Adventures in Bowling Green

Hey, Peter, where have you been?

2008-06-26T19:10:00.003-05:00

I've been blogging (a lot) at the Shotgun, the superb "ground zero" blog for freedom lovers. Actually, the blog is a strange mix of libertarians (like myself), and conservatives. We disagree with each other. Often. Mostly on cultural issues, but also on issues like whether or not giving Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus rights is a good thing (I think so).

I'm also on the radio every Monday from 4 to 6 p.m. on 88.1 WBGUFM in Bowling Green, OH. You can listen live on the Shotgun blog through your web browser.

I'm also working with the Institute for Liberal Studies putting on events like the upcoming Liberty Summer Seminar (pack your tent now, it's going to be over the July 26, 27 weekend this year, and will, again, host some of the best pro-liberty American and Canadian speakers anywhere).

And I'm "working" on my dissertation.

Okay? So go visit those sites. I doubt I'll be posting much on this one.

Andrew Napolitano Interview

2007-12-14T17:03:00.000-05:00

Here is the excerpted interview we did with Andrew Napolitano.

Visit our website for more. Or check out our ITunes feed. (And subscribe!)

Blimpin' for Ron Paul

2007-12-14T15:06:00.000-05:00

The Ron Paul blimp is up in the air. It took off this morning at 9:23 a.m. from Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

Check out a video from the launch:

And here is the live stream from Justin.TV:

Watch live video from ronpaulblimp on Justin.tv

Political Animals

2007-12-12T17:25:00.000-05:00

From 6 to 8:15 p.m. EST, this webcam should be streaming our radio show, if everything works out as it should. You can click on the link beneath the webcam for the live radio stream, coming from 88.1 WBGUFM in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Live Stream

Our guest tonight is Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News senior legal analyst and author of "A Nation of Sheep." Check out our website: www.bgpoliticalanimals.com.

Look! Up in the sky, it's... Ron Paul?

2007-12-07T01:55:00.000-05:00

Call it crazy, call it maverick, call it quixotic, call it whatever you'd like. One thing no one can deny is that it's kind of, well, awesome. And occasionally awe-inspiring.

Ron Paul's presidential campaign is all of those things. But the critics of Ron Paul now have one more joke to throw in his direction: The Paul campaign is full of hot air. Well, maybe not the campaign, but the blimp. What? I said blimp.

Ron Paul's grassroots--more energized, more active, more committed than any other candidate in either party--have begun organizing a blimp advertising campaign. The blimp is to get off the ground by the 10th of December, flying over New Hampshire, Iowa, and then to Boston for the planned December 16th "money bomb" in honour of the Boston Tea Party (with stops in-between). On one side of the blimp will be written "Who is Ron Paul?" and "Google Ron Paul," while the other will sport "Ron Paul R3VO7ution" (that's "revolution" with "EVOL" in inverted letters to spell out "LOVE").

The blimp may not fly. Trevor Lyman, the guy who organized the Nov. 5th fundraising event raising a Republican one-day record 4.3 million dollars from 38,000 donors, has sunk his life's savings into Paul's campaign, and the blimp is still stuck without enough money.

Initially, he posted up a pledge site. Over $400,000 was pledged on that site. Now that the site is up as an actual contribution site, those pledges are not being fulfilled. Today is the last day before the blimp gets punctured, and they are still short roughly 30,000 from the initial $200,000 needed to get the blimp off the ground by the 10th of December.

The blimp is already getting some media attention. If it were to fly, it might generate a heap more.

(Do I think it will fly? Oh, I do, I do. I've learned not to doubt the Paulites. Or Paulinistas, Paulbots, Paulunteers, or whatever else you'd like to call them.)

Here's a video:

Napolitano - this Wednesday

2007-12-07T01:22:00.000-05:00

This Wednesday, we interview none other than Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News senior judicial analyst and author of "Nation of Sheep." Napolitano's new book promises to be explosive, and richly libertarian. Check it out yourselves.

Listen live this Wednesday by clicking here (takes you straight to the 88.1 FM stream) from 6 to 8 p.m. EST. Call in, email, and ask Napolitano your own questions. You can also check out our podcasts by visiting our website here.

Yesterday was repeal day

2007-12-06T03:24:00.001-05:00

Maybe I'm a day late here, but you have to check out this video from Bureaucrash. (Happy late repeal day):

Testing testing

2007-12-06T00:21:00.000-05:00

It is possible that our next radio broadcast will have a webcam. Much like this one. Right now it's at my house, and, if you're looking at my blog at around midnight on Wednesday, then you're staring at my mug. And I'm not doing much.

Libertarians on Ron Paul

2007-12-01T20:38:00.001-05:00

Is Ron Paul good for the broader libertarian movement?

He's making waves. His campaign is flush with money. There's talk of a blimp. And a Boston Tea Party might set another record for one-day donations.

But he's not only brought a wide range of diverse people together, he is also the focal point of a widening rift: that between "liberaltarians" and "conservotarians."

The rift is partly a debate about branding and marketing. Just how should libertarian political ideas be bundled, packaged, and advertised? And what is the long-term impact of associating the broader libertarian movement with the nascent Ron Paul Presidential campaign?

To be sure, the word "libertarian" has not appeared nearly as often as it is being bandied about nowadays. This is wholly due to Ron Paul's campaign, since he is often called a libertarian in the media. Some think this is bad for the broader libertarian movement. One reason why this might be is because Paul's views on some issues (like abortion, immigration, gay marriage, and so on) will be associated with libertarianism. His stance on immigration and "national sovereignty" are anathema to the open border libertarians (like me), while his stances on abortion and gay marriage (leave it to the states to decide) are not the positions this libertarian would take (I would say get the state out of marriage, and I'm pro-choice).

(For an interesting post on why Paul's stances might be inconsistent with his avowed "Constitutionalism," and why his stance on the 14th amendment is a position no libertarian should agree with, read my friend Terrence's posts here and here. Please ignore his ridiculously titled blog. He promises me he will change it.)

Broadly speaking, it's the association between culturally conservative positions, rather than culturally liberal ones, that worry some libertarians.

An illustration: The latest spat has broken out over Steve Horwitz' explanation for why he, a "very staunch libertarian... for over 25 years," is not on board with the r3VO7ution.

Why not?

1. Paul's opposition to abortion ("Granted, Paul's argument to give it back to the states is better than a constitutional amendment banning it, but I think that forcing pregnant women to carry to term is akin to slavery, and in the same way I would not tolerate a state that permitted slavery, I am unwilling to tolerate the banning of abortion at the state level.")

2. Paul's opposition to illegal immigration ("Why should employers be prevented from engaging in labor contracts with adults from anywhere in the world? Why are some to be excluded? Don't people from other countries have the "natural right" to emigrate? Do we believe that people should be free to move or not? And why are libertarians, of all people, so concerned about the fictional lines drawn by politicians?")

3. Paul's stance on free trade ("My problem with Paul's position is that it's too focused on the impact of these agreements on the US, ignoring the fact that they do much good for the rest of the world, whatever the effects at home. I think the effects are positive for us too, and I don't fear any "loss of sovereignty" from them. The inward looking aspect of his stance on free trade (and immigration) is a real problem for me.")

In general, it's Paul's failure to be more cosmopolitan and more progressive in spirit, writes Horwitz, that is discomfiting. "Paul's cultural conservatism and several of his positions push in the opposite direction and, in my view, might do long-term damage to libertarianism even if it reaps some short-term benefits in this campaign."

Horwitz is, clearly, a liberaltarian. That word, by the way, is a neologism invented by Cato's Brink Lindsey in a hugely popular article by the same name, are culturally liberal, and politically libertarian. Politically, they support both economic and civil/political liberty. Culturally, they don't merely tolerate, but approve of and sometimes celebrate gay relationships & gay culture, pot smoking & "cannabis culture," and open immigration and emigration policies.

Their constellation of views also tend to include a general tendency to pacifism (including opposition to the War in Iraq), suspiciousness of organized religion, and pro-choice views on abortion.

You might, with Steve Horwitz, call it "cosmopolitanism" if you want, or "progressivism," but I prefer the less loaded "liberaltarian" label. In this camp, along with Horwitz, are the writers of Reason magazine, the policy wonks at the Cato Institute, Penn & Teller, and Drew Carey. (And me. But this isn't about me.)

Horwitz' posting has resulted in a bitter rebuke from the equally staunchly libertarian--but also staunchly pro-Ron Paul--folks at LewRockwell.com. They're eager to sleep in separate tents. And they don't go in for niceties.

"It is that hipper-than-thou sanctimoniousness, I submit," writes "a reader" in a post submitted by Lew Rockwell, "that is the real danger to the libertarian movement, rather than the fact that many of its adherents embrace unreconstructed anti-statis[m] while also remaining stubbornly - and contentedly - bourgeois."

Thomas DiLorenzo doesn't hesitate to get into it either:

"It sickens me that people like Horwitz LIBEL Ron Paul with SLANDEROUS remarks like "states rights is a 'signal' to neo-Confederates." A signal to do what? Bring back slavery? Lynchings? And just who are these "neo-Confederates" who the "cosmopolitan" Horwitz (as he describes himself) doesn't want to associate with? Furthermore, how does he know that when Ron Paul uses states' rights language he is not merely associating himself with such heroic libertarians as Lord Acton and Jefferson himself -- as opposed to diabolically sending "signals" to the KKK?

As Lew says, thank goodness there are only a few crackpot "cosmopolitan libertarians" like this."

I like to call the view espoused by Paul, and mentioned approvingly on LewRockwell.com, "conservotarianism." Conservotarians, a word I just made up for the sake of symmetry, are politically libertarian, but culturally conservative. In general, they frown on gay marriage, disapprove of abortion, tend to shrink from open borders, and believe that religion should be encouraged, fostered, and promoted.

Good examples include the scholars at the Acton Institute, the bloggers and writers at LewRockwell.com, and possibly the majority of libertarians on this blog.

I'm of the opinion that all these people just need to get along when it comes to politics. It's amazing to me that while liberals and conservatives can get together in spite of some very serious disagreements, libertarians will part ways over minor philosophical issues. Like herding cats, people often say.

This was only especially true when it came to Objectivist libertarians (and they *are* political libertarians, I don't care what they say) and non-Objectivist libertarians, but a new divide is beginning to show.

I brought up the topic (poorly and clumsily) on Free Talk Live yesterday. Here's that clip:

Last Wednesday's radio show

2007-12-01T15:34:00.001-05:00

William Cohen, the former Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, is interviewed on the radio show I co-host. We also get into it on the topic of abortion near the end of hour two.

Check the show out, if you'd like. For more, visit our website here.

Ever wonder where mushrooms come from?

2007-11-30T18:42:00.001-05:00

Here's the surprising answer:

A Ron Paul blimp?

2007-11-25T23:16:00.002-05:00

Yes, apparently...

I've often said that the most interesting thing about the Paul campaign for President is the grassroots nature of it. Without central direction from the campaign, various RP supporters are busy advertising for him, and raising some serious money (like 4.3 million on November 5th).

There are two separate big money-raising days planned. The first is "Rudysreadinglist.com" on November 30th. If they again manage to raise a couple million, imagine what the news stories will say! (Rudy's reading list refers to the Paul campaign's giving Giuliani a list of books to read about "blowback" after the first debate).

The second big money-raising day is set for December 16th, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

My predictions? The November 30th day will net between 1.5 and 2 million, while the Dec. 16th fundraiser will yield about 5 million. I'll repeat these predictions when the days roll around.

Overall, I believe the Paul campaign will get about 15 million for the quarter. Which is going to be huge.

The blimp will also be huge. Will they do it? Will this be yet another thing to marvel at from the Ron Paul supporters? I no longer doubt my fellow Paulians, Paulbots, Paultards, or whatever new monicker you want to give them (us...)

PS. Obama's big Los Angeles area organizer has turned his coat. Guess whose colours he's sporting now?

Uhm... should I sell?

2007-11-15T21:41:00.001-05:00

The post below explains what happened with the Liberty Dollars.

I do happen to have one Ron Paul silver dollar. I paid $25 for it. Check out what the price is on eBay for these things.

I want an Ipod Touch. Should I sell?

(Note: The sentimental value of this coin is very high.)

FBI follows the rainbow

2007-11-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

Some of my friends are gold bugs. Money cranks. People who think it is important that governments abandon fiat money and return to some sort of commodity standard (like gold, or silver, or platinum, or whatever).

Ron Paul advocates making alternative, commodity-backed currencies, legal to compete with the gov-says-so-backed currency.

I have to admit, I'm not sure I understand what all the hubbub is about. But that's beside the point. I don't care to argue the pros and cons of commodity-backed currency. What matters is that I've purchased silver and copper coins before, and I like the idea of owning gold. The silver coins I have include Ron Paul silver dollars, and I had an order in at Liberty Dollar for bronze Ron Paul dollars.

Then I received the following email earlier today.

Dear Liberty Dollar Supporters:

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8:00 this morning a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that where just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files, all the computers and froze our bank accounts.

We have no money. We have no products. We have no records to even know what was ordered or what you are owed. We have nothing but the will to push forward and overcome this massive assault on our liberty and our right to have real money as defined by the US Constitution. We should not to be defrauded by the fake government money.

But to make matters worse, all the gold and silver that backs up the paper certificates and digital currency held in the vault at Sunshine Mint has also been confiscated. Even the dies for mint the Gold and Silver Libertys have been taken.

This in spite of the fact that Edmond C. Moy, the Director of the Mint, acknowledged in a letter to a US Senator that the paper certificates did not violate Section 486 and were not illegal. But the FBI and Services took all the paper currency too.

The possibility of such action was the reason the Liberty Dollar was designed so that the vast majority of the money was in specie form and in the people’s hands. Of the $20 million Liberty Dollars, only about a million is in paper or digital form.

I regret that if you are due an order. It may be some time until it will be filled... if ever... it now all depends on our actions.

Everyone who has an unfulfilled order or has digital or paper currency should band together for a class action suit and demand redemption. We cannot allow the government to steal our money! Please don’t let this happen!!! Many of you read the articles quoting the government and Federal Reserve officials that the Liberty Dollar was legal. You did nothing wrong. You are legally entitled to your property. Let us use this terrible act to band together and further our goal – to return America to a value based currency.

Please forward this important Alert... so everyone who possess or use the Liberty Dollar is aware of the situation.

Please click HERE to sign up for the class action lawsuit and get your property back!
If the above link does not work you can access the page by copying the following into your web browser. http://www.libertydollar.org/classaction/index.php

Thanks again for your support at this darkest time as the damn government and their dollar sinks to a new low.

Bernard von NotHaus

I'm guessing this means no RP bronze dollars for me... (Yes, I've signed on to the class action lawsuit against the Feds.)

I have no idea why they would raid Liberty Dollar. I'm just now trying to get in touch with von NotHaus to see if he'll come on my radio show to talk about all of this. I'll let you know if I book him.

learn a tune

2007-11-15T02:40:00.000-05:00

More Can-con for your listening pleasure (I saw these guys live, thanks to Alice, in London, England. I didn't know they were Canadian until they asked the audience if there were any Canadians out there. I was the only one to shout.)

Over 1 Million so far

2007-11-05T10:20:00.001-05:00

Since midnight last night, Ron Paul has received over $1 million in contributions from over 7,500 donors. Why today? Check out this website. Then follow the action here. Join in. Just how high will Rn Paul go?

Political Animals tonight

2007-10-31T15:40:00.000-05:00

You can listen to a radio show I co-host tonight.

6 - 8 p.m. at www.WBGUFM.com

Participate by calling in at 888-7-WBGUFM, or by emailing politicalanimals - at - WBGUFM -dot- com.

Tonight's guest is none other than Marc Emery.

(Join our facebook group here.)

Ron Paul on Tonight show

2007-10-31T02:51:00.000-05:00

And you wonder why I think he is amazing:

Money quote (1:34 to go in the video). (Answering Leno's question about why he's running, and if he thinks his chances are good, Paul ends his answer like this)

"The message is powerful. I have my shortcomings, but the message has no shortcomings. The message of liberty is what America is all about.

"And the more people hear about this, and the more they understand the financial trouble we're in, the trouble the dollar is in, and the failure of our foreign policy; all of a sudden this has gotten so popular. Way beyond what I had ever conceived.

So I would say yes, there is a risk that I could win."

And right there. There, I thought to myself. It is so rare to feel pride in supporting a good, decent politician with the right message. Yeah, you read that right: pride. In a politician.

What's the risk, by the way? As of yesterday, some think it's not so bad. Yesterday, British betting houses changed their odds of a Ron Paul victory from 66 to 1, to 12 to 1. For anyone who knows anything about polling and betting, and how close to the actual election day numbers each get, you'll know that this is significant movement.

Major Maker EP

2007-10-31T01:21:00.000-05:00

"People Carrier", the new kick-ass EP from Major Maker, is available for sale in the Itunes Canada store. If you're quick, you can get "Last Goodbye" for free (since it's the "single of the week").

Check them out. They are responsible for the "Rollercoaster" song from the Maynard's commercial (yes, the song is on this CD).

Enjoy this pic

2007-10-31T00:26:00.001-05:00

At the Dem debate today, you might have seen this:

Ron Paul on Jay Leno

2007-10-30T04:54:00.000-05:00

Tonight. Watch it, enjoy it.

My surgery on Friday went well, thank you. I have a giant cast on my right hand, making typing nearly impossible (inefficient for sure). I shattered my pinky playing dodge ball. Four pins, some morphine, and fistfulls of Vicodin later, I'm recovering and still trying to figure out how to get back to a regular sleeping routine.

Back to Paul: The Leno show is going to get at least 100 bunches of flowers from RP supporters. Someone decided to give some author (Naomi Wolfe?) flowers for mentioning RP positively, and it sort of caught on.

November 5th is going to be a huge fundraising day for Paul. Visit his site, make some popcorn, and see if his servers manage the flood.

If you're curious about his contributions, why not visit a site that breaks down his fundraising in minute detail? I do. Daily.

And if you want to see video of RP, why not visit his YouTube site. Be like thousands and thousands of others. Check out, in particular, his two new TV commercials. I like the second one, and despise the first.

Paul has the most support amongst blacks of any Republican Presidential candidate. And amongst Polish-Canadians studying Philosophy in Ohio.

Man. This whole Ron Paul thing is awesome. Get on the freedom train, kids! It's global, it's hot, and it's all about liberty.

(Psst: This Wednesday, from 6 - 8 p.m. ET, we interview Marc Emery for the radio show I co-host. Listen live at WBGUFM.com.)

Marc Emery at the LSS

2007-10-24T20:43:00.000-05:00

Since Marc Emery was recently on the CBC (check out the video in the post below), I thought it might be a good idea to post the video from Emery's speech given at this year's Liberty Summer Seminar.

The videos are from two different angles, so you might want to watch them both...

From the Bureaucrash folk:

From Paul Synnott (complete)

Prince of Pot

2007-10-24T15:50:00.000-05:00

Here are the YouTube vids of the Prince of Pot special that aired yesterday:

Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton

2007-10-23T02:25:00.000-05:00

Radley Balko, over at Reason, does a great job taking apart Hillary Clinton. Reading his article made me think of last Sunday's Republican debate on Fox. In particular, it brought to mind this question Ron Paul was asked (paraphrasing):

"Hillary Clinton wants to end the War in Iraq. So do you. What makes you different from Hillary Clinton?"

I didn't like Paul's answer. It was a great opportunity for him to:

a) call HC out on the carpet for being part of the reason for the war, never mind that there is no reason to believe that a Hillary-led White House will end the war anytime within her first two terms.

b) distinguish himself from her on domestic issues, where a wider gulf exists between Paul and Clinton, than between any other Repub candidate for President.

With respect to a)

We could take Clinton's word for it, or we could, as Kasparov wisely recommends when it comes to Putin, look at her track record. She voted for the war, Paul didn't. She voted for more funding, Paul didn't. She hasn't apologized for voting for the War. She doesn't commit herself to pulling out any time soon.

We could also look at her track record during Bill's tenure as the President. It wasn't like she opposed her husband's radical and wide-ranging military escapades (yup, the biggest since WWII). In fact, she proudly said that she urged Bill to bomb Kosovo during a phone conversation when tensions there were mounting.

A peace candidate Hillary Clinton is not. A left neo-con, she is. (More grist for the foreign adventurism stems, in reality, from a left-wing ideology mill?)

With respect to b)

Clinton wants a (pre-Chaoulli decision) Canada-style health care system. Ron Paul wants more health care freedom. Clinton supported the Patriot Act, and is unlikely to pull out any of its teeth. Paul voted against the Patriot Act, and introduced American Freedom Agenda legislation just a couple of days ago into Congress that would, amongst other things, disallow torture, and restore habeas corpus (read the three-page PDF doc here. Really. It's awesome). On tax policy, Paul wants to abolish the IRS and eliminate the federal income tax. Clinton? I don't think so. Paul wants to fulfill Ronald Reagan's dream of abolishing the Department of Education. Clinton? Take a wild stab at this.

The only policy they see eye-to-eye on domestically is the stupid border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border idea. They both voted for it. They're both supporting a ReallyDumbIdea(TM)

Ron Paul is about as non-Clinton (or anti-Clinton) as they come. There is no Republican contender for President who more sharply differs, ideologically and with respect to their voting record, than my man Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton. Then again, that same gulf exists between Ron Paul and all the other Republican candidates as well. Is it any wonder I love the guy?

Poland out of the coalition?

2007-10-22T03:57:00.000-05:00

Poland just elected a government in favour of withdrawing from Iraq. Is anyone surprised?

There's an Army recruitment office on the corner of Wooster and Main St. in BG, Ohio. Every time I pass it, I can't help but think of their advertisement.

"An Army of One."

I'm not sure the recruiters are aware of how prescient their slogan is...

Kasparov is amazing

2007-10-22T03:45:00.000-05:00

Here's a man who gets it. Free markets, free minds. In Russia, no less. Now if he can just win, we would all be better off.

Exactly right

2007-10-08T12:19:00.001-05:00

The Boondocks gets it square on the head (click on the image to make it legible):

(H/T Rockwell blog)

A sad good bye

2007-10-07T19:15:00.001-05:00

I just got wind of the news that must be circling all over Canada now: The Western Standard, published out of Calgary, is closing up shop. Permanently.

I can barely believe it. I was, as some of you might know, one of the first batch of interns the magazine accepted way back in the Summer of 2003 or 2004 (I can't quite remember).

Unlike every other magazine in Canada and the U.S., the Western Standard didn't have an internal hierarchy. They didn't play favourites with stories, or with personalities (well, maybe they did play favourites with Mark Steyn, but wouldn't you? Wouldn't anybody?). If you had a great story, they'd publish it. If the story was bound to raise the roof, they'd just go the extra mile to fact check it, to ensure that it was exactly right, and to run with it giving the writer the quiet confidence of knowing that they would stand by your story. The WS really did take responsibility, as a team, for anything that may have been written in their pages (the facts, anyway, if not always the viewpoint).

That's how I managed to get a cover story published as an intern. My piece on Dr. Chaoulli's Supreme Court challenge wasn't a slam-dunk. I mentioned the story to Kevin Libin, the then-ed-in-chief, and suggested that it might be worth a big write-up. I remember he just sort of scowled at me and asked me whether the good doctor had any hope in hell of winning. I said I didn't think so. So Kevin asked me what possible angle the story might have--why was it newsworthy to talk about a Supreme Court case that was going to fail?

Take a step back for a moment with me. I don't remember exactly where I got news of the story from initially. It could have been Mike Cust, who would send me strange story ideas about two or three times a week (having people like Mike send you ideas is just about the best way to make your life easier as a reporter). I may have come across the story myself. Or, quite possibly, someone at the Fraser Institute may have pointed me in that direction. Or, less likely than Cust, but more likely than the Fraser Institute, it might have been my good friend Karen Selick who suggested it as a possible story.

However it came by my e-desk, I had heard of the challenge. I started digging. I checked all of the major newspapers and magazines. Not a word. Not even the mention that such a court case was on the SC docket. Nothing. Pure silence.

I called a couple of lawyers. Most of them told me, one after the other, that Chaoulli had no chance. No hope. That the Court accepted this case just to shut Chaoulli down, and to make it crystal clear that the Canadian government had every right to meddle in health care affairs, and to restrict and regulate according to the democratic decisions of Parliament.

But then I happened upon Dr. Brian Day. He was then the head of the Cambie Surgery Centre, a private hospital in British Columbia, and currently serves as the President of the Canadian Medical Association. He had status as an official intervenor. He insisted that Chaoulli wasn't just going to sway one or two justices, he told me, in no uncertain terms, that Chaoulli was going to win. He told me he would be willing to bet big money on it. He told me that, unless you were in the court room, watching the way the justices undressed and expressed subtly-hidden anger at the arguments of the government lawyers, you would think that Chaoulli had no chance. He was in the court room, however, on more than one occassion. And he told me that his impressions were clear, and forceful: The Court will side with Chaoulli.

My talk with Day happened after I chatted with Libin. I spoke with Libin after chatting with some Fraser Institute people, and a couple of lawyers. None of them were optimistic about Chaoulli's chances, so that's what I told Libin.

Libin asked what the point of my story would be. I told him that, even if Chaoulli loses, this is still a big story. A Supreme Court challenge to Canada's national identity (if the polls were to be trusted). A Supreme Court challenge to the biggest talking-point of Trudeaupian Canada. Damn it! It is still worth writing about!

Libin was unmoved. "Find me someone who thinks he has a chance in hell, and then we can have another chat."

I did better than that. I found Dr. Day, and asked him to give me some other names with credibility who would feel the same way. After all, if Day was so sure Chaoulli was going to win, surely his opinion will be shared by at least a lawyer or four. He suggested a few people, but the only name that really caught my attention was Osgoode Hall's Professor Patrick Moynahan. When I spoke with him, he also insisted that Chaoulli's chances were very good.

I returned to Libin, armed with some credible people who were willing to make an incredible claim: That Chaoulli had more than a chance in hell, that betting odds should be, if not in his favour, then at least good enough to be worth a bet.

What followed was an excruciating process of gathering material, putting it together, double-checking and triple-checking the facts, and filling in holes that Libin insisted I fill. A lot was left out of the story. A lot of good quotes, a lot of interesting information, and a lot of stuff that I really wanted in. But Libin had a nose for a good story. He impressed me every day, even while infuriating me with what I considered to be nit-picky nonsense. In the end, he was right about 90 per cent of it (I still insist that I was write about 10 per cent of the time when we disagreed about something).

Working at The Standard was journalism school. That's what I considered it. That is something to lament the passing of right there--no other place in Canada would take you in, give you a chance, and let you write a cover story if you've got something worth while to present to the readers.

That cover story, by the way, was the biggest story that I had in the magazine. But I still look back at the crazy assortment of stories they let me write--from those bureaucrats who literally count beans in cans of British baked beans, to Emery's offer of free pot and growing materials for farmers financially hit by mad cow disease--and think that they were worthwhile, strange, and worthy of making public. No other newspaper or magazine in the country ran with the kinds of stories The Standard ran with. And that, too, is something to lament the passing of.

I should point one thing out. If you want evidence of the kind of comraderie The Standard evoked, consider this: Even months and years after having been a part of the official masthead, I still talked about The Standard in terms of "we." When on the phone with Libin, or Doll, or Steel, I would still say "we ought to run with this story" or "we should do so-and-so." I still felt like I was a part of the magazine, in spite of not getting a paycheck from them. And that's saying a lot.

Here's to The Standard. I will miss it. Dearly.

She's done it again

2007-09-11T16:00:00.000-05:00

My sister, Agata, does some amazing stuff. Her concepts and ideas in product design are amazingly brilliant and original. I'm not the only one to notice, so my being her brother is hardly a reason to think that I'm biased in this case.

Here's a new concept: A light that you can interact with. Play with it, target a single area of your room or home to light, use an intuitive interface (like touching the wall) to turn it on or off, make it bigger, smaller, multiply the number of discrete areas that are lighted, etc.

Check out the video:

Awesome video

2007-08-29T13:42:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Ron Paul presidential campaign is the decentralized and grassroots nature of it. It is as though Ron Paul has become a kind of lightning rod drawing all the energy of the pro-liberty movement in the U.S. and in other countries.

Ron Paul is far from perfect (in my eyes). His positions on abortion and immigration do not resonate with me. His stance on fiat currency and support for some kind of commodity standard (whether gold or silver or copper or whatever) is something I just don't care that much about. But apart from these issues, Ron Paul is as close to perfect a candidate as there could be.

Every vote for Ron Paul will be interpreted as a vote against the War in Iraq (and nation-building in general), and as a vote for freedom. That is the perfect message. When they count votes for Ron Paul, each vote will count as a pro-liberty vote, and as an anti-war vote. It will not be counted as an anti-immigrant vote, it will not be counted as an anti-abortion vote, it will not be counted as an anti-Federal Reserve vote.

Ron Paul is also the perfect messenger. But you can go find that out on your own. His voting record is, quite likely, the best voting record of any Congresscritter in the history of the Congress (that might sound like hyperbole, but I mean it sincerely. Check his record all on your own and compare). Ever. Since the beginning of Congress.

In addition, there are no skeletons in this man's closet. He is faithful to his wife and family. He is a gentle fellow. He is humble, he is kind, he is sincere, he is passionate.

He said once, "this is a great movement you have started. I am glad to join your movement." Ron Paul is not leading the movement. All he is is a representative of a broader movement for liberty that started before he was in office, and will continue after his political career is over. All people needed was an excuse, something just about every liberty-lover could rally around. He is that excuse.

To see this, consider his appeal on the internet. I laugh every time I read the news on Paul's presidential campaign. They talk about his campaign's ability to mobilize online support, to get meetups going, to get people to make signs for him, and so on. Having been part of the RP r3VO7ution since the beginning, I can tell you that his campaign headquarters hasn't the first clue. They find out about spontaneous grassroots efforts for Paul as fast as I do.

I knew about the Ames Tribune full-page ad funded and organized entirely by Iowans either at the same time as they did, or before (I ordered a copy of the paper, and the full-page ad dons my office door in the Philosophy Department). The "Ron Paul REVOLUTION" (with backward letters for "EVOL"--spelling "LOVE") meme had nothing to do with the campaign. In fact, I'm told they initially wanted to stop that meme, but then caved when they realized just how popular it was. The online polls that Paul dominates, the telephone poll for the FOX debate that Paul nearly won, and similar things have nothing at all to do with his campaign headquarters.

None of this is intended as a criticism of the campaign and the campaign team. In fact, if anything, it is a good thing the campaign is mostly hands-off. They are responding and trying to channel that energy and activity in certain directions, as much as they can. YouTube videos about Ron Paul pop up faster than you can watch. By the time you've watched the ten new videos on YouTube about RP, there are ten new ones to watch. You could spend your entire day trying to catch up with all the YouTube videos, and still not do it.

A few weeks ago, a woman in New Hampshire decided RP wasn't getting enough media coverage. Frustrated, she decided to walk 10 miles from her home to the state capital building. "Maybe this will help him get some attention," she thought. She was right. She made the news, and people talked about her walk. Online, the RP folks were buzzing. So moved were they that they decided to host a "Walk across America" for Ron Paul. In two weeks time, on August 26th, over 100 cities participated. Thousands of people walked 6 to 14 miles with banners, signs, t-shirts, and pamphlets. The campaign was as surprised by this Walk as I was.

There hasn't been an opportunity like this for liberty-lovers in 50 years. There won't be another opportunity like this for another 50 years. That's why I'm aboard the Ron Paul Freedom Train. Get on. Toot toot. Let's roll!

LSS first vids up

2007-08-21T13:16:00.000-05:00

Lindy sings the LSS song after the LSS:

Gerry Nicholls' talk at the Seminar:

Press for the LSS

2007-08-13T14:14:00.000-05:00

Gerry Nicholls, an Associate with the Institute for Liberal Studies, writes about the Liberty Summer Seminar (and the "f" word... that's "freedom," not the other one) in an Edmonton Sun column today.

The Liberty Summer Seminar is less than a week away. You can still register, if you'd like, but you should do it sooner, rather than later. Gerry is scheduled to give a talk, as is M.P. Scott Reid, Marc "Prince of Pot" Emery, Karen Selick, Avril Allen, Ben Perrin, Dr. Jan Narveson (O.C.), Jason Talley, and Dr. Grant Brown. NQ Arbuckle and Lindy will be singing the night away during the concert portion of the Seminar.

The Hill Times, meanwhile, mentions the Seminar as well. No link is available, but Gerry was nice enough to send me the text, so I'm including it here:

Tory MP Reid and Nicholls to speak at Liberty Summer Seminar

Fighting for freedom, guerilla style, will be the topic of discussion at the Institute for Liberal Studies’ annual summer seminar.

Former vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition Gerry Nicholls will give his speech, "Pigs, Power and Politics: Fighting for Freedom Che Guevara-style,” on Saturday, Aug. 18, in Orono, Ont.

Mr. Nichols said conservatives and libertarians need to start using guerrilla warfare tactics to get their message across. “The mainstream media often tilts to the left, making it difficult to get the message out,” Mr. Nicholls told The Hill Times in an email. “Typically conservative organizations lack the funding of their counter-parts on the left, who receive grants or subsidies from governments or union bosses. So in effect, that means we have to be smarter in using our resources. We have to get a bigger bang for our scarce bucks. In other words, you have to be like a guerrilla operation.”

This includes selecting a vulnerable target, hitting it hard and then “vanishing back into the woods, waiting for another target to appear,” Mr. Nicholls said. He outlined that conservatives and libertarians should “forget everything you learned in poli-sci class” because, “in real life, policies and substance in and of themselves won’t get you noticed.”
Instead, these groups should use “a little razzle-dazzle,” he said. In addition, “emotion is important” which means not targeting the intellect, but rather invoking emotions such as fear. “Get a bad guy. Just as Star Wars needed Darth Vader, you need a bad guy to get people riled up against,” he said. At the same time, however, humour works, Mr. Nicholls said, so as not to “come across as mean-spirited.”

Other tips from Mr. Nicholls’ own Guerilla Warfare include being able to “define the debate before others define it,” not being afraid to use the media to get the message out and finally, “Don’t trust politicians.”

Conservative MP Scott Reid, meanwhile, will be discussing “How Ottawa is killing the family farm.”

— Bea Vongdouangchan

RP Speech video

2007-08-11T17:15:00.000-05:00

From the floor of the convention, RP looked invigorated, confident, and passionate. From the CSpan video, you can tell that Paul is exhausted, and the words do not come out as easily as usually. He trips up here and there. His mind was probably on other things. Like his wife, Carol, being in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat... Watch the footage:

Post event RP chat

2007-08-11T14:49:00.000-05:00

Jeff Frazee, the student guy for Ron Paul, is trying to have a chat with Ron Paul. He can't do it. Ron Paul is on the phone with Carol, his wife. She was hospitalized earlier today. It looks like she's fine and okay now, but had some heart problems.

Ron Paul had to miss most of the early morning adventures in Iowa to be with his wife in the hospital. When it turned out that it wasn't serious, he rushed back to the Coliseum to give his speech. Immediately afterwards, he gave this talk, then rushed to a phone to call his wife. That's what he's doing now. Chatting with her on the telephone, so no post-speech interview with Ron Paul for the JustIn.tv video feed.

If you watch the video, I love what he says at the end. "I am so glad that I can be a part of your revolution." This guy is super-awesome.

First vid

2007-08-11T14:35:00.001-05:00

Take a look for yourselves:

Blog Updates

2007-08-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

Ha ha ha. Check this out (Huckabee is blathering):

Huckabee is up next--lots of shots of him playing the guitar (or bass), playing in his band, dancing, etc.

"Give America back to the people on mainstreet." (Paul people are still chanting in the halls!)

No one has had a group like Paul's in terms of numbers and enthusiasm.

Overheard on National Review's The Corner:

The inner idealistic late1980s/90s conservative in me can't help but be rallied: Ron Paul wants to know what happened to all those plans to abolish the Department of ed and a whole of Cabinet agencies. And the IRS! Me too!! Go Ron Paul!!

Hell yeah! Are American conservatives beginning to warm to the only real small government candidate?...

More from The Corner:

The Ron Paul "Peace Train" nearly drowned me out!!! They emerged this afternoon from the corn fields, pumped up and ready to wage "peace" in Iraq and throughout the world. Overheard in the woman's bathroom backstage: "One of Paul's top Iowa staffers was out early this morning putting the final touches on 5-acre wide crop circle— formed in the shape of a peace sign with "Dr. Ron for Prez!" in red, white, and blue spraypaint underneath!" (At the time of this posting, I cannot confirm or dispute this.) I can barely hear myself think in here with Paul's throngs screaming in the background...the net-rootsers are going nuts, folks! I love it.

What? A crop circle? Really? I want to see this! Earlier, the RP supporters were converting the "Peace Train" tag into "Freedom train."

The chant now is: (one guy saying): Freedom... (Crowd:) Ron Paul. (Guy) Constitution (Crowd) Ron Paul (Guy) Freedom (Crowd) Ron Paul (Guy) Liberty (Crowd) Ron Paul." And repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

UPDATE: Quote from RSE:

Ron Paul's finished--"the peace train is leaving the building" according to Laura Ingraham. They think it's funny, and they don't take him--or his supporters seriously.
Believable, but disappointing.

(They're still chanting through the halls--"Ron Paul..Ron Paul")

It *is* disappointing. The moderator shouldn't be busy saying things like this. But whatever. That's how it goes.

NY Sun:

Ron Paul comes in after a very boisterous march-in by his supporters, chanting, "Paul for real change." K. Lo. has this right: Ron Paul has the LOUDEST supporters.

RP Speech

2007-08-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

RedStateEclectic live blog on RP here.

Justin live TV feed still running. Check out some behind-the-scenes stuff.

The speech:

Intro: He's given birth to over 4,000 babies.

Crowd goes bananas! The screaming is unbelievable. He has PACKED the Ames straw poll coliseum.

"Ron Paul, Ron Paul..."

(Roughly:)

RP: Thank you for that very healthy, encouraging welcome.

Our campaign is all about freedom, prosperity, and peace!

(Thunderous crowd response)

...we cannot have freedom without life. We have to protect all life if we want freedom... that includes the unborn as well... (cheering. I say "Boo" out loud).

More on abortion.

I am an advocate, a strong advocate of following, very strictly, the rule of law and the Constitution."

Huge cheers

The constitutions was written very precisely: to constrain the power of government, and to protect the liberty of each and every one of us."

Oh NO! The live feed is interrupted.

Okay, back on.

"A lot more respect for the second amendment" (that's guns)

"We need more self-responsibility and self-reliance."

Bringing up 9/11. I can't type fast enough.

"If we look at every problem we have today, the answers can be found in the Constitution and the rule of law." Something about strictly following the Constitution.

"...The most important choices we have are about the education of our children..." Something supportive of school choice. Cheers, plenty of them. I now can't hear Ron Paul above the clamour.

"We are overtaxed, and overregulated, by bureaucrats, the Founders would be ashamed..." God, people, SETTLE DOWN! I can't hear RP. Deafening roars.

"...the neo-conservatives who ... and they do not respect our national borders as they should." Stuff about amnesty and about opposing illegal immigration... I say "boo," but the crowd says "yay!"

Again, cut off. (Too much traffic? Bandwidth problems?) Okay, back on:

"We can finance the welfare and warfare state by overtaxing, and by printing money which is destroying our monetary system."

Stuff about the Federal Reserve.

I overhear someone yelling to Ron: "You're doing great, Ron! Keep it up! You're doing great!"

Ron Paul's got passion today, boy I'll tell you. He is giving a barn-burner of a speech.

"...the country is going bankrupt... We can't run the war, we can't run the war, without borrowing 2.something trillion dollars. And we get that money from the Chinese."

"We have to ask ourselves, do we believe in the Constitution?..."

"...it will not be easy. Because change is hard, and change is difficult. But let me tell you what will not be difficult... just get the government to do what it is supposed to do, and what it is not supposed to do is be the police man of the world. We are now spending almost a trillion dollars a year on foreign --stuff-- we have our bridges falling down. It astounds me that we are spending money to build and fix bridges in Iraq, when we should be fixing bridges here."

"Restoration to the ideals of the Founding Fathers... We have been the freest country in the world..."

"We have to systematically decentralize the government and increase freedom..."

"We do not need more money in Washington, we need a lot less money in Washington. We need a lot less taxes, and a lot more freedom."

"Since 9/11 we have come to believe that we cannot be safe without the government..." Something else here. Don't know what. Couldn't hear above the screams.

"So the goal of this campaign is very simple, and very very clear."

"I do NOT want to run your lives, or interfere with your religious beliefs. I do not want to run your economy, I do not want to run foreign wars. I do not know how, and I'm not interested.

Join this great campaign for freedom and liberty."

ROAR!

Ron Paul is off the stage. The chants of "Ron Paul" continue. "Who do we want?" "Ron Paul!"

The camera is on the supporters, shuffling away from the "mosh pit" area. There are hundreds of them...

The song is "right here, right now" (you know the one).

Ron Paul in Ames (Live)

2007-08-11T13:51:00.001-05:00

Live video feed: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/snippets/3/justintv-video/

Check it now. Ron Paul on in 10 minutes (it's 2:51 p.m.)

NY Sun: Welcome to Ames, Ron Paul country

RedStateEclectic is blogging the event.

Lew Rockwell Blog is buzzing!

Libertarians and Objectivists

2007-08-11T00:27:00.000-05:00

Here is the letter that I referred to in my post below. I've gotten permission from Paul McKeever, who runs the Freedom Party, to make this available on my blog. I'm putting it here in it's entirety, uncut.

I'm also embedding an interesting video by Paul McKeever on the David Kelley/Leonard Peikoff split in Objectivist circles. For those not in the know, David Kelley is affiliated with the Atlas Society (formerly The Objectivist Center), and Leonard Peikoff heads up the Ayn Rand Institute (and was declared Ayn Rand's intellectual heir by Ayn Rand... you make whatever you want out of that sort of declaration). I intend to respond to both, but it might have to wait until after the Seminar.

You can also refer to an earlier post of mine on what you need to believe to be a libertarian. It might have some relevance here as well.

Hi Peter:

I will not be in attendance. For the record, my reasons are as follows (and you can quote me on this if you would like to do so):

1. As an advocate of committing to reality and to rationality, I think it is a vice to use drugs to escape reality, but I do not think it a vice to use drugs per se. As Canada's marijuana laws apply to consenting adults, I regard those laws to violate a person's life, liberty and property, and I condemn them as wrong. I openly advocate repealing said laws, and I regard Marc Emery's arrest as being a vicious act, and an act for which the governments of Canada and the USA deserve moral condemnation. I oppose, in no uncertain terms, the extradition of Marc or any other Canadian to the USA in respect of marijuana cultivation, purchase, sale or use (whether medical, recreational, or other). In these senses, Marc and his colleagues have my unmitigated support.

2. I openly support the ultimate goal of eliminating government intervention in the economy: I am a capitalist, and my party is unapologetically pro-capitalist. Freedom Party takes the view that just as today's level of collectivism was decades in the making, the feasibility of restoring individual freedom and a capitalist social system necessarily will take some time. Accordingly, Freedom Party proposes not revolutionary, overnight change of all collectivist policies and laws, but changes - at as fast a rate as is feasible - to policies that could actually be implemented at this point in time. As an example, we are in favour of eliminating the Ontario government's health insurance monopoly, and - simultaneously - eliminating Ontario's income tax. The reverse - imposing the monopoly and the tax - both happened in 1969. What is feasible one way is feasible in reverse.

3. Unlike the libertarian movement, Freedom Party rejects anarchism. We believe and fully promote a government the role of which is solely to defend life, liberty and property, and to remedy violations to same.

4. We reject the libertarian idea that the non-initiation of coercive physical force is axiomatic: we regard the non-initiation of coercive physical force as a principle that is the logical consequence of a commitment to reality and reason.

5. We reject the idea tolerated by libertarianism, and promoted by many libertarians, that individual freedom and capitalism are founded upon the whim of a supernatural being, upon the greater good, or upon the consensus of the governed.

6. We do not agree with the libertarian idea that life, liberty and property can be defended effectively by a government that has no particular commitment to reality, to reason, and to the idea that every individual's highest purpose is his own happiness. Ensuring freedom and capitalism are a government's legitimate ends, but commitments to reality and reason are its means. Those ends do not justify those means. Rather, those means lead to just ends. Freedom Party takes the view that if, and only if, government takes care of its own commitment to reality and reason when making decisions about governance, then justice, individual freedom and capitalism will be inescapable logical consequences.

7. Freedom Party rejects libertarianism's attempt to promote one or more conceptions of "liberty" as a political value that need not be justified on any particular metaphysics, epistemology or ethics. We will not put the cart - liberty - before the horses: reality, reason, and rational selfishness. If one advocates freedom on grounds of obedience to an alleged supernatural entity's alleged commandment, or on grounds of deference to popular consensus; or if one implicitly or explicitly treats such grounds as legitimate - the effect, if any, of the effort to promote freedom on such grounds can be nothing but tyranny. Individual freedom cannot be achieved by giving sanction to ideas that are dismissive, even scornful, of the facts of reality or of rational, independent thought.

8. Similarly, for an advocate of reality and reason to attend an event known to be a libertarian one - one which brings together people who share a commitment to a political principle, but which includes expressly accepts the notion that liberty can be grounded upon obedience to the whims of a supernatural being, or upon deference to popular will, the advocate of reality and reason necessarily implies that liberty does not depend upon a commitment to reality and reason; he effectively gives irrationality a pass, and an unwarranted reputation as a rationale for individual freedom. Yet, all the while, the enemy of the freedom he seeks is the very irrationality that he implicitly sanctions by his participation.

As an advocate of freedom, and as the leader of Freedom Party, I choose to withhold that sanction, because I think that justice demands it of me.

I trust you will understand my reasons, even if you disagree with them.

Sincerely,

Paul McKeever
Leader, Freedom Party of Ontario

LSS and non-libertarians

2007-08-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

The Liberty Summer Seminar is coming up very soon. I always try to send out personal invitations to people who I think would enjoy the Seminar, and who might have a lot to gain from attending (both in terms of fun, and in the lively discussions that beer and politics tend to engender).

Many of my messages are to non-libertarians. While the Seminar features speakers who are either freedom-lovers, or will speak on topics where they happen to agree with a pro-liberty position, it has always benefited from the attendance of people who would call themselves "libertarian" only on those days that happen to coincide with wintry spells in hell. In fact, it has been sort of my mission to get more non-libertarians out each year than the year prior.

The reason? The Seminar is supposed to be intellectually stimulating! It is not supposed to be an echo-chamber. It is supposed to present the ideas of liberty to give people the context for a continuing debate.

"Hey y'all," says the speaker, "personal and/or economic liberty rocks, and here's why..."

To which the audience either says, "Hell yeah!" or "Hmmm, interesting... I'll have to think about it" or "Hell no!"

Then, Saturday night, when everyone is feeling groovy after another kick-ass concert and some Liberty Ale, people start chatting it up with the speakers, and with other attendees.

Conversations often begin like this, "You know... what you said up there was pretty neat. I had no idea that what was once considered waste is, through market mechanisms, converted into a resource." (think Pierre Desrochers, whose talk last year was phenomenal).

Even more often, they begin like this, "Not so fast Dr. Know-It-All, you haven't considered this fact that I will now explain, which will demonstrate the ludicracy (is that a word? Apparently not, let's try again)... ludicrousness... of your position." (Usually followed by a counter-refutation of the supposed, but mistaken, original refutation--since, well, libertarians are right about *everything*, ha!)

And then there are these beginners, "Tell me more about so-and-so and such-and-such." Or, "What say you about this-and-that?"

So I'm always surprised when some people resist attending because, they tell me, they're not libertarians. Well and... so what? I've attended more conferences and seminars hosted by non-libertarians, presenting positions fiercely critical of the market or of personal liberty than I can count on my fingers and toes. And I've enjoyed every single one of them. Every single one.

Here's why: Even if I come away thinking the same thing I did coming in, I've at least come to understand, or come closer to understanding, why people don't think like I do. Mostly, I've adjusted my positions after being persuaded here and there (admittedly, the changes are never giant ideological changes... they are usually changes in the reasons I have for supporting this or that. The most ground-breaking change was my abandonment of the natural rights tradition of libertarianism. Perhaps some will think this a failing in me. And maybe it is. But I have tried to keep an open mind). At any rate, at no point did I regret my attendance.

It is very much like reading a book. You don't demonstrate that you support, say, anarcho-syndicalism by reading Noam Chomsky. You demonstrate intellectual curiosity. Seminars like the LSS are very much like that. All they demonstrate is an interest, a curiosity, in discussing pro-liberty positions on a wide range of issues. You also demonstrate, by attending the LSS, an interest in having a good time with some kick-ass people, or an interest in some awesome Canadian, independent music ('cause, uhm, we have a concert).

So here's a shout-out to all the non-libertarians: Come out, come out, wherever you are!

No one will think you're a libertarian merely for being in attendance. And everyone will think, "man, this Seminar is so f*cking hot! Why didn't I come out before? Stupid, stupid."

What prompted this post? You'll see in a day or two, assuming I get permission to post a message I received from a friend of mine... so hold on to your hats, and come back later.

Major awesome ads

2007-08-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

Seen any of these ads? Does the singer sound familiar? Do you think that singer might be coming to the Liberty Summer Seminar? Hmmmm.... Here's a hint.

What fun!

2007-08-07T12:56:00.000-05:00

zolton leaves the following comment:

"wow thats the lamest thing I have ever seen, Especially the picture of the roid rager in the 2001 pictures. LoL
Camp capitalism are you kidding me?
What a joke, like honestly how much of a throwback do you have to be to legitimize and ancient system that could not adapt to new realities?
What is the goal of current society? To kill ourselves and conscientious human life.
Here's a tip, competition is the philosophical base of capitalism,competition to the Nth degree turns into ruthlessness.
If you abuse the enviroment and individuals (for it is profitable to do so) Then you at the top of the business world.
To be a proper libertarian you would have to be aware of being aware and your not.
Filters like geography and media hide the reality behind our actions, no doubt if the people were informed about how much blood was behind their chemical happiness things would change. But for capitalism to work you have to pull the wool over the eyes of the average consumer.
Bought the newest and coolest material items and still not happy?"

And I say: Lulz to you!

And here I was all complacent in my capitalism. BLAMO, zolton, you have wisened me up. Stating all those facts just like that. Breaking it down for me. Making the wool come off my eyes.

Here I was thinking all "Boy! How can I help screw the poor and the environment and buy more crap?" And zolton's all like, "Dude, you have to be aware! And you're not aware! I iz in ur koment secsion learnin' you lessons." To which my only response could be, "Oh, ROFLMAO. I iz stoopid. Why I never see that before? Especially the way geography--geography!--hides the reality of things."

Just to be clear, when you say "geography" hides the reality behind our actions, do you mean mountains or valleys or lakes? Sometimes, when I am underwater, I can't really tell whether my finger is bent or straight. So when I move my finger around, the reality of my action (a non-broken finger moving around) is "concealed" by the way the water makes my finger appear. And when I'm busy performing one action on this side of the mountain, I can't see the reality of it on the other side of the mountain. The mountain conceals the truth. Is this what you mean? Because that's, like, deep and profound and provides me with great clarity.

Blow-by-blow:

"wow thats the lamest thing I have ever seen, Especially the picture of the roid rager in the 2001 pictures. LoL"

I'm sorry you feel that way. If you attend, you might think differently. But then again, you might not. Since Sean is a friend of mine, I can attest to having good reason to believe he's never taken steroids. But the geography and media might be clouding my judgment, whereas you can see over the mountains and/or through them. So you tell me.

"Camp capitalism are you kidding me?
What a joke, like honestly how much of a throwback do you have to be to legitimize and ancient system that could not adapt to new realities?"

What "new" realities? What alternative do you prefer? What is the new paradigm for an economic system? Teach me! Teach me!

"What is the goal of current society? To kill ourselves and conscientious human life."

Uhm, what? I'm not sure what it means for society to have a goal. I can understand you saying that society is headed in some direction, but I can't imagine that society has some master plan with a direction. And even if it did have some master plan, what kind of a throwback do you have to be to think it's "to kill ourselves and conscientious human life?"

I'm not sure what your take on evolution is--maybe you think that's part of the media snowjob--but I take it that procreation and furtherance of our own life is part of what our genes compel us to pursue. At least individually. Maybe you are making some clever prisoners dilemma kind of argument. Each of us trying to live, procreate, and further our own genes leads to the destruction of all of us. Somehow.

I don't know what you mean by "conscientious human life." To be conscientious is to be thoughtful. But human life can't be conscientious, only person's can be conscientious, or thoughtful. I think you meant to say "conscious human life." But that, too, is strange. Why specify "conscious"? Will society leave "unconscious" persons alone? This just doesn't make any sense.

"Here's a tip, competition is the philosophical base of capitalism,competition to the Nth degree turns into ruthlessness."

Oh thanks for the philosophy lesson! But, just for my sake, since I'm obviously confused about concepts, help me understand this.

You see, I was under the impression that the philosophical base (or philosophical justification) for capitalism was either a) we have good reason to avoid violence, including the violence of coercing people into acting one way rather than the way they would prefer, and therefore ought to choose a voluntary system of consensual trade (capitalism); or b) we ought to prefer that economic system that leads to the greatest benefit for the greatest number of persons, and a free market leads to this (reasonable people can reasonably disagree about this), and so should pick capitalism for this reason; or some other option.

I guess I just don't see how competition can be a "philosophical base." I mean, it could be an essential part of the free market, or it could be a fact about capitalism as it is, or it might be something else, but a philosophical base?

Supposing you meant something different. Supposing you meant that competition is what makes capitalism tick (an essential part of the market, or what happens under free market conditions given reasonable assumptions about human nature), I still don't see how we go from competition to competition to the Nth degree. Is your claim that a free and open market leads to greater and greater levels of competition until we get ruthlessness? That's far from obvious. In fact, it looks like it's empirically false. Countries with the freest markets also happen to have the highest levels of social capital and charitable giving and, if you approve of the work of Ruut Veenhoeven, the highest levels of self-reported life satisfaction (or "happiness").

It may be true that competition epitomizes the market, or is an essential mechanism that, to put it bluntly, makes capitalism work at making just about everyone wealthier and better off (where "wealthier" and "better off" are *not* to be confused as the same thing), but there is no link between competition in capitalism and ruthlessness in general. You and I might compete with a particular product (we might produce mobile phones and compete with one another) and so be ruthless towards each other, but I might have deep and strong non-competitive bonds and relationships with other people (including people who help in the production of my product). Just because you and I compete, and might ruthlessly compete, doesn't mean that producing telephones is all that we do. Human beings are social creatures, zolton, and happiness comes not from what we have or what we own, but the relationships we have.

"If you abuse the enviroment and individuals (for it is profitable to do so) Then you at the top of the business world."

The "for it is profitable to do so" is contingent on no one else caring about these things. Obviously, that is false. Companies that do these things are not always at "the top of the business world." Many, like Whole Foods (run by a libertarian), or Greenpeace, or whatever else, succeed precisely as a market response to what people care about. But anyways, this is just one of those lefty bugaboos that aren't worth the time to refute.

And then you finish with a magisterial series of sentences:

"To be a proper libertarian you would have to be aware of being aware and your not.
Filters like geography and media hide the reality behind our actions, no doubt if the people were informed about how much blood was behind their chemical happiness things would change. But for capitalism to work you have to pull the wool over the eyes of the average consumer.
Bought the newest and coolest material items and still not happy?"

Since when is "being aware of being aware" (good God) a definitional requirement of "proper" libertarianism? Why would self-awareness of our awareness be a requirement? Besides this, what leads you to think that I, if the "you" is supposed to refer to me, am not "aware of being aware"? Or, if the "you" is supposed to refer to libertarians in general, is the claim you are making some sort of clever argument about the incoherence of libertarianism in general? Like this: To be a "proper" libertarian requires awareness of being aware, which would lead one to abandon capitalism (a conceptual requirement of libertarianism), and so would lead one to abandon libertarianism...

"Geography"? Senseless nonsense. "Chemical happiness"? So now we're all on drugs? I just don't get it. And what blood is being shed for this? For capitalism to work, you needn't pull the wool over anyone's eyes.

Seriously for a moment, zolton, your criticism of capitalism is incoherent babble. There are great critiques of capitalism out there, but yours is not one of them. I recommend, most sincerely, courses in philosophy at college. Many of them.

Incarcerex

2007-07-04T01:45:00.000-05:00

Awesome

2007-06-07T16:55:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul's vanishing trick

2007-06-06T12:37:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas and candidate for the Republican Party's presidential primary, is my favourite politician. When I think of all the politicians that I've followed, only one has not let me down.

In 2002, when I was at Cato, I tried to visit his office. I missed him by about a week. About two months ago, when I went to visit my buddy Talley in D.C., I also tried to visit Paul. Again, I barely missed him (this time by a day). His staff told me that he loves to meet with people, and told me his schedule for the next week just in case I was going to be around. But I wasn't.

This isn't the Ron Paul vanishing trick I was alluding to, mind you. The vanishing trick is this: Take a website, any website you want. Do you see a Ron Paul related poll, or a place where readers are asked to comment on the performance of the GOP presidential wannabes? Yes? Okay, now wait thirty minutes to an hour.

See Ron Paul absolutely crush everyone else on that poll? See Ron Paul supporters hammering the comment section with post after post about how kick ass Ron Paul is? You do? (Of course you do). Everything is as it always is thus far. Now wait another 30 minutes or so and...

"POOF," the site's down. The polling is closed, and you can't see the results. The comments have been turned off, and the page no longer links to where it once did.

Actually, it's usually the website's of //cue frightening music// the neo-con //pause// that vanish. GOPstrawpolls, for instance, shut down their GOP poll for a week or two after Ron Paul was slaughtering their favourite pro-war, pro-nuclear option candidates (that's basically everyone except Ron Paul. The crucial questions are "how much torture is enough torture?" and "how many nukes?" and "will you put bombs inside of the nuclear weapons before you drop them on --insert new big/bad evil dragon country here--" I digress).

Until yesterday. Yesterday, CNN hosted the debate. And after the debate, they asked an open question on their blog about who won. Here were the first few comments:

Ron Paul

Posted By Neil, Lexington Ky : June 5, 2007 9:13 pm

Ron Paul

Posted By Joe, San Francisco, CA : June 5, 2007 9:14 pm

Only one candidate stood out strongly: Doctor Ron Paul! Ron Paul, Dr. Ron Paul!

Posted By Dave, Naples, NY : June 5, 2007 9:15 pm

Ron Paul won. Without a question. It’s so ridiculous to see that these guys keep pumping the same neo-conservative line about them “hating our freedoms” when CIA reports have historically said otherwise.

Posted By Elias Ambler : June 5, 2007 9:16 pm

Ron Paul won the debate. He is the only candidate that seems to be honest and not out of touch. He is also anti-amnesty and believes that Americans have the right to privacy and believes in property rights (anti-eminent domain: none of the other candidates have even touched it). Before this debate I was unsure about who to support (Democrat or Republican) and with this debate I’m totally with Ron Paul.

Posted By Jerel Poor, St Louis Missouri : June 5, 2007 9:18 pm

Ron Paul

Posted By Justin Kansas City, MO : June 5, 2007 9:18 pm

Ron Paul

Posted By Brian, Lapeer, MI : June 5, 2007 9:18 pm

And it continued the same way through about 140 comments before this site was... shut down. Initially, it pointed readers to the "who won the Democratic debate?" blog question. Then it showed a "Nothing here" page.

Luckily, one enterprising young interpreneur (I just made that up) captured the page here.

And it isn't like CNN can shut down all the polls. It would look too obvious if they had closed down this section of debate results. Guess who won that poll?

It's these little mini-victories that make me happy. Because Ron Paul Rocks.

UPDATE: Andrew Banks posted this on Digg. So go there and digg it if you like it.

UPDATE (June 7): CNN explains their vanishing comments section today like so: "The comments section is intended to be informal, of course, but the strain on resources that night prompted us to take down the “Who won the GOP debate” question (though that didn’t stop Paul supporters from commenting; they started adding comments to the “Who won the Democratic debate?” post). The intention was not to censor Ron Paul supporters — right now, you’ll find hundreds of Paul posts on the site."

Okay, cool. Good for you, CNN.

Liberty Seminar pics on Flickr!

2007-05-21T19:57:00.001-05:00

Liberty Summer Seminar Sets:

2006 Liberty Summer Seminar

2005 LSS

2004 LSS

2003 LSS

2002 LSS

2001 LSS

Windsor Liberty Seminar Sets:

2007 Windsor Liberty Seminar

2006 WLS

Good commercial

2007-05-15T12:01:00.000-05:00

(Psssst: I know who sings this song... But I can't say...)

A response to Shruggy's abuse of libertarians

2007-05-07T11:10:00.000-05:00

Some dude posted this: On liberals, libertines, and libertarians. My friend, Stephanie Carvin, pointed it out to me.

It's difficult to read nonsense. It's especially difficult to read nonsense interspersed with ad hominem's and other character-driven assumptions. It's as though accepting a particular political belief is a gateway and great way to understanding someone's character. It isn't that. It depends on why you hold the political belief that you do, not on the fact that you hold some particular belief. At any rate, this post is worth at least something of a response.

"What's a 'libertarian'?"
That's pretty easy. Someone who believes in small (sometimes no) government, and in individual freedom.

"I know plenty of liberals, and more than a few libertines, but not anyone who would describe themselves as a 'libertarian', nor indeed anyone who appears to have the accompanying Nozick-esque ideology even if they didn't describe themselves thus."
Hello, I'm a libertarian. But I don't hold to a Nozick-esque ideology or philosophy. And I also know plenty of liberals (both thoughtful and thoughtless), and a few libertines as well.

You could retort that this is because I have a narrow circle of friends, which might be fair enough.
Yes, it looks like you do have a narrow circle of friends. Or you're not having political conversations with your friends. There are plenty of libertarians out there. Something like 10 to 20 per cent in English-speaking countries, if you trust polling data.

On the other hand, one of the reasons I haven't come across any libertarians in my community may well be - if what they write is anything to go by - that libertarians don't seem to live in communities of any kind.
Oh, tut tut, nonsense. Libertarianism is a view about politics. It tells you what politicians and bureaucrats should or shouldn't do. It tells you nothing about what you should do. And it tells you nothing about the role of communities in social life.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, I was giving serious thought to writing my dissertation on communitarian libertarianism. Why's that? There's two reasons, actually. The first stems from my work on the economics of happiness. I wrote my Master's thesis on this topic. It turns out that, not to anyone's surprise, community life is just about the most important thing for your personal happiness. Engaging with others, having a wide circle of friends (and a few very close friends), participating in the community, and joining charitable and social organizations, is the best key to happiness we know about. Sex is good too. What we need to know is what set of policies are most conducive to community of the right sort? (We also need to know what set of policies are going to lead to the best outcomes for the poor, the indigent, and so on).

If you think that the government running a bunch of community projects will help, you are sadly misinformed. Take a good long look at the social capital literature. Putnam's fine (Bowling Alone, I mean). Then take a good long look at the relationship between government involvement in a particular community effort, and the impact this has on the actual interrelationships between people.

Of course, you might come to a different conclusion than me. Perhaps you will think that what I have to say is a bit simplistic, or that it overlooks some vital set of data and empirical stuff. That's fine. I'll state my hypothesis, which I use as an assumption in framing my political philosophy: When there is a genuine need in a community, and government is awfully small, people tend to get together with like-minded others, and form community groups to help assuage the problem. This was so true of early America, that Alexis De Toqueville's "Democracy in America" can be read as a story of community organizations forming out of need. If we could go back in time and count the number of daily interactions between people in early America, we would probably find that it is much higher than today.

If we could circle the globe and compare those countries where a community need is seen as an automatic reason for a new government program, and those countries where a community need is not seen as an automatic reason for some new government program, I will bet you many dollars or pounds or whatever your preferred currency is, that the latter countries have much more social capital and stronger community bonds than the former. Take me up on this bet. Do it! But careful. It's a suckers bet.

If we care about communities, we should restrict, not promote, government involvement in charities, service clubs, social housing projects, and so on. Of course we need to balance this against the likelihood of people getting what they need. If it turns out to be true that non-gov initiatives will not meet some need sufficiently, then that's a reason for a corporation like the government to get involved. But if we have good reason to believe that the need will be sufficiently met, then we should do what will simultaneously promote the benefits of community. And that's to take a libertarian attitude about these particular projects and programs.

The second is my long-standing frustration with what I think is the most enormous non sequitor in political philosophy. Otherwise bright philosophers make this mistake all the time. Consider: Suppose we have an ethical obligation to ensure that other persons are sufficiently well off. Suppose we are obligated to help the poor, the indigent, the starving, the disaffected. What follows? Think hard. Are you thinking yet? If you think it follows that the government should be in the business of fulfilling these obligations, you've missed a few premises, and have failed the test. You have failed it miserably.

Take this second test: Suppose it is established that human beings need (not want) food and shelter. It is not something we could do without. What follows, my friend? In particular, what follows about the role and function of government? If you answered, "uhm, nothing just yet. I need a few more premises." Then you get an "A" in good reasoning. If you answered "New Government Program!" Then you are an imbecile. Maybe imbecile is too strong. It probably is.

But don't worry. You're in excellent company. Just about everyone thinks that this follows. But it doesn't. It's a non sequitor. I called it an enormous non sequitor. I called it this not because it is terribly obvious that it doesn't follow (although, when you think about it, it is terribly obvious), but because so many people are busy making this giant mistake.

When we talk about "our" ethical obligations, we can mean this in one of at least two ways. The first is to read "our" as a distributive, not collective, thing. Suppose we have five people. Me, you, Sally, Betty, and Sam. We can say that it is "our" responsibility to feed the hungry. Reading this as a distributive thing, this means that it is each of our responsibility to feed "the hungry" (not necessarily all of them, and the extent to which this is our responsibility is left unanalyzed for the sake of argument). I have this responsibility, so do you, so does Sally, Betty, and Sam. The second way of reading this is as a collective thing. Thus, Sally feeding the hungry satisfies our collective obligation to feed the hungry. "We" have fed the hungry when Sally has fed the hungry.

This is an important confusion. It is important because, supposing something like feeding the hungry is each of our responsibility, we are liable to feel satisfied that we have fulfilled our responsibility when somebody else has. We are liable to move from the distributive to the collective, and ignore the fact that we haven't fulfilled our responsibility at all. Fighting for a new government program is a way to shirk, not uphold, our ethical obligations. It's a way to avoid having to deal with the actual beneficiaries of the program. You can go to marbled and fancy government buildings, rather than to the corners of run-down neighbourhoods. You won't be on the hook for distributing the food, the money, the shelter. You can go home and feel satisfied that you're paying your taxes and, therefore, doing your part. But you're not. You're not, you're not, you're not. You are shirking what you take to be an ethical responsibility and obligation. Go out and help, don't call your representative.

I don't really feel like getting into this much deeper. But it is hard to think of an institution that does more damage to community of the right sort than Parliament (or Congress, or whatever your official congregation of public speech-making is called). Let's get back to the dialectic:

"...I suppose the blogosphere is a community of sorts and it's absolutely hoaching with them and I was wondering: how would I recognise one if I saw them in real life? I'm really not sure but if a regular trawl of the Land of Blog is anything to go by, I can guess at a sociological profile: libertarians, as far as one can tell, tend to be male rather than female; more likely to be without dependent children than with; more likely to have studied economics than history (are there any "libertarian historians"? Because history is full of bad news about the human condition); private or grammar educated rather than comp; relatively wealthy rather than relatively poor."
Ho-hum, what a bugaboo. Apart from the fringes, you can't tell them apart from ordinary folk. That's because libertarians are as ordinary as liberals and conservatives and libertines. You can focus on the fringe, if you'd like, and insist that we're all survivalists and readers of Ayn Rand. Or you can be charitable and not focus on the fringe. Because there are just as many crazy liberals (Rosie O'Donnell look-alikes with their concerted efforts to out-scream the opposition) and crazy conservatives (with their bibles and their fanatic aversion to accessories that do not include a cross), in roughly the same proportion.

More male than female? I'd be somewhat (but not very) surprised if this were true. Think Ayn Rand, Carla Howell, Judith Jarvis Thomson, the first female vice presidential candidate to receive an electoral college vote, Isabel Paterson, Wendy McElroy, the iFeminists, Harriet Taylor (John Stuart Mill's wife, who, I contend, was the reason for "On Liberty" and "On the Subjection of Women," while "Utilitarianism" was more the work of Mill. This would explain the gap between the libertarian strain in the former two, and the possibly non-libertarian Utilitarianism), and so on. But I haven't yet seen the stats. And I'd like the stats.

Without dependent children? I see no reason to believe this. And my circle of friends includes many libertarian parents.

Economics over history? That sounds right. I agree. But hardly for the reasons you propose. History, just like reality, has a libertarian bias, I'm afraid. To say that it is full of bad stories is usually to be pointing to shitty governments, my friend. And if people are shitty, why would you want to give them all the guns and power? Seems crazy to me.

Private vs. public ("comp") education: I doubt it. Private schools are full of future politicians and high-ranking civil servants and lawyers and accountants. All of those groups have reason to be in favour of more, rather than less, gov. Oh, I went to gov-run schools all my life. Elementary, secondary, undergrad, first master's, second master's, and now PhD. All of them funded by the state.

Poor vs. wealthy. There are many wealthy libertarians. But the proportion is rather small compared to liberals and conservatives. If libertarians were wealthier, you'd see more libertarian stuff. But you don't. The think tank world is an outlier. The world world is full of rich folk who got rich from special licenses and favours from gov. Go over the Forbes 500. There might be, what, two or three libertarians? (Charles G. Koch, for instance, and the Koch family). But that is well below the rest of the American population. You should see between 50 and 60 libertarians on the list (if the proportion sticks). But you don't. Libertarians are mostly lower- to middle-class types.

"All of this may be a) inaccurate"
(not all of it, but most of it),
"b) unfair,"
(yup, it is that),
"but I'm afraid without any corporeal contact of my own to counter this, at present my mental image of the average keyboard libertarian is of someone - the gorgeous Chris Dillow excepted - who is essentially a Tory who has extended the Thatcherite logic of free-markets beyond the shop-keeper and is up for an occasional line of coke and some free love, if only they could find themselves someone to have it with."
Hmmm.... Thanks for sharing your image of the libertarian. Perhaps this is a marketing failure on our part. Where's the libertarian PR department? We need more make up.

As well as a) and b) this all might be c) irrelevant since were talking about differences in ideology here - the truth or otherwise of which is not dependent on the sociological profile of those who espouse it. So is a libertarian really just a liberal, only more so; merely a step further along a scale which takes as its starting point the idea that the sphere in which individuals should be able to make decisions without state interference should be as large as possible? Is it really just a difference in tone - or is there something more substantial?
Oh, good. Recognizing c) is a good sign of a coming argument.
Many paths lead to libertarian conclusions. You might think the following:
1. Individuals should be as free as possible, and therefore libertarianism is the right view about politics.
2. Politicians are just like the rest of us, and it's best if we didn't have all those guns and power, and therefore libertarianism is the right view about politics (only as a second-best outcome given the facts).
3. History demonstrates that government programs fail, or make things worse, or things would have been better without the state, in general, than with it, and so conclude that libertarianism is roughly the right view about politics ("roughly" because there will be exceptions, and again this is a second-best conclusion, given the facts).
4. We should strive for the best outcomes for most people in as much of a distributive fashion as possible, and a free market and liberty tends to that, so libertarianism is the right view about politics.
And so on.
1. is only the most prominent path. But it is hardly the only one.

I'm not sure but I've a couple of thoughts. Karl Popper wrote that "the paradox of liberty is that it has to be limited in order to be enjoyed". Implicit in this - in Popper's whole thesis, I think - is a liberalism that accepts the need for the state as given. One, moreover, that extends beyond the narrow Nozickian property-rights preserving state. Liberals like this - like me - think that history shows Hobbes had something more than resembling a point when he talked about man in a "state of nature" - it's just that he failed to extend the logic of a need for restraint on government, as well as the governed.
I like that you cite Popper. The great comedic element in this is that Popper is more of a libertarian than a liberal. That's how I'd class him. But I'm not as narrow in my definition of "libertarian." I like to think of "libertarian" like we tend to think of "liberal" or "conservative." You needn't be Christian to be a conservative, and you needn't believe in gun control to be a liberal (think of Vermont. One of the least restrictive states when it comes to guns, and one of the most liberal). At any rate, Popper was enormously influenced by Hayek on his political views. One of his books includes a dedication to Hayek (The Poverty of Historicism). Both the poverty of historicism (where Popper argued that history cannot fit with the Marxist model, nor with any kind of historical determinism, because of the fundamental indeterminacy of future knowledge, and of innovation), and the Open Society and It's Enemies are best read as works conducive to libertarianism. It could be liberal too, but the choice of emphasis is revealing. Fighting the "collectivism" of Plato (I should point out that Popper's interpretation of Plato is terrible) and his ilk, and the "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" impulses of Marx, Hegel, and, again, Plato, are all themes the libertarians like to pounce on.

And then there's Hobbes. One of the greatest libertarians of our time, Jan Narveson, is Hobbesian through-and-through. Take a peek at his work. I must give you a nod for recognizing that the state needs governance too. Quis custodiet ipsos es custodes, after all.

"Libertarians don't come from this starting point, I don't think. Rather, they give the impression - to me, anyway - of people who have surrendered the anarchist position very grudgingly and whose default position with regards to the state is that the validity of its very existence is something that requires continual justification."
Well, uhm, yeah. Duh. So here we have a bunch of guys who can tell the rest of us what to do, and they've got guns, and they can lock us up. What do you think? Do you think they need "constant justification" or should we just give them carte blanche? You needn't be a deep thinker to give the edge to the libertarians on this one...

"Further, the broad church of liberalism has historically allowed for the possibility - indeed the certitude - that there are occasions where we can achieve more collectively than we could as individuals. Libertarians, in contrast, are at their most generous when they treat this idea with extreme scepticism."
Uh, oh. Go scroll back up. I think you have failed a crucial test. Tell me, we can grow more food collectively, than individually. True, right? So what follows? If you say "nothing," you get a cookie! If you say "we need a government agriculture program," you get held up a year. Agriculture is run collectively, although not by the government. Every business on the planet is run collectively, but not always by the government. To make a pencil, so many people need to work in concert. That's the parable of the bees, my friend. Libertarians are at their most ludicrous if they deny this. And there are those that deny this. Screw em. Focus your argument on the ones that get this right, on the best of them.

"This can be seen, I think, in their approach to education - as can be witnessed in this frankly appalling piece about the lessons that can be drawn about compulsory education from the recent university massacre in Virginia. There's something absolutist about all this. It is impossible for the libertarian to concede that the problem may have arisen due to lack of compulsion - i.e. the failure of the American republic to compel its citizens to disarm - so instead the narrative becomes one of the problems of compulsion, in this case with regards to schooling."
Yes, that may have been the problem. I don't think so, but I don't blame anyone for thinking this.

"School for these is somewhere where you are oppressed, denied your individuality, and indoctrinated. These things, of course, can and do happen in our school system. But their analysis is for me so heart-breakingly monist. Apparently missing for them (maybe not, perhaps they've just forgotten) is the experience of a place where you might have been bored most of the time, you might have resented your teachers and the uniform they made you wear - but it was still a place where you learned stuff, waded through tedious lessons in order to get the qualifications to do what you really wanted to do, had a laugh, made friends you've kept until this day - the sort of people you got drunk with for the first time, maybe took some drugs, maybe even met a future partner - or if not perhaps someone you lost your virginity to?"
Oh, yeah, you bet. But can't school be all of these things, and fun? It can be, it can. Let me say something crazy: Maybe schools shouldn't be a place where civil servants file kids into desks, give them bureaucratic nonsense work, and so on. Maybe schools should be varied, diverse, catering to what the kids want, and, here comes the craziest thing I will say in my response; cater to the parents, rather than the administrators. Community schools do this, gov-run institutions generally don't (there are exceptions, and good for those exceptions). (Hey, did you see what I did there? "Community" schools! Where parents and teachers and students get together. Where they work together. Where they are face-to-face and have real, genuine interaction. That's a community. And that's the vast, overwhelming, teetering on the brink of total and absolute, case in non-gov schools than in gov schools. The stats will bear this out. They will, they will. The stats do bear this out. They do, they do.)

If you want community, start saving money now so you can send your kid to a community school. Because those schools beat gov-run institutions into the ground when it comes to community.

"The kind of experiences, in other words, that are the stuff of communities - the sort of communities that the average libertarian gives the impression of having never lived in. All this may well be either inaccurately or unjustifiably personal, for all I know - but what prompted these thoughts was this: Chris Dillow, in this post, made a reference to an "area where libertarianism meets Marxism." He was talking about education but I went off in a tangent. I'm not sure the area where Marxism meets libertarianism is a particularly large one, or a particularly comfortable one. Marx wrote that it is man's social being that forms his consciousness. It's obviously not what he was talking about but I was wondering: would libertarians who favour, for example, privatizing the health service have a slightly different take - a different consciousness, you could say - if they'd had the experience of someone they loved being saved from disease, disfigurement or death because of the existence of this 'Stalinist' NHS? Perhaps they've had such an experience and confirm that they would not - but I doubt it."
If you want community, consider libertarianism. Don't take up the "individualist" attitude or credo that many libertarians take up (I don't).
I suspect that you are running into a terrible sample bias. Instead of taking a look at those people who have faced the NHS only, or those kids who went to gov-run schools only, ask those who had experience with both the gov stuff and the community-provided stuff. (Ha! I did it again. And it fits, damnit, it fits.)

Of course, if you're comparing some health care system with none, or some school with none, or some government with the state of nature, then you'll find that just about anything is better than nothing. But how about comparing the real-world alternatives, and not merely the all-or-nothing hobgoblin you put up as proof positive. I'll bet you dollars to Tim Horton's doughnuts (donuts, if you prefer) that people who have been witness to both prefer the stuff the community doles out to the stuff your local Ministry of Health, Education, and Control provides.

Hugs and kisses and liberty, my man. And say "no" to the non sequitor.

testing testing

2007-05-02T18:35:00.000-05:00

Just testing (don't try to click)

2007-05-02T13:56:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: Check out the links on the right. Now you can click those and register for the Seminar, or make a contribution to our cause. Awesomeness.

Gracious thanks to Mike Kerrigan for the spiffy buttons, and to Jason Talley for the graphic that you see on the PayPal page. I you two.

These buttons will soon appear on the ILS site.

(Okay, Paul, you can click through now, and send us money. That chipin website looks amazing. We'll have to use that...)

What do you have to believe to be a libertarian?

2007-04-23T15:01:00.000-05:00

As I write this, I'm listening and sort of watching, Paul McKeever talk about the difference between libertarianism and Objectivism (the philosophy of Ayn Rand). Paul explains why libertarians are wrong about a lot of things. In particular, libertarians don't hold the right metaphysical, epistemological and ethical views. More specifically, libertarians "don't have a single philosophy" and are too broad. They try, according to McKeever, to be a "big tent" and capture whoever believes in liberty. Hippies, radish-worshippers, druggies, and so on. Just so long as someone claims that they like liberty, that's enough, according to McKeever. But a "true" defence of liberty requires "the right" ethics, "the right" epistemology, and "the right" metaphysical views. In fact, these views logically precede our political philosophy.

Libertarianism is, in short, too narrow in forgetting to focus on foundational philosophical issues and, because of this, get things exactly backwards.This criticism is akin to many others. I find it disconcerting that the main group of people making this criticism are Objectivists. Ayn Rand, in one of her more moody moments, railed against libertarians for stealing her ideas, for being overly broad, for being disintegrated (a giant sin), and so on. She was particularly steamed at the Libertarian Party because, uhm, at the time, the Republicans REALLY needed to win, in her mind, to keep George McGovern from the presidency. Ho hum, diddly do. And a profound "Yawn."

I did some searching around, and came across this same debate on facebook.

A few things. First, it's ironic that Rand should be railing against anyone for stealing ideas. While she was original, you can find all sorts of precursors to her views in John Locke, in Frederic Bastiat, and in a whole host of other sources that she didn't bother to cite. One of the main criticisms of Rand, in fact, is her lack of footnoting and citing earlier sources that said just about the same things she said. But leaving that aside, here's my rejoinder to the Objectivist criticism of libertarianism, in a nut shell.

Libertarianism is broad and "lacks" foundations not because libertarians don't hold foundational views that would exclude many others, but because the word "libertarian" applies to the conclusion of an argument, and not the argument itself. For the sake of an argument, you can define your terms in special ways for special purposes. But when you are using the ordinary notion of "libertarian" you are referring to people who share the belief that government should be massively restrained (for whatever reason--including consequentialist and deontological reasons). More particularly, government's proper functions include (but are not limited to) national (self)defence, law courts, and police. Some libertarians, like Miltion Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, think the state should provide some social safety net. Other libertarians, like Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner, think we should have no government at all.

The Objectivist critique of libertarians is the same, in all essentials, to, say, a Catholic claiming that "Christians" are all confused because they don't all have the same metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical commitments. But of course they don't. "Christian," like libertarian, is a broader concept that captures a group of people who might have more particular beliefs about ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on, including Catholics. This is why Objectivists, regardless of what they say, are libertarians.

I find it strange that libertarians should be saddled with this nonsense, whereas other political philosophies get a friendly pass. Consider. To be a conservative, you needn't follow Leo Strauss, or think Ronald Reagan was awesome, or that Christianity is the way to go. Roughly, all you need is to believe in low taxes, the family, and a smaller government. You don't have ultra-specific conservative views that claim to be the only true views about conservatism. To be sure, you have many people who argue that this or that path is the best path to conservatism, that this or that philosophy is the best way to ground and justify conservatism, but you don't have anything like the distaste the Objectivists have for the libertarians.

The same is true of liberalism. You needn't be a Rawlsian, or think Bill Clinton was the bomb, to be a liberal. You can believe all sorts of different things. So long as you think that we should be neutral on the good life, provide some amount of resources to allow each to live a life that each judges best, and place some emphasis on equality of outcome, you're a liberal. Some will call themselves Rawlsian liberals to make plain what they think is the right way to ground and justify liberalism. Others can call themselves other sorts of liberals. And that's fine.

I call myself a libertarian. I'm a strange sort of libertarian, however. I don't believe in natural rights as metaphysical facts. As far as I'm concerned, they're just legal entities with no status apart from the law. I don't agree with Rand on just about anything (although there is much that I agree with, and, for full disclosure's sake, I passed through Rand to get to where I am now). I take a dim view of deontological ethics in general, and any a priori approach to, uhm, anything.

Instead, I take a more-or-less Rawlsian approach to political philosophy. Take our intuitions about ethics, mix them up with some considered judgments, throw in historical data about how certain institutions operate, and see if you can't get "reflective equilibrium" between all of these views. For that reason, I call myself a Hayekian libertarian. Hayek, for those of you who don't know, thought that Rawls was just about exactly right in terms of method, and just about exactly wrong about the conclusions that he reached. The empirical date, said Hayek, just doesn't support a bloated role for the government. That is, even if it really is our responsibility to take care of our neighbour, we shouldn't look to government as the institution that realizes that responsibility. It will do a poor job of it.

LSS & Macleans 50

2007-04-18T10:49:00.000-05:00

Nearly 10 per cent of the Macleans 50 is made up of Liberty Summer Seminar speaker alums!

The Macleans 50 are, "A diverse field of Canada’s most well known and respected personalities from journalists to politicians offering their comments on the issues of the day, everyday."

That means that, when you go to Macleans online, you can see their comments on news stories.

Who are they? They are: Tasha Kheiriddin (LSS '05), Danielle Smith (LSS '06), Gerry Nicholls (LSS '05 and '07), and Stephen Taylor (LSS '06 and '07).

Congrats!

LSS Theme Song

2007-04-12T20:48:00.000-05:00

Yes, believe it or not, the Liberty Summer Seminar (happening August 18, 19) has an official theme song. A theme song. You know, like a TV show. Lindy, who rocks, put this song together yesterday, and I did my best to put together a slide show for everyone (can you do better? Help us by putting together a video for the song yourself!)

You can check it out here (YouTube):

Or here (Google Video):

More on Nicholls

2007-04-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

Below this post is my take on the recent firing of Gerry Nicholls. I don't like it, and I've said so. I also don't like the NCC claiming that Gerry "decided" to go his own way and, when pushed by the Toronto Star, said that Gerry and the NCC will go their separate ways. They should have said that they were making Gerry go his own way from the start, not try to paint this as some sort of mutual decision or, worse, a decision by Gerry himself.

But Gerry is refusing to let the NCC's decision slow him down. I watched him on Mike Duffy, and I just now found out that he was on the radio earlier today (too late for me to listen in). Yesterday, meanwhile, Gerry opined in the Toronto Star on what the Liberals should do to move up in the polls. What's that advice? Check it out:

"To regain their status as the "Natural Governing Party," the Liberals must become less like 21st-century liberals and more like 19th-century liberals.
What does that mean?
Well as any historian will tell you, 19th-century liberals stood for free trade, minimal government, and individual freedom.
Somewhere in the 20th century, however, liberalism got mixed up with socialism ultimately resulting in ... well, in Pierre Trudeau.
Also in the 20th century, anyone opposing big government, the encroaching welfare state and high taxes became known as "fiscal conservatives."
And here in Canada, these fiscal conservatives have never really had a political voice."

Yup, that is what they should do. And they should take Gerry's advice, and become a "Liberal" party like, say, the Australian Liberal Party. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, or, more to the point, classically liberal (honest-to-goodness liberal, that is) or libertarian lite.

There is no doubt in my mind that moving in a libertarian direction on fiscal and social matters together would be consistent with what a very significant proportion of Canadians would most want anyways. That means legalizing pot, supporting gay marriage (or removing the government from being involved in the whole marriage business), cutting taxes (a lot), eliminating regulations, and slashing bureaucracy. That's a strong brew. A delicious brew. A great brew, like Maudite. Yum!

But this post isn't about why Gerry is right to advise the Liberal Party the way he does. This is good advice for all political parties (although the Liberals and Conservatives might have the best historic reasons to move in a direction like this). It's about Gerry staying active.

So I have an exciting announcement to make, which I'll make again a month or two from now. The day I heard Gerry was no longer working with the NCC, I thought it would be good to ask Gerry to come to the Liberty Summer Seminar and give a talk to all the kids about liberty (the specific topic will be decided soon). And he agreed.

Gerry has spoken at the LSS before, in 2005 in fact. You can listen to his talk here (MP3), where he discusses the election gag law and the NCC's opposition to it. He calls the LSS an "incredible event" and gives a great talk. It's really worth listening to. It is interesting to hear the sincerity in his voice when he talks about the mission and function of the National Citizens Coalition.

Of course, we will roll out more speakers soon. You can let us know you're coming on our Facebook site, and, soon, we will have registration up on our regular old Institute for Liberal Studies website. (But do sign up via Facebook. It's nice to see all of those faces on there of people who plan on coming out).

(Yes, Gerry will get the Peter M. Jaworski "Medal" of Freedom (TM) at the LSS this year. That's a photo opportunity if ever there was one!)

Nicholls and the vendus

2007-04-05T12:09:00.000-05:00

Word has it that Gerry Nicholls, the man who headed up the NCC after Harper left, has been told to move on by the organization.

This is a terrible shame, and a big mistake the NCC is making.

I've met Gerry on a number of occasions. He spoke at the Liberty Summer Seminar, and hung out with the gang before and afterwards. It was Nicholls who made me finally join the NCC, and it's Nicholls' departure that has me cancelling my membership in the NCC.

He emailed me to let me know he wasn't going to be at the NCC any longer, and he told me it wasn't his decision. He didn't want to leave, but he has to. I asked him why he was made to leave, and whether his criticism of the Harper Tories, which has been pretty fierce, had anything to do with it. He told me he can't say, since lawyers are involved. But the newspapers are speculating that this really is the reason, and I'm inclined to agree.

Gerry is a rare bird. As head of an organization with plenty of partisan Tories as members, it takes a certain amount of gumption and courage to criticize the federal Tories when they abandon what they have stood for. It's surprising and encouraging to see a man in his position stand up for small government when it would be much easier to ignore all of the pork barelling and focus on the three or four items in the budget that sort of, kind of, maybe, if read in the right way, gesture in the direction of small-c conservative or classical liberal ideas.

Taken as a whole, the budget was a disaster. It's ironic that the Tories are pushing ads in Quebec that use the word "vendu." Vendu, I'm told, has a double meaning. That second meaning that the Tories are hinting at in the ads is "sell out." Specifically, vendu is used against francophones who supported staying in Canada, but now sort of means a sell out to the cause in general. The only vendus I see are the federal Tories.

I guess I'm particularly upset with Jim Flaherty. He was Mike Harris' right-hand man. When Harris was doing what should make every conservative proud, it was Flaherty who delivered the message. And when I got drunk with him in Toronto, we had a nice long conversation about the importance of sticking to principle, even when it isn't terribly popular, and to doing what really is best for Canada and Canadians in the long run. I told him that I hoped he was really a libertarian in conservative garb, and he winked and nudged and hinted that he at least had strong leanings in that direction.

Strong leanings? And you deliver this budget? And you deliver it like you're proud of it?

What's that french word again?...

Many people have told me that, although they are small-c conservative, they can't help but find classical liberal or libertarian ideas terribly persuasive. They tell me they have strong leanings, just like Flaherty. Gerry Nicholls told me this a few times. And damned if he doesn't mean it.

Nicholls was one of the most prominent conservative commentators to call a spade a spade, and rip into the federal budget. Andrew Coyne was another. Nicholls said he couldn't tell what political party tabled it. It was something a Liberal would be proud to put forward, or a Dipper. He wondered out loud whether part of the motivation for the budget was to help Charest gain a minority in Quebec. Thank goodness, he said, that the Tories weren't trying to garner a majority for Charest. That would have bankrupted the country, he said.

Thank goodness, I say, that Andrew Coyne isn't heading up some small-c conservative think tank or advocacy organization. The vendus in charge would have been scrambling for small pink paper.

What are these people supposed to be loyal to, exactly? When working at the Western Standard, I had many a long conversation with Ezra and Libin and Steel and the gang. We wondered what would be best for the Standard in terms of a federal government. With the grits in charge, the Standard has a great target, and more grist for the Western Alienation mill. Alienation is good for circulation. But they all said that the point and purpose of the magazine isn't merely to sell print, and efficiently convert softwood lumber into glossy colourful eight-by-ten pages. The point is to make Canada better.

Their's is an environmental agenda, in a sense. Take down some maples and firs for glossy pages in the hopes that it'll keep the feds from taking down their own bigger corner of the forest for wallet-sized vanity pics of Elizabeths, and Lauriers, and MacDonalds, and spindles and spindles of red-tinged tape.

Conserve the forests! Eliminate pages from the regs!

And that's the point. It isn't that Harper is a swell guy and we should all be loyal to the Big Blue Machine. It's what the Machine is supposed to stand for that we should support (if you think it's worth supporting). Forget that, and all you're doing is the equivalent of supporting a team because it's your team. You're treating politics like sports.

Be loyal to your Maple Leafs or Flames or Oilers or Canucks or Habs, even if all the players change, even if they move ice rinks, even if their uniforms change, even if they lose, so long as they stay in the same city. City is to sports teams what policy is to political parties: the salient feature that defines it, that makes it sensible for you to support or not support. Everything else is bows, frills, and public relations.

Some people don't forget that it isn't about personalities or your history with the team. Some people can spot vendus and call them out.

I attended the NCC's Colin M. Brown Medal of Freedom ceremony when Harper was given it a few years back. I found that kind of funny back then. Taking nothing away from Harper, who, up to then, did some great work, but I couldn't help but feel like this was some sort of nonsense.

I'm no Colin M. Brown. I haven't founded any long-running and successful Coalition or Institute or Foundation. And I don't have the stack of money necessary to be giving away a fancy medal that'll spark some media attention and publicity.

But, for whatever it's worth, I do have a Peter M. Jaworski "Medal"* of Freedom to hand out too. And guess who's getting it?

If you guessed "Stephen Harper" you haven't been paying attention. If you guessed "Gerry Nicholls" then you are a clever sort.

Here's to you, Gerry Nicholls. You're the first to receive this "Medal"*. The Medal can be taken away at my whim, I'm afraid. No vendus allowed.

* By "medal" is meant a bottle of Liberty Ale from Anchor Steam Brewery. You can drink the beer, then keep the cap. 'Cause that's the medal part of it.

Help Lindy Win a Contest

2007-04-04T11:06:00.001-05:00

ILS' good friend Lindy Vopnfjord has entered a contest. He's entered his band, MajorMaker, co-fronted by Todor Kobakov, into Yahoo's "Up Yours" music contest. The reward is a stack of money, a contract with Universal Canada, studio time, and other goodies. You can help them win and get more attention (which they richly deserve).

How? Watch their video, rate them, and leave a comment. Then send the link to your friends, and encourage them to vote too. Here's the vid (follow this link if this doesn't work for you):

Lindy played the 2004 and 2006 Liberty Summer Seminar (and has agreed to come and play at this year's Liberty Summer Seminar on the August 18, 19 weekend--check out our facebook group and let us know you're coming!).

Do help. His stuff is awesome.

Institute for Liberal Studies

2007-04-01T23:48:00.000-05:00

Here I am, on YouTube, talking about the Institute for Liberal Studies.

Jim Watkin on Drugs

2007-03-23T23:10:00.001-05:00

Jim Watkin, with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, talks about why the war on drugs needs to end on CKLW AM 800 (you can listen to it here, courtesy of Blue Blogging Soapbox).

He will be speaking at the Windsor Liberty Seminar this Saturday (later today).

Take a listen to the interview, and come out to the Seminar to talk to him in person.

(x-posted to Institute for Liberal Studies)

Coyne is dead-on when it comes to the Budget

2007-03-20T23:50:00.000-05:00

Having read Andrew Coyne's most recent article, I've become convinced. The Canadian Tories are taking a page out of the George W. Bush school of conservatism. To get elected (which is all that matters), make sure to spend more money than any other party, uhm, ever.

In the history of Canadian politics, no federal government has promised to spend as much as this batch. In the history of American politics, no federal government has spent more than Bush II.

The trick is not to change what you spend the money on, or changing this downwards--the trick is all in the focus. Bush (I'm tempted to say "the dumber" but I'll stick with "the second") and Harper both are spending gobs of money on all the things the Democrats and Liberals would like. But they don't really talk about that, except to say, "see? are you finally happy now? We're doing what you want! Of course we're not doing it gladly, I mean, we're conservative. It's just that, you know, it's all real politik over here, and, well, we're doing this to prove a point, you see: you liberals are just never satisfied, are you?"

The issue then becomes whether or not liberals are ever satisfied, and not how many boatloads of dollar bills get sent out the door. Really, though: who cares about what would satisfy liberals? Who cares whether or not spending more or less will make them happy? What matters, if we are to judge the sincerity and motivation of the government, is whether or not it sticks to whatever it is it claims to most care about. Judging by this standard, both the Tories and the GOP are giant failures.

A second change in focus is in what you talk about when it comes to what you have spent. The Republicans and Tories can talk about tax cuts, military missions, soldiers, family, fighting the stupid war on drugs, and police. It doesn't matter if they are spending the same, less, or more than non-conservative governments. It's all in how much you talk about it, not how much you spend on it. Shine a light on these things. The Democrats and Liberals (and NDP) can talk about social assistance, the working poor, unionized labour, and social programs. It makes no difference whether or not their conservative counterparts spent more on each of these things. What matters is in how much they talk about it.

I guess you can tell I'm pretty miffed about the Budget. It's shit.

If both parties get sent out on their ass in the next election, I won't shed a tear. Maybe then we'll get a smaller government.

Windsor Liberty Seminar

2007-03-03T15:12:00.000-05:00

The Windsor Liberty Seminar will be held on Saturday, March 24th this year. I attended last year's Seminar, and thought it was one of the most memorable events of the year. This year's Seminar is shaping up to be equally awesome.

Thus far, speakers include:

The Fraser Institute's Brett Skinner will give a talk entitled "Liberty and Individualism Can Save Canadian Healthcare."

Malkin Dare from the Society for Quality Education will give a talk on school choice.

And Jim Watkin of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who will talk about whether or not the war on drugs is a good policy (it's not).

On top of all of this, Lindy will be giving a concert in Windsor that same night! For those of you that have been to the Liberty Summer Seminar, you'll know that Lindy is amazing. Follow the link and listen to his most recent album (click "Look/Listen"). I mean it: Lindy is incredible.

The WLS is one of two annual seminars hosted by the newly-formed Institute for Liberal Studies. The other is the Liberty Summer Seminar, which I host in Orono, Ontario, and which will probably fall on the first weekend in August (or thereabouts).

Follow this link and click on "register" (scroll down a bit, and, just above the pictures, you'll see "Agenda - Speakers - Register"). I'll be there. You should be there too.

PETA is terrible

2007-03-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has this advertisement in support of vegetarianism. Does anyone else think that a hyper-lefty organization like PETA shouldn't be using beer ad tactics to push their message? Shouldn't they "know" better?

(H/T Ruess)

The Polocracy

2007-02-25T16:13:00.001-05:00

(x-posted at Unideal Observers)

This post should be of interest to anyone who cares very much about democracy. I admit, this isn't exactly me, but I do like fiddling with the rationality of voting, and coming up with schemes that might improve the performance of democratic systems.

I have in mind a particular scheme that I want to run past everyone. The idea is called "the polocracy." It is called that for fairly obvious reasons.

Some background: In the literature, people have come up with different ways to use lotteries for the purpose of elections. For instance, the traditional lottery voting system runs like this. Every adult citizen casts a ballot (just like now). Then we put all those ballots into a lottery, pick one, and that vote determines who will be the political representative. An alternative system, called jury voting, goes like this. We have a policy in mind. We run a lottery to pick 12 or so ordinary citizens. Those citizens make up a "jury." This jury then deliberates on and decides what policy will prevail.

These uses of the lottery focus on policy and on the elected. The polocracy is aimed at choosing the electors. It would work like this. Every adult citizen puts their name into a lottery. That lottery selects a certain number of persons, a number we have decided upon in advance. Those chosen by the lottery become eligible voters, those not chosen cannot vote in this election. This lottery would be run prior to every election, at every level (federal, provincial/state, local/municipal, and so on).

Suppose, for instance, that we decide on 50% for a presidential election. Following some regional formula, we run the lottery until we have 50% of the American population selected to cast a ballot in this election. They get to vote for the president, the others get to stay home with their children, work on their novel, or do something that actually matters (ha ha).

Why would anyone want a system like this, over the current system? I can see three reasons, although there may be many more. The first reason is economic. If we care about how much elections cost to run, reducing the number of voters may be one way to economize on the costs of running an election. While running the lottery would be a novel cost, I doubt very much that it would swamp the savings of having fewer polling clerks, polling booths, verification procedures, and so on. In addition, this proposal would also economize on opportunity costs. When you vote, you pay the price not only in terms of gas and maintenance for your car to get to the polling booth, but also in terms of what else you could have done with your time.

Secondly, we might see benefits which we can loosely describe as "rationality" benefits. It would not make people more rational, but it would improve the rationality of casting a ballot in the first place. When we consider what we should do, many of us think that it matters whether or not our doing something will have any effect on the outcome at all. This is as true in the case of elections, as it is in the case of, say, hiring new faculty. When graduate students have one collective vote, compared to the faculty, graduate students have less of a reason to even bother letting fellow graduate students know who they prefer. Many of them will disenfranchise themselves from the process. If graduate students had more of a say, we could anticipate greater involvement on the part of graduate students. This is what, relatively speaking, we do see on the part of faculty. And the smaller the faculty, the more involved are each of the members, in general. So if we care about the proportion of eligible voters who bother casting a ballot, we should take seriously limiting the number of participants in the process. The polocracy does this.

Thirdly, we might see perfectionist benefits from such a procedure. I can see two reasons for these benefits. The first is related to the rationality benefits above, and the second stems from what I think will be a feeling of "specialness" on the part of those chosen to cast a ballot. People are more likely to become more conscientious consumers of political information when their input is weighty. Consider again the graduate students in the above example. If they had more of a say in a process that is as important as hiring new faculty, we can predict that they will consume information about possible hires much more conscientiously and actively. So, too, with regular voting. Reduce the number of voters, and you improve, even if just a little bit, how much and how often regular folk look into politics. Secondly, I think it is intuitive to assume that, if you received a letter in the mail saying "you get to vote in this election!" when not everyone gets such a letter, you might be moved to consume more political information on account of feeling "special" or "important." This, of course, will depend on the proportion of citizens chosen as voters, but if the number is sufficiently small, we can predict perfectionist benefits stemming from both of the reasons I have mentioned.

The reasons not to have such a system are (inexhaustively) as follows. We might fret about the perceived legitimacy of a system like this. We might think that the system was rigged to pick certain people, or that the vote would have been different had everyone voted. This is reason to ensure the proportion is sufficiently high to avoid such worries, and sufficiently transparent to make only kooks (like me) think that the system is rigged or would have worked out differently had everyone voted.

For those of us who know a thing or two about polling "science," we might be convinced that the above worries are not as good as all that. After all, as the number of voters increases, the benefit, in terms of accuracy, has declining marginal benefits. There is no particular reason, if we care about accuracy of outcome, to have everyone vote, only very many people.

The most significant concern is probably related to equality of political power. While everyone has an equal chance of being chosen as an elector, once the lottery runs, those chosen have greater political power than those not chosen (at least with respect to selecting the representatives). This is probably a deep and significant worry. One reason not to fret so much is because we are already unequal. Some of us don't bother to vote at all, choosing to forego having a say at all. In practice, then, we are unequal. We might object that there is a significant difference between being told that you can't vote, and choosing not to vote.

I agree that there is a difference here. So consider the second fact: In Canada and the United States, certain regional formulas make people politically unequal anyway. For instance, according to the terms of Confederation in Canada, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and the other maritime provinces have a certain number of guaranteed federal representatives. There are, approximately, 100,000 people living in P.E.I. and they get two Members of Parliament (or one, I can't recall). Whereas, in Ontario, something like 200,000 people choose one M.P., the number is half that (or one-quarter that) in P.E.I. The Islander's have more political power (are twice as, or whatever, more politically powerful) in terms of choosing representatives. The same is true in the U.S. Very few of us stay up at night fretting about this inequality. That is reason to think that our concern for political equality is not the most important consideration, that other considerations might trump our desire for political equality.

The question then becomes: Do the potential benefits of a polocracy outweigh the potential burdens? Since I believe the only very serious worry is the worry about equality, we can rephrase this question as: Do the economic, rationality, and perfectionist benefits justify reducing political equality to some degree? I suspect that they do.

Regina Spektor

2007-01-25T14:46:00.000-05:00

If you haven't listened to Regina Spektor's new album, you should. Really.

The videos available on her site are of her better songs on that album. It's haunting, and it's lovely. Especially her voice.

I have her other albums, but I'm not sure I like them as much. This album seems to have more of a pop sensibility, while the other albums are more playful and anti-folk with the unfortunate consequence that the songs seem not to mean much apart from the frivolousness of fleeting emotions.

But she's good. Great.

Caring

2007-01-24T00:34:00.000-05:00

As of late, I've been doing a lot of reading on sentimentalist accounts of ethics. In particular, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments has kept me up at nights. Here, I'm beginning to believe, is the beginnings of the right theory of morality. It is just the beginning, or the root, of the right moral theory.

There are many concerns. Not the least of which is this: Smith's account is intended to be primarily descriptive, and not normative. The theory tells us what Smith thought we do do when we make ethical judgments, and what, in fact, we want when we use ethics. It does not tell us what we ought to do.

I'm guessing that, in the not-too-distant future, I will post about the possibility of making Smith's account normative, and will post some significant differences between the account that I am pursuing for my dissertation, and both classical and neo-sentimentalist accounts. I will also describe the significant overlap, and why my dissertation can best be described as a sentimentalist account.

The title of my dissertation is "Me, Myself & Mine." I will give it a subtitle, which will make plain that my primary interest is not personal identity (or what makes me me), and neither is it political philosophy (as the "Mine" part might imply), but patterns of concern or caring. I want to explore what truly matters when it comes to what we care about, what we have good reason to care about, and, possibly, what we ought to care about. What I'm interested in is the patterns of concern that we have for the person that is me (Me), the self that is me (Myself), and the objects and things in the world that relate to me in particular ways (Mine).

Clearly, a definition or account of "caring" and "concern" are central to my dissertation. I'm beginning to believe that the best description of "caring" or "concern" is primarily, or most significantly, a sentimentalist account. In what follows, I want to begin exploring what it means to "care" about someone else.

A pure sentimentalist account of caring would be this. For P to care about someone (Q) or something (x) just is for P to feel a certain set of in principle specifiable sentiments when P judges that Q or x is either in a good or bad state. When P judges that Q, for instance, is worse off, P experiences negative affects, like grief, sadness, despair, and so on. Likewise, when P judges Q to be better off, P feels associated positive affects, like joy, happiness, and so on.

If we believe that feeling positive affects is part of what it means to be better off, and feeling negative affects is part of what it means to be worse off, then for P to judge that Q is better off is for P to be better off. This is so in the case of friends, lovers, our children, and our family in general (for the most part). When we judge that our children are better off, we feel positive affects and so are ourselves better off.

This means that improvements in Q's life are improvements in P's life, when P cares about Q. This is part of what it means to care about someone else. I suggest that a similar account can be given in the case of objects, but I won't offer it here.

Alternative accounts of caring could lean on desires or judgments. A desire account of caring would look like this. For P to care about Q is for P to desire that Q be in a good state, for Q's life to go better, and so on. A pure account would insist that this is all there is to caring--having these particular desires.

Desires and sentiments are, at least in principle, distinguishable. Consider this. Many times, friends will feel envy and jealousy at an improvement in the other's state of affairs. When Jones gets a good job, Smith, Jones' friend, may feel this way. On a desire account of caring, this would not undermine the status of Smith and Jones as friends, and we could still insist that Smith cares about Jones. We can insist on this quite apart from how Smith feels, so long as we can be certain that Smith does desire things to go better for Jones, and that Jones' getting this good job is consistent with those desires.

I strongly suspect that there can be a third, pure account of caring using judgment, but I have not yet thought of it. I'm working on it (help a brother out... can you think of an alternative account of caring that is principally about judgments and not desires/sentiments?)

If we want to defend the pure sentimentalist account of caring against the desire account, we can respond to the case of jealousy like this. We can say that Smith is not really a friend to Jones if he feels jealousy at her success. Without the appropriate sentiments, we cannot be said to truly care about someone. If Smith feels jealous, that's good reason to think that Smith does not really care about Jones, even if she thinks she does.

I do not think that this is a good strategy to take. It seems fairly clear to me that we can care about someone and yet still feel sentiments that would imply otherwise. In addition, this would be assuming the definition of caring, precisely the thing that is at issue.

An alternative strategy is to insist that jealousy and envy are not sentiments that constitute the subset of sentiments we use to judge caring. Since I do not yet have the first clue what sentiments are rightly affiliated with caring, we can use placeholders. Let the lower-case letters a through z stand for all possible sentiments. Let a through m be "positive" affect sentiments (joy, happy, glad, elation, and so on), and n through z be "negative" affect sentiments (sad, miserable, angry, jealous, and so on). (Yes, of course there are sentiments that cannot be neatly placed under "positive" or "negative" affect. Let's pretend these do not exist for our purposes. Or, if this is too much to ask, just add a third category of "neutral" or whatever affects).

Okay: For P to care about Q is for P to feel either a, c, d, or f, or all of them, or some of them, when P judges that Q is in a good state; and to feel n, o, r, and s, or all of them, or some of them, when P judges that Q is in a bad state. P feeling b, for instance, is not implicated in caring. That is, b is not relevant to determining whether P cares about Q. We might now claim that jealousy is not a caring-relevant sentiment. P feeling jealous tells us nothing about whether or not P cares about Q.

Surely, given the wide panoply of possible human sentiments, not all of them will be relevant for determining caring. This is why, in principle, we can make these distinctions between sentiments that are, and sentiments that are not, caring-relevant.

But suppose that what Smith feels is jealousy and nothing else. Her feelings are not mixed with at least one of the positive affects on our sentimental account that would imply caring. She does not feel jealous and a, c, d, or f. She merely feels jealous.

That having mixed feelings is at least a possibility seems right to me. I suspect we have complicated emotional states, where we can feel both glad and jealous at once, or alternately, or whatever. It is not silly to say "I'm jealous, but I'm happy for you," and to actually feel both emotions. I need to look into the psychological literature to make certain of this, but I don't think it is controversial.

This account may sidestep a number of possible objections. But probably not this one. It is very improbable to suggest that jealousy is not one of the sentiments associated with caring. I take it that this is fairly plain, so I won't go into detail.

A third possibility is to say that, right then, P does not care about Q, even if P cares about Q in general. For me to care about something is not necessarily for me to always and consistently care about it. It is to have, say, a certain disposition towards the object of my care most of the time and in most circumstances. This would imply the following qualifier to our sentimentalist account of caring: For P to care about Q is for P to feel some subset of positive (a, c, d, or f) or negative (n, o, r, or s) affect sentiments when P judges that Q is in a correspondingly good or bad state, most of the time, and in most circumstances.

Isn't it obvious that when people say "I wasn't a friend to you then" that they mean something like "I did not care about you in a way that is consistent with friendship then"? It might not be obvious. This is because, when we say something like "I wasn't a friend to you then," we might mean "I did not act in a way consistent with friendship," rather than, "I did not feel in a way that is consistent with friendship." While this is clearly so, we can make the following claim by way of rejoinder. Actions are not right or wrong all on their own. What makes an action right or wrong is the intention, or the motive behind it. While playing soccer (football for my European buddies), I may accidentally kick you while trying to play the ball (I'm not that good at this sport, and so have plenty of occasions to apologize for stepping on toes, kicking shins, and otherwise causing harm). Clearly, hoofing people in the shins is not a right thing to do. But the explanation "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to kick you, I was going for the ball," is typically accepted as a good nullifier of moral wrongness. We might say that what we mean (our motives) to do trumps what we do do (our actions).

(It is more complicated in the case of negligence, but this complication does not undermine our account. Negligence is being insufficiently "good" at acquiring the right information given the circumstances, when we believe that being sufficiently good at this information-gathering is a requirement of all of us. But then again, I suspect that what is really doing the moral work is the claim that we lacked the motivation to acquire sufficient information. And it is this lack of a motive that we think is a requirement for most of us in those circumstances, is what is being addressed, and not the lack of acquiring the information in the first place).

We might be inclined to distinguish motives and sentiments, and claim that the given response fails to address the worry. If we come to believe that motives and sentiments are necessarily linked, we may believe that to say "I meant to do so-and-so" just is a claim about how we feel, since some combination of feelings will be the right explanation for the motives. That sentiments and motives (or motivation for action) are so linked is argued below.

How we count the times and circumstances in the proffered qualifier will be difficult to determine. How many cases do we need? And in what proportion of those cases must we have the corresponding sentimental states? I hope this difficulty does not lead us to abandon the project, even if, at the moment, it appears a terribly difficult problem.

We might insist that there are some circumstances which are significant enough such that, were we to feel a sentiment inconsistent with caring at those times, it would undermine the claim that we really care about the thing in question. If we accept this, we would add to "most of the time, and in most circumstances" the further qualifier "and always when this or that," where "this or that" stands in for a full description of the circumstances or cases we judge to be significant enough.

One reason not to insist is this: Suppose P is on anti-depressants, or some other drug, that alters moods and sentiments. Or suppose that P has certain portions of his brain cut out, such that it is not possible for him to feel certain sentiments. Now suppose Q is in one of these most significant of circumstances, and P does not feel the appropriate corresponding sentiments. Does this mean that P does not care about Q? Perhaps not. We can chalk it up to the drugs, or the missing brain parts, and not to P's failure to care. P may still care, but merely be incapable of feeling the right sentiments.

This counter-example is not reason to abandon the "significant circumstances" qualifier. It is, instead, a reason to claim that, then, P really did not care about Q. Being incapable of feeling certain care-relevant sentiments at a time, according to the sentimentalist account of caring, is to be incapable of caring at that time. (Interestingly, the sentimental account of caring would suggest that, if P had portions of his brain cut out such that he could not feel care-relevant sentiments, we could no longer claim that P cares about anything.)

This view may be false. We may believe that the truth may be that we still care, even if we do not feel the corresponding care-relevant sentiments now. For instance, we may claim that we always care about our children, say, even if, at some times, and for some reason, we cannot experience the care-relevant sentiments. (It should of course be clear that I do not mean that we care about things only so long as we continuously feel certain care-relevant sentiments, and do not when we are not feeling those. Instead, we care when we feel these sentiments when we are appropriately confronted with the object of our caring.)

In fact, the above account of caring which includes a "most of the time and under most circumstances" qualifier accepts just this possibility. It claims that, to care about someone, is to have care-relevant corresponding sentiments not always, but in at least a sufficient amount of cases. This is to say that our judgment that we care about so-and-so or such-and-such can override temporary or occasional failures to feel certain sentiments.

This is very much like the following. We do not determine whether or not P is intelligent by looking at this test result. We average, aggregate, or use better tests to determine this. We look at P's history. P, just now, may be on anti-depressants or other drugs, and so perform poorly on this test, even if it is not true to say that P is not intelligent. It may be true to say that P is not intelligent now (because he is on drugs), but our global evaluation of P's intelligence will not hinge on this one case. So it appears plausible to say "P is intelligent, but not now (because he is on drugs)."

To be able to say this requires us to capture the truth about P's "normal" state, and to be able to distinguish this from "abnormal" states. To determine P's "actual" intelligence is to know when P is in a "normal" state, and to judge based on his performance when he is in this state. One (defeasible) heuristic is aggregating or averaging. About a month or so ago, I had three shots on goal in soccer (football), and scored all three times. One goal was extraordinary. I (falsely) believed that I was improving, and was beginning to feel somewhat confident. Subsequently, I haven't done much of anything, even though I've only had about one or two chances. Having chances, however, is part of what it takes to be good at soccer. You need to have a good idea of where to go, and what to do, and get in a good position at the right time. I am useless at this. When I am honest with myself, I find that I am extraordinarily talentless when it comes to soccer (although I often try to focus on the good, and convince myself that I am pretty good, even though this is false). When I am being honest with myself about soccer, I always try to think to myself of the fact that what really matters is wallyball, volleyball, whiffleball, and squash (all of which I am very good at), and not soccer, which is, as we all know, for hooligans.

This heuristic is defeasible because it is difficult to believe that we are ever in a "normal" state. It is, I suspect, always an approximation. Even when it is an approximation, judging this will also require an assumption that we know what is "normal" in order to know that this case is an approximation. We can be thoroughly skeptical about this, but I suspect that we do not have good enough reason to be quite so skeptical.

Let us leave the "significant circumstances" qualifier discussion to one side. I do not yet know what to say about it, except that I'm inclined to disagree with having it.

One reason to prefer sentimentalist to desire accounts of caring is because of the apparently more obvious link between sentiments and action. To feel a certain way is to be motivated to do something in particular ways. To feel "disgusted" is to be motivated to make certain facial expressions, and to engage in avoidance behaviour. This is so when we feel fear and joy too, and so on. Our emotional states are "reasons" for action in the sense of always giving us a certain amount of "action-juice" (and not in the sense of "reasons for action" that practical reason theorists use).

Suppose it takes one litre of action-juice to result in actual action. The claim here is that sentiments provide at least some amount of action-juice always, even if it is not enough action-juice to lead all the way to actual action. This contrasts with desires like this. To have a desire is not necessarily to be motivated to do anything at all. Only the combination of desire and sentiment motivates.

I have claimed, above, that desires and sentiments are, at least in principle, separable. Someone may complain that desires and sentiments are, in practice, deeply linked. Certain desires and certain corresponding sentiments are co-extensive. It is not possible to have certain desires without at the same time feeling certain sentiments. This co-extensive correspondence view strikes me as a touch implausible, even though I do believe that, in very, very many cases desires and sentiments come in packages. What is implausible is that this is so in every case, and not merely in the vast majority of cases, or in very many cases, and so on.

I suspect that this is a crazily controversial claim that I have just made. To convince anyone of this view would require plenty of evidence and argument. One very good reason for accepting this account is this. I recollect reading some psychological research about the relation between emotional states and actions. That people who failed to have certain emotional states failed also to behave in certain ways (I think I read something about people who failed to feel fear, and that this was disastrous for them because they also failed to behave in certain ways). Was there not also some research on people who lacked very many emotional states and, while they desired certain things, they never did anything about it? I need to find this research to get anywhere with this. So consider this another plea for help.

Why would the link between motivation and sentiment benefit a sentimentalist account of caring? One reason to think this is because of the common sense notion of caring. A common sense account seems to include something like "to care is to be motivated to do something for the object of the caring." By "do something" is meant doing good things for things we care about. If we were not so motivated, it would be hard to claim that we really care about the thing in question.

I want to suggest that we ought to stick with the common sense account of caring as much as possible. Our ordinary meaning of caring includes being able to say things like, "if you cared about me, you would do so-and-so." A more philosophically technical account would read this as "if you cared about me, you would be motivated to do so-and-so." If desire and sentiment are in principle separable, claims like the previous would only make sense using a sentimentalist conception of caring (provided the claim that desires, on their own, do not motivate action). Even if, in practice, desires and sentiments come in packages, we might wonder which, the desire or the sentiment, is doing the motivational work. The claim is that sentiments are motivational, and desires all on their own are not.

This distinction, and the claim that desires do not motivate, may be nothing more than philosophical fictions. Why wouldn't desires motivate? Many economists, and many of us in general, speak of doing so-and-so because we desired to. We often treat desires as primitive explanations of behaviour, primitive in the sense of requiring no further explanation. On this account, we would be forced to go deeper. To claim that we did it not because "we wanted to," but because "we felt like it." That the two are often used interchangably, as though they mean the same thing, is reason not to accept hard-and-fast distinctions.

Perhaps we shouldn't. To insist that desires do not motivate is to present a radical revision to our ordinary, as well as technical, understandings of the role of desires in action. It seems clear to most of us that explanations of action in terms of desires are not merely ways of speaking, but the truth about why we do certain things. "Feeling" like doing something is a good explanation (if not yet a justification), while "wanting" to do something is also a good explanation (if not yet a justification) of something we have done. Until I take a longer look at the psychological literature, we can go on the assumption that both desires and sentiments are able to motivate action.

A pure sentimentalist account of caring may be false for other reasons. If we can avoid controversial (and revisionist) accounts, we should do so. Consider that, very many of us, and non-philosophers for sure, do not believe that certain animals, that are capable of having analogous sentiments to ours, care about anything. If all that mattered were feeling certain things in response to other things, we could gauge whether the animals do feel a particular way, and conclude, contrary to our beliefs, that they care about this or that.

Even the sentimentalist account, however, is not bereft of cognitive requirements that at least many animals are incapable of. The sentimentalist account requires that we be able to judge that so-and-so or such-and-such is either in a good or bad state. Making this judgment is a cognitive requirement possibly too steep for at least very many animals (I doubt very, very much that dolphins and apes and monkeys are incapable of caring, for instance. But I doubt even more that chickens are capable of caring, even if they may have some limited range of sentiments).

Even if this is not a good reason to enrich our pure sentimentalist account, there are other reasons. The best one, in my mind, is that our ordinary notion of "caring" is deeply rich. It appears to include not merely certain judgments and corresponding sentiments, but also desires. It is terribly natural to say that caring means, amongst other things, wanting (desiring) that things go better for the object of our concern. Including desires in our complete account of caring seems right given the sort of thing "caring" is.

My thought is that "caring" or "concern" incorporates the sentiments in a descriptive sense. When you care about Q, you have the corresponding care-relevant sentimental responses to judgments concerning Q's being in a better or worse state. This is not the whole of the story. Desires are included in the following way. We may desire that things go better for Q, as part of the meaning of caring about Q. We may also desire to have certain sentiments about Q, given that we care (or want to care) about Q. If we feel envy at Q's successes, we may desire that this not be so, that, instead, we feel pride or gladness, or something like that.

My hope is that normativity can enter the account in the following sort of way. We may insist that it is right, fitting, appropriate, or obligatory for P to care about Q when Q stands in particular relations to P. For instance, Q may be the daughter of P, and, in general and with exceptions, we probably think it obligatory for P to care about Q. By this we mean more than merely the claim that P should behave in all the ways that imply care or concern, but that P, instead, actually care, and actually have concern. This may be partly due to our belief that sentiments add motivation (if we do not believe that sentiments are the sole motivators of action), and we ought to be motivated to take certain actions with respect to certain Qs.

I am busy sorting this out. It will take a while. Boy, this is a long post... perhaps I should stop here.

Drowning in spam

2007-01-23T00:57:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, I received over 2,000 spam messages in my yahoo account. Over 2,000!

The spam is complicated. Someone has decided to make pretend email addresses using my peterjaworski.com domain. Emails like dlkjalklsjdfd-at-peterjaworski.com. Of course, there are no such addresses, and I am not sending these emails out about which stocks to pick, and how you can improve your masculinity, and how you can last longer for your significant other. Now I'm not saying I wouldn't send this kind of advice out if I had really good stock tips, or really good products that could help with both of the problems I mention, or really good tips about how to last longer. I'm just saying that I don't have this advice, unfortunately, and so can't help you, and therefore am not responsible for those emails.

Here's what happens. The spam is sent out with the fake name. Very many of the emails are caught for what they are: spam. Spam filters send an automated message back to the made-up email address, which happens to use my domain name after the @ part. My domain is set up in such a way that *any* messages sent to whatever-at-pj.com is then forwarded to my yahoo account.

I guess this is a pretty smart way to double your spamming. You send a message to a recipient, and if their spam filter blocks it and sends an automated response, this pitiful sap gets the message too.

But, damn, I can't begin to tell you how frustrating this is, and how angry this makes me. They have effectively stolen my yahoo account. I can't use it anymore. I've tried to filter the emails, but that doesn't seem to work. Today, for instance, I deleted 500-some-odd messages in the morning, less than 100 in the afternoon, and just ten minutes ago deleted another 700-or-so spam messages.

The problem is that very many people use that address to send me mail. And I'm betting that I will, at least sometimes, miss some of these emails in my attempts to delete the spam messages. So your message might be accidentally deleted by me. I'm also expecting important messages from the American Political Science Association, the American Philosophical Association, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and the Ohio Philosophical Association within the next two months. So I have to keep at this deleting business for a good, long time to come...

Oh, if you're a friend, please change your primary email contact for me to my gmail account.

Ridiculousness

2007-01-23T00:45:00.000-05:00

As if you needed another reason to think Stephen Taylor is awesome, here is a post of his slamming the television censors for stopping two obviously appropriate television commercials. The grounds? Harper must approve the use of his words and image at a, get this, public rally. Yeah, public rally, where there was no assumption of privacy, where the media was invited, where the content of the speech was in the public record, and so on.

Taylor posts both commercials, along with a couple of letters from the biofuels people, the Conservative government (which, to their great credit, appears to be as confused about this decision as the rest of us), and the people who stopped the commercials (who, apparently, either do not know that Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister, and not Premier, of Canada, or have no idea that "Premier" is not the right title to apply to Harper).

A meta-ethical test

2007-01-21T16:20:00.000-05:00

I took a test that purports to help people determine what meta-ethical view is closest to their hearts. I don't know what to make of the results. I had just one or two reservations about the questions, but this is so typical of philosophers as to be not worth mentioning.

Here are my results:

Subjectivism
You scored 10 Objectivism, 57 Naturalism, and 73 Cognitivism!

There are meaningful ethical propositions which can be reduced to talk of other things, but no independent moral facts. You might agree with subjectivists. "Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical belief that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people. An ethical subjectivist might propose, for example, that what it means for something to be morally right is just for it to be approved of. (This can lead to the belief that different things are right according to each idiosyncratic moral outlook.) Another kind of ethical subjectivist might define "good" as "that which I desire".

A good pro-life argument

2007-01-19T03:45:00.000-05:00

I'm pro-choice. I have reasons for this view. But my reasons for this view are not important. What's important is this: Here's a really good argument for being pro-life. It hinges on an account of "natural kinds" within the animal kingdom. I suspect that most of us think there is a very real difference between, say, humans and chickens. A difference that is read off of the nature of the world, and not merely a kind of human construction in place for us to better understand it (the world, that is).

One way to reject the argument is to reject that the differences between humans and chickens is really so "natural." This sounds silly. But will you think it is as silly as all that after you peek at the case of the duck-billed platypus?

We all know that one difference between mammals and fish (and birds) is that mammals have live births (amongst other differences) and fish (and birds) lay eggs. We also know that the difference between live births and laying eggs is super duper important. That this is enough to claim a difference in kind, and a difference that is read off of the way the world is rather than merely how we think it is, or what is useful for us.

Oh, wait, live births is no longer a requirement of being a mammal? Having certain bones in the ear is? Right, right. Bones in the ear is what really, truly matters... Not live births! Forget what I said earlier... The platypus is so obviously a mammal, even if it lays eggs...

It's good to have amazing friends

2007-01-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, one of your buddies really makes you proud of their commitment, dedication, and willingness to do something to make things better. When this happens, you get more than a nice, warm feeling in your gut, you also get a little ambitious about doing something yourself.

And so it is with my man Jason Dudek. Read the news story I'm excerpting, and then consider helping him meet the $15,000 target to help some young people in Sierra Leone. Although I don't know very much about the situation there, I do know Dudek enough to be able to vouch for his awesomeness, and his ability to spot a cause worthy of support. I'll be sending along a contribution, and I hope you do this too.

Here's the organization he's founded: Braveheart Youth Foundation

Here's the news story:

Foundation aims to bring hope to children of Sierra Leone
Mon Jan 8 2007

By Heidi Hagenlocher

Jason Dudek has looked past the poverty and sees hope for children in Sierra Leone.

Dudek, 25, started Braveheart Youth Foundation, a registered Canadian charity, after working in the country in 2005 with the international organization Right to Play.

As part of the Winnipegger's job, he became connected with local projects, including a drop-in centre for street youth called Braveheart Miners and Multi-Purpose Co-operative Society, run by nurse Aminata Conteh.

"She's just such a humble person, I really wanted to help her anyway I could. Out of her own tiny little house she started up this organization to take care of kids on the streets," said Dudek, who is now attending the London School of Economics, working towards a master's degree in development management.

He met Conteh while he was living in Koidu, the capital of the eastern province Kono. The nurse had escaped the country and lived in the U.S. during the war, but she returned afterwards and started the centre in 2003.

"If you were in Koidu during the war, you were either running for your life, a soldier, or dead," Dudek said.

He described the town as the epicentre of the 11-year conflict (1991 to 2002) in Sierra Leone, which borders Guinea and Liberia in western Africa, because of the diamond mines in the area. Tens of thousands of people were killed, more than two million people were displaced, many of the street children Conteh works with became orphans or were separated from their families during this time. A trademark of the rebel forces (Revolutionary United Front) was to use child soldiers and initiate them through killing and mutilating civilians.

"The children need a life and a chance to be children, for their sake but also for the good of their community. They need a shelter and to go to school. They need to survive," Conteh wrote in a funding proposal.

What struck Dudek about Conteh was her desire to help, working out of her 300-square-foot leased house, sometimes having 50 children sleeping in and around it, even though she didn't have much money or support.

She had the opportunity to buy a 3,000 square-foot building, but needed money to renovate it before they could move in. After asking international agencies to help her without success, Dudek decided to start the foundation to raise $15,000 to pay for the renovations.
When he returned to Canada he asked Father Fred Olds, from St. Bernadette Parish, the church he attended in high school, to give him advice about setting it up.

"I think it's an extremely worthwhile project... I'm just giving him moral and spiritual support," said Olds, who is also the treasurer for the foundation.

Dudek started fundraising in September, but he already has close to $7,000. He plans to raise the money within one year and then deliver it to Conteh. Until then, she continues to work with the children out of her small home.

"If we disappear, she's just going to keep doing what she's doing," said Dudek.

"It's the future of development, it's not imposing a structure or an idea, it's working through an existing community organization... give these people the tools, they'll rebuild themselves."

To find out more about Braveheart Youth Foundation, check out www.braveheartyouth.ca.

History lessons for Cherniak

2006-12-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

I don't entirely know how I feel about an elected Senate, but I will say this much. The arguments against Senate reform that I've seen thus far are generally pretty bad arguments.

My friend, Jason Cherniak, for instance, has been on a roll as of late trying to make plain his position on the move to alter the Senate. His most recent post plays on the concept of "responsible government." This concept is historical, and represents early debates within Upper and Lower Canada prior to Confederation about the way governments were to be run. I will charge that Cherniak introduces his very own special meaning of "responsible government," one that bears little to no relation to the actual meaning of "responsible government" in the Canadian context. This will be my second charge against his argument, and we'll get to it after my first charge is made plain: That Cherniak ignores Quebec history (and Alberta history), focusing exclusively on Ontario history, to make his case.

Something that is typically overlooked in Canada are two separate rebellions that sought for independence for Canada from the British Crown. Unlike in the U.S., both rebellions were unsuccessful in accomplishing their primary purpose, although they were successful with respect to some secondary purposes.

In 1837, under Louis Joseph Papineau, Lower Canadians (Quebeckers) rose up against the government. Motivation for the uprising included age-old hatred of British rule in Quebec, made concrete and pressing by the rule of the Chateau Clique. The "Clique" was a governor-appointed group of people who were "advisors" to the governor, but who essentially ruled the day-to-day lives of Quebeckers. This was made worse when the Clique managed to take control (by being appointed) of the Legislative Council, the upper house in Lower Canada. Their mission was to anglicize the French-Canadian population by replacing the Roman Catholic church with Anglican churches, and trying to replace French civil law with a British common law system.

As it stood then, the Governor was appointed (and was always a Brit), as was the Legislative Council , and the Executive Council (the third branch, something like the governor's "cabinet"). This left the elected Legislative Assembly with little to no effective power. All these appointments left Quebeckers furious, especially given the aims of the appointees. It came to a boiling point in 1837, with open rebellion led by Papineau.

It is hard to figure out just what, exactly, steamed them so. I don't think anyone will disagree that appointing the governor is a bad idea. But would Quebeckers have been all right with an appointed Legislative Council, so long as the governor (and maybe executive council) had to be a member of the Legislative Assembly first (and, therefore, elected)?

The Senate reform bill leaves open whether Senators will be elected by the rest of us, or whether it will be decided by the provinces, with them being free to have either elections, or appointments by provincial parliament/legislative assembly, or by the Premier of the province, or by some other way. It would be strange to see that Quebeckers, who are aware of their history, would not opt for at least the second set of options--that of having Quebec senators chosen by Quebeckers, or by their representatives. It is only ignorance of Quebec history that would lead one to promote the status quo with respect to the Senate.

So that's my first charge against Cherniak. It may be true that Upper Canadian (or Ontario) history suggests a federally-appointed Senate would be more consistent with their particular vision for "responsible government," but it is hardly true of Quebec. To ignore the other founding nation is to ignore one reason for a reformed Senate.

Back to history: When Papineau led the charge against British rule in Quebec, the Canadian government chose to send troops from Upper Canada to help quell the Lower Canadian rebellion. This was an opportunity that Willion Lyon Mackenzie was aware he had to seize. As troops left Upper Canada, Mackenzie urged farmers to storm an armoury to take guns and ammunition to begin their own parallel rebellion. The farmers agreed, and Mackenzie managed to sack the storehouse and arm his troops. It was the only success in this particular story, the story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion, or, as it is sometimes referred to (with not just a hint of ridicule) the "bar fight on Yonge Street."

The causes of this conflict were similar to those in Lower Canada. Mackenzie and Papineau were cut of the same cloth. Neither was a fan of British rule, and neither could stomach having their government be run essentially by appointment, with table-scraps reserved for the elected lower house. Upper Canada had its own version of the Chateau Clique, the Family Compact. They, too, ran things, and they, too, were the cause of much anger and resentment.

Alas, neither rebellion succeeded in their primary aim of shaking off the British yoke. Papineau made his way to the U.S. and then to France to plead his case for military support in their uprising, but neither the U.S. President, nor the French crown would have it. Mackenzie, meanwhile, escaped with a handful of troops to Navy Island. They declared it the Republic of Canada on December 13, a republic that lasted for exactly one month, being crushed by British forces on January 13.

But both had moderate successes. Part of their mission included fighting for "responsible government." Here we get to my second charge against Cherniak. Responsible government, in Canada, means that all members of the government are ultimately accountable. They can be held to account by the people, through elections, or by other elected representatives through votes of no confidence, and other measures. Its early specific meaning was that the appointed governor could be made to resign by the elected legislative bodies. This was what Lord Durham, in his report following the Rebellions, suggested as a way to ease tensions. This is what he explicitly meant. But the concept has changed somewhat. Currently, what it means is that every member of government, including appointed members like Senators, can be made to adhere to the will of the people either directly by the people (elections), or by their representatives.

If the Senate has any effective power, as it surely does, then responsible government means that they can be held to account. The Senate, as it currently stands, is a violation of the concept of responsible government. It is not consistent with it, because no Senator can be fired, or be held to account in any way but by public opinion (and this only amounts to being shamed).

Having Senators elected by the people is only one option on the table. I agree with Cherniak that Upper and Lower Canadian history does not suggest this as the best possible way to proceed (although Albertan history begs to differ, a history that Cherniak also fails to even mention). What I believe is the best lesson to take from our history is this. Provinces, through their elected lower house, should make the decision on their own as to the make-up of the federal upper house.

In Ontario, this would mean either that the Premier appoint Ontario Senators (possibly with advice from his cabinet or caucus, or from all the sitting MPPs), or that MPPs, as a whole, come to the decision together. One possibility is that Ontario decides to leave it in the hands of the sitting Prime Minister. In Quebec, I don't think we can decide between either direct elections or appointments by Quebec representatives, but one thing is crystal clear. No one will convince me, nor anyone else, I wager, who has more than a high school understanding of Quebec history, that the Prime Minister should appoint the Senators. Whatever system is preferred, it will not be the current one. Only a repudiation of early Lower Canadian history could lead anyone to this conclusion (which is why Jean Charest's recent comments strike me as totally bizarre. It would be a "radical change" to Canada's system, but radical change is hardly a reason for Quebeckers to think it a bad idea...). It would have to be more recent history, and the fact that a significant number of recent Prime Ministers have come from la belle province, that would lead anyone to prefer the current system. Meanwhile in Alberta, and most obviously, their history points in only one direction: The people of Alberta directly elect their senators.

I can't decide whether this is merely political, or whether some people genuinely believe that Senate reform is a bad idea. Clearly, provincial history is on the side of reform. This, of course, does not mean that we should reform the Senate. Just because our past history points in one direction does not mean that we should follow that path. Times may have changed, and there may be other considerations, considerations about the current state of play, and the possible repercussions of changing a system so entrenched, that need to be taken account of. But an argument from history is an argument for Senate reform, even if that reform is not necessarily a popularly-elected Senate.

Liberaltarians

2006-12-13T13:47:00.000-05:00

About a week ago I mentioned Lind's article about the death of libertarianism. Since then, I have come across many articles that claim just the opposite. That libertarianism is not dead, but is finding a new home... on the left.

I'll explain in a second. I should also point out that Lind's article may have misdiagnosed the problem. It is not that libertarianism is dead, but that the conservatism of Republicans, as it used to be, is dead.

Why are the tales of libertarianism's death exaggerated? One reason to think this is because libertarians have shifted gears. Instead of aiming their arguments at economic liberty, they have begun to target social conservatism, and begun taking social libertarianism more seriously. If this is so, many writers, like Lind, may be confusing libertarians for liberals. When someone writes in defence of ending the war on drugs, they may be libertarians, but Lind may falsely believe that it is a liberal writing. So he's not counting enough libertarians.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that can be described as both left and right, as both liberal and conservative, in different respects. It is left and liberal on social issues (drugs, sex, and rock and roll); it is right and conservative on economic issues (anti-tax, and pro-free market ). It is for small government and liberty through-and-through. Conservatives are in favour of small government with respect to economics ("mind your own business"--where "business" means economic enterprise), but in favour of big government when it comes to social issues and the military. Social democrats (as they are called in Europe) and liberals (as they are, alas, alas, called in Anglo-America--but not in Australia! In Australia, "liberals" are still pro-liberty on both social and economic issues. Would that the rest of us were as wise about words as Australians... but I digress...) are in favour of small government with respect to social issues ("mind your own business"--where "business" means affairs), but in favour of big government when it comes to economic issues.

Libertarians are in favour of people minding their own business in both of the above senses of "business." Mind your own affairs, and mind your own economic enterprises. Just in case this is interpreted as thorough-going interpersonal isolationism, the libertarian claim is that what shouldn't mind my or your business is the government. You and I can take an interest in one another's businesses. We can try to persuade others that they should do one thing, rather than another. The claim is importantly restricted to the activities of governments, and not of churches, persons, charities, other institutions and so on. Libertarians can be busybodies. They can run around telling other people how they should run their lives, and how they should run their businesses. Libertarians just take very seriously the prohibition on doing so by making use of the government.

Sometimes they believe this because they believe that people shouldn't be coerced or forced to do things against their will. Some libertarians believe in what they call the "axiom of non-aggression," or something like a total prohibition on initiating force (Murray Rothbard comes to mind). I do not agree with these libertarians. In principle, I see nothing particularly wrong with forcing people to do what is right. By "in principle" I mean something like this. Suppose we had an oracle that could tell us everything, and knew everything. If we had such an oracle, there would be nothing wrong with coercing people to do what the oracle says. The problem is that we don't have this oracle. So we may be opposed to paternalism, coercion, and the use of force for practical reasons. We may believe that, for instance, giving someone the power to coerce us when we all agree that it is the right thing to do will not keep them from coercing us when we think it is the wrong thing to do. We may believe that, in practice, while some institution manages to get it right a lot of the times, they can get it wrong, sometimes horribly, terribly wrong. We may believe that the benefit of allowing coercion in cases where they will get it right is outweighed by the cost of those times when they get it wrong. This is what I believe. But this is another digression.

Conservatives found appeal in libertarianism when libertarianism expressed its economic arguments. Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, and so on, were all popular figures in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Most everybody knew their names, and was familiar with a handful of their arguments. Libertarians, at the time, probably sharpened their pens and got busy writing about economics because the biggest threat was to economic liberty. Communism comes to mind, as does socialism. These were real threats to liberty, real reasons to focus on economics. Communism is no longer a "real" threat, "real" in the sense of being politically feasible. Socialism is also no longer a "real" threat. (This is my perception, I'm guessing many others share this perception). Since this is so, many may have turned, or are now beginning to turn, to social liberty issues. Drugs, gays, and a culture of liberty.

This makes it natural for libertarians to begin abandoning conservatism, especially since modern-day conservatism in the Republican Party means supporting somewhat different big government programs from the Democratic Party's big government programs. This abandonment appears to be happening. The most significant of these articles is Brink Lidsay's article entitled "Liberaltarians" in the New Republic. I could not get past the first paragraph (firewall), but then found the article on Cato's website, where Lindsay works. In this article, Lindsay is pleading with libertarians to dump the elephants in favour of the donkeys. He is also arguing that liberals and libertarians in America have more in common, when you consider everything, than libertarians and conservatives do. Good for him. I agree. Read the article.

Today, meanwhile, the Economist chimes in with an article that argues the Republicans should target their guns at the Libertarian Party. This is a short article, but it expresses what I take to be a fact. In many cases, many libertarians are shifting their vote to Democrats, and the Libertarian Party, as a way of venting their anger with Republicans. Good for them. I support this move. Read the article.

Is libertarianism dead? Hardly. It's just shifting gears.

Column in the "West"?

2006-12-06T11:48:00.000-05:00

I did a double-take when I read an article in a "national newspaper" on Dion's French citizenship. Here's the part that raised my eyebrows:

It did not take long for the issue of Mr. Dion's dual citizenship to be raised after he won the Liberal leadership on Saturday, with a newspaper column in the West saying it was "a question of loyalty" while Bourque Newswatch -- a popular news Web site -- featured a headline: "Citizen Dion: Vive La France!"

Notice that the article refers to Bourque Newswatch, but only calls Ezra Levant's column in the Calgary Sun a "column in the West." Why be so obscure about this column while being specific about a news aggregating website?

Speaking of Friedman

2006-12-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

I mentioned Friedman below. I suppose I should say just a little bit more about the man who passed away recently.

Friedman was a personal hero of mine. I once had the opportunity to chat with him for about an hour over the telephone. Here's the article that came of it (the Queen's Journal website seems to be down just now... I may update the link if they fix the website). He was lucid, erudite, and quick-witted. I was surprised. I was half-expecting something very different. Maybe I thought, given his age, that he might be a bit difficult to speak with. But he wasn't. Not at all.

I wish I had met him in person. I never did. I would have told him all sorts of things. Milton Friedman was a rare mind.

I did get to chat with him, though, and this was more than enough. I even mailed him two copies of my interview, and he mailed one copy back with his signature across it. I made a poster out of it. It hangs at my parents' cottage.

Maybe one day Canada (or the U.S.) will decide to take Friedman's policy proposals more seriously. There is no doubt that his influence continues to animate many in both countries. Like me. Like many of my friends. Like you, probably. Even if you disagree with Friedman, you can't help but take him seriously. It isn't like you can just ignore him.

The last two weekends I raised a glass to Friedman. I'll keep raising a glass to him. You should too.

Death of libertarianism?

2006-12-03T22:33:00.000-05:00

In a Fukuyama moment, Michael Lind explains how libertarianism is dead as a serious movement in the U.S. (and, I guess, Canada and the U.K. to boot).

"The most epochal event in world politics since the cold war has occurred - and few people have noticed. I am not referring to the conflict in Iraq or Lebanon or the campaign against terrorism.

It is the utter and final defeat of the movement that has shaped the politics of the US and other western democracies for several decades: the libertarian counter-revolution."

"Utter" and "final" defeat?...

Lind explains:

"For nearly a decade, the Republican party has controlled Washington and most state legislatures. And yet every big proposal of the libertarians has been rejected by the public and their elected representatives. Their only temporary achievement has been tax cuts, which are likely to be rolled back at least in part to reduce the deficit in the years ahead. With the disappearance as a significant force of the libertarian right, the centre of gravity inevitably will shift somewhat left in matters of political economy. But we will not see a restoration of the mid-20th century pattern because there will be no revival of the socialist left. The demise of both socialism and libertarianism pretty much limits the field to moderate social democracy and big-government conservatism."

Those "big" proposals include social security privatization (through personal accounts) and health care privatization (also through personal accounts).

To be sure, libertarians in the U.S. have had a hard go of it. The Republican Party has abandoned the driving ideas behind, for instance, the Goldwater years, and the ideas of Milton Friedman that charmed many. That hasn't stopped Bush from giving Friedman a "freedom medal." Neither has it stopped Bush from spending more than anyone. Ever.

But to focus on fiscal libertarianism, to the exclusion of other issues, is to miss why the libertarian philosophy is not dead. Social libertarianism is far from dead. From gay marriage (with caveats) to marijuana, people from all over the political spectrum are thinking liberty. This is truer in Canada than it is in the U.S., but it doesn't change the fact that many Americans feel like Canadians on these two issues. And both of these issues are decidedly libertarian.

Yes, of course, many libertarians are not in favour of gay marriage. For these folks, it isn't that gays shouldn't get married, it's that the state has no business deciding who should and shouldn't get married. The state should decide who I'm allowed to marry just as much as it should decide what colour underwear I should be allowed to wear. In both cases, it's none of their business.

But if the state is going to be in the marriage business, then it should be neutral between different kinds of marriage contracts. If I want to marry a man or a woman should be no grist for their mill. Churches can choose whether to marry gays or straights, and people can go ahead and have their own private ceremonies too. That's the libertarian position. And it's a position many people agree with in Canada and the U.S. (and the U.K., and elsewhere too).

Social libertarianism is hardly dead. But neither is fiscal libertarianism. To take Lind's position is to be too short-sighted, and too narrowly focused on party politics. Yes, the Republicans haven't moved on any pro-liberty issues in a long, long time. They still pretend to be small government types by passing tax cuts. They fool plenty of people. But I suppose many people don't support the Republicans for principled reasons, but for the same reasons that you root for your sports team. It doesn't matter if the team sucks, or is playing poorly, or has nothing praiseworthy to recommend it. You pick your team, and you root for it. There is (almost) nothing that would count as being a reason to root for another team.

Other Republicans, the types who care about policy, are moved by the Republicans lack of fiscal discipline. They complain, and they feel betrayed. Many might move away from the Republicans for this reason. What keeps them hanging on? For my friends who are Republicans, they feel that the war on terror is more important. That doesn't mean they accept the Republicans' spendthrift ways. It just means that, for the moment, something else is worth having these types around for a while longer.

Lind is a bit too quick to think the pro-liberty movement is dead. It isn't. It's just not really at home in the Republican Party.

Pot smoking Tory

2006-11-28T13:18:00.000-05:00

John Tory has admitted that a 30-year-old article of his, appearing in Osgoode's Obiter Dicta student newspaper, wherein he wrote about smoking pot (even while driving) and urging more lenient pot laws for traffickers, is a true account. That is what he believed, and that is what he did. He tells us now that he hasn't smoked pot since.

"That was then and this is now," he said. "I'm 30 years older, hopefully a lot wiser. I think these are experiences that kids often have that help them to learn lessons and shape their attitudes when they get older."

Right. Great. Those are great lessons to learn, provided you don't get caught. If John Tory really thinks these are worthwhile lessons, lessons that young people should learn, like he did, then he should support police taking a hands-off attitude towards young adults' pot-smoking behaviour.

Why should Tory get to learn these lessons, while others learn the lesson that getting charged with pot possession could hurt their job prospects?

Just about everybody smokes, or has smoked, pot. Very many people continue to smoke pot throughout their lives. Good for them (I've tried it, but it didn't stick. I haven't smoked pot since New Year's Eve about 12 to 14 years ago in Florida).

Let them smoke pot.

Here's more from the article:

Tory went on to reminisce about the time he and a friend were entering a Lake Simcoe marina with a half pound of marijuana aboard and noticed they were being followed by another boat with a powerful searchlight.

[Did you get that? Half a pound of marijuana!]

"I managed to persuade my accomplice not to ditch the stuff so he stuffed it down his pants and we made it to the dock without incident," Tory wrote.

The Conservative leader said he believes many people his age have similar tales to tell.

[They sure do. Some have other tales to tell. Like being caught with half a pound of marijuana, getting charged, and being fired from work.]

"I characterize (the article) as honest observations of somebody 30 years ago," Tory said. "And at the same time I listened to Jimi Hendrix and I had long hair that was almost down to my shoulders, which my father was constantly telling me to get cut because I looked like a hippie."
All three provincial leaders -- including Premier Dalton McGuinty and NDP Leader Howard Hampton -- have admitted under previous questioning by reporters to experimenting with pot or hashish as young men.

So did Chretien. Good for all of them. Now if only they would have the courage to make pot legal.

The Freetarian, a.k.a. Sean "Val Venis" Morley

2006-10-30T15:04:00.000-05:00

My buddy, Sean Morley, has a new blog up-and-running. It's called the Freetarian. You can also check out his YouTube site here.

I met Morley a couple of years ago when he lived in Canada. He and I were both members of the Ontario Libertarian Party, and I was busy working for my campus newspaper, the Queen's University Journal. At the time, Features editor Erik Missio had a big thing for the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment). Sean Morley was (and is) "Val Venis" of the WWE.

We got in touch through the Party, and I interviewed him about politics for The Journal. He turned out to be an awesome guy. Real down-to-earth, intelligent, and funny.

We kept bumping into one another here and there (actually, I would drive down to his house and visit, he did live about twenty minutes from my home), until he left for Phoenix, Arizona. Alas.

It's good to know he is still keen on liberty, and still fighting the good fight, even if it isn't where the fight should be fought--in Canada. Where libertarians are multiplying every day!

Anyways, check out his blog. And watch him wrestle.

Garth Turner... libertarian?

2006-10-29T23:47:00.000-05:00

This is pretty surprising.

Stephen Taylor, friend and blogging ass-kicker, sent me an email letting me know that Garth Turner, the man booted from caucus who flirted with joining the Green Party for a while, claims to be, wait for it, a libertarian.

Yeah. Libertarian. Small government, pro-liberty, anti-war-on-drugs, kind of stuff.

Here's what he writes:

So, my libertarian, Progressive Conservative, democracy-loving ass was in the wrong caucus. But no more.

Now I'm open to this suggestion. If Garth Turner wants to be a libertarian, great. That adds another one to the list of MPs who either are, or claim to be, libertarian. Like Maxime Bernier (who worked for the libertarian Montreal Economic Institute), Andre Arthur (who describes himself as a libertarian), and Garth Turner. Who knew we had such representation? (I'd include Stephen Harper, but I think he's given up on Hayek. Which is a shame).

So. Here's hoping Turner means it.

2006-09-21T13:36:00.000-05:00

The State Is Not God

This is pretty good. Worth a look.

Ironically challenged

2006-09-19T15:58:00.000-05:00

So the pope quotes someone to the effect that the only new things Muhammad has brought into the world is evil and violence. The response to the accusation? Uhm... jihad.

That's right. A source inside the camp calling for jihad quotes a jihadi:

"We will respond to accusations of being violent with violence!"

And:

"How dare the pope say that we are violent! We will show him the error of his ways by calling on followers of Muhammad to do violence to him."

A justification of property

2006-09-14T23:12:00.000-05:00

Just now, I'm busy working on a long-ish paper about property. I'm dissatisfied with the "ordinary" defenses of property, and am working on my own. Roughly, the idea is as follows:

What justifies P's claim to an object or thing x is her having concern for the thing.

This justification is a shallow justification. In fact, it's difficult to believe that it is a justification at all. All it says is that, given the presence of a certain affective state (namely, concern), what follows is that some Q (an individual, or the rest of us) has a duty or obligation to respect P's claim to Q. We want to know more. Maybe a lot more. More can be said.

In the next little while, I will try to roll out my reasons for thinking that a conative state is what is necessary as a basic justification for property. The first step is to narrow the scope of the paper, and make clear some of the assumptions that I will be working with. In subsequent posts I'll outline the strategies taken by a few others. The labour view (John Locke), an identity view (associated with Hegel and a few new defenders like Samuel C. Wheeler III), and a projects-based view (primarily associated with Loren Lomasky).

Objects and things

For the purpose of this project, I am only interested in the potential ownership of physical (corporeal) objects and things. Chairs, board games, a parcel of land, a house, all will do. An original work of authorship, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual (or incorporeal) property will have to fall by the wayside. So, too, will ownership of stock, and similar incorporeals. This isn't to say that this theory isn't able to capture these kinds of property as well, but it is to say that more or something different will need to be said to capture these kinds of property.

Control rights

In addition, I am only interested in a subset of claims someone might have to objects and things. A.M. Honore disentangled all the possible features and relations captured by the concept property and ownership. Amongst these things are rights to use, destroy, transfer, receive income from, bequest, and so on. He called the entire set of these rights a "bundle of rights," with each particular token a "stick." In legal circles, people talk of these "sticks" as "incidents," which is the other word that Honore used to describe them. Property is a complex bundle of rights, with many particular sticks (I think Honore had 12 sticks in total).

J.P. Day has further separated the entire bundle into two broad categories: control rights, and transfer rights. Control rights are rights to use the object, to destroy it, to have it, and so on. Transfer rights are rights to accrue income, to bequest it, to give it away, to sell it, and so on. This project is only interested in control rights, not in transfer rights. This is not because the story I want to tell won't justify transfer rights, it just might. But it looks like transfer rights may require additional premises. At the very least, transfer rights to objects are more controversial than control rights to objects. The topic is controversial enough at the level of control rights.

Property is a social fact

Property has its roots in brute possession. To "have" something is the primitive ancestor of "owning" something. Robinson Crusoe on his island might have a coconut, could fashion a suit out of twigs and leaves, could construct some utensils to hold water, and maybe make some rudimentary (or sophisticated) tools out of rocks, vines, and sticks. All of these he would have in his possession. He would not, however, have them as property. Property is a necessarily social concept. For Robinson Crusoe to have these objects as his property requires him to have at least one other fellow come ashore. With at least one other person, we can begin to ask whether or not Crusoe has property, and what justifies his claim to property over and above his mere possession of it.

To say that property is a social relation is to recognize the concept as a four-place relation. Possession is a two-place relation. P has x (where P is a subject, and x is an object). A justification of possession (if one were required) would convert possession into a three-place relation. P has x in virtue of M (where P is a subject, x is an object, and M is the ground or reason for P's possessing x). Since property is a necessarily social relation, we need to introduce a variable to stand in for at least one other person. P has a claim to x in virtue of M against Q. Q does not equal P (where P is a subject, x is an object, M is the normative reason for P's claim to x, and Q is a subject not identical to P).

Further, this is also to heed the insights of Hohfeld, who famously argued that a "rights" claim, which is, at bottom, what a property claim is, entails a duty on the part of at least one other person. Otherwise, we have the "power" or the "liberty" to use certain things, but not a "right" to it. A four-place relation captures this insight.

This might be controversial. The reason for this is obvious to those who have worked with the concept of "desert." Desert is ordinarily viewed as a three-place relation (P deserves x in virtue of M). Jan Narveson claims that it is not that. Narveson says that desert is a four-place relation just like the relation I have suggested for property. His reasons for saying this are several-fold, including the fact that, for desert to have concreteness, we need to specify from whom or what the thing deserved is to come from. Desert cannot be a "free-floating" concept. But this view is not popularly accepted. Robinson Crusoe on his island can "deserve" happiness, say, and that happiness needn't come from some person or group of persons, or an institution. Even if Crusoe were the last person on earth, he might still deserve things. For this reason, and a few others, desert theorists do not accept Narveson's conceptual story. If these people are right, then it's possible that people may have relations to objects in a similar way to the way they might deserve things. Namely, persons may have property even though no one else is around.

If the concept of property were similar to the concept desert in relevant ways, then this would be a problem for the view I'm pushing. But it is not. Desert has, if Narveson is wrong, at least some non-social tokens. When desert is specific (like "Patricia deserves to be loved by Quincy for so-and-so reason), then desert becomes a four-place predicate. Property, however, has no non-social tokens. For this reason, property and desert are not always conceptually related, and when they are, desert is just like property in being a four-place relation.

Levels of justification

Laurence Becker claims that there are three possible levels at which a justification can be aimed. At the general level, a justificatory story aims to justify a property system in general. At the specific level, a justificatory story aims to justify some particular mode a property system may take from private property, to collective ownership, to some mixture of the two, or something else. At the particular level, a justificatory story aims to justify some particular individual's claim to some particular object.

My project is aimed at the particular level. What I seek to do is to provide some reasons why P might have a justified claim to some x, a claim that entails at least a reason for Q (either an individual, or some group of individuals) to abstain from taking it. This reason may not be overriding. There may be other moral reasons or claims that others have on that particular x. Whether or not those reasons or claims outweigh P's claim is a separate question.

A justification at the particular level, however, has implications for the specific and general levels. If it turns out that P has good grounds to claim x, and no one else does, then that's a prima facie grounds to prefer a property system that at least recognizes P's claim to x. And if it is not defeated by some criteria for justice at the specific level, then that, again, is a prima facie reason to prefer a particular propery system in general. Thus, while the project is tailored to be a particular justification, it will have an impact on our justification at the broader levels.

Thus, I want to give an account of what might justify some particular subject P's claims to the control rights on some object x against the rest of us.

That's the limited scope of my project. More later.

Blogging for Presidents...

2006-09-05T22:20:00.000-05:00

I'm not the first to report this, but it nevertheless bears repeating: The President of Iran has his own blog. Yup. A blog. President of Iran. Go check it out.

Chomsky on US foreign policy

2006-08-31T23:55:00.000-05:00

Okay, let it load, and then take a look at the conversation around 6:30. Then scroll down and take a look at my post on the possibility of a welfare liberal libertarian...

LSS in the WS

2006-08-31T15:50:00.000-05:00

Okay, she beat me to it, but here is Ezra Levant's take on this year's Liberty Summer Seminar:

If you're curious, here was last year's write-up on the LSS in the Standard:

Western Standard at it again...

2006-08-29T21:46:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you saw it, but there was a site up at the url Hezboliberal.com lampooning the Liberal Party and their sometimes odd stances on Middle East affairs. That site was shut down, after the ISP for the site received a lawyer's letter from the Liberal Party. But the Western Standard is eager for a little bit more controversy.

From Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant comes this:

So, we're going to do at the Western Standard what we've become accustomed to doing: having a little bit more guts than our competitors. We're going to host that Hezboliberal.com website. Not because we agree with it but because the Liberals think they can bully their opponents into submission.

Well, try bullying us. We weren't afraid of defying rioting mobs, and we sure as hell won't be afraid of taking on some Liberal lawyers. (Mr. Régimbald, our address for service of any writs can be found here.)

You can see the revived Hezboliberal.com website here, hosted on our server. Whether you agree with the content or not isn't the point. This is about stopping a bully. And about having some fun with some thin-skinned pols who can dish it out pretty good, but can't take it.

A welfare liberal libertarian?

2006-08-29T15:42:00.000-05:00

I sometimes consider myself a Rawlsian libertarian. Not always, but sometimes.

This is because I agree with the intuition that it is morally right that "we" (royal "we") have a responsibility to help the worst-off, the badly treated, and the trotted upon. We really *should* have welfare-like institutions.

I call them "welfare-like institutions" rather than just welfare for three good reasons. For one, we can't conclude from the fact that we have a moral responsibility to help the badly-off that it is some precise and specific institution that should do this. It's an open question whether the government is the right institution that will allow us to put our moral responsibility into practice. It just doesn't follow.

For two, moral responsibility implies a choice. There is a difference between a legal responsibility and a moral responsibility. Setting up a governmental welfare institution is to generate a legal responsibility, and not necessarily a moral one. We fail to act on our moral responsibilities if we are made to act in some way for fear of some evil befalling us. Like being sent to jail. Or being fined. Or getting grounded. A child is not acting morally when she shares her toys with her brother because she is under the threat of being grounded if she does not share. She acts morally when she chooses to share for the reason that she thinks it is the morally right thing to do.

The same is true with welfare. We do not act morally when we pay our taxes when we do so out of fear of being punished. We might if we do so out of a sense of moral responsibility.

And for three, it might turn out that non-governmental institutions will do the trick. This is an empirical question, and needs empirical studies to work. Maybe people will deny that this is true. Maybe charities and voluntary, non-governmental institutions will not be sufficient. Maybe. But we need to at least answer the empirical question, since governmental institutions come at a significant expense compared to equivalent voluntary institutions.

It's interesting to point out that Rawls himself, in the preface to the second edition of his A Theory of Justice (somewhere around pages 11 - 13), writes that he did not intend to justify the welfare state. To make sense of this claim we have to take the above three points into consideration. I take it that Rawls had something like the three things above in mind when he made this claim.

So that's one reason for thinking that a Rawlsian, or welfare liberal, libertarian is not entirely implausible. Here's another reason. This reason should appeal to ordinary welfare liberals from the left, and it is a reason that appeals to me.

Suppose the following is true. Suppose Bob, a welfare liberal, strongly supports a welfare state. His theory of justice demands the inclusion of a welfare state. Suppose he also virulently objects to a warfare state. His theory of justice says that war, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is morally illegitimate. Suppose further that Bob ranks his opposition to war higher than his support of government-run welfare. We might say that he considers the benefits of a welfare state at, say, 60, but the negative harm of a warfare state at -90.

I think Bob describes a great many Americans and Canadians who consider themselves on the left of the spectrum. We should help one another, even make people help one another, these sorts of people would say, but we should not engage in wars.

Follow me so far? Okay, here's the other important assumption I will ask you to grant for the sake of argument. Suppose that it is true that the governmental institutions we set up for the purposes of a welfare state have a 70 per cent likelihood of also engaging in war. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that governmental institutions are like that, for some reason.

Bob, the welfare liberal, makes the following calculation.

"If we set up a government, we can expect a benefit of 60. There is, however, a 70% chance of this government engaging in war, which would yield a harm of -90. If we multiply the probability of engaging in war by the harm of a war, we get -63. Subtracting the expected harm from the expected benefit yields a net expected benefit of -3."

Bob wants a welfare state. He is a genuine welfare liberal. But he really doesn't want war. He sings to himself, "War. Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" And he believes the lyrics. But his calculation has led him to the conclusion that he should expect a harm if we set up a welfare state, even though Bob wants that. What should Bob conclude? He should conclude that, in practice, we shouldn't have a welfare state (because it is likely to engage in war) even though, in theory, we should have a welfare state.
"If only we could have a welfare state without a warfare state," he laments to himself. "But I'm not a naive welfare liberal, I take empirical facts seriously, and I am honest about what I expect."

All I am trying to show is the possibility of a welfare liberal libertarian. I am making no claims about the status of the numbers used. If you adjust the numbers, you might conclude something else. Suppose you think the benefit of a welfare state is 70, rather than 60, for instance, keeping the probability of war the same. That would mean a net benefit of seven to our society. In that case, the welfare liberal should support government-run welfare, even though he can expect wars.

Whether or not any particular welfare liberal should fight for a libertarian society will depend on her beliefs about the probabilities, and her rankings of the relative benefits and harms of a welfare state as compared with a warfare state.

On what basis should she ground her probability claims? One approach would be to take a historical sample of liberal welfare states, and see how many of them also engaged in the sorts of wars that she strongly opposes. My (strong) suspicion is that the probability will be higher than 70 per cent.

I have abstracted away one other component of the argument for simplicity's sake, but I should at least mention it since it will strengthen my claim. The benefit that we have assumed comes without a probability assesment. But the benefit is not guaranteed. Welfare states make mistakes. Sometimes rich people get welfare. Sometimes poor people fall through the cracks. No welfare state is perfect. Thus, we must also downgrade the expected benefit of a welfare state by appeal to a probability of actually getting the benefit. That probability will be less than "unity" (as they say), or 100%.

There will be a less-than 100% probability of the benefit (welfare), just as there is a less-than 100% probability of the harm (war). It would be neat to put together a welfare liberal libertarian calculator, so that you could input your own preferred probabilities, and your own preferred relative benefit and harm assessments. I don't have the skills for this. But I wonder just how many welfare liberals would actually turn out to be libertarians, for non-traditional (or non-standard) reasons.

You would be, morally speaking, a welfare liberal. You would be, politically speaking, a libertarian.

Bush is an idiot

2006-08-28T23:23:00.000-05:00

You might hear that from lefties, and others in a bar conversation. But would you expect it from a University? That's the strategy taken for drawing attention to Lakehead University, who had the, uhm, "gumption" (?) to use this sort of image to draw attention to itself:

"Graduating from an Ivy League University
doesn't necessarily mean you're smart"

Yup... that's their advertising campaign. Here's the website, and here's an article on the subject. At least some of the faculty and higher-ups at the University aren't big fans of this. Neither am I. (Which isn't to say that I think Bush is particularly intelligent. I just think this is a poor PR move).

PS. Yes, the campaign seems to work. My blogging about it is an indication of this fact. It's still a dumb move, though.

National Newswatch?

2006-08-28T15:52:00.000-05:00

Nealenews was the news aggregator for me. I checked it daily. I was a bit upset when Brian Neale decided to pack it in. Not only was the layout superior to Bourque's, I also tended to click through more links on Nealenews as compared to Bourque. Neale's choices were better, near as I could tell, especially for someone like me. Part of the reason for this was his decision to link to blogs ahead of Bourque, and to include sources like the Western Standard.

Nealenews will be missed. In its wake comes the National Newswatch. Hopefully it will do a similarly good job of aggregating the news, so that I don't have to. But the layout really has to change...

The Tragedy of Economic Ignorance

2006-08-28T01:05:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Janet Neilson's astute eye for economic ignorance, we have this from the TTC:

The advert reads: "People don't litter at home. Why do they do it here?"

Uhm, duh!

(And when you're done understanding why this question is dumb, you can play a little game here).

Lindy @ LSS

2006-08-04T22:22:00.000-05:00


Lindy at the 2006 Liberty Summer Seminar. Video courtesy of Janet Neilson.

Videos galore!

2006-08-04T22:20:00.000-05:00

Okay, so this year we took advantage of the possibility of videotaping some of the talks at the Seminar. And by "we" I mean, whoever it was that got the digital camera video of Lindy (from the post below), Janet Neilson (whose video is just above this post), and Stephen Taylor.

You can check out all of the Google Videos by clicking this link (or by searching for "liberty summer seminar" at google.video.com).

Or, follow this link to see John Carpay's (Canadian Constitution Foundation) talk, this link for a talk by Fraser Institute founder and former Executive Director, Dr. Michael Walker, and this one here to watch Dr. Jan Narveson's (Prof, University of Waterloo) talk.

Lindy on YouTube

2006-08-03T06:52:00.000-05:00

LSS? Awesome

2006-08-02T16:58:00.000-05:00

I'm just beginning to recover from what I think was the best Liberty Summer Seminar ever.

On the Saturday, the Seminar was nearly flooded out with a torrent of rain. It was unbelievable. Just as soon as the second speaker (Pierre Desrochers) came up to speak, the sky opened up and let loose. Some from Alberta explained that they had never seen rain quite like that.

We took a few minutes to get everyone under the tent, to move some of the electrical things under cover, and to see if the rain would pass (it didn't), and then started up again. Even with the rain, no one really seemed to mind. Some even thought it added drama and excitement to the event (by "some" I mean "Ezra Levant").

Other than the rain, the Lindy concert was one to remember. You can check out a little bit of it by going here. Someone (and I don't know who... let me know if you know) had a digital camera and made a mini video of the concert. I wish more folks would bring some video equipment and make little clips like that for the rest of us to see.

At any rate, you can't see it in the video, but just off to the corner was Mike Walker (sitting right by me... here's a picture:)

He was awesome. Not only did he stay up later than the rest of us, he also rose early in the morning (8 a.m.) to play tennis with Ian Ferraro. I was supposed to play too, but managed to sleep through the first thirty or so minutes and, well, just sort of stayed in bed. At any rate, here's the very first quote back about the Seminar from none other than Mike Walker:

"This is the most fun I have had in years!"

He said that a few times, actually. Mostly while dancing on the stage in a circle with myself, Ollivia Sexton, Janet Neilson, Matt Bufton, and a few others (I had a few too many Liberty Ales to remember everyone in the circle). He bought up a copy of Lindy's CD and sent him an email letting him know that he's listening to the CD over and over on his trip through Newfoundland.

Really, check out Lindy for yourself over here on my space.

It was also cool to have a few conversations with Jason Cherniak, who blogs about the Seminar here. It's a nice post, and it looks like Cherniak will probably come back next year for another round of libertarian good times.

Speaking of blog posts, Chris Edey (a pretty cool UW grad) posted about the Seminar over here. He mentions the great Mike Walker story, and the rain.

Victor Wong, who blogs at the Phantom Observer, has a good post about Ezra Levant being a "liberal" (go read it yourself). It is a bit irksome that he decides to call the event "conservative" and concludes by saying that events like this Seminar show that conservatives aren't stuffed shirts. It's not that, of course, it's libertarian. I always ask the speakers to speak on subjects where they happen to agree with libertarians, even if they are not. And I don't care who attends. In fact, I prefer it if non-libertarians attend, since libertarians already agree with what most of the speakers talk about. At any rate, I guess this will become pretty clear if and when we decide to focus on something like the War on Drugs, say.

I'm sure there will be more blog buzz about this in the next few days. I'll link to anyone who talks about the Seminar, so long as you let me know (email me, or drop me a comment).

LSS News: Two Publishers!

2006-07-19T00:34:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone (feel free to forward this message widely) -

In our effort to bring you the best pro-liberty speakers in Canada, we are thrilled to announce two pubishers who will be speaking at this year's event: Ezra Levant and Stephen Taylor!

The Liberty Summer Seminar will be held on the July 29, 30 weekend in Orono, Ontario. It is hosted on a beautiful 40-acre property with a swimming pond, horseshoes, walking trails, and acres of forest. This year marks our sixth year.

Ezra is the publisher of the Western Standard newsmagazine, and author of Fight Kyoto and the recently released War on Fun. (Follow the link to order your copy).

Here's an excerpt of a review of the War on Fun on Quebecois Libre:

"The best book published in Canada lately... is my friend Ezra Levant's The War on Fun. In it, Ezra clearly shows how big health lobbies, politicians, do-gooders, busybodies and lawyers are attacking personal liberties, destroying the long Canadian tradition of freedom, turning rational grown-up adults into children, wanting to replace parental responsibility by bureaucratic programs and creating a victimhood mentality. As far as do-gooders are concerned, people (i.e., you and me) don't know what's best for them and must rely on bureaucrats and politicians to tell them what to do."

No stranger to controversy, the Western Standard's decision to publish the infamous Dutch cartoons depicting Muhammad sparked a long and still-current discussion in Canada about freedom of speech and possible limits on the right of publishers to publish what they'd like. Ezra will venture into these waters and explain the decision to publish, as well as why it was the right one, in his talk entitled "Publish and be damned: The Inside story of the Cartoon Kerfuffle."

Liberty Summer Seminar attendees will be familiar with Ezra, since he's attended the last two years in a row, and written glowingly about the Seminar here.

Stephen Taylor, meanwhile, is a graduate student in biochemistry (yes, biochemistry) at Queen's University, and a regular commentator on Canada's political scene. A thorough libertarian, Stephen is as convinced of the need for greater liberty in Canada as, well, us (the committee) are!

Stephen is "publisher" of the Blogging Tories aggregator, and his own popular blog, stephentaylor dot ca. The Blogging Tories is Canada's number one blog aggregator, with over 50,000 hits per day! That's a lot of hits. Meanwhile, his own personal blog was named the 3rd best political blog in Canada by the Hill Times (behind Warren Kinsella and Paul Wells). That's a lot of praise!

It is appropriate, then, that Stephen will talk about "Blogging for Liberty" at this year's Seminar.

If you haven't registered for the Seminar yet, do so now (it's easy).

If you're not a fan of camping, no problem! There are two motels within a ten minute drive of the property, and a number of bed and breakfasts that we'll happily point you to.

P.S. Maybe you saw our banner on the Western Standard website, or the Blogging Tories website, or, as of today, on Nealenews.com! Maybe you read about the Seminar on LewRockwell.com, or came across Jason Cherniak's blog where he mentioned his attendance at the Seminar? Want to join them? Want to help us advertise? Have a blog, a website, some on-line presence where you can advertise the Liberty Summer Seminar? Good: Hit "reply" and send us a message about it. We'll happily provide you with a banner, and you will get into our good books (that is, we'll love you forever).

Meanwhile, if you have questions, suggestions, or comments, you can hit "reply" and send me an email. If you have friends who you think might be interested in attending or knowing about this Seminar, please forward this email to them and let them know you plan on coming.

Cheers,

Liberty Summer Seminar Committee.

LSS on LewRockwell dot com

2006-07-17T16:10:00.000-05:00

In Apathetic Libertarians in Canada, LSS alum and friend, Michael Cust, writes about the Seminar in a discussion of, well, libertarians who are apathetic. Here's the LSS-relevant excerpt:

"... the Liberty Summer Seminar. It takes place on his estate outside of Toronto. Every year, he invites Canada’s top libertarian and pro-freedom academics, journalists, and activists to give talks during the day, while a pro-freedom band (and his mom!) rocks out in the evening. The event is annual and will be held next at the end of this month."

Thanks for the kind words, Mike, and for the plug. I'll post more about Mike's analysis of the Canadian libertarian movement later tonight or tomorrow.

Cherniak blogs the Seminar

2006-07-14T04:06:00.000-05:00

Popular Liberal Party blogger Jason Cherniak blogs about his attendance at this year's Liberty Summer Seminar.

Having pounded the pavement in Toronto with Cherniak trying to drum up petition signatures to keep Marc Emery from being deported to the U.S., I thought he would be just the right sort of person we should be encouraging to attend the Seminar. He is intelligent, thoughtful, and, probably due only to a lack of exposure, a non-libertarian. While I think events that reinforce the importance of liberty to those who already believe in liberty are a good idea, I'm glad that, each and every year, the Seminar manages to attract a not insignificant number of people who disagree with the libertarian political philosophy.

At best, these folks will come to agree with the philosophy. At the very least they'll get a better understanding of where people like me are coming from and why folks like me believe the things we do. Not to mention the fact that the late-night campfire chats (alcohol-enriched) are made all the more interesting. Spicy!

So I emailed Cherniak and asked him if he'd like to attend the Seminar. He said he would.

In his post he writes:

"...I think it will be a good time. I might not agree with the speakers, but I certainly think it will be important to listen to what they have to say and explain in words why I disagree with them. At other times, I will just drink and be merry.

In any case, I recommend that people consider attending the Liberty Summer Seminar. It should be a great time and a great debate."

I'm certain he will have a good time, even if he doesn't agree with the libertarian political philosophy. At least not entirely. He does say this, which surprised me, as well as a number of his readers in the comments:

"As I wrote last summer, I try to ground my Liberalism in libertarian philosophy. My basic argument is that we should all be free to do whatever we want as long as we do not harm others. I believe, however, that we need a strong government to stop the strong from taking advantage of the weak. Otherwise the lives of those who are not able to take advantage of others will be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"."

Cherniak grounding his Liberalism in libertarianism? I guess there is reason to believe this, given his stance on things like marijuana. I doubt that there exist better or stronger arguments for the legalization of marijuana than the arguments from individual liberty and self-direction. At any rate, I hope I can persuade him to stop thinking that we "need" a strong government to protect the weak. We need no such thing. Especially since "the strong" are the sorts of people who take advantage of the existence of institutions like governments precisely in order to take advantage of "the weak." But that's a conversation to be had over a pint or two of Liberty Ale, with a fire blazing, surrounded by trees and, as it turns out, a meteor shower.

Want in on the conversation? Register for the Seminar. Whether you're a libertarian, a Liberal, an NDP'er, a non-partisan lefty, righty, communitarian or Rawlsian liberal, the Liberty Summer Seminar is always a good time. Promise.

(Meanwhile, from a little while back now, Robyn posted an ad and blogged about the Seminar as well. Thanks to you, too, Robyn!)

Quote banner by Mike

2006-07-10T20:09:00.000-05:00

Check out this killer Quote Banner Kerrigan made for the Liberty Summer Seminar! How cool is that? (Pretty cool).

Thanks, Mike.

Update on Indigo

2006-07-09T12:36:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the censoring of Free Inquiry was a mistake. How odd.

Here's the Globe:

According to Mr. Flynn, the Indigo executive "gave me a sort of a stammering apology, said that the June-July issue was blocked by accident, and that they have contacted [Ajax, Ont.-based Disticor Magazine Distribution Services] to send it through again."

Earlier in the week, Mr. Flynn sent a letter to Indigo founder and CEO Heather Reisman saying he had learned from Disticor that Ms. Reisman's company had declined to stock the June-July Free Inquiry without giving a reason, and that future issues would be "inspected in advance on an issue-by-issue basis to determine [their] suitability" for Indigo and its Chapters, Coles and SmithBooks subsidiaries.

Calls by The Globe and Mail to four Indigo executives, including Mr. Silver, were not returned yesterday.

How strange that they should ban it, say it was a mistake, and give no reason for either move! Neither do we know what reason they may have had for stopping it, nor do we know why the mistake happened. I guess it could have been just "one of those things" (where someone presses a button somewhere on accident, or makes a phone call to a distributor, tells them they don't want the magazine anymore, and then realizes that they shouldn't have done any of that much later).

Time to Boycott Indigo

2006-07-08T20:06:00.000-05:00

I like Indigo. I like big book and magazine retailers. I like going into the Indigo, browsing their various offerings, and having everything in one place. It's convenient.

The same goes for Wal-Mart and Costco and, here in the U.S., Meijer's.

But, for the second time in six or so weeks, Indigo has gone ahead and censored a magazine. I just can't stand a retailer being so aggressive in determining what content is appropriate for me, and people like me. I can make my own decisions, Indigo, and I'm angry that you would take this opportunity away from me.

What did they ban this time? This time it's an issue of Free Inquiry, a secular humanist magazine catering to atheists, heathens, humanists, agnostics, and other non-religious folk. The reason? They haven't given a clear one yet, so we don't know, and that's part of what makes me so angry. If you are going to ban the sale of a magazine, you had better have a good story to tell. A good explanation. You shouldn't just ban something, and fail to alert your PR department, or news spokespeople why you are taking something off the shelves.

There is speculation about why, however. The first possible reasons is that Free Inquiry published four of the Danish cartoons in their April-May issue, and the ban on the June-July issue reflects Indigo's displeasure with having missed this fact in their craze to keep Danish cartoons off of their shelves. The second is an editorial by none other than philosopher Peter Singer in the current issue entitled "The Freedom to Ridicule Religion--and Deny the Holocaust." That editorial argues what the title implies.

The last time they banned a magazine was that issue of the Western Standard that published the Danish cartoons that sparked serious trouble in other parts of the world. I disagreed with that decision too. I had plenty to say about why publishing those cartoons was appropriate, and why news outlets in Canada made an error in news judgment in not publishing the cartoons.

I should make a few things plain. First, I don't mind that stores are legally permitted to determine what goes on their shelves. In fact, I think this is a good thing. So I'm not disputing Indigo's "right" to ban just whatever they'd like. Books with the colour purple on the cover, children's books, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and so on.

What I'm disputing is their decision in this case, and in cases similar to it. The response on my part, to show Indigo my displeasure, is to stop shopping at their stores. And to urge you, too, to just say no to Indigo.

Second, I don't dispute the banning or censoring, on the part of sellers, of certain materials that fall well outside of certain boundaries. In referring to the law (a separate issue), Peter Singer makes the following point (this is in that editorial in the Free Inquiry):

"Laws against incitement to racial, religious, or ethnic hatred, in circumstances where that incitement is intended to, or can reasonably be foreseen to, lead to violence or other criminal acts, are different, and are compatible with the freedom to express any views at all."

Third, I believe that a retailer with sufficient clout in a market has additional moral responsibilities. As it stands, Indigo is a giant. Supposing there were no other bookstores around, this bookstore's decision to censor would be as good as (as bad as) full legal censorship. It would amount to the same thing--the rest of us not getting access to a publication--even if the reasons for why this is bad would differ in the case of government versus private enterprise.

Indigo, of course, is not the only bookstore. There are others. But given Indigo's clout, they are, for very many of us, the sole, or a rare, venue for books. For this reason, I think they should feel additional pressure to be non-censorial. Pressure from customers (or, as in my case, former customers).

Mises Video

2006-07-07T10:55:00.000-05:00

The Mises Institute is up on YouTube! Here is a nice little video on Ludwig von Mises himself. Sweet!

Taylor interviews Smith

2006-07-05T11:21:00.000-05:00

Stephen Taylor interviewed Danielle Smith on property rights last week. The interview highlights problems with Canada's approach to property, and makes a few suggestions for how we should deal with property. Visit his post here, and then follow the instructions to download and listen to the podcast interview yourself.

Stephen Taylor runs a classy blog over on StephenTaylor.ca, and helped found Blogging Tories dot ca. Danielle, meanwhile, runs her own radio show--called, appropriately enough, Standing Ground. The radio show complements her work with the Alberta Property Rights Initiative, which she also runs. You can download and listen to Danielle's show weekly.

Both Stephen Taylor and Danielle Smith will have a chance to continue their conversation at this year's Liberty Summer Seminar. They are both confirmed speakers for the July 29, 30th event in Orono, Ontario. Visit our website if you want to meet both, and have your own conversation. If you bring a recorder, you can host your own podcast interview! Fun? Yes.