There could a be a judicial fast-track to expedite the execution of such people within a year, at most.  Put limits on the quantities and types of vile and soul-destroying rubbish that HollyWeird liberals dish out.  Stop attacking religion, that most excellent vehicle for the delivery of moral teachings.  If Holmes had internalized the Ten Commandments as a boy, could he have done what he did?  Do you think he would have been less likely to do what he did?

But liberals are morally and intellectually obtuse.  So they will fight against all reasonable proposals.  A liberal would far rather violate the rights of decent citizens than mete out justice to vicious criminals. 

Equality of Opportunity Thin and Thick

Will Knowland writes:

Browsing your Money Matters section, I noticed this:

Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with
equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under
the law.  It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial
of equality of opportunity -- via  'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever -- from the
premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome.  There
will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between
individuals and groups.  Equality of outcome is not even a value.  We must do
what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where
they may.

I agree that there will never be equality of outcome, but neither will there ever be equality of opportunity, because opportunities at any given moment won't be equal unless outcomes are. And must we do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity? Can does not imply may. Family circumstances, for example, are the biggest determinant of a child's educational success. The State could, as Plato wanted, remove children from their families at birth. That would produce a more level playing field.

As Don Colacho wisely warned, though, "levelling is the barbarian's substitute for order."

BV responds:  You say,  "neither will there ever be equality of opportunity, because opportunities at any given moment won't be equal unless outcomes are."  Your argument appears to be this:

a. There will never be equality of outcome
b. There is equality of opportunity if and only if there is equality of outcome
Therefore
c. There will never be equality of opportunity.

We agree that (a) is true, but I would deny (b).  In fact (b) strikes me as plainly false.  I enter local road races, but I never win.  I don't come close to winning: I am a back-of-the-pack plodder who if he is lucky wins in his age division.  So there is no equality of outcome.  But there is equality of opportunity: I have exactly the same opportunity to win as the world-class 25 year old who actually wins.  In what sense?  Well, no one barred me from entering the race; I wasn't forced to pay a higher entry fee; no one verbally abused me before or during the race; no one threw rocks at me; I was not forced to wear weights that would slow me down; obstacles were not thrown in my path; etc.  The timing chip even compensated me time-wise for the fact that I could not stand right at the starting line with the top runners.

So I had an equal opportunity qua runner to win, an opportunity equal to that of every other participant.  I was not discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, creed, length of hair, or the fact that I insist on wearing the skimpy, slit-up-the-side nylon shorts we wore in the '70s as opposed to those  utterly ridiculous, baggy, gangsta-rappa semi-auto concealing, knee-length monstrosities popular now among sartorial know-nothings [grin].

Obviously much depends on the concept of equality of opportunity being employed, and I favor a very 'thin' conception.  Clearly, one one can plump for 'thicker' conceptions.  But the thicker the conception, the less the contrast with equality of outcome/result.  I grant that there is no real chance of me winning any (well-attended) road race.  But that is irrelevant.  Relevant alone is whether I am being excluded on the basis of irrelevant criteria, such as my sex or the color or skimpiness of my running shorts.

As for ensuring equality of opportunity, I would say that we must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity in my thin sense.  But on your exceedingly thick conception, according to which equality of opportunity is equivalent to equality of outcome, then we, collectively, deploying the awesome coercive power of the State, should not do anything.  That's what I meant above when I said: let the chips fall where they may.

As for the liberal-left phrase 'level playing field,' we conservatives should avoid it.  If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.  It's a metaphor whose application is severely limited.

If we are playing soccer or basketball (and there is no handicapping going on), then there must be a level playing field if there is to be a fair competition.  But suppose Tom was born with two good eyes and Sally with none.  Should we intervene to right that cosmic unfairness, to 'level the playing field' as between Tom and Sally, by transplanting (if we could) one of his eyes into her head?  No.

Tom does not deserve his two good eyes, his intelligence, his height, his being born in the USA, in a good, two-parent, loving family, not in a war zone, not with crack cocaine in his system, etc.  But he has a right to his advantages despite not deserving them, and no one and no State has the right to violate his rights.

We are just scratching the surface of a whole cluster of thorny and bitterly controverted questions.

Addendum:  Knowland sends use this quotation from John Kekes, The Illusions of Egalitarianism, (Cornell, 2006), p.84: ". . . equal opportunity tends to produce unequal outcome, and equal outcome
requires making opportunities unequal by increasing the protection of some at the expense of others."

Is Political Science Science?

The answer depends on what counts as science.  The so-called 'hard' sciences set the standard.  This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high.  For example, is climate science science according to these criteria?  I'll leave you to ponder that question.  There are branches of physics that cannot satisfy all five criteria.  But most of physics and chemistry meets the standard.

Is political science science according to these criteria?  Obviously not. Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters.

Am I suggesting that the only real knowledge is rigorously scientific knowledge?  Of course not.  Consider the knowledge we find in the first article to which I linked.  There is no doubt in my mind that each of the five criteria the author mentions is a criterion of science in the strictest sense.  (I leave open the question whether there are other criteria).  Now how do we know that?  By performing repeatable experiments in highly controlled conditions?  No.  By making testable predictions? No. 

We know that (1)-(5) are criteria of genuine science by reflecting on  scientific practice and isolating its characteristics.  When we do that we engage in the philosophy of science.  Since some of the philosophy of science gives us genuine knowledge about natural science, knowledge that it not itself scientific knowledge, it cannot be the case that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.

That all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge is the thesis of (strong) scientism.  Therefore, (strong) scientism is false.

Related post:  What is Scientism? 

Mayor Bloomberg on the Purpose of Government

(CBS News) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off criticism of his controversial public health initiatives, saying that "if government's purpose isn't to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don't know what its purpose is." [emphasis added.]

 Bloomberg most recently put forth a plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from the city's eateries, street carts and stadiums. The proposal has been sharply criticized, in some cases by beverage and fast food companies as a case of government overreach.

He's also been criticized for previous efforts to, among other things, ban smoking in public places and the use of trans-fats in restaurant foods. Some have gone so far as to mock has as being like a "nanny."

 But on "CBS This Morning," Bloomberg fired back, saying, "We're not here to tell anybody what to do. But we certainly have an obligation to tell them what's the best science and best medicine says is in their interest.

In this startlingly incoherent outburst, Bloomberg betrays the liberal nanny-state mentality in as direct a way as one could wish.  And it is incoherent.  He wants to ban large drinks, pop corn, milk shakes and what all else while assuring us that "we're not here to tell anybody what to do."  He blatantly contradicts himself.  Does the man think before he speaks?

But the deeper problem is that he has no notion of the legitimate functions of government.  Apparently he has never heard of limited government.  Border control is a legitimate constitutionally grounded function of government.  One reason the borders must be controlled is to impede the spread of contagious diseases.  So government does have some role to play in the health and longevity of citizens.  Defense of the country against foreign aggressors is also a legitimate function  of government and it too bears upon health and longevity: it is hard to live a long and healthy life when bombs are raining down.

Beyond this, it is up to the individual to live in ways that insure health and longevity if those are values for him.  But they might not be.  Some value intensity of life over longevity of life.  Rod Serling, for example, lived an extremely intense and productive life.  Born in 1925, he died in 1975 at age 50.  His Type A behavior and four-pack a day cigarette habit did him in, but was also quite possibly a necessary condition of his productivity.  That was his free choice.  No government has the right to dictate that one value longevity over intensity.

A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment
of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activites under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’

But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 250 cc.  In the same way that governments levy arbitrary punitive taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.

The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is
relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland. 

The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not?

Does Bloomberg even see the issue? 

Propinquity and Social Distance

Familiarity and social proximity have their positive aspects, but they also breed contempt. No man a hero to his valet. Nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua:  No prophet is accepted in his own country. (Luke 4:24) Few bloggers are read by their relatives. Social distance, too, has positive and negative sides.  One negative is that people are more ready  to demonize and abuse the  distant than the near-by.  Internet exchanges make that abundantly evident.  On the positive side, distance breeds respect  and idealization which can taper off into idolization.

What is almost impossible to achieve is justice in our relations with others, near and far, falling into neither favoritism nor contempt, demonization nor idolization.  Four extremes to avoid if you would be just.

A. Inordinately favoring one's own; being partial; overlooking or downplaying their wrong-doing.  Tribalism. Nepotism.  Clanishness.  Chauvinism.  Racism.  Class-identification.  Blut und Boden mentality.  Example: John Gotti's children thought him a good man despite the fact that his good qualities were overshadowed by his murderous thuggishness. 

The conservative is more likely to make this mistake than the liberal.

B. Contempt for one's own; being impartial in violation of duties to kith and kin; treating them exactly as one would treat an outsider, if not better.  A vacuousness internationalism that ignores real differences.

The liberal is more likely to make this mistake than the conservative.

C. Demonization of the other, the foreigner, the stranger.  Xenophobia.  Irrational hatred of the other just because he is other.

Some conservatives are prone to this.

D. Excessive admiration of the other. Idolization of the far away. Idolatry.  Romanticization of foreign lands and cultures.

Many liberals make this mistake.

Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Just over the transom from James Anderson:

I appreciated your recent posts on "social justice." I agree that the phrase is a mendacious rhetorical device and that conservatives should refuse to use it. But what should we use instead? In one post you asked what's wrong with "plain old 'justice.'"  One problem is that the phrase "social justice" has now become so depressingly commonplace that many folk, unaware of this conceptual revisionism, understand "justice" as shorthand for "social justice". So conservatives need their own distinctive qualifier. Fight fire with fire. What would be your suggestion?

One possibility is "natural justice". Not only does it tip its hat toward the venerable natural law tradition, it also communicates the idea that justice is inextricably tied to the intrinsic nature of things (specifically, the nature of human beings) as opposed to being a mere social construction (as, perhaps, "social justice" suggests). And like "social justice" it has the virtue of being unobjectionable on the face of it. To adapt the opening sentence of one of your posts: "How could any decent person be opposed to natural justice?" What would be the alternative? Unnatural justice?

I'd love to read your own thoughts on this, if you're inclined to share them.

I wish I had a worked-out theory and I wish I had a good answer for Professor Anderson.  But I won't let the absence of both stop me from making a few remarks. Nescio, ergo blogo.

As a sort of joke I might suggest that 'subsidiarity' be used by conservatives instead of 'social justice.'  The trouble with that word, of course, is that it conveys no definite idea to the average person whereas 'social justice' seems to convey a definite idea, one that the average person is inclined to embrace.  It sounds so good!  Who could be opposed to social justice and a just society?   But once one understands what 'social justice' means in the mouth of a leftist, then one has excellent reason to oppose it.  The Left has hijacked the phrase and now they own it; it would be quixotic for a conservative to try to infuse it with a reasonable meaning and win it back.  Let the Left have it!

Anderson and I therefore  agree that we conservatives should never use 'social justice,' or 'economic justice' for that matter.  Beyond that, we might take to using 'socialist justice' as an informative and accurate  way of referring to what leftists call social justice.  But what word or phrase should we use?   How about 'local justice'?  That's not very good, but at least it points in the the subsidiarist direction. Plain old 'justice' is better.  Anderson's 'natural justice' is serviceable.  It has the virtue of combating the notion that justice is a social construct.  But it doesn't combat the top-down control model of socialists and collectivists.  This brings me to subsidiarity.

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the Obama administration and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

I take it that subsidiarity is easily detachable from other Catholic doctrines.  Professor Anderson needn't fear that he will be driven in the direction of papal infallibility or Transubstantiation.  In any case, Catholics don't own subsidiarity.  In the ComBox to this excellent post, we find:

"SPHERE SOVEREIGNTY: A principle of Reformed Christian social ethics, usually associated with the thought of Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper*, that identifies a number of God- ordained creational spheres, which include the family, the state, culture, and the church. These spheres each have their own organizing and ruling ordinances, and each maintains a measure of authority relative to the others. Just social and political structures, therefore, should be ordered so that the authority of each sphere is preserved (see Limited Government and Subsidiarity, The Principle of)."

Subsidiarity also fits well wth federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama come November.  By the way, 'federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Permit me to coin 'malaptronym.'  If an aptronym is a name that suits its bearer, then 'federalism' is a malaptronym, a name that not only does not suit its bearer, but misleads as to the nature of said bearer.   And the same, of course, is true in spades of 'social justice.'

I say we consign it to the dreaded index verborum prohibitorum!

Federalism

My plea for federalism is contained in Can Federalism Save Us?  And so I am pleased to point my readers to Jonah Goldeberg's The Federalist Solution.

Mitt Romney mentioned federalism in a recent speech but he didn't pause to explain what it means.  That was a mistake.  Joe Sixpack has no idea what federalism is.  He probably thinks it means that more power should be handed over to the federal government. It wouldn't have killed Romney to take 30 seconds and provide a crisp definition. 

The same goes for such terms as 'social justice.'  They do not wear their meanings on their faces.  Pols and commentators need to learn the importance of defining one's terms.  Launching into a discussion of socialism, for example, without preliminary clarification of what it is is foolish and unproductive.

But be pithy! Joe Sixpack is a tweeting twit whose attention span is commensurate with the length of his 'tweets.'  Do not these tweeting twits fear that their brains will soon be fit only to  flit?

What is Social Justice?

How could any decent person be opposed to social justice? Don't we all want to live in a just society? But as Barry Loberfeld points out,

The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As [George] Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," -- i.e., a just society?

One of my criticisms of Bill O'Reilly is that he will use the phrase 'social justice' without explaining what it means. He will say something like, 'Obama is for social justice.' The average person who hears that will think, 'Well, what's wrong with that?' This is where the lately lamented (here and here) anti-intellectualism of conservatives comes back to bite them. Too many conservatives fail to realize the importance of defining one's terms before launching into a debate. Of course, I am talking about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives; I am not talking about conservative intellectuals.

Define your terms! This is is such an obvious demand that I feel slightly embarrassed to make it; but given the low level of culture one must make it and make it again.

Walter Block, here, offers a characterization that Mr O'Reilly should be able to wrap his 'no-spin' head around:

First, this concept [social justice] may be defined substantively. Here, it is typically associated with left wing or socialist analyses, policies and prescriptions. For example, poverty is caused by unbridled capitalism; the solution is to heavily regulate markets, or ban them outright. Racism and sexism account for the relative plight of racial minorities and women; laws should be passed prohibiting their exercise. Greater reliance on government is required as the solution of all sorts of social problems. The planet is in great danger from environmental despoliation, due to an unjustified reliance on private property rights. Taxes are too low; they should be raised. Charity is an insult to the poor, who must obtain more revenues by right, not condescension. Diversity is the sine qua non of the fair society. Discrimination is one of the greatest evils to have ever beset mankind. Use of terminology such as "mankind" is sexist, and constitutes hate speech.

Now I refer you to an excellent First Things article by Michael Novak which you should carefully study. Excerpt:

From this line of reasoning it follows that “social justice” would have its natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do, so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be “blaming the victim.” It is the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) “control” it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable, Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.

Novak seems to think that there is such a thing as social justice "rightly understood." I am not convinced that right-thinking people should use the term at all. The Left has destroyed it and now they own it. Anyway, what  is wrong with plain old 'justice'? How could justice fail to be social? 'Social justice' as currently used carries a load of leftist baggage.

As I have said many times, if you are a conservative, don't talk like a (contemporary) liberal. Don't use question-begging phrases and epithets such as 'social justice,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'homophobe.' Never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. If you let them command the terms of the debate, you will lose. Insist on clarity of expression and definition of terms. Language matters.

'Social justice,' then is a term that our side ought to avoid except when criticizing it. Novak, however, thinks that the phrase has a legitimate use:

 

Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is “social” in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, through which free citizens exercise self–government by doing for themselves (that is, without turning to government) what needs to be done. Citizens who take part commonly explain their efforts as attempts to “give back” for all that they have received from the free society, or to meet the obligations of free citizens to think and act for themselves. The fact that this activity is carried out with others is one reason for designating it as a specific type of justice; it requires a broader range of social skills than do acts of individual justice.

Ron Paul and Libertarian Extremism

Ron Paul made a strong showing in Iowa last night despite his coming in third behind Santorum (second) and Romney (first).  But there is no way that Paul will receive the Republican nomination. His irresponsible foreign policy positions alone disqualify him.  You may disagree with that, but most agree with me, and that includes the better pundits such as Krauthammer.  So Paul's electability is zero.  It is too bad because Paul and libertarians generally have many good ideas which serve as correctives to the socialist drift of the country and can help us move back in the right direction towards limited government, self-reliance, and individual responsibility.  But libertarians cannot seem to control their tendency towards extremism.  This is why the Libertarian Party will always be a losertarian party.  Paul had the good sense to join the GOP, but he hasn't had the good sense to rein in the extremism that seems bred-in-the-bone with libertarians.

Paul is right that the the U.S.  is overextended abroad, but he can't seem to make the point in a moderate and nuanced way.  He has to say, foolishly and irresponsibly, that Iran is no threat.  And so he comes across as a crazy old man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency.  His 19th century isolationism was already outmoded in the 19th century.

The extremism of libertarians is connected with their being doctrinaire.  It is good to be principled but bad to be doctrinaire.  It requires the subtlety of the conservative mind to understand the difference and the dialectic between the two, a subtlety that is often lost on the adolescent mind of the libertarian who wants nice clear exceptionless principles to cling to.

I'll give an example of how libertarians, most if not all, are extreme and doctrinaire.  Individual liberty  is a very high value.  One of the pillars of this liberty is the right to private property. The defense of private property against collectivists is essential to both libertarian and conservative positions.  So far, so good. The tendency of the libertarian, however, is to absolutize the right to private property.  He has a hard time grasping that principles and values often butt up against competing principles and values that also have a serious claim on our respect.  So he cannot see that well-crafted eminent domain laws are right and reasonable.  He cannot see that there is something we can call the common good which is in tension with the right to private property. 

A second example is how libertarians typically absolutize the value of liberty while ignoring the claims of such opposing values as security and equality.  For more see my post, Liberty and Security.

Secular Theocracy

Part I of an article by David J. Theroux.

In Defense of Distributism

Here.  "Contrary to what our critics suggest, Distributism does not denote government redistribution of wealth, which is socialism, but rather the natural distribution of wealth that arises when the means of production are distributed as widely as possible in society."

I am afraid I must quibble with the lax definition of socialism just given. 

Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of "a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production."  This is the standard definition. 

By the way, it is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist. For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to the strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this definition.  Then they will accuse his opponents of mispresenting his position,  with some justice.

To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated socialism, despite the fact that his behavior manifests a decided slouch towards it. So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism, he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, and individual liberty.

Vote 'No' on Mandatory Voting

The following, from the Powerblogs site, was written in August of 2006 and is here re-published in redacted form.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Norman Ornstein advocates mandatory voting:

     In the Australian system, registered voters who do not show up at
     the polls either have to provide a reason for not voting or pay a
     modest fine, the equivalent of about $15. The fine accelerates with
     subsequent offenses. The result, however, is a turnout rate of more
     than 95 percent. The fine, of course, is an incentive to vote. But
     the system has also instilled the idea that voting is a societal
     obligation.

There is, however, a reason not to go the way of the Aussies and make voting mandatory. As it is here in the USA, roughly only half of the eligible voters actually vote. This is arguably good inasmuch as voters filter themselves similarly as lottery players tax themselves. If I were a liberal, I would say that eligible voters who stay home 'disenfranchise' themselves, and to the benefit of the rest of us.  (But of course I am not a liberal and I don't misuse words like 'disenfranchise.')

What I mean is that, generally speaking, the people who can vote but do not are precisely the people one would not want voting in the first  place. To vote takes time, energy, and a bit of commitment. Careless, lazy, and uninformed people are not likely to do it. And that is good.   I don't want my thoughtful vote neutralized by the vote of some dolt who is merely at the polling place to avoid a fine. And if you force a  man to vote, he may rebel and vote randomly or in other ways that subvert the process.

Of course, many refuse to vote out of disgust at their choices. My advice for them would be to hold their noses and vote for the least or the lesser of the evils. Politics is always about choosing the least or the lesser of evils. The very fact that we need government at all  shows that we live in an imperfect world, one in which a perfect candidate is not to be found.  Government itself is a necessary evil:  it would be better if we didn't need it, but we do need it.

I support the right of those who think the system irremediably corrupt to protest by refusing to vote.  Government is coercive by its very nature, and mandatory voting is a form of coercion that belongs in a police state rather than in a free republic. 

If you think that a higher voter turnout is a good thing, that is happening anyway  as divisions deepen and our politics become more polarized.  The nastier our politics, the higher the turnout.  And it will get nastier still.  So why do we need mandatory voting? 

Fact is, we are awash in unnecessary laws.  We don't need more laws  and more government interference in our lives.  And will this law be enforced? How? At what expense?  Isn't it perfectly obvious to everyone with commonsense that  we need to move toward less government rather than more, toward more liberty rather than less?

If you think about it, 'One man, one vote' is a very dubious principle. I think about it here. Voluntary voting is one way of balancing the ill effects of 'One man, one vote.'  But isn't voting a civic duty?  I would say that it is.   But not every duty should be legally mandated.  

Addendum: Re-reading the quotation above, I notice that Ornstein reports that registered Aussie voters who do not vote are subject to a fine if they don't have an excuse for not voting. One wonders if those eligible to vote are also legally required to register. If not, their system is a joke: one could avoid voting by simply failing to register! It sounds like an expensive bureaucratic mess to me in which the negatives outweigh the positives.

References

  1.http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/opinion/10ornstein.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin    

  2.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/telling-americans-to-vote-or-else.html?_r=1

9/11 Ten Years After: Liberty and Security

Liberty and security stand in a dialectical relation to each other in that (i) each requires the other to be what it is, and yet (ii) each is opposed to the other. Let me explain.

Ad (i). LIberty is something worth having.  But a liberty worth having is a liberty capable of being exercised fruitfully and often. Liberty in this concrete sense requires security to be what it is. My liberty to  leave my house at any time of the day or night would be worth little or nothing if I were to be mugged every time I stepped over the threshold. On the other hand, a security worth having is a security that makes possible the exercise of as much liberty as is consistent with the liberty of all. The security of a prison or of a police state is not a security worth having. A security worth having, therefore, requires liberty to be what it is, something worth having.

Ad (ii). Nevertheless, liberty and security oppose each other. The security of all requires limitations on the liberty of each. For if the liberty of each were allowed untrammelled expression, no one would be secure in his life and property. Thus security opposes and limits liberty. Equally, liberty opposes and limits security. The right to keep and bear arms, for example, poses a certain threat to security, as everyone must admit whether liberal, conservative, or libertarian. The question is not whether it poses a threat, but whether the threat it poses is acceptable given the desirability of the liberty it allows.

Ad (i) + (ii). The situation is complex. Liberty requires the very security that it limits, just as security limits the very liberty that it requires. It follows that any attack on our security is also an attack on our liberty. It seems to me that this is a point that liberals and leftists do not sufficiently appreciate, and that some of them do not appreciate at all. The 9/11 attack on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon  did not merely destroy the security of those working in them, it also destroyed their liberty, while impeding to greater and lesser degrees the liberty of all the rest of us. But it must also be said that any restriction on our liberties also negatively affects the value of our security -- a point conservatives need to bear in mind.

In the present circumstances, however, when the threats to our security are grave indeed, it is reasonable to tolerate greater than usual restrictions on our liberty. Any liberal or leftist who
disagrees with this should be unceremoniously confronted with the question: How much liberty did the victims of the 9/11 attack enjoy while they were being crushed under girders, burned alive, or falling to their deaths?

I now hand off to Charles Krauthammer, The 9/11 'Overreaction'?

On Private and Public Morality

Many liberals have the bad habit of confusing private and public morality.  They think that moral injunctions that make sense in private ought to be carried over into the public sphere.  Such liberals are dangerously confused.  There are those who, for example, take the Biblical injunction to "welcome the stranger" as a reason to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration.  Or consider the NT injunction to "turn the other cheek."

Although it is morally permissible for an individual to "turn the other cheek," "to resist not the evildoer," etc. in the letter and spirit of the New Testament, it is morally impermissible for government officials in charge of national defense and security to do the same. For they are responsible for people besides themselves. Consider the analogy of the pater familias. He cannot allow himself to be slaughtered if that would result in the slaughter of his spouse and children. He must, morally speaking, defend himself  and them. With a single person it is different. Such a person may (morally speaking) heed the advice Ludwig Wittgenstein gave to M. O'C. Drury: "If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred." (Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. R. Rhees, p. 149) That was presumably advice Wittgenstein gave himself while a combatant in World War I.  

It is a serious mistake, and one oft-made by liberals, to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.

Imagine a society that implements a policy of not resisting (apprehending, trying, convicting, incarcerating, killing) rapists, murderers, foreign invaders, and miscreants generally. Such a society would seal its own death warrant and cease to function. It is a fact of human nature that people, in the main, behave tolerably well only under threat of punishment. People for the most part do not do the right thing because it is the right thing, but out of fear of  punishment. This is not pessimism, but realism, and is known to be true by all unprejudiced students of history and society.

As for turning the other cheek, it is a policy that works well in certain atypical circumstances. If a man has a well-formed conscience,  and is capable of feeling shame, then turning the other cheek in the face of his affront can achieve a result far superior to that achieved by replying in kind. Nonviolence can work. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British may serve as an historical example. The Brits could be shamed and in any case Gandhi had no other means at his  disposal. But imagine what would happen if Israel turned the other cheek in the face of its Islamic enemies who would blow it off the face of the map at the first opportunity?

Once your enemy has reduced you to the status of a pig or a monkey fit only to be slaughtered, then there is no way to reach him, shame him, or persuade him by acts of forebearance and kindness. You must resist him, with deadly force if necessary, if you wish to preserve your existence. And even if you in particular do not care to preserve your existence, if you are a government official charged with a defense function, then you are morally obliged to resist with as much deadly force as is necessary to stop the attacker even if that means targeting the attacker's civilian population.

But is it not better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, as Socrates maintained? Would it not be better to perish than to defend one's life by taking life? Perhaps, but only if the underlying metaphysics and
soteriology are true. If the soul is immortal, and the phenomenal world is of no ultimate concern -- being a vale of tears, a place through which we temporarily sojourn on our way to our true home --
then the care of the soul is paramount and to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it.

The same goes for Christianity which, as Nietzsche remarks, is "Platonism for the people." If you are a Christian, and look beyond this world for your true happiness, then you are entitled to practice an austere morality in your private life. But you are not entitled to impose that morality and metaphysics on others, or demand that the State codify that morality and metaphysics in its laws and policies.

For one thing, it would violate the separation of Church and State. More importantly, the implementation of Christian morality would lead to the destruction of the State and the State's ability to secure life, liberty, and property -- the three Lockean purposes for which we have a state in the first place. And bear in mind that a part of the  liberty the State protects is the liberty to practice one's religion or no religion.

There is no use denying that the State is a violent and coercive entity. To function at all in pursuit of its legitimate tasks of securing life, liberty, and property, it must be able to make war against external enemies and impose discipline upon internal malefactors. The violence may be justified, but it is violence  nonethless. To incarcerate a person, for example, is to violate his liberty; it is to do evil to him, an evil necessary for a greater good that can be attained in no other way.

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.] There is a tension
     between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.

As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who apparently cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.

Voluntary Balkanization: Good or Bad?

Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization.  Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.

I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism,  might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences.  We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues.  Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power,  and numerous others.

We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions,"  to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell.   When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. 

We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty.  Comity (social harmony) in whose terms?  On what common ground?  Peace is always possible if one side just gives in.  If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign.  But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.'  We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles.  And what would these be?

There is no point in papering over very real differences.

Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing. The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?

The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right.  The leftist will give opposite answers with equal confidence.  There is no possibility of mediation here.  That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.'  Again, on what common ground?  There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views are pernicious.

If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.

Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism.  But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation.

No doubt there are disdvantages to segregation/balkanization.  Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here.  The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.

Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy  one expects from the NYT.  Less civic engagement!  The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference!  The Tea Party movement is a prime example.  The solution is less government.  As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over.  The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties.

Value-Free Government?

Libertarians sometimes speak as if government could and ought to be value-free.  But value-free government is as impossible as value-free education.

Education cannot be value-free for the simple reason that all education, assuming it is not confused with indoctrination, presupposes that knowledge is a value and ignorance a disvalue.  If knowledge is a value then so is the pursuit of truth.  And if the pursuit of truth is a value, then the habits of mind and character the cultivation of which are conducive to the pursuit of truth are values as well.  Among these are truthfulness and intellectual honesty.  But truthfulness and intellectual honesty cannot be brought to bear in the quest for truth without diligence and self-control and respect for those who know better.  We could continue with this reflection but we have gone far enough to see that the notion of value-free education is nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the notion of value-free government.  One would not be much of a libertarian if one did not hold liberty to be a value and (material) equality to be, if not a disvalue, then at least subordinate in the axiological hierarchy to liberty.  So libertarians have at least one value, liberty.  They advocate a government that allows its richest expression.  Anarchists, conservatives, liberals, fascists -- they too have their characteristic values which they hope to promote when and if they gain power.

What I have said suffices to show that the notion of value-free government is nonsense.  The question is not whether values but which values.

One Man, One Vote: A Dubious Principle

It is a highly dubious principle if you think about it.  But is there a better one?

Suppose you have two people, A and B. A is intelligent, well-informed, and serious. He does his level best to form correct opinions about the issues of the day. He is an independent thinker, and his thinking is based in broad experience of life. B, however, makes no attempt to become informed, or to think for himself. He votes as his union boss tells him to vote. Why should B's vote have the same weight as A's? Is it not self-evident that B's vote should not count as much as A's?

I think it is well-nigh self-evident.  The right to vote cannot derive simply from the fact that one exists or has interests.  Dogs and cats have interests, and so do children.  But we don't grant children the right to vote.  Why not? Presumbaly because they lack the maturity and good judgment necessary for casting an informed vote.  Nor do we grant felons the right to vote despite their interests.

The problem, however, is that there is no obvious criterion that one could employ to segregate those who are worthy of voting from those who are not. A friend of mine once proposed that only Ph.D.s should be allowed to vote. That is a hopeless proposal for several reasons. First of all, specialized expertise is no guarantee of even minimal competence outside of one's specialty. Second, there are Ph.D.s who are not even competent in their own disciplines. Third, there are plenty of non-Ph.D's who are more worthy of voting than many Ph.D.s. There are Ph.D.s I wouldn't hire to run a peanut stand let alone cast an intelligent vote.

The same holds for any other academic credential. Would you want to exclude the likes of [2]Eric Hoffer from voting on the ground that he  had no formal schooling whatsoever?

Sex and race are obvious non-starters as criteria for separating the worthy from the unworthy.

What about owning property? Should owning property, or once having  owned property, be a necessary condition for voting? No, for the simple reason that people eminently qualified to vote may for various good reasons remain renters all their lives. It is obvious that, generally speaking, property owners have a better and more balanced  understanding of taxation and cognate issues than non-owners do; but if we follow out this line of reasoning, then only property owning married persons with children should be allowed to vote.

There are people whose experience of life is very rich but who are too conceptually impoverished to extract any useful principles from their experience that they could bring to bear in the voting booth. And then there are people who have deliberately restricted their range of experience (by not having children, say) precisely in order to be in a position to develop fully their conceptual powers. Now to adjudicate between cases of these two sorts with an eye to determining fitness for voting would require the wisdom of Solomon. So forget about it.

We live in a culture in which adolescent immaturity often extends through the twenties and into the thirties and beyond. So one might think to exclude the unfit by allowing only people of age 30 or above the right to vote. But just as being 30 years old is no guarantee of maturity, being 18 is no guarantee of the opposite. In general, older people, being more experienced, are more judicious and thus more likely to vote intelligently. But the counterexamples to this are legion.

I'll insert an historical aside here. The right of 18-year-olds to vote is guaranteed by the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Before that, one had to be 21 years old. The 26th Amendment was ratified on July 1st, 1971 during the Vietnam war, a fact which is of course relevant to the Amendment's proposal and ratification. Some of us remember the words of Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction (1965):  "...you're old enough to kill, but not for votin'...."

Once we exclude educational credentials, sex, race, property-ownership, and age as criteria, what do we have left? Nothing  that I can see apart from the standard criteria of voter eligibility. One man, one vote though certainly a flawed principle, may be the best we can do.

We would make it worse, however, if we went the way of the Aussies and made voting mandatory. As it is here in the USA, roughly only half of the eligible voters actually vote, though this is changing with the exacerbation of political polarization. This is good inasmuch as voters filter themselves similarly as lottery players (quite stupidly) tax themselves. What I mean is that, generally speaking, the people who can vote but do not are precisely the people one would not want voting in the first place. To vote takes time, energy, and a bit of commitment. Careless, stupid, and uniformed people are not likely to do it. And that is good. Of course, many refuse to vote out of disgust at their choices. My advice for them would be to hold their noses and vote for the least or the lesser of the evils. Politics is always about choosing the least or the lesser of evils.  To not vote because there is no perfect candidate is to let the best become the enemy of the good.

I'll conclude by considering an objection. I said that 'One man, one vote' is a flawed principle. For it implies that the vote of a sage and the vote of a dolt count the same. It might be objected in defense
of the principle that both sage and dolt are equal in point of both having an equal interest in the structure of the society in which they live. Granted. But not all know their own long-term best interest. So from the mere fact that A and B have an equal stake in a well-ordered society it does not follow that each person's vote should count the same. 

What's more, this sort of reasoning proves too much. For children and felons and illegal aliens also have a stake in a well-ordered society, and only the seriously benighted  want to extend the vote to them. Of course, this does not stop many contemporary liberals from wanting to extend the vote to children and felons and illegal aliens. It merely  shows that they have lost all common sense. (Presumably they would make an exception in the case of the unborn!) So if equality of interest entails right to vote, then we have a reductio ad absurdum of  'one man, one vote.'

Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

I see that R. P. Wolff has a blog, The Philosopher's Stone.  His post Anarchism and Marxism caught my eye.  In it he addresses the question of the logical consistency of his anarchism and his Marxism.   The answer of course depends on how Wolff employs these terms.

First of all, when I call myself an anarchist, I mean just exactly what I explained in my little book In Defense of Anarchism. I deny that there is or could be a de jure legitimate state. That is the sum and substance of what I call in that book my "philosophical anarchism." This is a limited claim, but not at all a trivial one. [. . .]

My Marxism, as I have many times explained, is not a form of secular religious faith, but a conviction that Marx was correct when he argued that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Clearly, *A de jure legitimate state is impossible* and *Capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the  working class* are logically consistent propositions.  So if these propositions capture what is meant by 'anarchism' and 'Marxism,' then one can be both an anarchist and a Marxist.

So far, so good.  But suppose one accepts the second proposition.  Wouldn't one naturally want to bring about political change and eliminate capitalism and with it the exploitation of the working class?  (As Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.")  Now the implementation of this change and the maintenance of a a socialist order requires the coercive power of the state and with it the violation of the autonomy of all those who resist. 

This fact brings us to a much more interesting consistency question:  How could an anarchist (in Wolff's sense), consistently with his anarchism, be a Marxist in any full-blooded sense of the term?  In a full-blooded sense, a Marxist is not one who merely maintains the thesis that capitalism by its very nature exploits workers, but one who works to seize control of the state apparatus for the purpose of implementing the elimination of capitalism.  The following  two propositions are plainly inconsistent: *The state as such lacks moral justification* and *The state possess moral justification when its coercive power is employed to eliminate capitalism and usher in socialism.*

Now that is the inconsistency that bothers me.  Wolff appears to address it at the end of his post:

I can see no conflict whatsoever between philosophical anarchism and Marxian socialism. The citizens of a socialist society, were one ever to come into existence [Gott sei dank!], would have no more obligation to obey the laws of that state, merely because it was socialist, than they have now to obey the laws of the United States, merely because America is (let us grant for the sake of argument) democratic. Both groups of citizens would stand under the universal duty of judging for themselves whether what the laws command is something that on independent grounds it is good to do. There is no duty, prima facie or otherwise, to obey the law simply because it is the law.

There is something unsatisfactory about this answer.  Wolff obviously wants a socialist society.  But good Kantian that he is, Wolff must appreciate that to will the end is to will the means.  The end is a socialist order; the means is the imposition of  socialism and the eradication of capitalism by means of the coercive power of the state.  (You would have to be quite the utopian off in Cloud Cuckoo Land to suppose that socialism could be brought about in any other way.  And of course once the socialist state has total control, it won't "wither away.")  So it seems Wolff must will and thus find morally acceptable the state apparatus that enforces and maintains socialism.  But then his Marxism contradicts his anarchism.  For these two propositions are logically inconsistent: *No state is morally justified* and *States that enforce and maintain socialism are morally justified.*

The bit about there being no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law seems not to the point.  The point is that if socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and the only route to socialism is via the state's exercise of its coercive power, then one who  wills and works for the implementation of socialism must will and work for and find morally acceptable the existence of a socialist state.

Or maybe Wolff's position just boils down to the triviality that whatever order comes about, whether capitalist, socialist, mixed, or anything else,  there would be no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law.  But then he hasn't shown the consistency of anarchism and Marxism in any full-blooded sense of these terms.

I summarize Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism here , here, and here. 

Money, Power, and Equality

 J. R. Lucas, "Against Equality," in Justice and Equality, ed.  Hugo Bedau (Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 148-149:

Since men value power and prestige as much as the possession of wealth---indeed, these three `goods' cannot be completely separated---it is foolish to seek to establish an equality of wealth on egalitarian grounds. It is foolish first because it will not result in what egalitarians really want. It is foolish also because if we do not let men compete for money, they will compete all the more for power; and whereas the possession of wealth by another man does not hurt me, unless I am made vulnerable by envy, the possession of power by another is Inherently dangerous; and furthermore if we are to maintain a strict equality of wealth we need a much greater apparatus of state to secure it and therefore a much greater inequality of power. Better have bloated plutocrats than omnipotent bureaucrats.

This is a penetrating passage from a penetrating essay. Lucas is in effect pointing out a paradox at the heart of the egalitarian  position. If the egalitarian wants to equalize wealth, perhaps via a scheme of income redistribution, then he will need to make use of state power to do it: the wealthy will not voluntarily disembarrass themselves of their wealth. But state power is of necessity concentrated in the hands of a few, those who run the government,  whose power is vastly greater than, and hence unequal to, the power of  the governed.

The paradox, then, is that the enforcing of equality of wealth requires inequality of power. But, as Lucas points out, the powerful are much more dangerous to us than the wealthy. Your being wealthy takes away nothing from me, and indeed stimulates the economy from which I profit, whereas your being powerful poses a threat  to my liberty.

But I hear an objection coming: "Wealth is convertible into power since the wealthy can buy their way to political influence, whether legally or illegally." True, but the seriousness of this problem is a function of how intrusive and overreaching the government is. A government stripped down to essential functions offers fewer opportunities for the power-hungry. Note also that the wealthy may  feel it necessary to buy influence just to protect themselves from  regulatory zeal. 

Kierkegaard on the Impotence of Earthly Power

  The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justifed only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example,the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Paestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and sometimes misused.  This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.

We don't know whether or not God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and colaescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

Tough questions:  Could such a transcendental Ideal (in Kant's sense) be merely a transcendental Ideal impossible of existence in reality?  And could anything impossible count as an ideal?  But if God is possible would he not have to be actual?

On Smiting One's Political Enemies

Tony Hanson e-mails from the once-great state of California whose governor-elect is once again Governor Moonbeam:

I see you had Berlin's essay in your library and reread it. I just wanted to say I don't think that we are in quite the bind you describe since there still seems to be a lot of room for some good rationally justified smiting, polemics and general political ass-kicking in spite of value pluralism. I'll make this very brief.

Defense of Polemics. I am sure you would agree that one's opponents may have all sorts of bad reasons for their positions, and (politely?) exposing them can make people more thoughtful, and may even enlighten them to the truth of value pluralism so much so that they may "flinch" too. Could this encourage comity?

That is a good point and I fully agree with it.  The pluralistic position, according to which no objective resolution satisfactory to all competent practioners is possible due to irresolvable value differences, is entirely consistent with the possibility of the fully objective exposure of bad arguments and empirical falsehoods on both sides.  Take abortion.  There are bad arguments on both sides of the debate, and almost everyone will agree that there are.   (I won't say what those bad arguments are lest I spark a meta-debate as to exactly which arguments on both sides are bad; but that there are bad arguments on both sides is uncontroversial.)   An argument can be objectively bad for a number of different reasons: it is logically invalid; rests on an empirically false premise; involves a weak analogy; commits an informal fallacy; is so murky and indistinct as to be insusceptible of evaluation, etc.  The essence of the pluralistic position is that once all the bad arguments on both sides are set aside, one arrives at a set of 'good' arguments which, however, do not resolve the issue for an  impartial observer.

I would quibble, though, with your use of 'polemics.'  From the Greek polemos, it means strife, struggle, war.  So we can define polemics as verbal warfare, warfare at the level of ideas.  There needn't be anything polemical about pointing out to an opponent that one of his arguments falls short of an objective standard such as the one represented by formal logic.  Here there is the possibility of convincing the opponent (assuming he is sincere, intelligent, etc.) because the cognitive values that come into play (truth, clarity, logical coherence, etc.) are agreed upon.

Defense of War and Smiting.  You said, "Suppose further ... that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two." Say you are arguing with a Fascist or radical libertarian (who thinks property rights are absolute), and no empirical fact or reasoning satisfies them In other words, they are unreasonable.

But if you say that the radical libertarian is unreasonable, what are your criteria of reasonability or rationality?  I reject the radical libertarian position on property rights and I get the impression that you do as well.  But from his point of view, his stance is reasonable in that it is rationally derivable from certain axioms he accepts.  Is there some plain empirical fact that he fails to take cognizance of, or some rule of logic that he flouts?  When you  say that the radical libertarian is unreasonable, aren't you just rejecting his scheme of values? He places an absolute, inviolable, value on the individual and his property and refuses to admit that there are any competing values that would tend to have a relativizing effect.  Consider an eminent domain dispute.  Farmer Jones has worked hard all his life and owns 100 acres.  The Feds want to buy from him a strip of land for a much-needed road that cannot be placed anywhere else. Jones refuses to sell.  Even if he agrees that there is such a thing as the common good, he refuses to concede that it has the power to limit the absoluteness of his property right.

When you say that Jones is unreasonable, what you are doing is pitting your value-based conception of reasonableness against his.  But then my point goes through, which was that disputes like this are objectively irresolvable because rooted in value disputes which are objectively irresolvable.

Seems like its time for the Converse Clausewitz Principle [Politics is war conducted by other means]. Well, you can of course work to defeat libertarians in the political arena (though they do a pretty good job of this themselves, which is why I follow Medved in calling them 'losertarians.')  But the issue concerns your rational warrant for "unflinchingly" opposing them.  What makes you so cocksure that you are right and they are wrong?

Further, it seems a distinction needs to be made between the priority of a value, and the weight (or  height?) of the priority. Two people could prioritize security over liberty, but one would be prepared to sacrifice a lot more liberty for security than the other. The extremist gives his value too much weight, obviously; but it also seems one can be objectively wrong about the weight of the prioritized value, and not be an extremist. Invoking Aristotle might be helpful. Though one might not be a complete coward (or extremist), one might miss the mark with respect to courage and be a little cowardly, and so on with the various values. Moreover, it might not be possible to come to an agreement by using facts and reason, to what "hitting the mark" is, but you know it misses. Someone might have a different intuition on what hitting the mark is, or the target might be a large one allowing for disagreement, but it still might be worth trusting your sense of "tone," and fighting for it.

I agree that if value V1 takes priority over value V2, there remains the question of how much higher up in the axiological hierarchy V1 is.  Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  He apparently valued his liberty over his very life.  Would you call him an extremist?  If yes, then what is wrong with being an extremist?  If he is placing an inordinate value on liberty, how do you show that?  Or take the Obama liberal who is willing to sacrifice his liberty for (the promise of) cradle-to-grave security and material comfort.  How do you show in an objective manner that the liberal places too much value on security and not enough on liberty?  You simply assert that "one can be objectively wrong about the weight of the prioritized value." Gratuitous assertions, however, elicit gratuitous counterassertions in response.

Tea Partiers object to the liberty-encroaching governmental overreach of the Obama gang.  (Case in point: the 'individual mandate' of Obamacare which forces citizens to buy health insurance.)  The political conflict is rooted in a deep value conflict.  How resolve it?

I don't see how Aristotle helps in this.  I would also point out that he was talking about virtues, not values, which are a different animal entirely and didn't come into philosophical currency until the 19th century.  A virtue is a habit (hexis, habitus), a dispositional feature of an agent; a value is . . . well what exactly is a value?  An abstract or ideal object of some sort?

The ComBox is open to give Hanson an opportunity to reply.  Others may chime in as well, but only if their comments are well-informed, intelligent, and stick precisely to the topic under discussion, what he says and what I say here and in the post that Hanson in replying to.  I simply delete comments I consider to be substandard. 

Can I Stand Unflinchingly for Convictions that I Accept as Only Relatively Valid?

Isaiah Berlin's great essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" concludes as follows:

'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, ' and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.'  To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, p. 172.)

A marginalium of mine from 1994 reads, "If I think my convictions merely relatively valid, how can I stand for them unflinchingly?  Even if this is psychologically possible, it seems to be something we ought not do."

To expand upon my 1994 thought.  The liberty of the individual to be free from coercion and obstruction -- "negative liberty (freedom)" in Berlin's terminology -- obviously comes into conflict with other things we deem valuable such as equality, security, and public order. 

Consider how liberty and security are related. Liberty worth having is liberty within a context of security, and security is security worth having only if it makes possible a robust exercise of liberty.  For example, my liberty to leave my house at any time of the day or night  is worth very little if the probability is high that I will be accosted by muggers and other unsavory types when I step out my door.  The security of a police state would prevent that but at a cost too high to pay.

So liberty and security, though both values, are competing values.  Does one rank higher than the other such that we ought to prefer one to the other?  In a concrete situation in which they come into conflict,   one must choose.  Consider for example a sobriety checkpoint on New Year's Eve when by custom booze intake is high.  Such checkpoints involve a clear violation of the (negative) liberty of the individual, and yet they are arguably justifiable in the interests of security and public order.

Now suppose you have a conservative and a libertarian.  In conflict situations, the conservative tends to rank security over liberty, while the libertarian does the opposite.  They both agree that the values in play are indeed values, but they differ as to their prioritization.  Suppose further something that seems obviously true, namely, that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two. 

Now here's the question.  Given that the two maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses, how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially  on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?

I am suggesting that a truly civilized man, one who fully appreciates this predicament he is in, must give up his unflinchingness.  He ought to flinch!  After all, his opponent has all the same intellectual and moral virtues as he has --let us assume -- is equally capable of reasoning cogently above whatever are the facts, and is equally well apprised of all empirical facts that bear on the issue.  Isn't there something "barbaric" about insisting on one's own position assuming that all of these conditions have been met?

I agree with Berlin that it would be "dangerous and immature" to claim absolute truth for convictions that rest on value judgments that cannot be objectvely established.  But once we get this far, then unflinchingness must also go by the board: what I recognize as true only from my point of view, I cannot hold in an unflinching manner.

And yet I must act, hold opinions, vote, take a stand, smite my enemies.  Suspension of judgment and retreat from the political sphere does not seem to be a viable option -- especially not in the face of a bunch of leftist totalitarians who want to so extend the public /political sphere so as to destroy the private.  A hell of a bind we are in: we are essentially agents, hence must act, hence must stand fast, be resolute and smite our dangblasted political opponents -- all the while realizing that we have no justification for our unflinchingness.

The admirable writer Berlin mentions is Joseph Schumpeter.

The Conservative Disadvantage (2010 Version)

We conservatives are at a certain disadvantage as compared to our leftist brethren. We don’t seek the meaning of our lives in the political sphere but in the private arena: in hobbies, sports, our jobs and professions, in ourselves, our families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, clubs and churches; in foot races and chess tournaments; in the particular pleasures of the quotidian round in all of their scandalous particularity.

We don't look to politics for meaning. Above all, we conservatives do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere. We either deny that there is such a thing, or we seek it in religion, or in philosophy, or in meditation.  A conservative who denies that there is ‘pie in the sky’ will certainly not seek ‘pie in the future.’ He will not, like the leftist, look to a human future for redemption.  He understands human nature, its real possibilities, and its real limits.  He is impervious to utopian illusions.  He will accept no ersatz soteriology.

 A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning.  Politics for a conservative is more like garbage-collecting: it is a dirty job; somebody has to do; it would be better if nobody had to do it; and we should all lend a hand in getting the dirty job done. But there is little by way of meaning, immanent or transcendent, in garbage collecting and sewage disposal: these are things one gets out of the way so that meaningful activities can first begin.

I’m exaggerating a bit. To write is to exaggerate, as a Frenchman might put it, which amounts to a meta-exaggeration. But I’m exaggerating to make a serious point. We conservatives don’t look for meaning in all the wrong places. And because we don’t, we are at a certain disadvantage. We cannot bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the political struggle. We don't even use the word 'struggle.' We are not totally committed to defeating the totally committed totalitarians who would defeat us.

But now we need to become  active.  Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encroachment.    The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration.   So if you value your life and liberty, you are well advised to inform yourself and take appropriate action.

So get off your conservative duff and vote!  It matters.  We must divest 'conservative activist' of its oxymoronic ring.  There is too much at stake. Next week's election will be a watershed event.

Political Aporetics: A Problem with Enforced Equality

This is a sequel to yesterday's post on liberty and (material) equality and their conflict.  It should be read first. This post extends the analysis by pointing out a problem for socialists (redistributivists).  So consider the following aporetic triad, the first two limbs of which are similar to the first two limbs of yesterday's aporetic tetrad:

1. Justice demands redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer., and of other social goods from the haves tothe have-nots. A just society is a fair society, one in which there is a fair or equal distribution of the available social and economic goods such as power and wealth.

2. Redistribution, whether of wealth or of other goods such as power, requires an agency of redistribution which forces, via the coercive power of government, the better off to pay higher taxes, forego benefits, make sacrifices, or in some other way compensate the worse off so that greater material equality is brought about.

3. Any effective redistributive agency must possess and exercise power which is far in excess of the power available to other individual and collective agents in the society: it must be greatly UNEQUAL to the latter in power.

These three propositions are individually plausible, and for the redistributivist, not just plausible but mandatory.  (1) defines the redistributivist position, while (2) and (3) he must accept if he wants to implement his scheme of justice.  But the propositions are not jointly consistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  Thus (2) and (3), taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (1). 

The conservative/libertarian will have no trouble solving the problem.  He will reject (1).  Justice does NOT demand redistribution; indeed, justice rules it out.  The leftist/redistributivist, however, is in a jam.  He cannot reject (2) or (3) since these are facts that all must acknowledge.  And he must accept (1) since it is definatory of his position.

The redistributivist position thus appears to be internally incoherent.  The redistributivist  is committed to the acceptance of propositions that cannot all be true.  He wants equality, but to enforce it he must embrace inequality

For a concrete historical example, consider Cuba under Fidel Castro.  Who has all the money and the power?  The people?

Political Aporetics: Liberty Versus Equality

Political disagreement is ultimately rooted in philosophical disagreement.  So if the latter is objectively irresolvable, then so is the former.  I claim that both are irresolvable due to value differences that cannot be resolved either by appeal to empirical facts or by reasoning.  In illustration of my thesis, consider the the values of individual liberty and material (as opposed to formal) equality.  I will assume that both are indeed values to which all of us accord respect.  Even so, value conflict can arise  in the form of a conflict of prioritizations.  I value liberty over equality, while Peter, say, values equality over liberty.  That difference suffices to put us at serious odds despite the fact that we both value liberty and equality.  The conflict over prioritization -- our difference as to which trumps which -- makes the following aporetic tetrad objectively irresolvable:

1. Justice demands redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer.  A just society is a fair society, one in which there is a fair distribution of the available social and economic goods.

2. Wealth redistribution requires an agency of redistribution which forces, via the coercive power of government, the better off to pay higher taxes, forego benefits, or in some other way compensate the worse off so that greater material equality is brought about.

3. Coercive redistribution violates the liberty of the individual.

4. It is wrong to violate the liberty of the individual in the way that redistribution requires.

It is easy to see that the limbs of this tetrad, despite the plausibility of each, cannot all be true: the first three, entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed, any three of them entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the inconsistency problem, one of the propositions must be rejected.  But which one?  (2) and (3) are uncontroversial and so not candidates for rejection.  This leaves (1) and (4).

The conservative/libertarian will reject (1) while the liberal/leftist will reject (4).  Each will thus solve the problem -- from his own point of view.  But surely neither amounts to an objective solution to the problem since the solutions are logically incompatible and both are equally rational and equally consistent with all relevant empirical facts.

Indeed, this is why there is a philosophical problem in the first place.  There is nothing illogical about the conservative or liberal positions: neither falls afoul of any logical rule or canon of reasoning.  And there is no empirical fact that allows us to decide between the two positions.  The difference between the positions is ultimately rooted in a value difference, specifically, a difference concerning the prioritization of liberty and equality.  To the conservative, it is self-evident that liberty is such a high value that no consideration of material equality or fairness of distribution could provide any reason to violate the liberty of the individual by, for example, taxing him at a higher rate because he is more economically productive. To the liberal,on the other hand, it is is just self-evident that justice demands redistribution and so a certain amount of coercive taking of what belongs to the productive and a giving of it to the less or non-productive(for example, in the form of food stamps).

Because the doctrinal differences are rooted in a value difference, the doctrinal difference can be objectively resolved only if the value conflict can be objectively resolved.  But the latter cannot be, not by any appeal to empirical facts and not by any abstract reasoning.  If so, the political dispute regarding liberty and equality is objectively irresolvable.

I conjecture that all of the fundamental political problems are like this.  All are at bottom philosophical problems representable by an aporetic polyad consisting of propositions which are individually plausible but not jointly consistent.  If so, a certain political pessimism is the upshot.  We cannot resolve our political differences by appeal to empirical facts or by abstract reasoning or by the two together.  We are stuck with irreconcilable differences rooted in ultimately divergent values.

The question then becomes one of figuring how we can nonetheless continue to live with each other in some semblance of peace despite our irreconcilable differences.  Federalism may be part of the answer.  See my post Can Federalism Save Us?

Immanuel Kant Versus Israel?

Old Kant man that I am, I have added a question mark to the title of an extremely interesting piece by Daniel Pipes.  In it, Pipes summarizes and comments upon an article by Yoram Hazony,  "Israel Through European Eyes."  Worth careful study.

Can Federalism Save Us?

I fear that we are coming apart as a nation.   We are disagreeing about things we ought not be disagreeing about, such as the need to secure the borders.  The rifts are deep and nasty.  Polarization and demonization of the opponent are the order of the day.   Do you want more of this?  Then give government more say in your life.  The bigger the government, the more to fight over.  Do you want less?  Then support limited government and federalism.  A return to federalism may be a way to ease the tensions, not that I am sanguine about any solution. 

Federalism, roughly, is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that both the central and the constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs.  Federalism is implied by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." 

Federalism would make for less contention, because people who support high taxes and liberal schemes could head for states like Massachusetts or California, while the  conservatively inclined who support gun rights and capital punishment could gravitate toward states like Texas. 

The fact of the matter is that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues (abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, wealth redistribution, the purposes and limits, if any, of governmental power  . . .) and we will never agree on them.  These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people.  And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted  in fundamental worldview differences.  When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.

Worldview differences in turn reflect differences  in values.  Now values are not like tastes.  Tastes cannot be reasonably discussed and disputed  while values can.  (De gustibus non est disputandum.) But value differences, though they can be fruitfully discussed,  cannot be objectively resolved because any attempted resolution will end up relying on higher-order value judgments.  There is no exit from the axiological circle.  We can articulate and defend our values and clarify our value differences.  What we cannot do is resolve our value differences to the satisfaction of all sincere, intelligent, and informed discussants. 

Consider religion.  Is it a value or not?  Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, as conducive to human flourishing.  Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing.  The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true.  Nor is  the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible.  The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others.  For example,  would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square?  Does Bible study tend to make us better people?

For a conservative like Dennis Prager, the answer to both questions is obvious.  As I recall, he gives an example something like the following.  You are walking down the street in a bad part of town.  On one side of the street  people are leaving a Bible study class.  On the other side, a bunch of  Hells [sic] Angels are coming out of the PussyCat Lounge.  Which side of the street do you want to be on?  For a conservative the answer is obvious.  People who study the Bible with its Ten Commandments, etc. are less likely to mug or injure you than drunken bikers who have been getting in touch with their inner demons  for the last three hours.  But of course this little thought experiment won't cut any ice with a dedicated leftist.

I won't spell out the leftist response.  I will say only that you will enter a morass of consideration and counter-consideration that cannot be objectively adjudicated.

My thesis is that there can be no objective resolution, satisfactory to every sincere, intelligent, and well-informed discussant, of the question of the value of religion.  And this is a special case of a general thesis about the objective insolubility of value questions with respect to the  issues that most concern us.

Another  sort of value difference concerns not what we count as values, but how we weight  or prioritize them.  Presumably both conservatives and liberals value both liberty and security.  But they will differ bitterly over which trumps the other and in what circumstances.  Here too it is naive to  expect an objective resolution of the issue satisfactory to all participants, even those who meet the most stringent standards of moral probity, intellectual acuity, knowledgeability with respect to relevant empirical issues, etc.

Liberal and conservative, when locked in polemic, like to call each other stupid.  But of course intelligence or the lack thereof has nothing to do with the intractability of the debates.  The intractability is rooted in value differences about which consensus is impossible.  On the abortion question, for example, there is no empirical evidence that can resolve the dispute.  Empirical data from biology and other sciences are of course relevant to the correct formulation of the problem, but contribute nothing to its resolution.  Nor can reason whose organon  is logic resolve the dispute.  You would have to be as naive as Ayn Rand to think that Reason dictates a solution.

Recognizing these facts, we must ask ourselves: How can we keep from tearing each other apart literally or figuratively?  Guns, God, abortion, illegal immigration -- these are issues that get the blood up.  I am floating the suggestion that federalism and severe limitations on the reach of the central government are what we need to lessen tensions. 

Example:  Suppose Roe v. Wade is overturned and the question of the legality of abortion is returned to the states.  Some states will make it legal, others illegal.  This would be a modest step in the direction of mitigating the tensions between the warring camps.  If abortion is a question for the states, then no federal monies could be allocated to the support of abortion.  People who want to live in abortion states can move there; people who don't can move to states in which abortion is illegal. Each can live with their own kind and avoid having their values and sensibilities disrespected.

I understand that my proposal will not be acceptable to either liberals or conservatives.  Both want to use the power of the central government to enforce what they consider right.  Both sides are convinced that they are right.  But of course they cannot both be right.  So how do they propose to heal the splits in the body politic?

The Losertarian Party

Politics is a practical business: it is about the gaining and maintaining of power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies that one believes to be beneficial, and for opposing those whose policies one believes to be deleterious. As the Converse Clausewitz Principle has it, it is war conducted by other means.  For this very reason, I stay clear of it except for voting and blogging: I am by inclination and aptitude a theoretician, a "spectator of all time and existence" to borrow a marvellous phrase from the  Plato's Republic. But part of the theoretician's task is to understand the political. And if I understand it, I understand that the Libertarian Party, though it might be a nice debating society, is a waste of time practically speaking. That's why I approve of and borrow Michael Medved's moniker, 'Losertarian Party.' These adolescents will never get power, so what's the point? It's a party of computer geeks, sci-fi freaks, and adolescents of all ages, the sort that never outgrow Ayn Rand.  Open borders, legal dope, ACLU-type extremism about freedom of expression.  Out of the mainstream and rightly so.

So Ron Paul made a smart move when he joined the Republicans, and his son Rand seems more conservative than libertarian. 

As I said, politics is a practical business. It's about winning, not talking. It's not about ideological purity or having the supposedly best ideas; it's about gaining the power to implement good ideas.  The practical politician understands that quite often  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, the best is the enemy of the good.

Patriotism and Jingoism

It is not uncommon to hear people confuse patriotism with jingoism. So let's spend a few moments this Fourth of July reflecting on the difference. 

Jingoism is well described by Robert Hendrickson as "bellicose chauvinism." But given the general level of culture, I am afraid I can't leave it at that, but must go on to explain 'chauvinism' and 'bellicose.' Chauvinism has nothing to do with sex or race. I have no objection to the phrases 'male chauvinism' or 'white chavinism,' the latter a term widely used in the 1950s in Communist Party USA circles; but the qualifiers are essential. Chauvinism, named after Nicholas Chauvin of Rochefort, an officer under Napoleon, is excessive nationalism. 'Bellicose' from the Latin word for war (bellum, belli) means warlike. So we get 'warlike excessive nationalism' as the definiens of 'jingoism.'

According to Henrickson, the term 'jingoism' originated from a refrain from the British music hall song "The Great MacDermott" (1878) urging Great Britain to fight the Russians and prevent them from taking Constantinople:

We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo if we do/ We've got the ships, we've got the men, and the money, too.

'By Jingo,' in turn, is a euphemism for 'by Jesus' that dates back to the later 17th century. (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed. p. 395) So much for 'jingoism.' I think we are all going to agree that it is not a good thing. Patriotism, however, is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue it is a means between two extremes. In this case, one of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, within bounds. The patriot is neither a jingoist nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. To confuse a patriot with a jingoist is like confusing a dissenter with a traitor. No doubt sometimes a jingoist or chauvinist will hide beneath the mantle of patriotism, but just as often a traitor will hide beneath the mantle of dissent. The patriot is also not a xenophobe since ordinate love of one's country does not entail hattred or fear of other countries and their inhabitants. Is patriotism, defined as the ordinate love of, and loyalty to, one's country justified?

Although it does not entail xenophobia, patriotism does imply a certain partiality to one's own country precisely because it is one's own. Is this partiality toward one's own country justifiable?  If it is, then so is patriotism.  As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we because of the laws.  Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense.

A Case for Open Immigration?

Spencer Case sent me a link to a short op-ed piece by Michael Huemer who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado.  Huemer's thesis is that

. . . U.S. immigration policy is fundamentally unjust. It disregards the rights and interests of other human beings, merely because those persons were born in another country. It coercively imposes clear and serious harms on some people, for the sake of relatively minor or dubious benefits for others who happened to have been born in the right geographical area.

Huemer's argument stripped to essentials and in his own words:

1. It is wrong to knowingly impose severe harms on others, by force, without having a good reason for doing so. This principle holds regardless of where one's victims were born or presently reside.

2. The U.S. government, in restricting immigration, knowingly and coercively imposes severe harms on millions of human beings.

3.  The U.S. government has no good reason for imposing such harms on potential immigrants.

--------

4. It follows that U.S. immigration policy is morally wrong.

Before addressing Huemer's argument, some preliminary points need to be made.

A. First, a difficult issue such as the one before us cannot be resolved via some quick little argument like the above.  Numerous considerations and counter-considerations come into play.

B. Here is a consideration in the light of which Huemer's argument has an aura of the fantastic.  The U. S. is a welfare state.  Now no welfare state can hope to survive and meet it commitments to provide all sorts of services at taxpayer expense if it opens its borders wide.  Without trying to estimate the tsunami of humanity that would flood into the country from all sides were immigration restrictions removed, it is clear that open borders is a wildly impractical proposal.  And note that this impracticality itself has moral ramifications: if bona fide citizens have been promised that they will be taken care of by some such system as Social Security into their old age, and the government reneges on its promises because of an empty treasury, then the rights of the retirees will have been violated -- which is a moral issue.

If state functions were stripped down to 'night watchman' size as certain libertarians would advocate, then perhaps an open borders policy would be workable; but obviously such a rollback of governmental powers and functions  has no chance of occurring.  Let the quixotic rollback occur; THEN and ONLY THEN we can talk about open borders.  Meanwhile we do have border control, half-hearted as it is.  It is not obviously unjust to those who immigrate legally to allow others in illegally? 

C.  An open borders policy is impractical not only for the reason mentioned, but for many others besides. I catalog some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.

Now to Huemer's argument.

I see no reason to accept premise (2) according to which the U. S. government imposes severe harms on people by preventing them from immigrating.  Suppose you have foolishly gone into the desert without proper supplies.  You soon find yourself  in dire need of water.  Coming upon my camp, you enter it and try to take my water.  I prevent you from doing so.  Have I harmed you?  I have not inflicted any harm upon you;  I have merely prevented you from getting something you need for your well-being.  But you have no right to my water, even if I have more than enough.  If you steal my supplies, you violate my property rights; I am therefore morally justified in resisting the theft.  You are morally obliged to respect my property rights, but I am under no moral obligation to give you what you need, especially in light of the fact that you have freely put yourself in harm's way.

Similarly, the U. S. government does not harm those whom it does not allow to enter its territory, for they have no right to enter its territory in the first place, and in so doing violate the property rights of the U. S.

Once this is appreciated it will also be seen why (3) is false.  The U. S. does have a good moral reason to prevent foreigners from entering its territory, namely, to prevent them from violating the property rights of the U. S.

Now at this point I expect someone to object as follows.  "I grant you that illegal aliens are not justified in violating private property rights, but when they cross public lands, travel on public roads, use public facilities, etc. they are not violating any property rights.  The U. S. has no property rights; there are no public property rights that need to be respected." 

This objection is easily rebutted.  It is based on a false analogy with unowned resources. An incursion into an uninhabited region not in the jurisdiction of a state does not violate property rights. But the public lands of the U. S. are within the jurisdiction of the U.S.  These lands are managed and protected by the state which gets the werewithal of such management and protection, and in some instances, the money to pay for the  original acquisition, from coercive taxation.  Thus we taxpayers collectively own these lands.  It is not as if the land, roads, resources and the like of the U.S. which are not privately owned are somehow open to anyone in the world who wants to come here.  Just as an illegal alien violates property rights when he breaks into my house, he violates property rights when he breaks into my country.  For a country belongs collectively to its citizens, not to everyone in the world.

The fundamental point is that foreigners have no right to immigrate.  Since they have no such right, no moral wrong is done to them by preventing them from immigrating even though they would be better off were they to immigrate.  Furthermore, the U.S. government and every government has not only the right, but also the moral obligation, to control its border for the the good of its citizens.  After all, protection from foreign invasion is one of the legitimate functions of government.

 

Illegal Immigration, The Catholic Bishops, and the Misuse of Scripture

(Written 26 April 2006, revised 23 May 2010)

At the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we read:

Why is the Catholic Church involved in the immigration issue? There are several reasons the Catholic Church is involved in the  immigration debate. The Old and New Testaments, as well as the encyclicals of the Popes, form the basis for the Church's position.  In Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls upon us to "welcome the  stranger,for what you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me. " (Mt. 25-35, 40).

There is a deep mistake being made here, and we should try to understand what it is. The mistake is to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.

Note first that if one scriptural passage can be invoked as a basis for public policy and law, then any can. We are enjoined in other New Testament places to "Resist not the evildoer," "Turn the other cheek," and the like. 

Injunctions such as these cannot be made the basis for public policy whatever value they have in the private sphere.

Imagine a society that implements a policy of not resisting (apprehending, trying, convicting, incarcerating) rapists, murderers, and miscreants generally. Such a society would seal its own death
warrant and cease to function. It is a fact of human nature that people, in the main, behave tolerably well only under threat of punishment. People for the most part do not do the right thing because  it is the right thing, but out of fear of punishment. This is not pessimism, but realism, and is known to be true by all unprejudiced students of history and society.  Conservatives know this 'with their bones'; liberals need to learn it the hard way.  Therefore not even a 'Christian' society can afford to make "Resist not the evildoer" a principle of public policy.

As for turning the other cheek, it is a policy that works well in certain atypical circumstances. If a man has a well-formed conscience, and is capable of feeling shame, then turning the other cheek in the face of his affront can achieve a result far superior to that achieved by replying in kind. Nonviolence can work. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British may serve as an historical example. The Brits could be shamed and in any case Gandhi had no other means at his disposal. But imagine what would happen if Israel turned the other cheek in the face of its Islamist enemies who would blow it off the face of the earth at the first opportunity?

Once your enemy has reduced you to the status of a pig or a dog fit only to be slaughtered, then there is no way to reach him, shame him, or persuade him by acts of forebearance and kindness. You must resist him, with deadly force if necessary, if you wish to preserve your existence.  The evil triumph when the good fail to defend themselves.

But is it not better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, as Socrates maintained? Would it not be better to perish than to defend one's life by taking life? Perhaps, but only if the underlying metaphysics and
soteriology are true. If the soul is immortal, and the phenomenal world is of no ultimate concern -- being a vale of tears, a place through which we temporarily sojourn on our way to our true home --
then the care of the soul is paramount and to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it.

The same goes for Christianity which, as Nietzsche remarks, is "Platonism for the people." If you are a Christian, and look beyond this world for your true happiness, then you are entitled to practice
an austere morality in your private life. But you are not entitled to impose that morality and metaphysics on others, or demand that the State codify that morality and metaphysics in its laws and policies. For one thing, it would violate the separation of Church and State. More importantly, the implementation of Christian morality would lead to the destruction of the State and the State's ability to secure life, liberty, and property -- the three Lockean purposes for which we have a state in the first place.

The problem of confusing private and public morality is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher/Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

A Catholic bishop, therefore, who is pro illegal immigration on the strength of the "welcome the stranger" passage demonstrates a failure to understand the simple point that Arendt undescores.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I
cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's lawbreaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops who cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.

Conservatives Versus Libertarians on Immigration

Victor Reppert thinks that a conservative case can be made against immigration restriction but cites a libertarian article in support of his contention.  But as I see it, it is important to distinguish carefully between conservative and libertarian positions on this and other issues, despite several important points of agreement.  Pace Reppert, no conservative who understands his position can support open borders or tolerate the elision of the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  There are no conservative arguments for open borders.  But let's turn now to the article in question.  Here are some excerpts:

. . . the false dichotomy between civil and economic liberties. Both incorrectly bifurcated forms of freedom are rooted in the same set of property rights, first and foremost in one’s own person and, by extension, in the tangible property one acquires justly through homesteading, gifts and honest market transactions. If Big Brother tries to comprehensively regulate immigration, he can smash economic freedom of association. And if the state has the power to oversee our economic lives, our personal freedom will always suffer in the process.

This is the type of excessive rhetoric that libertarians are known for.  Immigration laws obviously limit economic freedom of association, but to write that they "smash" it is to suggest that the limitation is some pure power move on the part of "Big Brother" without reason or justification.  But there are a number of solid reasons for border control none of which is  so much as mentioned in the article.  I sketch some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.  And what exactly is wrong with the distinction between civil and economic liberties?  The word 'civil' derives from the Latin civis, civis, citizen and civitas, civitatis, state, citizenship.  So I hope I will be forgiven for asking how a person could have civil liberties apart from his membership in some state or other, and how a person who has civil liberties in a state of which he is a citizen can have any civil liberties in a state of which he is not a citizen.  As an American citizen I have the civil right to the presumption of innocence.  But I don't have that right when I head south of the border.  I can see how economic liberties are grounded in the universal right to life, a right that does not derive from membership in any polis, civitas, Staat, state.  But civil rights and liberties are state-specific.  The right to vote is a civil right, but Mexicans don't have the right to vote in American elections any more than Americans have the right to vote in Mexican elections.  There is no universal right to vote wherever one happens to be.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly wrongheaded.  Since the USA is a welfare state and under ObamaCare about to become even more of one, it is obviously suicidal  for purely fiscal reasons alone to open the borders.  Who would not want to come to this great prosperous nation of ours?  Do I really need to spell this out?  Only if the libertarians got  their way and succeeded in shrinking the government down to 'night watchman' functions (the Lockean triad: protection of life, liberty, and property), would this fiscal objection to open borders be removed.   But obviously this shrink-down is not going to happen.  Given that the USA is a welfare state and will remain one  -- the only real question being how much of one -- it is all the more necessary to control entry into the country.

Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals.

This is very shoddy reasoning.  Conservatives maintain that there are certain natural unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness (which is not the right to be or be made happy).  These natural rights are not granted by governments but secured by legitimate governments.  They are rights that one has irrespective of one's being a citizen of a state. But it does not follow that every right that one has one one has irrespective of citizenship.  My right to vote is not a right to vote anywhere.  When I lived in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, I did not have the right to vote in those countries, nor should I have had that right.  Just as I don't have the right to vote anywhere, I don't have the right to live anywhere or travel anywhere.  When I lived in Turkey I could not stand on my natural right to live in Turkey: there is no such right.  I had to apply for a visa and be granted permission to live there for a stated period of time after I had paid a fee for the privilege.  Now you might not want to call living in Turkey a 'privilege,' but it is surely not a natural right that everyone has just in virtue of being a human being.

The author says that communities have a right to decide who shall live in them.  But a community is a political entity, a state writ small, and what goes for states writ small goes for states writ large.

. . . constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

This is just false.  "Congress shall have the power to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization . . . ." (Article I, Section 8)  As for Reagan's example, is this guy suggesting that conservatives should follow Reagan's example even in matters on which he acted foolishly or not like a conservative?  Come on!  Amnesty for those illegals already here and established may well be unavoidable.  But this is separate form the question whether the border should be sealed to keep out additional illegal aliens.

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  This passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view:

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Immigration Legal and Illegal

A reader from Down Under poses this question:

America is experiencing immigration problems somewhat like Australia's. The idea of  'multiculturalism' some would say is beginning to show its flaws. Who do you believe should be allowed to enter your country? Please feel free to be as politically incorrect as you like.

1. First of all, one must insist on a distinction that many on the Left willfully ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. (Libertarians also typically elide the distinction.)  Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration, as any right-thinking person must, is not to oppose legal immigration. So, to answer one of your questions, no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists? Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?

2. The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal.  If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people.  Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.

3. There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like Bush and McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

4. Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.

A salient feature of liberals and leftists -- there isn't much difference nowadays -- is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist.

"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons.  Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration.  To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy.  Not good.

5. The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.

6. Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.'  I discuss this in a separate post.  But having written thousands of posts, I don't quite know where it is.

7. How long can a welfare state survive with open borders?  Think about it.  The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here.  So something has to give.  Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders.  The first has no real chance of happening.  Quixotic is the quest  of  strict constructionists  and libertarians who call for it.  Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government.  Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look  like.  For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated.  That won't happen.  Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers.  They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible.  By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.

8. Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:

A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but liberals. They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.

By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.

B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.

C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.

D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane -- or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies"  born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.

The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.

I hope I have been politically incorrect enough for my reader's taste.

  

Fruitful Tensions

Mike Rand e-mails,

I was interested to see your recent correspondence and post on the radical vs the conservative. I couldn't help but notice that there is a potential parallel between this and a common interest of yours [ours?], the productive tension between Aristotle and Plato. A radical may be liable to point out that it because Plato is prepared to build a state upon rational rather than traditional grounds that he is prepared to consider women as equally well qualified to rule the state on meritocratic grounds (a la Mill), a thesis which is well supported in the contemporary world though unthinkable in ancient Greece. They may also contrast this against Aristotle’s impression of women which appears indefensible in the modern era but natural in his own time, and they may also draw attention to Aristotle’s defense of slavery. The conservative Aristotle on these points alone appears monstrous to a modern audience against the radical Plato. In accord with the recent post, we might very well conclude that the conservative is a reality-based thinker (within his own environment), whilst the radical is a utopian (prepared to look beyond his environment). The conservative in reply would of course draw attention to the realistic and practical view of Aristotle on running a state and compare this to the proto-communist authoritarian and elitist Plato who would construct a state, mentally at least, that would appear equally monstrous to a modern audience.

This is very perceptive.  Since I am first and foremost an aporetician keen to isolate and sharpen problems under suspension of the natural tendency to glom onto  quick solutions, it interests me and indeed worries me that there may be a tension between my tendency to give the palm to Plato over Aristotle and my conservative tendency.  As I said recently:

One cannot be a philosopher unless one believes that at least some important truths are attainable or at least approachable by dialectical and argumentative means.  Thus there is no place in philosophy for the misologist, the hater of reason, and his close relative the fideist.   Reasoning and argument loom large in philosophy . . . .

But now I must add that to the extent that I favor reason over experience and tradition, the universal over the particular, the global over the local, the impersonal over the personal, to that extent I am in some conflict with my conservative tendency.  One of the differences between conservatives and their liberal/left/radical brethren is that they are skeptical aqbout the value of reason in the ordering of political affairs.