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gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

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Homesteading on the High Seas

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:58:00 EDT

If Peter Thiel funds something, it's bound to be cutting-edge awesome.

He is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which seeks to slow, stop, and eventually reverse aging. He was a producer of the film Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's charmingly ambiguous novel about a pro-tobacco lobbyist. An early investor in social networking, he was involved with Linked In and was the first investor in Facebook. He's big at the Singularity Institute (reason's Ronald Bailey caught up with him at the Singularity Summit earlier this year, check out the interview in the May print edition), which ponders and pushes artificial intelligence in preparation for a Vernor Vingeian "intelligence explosion." His first success was PayPal, which he originally hoped "would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency, something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore data haven free from government control."

And last week, Thiel announced a $500,000 investment—the same amount he put into Facebook in June 2004—in the Seasteading Institute. Seasteading, or "homesteading on the high seas," is an idea that has long attracted libertarians and others who would like to see a little more competition between forms of government. The idea is to get out into international waters and set up a floating outpost (or 12, or 1,200) from which people can come and go, experimenting with different types of legal, social, and contractual arrangements.

Thiel's co-conspirator and resident big thinker is none other than the impeccably credentialed Patri Friedman, son of David "Machinery of Freedom" Friedman, grandson of Milton "Capitalism and Freedom" Friedman. Patri, 31, has been beating the drums for various floating autonomous entities for several years, whenever he can steal time from his work as a software engineer at Google and from his now 2-year-old son, Tovar.

Despite the seemingly radical idea he's championing, Patri sees himself as a practical guy: "Starting a new country is actually a much less hard problem than, say, a libertarian winning a U.S. election," he says. He says that most of his competitors in the libertarian/anarchist autonomous entity business have been too ambitious, citing efforts from Sealand (the abandoned offshore fort-turned-free-state "which sort of worked" until it was devastated by fire in 2006) to more dramatic failures like Freedom Ship (current estimated cost >$11 billion, construction not yet begun) and the Aquarius phase of the Millennial Project ("colonizing the galaxy in eight easy steps!") to Minerva Reef (an uninhabited dredged island "invaded" by neighboring Tonga and eventually more or less reclaimed by the sea).

Learning a valuable lesson from his predecessors, Friedman is an incrementalist. "I want to talk about what to do this year, not how to colonize the galaxy." One way to start small, he says, is to hold a kind of floating Burning Man, called Ephemerisle, an idea inspired by childhood pilgrimages with his father to Pennsic, a Society for Creative Anachronism medieval reenactment held outside Pittsburgh, and college stints at Burning Man.

"There aren't that many people who are wiling to drop their lives and move to the ocean." Instead, he says, "it could start as a one week vacation, but then unlike Burning Man it could grow and eventually become permanent." Friedman hopes to hold the first Ephemerisle next summer, inviting many types of floating vessels to join him in international waters. Even an ordinary cruise ship might be enough to get started, since the cruise industry has proven that "providing power, water, food, and internet on the ocean is not only possible but can be profitable." But some of Thiel's grant is going toward figuring out the best way to throw up some small, cheap seasteads to provide a little non-state infrastructure and get things rolling (or floating, as the case may be).

From the official website: "Think about all the hot air and argumentation about a whole host of different political issues—freedom vs. security, absolute wealth vs. inequality, strong family vs. tolerance, open vs. closed borders, whatever the topic du jour is. Instead of deciding them through rhetoric, or voting on a few representatives to decide them for tens or hundreds of millions of people at once, imagine if we could try them each on a small scale and see what happens."

Thiel and Friedman met at a dinner set up by a couple of guys who work for Thiel's investment firm, Clarium Capital, and happened to be fans of Friedman's blog. Ajay Royan, a principal at Clarion and now a board member at the Seasteading Institute, described how the meeting of minds between Friedman and Thiel came about a few months back: "Peter knows Patri's grandfather, so we were just tickled that somebody of that lineage was so close to us physically and was thinking about macro issues from that perspective," says Royan. "We'd been having a lot internal debate [at Clarium] about how we get a freer space for people to function in. What was intriguing to us was that here was somebody proposing to shift the canvas to a relatively neutral space by recreating a frontier."

Not content with revolutionizing technology and society, Thiel says he's looking to bring "innovation to the public sector, where it's vitally needed." As with PayPal, his aspirations for the project are far from modest: "We're at a fascinating juncture: the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level."

Having a low-cost, gradually ramping up cluster of choices to live on would lower the cost of "jurisdictional arbitrage," which is very high right now, says Friedman. If you don't like your government right now, the only way to get a new one is to sell your house, pack up, move to another country, deal with immigration, get a new job and a new house, make new friends, and learn a new culture. This is expensive. But hopping from boat to boat, platform to platform, or island to island is cheap.

In fact, Friedman sees seasteading as a real, viable version of a metaphor his dad once used to sell anarcho-capitalism, and demonstrate why Nozickian utopias with lots of free entry and exit will tend toward libertarianism rather than authoritarianism:

Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language. One day, the president of France announces that because of troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents.

The question is (to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes): Will three generations of Friedmans be enough? Patri Friedman is optimistic. "I hope I can create a world where [my son] doesn't need to worry about how to increase freedom because we've already got it." he says. "But I suspect that I'll still be working on it by the time he's old enough to help."

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor

The Traditionalist Counterculture

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:49:00 EST

In the web journal First Principles, reason managing editor Jesse Walker takes a look at "cruncy cons," National Review conservatives, the Summer of Love, and "the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement."

Read all about it here.

William F. Buckley, RIP

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:11:00 EST

William F. Buckley Jr., who founded National Review and did more than any other intellectual to create a conservative alliance between traditionalists and libertarians (an achievement that seems more impressive with each passing day), died this morning at the age of 82. I think my first introduction to Buckley was through David Frye's impersonation of him on I Am the President, so for me he was part of a pantheon of important political figures with distinctive voices from early on. I vividly remember watching a 60 Minutes interview with Buckley in the 1970s and being struck by how much he seemed to relish intellectual combat while remaining calm, polite, and self-assured, traits that also came through in his long-running PBS talk show Firing Line. For left-liberals, I realized, he was a house-broken conservative, witty, learned, and cordial even while espousing horrifying opinions. Although many of today's most conspicuous conservatives eschew that role, Buckley's dignified, thoughtful approach earned the conservative movement mainstream credibility and may even have persuaded a few people, instead of simply stirring up the mob.

In the early 1990s I worked for Buckley at National Review, although by that time he was not much involved in the day-to-day running of the magazine. He would see us at the editorial meetings every two weeks and treat us to lunch at a neighborhood Italian restaurant he favored. In conversation he was always sharp but gentlemanly. At one of those post-meeting meals I remarked that there was something to be said for the Articles of Confederation. "Yes," Buckley replied with a sly smile, taking a slug of red wine, "but not much." This formulation, which allowed for continued argument but also let me drop the subject without embarrassment, was of a piece with his confident but laid-back intellectual style.

As for substance, Buckley often called himself a libertarian; the subtitle of Happy Days Were Here Again, his 1993 collection of columns and articles, was "Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist." Buckley represented the classical liberal strain of modern American conservatism often enough that his endorsement of statist schemes such as "national service" (or, more recently, tobacco prohibition) caused real dismay. He especially endeared himself to libertarians with his courageous and persistent criticism of the war on drugs, a stance that continues to distinguish National Review from other conservative organs. Although Buckley's support for repealing drug prohibition grew more out of pragmatic concerns than a principled commitment to individual freedom, his prolific writings usually reflected skepticism of government intervention. In recent years this skepticism drove him to question another war popular with conservatives, one that could prove to be as long-lived as the war on drugs, if John McCain has anything to say about it. Buckley, in short, admirably combined an ability to fuse the disparate elements of the conservative coalition with a willingness to break them apart when he thought the stakes were high enough.

Morally Vacuous and Poisonously Dogmatic?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last week, The Weekly Standard ran an article by academics Benjamin and Jena Silber Storey praising the rise of Sen. John McCain in the Republican presidential primaries.

The Weekly Standard has long been a McCain supporter, going back to the 2000 election. The magazine adores McCain's rugged, Theodore Roosevelt philosophy of governance, one that emphasizes American might, exalts public service, and believes that so long as the right people are governing, government can be a transformative, transcendent, almost mystical force for good in the world.

The Weekly Standard began in the mid-1990s, on the heels of the dramatic GOP takeover of Congress. What's odd is that the 1994 takeover was driven in large part by the libertarian wing of the party, and was animated by libertarian ideas. The "Contract With America" did include some nods to the Christian right, but it was mostly a call for a transparent, accountable, dramatically limited government.

But almost immediately thereafter, The Weekly Standard rose to high prominence in the Republican Party, and began nudging the GOP away from its libertarian influences toward a broader, more collectivist vision—what neoconservative leaders William Kristol and David Brooks would come to call "National Greatness." A cynic might call it socialism for conservatives.

The Storey article, then, not only exalts John McCain, but takes some ugly swipes at libertarianism—though they tend to be as uninformed as they are ad hominem. I should note, here, that the article attacks reason magazine, where I'm a senior editor.

Here's part of the offending passage:

The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues. Recent congressional history has laid bare the fallacy of this argument. Republicans who proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned out to believe it when they got into office, amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means of their newfound powers. Why should we be surprised? To expect them to do otherwise would be to expect that men sometimes risk their self-interest for the sake of the public good, which our economist friends tell us is impossible. Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.

reason's editor-in-chief Matt Welch already posted an excellent rebuttal to this passage. But there's a broader lesson here, too. The passage drives home just how far the Republican Party has drifted from the Reagan-Goldwater movement that swept it into power.

One problem with the Storeys' attack on libertarianism is its historical ignorance. If there have been actual Republicans who have stumped on the message that "greed is good," I sure don't remember them (the slogan, from the movie Wall Street, is also something of a caricature of libertarianism).

The GOP's lone flirtation with the principles of limited, accountable, transparent government lasted from election night 1994 until about the time newly minted GOP committee chairmen started slamming their gavels. The party has since been dominated by a White House and Congressional leadership that has stood firm on issues like flag burning, gay marriage, and abstinence-only education, while dramatically growing the federal budget, inventing new entitlements and cabinet-level agencies, and generally bloating the size, scope, and influence of the federal government.

Libertarians, these ain't.

And what about that "bridge to nowhere?"

The term refers to the pork barrel project in Alaska that came to represent the problems with the corrupt earmarking process in appropriations bills. But there's nothing remotely libertarian about the three Republicans responsible for the "bridge to nowhere."

Sens. Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski and Rep. Don Young were mainstream, big government Republicans. Earmark darling Sen. Trent Lott hasn't exactly been a libertarian standard-bearer, either. As for the party's problems with corruption, disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham was a Christian Coalition darling. Ohio Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney was an anti-trade, America-firster. Rep. Tom Delay was a moral-right conservative who's most notable accomplishment was the disastrous prescription drug benefit, the largest new federal entitlement in 40 years.

These weren't champions of the free market and limited government meddling. They were big government conservatives.

In fact, the few actual libertarian-leaning Republicans left—Reps. Jeff Flake and Ron Paul and Sen. John Sununu, for example—have led the charge to reform the corrupt earmarking process.

The Storey article next says we shouldn't expect politicians to "risk their self-interest for the sake of the public good, which our economist friends tell us is impossible."

That's exactly right. This is the basis of public choice theory (an area of study dominated by libertarian economists), which tells us that public servants aren't altruistic, all-knowing philosopher kings who govern with wisdom and restraint. Rather, just like people in the private sector, they're more likely to act to further their own interests, not the interests of the public, or the interests of addressing the problem the agency was created to solve.

So yes, the fall of the GOP and all of the corruption, abuse of office and power, and bad governing that went with it is exactly what we would expect. It's what politicians do. Which is exactly why libertarians believe in limited government. Libertarianism acknowledges the trappings of power. Libertarians understand that people are generally selfish, and behave selfishly. The free market harnesses self-interest in ways that are productive and positive for everyone. People looking to further their own self interest in positive, productive ways generally are rewarded. People who go too far are generally punished. Consumers at least have choices, and transactions are voluntary. That isn't the case with government.

It's in the pages of The Weekly Standard that you'll find paeans to "great works" projects, odes to Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, grand schemes to remap and democratize the Middle East, and a general fetishization of politics and public service. The kind of "national greatness" envisioned by Kristol and Brooks requires a faith in the altruism and selflessness of politicians and government agents that's wholly at odds with human nature-or human history.

The moral failures of the Republican Party have nothing to do with libertarianism. They're the inevitable, entirely foreseeable failures of men given too much power and not enough accountability. Neoconservatives like those at the Weekly Standard believe in giving government more of the former and, judging by the magazine's ceaseless defenses of the Bush administration, less of the latter.

At the urging of the neoconservatives, the GOP has drifted further and further away from libertarianism since taking power in 1994. It takes considerable gall for them to now blame libertarianism for the Republicans' failures.

Hayek vs. the Ants

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:45:00 EST

A very interesting piece by the always very interesting Wirkman Virkkala, that asks the not very musical question: Can one reconcile with Hayek the fact that ants seem at the same time socialist and nomocratic, living indeed in "a Marxist utopia, with the bulk of the society switching roles over time and according to need"? Hayek of course believed that, in human terms, liberal social orders had to be nomocratic (that is, rule-based) rather than teleocratic (ends-based, as he saw socialist systems).

I think you already know enough from your reaction to that sentence whether you want to read the whole thing. (And I recommend you do. It's not very long, either.)

For reason's most recent piece on Hayek, see Steven Horwitz's review of Theodore Burczak's Socialism After Hayek from our July 2007 issue.

For much, much more on Hayek's life, time, and thoughts (though very little about ants), see my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. And also check out the book's dedicated blog, somewhat freshly reorganized with all perma-links on the right hand side updated and conveniently categorized to guide you to all past reviews, interviews, excerpts, spinoff op-eds, and audio and video circulating about the book.

We Don't Need Another Hero

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:36:00 EDT

Over at the New York Post, reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie questions whether Bush insider Michael J. Gerson's Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (and Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't) really needed such a long subtitle.

Click here to read the review.

Mike Gravel: Dadaist Performance Guru

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:39:00 EDT

In the LA Times, avowed nihilist Crispin Sartwell riffs on the unknown reality that is a Mike Gravel campaign video:

That is why as Americans we all owe a debt of aesthetic gratitude to the genius of former senator and current Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, who has taken the pabulum and kitsch that is our political art and transcended it—swept it up, summarized it and broken through it into a new range of possibilities. Mike Gravel is to political advertising what Ralph Waldo Emerson is to the essay, Walt Whitman to poetry, Jackson Pollock to painting, 50 Cent to bullet wounds. He is the avant garde of the new artpolitical era.

Here's "Fire."

Remembering the Victims of Communism

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:07:00 EDT

The Victims of Communism Memorial is being dedicated in Washington, D.C. today, in a service featuring Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). Other events later in the day include a roundtable discussion with Richard Pipes, Paul Hollander, and Harry Wu; and a dinner with William F. Buckley and Elena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov's wife).

Details here.

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this piece in the New Statesman that asks whether brutal repression is a feature not a bug in communism. Writes Robert Service, author of Comrades: A World History of Communism,

In all cases of durable state communism, there was some approximation to the Soviet "model". A single party kept itself in power without concern for electoral mandate. A nomenklatura system of personnel appointment was introduced. Religion was harassed. National traditions were emasculated. The rule of law was flouted. The political police was ubiquitous and ruthless; labour camps were established. Foreign travel permits were made hard to come by. Radio and TV broadcasts from abroad were banned. A prim public culture was installed.
This was the pattern despite the many national differences....

Service notes that, with the exception of Pol Pot's Cambodia, these same regimes industrialized quickly, expanded education, and did other things that helped to explain their staying power (and their good press in the liberal West). More here.

Alan Charles Kors took a long look at The God that Failed (the 1950 anthology and the ideology) for Reason here.

Richard Rorty, R.I.P.

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:31:00 EDT

Philosopher Richard Rorty is dead at age 75 of pancreatic cancer. The New York Times obit. The summation, from it, of his pragmatic brand of philosophy:

When his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing. To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs and language.

Tyler Cowen, a sometime reason contributor, explains some reasons that economists might want to be familiar with Rorty. A sample:

He emphasized that there is no unique way to translate the results of a model into an interpretation of the real world. This is trivial for those who know it, but not everyone does.
That means when DSquared writes: "[The case for free trade] can't be derived in an economy with a positive rate of profit; Ian Steedman proved this one in a series of papers discussed on Rob Vienneau's blog" the correct response is one never thought it could be derived in the first place.....
...Rorty stressed the importance of knowing fiction and the humanities for the social sciences or policy assessment.

A highly critical reason review of Rorty's book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Alan Charles Kors, from our Dec. 1998 issue. A sample that sums up Rorty's political thinking:

For Rorty, who has moved from analytic philosophy to skeptical pragmatism to terminal silliness, the real problem is that contempt for country and the illusion of scientific truth have led leftists away from their rightful role as "agents" into a self-defeating role as "spectators." Agents do things like organize effective coalitions to take the fruits of one person's labor or estate and give it to another person. Spectators do things like teach university courses about phallogocentric hegemonies.....
Rorty believes there was a time when the left was Whitmanesque, celebrating America, despite her faults, as a set of possibilities, and when it was imbued with the spirit of John Dewey, eschewing scientific certainties and seeking a civic consensus on what the nation could become and achieve. Marx got in the way. He had an unfortunate commitment to notions of science and historical certainty. There went Whitman's festive spirit and Dewey's democratic pragmatism.
The New Left got in the way. It could have thought of certain phenomena (slavery, Jim Crow, exploitation, Vietnam, and the like) as our "tragedies," but instead it thought of them as our "sins," which made America unforgiveable rather than something that could be transcended and achieved. This alienated people who belonged to unions and rather liked their country......
Postmodernism got in the way. It was attracted to science, in Rorty's singular estimation. With no trace of irony, he writes that "the Foucauldian Left represents an unfortunate regression to the Marxist obsession with scientific rigor." It spoke a jargon that put off the average working guy. It engaged in speculation instead of reformist coalition building.
Rorty's fondest hope for the species is that the "Cultural Left," which has done so much to reduce cultural "sadism" through what the defenders of the corporations call "political correctness," be united with the "Reformist Left," creating an effective coalition, just in the nick of time, to defeat the forces of "selfishness."

Lefty critic of the Democratic Party and conventional liberals Eric Lott uses Rorty as an example of weak-kneed Democratic thinking that is keeping the progressive man down--see my review of Lott's recent book The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual.

You Can't Force Economists to Think Seriously About Coercion

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:58:00 EDT

Economist Daniel Klein over at Cato Unbound argues that it's OK--in fact, often essential--for economists to deal with the concept of coercion in their science. "The distinction between voluntary and coercive is built into many of the key analytic distinctions we use in economics," he insists. The essay is long and detailed and worth reading in full, but for those who like to leap to the conclusion:

Economic understanding, by experts and the general public alike, would gain by economists doing more of the following: (1) using the voluntary/coercive distinction in their formulations, analysis, and discourse; (2) making that utilization explicit and unabashed; (3) thinking hard about the content of that distinction, particularly by clarifying the holes and gray areas; (4) making it clear that, while they may promote a presumption of liberty, they do not mean to suggest that the distinction carries a necessary condemnation of coercion.

Michael Medved Drills Into the Core of Conservatism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:08:00 EDT

As a libertarian who used to work at National Review and who counts conservatives among my friends and political allies, I have long searched for the unifying thread that ties together the seemingly disparate positions typically advocated by people on "the right." Why does opposition to gun control tend to go hand in hand with support for drug control (National Review's editors being an honorable exception on that score)? What does banning flag burning have in common with repealing restrictions on political ads? Why does pro-life on abortion and assisted suicide become pro-death on capital punishment? How does support for freedom of contract jibe with opposition to gay marriage? What do lower taxes have to do with prohibiting cloning? How is support for free markets reconciled with bans on migrant labor and online gambling?

Now Michael Medved, who complains that "most of the common efforts to define the fundamentals of conservative thinking fall short in their explanatory power," has made it all clear to me: The "core of conservatism," he says, is "distinctions and consequences," to which other political persuasions are oblivious or indifferent. "Conservatives feel impelled to make clear distinctions between right and wrong," Medved avers. "We reject all notions of moral relativism." Not only that, he says, but conservatives want society to "encourage the good and discourage the bad." They always ask, "Will a given policy or initiative help society to encourage good behavior and discourage destructiveness?" Everyone else, I guess, wants to know how to discourage good behavior and encourage destructiveness.

I'm not a conservative, so by definition I'm not very good with distinctions, but that seems like a pretty clear one to me. Still, it does not go very far in "resolv[ing] some of the apparent conservative contradictions," as Medved promises to do.

"It's impossible to say that conservatives want 'small government' above all," he concedes, "when most of us want expanded governmental efforts to crack down on terrorists, crooks and illegal immigrants. Yes, we generally favor 'less regulation,' but we also want more restrictions on abortion, pornography and desecration of the flag." Is there some theory about the proper role of government underlying those policy preferences? Medved never really says, beyond the idea that the government should foster good things and crack down on bad things.

One of those good things is capitalism, except when it isn't (emphasis added):

We favor free markets and small government not for their own sake but because the profit system represents the best possible means to encourage wholesome, constructive choices. The only way to make money in a free marketplace is to benefit and bless other people: to provide them with a product or a service they choose to buy. You enrich yourself and enhance your own power by providing your neighbors with what they want.

As long as it's not drugs. Or gangster rap. Or pornography. Or lap dances. Or abortion. Or an opportunity to bet on football. Presumably Medved-style conservatives see no benefit or blessing in these activities because they are not wholesome or constructive. (Does that mean no one makes money by providing them?) Yet many left-liberals are willing to tolerate such transactions, even while seeking to ban the sale of handguns, trans fats, harp seal fur, or drinks in smoky bars. Is this because they do not draw distinctions or care about consequences? Or is it because they draw different distinctions and care about different consequences?

Likewise, Medved asserts that "liberals want us to continue to pour foreign aid into the most dysfunctional nations on earth." Like Iraq? No, not like Iraq, because Saddam was evil! The rulers of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia "aren't all that good," Medved concedes, but they're our friends. So much for eschewing moral relativism and making clear distinctions between right and wrong.

Instead of elucidating the differences in values and principles that distinguish modern American conservatism, Medved settles for smugly assuming his own moral and intellectual superiority. The "core of conservatism," it seems, is a dark, mushy mess.

Philosopher Kings vs. Milton Friedman

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:29:00 EST

The always-interesting Arnold Kling writes at TCSDaily:

Milton Friedman got it right, and Plato got it wrong.
That is the message that I take away from Clifford Winston's exhaustive survey of the actual results of well-intentioned government policies aimed at correcting market failures. He looks at policies designed to address all of the ills that economists and others have identified with markets -- monopoly power, imperfect information, externalities, and so on. Government tends to make things worse, not better.

More here.

It Usually Begins with Sammy Hagar*

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:08:00 EST

In Sunday's LA Times--the obscure West Coast daily that is fast becoming a dumping ground for Reason mag cast-offs--former Van Halen frontman, tequila pusher, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and compulsive, red-suit wearing recidivist speeder Sammy Hagar joins the Rand-o-Rama when asked what his "bedstand reading" is: "Anything by Ayn Rand."

Throughouth the short Q&A, Hagar offers up other pearls of wisdom:

CULTURAL ADDICTION

"I love the Food Network. I'm happiest in a kitchen. When I'm home from touring I don't want to eat out, I want to cook and try out new things. Gourmet food and fine wines…. Emeril Lagasse is a good pal of mine and we did this charity auction where the bidder comes to my house in Cabo for dinner with us and Emeril cooks. The guy is a rock star."...

SECRET WEAPON FOR NAVIGATING THE CULTURE

"Did I mention margaritas? I think you need to take life like a day at the beach. You have to work hard but also sit back, listen to the ocean and look at the sun, feel everything and not take yourself too seriously. Does that answer the question? Probably not."

More here.

Back in 2005, on the occasion of Ayn Rand's 100th birthday, Reason compiled samplings from books, movies, and more that document "the long shelf life" of the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. That's online here.

The New Individualist, the magazine of The Objectivist Center, has compiled a long, entertaining, and exhaustive list of celebrity Rand fans here. And here's movie news that makes Rand fans tremble like Dominique watching Howard Roark work a jackhammer.

Not particularly obscure headline allusion here.

Libertarianism in the Britannica

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:39:00 EST

The Encyclopedia Britannica will now have its first extended stand-alone coverage of libertarianism, in an entry written by David Boaz of the Cato Institute. And you can check it out here .

Unethical Ethicists Go to the Library

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:25:00 EST

A philosophy professor at UC-Riverside crunches some numbers and find that ethicists have stickier fingers than their colleagues:

Ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.

Do these numbers reflect book thieves in search of a cure for their compulsion? Or could the explanation be a rash of ironical practical jokesters trolling university libraries? Read more here.

Via Marginal Revolution

Even More About Robert Anton Wilson

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:14:00 EST

RU Sirius has a nice appreciation of the recently deceased author over at 10 Zen Monkeys. A snippet:

Robert Anton Wilson taught us all that “the universe contains a maybe.” So maybe there is an afterlife, and maybe Bob’s consciousness is hovering around all of us who were touched by his words and his presence all these years. And if that’s the case, I’m sure he’d like to see you do something strange and irreverent — and yet beautiful –- in his honor.

More here. Tribute show to Wilson on Sirius' web radio program here.

Reason on Wilson here and here.

Jesse Walker discussed Wilson, the subject of the documentary Maybe Logic as "the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room" here.

"I'm Basically a Libertarian."

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:46:00 EST

I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations.

That's James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, talking in the January 2007 issue of Esquire. More of that here (full disclosure: the Esquire page seems to be missing random words of Watson's wisdom).

In the Fall 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, Watson was asked whether there should be "some legal restriction[s] on genetic research." His answer:

I would say no. I am very libertarian. If someone discovers one day that we can add a gene so that children can be born more intelligent, or more beautiful, or healthier—well, I do not see why not to do it. I do not believe that suffering does any good to a person. Some people say: “Christ suffered, therefore men also need to suffer.” I do not buy this argument. Today, we do not have the ability to improve humanity in this way. If someday we can, why not do it? Some people allege that this would favor the rich, but there is no novelty there.The rich always buy the new technologies before other people.

Full Q & A here.

And in July 2003, Watson told Discover this in reaction to a hypothetical in which he's "put in charge" of what the country should "do" about genetics:

My sensibility is very libertarian. Just let all genetic decisions be made by individual women. That is, never ask what's good for the country; ask what's good for the family. I don't know what's good for the country, but you can often say what's good or bad for the family. That is, mental disease is no good for any family. And so if there's a way of trying to fight that, I'd let a woman have the choice to do it or not do it. Not give in and have the state tell you to have a certain sort of child. I would be very frightened by the state telling you one way or the other.

Whole thing here.

Hat tip to the folks at The Institute for Humane Studies.

Reason's Ronald Bailey discussed biopolitics--and why individuals, and not states--should be allowed to make genetic decisions here (among other places).

Reason's January 2006 cover story, "Who's Afraid of Radical Human Enhancement?," was a heated debate on related topics. Read it here.

In Defense of Unhappiness

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:49:00 EST

Are we suffering from "affluenza"? Does more wealth do anything to make us happier, or are we doomed to be envious and unhappy no matter how well off we are?

There is no "paradox of prosperity" says Daniel Ben-Ami:

Coveting what the rich have should not be dismissed as unhealthy envy. On the contrary, the fact people are dissatisfied with their lot can be seen as a healthy motive for change. Humanity has historically progressed by constantly trying to improve its position. As a result people are better off than ever before. In this sense unhappiness should be welcomed. It is a sign of ambition and a drive to progress rather than one of inherent misery. In contrast, the essentially conservative message of the happiness gurus is that people should be happy with their lot.
From here it should be clear that there is no paradox of prosperity. The rise of mass affluence is an incredibly positive development. It has bolstered the quality of people’s lives enormously. But there never was any guarantee that such progress would bring happiness. One of the most positive qualities of human beings is that they often want more than they have got.

Read Will Wilkinson writing in reason on the happiness wars here.

Is Taxation Theft?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:23:00 EST

Libertarian thinker Timothy Wirkman Virkkala parses out the common radical libertarian slogan "taxation is theft!" and finds it represents an unfortunate lack of understanding of the way most non-libertarians think. The heart of a long and very interesting disquisition:

Taxation is the expropriation of private property according to an established rate, as put into law by an established state.
Robbery and other forms of theft are illegal kinds of expropriation, and piecemeal at that. Taxation is a legal kind of expropriation.
To many libertarians, this distinction is not much of a distinction at all. They have pretty much thrown out the distinctions between legal and illegal, and are in a continual revolutionary mode of thinking, ready at a moment's notice to throw out whole chunks of the rule of law and state practice.
So of course they equate all kinds of expropriation.
Well, not all, since libertarians do support some forms of expropriation. They have no trouble expropriating the loot of thieves from thieves, after court adjudication. And they have no trouble expropriating from a person found liable, in court, to a tort claim.
They just don't support taxation.
My Contention: The main reason radical libertarians will not get anywhere is their complete lack of understanding of the normal mindset, which is not constantly in revolutionary mode. Radical libertarians who trot out slogans such as taxation is theft do not address the respect a non-revolutionary has for the rule of law.
Indeed, because of this revolutionary stance — and I'm not talking about physical, bloody revolution so much as a particular stance regarding ideas and consent — these libertarians cannot deal with normal folk.
They offend normal folk; libertarians often (and with good reason) strike normal citizens as lunatics, perhaps dangerous lunatics.
...............
It may be that we will someday be able to support all worthy public projects without any taxation.
But however we manage to do this....it will have to be done within the framework of the rule of law.
And people in such a future society will have to regard the means used at that time in something other than constant revolutionary mode. Even if they can think of better ways, they will have to show some respect for the rule of law of the day.

While I found Virkkala's thoughts intelligent and interesting, as he never fails to be, I still think the "taxation is theft" slogan is a useful way to get people thinking about the ways in which how the state operates can be seen as violating standard western notions of justice that most people accept and believe in as much as they believe in the state themselves; the cognitive dissonance that might result can lead to an understanding of some truths about the nature of the state that are otherwise difficult to get at. But for those who enjoy thinking about how the "revolutionary mode" of some libertarian ideas rub against the grain of standard American thinking, his whole essay is well worth reading.

Lowdown Conservative Academia Shutout Blues

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:39:00 EST

The Chronicle of Higher Education weighs in with an interesting, but somewhat muddled, version of that old song: "Low Down Conservative Academia Shutout Blues." Yeah, ev'rybody's talking 'bout Foucault, religious right, corporate whores, needless wars, but all Mark Bauerlein is saying is, Give Hayek A Chance.

The biggest muddle, in a piece complaining that academic and popular books assessing conservatism don't treat it as a coherent intellectual tradition, is his casual linking of disparate thinkers, thus: "Count the names Hayek, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, etc., on syllabi in courses on "Culture & Society." Tally how often, in left-of-center periodicals, those names are linked to moneyed interests. The framing is complete. Heralds of conservatism start and finish in the messy realm of politics and finance, never rising into the temple of reflection."

The complaint about the association of conservative and free-market thinking with moneyed interests is apt. That Hayek, a classic 19th century liberal and apostle of the knowledge-spreading and dynamic powers of free markets and the unrestricted price system, Kirk with his tradition-rooted mistrust of untrammeled capitalism, and Kristol's bellicose nationalism and love of censorship can be so casually conflated is a sign that even at the highest levels, academic understanding of conservative is deficient.

This is not to say there are no interesting ways in which the three can be compared; Hayek shared with Kirk an interest in the defense of rooted tradition that cannot necessarily be rationally justified, and with Kristol an interest in dynamic economic growth, but the differences between all three are more important than the similarities, and merely linking those three together does not a defensible and coherent intelellectual tendency make. The main reason for this, as Hayek pre-emptively told Bauerlein and all the rest of us over four decades ago, is that Hayek is "not a conservative ."

Indeed, as Hayek wrote, in language that sounds quite a bit like the unnamed and innumerable liberal professors who keep conservativism from a position of respect in the academy, "conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality."

Of course, in large part thanks to the influence of libertarians such as Hayek and Milton Friedman on conservatism as popularly understood, the conservative of today is far more respectful of liberty and markets overall than was the conservatism of the 1950s that Hayek wrote about here. Still, it won't help further academic understanding and appreciation of either Hayek or conservatism to lump them together as Bauerlein does.

UPDATE: I misspelled the name of the author of the linked story in my original post (now fixed).
Reason's editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie had earlier discussed Bauerlein's calls for "a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek" in his report on the 2005 Modern Language Association meetings at TechCentral Station; and readers should also check out a great essay Bauerlein wrote for Reason, reviewing the Anti-Chomsky Reader (edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz) in our April 2005 issue

Conserberaltarians

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:10:00 EST

Virginia Postrel zeroes in on what has bugged me the most about the response to Brink Lindsey's "Liberaltarians" article:

...it seems much clearer to me than to many other commenters that Brink Lindsey's TNR article is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.

I'll add that just as libertarians have more to offer than a pathetic voting bloc, the left has more to offer than the pathetic Democratic Party. I really don't see much hope at all for turning the Democrats in a libertarian direction (though I'll cheer on anyone who's willing to try), but I know plenty of people who reflexively vote Democratic (when they vote at all) but are easily 80% libertarian in their own attitudes. Call them Whole Earth Catalog libertarians, Santa Fe Institute libertarians, bOING bOING libertarians. They appreciate spontaneous order, entrepreneurship (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), decentralization, free expression, and peace. The hard-core do-it-yourselfers among them (and the veterans of the New Left) also appreciate the widespread private ownership of guns. They might not agree with everything in Brink's article, but hey, neither do I. That's fine. It's a big tent.

Another pet peeve: Why does this have to be discussed as a "divorce" from the conservative movement? A divorce from the Republican Party, sure -- my hat's off to Ron Paul and a few others in the GOP, but the Republican establishment is as hostile to liberty as the Democratic leadership, maybe more so. But there's plenty of 80%ers on the right, too, and I'm as happy to hang out with them as I am to hang out with friendly liberals, friendly leftists, and friendly counterculturalists. There are many lefts, and there are many rights. We don't have to marry any of them, and we don't have to divorce any of them either. Insert the free-love metaphor of your choice here.

More on the Elusive "Liberaltarian"

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:22:00 EST

Contributing editor Julian Sanchez supplies a nifty, and interesting in its own right, roundup of the most valuable chatter caused by fellow Reason contributing editor Brink Lindsey's New Republic essay on the possibilities for liberal-libertarian ideological and political fusion.

Julian's latest feature reporting masterpiece, "The Pinpoint Search," on the meaning of the latest wave of high-tech search technologies, is the cover story in the January 2007 issue of Reason--already in your hands if you are a subscriber, and if you are not, why not?

The Heavens Fart

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:45:00 EST

If you've read our interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone and still can't get enough South Park, check out Paul Cantor's praise for the program at LewRockwell.com. Here's a sample:

Before dismissing South Park, we should recall that some of the greatest comic writers -- Aristophanes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift -- plumbed the depths of obscenity even as they rose to the heights of philosophical thought. The same intellectual courage that emboldened them to defy conventional proprieties empowered them to reject conventional ideas and break through the intellectual frontiers of their day. Without claiming that South Park deserves to rank with such distinguished predecessors, I will say that the show descends from a long tradition of comedy that ever since ancient Athens has combined obscenity with philosophy. There are almost as many fart jokes in Aristophanes' play The Clouds as there are in a typical episode of The Terrance and Philip Show in South Park. In fact, in the earliest dramatic representation of Socrates that has come down to us, he is making fart jokes as he tries to explain to a dumb Athenian named Strepsiades that thunder is a purely natural phenomenon and not the work of the great god Zeus: "First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make. Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder. For thunder and farting are, in principle, one and the same." Cartman couldn't have said it better.

The whole thing is here. While I enjoyed Cantor's essay, I think his analysis of the underwear-gnomes episode misses something obvious. The gnomes' famous three-step diagram ("Phase 1: Collect Underpants; Phase 2: ?; Phase 3: Profit") doesn't merely "encapsulate[] the economic illiteracy of the American public," who "can see no connection between the activities businessmen undertake and the profits they make." It's a funny parody of the poorly reasoned business plans that were all the rage during the dot-com bubble. (The episode first aired in 1998.) With more nuance than is sometimes acknowledged, the episode doesn't just endorse the free market; it satirizes both corporate and anti-corporate cant.

Bonus links: Cantor's Reason articles are here. Barry Fagin explains why he lets his kids watch South Park here. My appreciation of the show is here.

Alert the Times: Milton Friedman Was a Liberal

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:44:00 EST

I suppose it was inevitable that the New York Times obituary for Milton Friedman would describe his views as "conservative," but it's still a bit depressing. To be fair, the headline accurately calls Friedman a "free-market theorist," and the word libertarian even makes an appearance (in the 16th paragraph and the subhead preceding it). But the Times also says Friedman flew "the flag of economic conservatism," describes the the Chicago School of economics as "conservative," says Friedman "helped ignite the conservative rebellion after World War II," and calls him a "guiding light to American conservatives." The general impression is that Friedman was a conservative with eccentric views about drug policy.

So in what sense was Friedman conservative? Was it conservative to advocate laissez faire in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, when the consensus on the left and the right was that managing the economy was one of the government's main tasks? Was it conservative to oppose Keynsianism when everyone was a Keynesian? For that matter, is there anything less conservative than the creative destruction of the free market?

You could say Friedman was conservative in that he tried to preserve the individualist, anti-statist values on which this country was founded. But this was more a task of recovery than conservation. In any case, the values for which he fought were not inherently conservative, which becomes clear when you consider his influence in formerly communist countries (which the Times obituary mentions). Is it too much to ask that the Times describe Friedman as Friedman described himself? Obviously, that would require an explanation of the distinction between contemporary leftish "liberals" and the classical variety, but such an explanation would be neither a pointless semantic exercise nor an obscure history lesson. It would illuminate what Friedman stood for.