Category: Philosophy

There is a huge contradiction in the witness' testimony!

What Do Words Mean Anyhow?

by Darien Sumner

The Adam Smith Institute’s Tim Worstall claims to be one of the world’s foremost experts on scandium. Whether or not this is true I am ill-equipped to say, as I know almost exactly nothing about scandium. I assume they use it to make scanners, and I was figuring it was probably from Sweden, but then I realized I was confusing it with Scandinavium, a similar metal so heavy that Iron Maiden’s played there nine times. Anyhow, the point is: I don’t know anything about scandium, and I freely concede, in advance, any arguments about scandium I ever get into against Tim Worstall, who knows much more about scandium than he does about socialism. Sadly, it’s the latter he’s chosen to write about today, in an utterly bizarre article nominally about the mining strikes in Bolivia.

If you haven’t been following the Bolivian mining strikes, they’ve now escalated to the point where Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Rodolfo Illanes was recently kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the strikers. Our friend Tim Worstall would have us believe that the strikers are protesting against socialism, but is that really the case? We’ll explore that very soon, but before we dive into the pièce de résistance, we need to whet our appetites with this lovely little amuse-bouche of stupidity:

Around here we usually make fun of Bolivarian socialism by reference to the idiocies which Nicolas Maduro has been imposing upon the people of Venezuela. They do, after all, call their system "Bolivarian socialism." Across the continent, in Bolivia, we also have a closely related Bolivian socialism. Evo Morales has often said that he takes inspiration from Hugo Chavez, and that the system he is using in Bolivia is similar. So, Bolivarian socialism in Bolivia then. Umm, perhaps both Bolivian and Bolivarian socialism?

Why yes, those do sound rather similar! What an astonishing coincidence! On a related note, I’ve always found it weird how similar the titles of Superman and Superman II are. What do you suppose were the odds that would just happen by chance, as it so obviously did? The universe is a mysterious place, my friends!

(more…)

Reëxamining Some Thinking

by Darien Sumner

In case you’re unfamiliar with Alicia Dearn, she’s a lawyer and establishment libertarian who worked in the Gary Johnson 2012 campaign, then went on to lobby for his VP slot in 2016 (only to get passed over for the worst possible choice). Last week, she made the following pronouncement:

Libertarians who think that the anti-discrimination laws are against libertarian ethics are wrong and need to re-examine their thinking.

I’m one of those horrible wrong libertarians, as I believe I’ve made clear once or twice recently, so I consider myself fortunate that I have Alicia Dearn to hand to guide me through reëxamining my thinking. Let’s see what she has for us!

(more…)

Second Helpings

by Darien Sumner

I’m not letting go of this cake thing just yet. There’s much more to explore! First up, let’s take a look at the way economics is done. In economics, when we wish to elucidate a given concept, we often set up a simple thought experiment in which we hold all confounding factors constant, and just allow the one thing we’re interested in studying to vary. So to take a very simple example, we could propose the following:

Ron has a dollar in his pocket. He walks into a store that has twenty pieces of candy for sale. What is the highest price the store could charge that would allow Ron to buy all the candy?

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this example in a vacuum. It does, however, make a ton of assumptions — that all the candy is interchangeable from both Ron’s and the store’s perspective, that Ron would be willing to spend all his money on candy, that Ron would want all twenty pieces of candy at any price, that no other potential customers are also attempting to buy the candy, and so forth — that, while totally sensible from the limited perspective of our experiment, make it completely inapplicable as, say, a basis for public policy. If anybody were to say the government ought to intervene and set a maximum price of five cents on all candy so Ron can always buy it all, and that this example "proves" it, I suspect that basically nobody would have trouble understanding why that makes no sense.

(more…)

Eating Your Cake nor Having It Neither

by Darien Sumner

To think I was actually worried when Rand Paul suspended his campaign. Who would be there to make laughable, libertarian-lite remarks and to take utterly nonsensical positions in an attempt to compromise every principle with every claimant? Fortunately for me, Gary Johnson was there to take up the mantle, and, so far, he’s done a bang-up job of continuing the Rand Paulian message muddying. I’ve already reported that he declared religious freedom a "black hole" and said that he believes that the federal government should have unlimited authority to police human interaction so the dread bogeyman called "discrimination" wouldn’t force him to be a social conservative. Here’s the quotation most apropos to today:

[T]he objective here is to say that discrimination is not allowed for by business… I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.

So that was your Libertarian Party nominee for president last week. The reason I bring this up again is because the Clinton News Network had one of its laughable "Libertarian Party Town Hall" specials, in which Gary Johnson frustrates the network by sounding like a more feminine Hillary Clinton rather than a more feminine Donald Trump, and thus siphons voters from entirely the wrong side. Among many, many other moments of weirdness, Gary Johnson said this thing:

(more…)

Is the Libertarian Party Good for Anything?

by Darien Sumner

It’s been pointed out to me that I was perhaps a bit too harsh in last week’s article, What Libertarianism Is and What Libertarianism Is Not. In that article, I lambaste the Libertarian Party and its current comedy revue of a presidential ticket for being terrible exemplars of libertarianism; indeed, my pithy Facebook summary read in part "there is nothing libertarian about the Libertarian Party." I stand by every word I wrote in both article and summary; the Libertarian Party is currently miles afield of what it actually means to be a libertarian. I checked: the phrase "non-aggression principle" appears only twice on the party’s web site, once in a quote from Ron Paul describing the great Mary Ruwart’s book, Healing Our World, and once as the title of a talk to be given at the 2014 Libertarian Party of Oklahoma state convention. The fact that the core principle of the libertarian philosophy goes effectively unmentioned on the Libertarian Party’s web site speaks volumes.

All of which is not to say, however, that the Libertarian Party is completely worthless. It’s terrible at spreading libertarian ideas, to be sure, but it’s effective at attracting people who are beginning to think libertarian thoughts; in a sense, it’s sort of like a big magnet that helps to draw in what Albert Jay Nock called the "Remnant." Many people are drawn to the Libertarian Party because they’ve noticed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans offer a single alternative to endless war, and many others because they’ve begun to realize what a cruel, inhuman farce the drug war is — at this time, those are the two major issues that push people in the libertarian direction, and the Libertarian Party is there to catch the pushees.

(more…)

Why Socialism Is Impossible

by Darien Sumner

Libertarians traditionally do a terrible job of explaining why socialism can’t work. Which is to say: we’re great at explaining it to other libertarians, but we think we can talk to our Bernie Sanders-supporter friends the same way. If you’re talking to someone who doesn’t already understand the problem, and you just say something like "in a socialist environment there can’t be market prices," you have to realize that person will think that’s a feature, not a bug. Most of us libertarians know about the socialist calculation problem, but to the wider audience it’s pretty esoteric stuff; it’s not just plainly intuitive to most people that the absence of market prices causes discoördination in production. Either way, it seems like ultimately you have some guy deciding what products, and how many, to make. Can’t we just put those successful entrepreneurs — the Bill Gateses and Jeff Bezoses of the world — in charge of the planning boards and have it work just fine?

This, of course, is where libertarians tend to fall down. We’re great at extolling the virtues of the entrepreneur, but, in a very significant sense, we miss the most important element: what’s critical about entrepreneurs is not that they make amazing, successful things, but that they’re able to fail in a controlled manner. When a product fails on the market, only the entrepreneur and those closely connected to him suffer, which is important for two reasons: first because it means that random people, uninvolved with the failed project, don’t have to bear the cost of the failure, and second because, by concentrating that cost on the people responsible, the failure is made immediately apparent, and the pressure to cease failing is substantial. Amazon’s Fire Phone, by all accounts, was a neat piece of technology, but nobody cared enough to buy one, and Amazon cut it loose after a few months of disappointing performance. Microsoft’s Windows 8 suffered a similar poor reception, which encouraged the company to proceed in a new direction (and quite swiftly!) with its replacement. While the successes are, of course, the ultimate goal of the market economy — the production of goods and services people want — the only thing that makes those successes possible is the market’s robust failure mechanism. When governments attempt to "soften the blow" of failure by socializing the losses, that not only creates a massive injustice (as innocent people unconnected to the failure are now forced to pay for it), but it also encourages businesses to linger in failed products and failed practices longer than they should.

(more…)

On Voting

by Darien Sumner

I’ve always been firmly planted on the "against" side of the big "should libertarians vote" debate, so I was pleased to discover that, in a recent episode of The Tom Woods Show, Jeff Deist made the case for why libertarians shouldn’t vote in a much more lucid and succinct manner than I’ve ever heard it presented. The whole interview’s worth listening to, of course — Woods and Deist are always engaging and insightful — but I’ll quote the relevant portion below for your perusal.

Here’s why I tell people they can’t get emotionally attached to Hillary, or to Trump, or even to Gary Johnson, and that they, in my opinion anyway, shouldn’t vote for any of the three, and it’s very simple: at some point, regardless of who wins, regardless of your take on the "lesser of evils" argument (which applies equally to Gary Johnson, I might add) — regardless of your take on that, at some point, whoever is president is going to order bombs to be dropped somewhere, and at some point the person for whom you pulled the lever is going to be responsible for a young child somewhere, probably in the Islamic world, laying there with his arm blown off or something like this, and I think that no libertarian ought to live with that, or to give that his or her sanction. So that’s why I try very hard to be emotionally detached from this, to view things as they are, and to simply not vote — not as some great, noble gesture on my part, but just as a tiny drip, another drop in the bucket, hopefully, of people who don’t sanction this whole sordid affair.

(more…)

What Libertarianism Is and What Libertarianism Is Not

by Darien Sumner

I have people asking me why I don’t support Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign. He’s the Libertarian Party nominee, after all — as a libertarian, shouldn’t I support him, if only to get more exposure for libertarianism? It’s an argument that’s not without a basis, but there’s a bit of question begging involved, since it tacitly asserts that more exposure for Johnson and the LP (and, hilariously, William Weld) will lead to more exposure for libertarianism. I’m not convinced this is the case; it seems more likely merely to bring more attention to the kind of bastardized, milquetoast libertarianism that even has room for Mitt Romney and Jeb!. I consider myself a "big tent" libertarian, but if the tent has gotten so big that it can accommodate not just William Weld but Jeb Bush, we’ve clearly left the big top behind in favor of the sideshow.

The real problem is one of definition; many "movement" libertarians simply don’t understand what libertarianism actually is. There’s a substantial cohort out there with the (entirely correct) conviction that both the Republican and Democratic parties are disastrous and the desire to fix the system. These people latch on to the Libertarian Party because it’s an alternative with some appealing talking points, and not because they truly understand libertarianism and want to promote it. So far, there’s nothing wrong with any of this; we all have to start somewhere, and I myself was once that exact person, so please don’t read me as being disdainful of people who are attracted to some elements of libertarianism without a fully developed libertarian theory. Unless, that is, those people are in the upper echelons of the Libertarian Party, in which case, yes, please do read me that way.

(more…)

Censorship and Morality

by Darien Sumner

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those are the exact words the irresponsible hippies who founded this country chose when they wrote the First Amendment. Those words are important; they were very carefully and very specifically chosen, and they reflect, as Judge Napolitano has forcefully explained, a very specific understanding of what it means to speak freely, and what the government doesn’t get to do about it:

The freedom of speech, as the framers envisioned it, is a preëxisting right; it came before the United States government, it was never abandoned to the United States government, and the United States government is obligated to respect it. The people are fundamentally and inherently free to speak as they please, completely irrespective of whether or not their overlords like it. This freedom is also understood to be a freedom not merely to speak as you please, but to put those words into writing — hence freedom of the press.

(more…)

Has the Libertarian Moment Passed?

by Darien Sumner

James E. Miller, writing for Taki’s Magazine, certainly thinks so. While he has some interesting and some worthwhile things to say, it’s interesting to note that he also clearly has no idea what he’s talking about — he doesn’t exhibit any knowledge of what libertarianism is, where it comes from, or what its aims are, nor does he appear to care very much. His article is very much an alt-right victory lap, heavy on the fist-pumping and potty mouth, and rather light on the actual research. Still and all, he’s not entirely wrong, as we see when he opens his piece with:

There is no libertarian moment.

Miller is entirely correct; the libertarian moment does not exist. It never did. What exists in America is perhaps best described as an anti-establishment moment; the great mass of the American people is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with "business as usual" in Washington, and wants a change it can believe in — hence the rise of Obama in 2008, and the popularity of perceived "outsider" candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, not one of whom has the tiniest shred of libertarian leaning. Ron Paul also received the benefit of this "moment," and that misled a lot of people into believing that America was now ripe for a libertarian revolution, in spite of the fact that a greater-than-ever (and still rising) percentage of Americans is presently dependent on government largesse in one form or another. However attractive the idea of liberty may be, most people will take the money instead.

(more…)