(Embrace it! Own it! :o)

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.¹ 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.

1. The foregoing should not be taken to preclude the maintenance of social order and protection of liberty by some sort of voluntary government and/or informal order, voluntary law, and polycentric rather than monocentric coercive law (such as some historical examples of customary or common law). The arguments in the foregoing and subsequent paragraph have been made, in whole or in part, by the nineteenth-century American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner as well as by contemporary libertarians Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Roderick Long. ↩

In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss wrote that “Machiavelli does not bring to light a single phenomenon of any fundamental importance which was not fully known to the classics.” I have not yet read Strauss’s book, so I cannot speak for him regarding what precisely he meant by this statement but I suspect that what he meant bears some similarity to a growing sense within me that the ancient Greeks developed, at least in essence and prototypical form, every or most major philosophical positions that have been advocated at one time or another in modernity. If anything is fundamentally new about modern political philosophy, I think that it lies in the sheer predominance and popular acceptance of certain of these philosophical positions: namely, those related to the positivist-empiricist-historicist paradigm of our age. Modernity is plagued by a host of artificial dichotomies, reified abstractions such as realism-idealism, rationalism-empiricism, mind-body, Self-Other, subjective-objective, science vs. philosophy and foundationless value-judgments, and so forth. Classical or premodern political philosophy might be characterized by the search for right order, modern political philosophy by the search for order simplicitor, and postmodern political philosophy by giving up on the search for order altogether (moral, immoral, or amoral) (but perhaps this last is starting to change?). I find that these are dominant trends only, however; exceptions abound.

To begin with, are the features characteristic of modern political philosophy fundamentally new? The atomism, materialism, and mechanism that underlie a good deal of modern political philosophy and most of the social sciences were present already in ancient Greece in the ideas of such thinkers as Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and some of the sophists. Social contract theory and state-of-nature theorizing is a distinguishing characteristic of the modern, Enlightenment liberalism of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, and Rawls and even critics of liberalism like Rousseau. Plato makes a prototypical social contract argument in the Crito, however, and Aristotle recognizes that the immediate motivation for social and political life, if not its natural end, may be personal advantage. Plato and Aristotle explicitly combated the sophistic view that the polis is an artificial convention, such as Glaucon’s reformulation of Thrasymachus’ argument in Book II of the Republic that justice is a conventional compromise between doing injustice (good) and suffering injustice (bad). There is even an explicit, if not self-conscious, state-of-nature tale in the form of the Promethean myth told by Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras; granted, this myth was told by Protagoras in order to illustrate why he thinks virtue is teachable and not to justify or explain the origin and purpose of government, but the seeds are there. Moreover, the Greeks and Romans were no strangers to absolutist and amoral (or immoral) arguments such as “might makes right” and “justice is the advantage of the stronger,” nor were they strangers to power politics.

The lines become even more blurred when we consider modern political theorists who shared some of the concerns of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas about right order and virtue. Even Locke, for whom the origin and purpose of government is solely the protection of life, liberty, and property argued (unlike Hobbes) that natural moral law still applied even in the state of nature, that liberty in the state of nature was not license or “do whatever you please’.” Algernon Sidney and Montesquieu were republicans concerned with ordered liberty and moral and civic (or republican) virtue. If I remember correctly, Strauss, in his “Thoughts on Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,”¹ has argued that the state of nature originally played a role only in Christian theology and was first given a role in secular and political philosophy by Hobbes. We have already seen that this is not quite true; there is an example of the state of nature in Greek myth and ethical/political philosophy even if it wasn’t self-consciously labeled a state of nature and used for familiar social contract purposes. There is another instance of the state of nature being used in political philosophy prior to Hobbes, five decades earlier in fact. One can debate whether this example counts as premodern or modern, but the Spanish Scholastic and Jesuit Juan de Mariana explicitly employed the state of nature to ground his pre-Lockean argument for popular sovereignty and a radical defense of tyrannicide in his 1599 book De Rege. The Promethean myth, Mariana’s account, and modern Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of the state of nature bear important descriptive similarities.

Nevertheless, as I noted in the beginning, I think the primary difference between premodern and modern political philosophy lies in the dominant trend that received philosophical and popular acceptance. The premodern political philosophers whose thought achieved dominance — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and others — were primarily concerned with the search for right order. They generally accepted essentialism, teleology, eudaimonism, and natural law-type virtue or deontic ethics. Modern political philosophers tend to be more concerned with the search for peace and order, consequentialist or deontic ethical systems concerned primarily with social order, and are more likely to be rationalists or empiricists and base their theories on reductionist foundations. To illustrate, I will briefly examine the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas on one hand and Machiavelli and Hobbes on the other. Aristotle and Aquinas would probably view the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes as reductionist and insufficiently concerned with promoting virtue and the pursuit of the good life. Machiavelli and Hobbes have criticized classical political philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas for being overly concerned with utopias and idealistic regimes, and for having a misguided, idealistic view of the world and human nature.

Aristotle is a classical virtue ethicist who views man’s natural end as a life of well-being, flourishing, or happiness (eudaimonia). Classical supply-side theories of virtue ethics like Aristotle’s start from the question “What kind of person should I be?” not, as in typically modern demand-side theories, “What rules should I follow?” or “What consequences should I aim for?” The good life is a life of reason lived in community with other rational beings. The virtues are traits of character constitutive of the good life that tend to be conducive to man’s natural end. There is not and cannot be an exhaustive set of rules governing human behavior that is universal to all human beings and applicable in every situation. Virtue is right action, a mean between the vices of excess and deficiency, the mean relative to us. The moral virtues are generic principles that guide us in our pursuit or search for the good life. They must be applied to particular situations in light of our individual context. The intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis) guides the proper application of the moral virtues to specific contexts. Prudence is not mere cleverness or calculation of the best means for any ends. One might say that prudence without the moral virtues is empty, the moral virtues without prudence are blind. Given that man’s natural end is the good life, and that man is a political being who requires community to pursue that end, the polis is natural and its end is the eudaimonia of each and every one of its citizens. To this end, the constitution and laws of the polis ideally will be designed to promote virtue and discourage vice. Education is extremely important.

The Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas sought to integrate Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology and medieval political thought. To Aristotle’s intellectual and moral virtues, he added the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. As a Christian, and particularly one coming after Augustine, Aquinas still held that moral perfection is the natural end of man but that it cannot be fully and perfectly achieved in this life and even then only by the aid of divine grace. As an Aristotelian, however, and living in the high Middle Ages, Aquinas was not so pessimistic as Augustine that he would settle for the purpose of the secular institutions of the City of Man as being purely the maintenance of peace and order (shades of Hobbes) while the Church concerned itself with the salvation of souls. Human law should encourage virtue and discourage vice, but it cannot achieve moral perfection directly and should focus primarily on prohibiting and punishing the worst forms of vice, those that severely threaten the social order (theft, murder, and the like). Even in Mariana, late in the Scholastic-Thomist tradition, we see the end of political society to be not merely peace and order but also living well.

With Machiavelli we see a relatively new scientific method and a focus on realist-practical politics. Machiavelli rejects the search for right order and the best regime as utopian, declaring that none of these ideal constructions of his predecessors have ever existed anywhere and never will. He finds fault with their ethical theories as well, arguing that to follow them is to invite ruin and that they are antithetical to great and successful politics. In place of classical inductive and deductive methods, and dialectic, Machiavelli claims to employ a new method of enumerative generalizations from historical experience to discover an evolving set of maxims that will tend to lead to success in politics. As a pre-Enlightenment thinker, however, and as bold as he is, Machiavelli is not so bold as to claim that he has discovered a means by which man can completely overcome Fortune. Arguing that a prince must know when not to be good, Machiavelli attempts to establish a separate set of rules for political and private life. In politics, the ends justify the means and the principal end is a great and well-ordered commonwealth or republic. Tellingly, Machiavelli’s table of virtues is of the same number as Aristotle’s, eleven, but its composition is markedly different and justice is strikingly missing. All of the virtues and vices in Machiavelli’s table involve reputation, how the prince is viewed by others, and usefulness for success in politics.

With Hobbes we see the hubris characteristic of the Enlightenment in full flower. In the introduction to his Leviathan, Hobbes likens the ability of man to create an artificial man (i.e., the State) to the miracle of God’s creation of man himself. The tone of power and optimism in the capability of human reason to reshape the world and human nature is striking. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes reduces politics to power (but arguably not as consistently as Spinoza) and goes even further, reducing the purpose of government purely to maintaining peace and order and its origin to base human passions: the desire for power over others, fear of death in the unsafe and miserable state of nature, and calculating self-interest. The people agree to install a ruler as sovereign and he is to have absolute power; law is the dictate of the sovereign. Justice is an artificial convention, having no place in the state of nature where force and fraud are the cardinal virtues. The laws of nature are prudential (in the calculating, not the Aristotelian, sense): the first is to seek peace and follow it, but the first right of nature is to utilize any means necessary for self-preservation. The second law of nature is to form a compact and give up all of his rights and some of his liberty when others are willing; the corresponding second right of nature is that if others are not willing, he may do whatever he likes to defend and advance himself. The third law of nature is the origin of justice: that men should perform the compacts they make.

1. I’m not sure if this is the exact title for the essay. ↩

Apparently they thought it would be funny to highlight the allegedly voluntary nature of this campaign by, um, alluding to the very justifiable fears that many environmentalists are willing to impose their values on others by (deadly) force. It would be wonderful if everyone would make some small sacrifice to reduce their carbon emissions by 10%, so the campaign goes, but if you don’t want to, that’s cool. It’s your choice. No pressure. Red button pressed. BOOM!!! SPLATTER!!! Such a pity you made the wrong choice. Tee hee!

I’m not kidding. Watch the video below. But be forewarned: it is graphic.

The video, in light of the organization’s 10% campaign, ironically brings to my mind the Roman disciplinary practice of decimation. Decimation was a punishment imposed on Roman military units for failure, cowardice, or mutiny in which one in ten (10% of) soldiers were selected by lot to be slaughtered by their comrades. Only the decimated victims in 10:10’s video are chosen for this ultimate punishment by their failure to make the “right” choice. No pressure.

Decimating the global population sure is one way to reduce carbon emissions by 10%…but it is not very humane. The video is strategically clueless and in poor taste at best.

I really don’t understand what 10:10 was thinking in making this video. They have since pulled it from their own website, stating that apparently not everyone found it to be funny and hinting that some were even offended. Gee, I wonder why. Likely, the video will prove to be great fodder for skeptics of global warming alarmism and statist environmental policies for years to come.

Here is 10:10’s explanation. See if you can make any more sense of this fiasco.

NO PRESSURE

Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others — agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

White’s solution is to end the culture of rampant consumerism in the West. How does he propose to do this? Ah, now there’s the rub.

White’s own ecofascist solution is three-fold: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power, and the “downshifting” of the global economy.

The nature of criminalizing advertising is clear. But he no doubt has equally authoritarian means in mind for implementing his two other proposals.

How does he plan to revoke corporate power? By eliminating limited liability. By “reviving the possibilty of death penalties for [‘misbehaving’] corporations.” And presumably by other government means.

How does he plan to “downshift” the global economy? He offers some apparently voluntary examples here, at least, but I doubt he’d be satisfied with purely voluntary means.

It’s an awfully convenient rhetorical strategy to juxtapose authoritarian environmental and anti-market proposals with the most extreme examples of ecofascism. It makes his own proposals seem downright reasonable in comparison.

The extreme ecofascists are perhaps making a strategic blunder too in attacking the sacred cow of democracy. White is more clever. He is catering to the widespread religious devotion to democracy and demonization of market activity, crying: No need to put democracy on hold! We’ll just put the economy on hold instead!

Does White call for an end to, or even mention, government policies and rhetoric that encourage rampant consumerism? such as artificially low interest rates, inflation, stimulus checks and other forms of subsidies, taxes on savings and investment, targeted tax credits for various forms of spending, various social-welfare programs, indoctrination in public schools to be good consumerist citizens, calls from political leaders to spend spend spend, and so on.

No, he does not.

Instead, he calls for a softer ecofascism in the name of fending off ecofascism. Consumption is a compulsion and is harming the environment; only corporations are to blame and government is the solution. Where have I heard that before?

~*~

Cross-posted at the Mises Econ blog and The Libertarian Standard.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Obligation . . . is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory.¹

Well, this is just patently absurd. Libertarians, of course, do not deny that individuals can have obligations to others, including non-humans.

Fortunately, Callahan goes on to clarify what he means:

We can have obligations that we did not agree to take upon ourselves.

But this is something that not all libertarians deny, as a wide and deep enough perusal of libertarian literature will demonstrate.

At the very least, libertarians recognize the unchosen obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force against other rational beings (i.e., to refrain from what we call aggression).

Libertarians generally make two important sets of distinctions regarding obligation: that between negative and positive obligations and that between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. One can go further and recognize that obligations can have different weightings relative to one another such that one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Rights, at least as I define the term, are legitimately enforceable² moral claims against another’s prior obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force. The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)³ and corresponding rights⁴ are unchosen, enforceable negative obligations.

Can we have unchosen positive obligations? Libertarians need not deny this, and not all do. It should be easily recognized that unchosen, unenforceable positive obligations are strictly compatible with the NAP/rights.

What about unchosen, enforceable positive obligations? Provided they are compatible with the NAP/rights, if there are any that meet this description, then libertarians need not deny unchosen, enforceable positive obligations outright. I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to come up with possible examples of unchosen, enforceable positive obligations that are compatible with the NAP/rights. If you take the challenge, bear in mind what I wrote about how one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Suffice to say that it is a myth that libertarians (need to) deny unchosen, even positive, obligations. Callahan is attacking a straw man.

To criticize libertarians in general for denying unchosen, enforceable positive obligations, or just certain of them, would be more accurate. But to do so would be to take the position that the threat or use of initiatory physical force (i.e., aggression) is at least sometimes justified — that, for example, what is usually thought of commonsensically as theft or trespass or murder in everyday life, is not theft or trespass or murder in the “political” sphere, i.e., when the state or the “community” does it.⁵

I will conclude with four quotations of my own:⁶

Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better serves the name: that is virtue. But then what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?
— Alexis de Tocqueville

The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed.
–Albert Jay Nock

Simplicity and truth of character are not produced by the constraint of laws, nor by the authority of the state, and absolutely no one can be forced or legislated into a state of blessedness; the means required are faithful and brotherly admonition, sound education, and, above all, free use of the individual judgment.
— Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Question 96, Second Article

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

1. It doesn’t help interpretation that Callahan started this sentence in the title of his post. ↩

2. The presence of the term ‘legitimately’ here but not elsewhere in the post should not be taken to imply I am making a different claim here. I add it here in a definition for greater clarity. ↩

3. It’s not an axiom. ↩

4. Most fundamentally, the life, liberty, and property triad. Of the three, I think liberty is the most fundamental (at least at the individual level of analysis, from the perspective of moral theory; at the structural level of analysis, that of political and legal theory, the right to property may be the most fundamental; rights cannot be fully understood exclusively from either perspective, but rather must be conceived from a dialectical perspective that encompasses both as well as the cultural level (see Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism for more on these three levels of dialectical analysis, which I adapted to conceptualizing rights chapter 3 of my dissertation) ) but it cannot be exercised or properly understood without the right to private property. ↩

5. In chapters 6 and 7 of my dissertation, I deny that this is truly the political sphere. I conceive of genuine, immanent politics as discourse and deliberation between equals in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being). By ‘equals’ I mean ‘equality in authority’ as in Locke’s state of nature, though I do not conceive of ‘nature’ in Lockean, social-contract theory terms but rather in Aristotelian terms, i.e., of teleological completeness or perfection. In short, politics presupposes liberty. Hence, the term ‘vulgar politics’ (or vicarious politics) used as a category on this site as a synonym for statist “politics.” ↩

6. Yes, I know these thinkers were not libertarian. But seen in the proper light philosophically, free of the contradictory ideas held by those who wrote them, these statements present truth. Accurate textual exegesis has its place but is another matter, one we are not concerned with here. ↩

Congressman Etheridge thinks he can interrogate and assault someone simply for having the temerity to ask him a question in public, apparently without fear of retaliation or legal consequences, despite being recorded. He has a right to know who the student is? I don’t think so. He’s not police. I don’t think even a police officer would have cause under positive law to demand identification and assault the student simply for video recording and asking a question in public. In any case, their authority is illegitimate and what we have here clearly is assault even under current positive law.

What’s more disturbing is that this incident is indicative of just how much our petty tyrants view themselves as being above us and the law — though I suppose assaulting one person on the street is an improvement over assaulting millions through his legislative acts; if only he and his fellow control-freaks would cease the latter, the world would be a much better place and their private crime manageable.

Update: Congressman Etheridge and the establishment news media go into damage control mode.

Update II: Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com agrees that this is “a clear case of assault and battery” and that Etheridge is “obviously inebriated with an extreme sense of entitlement.” He’s not impressed with Etheridge’s public apology after being outed online. Greenwald says in an update that he expected Democrats would try to defend Etheridge’s actions, but even he was “surprised by the extent of the eagerness to defend a clearly illegal and indefensible assault based on the political ideologies of those involved.” Follow the link to read more.

Unedited video from the first camera:

Update III: Digby reminds us of other similar incidents (with video) and points out that the state’smen and/or their security detail are never prosecuted, whereas a private citizen doing the same thing generally would be.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour–inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization“ (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being — not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

…because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

Benford does report some remarks by Clarke I do agree with, however. For example: “for the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

And here’s another: “exact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Finally, here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of statism: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.”

Update: In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford adds two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good ideal all along!”