Saturday, April 10, 2004 The Wonders of Google By Diana Hsieh @ 10:48 PM Google searches reveal the most interesting information. Did you know, for example, that I was mentioned in a November 14, 2003 Christian Science Monitor article entitled Employees let off steam online? No? Well, neither did I. (Paul and I do subscribe to the Monitor, as it is an excellent paper. Just imagine the shock of reading about myself over my cup of morning tea! But alas, I missed the article in the print edition.) And indeed, I would have been shocked, given the three errors packed into a single sentence: There has yet to be any significant blogging lawsuit - except for the Church of Scientology's case against California blogger Diana Hsieh for suggesting that a link exists between Scientology and a firearms training facility. Correction #1: I am not a California blogger, but rather a Colorado blogger. I moved from California to Colorado long before the lawsuit was ever filed. Correction #2: The lawsuit against me was filed by Ignatius Piazza and Front Sight. Although the case concerns negative statements I made about Scientology, to the best of my knowledge, the Church of Scientology is not involved in the lawsuit. Correction #3: My concern centered around Front Sight Founder and Director Ignatius Piazza's personal involvement with Scientology, not any direct connection between Front Sight and Scientology. In all likelihood, the reporter simply accepted the information as (inaccurately) summarized on MetaFilter or somesuch, without bothering to check the source. That's disappointing, since the correct information was just a click away. The case was summarized far more accurately in the Las Vegas Weekly back in October. Also available online is Dr. Stephen Kent's expert witness report. As the case is ongoing, I've generally adopted a policy of saying nothing about it. But two bits of good news seem worth noting. First, Front Sight's case against me has been dismissed, such that Piazza is now the only plaintiff. Second, opposing council waited too long to schedule my deposition, so now they shall not get that opportunity before trial. Double Yeah! Link / Noodles / Trackback Women as a Force of Civilization By Diana Hsieh @ 8:56 AM Really, you have to wonder what kind of person this guy was before his wife died: :"Red" Rountree insists he's had a good life, an odd statement coming from a 92-year-old now serving a 12-year sentence for robbing a Texas bank. Mr. Rountree told the Associated Press that he stopped behaving after his wife died in 1986--hanging out with the wrong sort, taking to drink, experimenting with drugs and, eventually, robbing banks. He knocked over his first at age 86, in Mississippi, and a year later became the oldest inmate in Florida's prison system when he was convicted of robbing another in Pensacola. But he makes no apologies. "You want to know why I rob banks?" he asked the AP. "It's fun. I feel good, awful good. I feel good for sometimes days, for sometimes hours." Sheesh. And from the same page, more abuse of anti-trust laws: At the University of Wisconsin, where protesters once blew up the Army Math Research Center, a new generation of activists has filed a complaint in state court accusing two-dozen local drinking establishments of violating antitrust laws by collectively agreeing to eliminate their Friday- and Saturday-night drink specials. The bar owners told the Chronicle of Higher Education that they were simply responding to a call from the university to help cut down on student binge drinking. A lawyer for the tavern league told the paper: "When you combine a student with imagination with a lawyer with time on his hands, this is what you get." I say that this is an "abuse" of anti-trust, but really, much like with heroine, there is no such thing as wise use. Link / Noodles / Trackback Wednesday, April 07, 2004 A Technical Note By Diana Hsieh @ 3:27 PM Since Chris was having so much trouble with my defective comments script, I cleaned up his entries by adding the proper URLs to the proper places. (I also deleted Roger's extra post.) Most importantly, I fixed the script. This took a bit of digging, as I'm a bit rusty on my PERL regexps. (The problem was very minor and quite obvious in retrospect. Doh!) Oh, and I also made the comment box larger, although surely not nearly large enough for many of the recent comments! So by all means, continue the big debate. Link / Noodles / Trackback The Theory and Practice of Communism By Diana Hsieh @ 11:14 AM David Frum has some interesting observations about the theory and practice of communism in a flashback commentary on Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. He writes: ...Applebaum is ultimately interested less in the Gulag's horror than its creators' motives. We today may look back on the camp era and see only waste: Stalin's "preposterous public-works projects," as Remnick calls them. But that's not how it seemed to many at the time. At the time, many Westerners paid tribute to the Soviet Union's achievements -- its mighty dams and railways, its cities in the Arctic circle and vast farms of irrigated grain. Even anti-Communists like Richard Crossman, editor of The God That Failed, paid tribute to the "terrifying efficiency" of the Soviet economy: Liberated from petty concerns like profit and loss and cost-accounting, the Soviets could do things that no capitalist society would ever dare attempt. Andrei Amalrik, in his Notes of a Revolutionary, recalls Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau's visit to the Siberian city of Norilsk. Trudeau lamented that Canada had never succeeded in building so large a city so far north -- unaware, or unconcerned, that Norilsk had been built by prisoners. Any decent person can recognize the inhumanity and cruelty of the Gulag (though as a matter of record, a remarkable number of people who considered themselves decent managed to avoid recognizing it when it counted). But what Applebaum emphasizes, as nobody before her has done, is the Gulag's sheer stupid pointlessness. Who would set prisoners to work digging an unnecessary canal from the White Sea to the Baltic using only hand tools? How could anybody imagine that starving slaves could outproduce American factories? Were the Soviets crazy? Applebaum does not answer this question directly -- but she provides the evidence for the reader to find the answer for himself. The Soviets were not crazy. They believed that society's wealth consisted in something called the "surplus value" of the worker's labor. In a capitalist society, the capitalist stole that surplus value. In the Communist fairyland of tomorrow, the worker would keep the surplus for his own benefit. In the meantime, Marxian theory suggested, the emerging socialist state could develop by appropriating for itself the surplus value that had previously enriched the capitalist. And if the worker could be forced to eat less, to live in a barracks instead of a house, to wear rags rather than clothes -- why then the surplus would be even bigger, and the state would advance even faster, and the Communist fairyland would arrive even sooner. It all made a terrible sense -- that is, if you accepted the crackpot economics on which the plan rested. In other words, just as Solzhenitsyn traced the responsibility for the creation of the Gulag back from Stalin to Lenin, so Applebaum follows the path all the way back to Das Kapital. She shows us that the Gulag is not just an incident in the history of Russia. It is the culmination of the history of socialism. Given that so many people laud communist theory while decrying communist practice, such arguments logically connecting the theory to the practice seem particularly important to develop and advance. Yet in my readings on communism so far, they seem quite rare. I'm not entirely certain why, although I suspect a lack of deep interest in and/or understanding of Marx's dialectical materialism, as well as the commonality between the altruism of communism and that of its oftentimes Christian critics. Of course, communist countries do vary somewhat in their theory... and thus in their practice. Based upon Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Mao's communism seemed to take on more of an idealist flair. Soldiers in the Red Army, for example, were expected to achieve victory on the basis of will alone, despite being poorly equipped. To suggest otherwise was cause for a prison term. Nor would I deny that, for example, Stalin's extreme paranoia substantially impacted the particulars of Soviet policy. But these are merely minor variations upon the major themes. At the end of his book Communism: A History, Richard Pipes has an interesting discussion of the connection between communist theory and practice. While I don't agree with some aspects of his analysis -- and none of it goes deep enough -- it is quite interesting. Let me quote at length from the chapter "Looking Back": We are now in a position to address the question posed in the Preface: whether the failure of communism "was due to human error or to flaws inherent in its very nature." The record of history strongly suggests the latter to be the case. Communism was not a good idea that went wrong; it was a bad idea. ... Marxism, the theoretical foundation of Communism, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, such as Marx and Engels had wrongly attributed to capitalism. It rested on a faulty philosophy of history as well as an unrealistic psychological doctrine. Marxism's basic contention that private property, which it strives to abolish, is a transient historical phenomenon--an interlude between primitive and advanced Communism--is plainly false. All evidence indicates that land, the main source of wealth in premodern times, unless monopolized by monarchs, had always belonged to tribes, families, or individuals. Livestock as well as commerce and the capital to which it gives rise were always and everywhere in private hands. From which it follows that private property is not a transient phenomenon but a permanent feature of social life, and, as such, indestructible. No less flawed is Marxism's notion that human nature is infinitely malleable, and hence that a combination of coercion and education can produce beings purged of acquisitiveness and willing to dissolve in society at large, a society where, as envisioned by Plato, "the private and individual is altogether banished from life." Even if the immense pressures exerted by Communist regimes to this end were to succeed, their success would at best be ephemeral: as animal trainers have discovered, after being subjected to intensive drilling to perform tricks, animals, freed from training, after a while forget what they have learned and revert to their instinctive behavior. Furthermore, given that acquired characteristics are not heritable, each new generation will bring into the world non-Communist attitudes, among which acquisitiveness is certainly not the least powerful. Communism ultimately was defeated by its inability to refashion human nature... Such realities have forced Communist regimes to resort to violence as a routine means of governance. To compel people to give up what they own and to surrender their private interests to the state requires that public authority dispose of boundless authority. This is what Lenin meant when he defined the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as "power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, that is restrained by absolutely no rules, that rests directly on coercion." Experience indicates that such a regime is, indeed, feasible: it has been imposed on Russia and its dependencies, on China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Cambodia, as well as on a variety of countries in Africa and Latin America. But its price is not only enormous human suffering, it is also the destruction of the very objective for which such regimes are established, namely equality. In advocating a regime resting on coercion, Lenin assumed that it would be temporary; its mussion accomplished, the coercive state would wither away. He ignored, however, that the abstraction called "state" is made up of individuals who, whatever their historical mission, attend also to their private interests. Although in Marxist sociology the state serves only the owners of property and has no stake of its own, in reality the stewards quickly evolve into a new class. The "vanguard part" meant to usher in a new era becomes an end in itself. The state--or more precisely, the Communist Party--has no choice but to accommodate this new class because it depends upon it to stay in power. And under Communism, the officialdom grows by leaps and bounds for the simple reason that inasmuch as all aspects of national life, the economy very much included, are taken over by the state, it requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This bureaucracy is the favorite scapegoat of every Communist regime, yet none can manage without it. In the Soviet Union, within a few years of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, the regime began to offer unique rewards to its leading cadres, which in time evolved into the nomenklatura, a hereditary privileged class. This spelled the end of the ideal of equality. Thus to enforce the equality of possessions it is necessary to institutionalize inequality of rights. The contradiction between ends and means is built into Communism and into every country where the state owns all the productive wealth. True, periodic attempts have been made to shake off the grip that the Communist officialdom secured on the state and society. Lenin and Stalin tried purges, which under Stalin led to mass murder. Mao launched his "Cultural Revolution" to destroy entrenched party interests. None of these attempts succeeded. In the end, the nomenklaturas won out because without them nothing would work. Attempts to introduce Communism by democratic means also failed. As the experience of Allende's Chile demonstrates, the assault on private property in the presence of a relatively free press, an independent judiciary, and an elected legislature cannot succeed because the opposition, which under a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is ruthlessly crushed, here has the opportunity to organize resistance. As its numbers swelled, it easily toppled the revolutionary regime. In Nicaragua, where in 1990 the Communist Sandinistas felt enough confidence in their popularity to submit themselves to a popular vote, the people swept them out of power. The bureaucratization inherent in Communist regimes was also responsible for the economic failures that either contributed to their downfall or else compelled them to abandon Communism in all but name. The nationalization of productive assets let to the transfer of their management to officials who had neither the competence nor the motivation to operate them efficiently. The inevitable result was declining productivity. Furthermore, the rigidity inherent in centralized management made Communist economies unresponsive to technological innovation, which explains why the Soviet Union, despite its high level of science, missed out on some of the most important technological discoveries of recent times. As Friedrich Hayek has pointed out, only the free market has the ability to sense and respond to shifts in the economy. And only the prospect of enrichment motivates people to exert themselves beyond their immediate needs. Under Communism, effective incentives were lacking: indeed, diligence at work was punished, in that meeting one's productivity quotas resulted in these quotas being raised. ... Nor is the inability to provide abundance and enforce equality, its alleged objectives, the only contradiction inherent in Communism. Another is the lack of freedom, which along with equality and abundance was for Marx the ultimate objective of a Communist society. The nationalization of all productive resources turns all citizens into state employees--in other words, dependents of the government. Under such conditions, there are no effective limits to state power. In the words of Trotsky: "In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat." Only the recognition by the state of right of its citizens to their belongings--and respect shown to this right--ensures freedom. And inasmuch as property is a legal concept, enforced by the courts, it also signifies that the state is bound by law. This means that the goal of Communism, the abolition of property, inevitably leads to the abolition of liberty and legality. The nationalization of productive resources, far from liberating men from enslavement by things, as Marx and Engels had envisioned, converts them into slaves of their rulers and, because of endemic shortages, makes them more materialistic than ever. ... These inherent flaws were acknowledged by many Communists, leading to various "revisionisms." To the true believers, however, the failures proved not that the doctrine was wrong but that it had not been applied with sufficient ruthlessness. Confirming Santayana's definition of fanatics as people who redouble their efforts after forgetting their aim, they went on killing sprees of mounting savagery. Thus Communism generated ever greater oceans of blood as it progressed from Lenin to Stalin, and from Stalin to Mao and Pol Pot. So does anyone know of a deep analysis of the connections between the theory and practice of communism? Oh, and a how about a good introductory text on Marxism? (Is Thomas Sowell's worth reading? Any others?) Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, April 05, 2004 A Hegelian Synthesis By Diana Hsieh @ 11:04 PM What do you have when you combine a square-wheeled bicycle with just the right kind of bumpy road? In a lovely little Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis, you get a perfectly smooth ride. Really. (Scooped from GeekPress by reading over Paul's shoulder.) Link / Noodles / Trackback Congratulations! By Diana Hsieh @ 7:22 PM Late this afternoon, I was lying in bed with New Kitty (a.k.a Elliot) reading Anne Applebaum's so-far-excellent book Gulag: A History. (I was rather exhausted after spending the day up in Boulder for the tail end of the Rocky Mountain Virtue Ethics Summit.) Paul called to say hello. He told me that the book I was just reading at that very moment had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. How cool! I've certainly enjoyed the book so far, although I'm not even 100 pages into it. It's a clear, engaging, and compelling account of one of the the horrors of the Soviet regime. So congratulations to Anne Applebaum! Link / Noodles / Trackback Rationalistic Rights By Diana Hsieh @ 11:41 AM If you plug your laptop in at the airport or train station, are you stealing electricity? According to many of the folks commenting on this Samizdata post, the answer is clearly YES. Since you do not have permission to use the electrical outlet, you are a thief, albeit a small one. Such an answer seems to me to imply a very rationalistic understanding of rights. Most businesses are happy to provide complimentary services to their customers. Although we may ask where the restrooms are, we do not ask our waitress whether we have permission to use them. When we buy a latte at Starbucks, we do not ask permission to consume some of the sugar or take a napkin. Such social conventions facilitate human interaction and trade by establishing a default, a default which may nonetheless still be overridden by express statements. Notably, that default is limited to a certain range of reasonable action. We certainly do not have implicit permission redecorate the restaurant's bathroom or to take hundreds of napkins. Although the phenomena of plugging in laptops is a relatively recent one, there is little reason to suspect that the convention is resented or unwelcome to business owners. If it were, we would expect to see blocked off outlets, stickers on outlets forbidding plugging in, and so on. We would expect business owners to throw out plugged-in laptop users or perhaps even call the police to arrest them. People often don't notice these conventions of trade, precisely because they are so completely taken for granted. (One of the hazards and excitements of foreign travel is that such conventions do change.) Nonetheless, they are a real and important part of social interactions, one which claims about rights violations ought to be sensitive. To ignore them is to treat rights as floating abstractions unconnected to actual facts about social interaction... and that only leads to trouble. Link / Noodles / Trackback Socialist Dreamin' By Diana Hsieh @ 10:12 AM A few weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned that there were people who called themselves "socialist libertarians." I found this to be rather astonishing and implausible at the time, but apparently true. Here's the "Manifesto" of Socialist Libertarianism: [...] There's been a lot of rhetoric in American politics that equates libertarianism with capitalism, particularly from the followers of A*y*n R*a*n*d. In their minds, libertarianism is exclusively about selfishness. There's no room for community. All that is important is the right of the monied few to make more and more money without government restriction. I do not consider these to be true libertarians because inevitably they turn into mouthpieces for self-centered de facto despots who want no checks on their right to enslave others. They also hold that the people are stupid and that only their gods offer a true creative impulse. They point to Frank Lloyd Wright as an example of their genius, not mentioning that every one of his stylish Prarie-Style houses is falling down because he did not listen to contemporaries who warned him that they needed more structural support. They never speak up to the fact that you can be fired for criticizing your boss, that the moment you walk in your workplace in the morning, you lose your rights to freedom of speech and freedom to organize into unions. Corporations severely limit what you can say within them and what changes you make within them. Only those whose imaginations end at the board room door think that they offer ultimate freedom. There are true capitalist libertarians, but these I have mentioned do not fit the criteria. As a socialist libertarian, I hold firm on the principle that I must not only be free to speak, but ready to listen to reasonable points of view. Where the capitalist libertarian puts the emphasis on protecting the making of money, I put it on protecting what we hold in common. I style myself after John Stuart Mill who held that it was for the good of the community that we must have freedom of speech, that even stupid points of view must be allowed their day if only to show their stupidity. All libertarians hold that any law should be carefully considered. Is social pressure enough? Is the damage being done by the act physically real and prosecutable? The socialist libertarian goes on to ask does this law benefit only one person or the whole community? We allow no despots in socialist libertarianism, we prevent no organization of people within the greater body politic. We thus oppose not only the excesses of Capitalism, but those of Communism as well. Russia failed because it did not allow correction of its economy by free voices. It failed because it was taken over by conservative leadership. It failed because it did not respect diversity in outlook. The socialist libertarian holds that diversity is a good thing, that free markets do benefit us in some affairs, but in things we all share -- water purification systems, electricity, roads, police and fire, parkland -- profit can only warp and seduce us towards authoritarianism and loss of resources. A socialist libertarian does not enter the house of the man who wants to be self-sustaining in energy because there is no need to have him for the sake of profit. For this reason and for reasons of better air and water quality (things that are shared by everyone), it is the socialist libertarian who champions solar energy and other clean fuels. Only under our present system of capitalist authoritarianism are contracts made to limit energy independence. Capitalist libertarians, too, love these things, but only the socialist libertarian takes steps to allow everyone to have the means of independence in their lives, to supplement incomes and make it possible for everyone to put a solar generator on her or his roof if he/she desires. This is one of the reasons why I am a socialist libertarian: it puts all people first. It does not naively say that only through selfishness can there be freedom. We've seen too many despots rise on selfishness and we're looking, encouraging other ways. [...] Community property exists for all people. All libertarians believe that there should be some laws. The question is what do they protect first: private interest or the good of all the people? Oh, where to begin!?! Clearly, such "socialist libertarianism" bears no substantial resemblance to libertarianism as it is normally understood. The use of the term is a sneaky way of casting massive government coercion as genuine freedom. The same corruption has visited upon the concepts freedom, liberty, rights, censorship, and liberalism -- just to name a few. Yet we might still ask: Precisely what meaning does the concept "libertarianism" have? Is there some set of core political doctrines held in common by those commonly considered libertarians, such as Milton Friedman, John Locke, Jan Narveson, Ayn Rand, David Friedman, George H. Smith, Rod Long, Adam Smith, Friedich Hayek, Julian Simon, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Jefferson, and so on? I think not. Such libertarian thinkers differ widely in the foundations of their political views: moral versus economic, egoistic versus altruistic, utilitarian versus deontological versus teleological, and so on. They differ in their substantive views of the proper political order. Some libertarians are anarchists; they seek to abolish the state in favor of private defense agencies. Others advocate a minimal state limited to police, the courts, and national defense. Others are willing to use government to solve so-called market failures, educate children, and provide for the poor. Such libertarians also often diverge in their implementation of rights, including on abortion, self-defense, animal rights, intellectual property, and more. Given these substantial and wide-ranging differences, the term "libertarianism" seems to be based upon family resemblance more than any feature (or features) common to all. Such a mixed-bag concept seems epistemologically indefensible to me... and virtually useless. Interestingly, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes libertarianism as follows: In political philosophy 'libertarianism' is a name given to a range of views which take as their central value liberty or freedom. Although occasionally the term is applied to versions of anti-authoritarian Marxist theory (the 'libertarian left'), more commonly it is associated with a view which champions particularly pure forms of capitalism. Libertarians endorse the free market and unfettered free exchange, and oppose paternalistic or moralistic legislation (for example, laws regulating sexual behaviour or the consumption of alcohol or drugs). Liberty, on such a view, is identified with the absence of interference by the state or by others. The legitimate state exists purely to guard individual rights, protecting people and their property from force, theft and fraud. This is the 'minimal state' or 'night-watchman state' of classical liberalism. The state has no authority to engage in the redistribution of property (except to rectify the effects of theft, and so on) or, in certain versions at least, to pursue policies designed to further the common good. Such activities are viewed by the libertarian as illegitimate interferences with an individual's right to do what they wish with their own person or property. This sketch of libertarianism seems fairly reasonable, in that it encompasses a fairly narrow and definite range of political views. It explicitly appeals to individual rights. It excludes both anarchism and state intrusion to futher "the common good." It references particular freedoms endorsed by libertarianism. Of course, it doesn't mention the philosophic foundations of rights and minimal government. But must it do so? In keeping with the orthodox Objectivist view, I regard a proper metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical foundation as indispensable to politics. Yet I also wonder whether the concept "libertarianism" can abstract away from such foundations in much the same way that the concepts "egoism" and "selfishness" seem to do. In the introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand discusses the ways in which the term "selfishness" has been subject to a particularly nasty package-deal. The term actually means "concern with one's own interests" but is used so as to evoke the image of "a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment." She advocates redeeming the concept by returning it to its genuine meaning of "concern with one's own interests." Notably, Rand is not advocating the creation of a new, more positive package-deal. She acknowledges the reality of irrational, subjectivist forms of egoism in which "any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one's own benefit." She notes that her own ethic requires not merely selfishness, but also "a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest." Given the existence of forms of selfishness and egoism deeply opposed to the rational type advocated by Objectivism, the fact that someone is an egoist will not tell us much about the truth of his ethics as whole. The person might be radically mistaken about the nature of his self-interest, opting for predation rather than production and trade. Worse still, he might appeal to deeply faulty epistemological methods to determine self-interest, such as emotion or authority rather than reason. So the mere fact that someone advocates egoism will not make them an "ethical ally," so to speak. Similarly, a profession of libertarianism might indicate little about the rationality, consistency, or truth of a person's political views as a whole. Due to weak, confused, or outright false philosophical foundations, a libertarian might advance arguments and advocate views which are deeply flawed and ultimately destructive of liberty. (Examples would include subjectivist, religious, and altruist versions of libertarianism.) So on this view, even though the Objectivist politics is a form of libertarianism, Objectivists ought not ally themselves with any and all libertarians. They ought to be careful in their political alliances by attending to the philosophical justifications for liberty offered. On the surface, this argument from analogy is fairly plausible. But in explicitly formulating it here and examining the details of Ayn Rand's analysis of the concept "selfishness," it now seems to me that the that similarity is only skin deep. The argument about egoism only works because the beneficiary of an action is only one aspect of a total moral theory. As Ayn Rand herself writes, "the choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality." In contrast, libertarianism is supposed to be a fairly comprehensive political theory, not merely one aspect thereof. So any substantial differences between versions of libertarianism would have to arise out of substantial differences in the underlying philosophy. And major differences in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics would indicate that the political theories really aren't all that similar in the end, such that to classify them all as "libertarian" would be to focus on inessentials. However, substantially similar political theories with substantially similar philosophical foundations could be justly united under a single concept. For the reasons outlined here, I would say that any concept which included the Objectivist politics would at least require foundational adherence to reason, egoism, harmony of interests, and mind-body integration. Many people do opt for a different approach, namely that of reducing libertarianism to a single principle: the rejection of the initiation of force. As an example of this view, the oath required to join the Libertarian Party is merely: "I certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals." This approach is untenable, even dangerous, because it strips libertarianism of the content which gives it meaning, such that it can become just about anything to anybody. The basic problem is that what does or does not constitute coercion is radically dependent upon prior notions of the range of actions to which an individual is entitled. If I am not entitled to the money I earn, then the government is not coercing me by redistributing it to the needy. If I am not entitled to self-defense, then I am initiating force in warding off a rapist. If I am not entitled to my car, then anyone may use and abuse it. My friend Jimmy Wales has argued this point nicely in answering the question "how does forcing a property-owner to do without his property by taking it from him without his consent, in itself, constitute 'coercion'?" It is not possible to define coercion in this context without appeal to a theory of rights. Cutting it down to the most bare bones example, consider yourself and a common thief. The thief wants to take your television. One of your desires will be frustrated. He'll either get your television, or he won't. If you keep your t.v. (perhaps tossing him out of your house before he can grab it) have you initiated force against him? Or did he initiate force against you by trying to take it in the first place? The only way to answer these questions is by an appeal to *moral right*. That is, who has a morally rightful *claim* to the television. And why? The Objectivist claim is that *you* have a morally rightful claim to the television, assuming you acquired it through honest production and trade. The source of this right is ultimately in the nature of humans, and the essential requirements for human survival in a society. You have a *moral* right, says Objectivism, to pursue your own values, to work and keep the product of your efforts. And you have a *moral* right to defend these values from people who would attempt to take them. So by stripping a rich political theory down to a single principle which is not even comprehensible in isolation, the focus on the non-initiation of force principle lends credence to the claims of socialists, communitarians, and other statists that they are the true libertarians. After all, they too are opposed to the use of force. They just simply understand what does and does not constitute force quite differently from you and me. And so we find the "Socialist Libertarian Manifesto" which began this post. I suspect that it is possible to form and define the concept "libertarianism" in an epistemologically respectable way. However, if done, then many people who are widely regarded as libertarians will no longer be so, leading to chaos in communication. So perhaps it is best to avoid the term altogether. But really, it would be nice to have a single term to describe Ayn Rand's politics, since it does share many basic features with the politics of earlier thinkers like John Locke and some of the US Founding Fathers. In that case, "classical liberalism" would be a good general term. Yet Ayn Rand's philosophic foundations differ substantially from even those original classical liberals. So where does that leave me? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. Link / Noodles / Trackback

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