Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

Laissez Faire Books will of course be publishing and selling ebooks and dead-tree books individually. They’re a bit pricey this way, if you ask me.  The way you’ll want to get these books and the added value that LFB has to offer, however, is to sign on to the new business model that promises to return the company to the center of the libertarian movement as a book publisher, seller, and community (with online forums).

Yesterday, on the 19th of April, Jeffrey Tucker and LFB launched the Laissez Faire Club. This is an innovative subscription-based book club that offers a host of members-only benefits for the price of $10 per month, or $120 per year. Members will receive a 20% discount on all LFB products, a new ebook at no extra charge every week (in epub and mobi formats) as well as access to the entire archive of previously distributed ebooks, Tucker’s Take (short video book reviews by Jeffrey Tucker), free reports, live author interviews, a private online community forum shielded from search engines and prying eyes and drive-by trolls, and more now and to come.

That sounds like a good deal to me. I signed up last night for a free trial, which comes with some free content that’s yours to keep even if you choose to cancel your membership before the free trial is up.

In the information age, and in light of the illegitimacy of so-called intellectual property, how do you  make money publishing and selling books? Many are wailing and gnashing their teeth, rending their shirts, and lashing out in fear and lazy greed — unable to let go of their precious, state-supported publishing model, dependent on IP and an oligopoly over the publication and distribution of dead-tree books. The Big Six publishers don’t seem to have a clue. But I think it’s not really that hard to figure out:

You treat your customers right, provide them with valuable content that they’ll want to ensure you’re able to continue providing, and sell them added value built around the books: reasonable prices, great customer service with a personal touch, knowledgeable and engaged staff, early access, extra content like free reports on how to circumvent the state legally or Tucker’s Take, personal engagement with their favorite authors, a private and secure community comprised of fellow lovers of liberty, and so on.

Head on over to Laissez Faire Books to learn more about the new Laissez Faire Club and, if you’re a lover of liberty and books and books about liberty, become a member today.

[Prometheus Unbound & TLS]

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources. In this one, I threw my Voegelinian professor Ellis Sandoz a few bones. I no longer have the original exam questions to which I responded below, so bear with me through the beginning of the essay.

Questions one and three seem strongly related but have a somewhat different focus. Both interest me but I will attempt to focus on the former while nevertheless attempting to answer the latter at least in part, owing to the last element of the first question having to do with the subject of poet philosophers. Hence, I will write a critical essay on the following quotation:

Euripides shows us that our self-creation as political beings is not irreversible. The political, existing by and in nomos, can also cease to hold us. The human being, as a social being, lives suspended between beast and god, defined against both of these self-sufficient creatures by its open and vulnerable nature, the relational character of its most basic concerns. But if being human is a matter of the character of one’s trust and commitment, rather than an immutable matter of natural fact, then the human being is also the being that can most easily cease to be itself — either by moving (Platonically) upwards towards the self-sufficiency of the divine, or by slipping downward towards the self-sufficiency of doggishness.

I will attempt to address this quotation in light of the questions raised and with regard to my own research interests in the possibility of transcending the liberal/communitarian debate with a form of Aristotelian liberalism.

Civilization is susceptible to rigidification and decay on the one hand and disintegration on the other, with the latter usually as a result of the former. The modern state-of-nature theorizing of the Enlightenment-liberal social-contract tradition provides an interesting case study of a philosophical anthropology built upon Enlightenment metaphysics and epistemology, particularly atomism, materialism, mechanism, and hypostatized rationalism and empiricism. In this worldview, man in the state of nature is a beast, the worst of them, Locke’s unrealistically benign version notwithstanding. Ethical and political philosophy built upon these foundations, particularly when ethical language and action is impoverished by a single-minded focus on the proliferation of rights (with the result of trivializing them), is bound to produce impoverished human beings, the sort of atomistic individuals communitarians have accused liberalism of necessarily producing. The heirs of the Enlightenment (even Nietzsche) have sometimes lapsed into holding up this beast as if he were a god to be universally emulated.

On the other hand, communitarians have been just as prone to confuse convention (nomos) with nature (kosmos) and dogmatize or hypostatize a particular set of cultural values and institutions as the Good from which they themselves and others have no natural or conventional right to deviate. Deviation is labeled atomistic individualism, immorality, the mark of the beast. It is overlooked or forgotten that while man’s telos  [end] is eudaimonia [well-being, flourishing] and his telos involves social and political life, this telos does not have one unitary and universal form for everyone and must be freely chosen. Moreover, and in any case, man is not a god possessed of omnipotence, omniscience, and infallibility. The communitarian impulse is always in danger of falling into paternalism and totalitarianism.

Both the atomistic god-beast and the communitarian god-automaton cease to be human. Indeed, are the two really so very different? Both are capable of the most inhuman atrocities.

Freedom or community is a false alternative — for there is another option: freedom in community — but, for the most part, neither side has yet to formulate an adequate conception of it in my estimation. I do not mean to suggest that there is any final solution or utopia that can be reached, however. Human existence in the metaxy — our open and vulnerable … our rational, individual and social nature — make this a tension and a struggle that each of us must face within ourselves and together every day of our lives, and every generation.

Some illustrative examples of this tension in Euripedes’ Hecuba and Aeschylus’ Oresteia are in order.

Hecuba is set after the Trojan war, with the victorious Greek army on its long journey home but stranded for lack of wind for their sails and haunted by the ghost of Achilles demanding a sacrifice. Hecuba, the Trojan queen, and her daughter, Polyxena, have been taken captive by Agamemnon; and Hecuba’s son, Polydorus, had before the war been sent to the safety of a friend’s home, the Thracian king Polymestor. Polymestor tragically takes advantage of Hecuba’s misfortune to slay Polydorus and keep for himself the great wealth that had been sent with Polydorus from Troy for safekeeping. Polymestor chose to break with his moral and traditional responsibilities as host and friend, forsaking convention.

Agamemnon chooses to give up Polyxena as a sacrifice to appease Achilles, acceding to the demands of the soldiers who were instigated by the demagoguery of the wily Odysseus. Here we see the misuse of convention and the tyranny of the community over the individual in the name of the alleged “prudential” necessity of achieving the supposed common good at the expense of an individual’s good. Hecuba unfortunately takes out her revenge against Polymestor on his sons, but in defending the justness of her actions appeals to a higher law and leaves her fate up to reason and her ability to persuade.

Fast forwarding a bit, the Oresteia is set during and after Agamemnon’s return home. The Trojan war was tragically begun ostensibly for honor and to reclaim a wayward or stolen bride (Helen). Agamemnon has been away at war for some ten years and has brought back a mistress, the prophetess Cassandra. In the meantime, his wife has grown estranged and resentful and has taken up with another man who has a familial obligation, or so he perceives, to slay Agamemnon. Agamemnon is slain by his wife and her new lover, who are both in turn slain by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, driven by bloodlust and his own perceived familial obligation for revenge (and, admittedly, at the instigation of Apollo). For the sin of slaying his own mother, Orestes is hounded by the Furies (or his own guilt?) and flees to Athens where Athena presides over a trial in which Orestes is found innocent of wrongdoing and the Furies are appeased with a place in Athenian, democratic society.

While admittedly not ideal examples, the plays Hecuba and Oresteia both movingly portray trajedies that could have been avoided, highlight the dangers of renouncing one’s humanity in favor of either pole of our tensional existence, of renouncing either freedom or community, while at the same time providing a ray of hope that reason, persuasion, and a respect for difference can help us avoid further tragedy by stopping the cycle of violence. And, in the worst case scenario, surely it is more Greek and Christian (and less modern!) to die human rather than by our own actions to live an inhuman life. The nature of human existence is such that neither freedom nor community can ever be completely eradicated from the hearts and minds of men.

With regard to the alleged conflict between poetry and philosophy, and the question of the poet philosopher, I think this conflict is an illusory one and both the poet and the philosopher have value, especially the poet philosopher. Ever since I was twelve years old I have had a deep and abiding fascination with and interest in fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, and comic books. It is my belief that the best of these writers, even of popular fiction, are as good if not better observers and critics of the world than most philosophers and social scientists and at worst it is difficult to tell which is the more pernicious. Indeed, one can argue that the best poets are at least to some degree philosophers. But, if taken separately both poetry and philosophy have value, then surely their combination is all the more valuable. In isolation philosophers have a dreadful tendency to become detached from the world and poets can become lost in the meaningless, trivial, or pernicious dramatization of concretes.

There is no guarantee a poet philosopher will not philosophize and dramatize error, but the combination could help to mitigate the countervailing tendencies and keep, so to speak, one’s philosophical side down to earth and one’s poetic side mindful of the philosophical import of his work. With this in mind and in light of the foregoing, Plato’s Republic appears to me to be a philosophical tragedy, for despite being a poet philosopher, Plato’s ambivalence toward politics and poetry perhaps led him to too single-minded a focus on the transcendent and a detachment from the immanent. Plato’s philosopher tragically removes himself from the polis for want of a realistic standard for political and social action.

Atoms form bonds of varying strengths with other atoms to form molecules. The bonds they form naturally are generally stable, whereas the ones that are forced by men decay rapidly — and give you cancer.

(Embrace it! Own it! )

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard; HT fellow TLS blogger Robert Wicks for suggesting the second sentence.]

Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources.

In this essay I will address how the American framers conceived of liberty as well as how the Constitution they designed was supposed to secure it and whether it has in fact done so. Stating my conclusions right out, which I will then seek to explain and justify as best I can in the space and time allotted, I think that though the Constitution was a grand and very admirable attempt at securing liberty it was at the outset doomed to failure in the long run in large part due to inner contradictions and inadequate safeguards.

By and large the framers, and the American people in general, conceived of liberty in Lockean and republican terms. Locke’s influence was particularly prevalent owing largely to the influence of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, which popularized and enhanced the popularity of Lockean individual rights arguments. This is not to neglect the importance of republicanism and of Christianity; the framers in particular were steeped in republicanism, and Christianity was indeed a formative influence on the early Americans, particularly through the thousands of fiery political sermons of the day, many of which also employed Lockean rights language (such as Elisha Williams in particular, but also Jonathan Mayhew and John Allen).

However, liberalism and republicanism were in tension from the outset, and Christianity has been employed effectively in support of both sides. On the one hand, the sole justification and purpose of government is the protection of each and every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Consistently applied this means that all morals legislation and economic regulation are unjust and invalid. On the other hand, republicans like Algernon Sidney and John Adams feared that liberty unrestrained will degenerate into license, that virtue ought to be promoted and/or required, and vice discouraged and/or prohibited, with the coercive and legal power of the state; and that republican or civic virtue is necessary and must be somehow enforced and inculcated in the people if liberty and the republic are to be sustained. While some liberals have and continue to deny the virtue of virtue, ethical neutrality or relativism is not an inherent feature of liberalism and many liberals do indeed hold and advocate firm moral convictions.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly used Lockean, common law, and republican language. The Constitution itself was an attempt to establish a government that would be responsive to the people, who are the sovereign(s), and limited to securing peace and order by protecting individual rights. It was difficult for the framers to be consistently liberal, however. The three-fifths compromise and related compromises legitimizing slavery in the Constitution came out of the Convention debates. The Anti-Federalists decried the lack of a Bill of Rights, and the Constitution was not ratified until the American people were satisfied that one would indeed be added. The ratification process itself was marred by chicanery and coercion in a number of instances, particularly Pennsylvania. Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion serve as early examples that the state governments and the new national government installed by the Constitution, and those who lead them, left something to be desired in terms of the protection of liberty. From the outset there were attempts to fund public works at the taxpayers’ expense and regulate, tax, or prohibit various sorts of peaceful and voluntary activities.

Ultimately, I think that the Constitution gave the national government too much power. And I must agree with the Anti-Federalists, Thomas Paine, and the preferences of Thomas Jefferson for local democracy, that the United States started off too large territorially to be a constitutionally limited republic, and it continued to grow thereafter. Montesquieu, too, would have objected to a republic of such size, as even Rousseau would have. The fundamental inner contradiction of the state created by the US Constitution, however, and of all modern nation-states generally, is that it claims a territorial monopoly on the legal use of force and of ultimate decision-making. By its very nature then, the state, insofar as it attempts to enforce that monopoly, necessarily contradicts itself by violating the rights of any individuals who dissent. Tacit, implicit, or hypothetical consent cannot be assumed. As one might expect of such a monopoly, both from economic theory and human history, the political elites, plutocrats, and other special interests have never run out of opportunities and “prudential” reasons for expanding government power and extending government intervention at home and abroad.

The principle of separation of powers with checks and balances embodied in the Constitution was an ingenious modern, and very American, innovation and adaptation of the classical mixed republic to the American context. The classical mixed regime attempted to institutionalize competition between social classes as embodied by kingly, aristocratic, and democratic elements of a commonwealth. Lacking royalty and a nobility, and drawing upon distinctions made by Locke and Montesquieu between executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the US Constitution embodies the separation of these three powers more thoroughly than the constitution of England while mixing them somewhat in such a way that each branch would be led to check and balance the ambitions of the others. The arguments for this are laid out in the writings of Publius and John Adams. This constitutional separation of powers can be thought of as an attempt to simulate market competition; however, situated within the fundamentally monopolistic context of a state, this simulated market competition must theoretically and has historically proven to be inadequate to the task. The three national branches and the multiple federalist levels of government (national, state, local) have time and again found it in their interest and the interests of their constituents and political allies to compromise and cooperate in the expansion of government power at the expense of individual liberty.

The writings, speeches, and actions of Abraham Lincoln provide an eloquent illustration of this conflict between liberty and power. The so-called Civil War represents the death-blow of federalism, and only some seventy years after the ratification of the Constitution. While the war had the salutary effect of ending slavery (a reprehensible institution) in the South, this was neither Lincoln’s original intent nor even in the end his primary purpose. The United States is, to my knowledge (and excepting slave rebellions), the only country to end slavery primarily by means of violence and war; and all in the name of saving the Union. After the Civil War, the US government can no longer justifiably be said to rest upon the consent of the people, if it even could before.

From the late nineteenth century onward, Marxism and socialism began to increase in popularity first among the intellectuals and then the poor of America. America’s first (progressive) imperialist war was fought against Spain in the 1890’s under the leadership of McKinley. Progressivism picked up speed in both domestic and foreign policy with the social welfare policies and warfare socialism of Wilson and then FDR. Government social-welfare programs quickly crowded out the fraternal societies and other voluntary social-welfare associations that predominated in America (and England) in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, once glowingly reported on the peculiarly American independence and propensity to spontaneously form voluntary associations for whatever need arose, but that independence and propensity are gradually being eroded by a growing dependency upon the progressive welfare-warfare state. Appeals for a more classical liberal approach to politics by such thinkers as Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), Herbert Spencer (Social Statics), Albert J. Nock (Our Enemy, The State), William Graham Sumner, Randolph Bourne (“War is the Health of the State”) and others have largely gone unheeded. Both major parties and the general populace now support a welfare-warfare state far removed from the constitutionally limited republic with which this country began, merely quibbling over specific matters of policy, focus, and rhetoric.

This post is excerpted and adapted from the concluding chapter of my dissertation (so I suppose it might qualify as part of my college essays series), wherein I addressed two related objections to libertarianism in general and to my account of Aristotelian liberalism in particular: utopianism and gnosticism, the latter being sort of a theological version of the former. Does the theory of virtue ethics and natural rights described in my dissertation represent an impossibly high standard of ethical excellence? On a related note, is it foolishly impractical given the current shoddy state of the world? And is the ideal society suggested by my nonstatist conception of politics and severe critique of the state an impossible goal? Even if it is achieved, will it ring in a perfect world of peace, love, and happiness without violence, misfortune, and suffering? Naturally, my short answer to all of these questions is “No.”

First, I wish to answer the charge of gnosticism that might be leveled by followers of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is very popular in certain conservative and communitarian circles, particularly those averse to philosophical systems and principled, as opposed to practical or pragmatic or “realist,” politics. I should know; I studied political science and philosophy at Louisiana State University where Voegelin had been a prominent professor. Indeed, LSU is home to the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies. I was introduced to the work of Voegelin by Professor Ellis Sandoz, a student of Voegelin himself and the director of the institute.

Gnosticism, as Voegelin uses the term, essentially means a “type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. As a religious or quasi-religious movement, gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).” Now, does that sound like it applies to libertarianism, much less Austro-libertarianism? Rather, it makes me think in particular of the constructivist rationalism, criticized incisively by Friedrich Hayek, that arose out of the Enlightenment and pervades various forms of modern statism.

In his political analysis, Voegelin uses the term to refer to a certain kind of mass movement, particularly mass political movements. As examples, he gives “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.” In his view, the consequences wrought by these movements have been disastrous. With few and only partial qualifications, I do not disagree. What makes them gnostic are certain similar characteristics they share with the original Gnostic religious movement of antiquity. Before listing the main characteristics, it first bears pointing out that even the broad libertarian movement as a whole might not yet qualify as a mass movement. However, as Voegelin points out, “none of the movements cited began as a mass movement; all derived from intellectuals and small groups,” so contemporary libertarianism and Aristotelian liberalism are not off the hook yet! With regard to the following list, Voegelin cautions that the six characteristics, “taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.”

1) It must first be pointed out that the Gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Despite Voegelin’s caveat it seems this characteristic does not carry much explanatory power. It would seem more relevant if the dissatisfaction manifests as a form of profound alienation from the world, from the society as a whole in which one lives, or from its government. Certainly liberals and libertarians must feel some alienation, but is it enough to really count significantly toward gnosticism?

2) Not quite so understanding is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to us men (wherever its origin is to be sought) is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. But gnostics are not inclined to discover that human beings in general and they themselves in particular are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.

Voegelin comes dangerously close here to extreme pessimism and fatalism, and to absolving people of their responsibility for not behaving as well as they should and are able. On the other hand, it seems from his description of the gnostic that the gnostic too flirts with, even embraces, absolving people of responsibility: It is not their fault; they could not help it; all the blame rests with flawed institutions and/or deterministic socio-economic and historical forces.

Liberalism, particularly the version of liberalism (or libertarianism) presented in my dissertation, avoids both of these extremes. In order to approach and achieve our ideal, human nature need not be changed. What is necessary is education and a change of institutions. There is a reciprocal causal relationship between people and their institutions; people shape them and are influenced in turn. Institutions present definite behavioral incentives and disincentives. But responsibility for one’s behavior ultimately resides in the individual.

3) The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.

Salvation is certainly too strong a word for what we expect from our ideal society. It would bring greater material and spiritual prosperity, less injustice, i.e., less crime, exploitation, and war. But it will not bring heaven on earth or personal salvation. There will still be crime, some wealth and income inequality (for that is only natural), scarcity, unhappiness, and suffering. It will simply be much better than conditions are now. All the evils that exist in the world are created by human beings, and while these evils cannot all be eradicated entirely, they need not be as great and prevalent are they are and have been.

4) From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered – namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man’s salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.

Perhaps some contemporary classical liberals and libertarians believe there is an inexorable progressive historical process tending toward a final stage of history, but I do not think most do. Indeed, there is nothing guaranteed about achieving our ideal and even should it be achieved there is no guarantee that it will last forever. Human beings and human society being what they are, it is always possible for the necessary traditions and institutions to erode in the minds and hearts of men over the course of generations.

5) With this fifth point we come to the Gnostic trait in the narrower sense – the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.

Classical liberalism and libertarianism in general, and the account presented in my dissertation in particular, do not seek to change the entire order of being. Some things, like the laws of physics and of economics, just cannot be changed by man. The only changes that are sought lie within the realms of personal education and morality as well as social, economic, and political institutions. These are changes that are within the realm of human action. Unlike other political movements, however, the changes and goals of liberalism properly conceived cannot be achieved by aggression, top-down central planning, or sudden and violent cultural revolutions. Rather, they can only be achieved through persuasion, education, the building up of alternative institutions – in short, a far from inevitable process of social evolution driven by purposeful, but not centrally coordinated, human action, the results of which on the macro-level will not be of human design. It will take generations, but “anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”

6) If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescriptions for such change. Knowledge – gnosis – of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. As the sixth feature of the gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the gnostic’s readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.

Even non-gnostic movements have their leaders and their “prophets.” Knowledge is necessary for any human endeavor. This is another feature that does not really add much by itself. Features 2-5 seem to do the bulk of the explanatory work. Taking all six features into consideration together, it seems we can say conclusively that liberalism, particularly Aristotelian liberalism, does not qualify as a gnostic political movement. Aristotelian liberalism is about liberty and human flourishing; it is no more gnostic than Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy.

In answering the hypothetical charge of gnosticism, the charge of utopianism has partially been met as well. The conception of human nature presented in my dissertation is, I think, a realistic one and the ideal society envisioned does not require human nature somehow to be miraculously changed in order for it to be brought about and maintained. The ideal society is not a perfect one in an otherworldly Platonic or Christian sense. It will not bring Heaven on Earth or usher in the End of History. We do not seek to immanentize the eschaton.

I take the moral case to have been made fairly strongly in my dissertation, although the case can always be strengthened by fleshing the arguments out more fully and presenting more than time or space allowed there or in a blogpost. What I did not spend much time addressing in my dissertation is the question of practicality, which raises objections that are variations on the theme “it will never work.” Addressing this question is largely beyond the scope of my dissertation and this blogpost. I must restrict myself to saying a few things.

The moral/practical dichotomy does not sit well within Aristotelian philosophy. As I have argued elsewhere, Aristotelian virtue ethics, unlike most modern ethics, does not recognize a natural tension between what is moral and what is in one’s rational or enlightened self-interest. Immorality is never practical or in one’s rational self-interest in this view, even though a Hobbes or a Machiavelli would counsel otherwise. Moreover, if a critic is not convinced of the practicality, that does not by itself obviate the moral case; arguments need to be presented against the latter as well. This is simply a point about proper argumentation and should not be taken as implying an embrace of a theory/practice dichotomy. It is sometimes said, “Well, it’s good in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.” But this is nonsense. If a theory is inapplicable to reality, then it is not a good theory.

The various theories of statism have been making a royal mess of things for centuries now. Perhaps it is time to try something radically different. Ronald Hamowy has observed that “For at least two hundred years [owing to the Scottish Enlightenment], social philosophers have known that association does not need government, that, indeed, government is destructive of association.” Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith as well as modern thinkers like Austrian economist F.A. Hayek have theorized about and described the emergence of society, culture, law, language, and markets as spontaneous orders. Austrian economists, libertarians, and others have built up a significant body of literature that demonstrates both theoretically and historically that legislative law and state-provided goods and services are inferior to other institutions in civil society: free markets and free enterprises, cultural norms, customary law and polycentric legal systems, and private organizations such as the family, churches, private schools, clubs, fraternal orders, and the like.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

I wrote a ton of essays in college, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. My degrees are in political science, philosophy, and history, after all. They range in length from one single-spaced page to five double-spaced pages and beyond.

I’m going to start putting some of these online as part of a new series of posts. There’s some good content in these essays that I think others might find interesting, even if I was a student when I wrote them. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in them now and they aren’t always as radical as I would like them to be now or as I could have written them then. They were written for a grade after all and often rather quickly the night before they were due. Nevertheless, I was often bold  – perhaps too bold. Luckily, I had tolerant professors, though they generally didn’t share my (ir)religious and political views.

I’m going to kick things off with the essays I wrote for my doctoral general exams (political theory and international relations) and then follow up with the short reaction papers from my philosophy and political philosophy graduate seminars. Then I’ll see what else I can dredge up that might be worth posting. I’ll be collecting all of these posts in a list on a new College Essays page. There’s a new category and tag devoted to this series as well.

I wrote this in a strong, rebellious Nietzsche phase in Nov. 1999:

Human, All Too Human

What beast is Man!
Cruel and mean-spirited
Conformity is the master plan
Individuality has faded

To be different is to be outcast
Mindlessly follow the herd mentality
The disease spreads fast
Don’t deviate from the herd morality!

No one questions anymore
Do you know who you are…really?
Name, age, sex, job…categories galore
All aspects of an external identity

Look inside and what do you see?
A pale reflection, shaped and molded
From behavioral controls of society
A forged soul, twisted and distorted

Smother me not with your well-meaning lies
One True Way? It’s a sham
I, myself, will surmise
Who it is that I am

Last week I launched a new website called Prometheus Unbound.  I aim for it to be a sort of online “magazine,” a libertarian review of fiction and literature. The site will feature reviews, news commentary, articles and editorials, and eventually (I hope) interviews, from a libertarian perspective. I’m entertaining the possibility of publishing original fiction in the undetermined future, but won’t be doing so anytime soon.

I’ve already got a number of posts up, some old and republished from other sites, some new. I’m hoping this won’t be a one-man show, so I’m looking for some regular writers as well as submissions from irregular or part-time contributors. There are already a few others on board, so you should start to see posts from them before long. If you’re interested in contributing a review, news commentary, or the like, contact me.

You can learn more about Prometheus Unbound, my reasons for creating it, and what I’m looking for in submissions by starting with my introductory post. I’m particularly interested in science fiction and fantasy prose fiction, but Prometheus Unbound will be open to submissions dealing with just about any genre or medium, including film, tv, comics and graphic novels, and poetry.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Watch this political ad (below) promoting Washington State’s Initiative 1098, which seeks to dedicate $2 billion per year to fund education and healthcare for children. It’s always for the children! It’s not about soaking the rich! even though this other Yeson1098 video makes a point of demonizing the greedy rich. The slogan is “the wealthy pay more, the rest of us pay less.” Bill Gates, Sr., is presented as a grandfatherly figure sacrificing his comfort for the sake of childrens’ enjoyment while he explains the reasonableness of this new scheme to legally plunder the rich.

His son could donate $2 billion of his own money each year for a couple decades and still have plenty left over, thereby funding this initiative all by himself for a good long while, and yet wealthy progressives like the Gates’ eagerly volunteer the money of others.

You can’t really be generous or charitable with other peoples’ money. Taking from them against their will or volunteering them to be targets of theft is immoral and unjust.

Anyone who is in favor of funding this initiative can simply devise a voluntary payment scheme and put up their own money. Then we’ll see how much progressives really care about the children.

Instead, they waste creativity, time, and money manipulating the statist-democratic process and promoting majoritarian-populist initiatives with clever, emotional, yet substanceless propaganda.

Hypocrites.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

I’m hearing reports that nearly $1 billion has already been spent on US House elections alone. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics predicts “$3.7 billion will be spent on this midterm election.” That’s 30% more than last time. It’s no surprise that the more legal plunder government is able to redistribute, the more people are willing to spend to gain control of the state. Obama is making Bush the Younger look thrifty and the next president will likely do the same for him. The increase in electoral spending will continue apace.

Such a distraction and waste of money political elections, especially national elections, are. As I explained in Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons: “The very existence of [a] centralized voting system for deciding public matters of moral importance encourages citizens to focus their energies on this formal democratic process, which is to say that it encourages the wasting of time and money on vote getting (or buying), at the expense of getting anything actually productive done in a timely fashion.”

Republicans distracted their base from important issues, for example, by whipping up ignorant, bigoted hysteria and rage at Muslims and the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” Fellow TLS blogger Matt Mortellaro recently discussed their latest gambit, an attempt to defund NPR (and PBS), ostensibly saving $608 million dollars next year, under the guise of defending the 1st Amendment rights of a liberal political pundit (Juan Williams) because he said something they like about Muslims. Political theater.

So let’s see… $3.7b spent (by Demopublicans) vs. $608m saved. Nice.

Well, at least all that spending is stimulating the economy… Oh wait.

Imagine what could be accomplished with all that wasted money, manpower, and brain power if only it were spent on — nay, invested in — something other than electoral politics. New companies started, existing ones expanded, more actually productive jobs created. Productive innovation in business models, manufacturing, science, technology. Socio-economic problems solved by direct action.

But forget all that. I guess it’s more important to get the “right guy” elected so we don’t have to be “fearful of the state” for a few years. Good luck. I suspect the Tea Party Congressional candidates and the next Republican president will prove just as disappointing to Republicans as Obama was to Democrats though.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.