I can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but the Tea Parties make me extremely uneasy, which is why I have been so cautious about saying anything positive about them.

When they first started, I was equal parts hopeful and skeptical that in spite of being a mixed bag of Christian Fundamentalists, libertarians, and even some Objectivists, that the tea parties as a movement would turn to be explicitly and properly dedicated to promoting the defense of individual rights.

As time has passed, it seems to me that the tea parties (I think there are several by now) have been moving to meet my worst expectations.

This afternoon, though, I stumbled across this quotation from Ayn Rand:

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies.

Are the tea parties going to become the new Libertarians for Objectivists?

I need to get off of this Libertarian trip.  These people are just bonkers.

BUT! I was listening to a podcast this evening by a Libertarian and he was complaining because police officer pulled him over for running a stop sign.  The conversation went a lot like this.

L: Why are you pulling me over?

P: You rolled through the stop sign.

L: Did I violate anyone’s rights?

P: You violated the law.

L: Why is that the law?

P: Because you endangered yourself and others.

L: But did I violate anyone’s rights?

P: You violated the law.

L: So?

P: My job is to enforce the law.

L: The law is to protect people’s rights.

P: You can take that up with the judge.

L: But you have discretion, right?

P: Yes, but you rolled through the stop sign, so you violated the law, so you’re getting a ticket.

L: But did I violate anyone’s rights?

If you’re note annoyed with this conversation even up to that point, you have a level of patience that I think should be put in a record book somewhere.  This is ridiculous.  It’s absurd.

In the podcast I’m listening to, the Libertarian in the conversation above implied a confession.  He said something to the effect of, “I was barely going 15 MPH half a mile an hour.  That’s not enough to hurt anyone.”  So, he DID go through the stop sign!

I don’t agree with government maintenance of roads, but the fact is that they do maintain the roads and they do enforce the rules of conduct.  Right or wrong, that is the case.  And right or wrong, it’s not the police officer’s job to decide which laws he will and will not enforce.

I would very much prefer that my police officers be blind and stupid when it comes to enforcement of the law while our judiciary listens to things like, “I rolled through the stop sign at 15MPH and there was no one around.”  I don’t want police officers pretending to be judges when it comes to enforcing the law.

Even if we had an ideal form of government and streets were privately owned and you were pulled over by the private street rule enforcement club, you might ask, “Did I violate anyone’s rights?” and they would probably say, “You broke the rules of this road.” And you might continue to make an ass of yourself.

Regardless of your particular context, it is illegal to drive through stop signs.  Stop fighting that.  It’s stupid!

Take a more extreme example.  What if you shoot someone dead while they are coming at you with a knife?  I want the cops to take you to jail.  I want them to lock you up until a judge says, “The evidence shows that you were defending yourself. You are free to go.” I do not want you to go free until that determination has been made.  That is actually legitimate role of the government.

If you were to argue, “But I was defending myself! Can’t you see?”  I do not want the arresting police officer to even discuss that with you, you crazy gun-wielding maniac.

So, to protest against the police power outside of the judiciary or the legislature is stupid.  It makes you look like an ass.  And it makes your case in court reallyreallyreally weak!  So, shut up. Take your ticket and take it to court.  If you have a point about the legitimacy of some law or another to make make it there. Do not make it to the police officer!

So many Libertarians act like armyguys and policemen are sitting around debating the Lockian theory of property rights versus that of some other dead guy.  Ridiculous!  Shut up and follow the rules!

Update: changed “15MPH” to “half a mile an hour”

A lot of people have been alleging that Rand Paul’s name is derived from Ayn Rand, but it isn’t.

Also, Nathaniel Branden’s name is not based on Ayn Rand, either.

Here’s a Libertarian talking about Rand Paul:

Does the libertarian affection for private property and freedom of contract mean that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong to deny the white owner of a luncheonette the right to exclude a black customer from his premises solely on the ground of race?

Paul answered yes, based on a rote application of the Randian approach. The correct answer to that question was no, for reasons that place normative libertarian theory in its proper social and historical context, to which Paul was blind. That context of course is Jim Crow segregation that dominated the South and also exerted its baleful influence in the North. State-imposed segregation is the antithesis of what every libertarian theory requires, by imposing legal barriers that make it virtually impossible for individuals to enter freely into voluntary transitions with trading partners of their own choice, white or black.

Rachel Maddow herself summarizes Dr. Paul’s remark thusly, “Federal protections against discrimination essentially amount to government overreach when they impinge on the rights of private business owners to run their businesses the way they see fit.”

This means state-imposed segregation is something Dr. Paul also opposes along with the imposition against segregation.  And he made remarks supporting that conclusion repeatedly.

While I think the response as written is much better at glossing over the point that Maddow was getting at and in providing better historical context for that legislation, it still fails to provide the answer that Maddow and the large part of those outraged by Paul’s remarks wanted to hear.

Rachel Maddow’s treatment of Rand Paul has been making the rounds on a number of blogs in the past day or so.

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I have a hard time listening to Paul because his accent and his slow, trippy speech patterns are absolutely grating on my ears. (I did make it through for the sake of this post, though. I suffered just for you!)

Paul has made is very clear that he thinks racism is wrong and that the government should not be permitted to discriminate against people. No one misunderstands that. What he keeps trying to dodge is being forced to say that he believes private citizens should have the right to discriminate if they please. Rachel Maddow rightfully confronts him on his attempt to skirt and obscure this fact saying, “But isn’t being for civil rights but against the Civil Rights Act a little like saying you’re against cholesterol but for fried cheese?”
But even so, Paul kept dodging around the point of the question. Paul does eventually make a semi-clear statement about his view, but falls back into obfuscation about two seconds later. Maddow absolutely dominated him in this discussion and he came off looking like a total ass.

He absolutely should have given a clear, succinct statement that he does think private people should be permitted to discriminate. He’s a Libertarian like his father, so even though lots of people have expressed shock over this viewpoint, it’s not actually as unusual as Rachel Maddow seems to think.

Anyway, today, he’s turned around with this:

Aside from him stating clearly that he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, I think it’s particularly telling that he now states that he does think the government should intervene in situations like civil rights. He fudges and says he’s for that only in “extreme” situations, but what on earth does that mean?

More importantly, exactly what are Rand Paul’s principles now? It used to seem like he was a unwavering defender of private property rights even into “extreme” situations like the institutional racism of Jim Crow South. But his most recent statement sounds more like he’s a pragmatic defender of “small” government. What standards is this man using to make decisions?

I can’t say that this is typical of Libertarians, but it’s pretty typical of politicians. I’m mostly surprised that he was so inept at dealing with the situation and that he’s buckled so fast.

I wonder what Ron Paul has said on this topic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my earlier post. I wasn’t able to get my dinner companions last night to discuss the topic at any length but I think that is because they don’t know the argument presented by Tom in his post.  Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking about my post and reading other people’s posts and comments on the topic and I feel compelled to write for a little more depth.

Before I get into that I will comment briefly on the American Civil War. I am not very interested in this period in American history.  I’ve never been terribly interested in it and, as a result, I am not very knowledgeable about it. I did go to a school for grades seven and eight where I was taught that the war was fought over the issue of states’ rights. I also attended schools where it was argued that the primary issue was slavery. After a cursory review of things I’ve seen on the internets, the facts render the latter argument indisputable. The overwhelming concern among the confederates was a desire to perpetuate slavery, which they transmuted into an argument about states’ rights. That people continue to argue that the primary issue was that of states’ rights strikes me as absurd on its very face.  Finally, I utterly reject the idea that the states are sovereign nations which submit to the US Constitution at their own pleasure. They were sovereign nations before they ratified the Constitution, but not after.  Ratification meant they were relinquishing their independence.

But I’d like to discuss the general issues of secession, rebellion, and independence.

Herein, I’ll try to consistently refer to “secession” as the unilateral disjunction of a region from its federal government in order to establish its own independence. The term “region” will refer to a part of a governed geography.  I will also try to use the word “state” to refer to countries or governments in general and at large, but not in the American use of the term for which I’ll say “province” instead.   Therefore, use of the term “federal” will refer to the superseding or highest level of government in a country (because I am going to be talking primarily about governance within a single country subdivided into governed units and not arrangements between independent, sovereign nations) while “provincial” or “regional” will refer to levels of government restricted to those sub-units of the governed geography.

The objective behind this post is to show that claims to “states’ rights” which subsume some power of secession or rebellion granted to regional governments result in de facto anarchy. I’d also like to explore some of the requirements of independence and federal governance.

To start, it strikes me as patently obvious that no government can pass a law allowing for secession or rebellion.  That would be like passing a law, or writing a provision into your constitution which states that the constitution of the land is null and void.

Law 1: No murdering up in this here country!

Amendment 1 to Law 1: Unless you feel like it.

Amendment 2 to Law 1: We’d really prefer that you don’t, though.

Ayn Rand even said, “a government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.” It has to be a given geographical area because it has to be linked to the physical context in which people in that area interact.  You couldn’t have roving governments for hire as I’ve seen some anarcho-Libertarian-whatevers claim. Those are called “mercenaries,” “gangs,” or “warlords.”

You can “stack” governments by subdividing the country into regions or provinces and delimiting the powers they have regarding certain rules of conduct in their particular areas, but there generally needs to be some overriding authority at the top to settle disputes between the regional governments.

If you’re still trying to relate this back to the situation around the American Civil War, the difference between a federation and a confederation should be noted.

Wikipedia:

A federation (Latin: foedus, foederis, ‘covenant’), also known as a federal state, is a type of sovereign state characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions united by a central (federal) government.

A confederation is an association of sovereign member states, that by treaty have delegated certain of their competences to common institutions, in order to coordinate their policies in a number of areas, without however constituting a new state on top of the member states.

The former is what we have here in the US and have had since the ratification of the Constitution.  The latter seems to be what the confederates and their modern-day brethren, neo-confederates, seem to think we have.

So far, I haven’t said anything about a province trying to rid itself of its federal overseers, so let’s start with the peaceful options.  In the comments of my previous post, Jim Woods listed a bunch of real-life examples of voluntary separations.

I’m not going to dig into the vagaries of all these specific instances because it’s clear enough that it can be done, but only with agreement from the federal level of the government.

I can’t imagine the situation where a state tries to eject a province from its protection, but I imagine that could, theoretically, be done unilaterally by the federal government.  It couldn’t be done in the US because the Constitution doesn’t allow that and I imagine every similarly structured state is the same way, but it seems possible even if extremely, unlikely and implausible.  The federal government would just say, “Yo! We’re not dealing with you yahoos anymore.  You’re on your own!” And they’d withhold the use of its government powers to enforce that list of specific behaviors discussed above.

More commonly, a region wants to be independent from its state and Jim has also persuaded me that this is at least theoretically possible for the states of the US via legal provisions and his list above implies other methods as well.  Here are some I can imagine:

• A province might say, “WE’RE INDEPENDENT NOW!” And the federal government might say, “Well, you were really kind of a pain in the ass this whole time, so even though you’re totally breaking the law and we could crush you, we won’t because good riddance!” In an alternate possibility, the federal government may not be strong enough to stop the declaration, and therefore not even attempt to stop it.
• A government might have some sort of legal process whereby if a province meets certain conditions and petitions for independence, it will honor the request.

But when a province unilaterally declares its independence, it is an act of rebellion which the federal government would be justified in quelling with the full weight of its police powers.  Independence of a province/region/territory can only come with at least the implied the consent of the federal government.

It should be noted here that rebellion is not legal.  It cannot possibly be legal. The word means resisting your government’s attempts to enforce its laws.  When the US rebelled against Great Britain and won its independence, that action was illegal.  [Update: Jim Woods, who seems to be very well-studied in this area, has persuaded me against the preceding point.  See comments for details.] The failed attempt by the southern states to gain independence was also not legal.  The question here is not one of morality, but one of politics.  And rebellion is illegal and when laws are broken, the government’s role is to enforce them with force.

I’m not against rebellion as such.  There have been zillions of rebellions and wars of independence in the history of man.  Some of them were morally good and some weren’t. For the record, I regard the southern secession as both illegal and immoral.

Commenter RaeMeg asked if I would support secession given moral justification.  I keep thinking about this.  Initially, I responded that I probably wouldn’t like it because I wouldn’t want someone to call the federal government down on me and my property, but I was also imagining a rebellion of mixed purposes.  Since I’m not really opposed to a justified rebellion you’d think I would easily say that I support all modes of rebellion including secession when it’s justified. So, I think, if the rebellion were moral and our goal was to set up a moral government of our own, then I would be fine with that.

K. nuff blather about that for now. Comments welcome!

Before I kick this rant off, I should disclose that I know Tom in real life.  He and I went to business school together.  I was also very excited when I learned that he had discovered the work of Ayn Rand (He probably understands now some of the rants I went on in our business ethics classes.) and was impressed.  So, I was very disappointed this afternoon when this post from his blog came up in my reader: In Honor of Lincoln’s Birthday.

Now, I have no particular love of Lincoln except that he waged a war in a way that the the United States has never done since WWII.  So, I wasn’t all that dismayed to learn from Tom’s post that Lincoln did support a large number of distasteful government actions including the Fed and corporate subsidies.

What dismayed me about this post was the support for the claim that states have a right to secession.  Let me be clear about this: states and regions do not have a right to a peaceful secession.

I don’t care that Thomas Jefferson or anyone else may have argued to the contrary.

When a state or region claims to secede, they are announcing a claim that they are no longer subject to the laws of the land.  This would be like a gang announcing that they are not going to allow the police to protect people in their territory.  It is, in short, an announcement of rebellion and the government must make an effort to put it down.

The only way the Confederacy could have maintained their secession from the United States would be if they had won the Civil War they started.  They didn’t.  They lost in a big, horrible way.

Here is what Ayn Rand said about states’ rights in the Virtue of Selfishness in her essay, “Racism”:

The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights.

It does not matter whether Lincoln had any particular concern with slavery, it was his job as president to end it as a violation of individual rights.

It is popular among secessionists to argue that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but that is an obfuscation of the primary issue of slavery, which is what caused the southern states to secede in the first place. States have no right to run roughshod over the individual rights of their constituency and no matter how correct a state nor how wrong the federal government, there is nothing which guarantees a legal claim to secession.

On the question of a legal claim to secession, what would guarantee such a claim? A seceding state cannot say that the US Constitution protects them because they are renouncing the protection of the Constitution. They cannot say their own laws protect them because the US Government is not subject to the laws of other countries. Citizens may stage a revolution against their government, but no matter how righteous their cause, they are not guaranteed victory and no proper government can grant them the right to do so.

UPDATE 2/15/2010: Commentor Jim Woods has a lengthy (and entertaining) discussion of the particulars around the American Civil War.

Gus van Horn has a FANTASTIC post up today about Free Market rhetoric in politics.  It’s a little long, but completely worth the time to read every word.

For “genius” of this kind, consider a group that makes lots of hay out of the similarity between our two big government political parties and the fact that their policies will lead to tyranny. Consider further that in the process of doing so, this group is constantly plagiarizing the conclusions of a brilliant political philosopher, even to the point of glomming on to the popularity of one of her most famous works — while at the same time smearing its author as “intolerant” and “dogmatic” as a means of belittling the principles she used to reach the conclusions they’re plagiarizing. Such a group will pose as an “alternative” to the main two parties, while selling the exact same product not just in a different bottle, but with different flavoring. That group is the Libertarian Party.

He deftly eviscerates the Republican party, the Democratic party, and the Libertarian party in one remarkably short post.  Check it out.

I stumbled across Jeffrey Tucker’s article “Free Bernie Madoff” a week or so ago and I’m only just now getting around to blogging about it.

For those who are just too caught up in coverage of Michael Jackson’s funeral to remember the prime orchestrator behind the largest ponzi scheme in history, Wikipedia has a nice summary of his malfeasance:

Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff (pronounced /ˈmeɪdɒf/; born April 29, 1938) is a convicted felon and former financier. Madoff, who served as a non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, pled guilty to an 11-count criminal complaint, admitting to defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars and was convicted of operating a Ponzi scheme that has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person.^[3][4] Federal prosecutors estimated client losses, which included fabricated gains, of almost $65 billion.^[5] On June 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum allowed.^[6][7] As there is no parole in the federal correctional system, it was tantamount to a life sentence.

That’s $65 billion with a B.

His crimes listed over there on Wikipedia reads like a thesaurus entry for Deceit:

Securities fraud, investment advisor fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, perjury, making false filings with the SEC, theft from an employee benefit plan

And he knows it.  He knows and admitted that his scheme was just a big lie.  That in itself makes me wonder if he isn’t some sort of sociopath.  Bottom line: this guy is just a very fancy form of scum.

So, imagine how disgusted I was to see this alleged advocate of liberty, Jeffrey Tucker, calling to have Bernie Madoff freed from prison.

Mr. Tucker’s argument seems to be something like this:

• Madoff is financially ruined.
• Madoff is unpopular.
• Jailing him is expensive.

Therefore, we should just set him free.

Mr. Tucker them proceeds to address some of the common arguments for punishing criminals.  He sees the idea of jail as a rehabilitative effort as foolish, and I agree. He speculates that perhaps the goal of jail is to impose feelings of remorse, a suggestion that I find ludicrous and pointless; why should I, let alone our justice system, care how Madoff feels?

Mr. Tucker gives another possibility that I’d like to come back to in a moment, but basically, he sees jailing Madoff as pointless.

What, then, precisely, is the point of jailing him? He is no direct threat to anyone. Society would not be safer because he is in the slammer. He is not going to rob people or beat people up. He might write a book and donate the funds to charity or make some restitution to his victims. I, for one, would like to read that book.

I’m tempted to go on a tangent here, snark that there is no guarantee that this “poor, downtrodden soul” won’t turn violent and quibble about the fact that he has proven his willingness to rob people.  But I will get into why skimming from his future income is a grotesque injustice.

But first, let’s look at Mr. Tucker’s moral outrage at the Madoff sentence.

First, he says, “Maybe the idea of jail is punishment. I don’t see how it can be a worse punishment than he would face on the outside.” And then he says

Prisoners … face a kind of metaphysical transformation. They go from being valued members of society to being treated like blobs of flesh taking up space. Their wardens see them as objects. They are abused by fellow inmates and live in a state of incredible degradation everyday.

All prisoners are therefore living amidst a kind of torture. It isn’t modern. It isn’t even medieval. It is contrary to all principles of civilization.

So, jail, as punishment, IS worse than being left free to suffer the social punishment!  But even more offensive is the snotty, and frankly sneaky, way in which Mr. Tucker invites us to engage in a bit of duplicity of our own:

For decades we’ve been told by sociologists that the real criminals in society are not muggers and murderers and rapists but rather “white-collars criminals” who are capitalists sneakily stealing money using fancy finance.

Can I interrupt here for a second? “Capitalists” don’t steal.  Criminals steal.  Capitalists trade.  FUNDAMENTALLY.  If you are mooching, you’re not a capitalist.  If you are stealing, you’re not a capitalist.  If you are exchanging value for value in commerce, then you can call yourself a capitalist, but I resent the idea that I, a capitalist, I am in some way “sneaky” or even possibly stealing anything from anyone.  The fact that Mr. Tucker doesn’t seem recognize the difference is enough to tell you that dude is way off base.  (Is if the headline “Free Bernie Madoff” weren’t clue enough.)

So, Mr. Tucker doesn’t reject the idea of a hierarchy of viciousness for crimes.  He just wants to invert the one offered by these “bourgeoisie” sociologists and he wants to go further than any of them and simply stop prosecuting the “lesser” crimes at all.  I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with an example of a case in which a mildly violent criminal has been set free to roam the streets while Bernie Madoff rots in jail for stealing a mere $65 billion dollars, but I’ve never heard of anyone suggesting that we set serial killers and mass murderers free.  Yet, in the analogy between these two lines of reasoning, Bernie Madoff is the equivalent of a mass murderer.

I think we, Mr. Tucker and I — I cannot speak for these nameless, purported sociologists — agree that when possible, victims should have their property restored to them.  I also think we agree that whatever sentences are doled out, they should be proportionate in some way to the crime committed.  But we disagree on two other key points.

First, Mr. Tucker seems to think that the only reasonable goal behind imprisonment is to prevent violent criminals from being violent again.  I can only assume that if someone say snatches and old lady’s purse, he proposes to jail them for life, because anyone can be violent, but the only people who warrant any government action against them — apparently, according to Mr. Tucker — are the ones who’ve proven to be willing violent.  And since anyone can be violent at any time, they have to be jailed forever as a preventative measure.

Secondly and more importantly, Mr. Tucker is one of these idiots who seem to think the only real crimes are the ones that involve fists and guns.  Simply lying and misrepresenting one’s self and intentions to others is perhaps “not good” but it doesn’t seem to warrant any punishment at all.  Mr. Tucker even says that Madoff’s “investors” acted according to their own volition — as if consent can be given in cases of fraud.When one marches to the edge of a cliff at the point of a gun, one is exercising volition, just as one would be doing if one refused to march at the point of a gun, but in both cases one is being coerced.

He seems to think that the government should just take the fruits of the fraud back and then tell everyone that the person in question is a big, fat liar and that is all.  But he does not seem to think these are actual crimes which warrant punishment. And that’s getting the real point that Mr. Tucker misses.

Both the alleged sociologists and Mr. Tucker have failed to identify the principle underlying the concept of justice, which is to simply give people what they deserve. When you violate another person’s rights either through force or fraud you are a ciminal and you deserve to be punished.  The punishment should be proportionate to the crime.

But Mr. Tucker doesn’t think criminals like Madoff actually deserve anything.  They don’t deserve their loot, but they also don’t deserve any punishment.  At worst, Mr. Tucker thinks they deserve public scorn.

Mr. Tucker even fails to comprehend the role of proportion in assigning punishments to crimes.  Because, he says, Bernie Madoff’s crimes aren’t “unusually evil.” He ignores the fact that Madoff orchestrated a $65 BILLION scam — the largest in the history of individual criminals.  Comparing this to the trillion dollar scam that is the Social Security System does not in any way mitigate Madoff’s crime here.

Aside from all the plain stupidity in this article, the most irritating part is that Mr. Tucker does it all with a sneer and an implied accusation of emotionalism toward those who would disagree.   He implies that the righteous outrage people feel about the crime and the scale of the crime are not merely barbaric and vengeful, but are also silly busy-bodies who can’t mind their own business. After all, who cares that he stole $65 BILLION from a bunch of rich people?

This is pretty typical of Libertarians like Mr. Tucker.  They don’t comprehend the meaning of “rights,” “freedom,” or even “crime.”  As a result, they don’t understand the fundamental role of government in the lives of individuals, let alone its role in crime and punishment.