When Collectivists clash with the State

The Quebec student strike, that I have already written about here, raises some interesting issues.

The students have formed a "union," wherein every member (like it or not) is subject to the will of the group, just like a labour union. The protest, of course, should make anyone with any sense morality, cringe. The students want full funding for their post secondary education, the right to free schools. Already 90% of their tuition is borne on the backs of taxpayers, but they want it all.

To get it all they have taken to the streets.But a new law passed, called Bill 78, restricts student access to free speech and assembly.

I don't know where to start critiquing this. Does a good citizen support the students right to speak on behalf of their desire to confiscate money from the general population and pay to send them through university? Or should the State be criticized for such a draconian law? Probably both. Watch what ReasonTV makes of this.    

Liberty with a side of sauerkraut - Part 3 - Equality vs. Freedom

Jan Narveson at LSS 2012...

In my previous post, John Tomasi raised the idea of social justice through the fostering of the "democratic citizen," both concepts not common to libertarian discussions. The Sunday session at the Liberty Summer Seminar (LSS) began with a response to John Tomasi's presentation from Prof. Jan Narveson. Jan is the Chairman (among other things) of the Institute for Liberal Studies which runs the LSS.

Jan started his response with some comments on democracy, or more accurately some swipes at democracy. Our society, indeed much of the planet, views democracy as the ultimate form of government, and very often confuses it with freedom. It is after all, rule by the majority, the "will" of the people, so it must be correct.

Jan's first comment sounded like this: it was decided in a democratic vote (51 to 49) that you should be boiled in oil (ouch), then he went on to Churchill's famous quote about democracy. He then asked "if your rights were protected, would you still want democracy, maybe not?"

The great lie of democracy is that laws are passed by the majority, its never true. And even if it were true, is it right, is it moral? In a representative democracy such as we have, laws are never passed by the majority, always a plurality, and as for the laws themselves, some, we would all want, but many are designed to benefit certain groups at the expense of others. "Democracy," Jan continues, "proves only who would win in a fair fight." It's not the most rational approach, it's rarely the best idea, and is simply based on the size of the mob and its clout. "Is this a good system of government, he asked?"

The democratic citizen that John Tomasi wants, must submerge his "self-ownership," his right to his property, to people he doesn't know, and for a purpose he does not necessarily support, mediated by a government he may not have chosen. That is essentially what we have now, but John Tomasi thinks that if we allow people to accumulate as much wealth as possible, this satisfies libertarians.

Prof. Narveson points to a principle that is popular among some left liberals called the Difference Principle, based on the faulty premise that: "Each member of society has an equal claim on their society’s goods." Jan referred to it as the "maximin" principle, or maximize the minimum, favouring the bottom but allowing the wealthy no restrictions. Note that word "allowing." The reason this inequality might be acceptable to some left liberals, that typically have problems with property rights and wealth accumulation, is that it could be to the advantage of those who are worst-off, because the really wealthy have more to "share" with them.

I doubt that satisfies many libertarians, not me anyway. Many people think that the wealthy have a duty to share. That is a moral position that I don't support, it's typically a religious dictate. I prefer the word responsibility, it's not as strong as duty which is obligatory. A responsible human being, that has the where-with-all to share, probably should, but they should be able to choose.

Prof. Narveson finished by stating that this issue highlights the difference between "equality and freedom." The former is forced, the latter is not. "Free markets," he said provide equality," because no one has coercive powers.

The next speaker Jacob Levy, a political science professor from McGill, and a more frequent writer for Bleeding Heart Libertarians, argued from a more practical position in support of John Tomasi. His point was that the state already exists, its been around since the 1600's, and has evolved along with modern financial institutions in most jurisdictions. "The state will not be legislated away," he said, an aspiration of some libertarians. The state has armies, taxation and spending authority and in many ways national defence is already redistributionist, both rich and poor are defended equally. That argument is a bit of a cop out I think. I kept thinking of the argument from the American Revolution, when the slaves are freed who will pick the cotton?

The final speaker was Pierre Desrochers, who introduced his book (The Locavore's Dilemma) co-authored by his wife Hiroko Shimizu - that I have already talked about here.

LSS 2012 was a memorable experience, you should come next year.  



   

Liberty with a side of sauerkraut - Part 2 - Social Justice

The Flag that flew over LSS #12......

I've separated this post of my experience at the Liberty Summer Seminar 2012 (LSS) from the previous post because this one may prove to be a bit more contentious.

In the previous post I implied that libertarians come in various flavours. Our final speaker on Saturday, the keynote speaker, John Tomasi is a case in point, a different flavour. John was there with his new book Free Market Fairness. John is also an occasional contributor to the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL).

Sometimes I try to read BHL and generally I find it difficult to understand. It's typically written for academics by academics, with lots of philosophical jargon and references sprinkled everywhere. But, I have a sliver of sympathy for some of the concepts espoused.

This paragraph was copied from the "About" section of BHL, and gives you an idea of the blog's purpose:

"Bleeding Heart Libertarians is a blog about free markets and social justice. All of us who blog at this site are, broadly speaking, libertarians. In particular, we are libertarians who believe that addressing the needs of the economically vulnerable by remedying injustice, engaging in benevolence, fostering mutual aid, and encouraging the flourishing of free markets is both practically and morally important."

You can see from the first line of the "BHL About" their mention of the term "social justice," not a common phrase among libertarians. In his keynote presentation at LSS, John Tomasi outlined the various forms of Liberalism that applied to his argument. There are Classical Liberals and Libertarians, both seeking Economic Liberty, the former for utilitarian reasons, and the latter because of the concept of self-ownership. Then there are High Liberals that seek social justice through what Tomasi called the Democratic Citizen. What Tomasi wants to do is to somehow meld Economic Liberty with the Democratic Citizen idea to create the Neo-Classical Liberal, a hybrid of libertarianism and high liberalism who favour social justice.

Really, this all boils down to: what is social justice? That was not entirely clear to me except that it somehow allows a strictly limited government to redistribute the wealth of its well off citizens, such that, the not so well off are better off. Tomasi never got down to the mechanics of how this was to be done, he is a political philosopher after all. I kept thinking that there needs to be an element of coercion here, this is not a voluntary situation, so how is it different from what we have now except by degree? Most governments in the Western democracies already do a considerable amount of redistribution, and then some. So is it the same? Tomasi says no, he believes in Economic Liberty. But is that true?     

Early on in his presentation Prof. Tomasi, confided to us that he was uncomfortable with the Libertarian idea of "self-ownership," a comment I thought was rather strange coming from a libertarian. Self-ownership is foundational to the right to property, your most fundamental property is your self. From self-ownership it follows that you have the right to those things produced by your self, through your labour, be it money or whatever. Its all your property, to dispose of as you wish, that is true Economic Liberty. So fudging on "self-ownership" is like fudging on property rights, and if that is free market fairness, then I'm really missing something.

I'll have more to say in Part 3. 

Liberty with a side of sauerkraut - Part 1

The Libertarian "big tent..."

It didn't rain! For the first time in its 12 year history, the rain held off, in fact the weather was spectacular during the Liberty Summer Seminar (LSS) at the Jaworski Estate in Orono Ontario last weekend.

This annual two day seminar is one of the largest gatherings of libertarians of all stripes in Canada. Stripes of libertarians? Absolutely, if you thought libertarians came in only one flavour, this seminar would have been an eyeopener. I'll say more about that later in Part 2.

I'm always impressed with the selection of speakers at LSS, this year was no different. For me each speaker was a highlight, so let me select for you what it was I learned from them.

Fred McMahon of the Fraser Institute was first up on Saturday talking about economic freedom and how it relates to other freedoms. Fred pointed out that economic freedom is the fundamental freedom on which all the others are built. Historically the first European nations that were free, were market oriented. Freedom, he said, is often confused with democracy, and has little to do with it. In fact, to be economically free means being liberated from dependence on government, something that most democracies today, do their best to thwart.

The Fraser Institute produces much of its research based on econometrics, which most Austro-libertarians dismiss because human action, they say, is impossible to model through laboratory experiments as other sciences are. That didn't stop Fred from displaying slide after slide demonstrating the positive relationship based on econometrics, of economic freedom to wealth and happiness.

Next up was Cindy Cerquitella of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Cindy's topic was Freedom Champions: Stories from the field. For those who are unaware of Atlas (not named after Atlas Shrugged) its mission: "is to discover, develop and support Intellectual Entrepreneurs worldwide who advance the Atlas vision of a society of free and responsible individuals. Achieving Atlas’s vision of a “peaceful and prosperous society of free and responsible individuals” requires respect for the foundations of a free society: individual liberty, property rights, limited government under the rule of law, and the market order. To move public policy debates toward these classical liberal ideas...." In other words, an organization after my own heart.

Cindy spoke about think tanks around the world, and demonstrated a positively encyclopedic knowledge about them. After speaking of a few interesting groups that Atlas supports in some countries, the audience was invited to shout out a country, to which she named the think tank and some of its members, for country after country, no notes, very impressive. And I was buoyed by how many countries there were that had liberty oriented think tanks.

Our next speaker was Victoria Henderson speaking about Advancing Liberty in the Americas (Latin America). Victoria was part of a panel on drug policy that I attended last January, though drugs are not her field of study. Her field is Latin American Studies and Geography, and she is the Managing Director at the Institute for Social and Economic Analysis (ISEA).

Victoria used two terms with which I was not familiar: Epistemic Communities - voluntary groups held together by ideas, and Epistemic Landscapes for which she gave an interesting example: in her class of 174 at Queen's University, students were shown pictures of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx and then, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman. Ninety percent of the class knew the first trio, only one person knew all of the second. That is the "landscape" we are up against, an educational apparatus in Canada that is geared to teaching about collectivist thinkers and thinking.

One fact that Victoria mentioned, a surprise to me, was that the Austrian School had a precursor in 16th Century Spain. Further investigation suggests there was no direct influence, but the School of Salamanca was in many ways so similar to the Austrian School that Murray Rothbard referred to them as proto-Austrians.

Another surprise to me, was Victoria's mention of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM) - The Free Market University in Guatemala! Who knew? A university that teaches about Mises, Hayek, Friedman etc. In fact there is a library named after Mises: La Biblioteca Ludwig von Mises. UFM is 41 years old, and on its a 40th anniversary last year it wrote "if Guatemala were to enjoy prosperity, it would be necessary for a group of influential people to understand, very clearly, the ethical, legal and economic aspects of a society of free and responsible persons," that is a worthy and wonderful mission.

Stay tuned for Part 2, BTW, I love sauerkraut.