Qui Custodiet

I wrote this for an English assignment. Yes, I have to take English.


Qui custodiet ipsos custodies? Who guards the guardians? The ancient Latin proverbial question is important in any civil society, but it has become more important in the United States now than ever before, because the aggressiveness of police organizations toward the citizenry they police is growing. The aggression of the modern American police force is reflected in three principal areas: the equipment they use to carry out those duties, the methods they employ, and the powerful perverse incentive structure they have developed that encourages them to make an increasing number of encounters with the public hostile ones.

“It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” said Albany County (New York) Sheriff Craig Apple of the MRAP, or mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, his department received, at no cost, from the Department of Defense’s Iraq War surplus. Albany County is one of 165 counties to get the MRAP. The MRAP, a large turreted armored truck, is physically one of the largest giveaways the military has made to law enforcement, but it is far from the only one. The Associated Press found that $4.2 billion in military equipment ranging from blankets to bayonets to Humvees has been distributed since 1990 (Associated Press, 2013).

“Our problem is we have to make sure we are prepared to respond to every type of crisis,” Sheriff Apple stated. Left unstated is how his department would have responded to such a crisis prior to obtaining the MRAP. The apparent answer is that they would have used a less heavy and intimidating piece of equipment. Undoubtedly the MRAP is safer for his officers, which is a positive development. But it is a development that comes at a time when officer fatalities are at their lowest level since 1959, and officer fatalities by gunfire at their lowest level since 1887, when the country’s population was a quarter of its current level. (Pearce, 2013). The MRAP seems to be an answer without a question.

Police methodology has become as aggressive as equipment, and nothing typifies that fact like the rise of the no-knock raid. In the United States a no-knock entry, one in which officers enter a property with minimal or no prior announcement in order to protect their safety or prevent evidence from being destroyed, requires a warrant. In 1981, 3,000 such warrants were issued. In 2005, when an octogenarian was accidentally killed in Atlanta during a no-knock raid on the wrong address, the number was 50,000 (Johnson, 2006).

More recent numbers are hard to find, but it is clear that the number of no-knock raids has vastly increased even as injuries and fatalities to officers have drastically fallen. The number of violent incidents associated with these raids has been high. Statistics are again difficult to come by, but the CATO Institute, which has done much work on this subject in conjunction with the Washington Post’s Radley Balko, has an interactive map of “botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids” on its web site, with dozens of incidents neatly divided into chilling categories including “Raid on an innocent suspect”, “Death of an innocent”, “Death or injury of a police officer”, and “Death of a nonviolent offender” (Balko, 2006).

Why are the police now using such aggressive equipment and tactics? Officer safety is again the primary cited concern, and though the beginning of the decline in officer injuries and fatalities predates much of the current militarization trend, it’s certainly possible that officers are safer because of that trend. On the other hand, it’s also the case that officers have a powerful new incentive to confront the public: asset forfeiture. Federal, state, and local authorities are permitted to seize assets that are the proceeds of or were used to facilitate federal crimes (including drug offenses). These assets can be seized immediately and held until the defendants are acquitted, and in some cases beyond; where civil forfeiture is used, they need not even be charged. The Department of Justice collects statistics on its seizures, which increased from about $285 million in 1989 to $1.8 billion in 2010, an annualized increase of almost 20 percent per year. Those statistics don’t include seizures by the Treasury Department (including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) nor do they include state and local seizures which are authorized under federal law (Maguire, 2010).

What do the proceeds of those seizures fund? In some cases they fund departmental activities, with the expansion of one’s budget being a powerful bureaucratic incentive in itself. But abuses are possible in any system where large sums are at stake and the consequences for missteps are minimal, and not surprisingly, abuses have been found. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in 1996 that Fulton County (Georgia) prosecutor Tom Howard had spent $8,200 on a security system for his home, and thousands more on food and parties, even as his department was slashing its budget and leaving its bills unpaid (Mariano, 2013). The funds came from the federal asset forfeiture program. Such spending violates Department of Justice rules on using those funds, but the Department of Justice has audited only a tiny fraction of forfeiture funds, and many states have forfeiture programs of their own. In a related article, the Economist noted that the average amount per seizure in Georgia that year was $647, and opined, “This sounds as though federal investigators are taking poor people's money and stuff so that friends of the Fulton County DA's office can eat crab cakes in champagne sauce and enjoy a fancy Christmas party.” (J.F., 2013)

The classic elements of any crime story are motive, method, and opportunity. The police have the motive to deal aggressively with the public they are meant to protect and serve: asset forfeitures. They have the method: no-knock warrants. And increasingly, they have the opportunity: surplus military equipment. This issue, and the injuries, deaths, and general injustice it causes, are a brutal reminder that we as a people must guard the guardians.

References

Associated Press. (2013, November 24). Leftover armored trucks from Iraq coming to local police agencies. Retrieved from New York Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/police-surplus-armored-trucks-iraq-article-1.1527650

Balko, R. (2006). Botched Paramilitary Police Raids. Retrieved from The CATO Institute: http://www.cato.org/raidmap

J.F. (2013, October 15). Fighting Crime Through Superior Steak. Retrieved from The Economist.

Johnson, P. (2006, November 29). After Atlanta raid tragedy, new scrutiny of police tactics. Retrieved from Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1129/p03s03-ussc.html

Maguire, K. (Ed.). (2010). Value of Asset Forfeiture Recoveries by U.S. Attorneys. Retrieved from Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online: http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t4452010.pdf

Mariano, W. (2013, October 5). DA's spending of federal forfeiture money in question. Retrieved from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: http://www.myajc.com/news/news/das-spending-of-federal-forfeiture-money-in-questi/nbFGb/

Pearce, M. (2013, December 30). 33 cops killed by gunfire in 2013, the lowest number since 1887. Retrieved from Los Angeles Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/30/nation/la-na-nn-police-deaths-20131230

I pass the libertarian hypocrisy test

I found an article so dreadful that it demands that I revive this long dormant blog.  In it, something called RJ Eskow has eleven questions that he demands be asked of libertarians to determine whether they're hypocrites.  I love quizzes.  Here we go.

Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?

Yes.  You may find libertarians who are in favor of right-to-work laws on the grounds that liberty, including liberty of where to work, should be defended for the individual against any concentration of power, including that of a labor union.  I am not one of them; I'm persuaded that right-to-work is not something the state should be promulgating.

What you won't find, I think, is libertarians who think unions should be banned altogether, especially not in the private sector.  That includes Eskow's boogieman Ayn Rand (libertarian only by the loosest possible definition, as we will discuss below), who endorses unions and has one of her heroes address one in "The Fountainhead".

This does not mean that unions are a good idea.  I think it's perfectly fair to attribute the decline of the American auto industry, for example, in part (and only in part) to unionization.  But libertarians are not the people you have to worry about making things illegal just because they're dumb.

Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?

You mean, am I against slavery?  Gee, sure, why not.  Not coincidentally, Lysander Spooner, one of libertarianism's early heroes, was also one of America's prominent abolitionists.

Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?

These are all basically the same question so far, but yes.  Of course, corporations who engage in "antitrust" by "colluding" to fix wages are also employing market forces.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander.  Or at least it is if you don't want to be a hypocrite.  Right, RJ Eskow?

Is our libertarian willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?

You'd have to read this for more context.  The short answer is: maybe, if the regulation does more good than harm, which is seldom the case.  But we don't need to talk about regulation to deal with the example Eskow is citing: "banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and investor fraud."  Fraud is a crime, not a regulated activity. At least, I hope so. You never can tell with progressives.

Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.

Does our progressive believe in democracy?  If so, democratically elected Adolf Hitler did nothing wrong, right?

Come on.  Sure, I believe in democracy.  I also believe in moderation, which means putting a lot of things, such as those found in the American Bill of Rights, off limits to the meddling of the people and their representatives.  One of the things that should be off limits is unreasonable regulation of the markets.

We can argue about what that means, but when we do, we must always bear in mind that government has an agency problem.  Public choice economics (not a particularly libertarian school of thought) tells us that our representatives will always represent their own interests.  The same is true of regulators, who also experience a phenomenon known as "regulatory capture" where they soon begin to regulate for benefit of their targets rather than to restrain them.

So do I believe in regulation?  In theory, yes.  In practice, not if we will get this.  And it's my belief that we will always get this:

"But the government didn't really do its job of inspecting the rig. According to the Associated Press, the actual number of MMS inspections of the Deepwater Horizon rig fell short of agency's own monthly standard. It turns out that the MMS collects billions in royalties from the very industry it's supposed to regulate. So if it interrupts the flow of oil and gas -- and hence cash from the industry -- the MMS cuts the value of its own royalty stream."

 Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?

Has our progressive ever used wealth generated by the free market to advocate restrictions on the free market?  Eskow's bio blurb lists him as a business owner.  Has he ever generated cash as the result of a voluntary trade?  Uh oh.

Don't worry, that's a trick question.  He can't avoid it.  We live in a mixed economy, no one can avoid either government tentacles or free market ones, and there can be no evidence of hypocrisy on either side as a result.  Of course, we have no idea how much wealth would exist in a *genuinely* free market.

Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?

Gladly.  You will hardly find anyone *other than* libertarians who can answer yes to this.  I would point Eskow at Stephan Kinsella's writings.  There is, to be sure, controversy on this among libertarians, but the growing consensus is that intellectual property is a government grant of monopoly for things for which no monopoly can be economically justified.  In other words, it's a type of ineffective regulation for the benefit of the regulated, just like what the MMS did with BP's offshore rigs.  I can't speak for Peter Thiel, but yes, I think that's bad, and I think that people who think like I do are a lot more likely to think it's bad than people who think like RJ Eskow are.

It's true that Eskow is attempting to attack Randian Objectivists here, and they do believe in intellectual property, but the problem there is that he keeps using the word "libertarian".  It's nice that Eskow thinks Objectivists are libertarians, but neither Objectivists nor non-Objectivist libertarians would agree.  Rand herself called libertarians "the hippies of the right".  They're not like us, RJ.  Unless we are making up our own definitions, in which case, you're a Stalinist Nazi Evilcrat.

Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?

By large corporations you mean things that exist entirely because they have government charters and government grants of limited liability and government-created barriers to entry?  Well let me think a nanosecond.

Large corporations are absolutely a threat to our freedoms.  They are also not in any sense whatsoever the work of the free market.  They are creations of law, tentacles of government, in short: entirely the work of RJ Eskow's beloved democratic process.  For a progressive to criticize a large corporation is genuine hypocrisy.

Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.” That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?

Well this is a neat rhetorical trick, for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, we're still confusing Objectivists with libertarians here.  Secondly, it's an attempt to force libertarians to counterattack by smearing two beloved figures.

Which, in the case of Gandhi at least, I will cheerfully do.  Gandhi was a politician, and not always a particularly good one.  Politicians, as previously discussed, govern for their personal benefit.  I can't speak to Doctor King's history, but in my experience, we don't have to worry about what people who live for others are.  There aren't any.

To the more general question of whether libertarians oppose good works: of course not.  We just have a pretty basic test: if you're forcing someone else to do it (which is what government taxation is) it doesn't count as you doing a good work.

Central planning and September 11th

Central planning caused September 11th. Well, sort of. Bear with me:

The Islamic world was ascendant for most of its history. From Mohammed to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam moved from triumph to triumph. When, from the 18th century onward, the West, so long cowed by Muslim might, started to become more and more globally dominant, Muslims started asking the same sorts of questions Americans are asking today: Why are we losing our dominance? What must we do to regain our lost power? Once outright colonialism ended after the Second World War, two main competing answers arose. The first was to out-West the West, to identify and adopt those Western policies and ideals that led to Western dominance. The paragon of this strategy was Ataturk, and adherents include Nasser, Mossadeq, and Ba'athists. The second was to return to Islam's (imagined) core strengths- fundamentalism, as represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and Osama bin Laden.

The former strategy failed disastrously. Why? Well, because when it was adopted, the West's leading lights were enthralled with planning. Bright young Egyptians, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, etc., heading to the West's finest universities to learn how to better their own countries, would learn the gospel of economic planning, even what we think of as the "West," to say nothing of the Soviet Bloc. And remember that the prestige of the USSR was very high at this time in history, just after the Second World War- the Soviets had crushed the Nazis and appeared to be moving from triumph to triumph, industrializing at a breakneck pace, launching Sputnik, etc.

As history tells us, planning faceplanted hard in the 1970s. In the free West, we experienced some economic turmoil, but we had quite a cushion to protect us against the negative consequences of our experiment with planning. The Islamic world had no such cushion; these were societies just leaving agrarian poverty. The strategy of Westernization, or at least of co-opting selected aspects of the West, was broadly discredited. The rest is, as they say, history.

Update: Maybe the economic cushion wasn't as important as the ideological one- in the West, we had the ideology- liberalism- that made us wealthy to begin with upon which we could fall back. The Muslim world had Islamic fundamentalism as its strongest alternative.

Moral arguments

What is the value in making moral arguments? By moral arguments I mean arguments that we should adopt some norm or policy or such because it is good, or right, or just.

I cannot think of an example of an argument commonly made of the form, "X may lead to unpleasant consequences, but we must nevertheless adopt X because it is right." In fact, the only times I can remember hearing such lines of reasoning are when people are defending their chosen rationalization of our innate urge to adapt to our culture's mores. Take the streetcar argument. Your typical deontologist will argue that we must never force someone to serve as a means to another's end, that all humans are ends in themselves. Very nice. But consider a runaway streetcar, headed towards a crowd of schoolchildren. The brakes are gone, but you, the driver, can divert the streetcar onto another track. On this track, it will only hit one very sick old man, whom you recognize and know has not long to live anyway. Most psychologically normal human beings would say that the situation is unfortunate, but of course diverting, killing the old man, and sparing the schoolchildren is the only decent thing to do. The deontologist, possessed, as Max Stirner would say, by "spooks," says no! Justice, though the heavens fall, and our brave Kantian would let the schoolchildren die. (The argument goes through many permutations as the Kantians try to escape the implications, but I think the Kantian attempts just further their critics' point; the Kantians know their beliefs, ultimately, fail.)

Utilitarians have the same trouble, facing such fearsome beasts as utility monsters (let's say that one man feels so much pleasure from watching ten men suffer that society's net utility is increased by letting him torture them; should we do so?) and going through similar permutations as the possessed try to rationalize the irrational and fit their inbuilt, culturally conditioned sense of morality to some rationalistic framework. All moral realists, or more precisely moral rationalists fail precisely because the moral sense is not a product of reason and does not obey the rules of logic. I could go on about this all day, but back to my main point: what is the use of moral arguments, especially in politics?

We're libertarians here, and we argue for a more or less specific set of political policies and social norms. Of course we think society will be better- more peaceful, more prosperous, more free, more pleasant- if our policies and norms are adopted. All libertarians think this, as, mutatis mutandis, do all socialists, neoliberals, etc. No one argues for any political ideal because they think it is right despite thinking the condition of society would be worsened by adopting it. So why can't we take it as read that everyone thinks their ideals are moral and morally necessary and concentrate on function: on whether or not society will actually be improved by whatever is in question, whether a society adopting X will be more or less pleasant to live in.

The objection will be raised, "Why not try to persuade people that their ideals are immoral, and that ours are moral, and that they therefore should adopt ours?" The answer is implied above: just as no one says, "Yes, we will all be worse off if we do X, but nevertheless we must," no one says, "Even though I think society will be bettered by X, I have been persuaded that X is immoral and must be abandoned." (Well, perhaps ethical philosophers do, but I am restricting myself to psychologically normal adult human beings. The possessed behave in strange ways.)

Anyway, that is why I think moral arguments are useless. Excoriate me below.

Piracy as Direct Action

"[T]he patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against
competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously
in excess of the labor measure of their services,—in other words, in giving certain people a right of
property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others
for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly
would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be
satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it
by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of
business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines." -Benjamin Tucker

Longer and more comprehensive words have been written against intellectual property, or IP, but libertarian forefather Benjamin Tucker sums it up neatly- IP artificially inflates the bottom lines of those best able to utilize state power. The biggest corporations, with the most money and the most political influence, own the most IP and write most IP law. We are all familiar with the depredations of the RIAA and the MPAA and their most recent attempts, via SOPA, ACTA and other such nefarious acronyms, to smash with the state club what they could not destroy on the open market. But even the enemies of these laws don't make IP itself their enemy; in fact, one of SOPA's most vocal opponents, Google, is also one of the foremost IP litigants, perpetually engaged in a litigious menage a trois with its biggest rivals in the mobile phone market

IP "reform," at least that genus of reforms that stand any chance at all of being enacted, is typically written by one species of corporation to benefit it and/or hurt its rivals. No major parties or candidates are willing to do what needs to be done; against IP the ballot is, as against so many other things, useless. So what to do?


Direct action. Don't beg the state to give you the world you want. Create it, or even better, act as if it already exists. The IWW tells a story of lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest struggling for an eight hour day and better working conditions. Rather than plead at the legislature, they simply stopped working after eight hours and set fire to the miserable bunkhouses their employers required them to use. They did not beg like slaves, they took like free men, and they won. Eventually the law caught up- legislators hate to feel left out.

If we want a world without IP, let's make one. Steal any IP that isn't nailed down. Only buy what you can't pirate, and immediately make available for piracy everything you buy. The state will inevitably flail about trying to stop us, but they cannot arrest all of us. The bosses in the Pacific Northwest eventually ran out of lumberjacks, and had to give in. Let's starve the IP beast of customers, of consent, of legitimacy.

Crucify Them on a Cross of Gold

This article is a shining exemplar of what's wrong with Austrian economics, and has actually irritated me to the point of blogging.  These people (especially the disciples of Rothbard, whose name has also come up recently in connection with his Dixiecrat alliances) do not know anything about history, and when they try to study it, they fail.  They're not too good at math, either.  I'll put the worst parts in an appropriate red color:

Let’s see, Tall Paul left the Fed in 1987. Using even the establishment’s numbers via “The Inflation Calculator” what cost a $1.00 in 1987 cost $1.89 in 2010. So the value of the dollar has been cut in half just since 1987 using the most conservative numbers. What’s stable and predictable about cutting the value of the dollar in half?

The rule of 72 tells us that cutting the value of the dollar in half over a period of 25 years is an inflation rate of less than 3 percent.  I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether that's stable and predictable, or not. Employers seem to think it is, which is why they often plan raises of 3-4 percent a year.

And what’s so bad about falling prices for a long period of time. That’s how we all become better off is when goods and services become more affordable through technological improvements.

This assumes two unlike things are the same.  Deflation, like inflation, is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.  If prices fall because technology is improving, that's not deflation.  If prices fall because the economy is growing faster than the money supply, which is what happens on the gold standard, that *is* deflation.  One of these things is not like the other.


You may ask what's the difference?  Prices falling must be good, right?  The difference is whether value is actually being created.  If wages fall as fast as prices, all that happens is that we've changed the measuring unit.  For falls in prices to be valuable, things actually have to be less rare in terms of what it takes to buy them.  Austrians should get this, but if they did, they wouldn't write crap like this.


If prices are falling due to technological improvement, workers may be temporarily displaced, and these effects may even be severe.  In the long run, however, the new technology will create new opportunities and the long-term result will be that the value of goods will fall relative to the value of labor, that is, your wages will buy more stuff.  This is why most of us don't have servants; compared to the early 20th century, say, the value of labor has skyrocketed.  A superbly trained butler now makes as much as a good lawyer.  In a technological innovation, employers don't need to cut wages or fire people because they're making more money; they need to hire more people, and each of those people's salaries can buy more stuff. 


Altering the value of things by jacking around with the currency supply, however, does not create value.  How could it?  That would be magic.  What happens is the price of goods falls, putting pressure on producers to cut costs, including labor costs.   People don't typically respond well to wages being cut (although that has happened some in this recession).  So employers just fire people instead.  In the long term as employees are shuffled around, wages do effectively fall, as fired people get hired at lower wages.  Since prices are lower too, the purchasing power of the workers remains the same, and the only cost here would normally be the shoeleather expense of the fired workers shuffling around... except for two factors.  One is debt.  When workers' salaries drop, the value of their debts does not.  And the other is time preference: money getting less valuable (inflation) causes people to spend it.  Money getting more valuable (deflation) causes people to save it for the future when it is expected to be worth more.  Therefore both inflation and deflation are self-reinforcing.

The long depression Parker talks about (1870s to 1900) was actually a period of great prosperity. This period of the classical gold standard was marked by gently falling prices leading to increased productivity, raised living standards, and the first glimpses of globalization.

The period in question was and is known as the Great Deflation.  A comparison of the Panic of 1873, which occurred at the beginning of it and was considered by some who lived through both to be worse than the Great Depression, with our current mess is eerily exact.


The title of this post is taken from a famous speech by William Jennings Bryan, in which he accused the federal government of crucifying farmers with the gold standard.  The amount of currency available per capita fell by 7/8 during this period as Lincoln's dollars not backed by gold from the Civil War era were retired.  Prices fell by 1.7% per year, which over thirty years nearly doubled the value of the dollar.  We are evidently meant to believe that halving the value of the dollar is unstable and unpredictable, but doubling it is not.

While prices fell, the US economy prospered. Industry expanded; the railroads expanded; physical output, net national product, and real per capita income all roared ahead. For the decade from 1869 to 1879, the real national product grew 6.8% per year and real-product-per-capita growth was described by Murray Rothbard, in his History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II as “phenomenal” at 4.5% per year.

In the Western farm areas Bryan referred to, money became intermittently unobtainable and the economy was reduced to barter.  Due to debt, the price of grain actually fell below its production cost for most farmers, leaving large areas of the countryside barren.  At the same time, a massive real estate and lending bubble in the cities popped.  Banks foreclosed and then collapsed under bank runs, jobless people rioted, socialism rose and tension increased between labor and big business.  18,000 businesses failed.  The official unemployment rate soared to 14%.  To quote the article I linked above:

The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.    

This is just, you know, some stuff that happened.  History, as it was.  The upshot of this post is: If they can't tell you the truth about history, it's because they're not able to tell you the truth about economics.  Von Mises was smarter than this, and there are real insights to be had from Human Action.  Disciples like this do him no credit.

  

If not Ron Paul, who?

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post up today drawing a comparison between Louis Farrakan and Ron Paul:

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue--the state's broad use of violence and surveillance--which the America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned. 

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul.

So my question is, who? Who do you have, Mr. Coates? I am going to go ahead and assume you aren't an anarchist and will be voting, so pray tell me for whom? Ron Paul was involved in the publication and distribution of some henious newsletters and stands, as Mr. Coates says, "convicted of moral cowardice." Barack Obama stands convicted of far, far worse- several thousand counts of murder, to start- and the rest of the Republican field thinks he's not killing enough people. Give me a moral coward over a murderous authoritarian sociopath any day.

In this election we face a choice between a line-up of interchangeable authoritarians  (all of whom support a vastly expanded state security apparatus and the liberal application of military force abroad) and Ron Paul. I wish Gary Johnson were viable too, but he's not. Ron Paul is just barely viable, his candidacy a long-shot- but he still has a shot. I wish the Democratic left had the stones to mount a serious primary challenge to Obama, but it doesn't. We may deserve better, but we don't have any better, and faced with the actual line-up, Ron Paul is still the obvious choice for anyone who cares a whit about freedom, about peace, about humanity.

Mr. Coates also asks a few practical questions regarding a Paul presidency that I will attempt to answer:

It is not enough to simply proffer Paul as a protest candidate.One must fully imagine the import of a Paul presidency. How, precisely, would Paul end the drug war? What, exactly, would he do about the Middle East? How, specifically,would the world look for women under a Ron Paul presidency? 

And then the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fund-raised by predicting a race-war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that  Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own politically gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice.

First, as President, Ron Paul would be well within his executive authority to pardon all nonviolent federal drug offenders and to order the DOJ and its subsidiary agencies to end all enforcement efforts. No, the President cannot repeal the relevant laws, but again- the choice is between someone who will enforce them to the hilt and someone who will not enforce them at all. Not a hard choice.

As for the Middle East, I imagine he will blow up a lot less of it. I understand that this is a problem for Establishment pundits, but based on my time over there, I suspect such a policy will prove wildly popular with the locals. Practically speaking, Saudi Arabia is hideously beweaponed as is Israel, and the latter state has a credible nuclear deterrent. Iran is, in the end, a large, poor country dependent on exporting its natural resources in order to feed its people- not an existential threat to anyone.

The world for women will, again, be filled with far fewer explosions. Shocking as this may seem, foreign women value not being incinerated quite highly. One might reply that women in Afghanistan will suffer tremendously as their newfound gains are lost. I agree that this is tragic, but I don't see any way to avoid it. Sooner or later, we will leave Afghanistan (I hope), and the culture will reassert itself.

The last two: the President actually does no management of the nuclear arsenal. The Air Force has officers who do that. This phenomenon is called "delegation." Presidents also do not lead troops in battle or captain aircraft carriers, it may surprise Mr. Coates to learn. As for his broader management skills- why, perhaps a President incapable of keeping so many irons in the fire will keep fewer irons in the fire. How tragic not to have an omnipresent, omnipotent executive. And finally, Ron Paul does not aspire to lead the free world. Wouldn't that be a nice change?


The agonizing over Ron Paul's newsletters betrays the cognitive inertia that burdens so many. A murderous, intrusive, rampaging state is simply the norm now, and Presidential candidates who want to keep the killing spree rolling are simply normal, default candidates- a Romney for the right and an Obama for the left. Supporters of either are not held to the same standard as Paul supporters. Ron Paul wrote a racist newsletter! Your candidate either has or will kill thousands and imprison thousands more. Cast the plank out of thine own eye, indeed.

Thoughts on morality and culture.

Moral and ethical principles cannot be said to exist in any meaningful sense. We attempt to rationalize and systematize our innate moral sense but all systematizations fail when tested against that same moral sense. Ethical philosophy is replete with examples given by each of the various schools of ethical thought that expose the contradictions inherent in any system of ethics. Kantian ethics fall before the runaway train argument, utilitarianism is haunted by utility monsters, etc., etc.

But the moral sense, the feeling that some things are right and others are wrong, lingers. What is this sense? A part of the social instinct, the urge to adapt to the group. Morality is defined by culture.

That sounds wishy-washy if you don't understand the power of culture. We are dominated by culture. Culture is more powerful than most of us imagine. Consider Jerry Sandusky. A coach at Penn State, he parlayed his high status into a charitable front for preying on young children. To us, today, this is horrifying, disgusting and disturbing, and most would not object to Sandusky's execution.

But consider his actions in another cultural context. Had Sandusky been an Athenian in the 5th century BCE, his behavior would have been normal, even commendable. He would have been viewed as bestowing a great honor on the low-status pubescent boys he molested. Their careers would have been given a boost, their families would have been quite pleased to see their children draw the interest of such a prestigious older man.

So consider again Jerry Sandusky and your revulsion at his deeds: that revulsion is culturally conditioned. Do you feel the power of culture now?

Tyler Cowen says that torturing babies is objectively wrong. I cannot myself think of a more abhorrent idea. But here again we find the fingerprints of culture. We have very strong reasons to believe that the ancient Phoenicians and their Carthaginian relatives practiced child sacrifice, and not simply of the children of enemies or slaves. The children of high-born families may have been viewed as a particularly effective offering. The texts tell us that the children weren't killed swiftly or left to die of exposure, either. They were burned to death. Even today, child sacrifice endures.

Our culture tells us what the acceptable and unacceptable forms of sexuality are. Our culture tells us how to treat our children. We are dominated by culture. Why?

Culture is the primary means by which humans adapt to their environment. We are nearly helpless as individuals, capable of little more than bare existence. In groups, we become the dominant species, altering the environment at will and leaving our mark everywhere on Earth and even beyond. Culture binds the group together and provides the set of adaptations needed for survival in the group and the environment. We are not eusocial insects, drones driven by chemical signals, but neither are we lions, functioning better in a group but capable alone. We need society, but we also need to be individuals. Culture splits the difference, binds us powerfully but not mechanically, irresistibly. The ability to resist cultural conditioning gives us child molesters but also permits progress and change.

Saying that morality is the product of culture is not to say that morality is meaningless or feeble. Culture is as powerful as your loathing of child molesters. But it does mean that we cannot couch our arguments for adopting new political, legal, or behavioral norms in moral terms. The ultimate test of any norm is whether or not it is adaptive, whether or not it furthers humanity's adaptation to our environment. And this test is a factual, empirical one, one that can be measurably passed or failed. Theoretical reasoning can give an indication of what norms could be more or less effective, but only outcomes give the final proof.