Understanding history as best we can is important for obvious reasons. It’s particularly important for libertarians who want to persuade people to the freedom philosophy. In making their case for individual freedom, mutual aid, social cooperation, foreign nonintervention, and peace, libertarians commonly place great weight on historical examples most often drawn from the early United States. So if they misstate history or draw obviously wrong conclusions, they will discredit their case. Much depends therefore on getting history right.

Libertarians naturally sense that their philosophy will be easier to sell to the public if they can root it in America’s heritage. This is understandable. Finding common ground with someone you’re trying to persuade is a good way to win a fair hearing for your case. Well-known aspects of early American history, at least as it is usually taught, fit nicely with the libertarian outlook; these include Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, the opening passages of the Declaration of Independence, and popular animosity toward arbitrary British rule.

The problem arises when libertarians cherry-pick confirming historical anecdotes while distorting or ignoring deeper disconfirming evidence. The drawbacks to grounding the case for freedom in historical inaccuracies should be obvious. If a libertarian with a shaky historical story encounters someone with sounder historical knowledge, the libertarian is in for trouble. The point of discussing libertarianism with nonlibertarians is not to feel good but to persuade. If the history is wrong, why should anyone believe anything else the libertarian says?

The damage done to a young person new to libertarianism is particularly tragic. Discovery of the libertarian philosophy, especially when combined with the a priori approach of Austrian economics, can make young libertarians feel virtually omniscient and ready for argument on any relevant topic. When such libertarians venture into empirical areas — such as history — they are prone to use ideology or the a priori method as guides to the truth. If libertarians with this frame of mind run into serious students of history, the results can be traumatic. The disillusionment can be so great that a young libertarian might decide to keep quiet from then on or give up the philosophy entirely. A libertarian who might have become a powerful advocate is lost to the movement. Thus we owe young libertarians the most accurate historical interpretation possible. Gross oversimplification sets them up for disaster. It’s like sending a sheep to the slaughter.

Where are libertarians likely go wrong when it comes to history? By and large, it’s in presenting American history as an essentially libertarian story. (This goes for the industrial revolution in England also.) We’ve all heard it: British imperial rule violated the rights of the American colonists, who — fired up by the ideas of John Locke — drove out the British, adopted limited government and free markets through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and pursued a noninterventionist foreign policy; this lasted until the Progressives and New Dealers came along. It’s not that everything about this overview is wrong; it contains grains of truth. Americans were upset by British arbitrary rule (which violated the accustomed “rights of Englishmen”), and Lockean ideas were in the air. But much of the rest of the libertarian template is more folklore than history.

For one thing, the early state governments were hardly strictly limited. Libertarians too readily confuse the desire for a relatively weak central government with the desire for strict limits on government generally. For many Americans a strong central government was seen as an intrusion on state and local government to which they gave their primary allegiance. But that is not a libertarian view; it depends on what people want state and local governments to do. (Jonathan Hughes’s The Governmental Habit Redux is helpful here.)

Libertarians also wish to believe that the early national government was fairly libertarian-ish. With the exception of slavery and tariffs, it is often explained, government was strictly limited by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Slavery of course was an egregious exception, which was enforced by the national government, and passionate opponents agitated against it. Tariffs were part of a larger system of government intervention, which many libertarians simply ignore. Nor were these the only serious exceptions to an otherwise libertarian program. But before getting to that, we must say something about the Constitution.

Libertarians of course know that the Constitution was not the first charter of the United States. But many of them rarely talk about the first one: the Articles of Confederation, which was adopted before the war with Britain ended. Under the Articles the weak national quasi-government lacked, among other powers, the powers to tax and regulate trade, which is why I call it a quasi-government. It obtained its money from the states, which did have the power to tax. So while it could not steal money, it nonetheless subsisted on stolen money. (The Articles were no libertarian document.)

Advocates of a unified nation under a powerful central government, such as James Madison, tried immediately to expand government power under the Articles but got nowhere. The centralists eventually arranged for the Federal Convention in Philadelphia, where the Constitution — the acknowledged purpose of which was to produce more, not less, government — was adopted. The libertarian Albert Jay Nock called the convention a coup d’etat because it was only supposed to amend the Articles. Instead, the men assembled tore up the Articles, crafted an entirely new plan that included the powers to tax and to regulate trade, and changed the ratification rules to permit merely nine states to carry the day, instead of the unanimous consent required for amendments to the Articles.

The Constitution that was sent to the state conventions for ratification drew the opposition of people who soon were known as Antifederalists. (Those who favored the Constitution’s strong central government were the real antifederalists, but they grabbed the popular “federalist” label first.) The Antifederalists lodged many serious objections to the proposed Constitution, only one of which was the lack of a bill of rights. They saw danger in, among other things, the broad language of the tax power, the general-welfare clause, the supremacy clause, and the necessary-and-proper clause — all of which, in their view, harbored unenumerated powers, contrary to Madison’s declaration. The Bill of Rights, which the first Congress later added to the already-ratified Constitution, did not even attempt to address the Antifederalists’ major objections. (History, I submit, has confirmed their predictions of tyranny.)

Many libertarians who presumably know this story are strangely silent about it. On the rare occasion they mention the Articles, they say little more than that unspecified problems with them prompted the Philadelphia convention and adoption by the assembled demigod-like Founding Fathers of that ingenious architecture of limited government we know as the Constitution. Then, the story continues, the libertarian masses’ objection to the lack of a bill of rights led to the adoption of the first ten amendments to protect our liberties. All was well until …

One would expect a “government” that lacked the power to tax and regulate trade to be of more interest to libertarians. One would also expect libertarians to be suspicious of plan to address those alleged deficiencies. Instead, the Articles typically are shunted aside and the Constitution is lauded as a historic achievement in the struggle for liberty. That is odd indeed.

I think we can explain this lack of interest in the Articles by noting that it fits poorly into the mainstream libertarian narrative about America. After all, it would be hard to praise the Constitution as a reasonably good attempt to limit government while acknowledging that it replaced a political arrangement under which the government could neither tax nor regulate trade. In that context the Constitution looks like a step backward not forward.

This also explains an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon: the lack of interest among many libertarians in the most libertarian of the early Americans: the Antifederalists. (Admittedly, not all Antifederalists were as libertarian as the best of them were.) Libertarians who have what has been called a Constitution fetish could hardly embrace the principled libertarian opponents of their beloved Constitution. The story wouldn’t make sense. (See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s “The Constitution as Counter-Revolution” [PDF].)

Many libertarians also like to paint the early national period in pacific colors, quoting Washington, Jefferson, and Madison against standing armies, alliances, and war. In contrast to today, we’re told, the American people and their “leaders” hated empire and imperialism. But this is misleading. From the start America’s rulers, with public support, were bent on creating at least a continental empire, including Canada, Mexico, and neighboring islands. Some had the entire Western Hemisphere in their sights. Americans were not anti-empire; they were anti-British Empire — or, more accurately, anti-Old-World Empire. They did not want to be colonists anymore. America’s future rulers saw their revolution as a showdown between an exhausted old imperial order and the rising imperial order in the New World. (Of course, it was called an Empire of, or for, Liberty.) Continental expansion — conquest — required an army powerful enough to “remove” the Indians from lands the white population coveted. “Removal” of course meant brutal confinement — so the Indian populations could be controlled — or extermination. This government program constituted a series of wars on foreign nations in the name of national security.

Continental expansion also was accomplished by acknowledged unconstitutional acts, such as the national government’s acquisition of the huge Louisiana territory from Napoleon, which placed the inhabitants under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government without their consent. The War of 1812 was motivated in part by a wish to take Canada from the British. (See my “The War of 1812 Was the Health of the State,” part 1 and part 2.) A few years later, American administrations began to built up the army and navy in order to bully Spain into ceding another huge area. The U.S. government thus gained jurisdiction over a vast territory reaching to the Pacific Ocean, from which the navy could project American influence and power to Asia. (In light of this empire-building, the Civil War can be seen as empire preservation.)

National security was always on the politicians’ minds: the exceptional nation, whose destiny was manifest, could never be safe if surrounded by Old World monarchies and their colonial possessions. American politicians generally hoped to acquire those possessions through negotiation, but war — which major political figures believed was good for the national spirit — was always an option, as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams let the Spanish know in no uncertain terms in the years before 1820. Had Spain been more defiant of Adams, the Spanish-American War would have occurred 78 years earlier than it did.

We can acknowledge that leading politicians were domestic liberals, relatively speaking, in that they did not want the national government to intrude (as the British did) arbitrarily into the private affairs of Americans. The resulting personal freedom can account for the rising prosperity. But libertarians tend to push this point too far. In fact, with the War of 1812 — slightly more than two decades after ratification of the Constitution — America’s rulers, including former Jeffersonians, favored expanded powers for the national government, including a central role in the economy to create a national market and a national-security state. A pushback by the older Jeffersonian wing of the American political establishment took place briefly, but the centralists soon won the day for good. Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay were surely smiling.

The government’s role in the economy came in the form of aggressive trade policy, internal improvements (with land grants to cronies), and more. The trade wars preceding and associated with the War of 1812 convinced most Americans that government was indispensable to making the United States a global commercial power. Free trade did not mean the laissez faire of Richard Cobden but rather a comprehensive government effort to open — by force if necessary — foreign markets to American merchants. In short order the objective changed from open markets and reciprocity to neomercantilism. Privileges for well-connected business interests were present all along the way. (Grover Cleveland complained about this in 1888.)

I am not saying that if early Americans could have been seen today’s America, they would have been pleased. Some clearly would not have been. I am saying that what they favored — national and commercial greatness — prepared the way for what America has become — whether or they would have favored it. If you will the end, you will the means. You cannot build a continental empire and a worldwide political and military presence without planting the seeds of powerful government at home, a national-security state, and all that they require, including income taxation, regulation, central banking, and a welfare state to ameliorate the worst hardships of the system’s victims, if only to tamp down radical resistance.

If libertarians mischaracterize this history, they discredit the case for liberty not only by appearing uninformed, but also by associating the freedom philosophy with a story that is more corporatist and imperialist than libertarian. As I’ve said before, the good old days lie ahead.

Primeiramente, peço desculpas a quem apoia o C4SS pelo atraso no meu relatório da coordenação de mídias em português. Os últimos dois meses foram um tanto caóticos (por conta de minhas obrigações acadêmicas), mas a partir de agora devemos continuar nossas operações normais.

Em fevereiro e março, publicamos 16 artigos. Foram 10208 envios jornais e sites e 49 republicações.

Surpreendentemente, as curtidas em nossa página do Facebook caíram no último mês. Em fevereiro, já passavam das 4010. Caímos a 3970, mas estamos, agora, em 4001. A explicação para isso foi que o Facebook passou a excluir perfis falsos ou inativos. A maior parte desses perfis são feitos para produzir likes no maior número de páginas possível e não são pessoas reais que interagem com nosso conteúdo. Dado que os posts aparecem apenas para uma fração das pessoas que curtem nossa página, essa medida garante que a interação com nossos posts aumente, já que eles devem aparecer para pessoas que de fato demandam nosso conteúdo.

Nossos seguidores no Twitter caíram em relação a janeiro. Caímos para 104 (-2). Já nossos seguidores no Tumblr passaram para 20 (+6).

Como sempre, nós pedimos a sua doação. É ela que mantém o nosso centro em funcionamento!

No decorrer dos próximos meses, nós disponibilizaremos pagamentos em real no PagSeguro e no PayPal, para facilitar suas doações — principalmente para quem deseja contribuir mensalmente.

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: February-March 2015

First of all, I would like to apologize for putting the Portuguese Media Coordinator Report up so late. The last two months were quite hectic for me (due to my academic duties), but everything should be smoother from now on.

In February and March, we published 16 articles in Portuguese. There were 10208 submissions and 49 pickups.

Surprisingly, our Facebook page likes dropped last month. In February there were already over 4010. We fell to 3970 but we’re now again at 4001. The explanation for this is that Facebook has been cleaning up fake or inactive profiles. Most of these profiles are like farming and not interacting with our content at all. Since our posts only appear on a few of our followers’ timelines, this measure should actually help us get more engagement our of our content, ensuring they are being fed to people who demand C4SS.

Our followers Twitter dropped relative to Janurary, falling to 104 (-2). On the other hand, we now have more followers on Tumblr, 20 (+6).

As always, we ask you to donate. It’s your donation that allows us to keep fighting the good fight!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, “at ten in the evening.” The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever! –Murray Bookchin

Part of the dissolutionary strategy advocated by C4SS is called Open Source Insurgency or embracing institutional, organizational or technological innovations — low-tech or high-tech — that render centralized or authoritarian governance impossible (or so damn costly as to be regarded as impossible). One of these innovations is Tor. And, so, C4SS maintains an always-on Tor Node. But we need your help.

C4SS has maintained a Tor relay node for over three years. This is our second quarter fundraiser for the project. Every contribution will help us maintain this node until July 2015. Every contribution above our needed amount will be earmarked for our second quarter fundraiser.

We encourage everyone to consider operating a Tor relay node yourself. If this, for whatever reason, is not an option, you can still support the Tor project and online anonymity with a $5 donation to the C4SS Tor relay node.

C4SS maintains a Tor relay node with a freedom friendly data center in the Netherlands. The relay is part of a global network dedicated to the idea that a free society requires freedom of information. Since June 2011 C4SS has continuously added nearly 10 Mbps of bandwidth to the network (statistics). Although we can’t know, by design, what passes through the relay, it’s entirely likely that it has facilitated communications by revolutionaries, agorists, whistleblowers, journalists working under censorious regimes and many more striving to advance the cause of liberty and the dissolution of authority.

If you believe, as we do, that Tor is one of the technologies that makes both state and corporate oppression not only obsolete, but impossible, please consider operating as a Tor relay or donating to support the C4SS node.

The State is damage, we will find a route around!

• Internet Security Is Our Responsibility
• Tor: The Onion Router
• Tor Is For Everyone: Why You Should Use Tor
• 7 Things You Should Know About Tor
• Using PGP Encryption To Communicate Privately
• Keeping Your Cryptocurrency Safe
• Dark Wallet: New Weapons for Old Wars

If you are interested in learning more about Tor and how to become a relay node yourself, then check out our write up on the project: Stateless Tor.

Please donate today!

Bitcoin is also welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

To get a sense of how badly the regime in Iran wants sanctions relief for the Iranian people, you have to do more than contemplate the major concessions it has made in negotiations with the United States and the rest of the P5+1. Not only is Iran willing to dismantle a major part of its peaceful civilian nuclear program, to submit to the most intrusive inspects, to redesign a reactor, to eliminate two-thirds of its centrifuges, to get rid of much of its enriched uranium, and to limit nuclear research — it must do all this while being harangued by the nuclear monopolist of the Middle East — Israel — which remains, unlike Iran, a nonsigner of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and faces no inspections or limits on its production of nuclear weapons.

This is something out of Alice in Wonderland. The Islamic Republic of Iran, born in 1979, has not attacked another country. (With U.S. help, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.) In contrast, Israel has attacked its Arab neighbors several times its founding, including two devastating invasions and a long occupation of Lebanon, not to mention repeated onslaughts in the Gaza Strip and the military occupation of the West Bank. Israel has also repeatedly threatened war against Iran and engaged in covert and proxy warfare, including the assassination of scientists. Even with Iran progressing toward a nuclear agreement, Israel (like the United States) continues to threaten Iran.

Yet Iran is universally cast as the villain (with scant evidence) and Israel the vulnerable victim.

You’d never know that Iran favors turning the Middle East into a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone (a nuclear-weapons-free zone was first proposed by the U.S.-allied shah of Iran and Egypt in 1974), and beyond that, Iran over a decade ago offered a “grand bargain” that contained provisions to reassure the world about its nuclear program and an offer to recognize Israel, specifically, acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative. The George W. Bush administration rebuffed Iran.

At the last NPT review conference in 2010, Iran renewed its support for the zone, the BBC reported at the time: “Tehran supports the ‘immediate and unconditional’ implementation of the 1995 resolution [to create the zone], declares the [then] president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The United States and Israel claim in principle to support having the Middle East free of nuclear weapons — but not just yet. The Israeli government said in 2010 that implementation of the principle could occur “only after peace agreements with all the countries in the region.” ABC News quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Israel might sign the NPT “if the Middle East one day advances to a messianic age where the lion lies down with the lambs.”

That is classic Netanyahu demagoguery. As noted, the Arab League in 2002 — and again in 2007 — offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and arrived at a “just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” At that point the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region”; i.e., they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”

Thus Netanyahu’s position is a sham. He could have peace treaties in short order if he wanted to. But, as he said before the recent elections, he will never allow the Palestinians to have their own country.

For its part, the United States “broadly agrees with Israel that conditions for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone do not yet exist in the Middle East,” the BBC reported. In other words, the Obama administration slavishly takes the Israel-AIPAC line.

While politicians and pundits lose sleep over an Iranian nuclear-weapons program that does not exist — are they having nightmares of the United States being deterred by Iran? — they support Israel, the nuclear power that brutalizes a captive population, attacks its neighbors, threatens war against Iran, and refuses to talk peace with willing partners.

Welcome to Missing Comma, the new, official C4SS Media Coordinator blog.

Thomas Knapp stepped down as Media Coordinator for the Center for a Stateless Society last week, leaving the job to me. He has been a force to be reckoned with here for the past five years, and his work has taken the Center from a tiny blog in an even tinier corner of the Internet to an outlet that regularly gets published by newspapers and websites around the world. Tom laid the groundwork for a lot of what we’re able to do at the Center, and without him, we likely wouldn’t be where we are today.

I worked with Tom for about three weeks before the end of March, getting ready to take over from where he left off. While no transition is ever perfectly clean, Tom has made sure that this one has been as close to perfection as he could get it. I’m eager to really start getting a good work-flow going and hopefully improving upon the work Tom did.

Ideally, I’d like to begin leaving weekly updates here. These updates will include a rough total of submissions for the week, an equally rough number of pickups and mentions, and a digest of the various works our writers have published since the last update. At the end of each month, I will still be publishing a Media Coordinator Update that includes cleaned up submissions totals and a solid accounting of how and where C4SS appeared in the world at large.

But that’s not all I’d like to do with this space. Missing Comma was originally set up as a sort of unofficial public editor blog for the Center; now that I’m Media Coordinator, I’m hoping to transition it into the actual public editor blog here. If I’m able to do so, this blog will not only become the public-facing place for weekly publishing updates, with luck – and your participation – it will become a conversation hub where C4SS Fellows and readers alike can discuss the impact our writing has – or should have – on the world.

Ethics in journalism in general is still a major focus for me and for this blog, and it’s something I’m still very much interested in covering in this space. As I ease into the role of Media Coordinator, I will be returning to a regular blogging schedule that includes articles on major journalism-related issues of the day. In fact, I’m busy writing one such article now.

As always, the reason we’re here is because of your support. You, the reader, keep us going; I and the rest of the Center for a Stateless Society thank you for what you’ve helped us accomplish over the past five years. With any luck, we’ll be able to keep the momentum going and take the next five years by storm.

Sincerely,
Trevor Hultner
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

James W. Ely Jr. discusses a book on classical liberalism and the Constitution.

Brian Doherty discusses a book on Somalia.

Robert Fantina discusses militarism abroad and police violence at home.

Andy Piascik discusses the Vietnam War.

Peter Maass discusses why Bergdahl should suffer more than the generals who did worse.

Rpbert Parry discusses the NYT publishing calls to bomb Iran.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Saudi airstrikes in Yemen.

Scott Mcpherson discusses Yemen falling apart.

Gary Leupp discusses the pointlessness of joining a Sunni-Shia war.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses anti-discrimination laws and discrimination generally.

Trevor Timm discusses Obama’s foreign policy of militarism.

Jason Ditz discusses the tyranny of the majority in Israel.

Gregory Elich discusses a NATO bombing raid of the past.

Sheldon Richman discusses America’s foreign policy makers endangering us.

Michael Horton discusses Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Matthew Hoh discusses the blood sacrifice of Sergeant Bergdahl.

Robert Parry discusses the Mideast crisis.

Sheldon Richman discusses libertarian vs welfare statist property rights.

Uri Avnery discusses why he’s not afraid of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the nonsense of war.

Last week I set out Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long’s argument that libertarianism can’t be reasonably dismissed as strange. (A modest objective, to be sure.) After all, Long writes, mainstream libertarianism holds that each individual has a right not to be aggressed against, aggression being defined descriptively (not normatively) as the initiation of physical force. What’s weird about that? To those who object that libertarians believe in only that right and no others, Long responds that other alleged rights, say, positive welfare rights, would have to conflict with the right not to be aggressed against, making for an incoherent theory. As I summed up the argument:

If people had rights in addition to the right to be free from aggression, that would indicate that they had enforceable claims against others whose alleged rights violation did not entail the use of aggressive force. (If it did entail the use of aggressive force, we would … not be talking about an additional right.) That would in turn indicate that the one whose alleged other right is violated could legitimately use force to compel others to act in a certain way. (Remember, that’s an important part of what it means to have a right.) But since by stipulation those others had not used aggressive force, the force used against them in defense of the alleged other right would itself entail aggression.

In other words, Smith’s right to be free from aggression would clash with Jones’s proposed other right. That is incoherent, unless we dump the right not to be aggressed against — which would open up a horrendous can of worms.

But that was only one half of Long’s paper. It’s worthwhile to look at the second half.

Long begins by addressing a claim that critics of the libertarian theory of property rights often make, namely, that using a resource in someone else’s possession without consent does not constitute aggression:

Libertarians, notoriously, condemn as unrightful any interference with private property. But how is this connected with the libertarian position on aggression? After all, someone could acknowledge a right to be free from initiatory force, but deny that seizing someone’s external possessions counts as initiatory force, or indeed as force at all.

(Matt Bruenig makes this objection to libertarianism, to which I respond here.)

This is an important matter for libertarians, as Long explains: “Since libertarians accept the Positive Thesis” that human beings have only the right not to be aggressed against, “they can acknowledge a right to control external resources only insofar as interference with such control would constitute initiatory force.”

But how can interference count as initiatory force when perhaps no force at all is used? If I see your bicycle leaning up against the fence at your home and use it, without asking, to run errands, how can it be said that I have initiated force against you? I don’t seem to have used force at all.

To see why libertarians reasonably interpret this as aggression, Long asks us to

Imagine a world in which people freely expropriate other people’s possessions; nobody initiates force directly against another person’s body, but subject to that constraint, people regularly grab any external resource they can get their hands on, regardless of who has made or been using the resource. Any conception of aggression according to which the world so described is free of aggression is not a plausible one.

In a note Long embraces “a broadly Lockean account in which a person’s right to exclusive control over her possessions is seen as closely analogous to her right to exclusive control over the molecules currently composing her body.” But he hastens to add that “I do not take my present argument to depend on the correctness of this account, since at the moment my thesis is not that the libertarian view of property is true, but rather that it is, while the welfare-statist view is not, intelligible as an application of the Positive Thesis,” that is, that persons have a right not to be aggressed against.

Thus, Long continues, some uses of external possessions would have to count as aggression, and stopping such uses would therefore not count as aggression; in fact it would be permissible under the libertarian theory of rights, since rights entail the permissibility of using force against violators. “In short,” Long writes, “we are committed to a system of property rights – that is, a set of principles determining when one may, and when one may not, interfere with a person’s control over some external resource.”

As already indicated, Long’s purpose is not to show that libertarian rights theory is “decisively superior” to a theory of welfare rights, but only that welfare-rights theory has serious problems not found in the libertarian theory.

We must back up a step. Long notes that welfare statists are not committed to rejecting property rights. Rather, the welfare statist believes that when government transfers resources from one person to another, it is simply recognizing and enforcing the recipient’s (alleged) rightful property claim to those resources. That is, the welfare statist “is asserting a right, on the part of one group, to exercise control over certain resources that have heretofore been under the control of another group. Hence the libertarian and the welfare-statist disagree, not about the existence of property rights, but about the transfer conditions of those rights.”

Indeed. Libertarians hold that resources may be transferred only by consent. But, Long notes, “for the welfare-statist, such a transfer of property rights can be triggered not only by mutual consent, but also by, e.g., Y’s need, regardless of X’s consent.”

The question is whether the welfare-statist approach has serious flaws that the libertarian theory escapes.

Keep in mind that mainstream libertarian property-rights theory gets off the ground with the Lockean labor-theory of just initial appropriation. This then leads to what Long calls “justice in transfer (mutual consent), and justice in rectification (say, restitution plus damages).” He continues:

I count as initiating force against a person if I seize an external resource that she is entitled to by the application of those three principles. If she is not entitled to the resource under these principles, but is in possession of the resource anyway, then my seizing the resource counts as force, but not as initiatory force, so long as I am acting on behalf of whichever person is entitled to the resource; otherwise I am initiating force against that person.

For Long, “this is at least a possible and coherently intelligible way of instantiating that right” to be free from aggression — which is more than can be said for the welfare statist’s theory of rights. I refer you to Long’s paper for the details. Suffice it to say here that problems abound with a theory which holds that a person can be transformed from a legitimate holder of a resource to an aggressor with respect to that resource without having done anything at all.

Moreover, the welfare statist doesn’t say that individuals in need have a right to appropriate resources directly. Only the government has that right.

But now it is the government’s right to control … resources that stands in need of justification. Since governments, on any liberal view, are not mystical bodies of social union but are simply collections of individuals, on an equal moral footing with the individuals they govern, a government can have no rights in excess of the sum of the rights of the individuals composing it.

Thus “the libertarian’s ethical and political commitments should now be, if not compelling, then at least comprehensible” — which is what Long sought to accomplish with his paper.

American politicians frequently declare that the government’s first duty is to protect us from foreign threats. If that’s so, why have they embroiled us in the Middle East?

Instead of keeping us safe, they seem to strive to put us in harm’s way by provoking one side or the other in sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and political conflicts. With one glaring exception — Israel versus Palestine — the U.S. government has been on almost every side of these complicated conflicts at one time or another, depending on the geostrategic context.

Considering that record, maybe we should reassess this thing called government. Perhaps if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t need it.

Following his predecessors, Barack Obama today has us ear-deep in the old conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as in the overlapping political friction between Arabs and Iranians (Persians) for regional dominance. What makes this all the more bewildering is that the Obama administration isn’t firmly on one side or the other. In Syria it is officially against Shiite Iran’s ally President Bashar al-Assad, a position that objectively helps Sunni ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliate, which also oppose Assad. But in neighboring Iraq, Obama is de facto allied with Iran and its Shiite ally-regime in Baghdad against ISIS. (George W. Bush’s overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein guaranteed that Iraq and Iran would be allies.)

The latest wrinkle is now occurring in Yemen, a country long plagued by sectarian, tribal, and political turmoil. The United States has aggravated the conflicts through drone warfare, by engineering the replacement of one leader with another, and by its intervention and distribution of arms throughout the region. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Houthis, who practice a form of Islam, Zaidi, that in some ways resembles Shiism and in other ways Sunnism, have taken control of parts of Yemen. But how is that a threat to us? These opponents of al-Qaeda are said to be backed by Iran, though this is undoubtedly an exaggeration, if not a fabrication, because the dispute appears to be internal. Nevertheless, for the ruling elites in the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, Iran is the bogeyman, so it’s threatening everywhere. Patrick Cockburn, a reporter familiar with the region, warns that U.S. backing of Sunni Arab intervention in Yemen could produce a self-fulfilling prophecy by driving the Houthis firmly into the Iranian and Shiite camps.

The question is: why must Americans be embroiled in this civil war, as well as the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Libya? If Iran and Saudi Arabia want to contend with each other for dominance in the Muslim world, what business is that of ours? All we can do is worsen the violence. No wonder so many people wish us ill.

Some might reply that neglecting the region would create breeding grounds for terrorism. But it’s intervention that breeds hatred of and possibly violence against Americans. Oil isn’t a good answer either. Whoever controls the oil will sell it — if not to Americans, then to others who will then sell it to Americans in the global market. When you factor in the high cost of the American military, oil isn’t so cheap.

And while we’re questioning the sense of putting Americans in the middle of foreign conflicts, let’s not forget U.S. policy toward Israel. Israel was founded mostly on land seized illegitimately from Palestinian Arabs — Muslim and Christian — and its occupation of additional Palestinian territory is now almost 50 years old. Whether American politicians have had self-serving or humanitarian motives, their policy, pushed by Israel’s Jewish American lobby, has underwritten brutal injustice.

Thus U.S. intervention in the Middle East has made enemies for the American people, putting them at risk unnecessarily. This was blindingly clear on 9/11, the perpetrators of which cited America’s alliance with Israel against the Palestinians among their grievances. Today we live with the threat (however exaggerated) that terrorism could again come to United States. This is a direct outcome of the American presence in a range of conflicts.

For this we may thank the largely unaccountable people who make foreign policy. We’d be safer without them.

In a book review of Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (which I confess I haven’t read), Roger McKinney — evidently following Siedentop — trots out the hackneyed claim that individualism is a product solely of the West, and specifically of the post-pagan West.

In response to the first claim, I’ll simply point to the many anticipations of libertarian ideas that are to be found in ancient China, particularly among the early Confucians. Ideas of liberty, equality, universal justice, and the value of commercial activity — all of which McKinney rightly associates with individualism — can also be found in ancient India and the medieval Islamic world.

But for present purposes I want to focus on what McKinney says about ancient Greece and Rome. To deny the Greeks and Romans a conception of individualism seems startling, since many of the most individualistic features of modern law have their roots in Greco-Roman traditions, and because most Greek and Roman philosophers made the pursuit of one’s own happiness and self-realisation the core of their ethical outlook. (Of course Greco-Roman individualism was not atomistic or antisocial; but that’s surely a feature, not a bug.) So what does McKinney have in mind?

To start with, he writes:

[In Morocco] cheating others is not considered unethical at all but a sign of an astute businessman. … Moroccan business ethics might be appalling to westerners, but ancient Greeks and Romans would have understood and applauded them ….

I’m not sure how appalling such conduct is to my business ethics students, many of whom readily agree with Albert Carr’s defense of relaxed ethical standards for business life as opposed to family life. In any case, the applause from ancient Greeks and Romans would hardly have been universal. One of Rome’s leading thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero, wrote a whole book, De Officiis (usually translated either asOn Offices or as On Duties), which is essentially a treatise on business ethics. In it he records some of the leading debates among Greek and Roman thinkers as to what sort of conduct is and is not permissible in commercial transactions. While a variety of views are canvassed, none of them fits McKinney’s description; and Cicero himself insists firmly that justice and fair dealing are owed to all human beings. (Cicero also argues in the same work that each of us has a responsibility to fulfill the demands not just of universal human nature but of our individualised nature, which certainly seems like a kind of individualism.)

Like Moroccans, ancient Greeks and Romans cared little for non-family members. Those “… outside the family circle were not deemed to share any attributes with those within. No common humanity was acknowledged, an attitude confirmed by the practice of enslavement.”

The attitude described here certainly existed (and continues to exist today; indeed it fairly describes u.s. foreign policy), but the suggestion that this view was all-pervasive and unchallenged in Greco-Roman antiquity is a mistake. The Cynics and Stoics defended a vision of all humanity as a single community, a cosmopolis; and even the less cosmopolitan Aristotle, who defended slavery on the basis of bullshit theories of racial inferiority, insisted that foreign races that were not inferior (and he granted that there were some) could not justly be conquered or enslaved. On this basis Aristotle condemned societies with aggressive foreign policies. Aristotle also insisted (NE 1108a9-28, 1126b19-1127a2, 1155a16-31) that we have duties of friendship toward strangers and foreigners. The legitimacy of slavery was also challenged by thinkers from Alkidamas to Zeno of Citium.

For the ancient Romans and Greeks society consisted of a collection of extended families. The heads of the families, including family-based clans and tribes, held all the power and made all of the decisions. Only the heads of families could become citizens in the polis.

Sure, for the most part – though again hardly confined to antiquity, since even the supposedly egalitarian John Rawls in the first version of his 1971 Theory of Justice had “heads of families” as the contracting parties behind the Veil of Ignorance. But likewise again, this perspective was not exactly unchallenged; Plato famously advocated an independent political role for women in his Republic, as well as the abolition of the family; and similar views were defended by the Cynics and early Stoics (and arguably Xenophon to some extent).

Antiquity had no notion of the powers of the government being limited by the rights of individuals, even for family heads.

The entire Athenian legal system was a vast contrivance to limit governmental power. Ancient constitutional thought focused heavily on the idea of structuring the balance of power between different classes so as to prevent any one class from being in a position to impose injustice unchecked on another. And the idea that individuals have claims of justice that states are bound to respect was defended by nearly every ancient political theorist, including Aristotle and Cicero. (For Aristotle, see Fred Miller’s book Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics; for Cicero, see his discussion of natural law in De Republica and De Legibus.)

Consider also Pericles’ funeral oration, as recorded or invented (or some of each) by Thucydides, in which tolerance and respect for individual choice are lauded: “in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes.” Of course Athens did not live up consistently to this ideal (nor do modern so-called liberal societies live up to it today), but the ideal was clearly recognised and formulated.

The ancients had no concept of the equality of man, either. Even for Plato and Aristotle, a natural hierarchy of humanity existed, much like the caste system of India. Some were born to rule, others to serve or fight.

Certainly Plato and Aristotle believed in political hierarchies based on allegedly natural inequalities. But they were not the only political thinkers of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Cynics and early Stoics (such as Zeno of Citium) defended a vision of society in which all hierarchical distinctions of rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, males and females would be abolished. Some Epicureans (like Diogenes of Oenoanda) held similar views. (And turning our gaze momentarily eastward: the caste system in India had its early critics as well, notably among Buddhists.)

Politics and war became the noblest occupations while commerce was held in contempt.

Held in contempt by whom? Successful merchants enjoyed enormous social prestige in Greece and Rome; and Hesiod’s praise of industry and commercial competition is justly famous. As for the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle did disparage commerce (though Aristotle disparaged warfare as well – as did the Epicureans), but again, they were not the only philosophers in classical antiquity. The Stoics in particular were vigorous defenders of commerce, as was Xenophon; and then of course there’s Cicero, whose book on business ethics I’ve previously mentioned. I challenge anyone to read Cicero and come away with an impression of a thinker who is valorising warfare and downgrading commerce. Individualism may not have reigned supreme in antiquity (nor does it today), but its basic concepts were formulated and defended by a good many influential thinkers.

For more on classical Greek and Roman individualism, see my various discussions here.

Dear C4SS supporters,

Welcome to my final media coordinator report. Not THE last media coordinator report, just MY last media coordinator report. After not quite five years in this position, I’ve decided it’s time to move on (amicably — I remain a senior fellow at the Center and an advisor at our parent organization, the Molinari Institute). It’s been a pleasure working with all of my comrades at the Center and for all of you who support our efforts. Thank you for a wonderful and rewarding experience!

And, of course, congratulations to my successor in the position, Trevor Hultner, who has spent most of this last month getting up to speed on the various tasks involved. When the C4SS phone rings now, it’s Trevor who answers it. He’s been handling final editing/proofing of our op-eds for a couple of weeks and took over submissions yesterday. I know you’ll treat him as well as you’ve treated me.

Because of the overlap involved in a change of this kind, and because I messed up a text file I’ve maintained, this month’s figures are a little fragmented.

For example, I know that I’ve made 35,529 submissions of Center op-eds to 2,578 publications worldwide this month — but that figure is low because Trevor has made and/or will today make, several thousand more. The real total for March will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 submissions.

I also know that I identified and logged AT LEAST 50 pickups of C4SS material and three mentions/quotes/cites of C4SS material this month.

I can’t blame Trevor or the changeover for the vagueness of that number. I apparently forgot to hit “save” the other day on the text file I use as a counting tool. I know this because the three mentions/quotes/cites I found aren’t there, even though I typed them in. There may be some missing pickups as well, but 50 is the number showing and the number I’m certain of.

The reason I have always kept a running log of pickups/mentions is that tracking this stuff is a sort of “rolling” thing. A piece that gets published and submitted on February 25th might well not be picked up until February 28th and might not show up in the search engines and get noticed and logged into the press room page by me or my successor until March 8th. So I can’t just go back to the press room and grab a number for a given month. The pickups are all logged there with publication date, not the date they were found. Sorry about that.

Anyway — around 40k submissions this month, and more than 50 pickups/mentions this month. Not bad! As always, I hope and expect that number to increase over time … but as of the moment I hit “publish” on this report, that’s out of my hands and in the (capable) hands of others. Once again, it has been a privilege to work with and for all of you.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Senior Fellow
Center for a Stateless Society

Call for Abstracts

for the Molinari Society’s next Eastern Symposium, to be held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting, January 6-9, 2016, in Washington DC. (Note that this meeting is the week after New Year’s, rather than, as in past years, just before New Year’s. This later time is expected to be the new normal for the Eastern APA henceforth.)

Symposium Topic:
Police Abuse: Solutions Beyond the State

Submission Deadline:
18 May 2015

Abuses of power by police officers, especially abuses motivated by racial bias, are at last beginning to receive increased public scrutiny. Anarchists have long regarded police misconduct as a deep-rooted and systemic problem, one requiring radical rather than reformist solutions, but have not always agreed about what a radical solution should look like. Some anarchists have advocated a system of private security firms held in check by market competition; others have looked to volunteer and mutual-aid watch groups responsible to the communities they patrol; still others have rejected both models as insufficiently different from the government police system they’re supposed to replace.

Would/should there be police, or something like police, in an anarchist society? If so, how might they be restrained from abuses? If not, what institutions or practices might secure protection from invasive behaviour instead?

Abstracts should be submitted for the 2016 Eastern Symposium by 18 May, 2015. Submissions from any point of view (anarchist or otherwise) are welcome. Please submit an abstract only if you expect to be able to present the paper in person at the Symposium. (Final papers should be of appropriate scope and length to be presented within 15-30 minutes.) Submitting authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their papers by 31 May, 2015.

Submit abstracts as e-mail attachments, in Word .doc or .docx format, PDF, or ODT, to longrob@auburn.edu.

For any questions or information, contact Roderick T. Long at the above email address.

(In other news, the Molinari Symposium originally scheduled for this year’s Pacific APA in Vancouver has been postponed to next year in San Francisco; details to follow in due course.)

The worker-run independent publisher and radical book distributor AK Press recently had a major setback because of a nearby warehouse fire. Happily, no one in the warehouse that AK resides in was harmed and everyone got out safely. But unfortunately several units (including AK’s) took water and smoke damage. In addition the City of Oakland has red-tagged their building which means they cannot do their usual business.

To recover from this mess and to help support other nearby organizations that were affected by this disaster AK Press are looking for some support on their GoFundMe campaign.

AK Press says on their website that,

We’re anarchists, which is reflected both in the books we provide and in the way we organize our business. Decisions at AK Press are made collectively, from what we publish, to what we distribute and how we structure our labor. All the work, from sweeping floors to answering phones, is shared. When the telemarketers call and ask, “who’s in charge?” The answer is: everyone.

And:

“Our goal isn’t profit (although we do have to pay the rent),” the site continues. “Our goal is supplying radical words and images to as many people as possible. The books and other media we distribute are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants. We make them widely available to help you make positive (or, hell, revolutionary) changes in the world.”

AK Press already has over 30,000 of their 150,000 goal, please support radical publishing and distribution!

Uri Avnery discusses what the Israeli left should do.

D. Brady Nelson discusses government regulation as a hidden tax.

Sheldon Richman discusses rethinking the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Justin Raimondo discusses Bibi as George Wallace.

Kevin Carson discusses Thomas Piketty’s book on capital.

Robert VerBruggen discusses a book on gun control in Nazi Germany.

Bruce Fein discusses counter-terrorism policy and stupidity.

Tom Switzer discusses myths about the Iraq War.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Tony Blair and the Middle East.

Rebecca Gordon discusses the War on Drugs in Afghanistan and Mexico.

Chris Rufer discusses corporate welfare.

William Smith discusses food freedom and community.

Lawrence Davidson discusses the recent Israeli vote for the right.

Christopher Burg discusses why he won’t get involved in politics again.

Laurence M. Vance discusses Hilary Clinton as a conservative Republican.

Dave Lindorff discusses making enemies via drones in Yemen.

Binoy Kampmark discusses Australia in Afghanistan.

Dan Sanchez discusses why Ron Paul is right about Ukraine.

Bionic Mosquito discusses prelude to war.

Bionic Mosquito discusses famine under Stalin.

Adam Hudson discusses torture in American history.

David Swanson discusses why Bill Maher is not our best weapon against ISIS.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses a world without the welfare state.

Sheldon Richman discusses why mandatory voting is a bad idea.

Mikayla Novak discusses household production from a libertarian feminist perspective.

Todd E. Pierce discusses fascism and neocons.

Laurence M. Vance discusses dress codes, employment, and religion.

Sheldon Richman discusses how many rights we have.

Adil E. Shamoo and Bonnie Bricker discusses why ISIS exists.

Paul Craig Roberts discusses how the regime became murder inc.

So, libertarians, how many rights do people have? One (say, the right to life, albeit with countless applications)? Three (life, liberty, and property)? Or an unlimited number (the right to do this, that, and the other, ad infinitum)?

Because part of any strategy to achieve a fully free society presumably includes persuading nonlibertarians to be libertarians, formulating a clear answer to my question seems worthwhile. The simpler the answer the better (other things equal), because getting people to think about moral and political philosophy, especially when we appear to be challenging the reigning view, is tough enough without needlessly making it tougher.

For that reason, I would like it to be the case that we have only one right — a right that could account for what at first glance appear to be other distinct rights. The challenge is to make that case. Fortunately for me, Roderick Long does this in “Why Libertarians Believe There Is Only One Right.”

Long begins by noting that the libertarian philosophy strikes some nonlibertarians, particularly advocates of the welfare state, as “weird.” He cites one critic who complains that libertarians see rights violations all around while denying the existence of welfare rights. Long comments:

The unspoken subtext is: why on earth would anyone believe this? To the nonlibertarian, libertarianism seems simply weird in its insistence that people have, on the one hand, no welfare rights at all — and on the other hand, property rights so robust that nearly every law on the books stands in violation of them. Libertarianism, in its apparent stark and fanatical focus on negative rights above all else, irresistibly reminds nonlibertarians of the contending schools of Presocratic philosophy, intemperately insisting that everything was water, or fire, or motion, or rest.

But appearances can be misleading — and are in this case, Long writes. Libertarianism “derives not from an alien set of values, but rather from a quite ordinary set of values coupled with a recognition of the logical implications of those values.” (Long emphasizes that his intention in this paper is not to demonstrate the truth of libertarianism but only to show that libertarianism isn’t “especially puzzling or mysterious” — certainly an effort worth making.)

Mainstream libertarians, Long writes, “believe that there is, fundamentally, only one right: the right not to be aggressed against.  All further rights are simply applications of, rather than supplements to, this basic right.” (I state what I see as the basis of the nonaggression obligation here.) Long sets out a positive and a negative thesis.

Positive Thesis: “we have a right not to be aggressed against.” (He uses “aggression” in the nonnormative sense to mean simply initiatory force.)

Negative Thesis: “we have no other rights.”

Thus we have only one right. Long acknowledges that while not everyone accepts the Positive Thesis, nevertheless “it is attractive and … there is nothing mysterious about embracing it.” The Negative Thesis, however, is apt to provoke outrage.

First we need to be clear on what we mean by a right.

To have a right [Long writes] is to have a moral claim against another person or persons; but not every such moral claim is a right. My having a right to be treated in a certain manner involves, at least, other people having an obligation so to treat me; but it must involve more than this, for not every such obligation has a right as its correlate. I have an obligation to be polite to my associates and grateful to my benefactors, but they have no right (except metaphorically) to my politeness or my gratitude….

The obligations that are correlated with rights differ from other obligations in being legitimately enforceable…. Only if a moral claim is a right may you use force as a means of securing my compliance.

Teasing out the implications, Long says a right has two parts. The first is the obligation that other people have to treat the right-holder in a particular way. The second part is the right-holder’s legitimate authority to compel others to act that way. (Long calls this the “permissibility component.”)

We perhaps are not surprised to learn that the positive and negative theses are intimately related: “The Positive Thesis turns out to entail the Negative Thesis (at least with the help of some truistic auxiliary premises).” Thus it makes no sense for someone to embrace the Positive Thesis without also embracing the Negative Thesis, although may nonlibertarians think they can do so.

How is the Negative Thesis entailed by the Positive Thesis? Long: “The possibility of accepting the Positive Thesis while rejecting the Negative Thesis is precluded by the logical structure of the concepts involved. If people have a right not to be aggressed against, then people have a right not to be subjected to any initiatory use of force.” This is a tautology of great consequence.

If people had rights in addition to the right to be free from aggression, that would indicate that they had enforceable claims against others whose alleged rights violation did not entail the use of aggressive force. (If it did entail the use of aggressive force, we would be back to the Positive Thesis and would not be talking about an additional right.) That would in turn indicate that the one whose alleged other right is violated could legitimately use force to compel others to act in a certain way. (Remember, that’s an important part of what it means to have a right.) But since by stipulation those others had not used aggressive force, the force used against them in defense of the alleged other right would itself entail aggression.

In other words, Smith’s right to be free from aggression would clash with Jones’s proposed other right. That is incoherent, unless we dump the right not to be aggressed against — which would open up a horrendous can of worms. Long explains:

If an activity involves no use of force, then there can be no right to suppress it by force, since such a use of force would be aggression, and so would violate the obligation component of the right not to be aggressed against. And if an activity involves a non-initiatory use of force, then once again there can be no right to suppress it by force, since such a use of force would violate the permissibility component of the right not to be aggressed against. Hence the only activity whose forcible suppression is consistent with the right not to be aggressed against, is aggression itself…. Thus if aggression is the only activity whose forcible suppression is permissible, then refraining from aggression is the only activity whose performance may legitimately be compelled. It follows that by recognizing a right not to be aggressed against, we have thereby ipso facto ruled out the existence of any other right.

This exposes a fatal flaw in the theory of positive, or welfare, rights. Moreover, Long adds, it demolishes the “frequent charge that libertarians recognize too few rights.” Since the concept right implies that people must not violate of them, “every time we add a right here, we ipso facto subtract a right there; the total quantity of rights can thus be rearranged, but not increased. Perhaps libertarians recognize the wrong rights; but it makes no sense to complain that they recognize too few.”

President Obama thinks that forcing us to vote might be a good idea. That he could favor punishing people for not voting — which means taking their money by force and imprisoning or even shooting them if they resist — is unsurprising. The essence of government is violence — aggressive, not defensive, force. Government is not usually described in such unrefined terms, but consider its most basic power: taxation. If you can’t refuse the tax collector with impunity, you are a victim of robbery. It doesn’t matter that government claims to render “services” if you don’t want them.

Most of us learn young that violence is wrong except in defense of self or other innocent life. To those who say society without government would be problematic, I reply that most of us also learn that even a good end cannot justify a bad means. Besides, most of the ills that government “protects” us from — such as economic distress and terrorism — result from its own policies.

Aside from the violence inherent in the system, mandatory voting has conceptual problems. Enthusiasts of modern government often say that voting is a right — the most sacred right in some people’s eyes. (More sacred than the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?) It’s also said to be a duty. Can it be both?

Having a right means you may freely decide to take — or not take — an action without forcible interference by anyone else, including people in the government. Your right to the car you bought signifies that you are free to use it peacefully — or not. It makes no sense to say that your right to your car obligates you to use it or face punishment. Anyone who talks that way simply does not understand what a right is. A right, then, differs from an enforceable duty.

The story is the same with voting. If one has a right to vote, the idea of making the exercise of that right mandatory is absurd. No matter how many good consequences Obama dubiously foresees from compulsory voting, they can’t change the fact that forcing people to exercise a right makes no sense. It’s a sad commentary that he is not ridiculed widely for his suggestion.

If voting is a right, it can’t be a duty, and if it’s a duty, it can’t a right. Perhaps it’s neither.

I’ve assumed people have a right to vote, but let’s not be too hasty. It’s an odd right, indeed, because it entails participation in the process by which government officials are chosen. But as we’ve already established, government’s essence is aggressive violence. Can you have a right to participate in what would be condemned as a criminal operation if it were run “privately”? Can you have a right to help determine who will govern others against their will?

If for the sake of argument we concede the right to participate in the political system, shouldn’t we have to acknowledge the corollary right not to participate? I don’t mean just the right not to vote, but the right to opt out of government altogether — voting, taxation, war, regulation. Yet government does not let us theoretically free people opt out of individual programs — try opting out of the Mideast wars or Social Security — much less across the board.

In other words, no matter how often we’re told that the government exists by the consent of the governed, it really does not. Were you asked to consent? Please don’t say that remaining in the country counts as consent, for that would assume what is here disputed: that before any specific consent, the government has legitimate jurisdiction over the territory known as the United States of America. In fact, consent is merely presumed, and nothing you can do will ever be taken by the government as legitimate withholding of consent. Yet if that is true, then nothing you can do could logically constitute consent either. To repeat: if nonconsent is impossible, so is consent.

Individual freedom in moral communities requires not an impotent “right” to cast one vote among multitudes, but the right to ignore the state and live peacefully.

Durante el mes de marzo traduje al español mi artículo “Mentiras a diestra y siniestra: La muerte del fiscal Alberto Nisman”, “¡Hey Google, no seas malo!” de Kevin Carson, y “‘Reforma plolítica’, el nuevo término de moda impulsado por el gobierno” de Erick Vasconcelos.

Como de constumbre, aprovecho para invitarte a hacer una donación de US$5 para C4SS. Con ella nos ayudarías a seguir con nuestro esfuerzo por reflexionar seriamente sobre la idea de una sociedad organizada en base a la cooperación voluntaria y cómo hacerla realidad.

¡Salud y Libertad!

Spanish Media Coordinator Report, March 2015

During March I translated into Spanish my own “Lies All the Way Down: The Death of Prosecutor Alberto Nisman”, “Hey, Google — Don’t Be Evil!” by Kevin Carson, and “Political Reform: The New Government Buzzword” by by Erick Vasconcelos.

As always, I’m seizing this opportunity to invite you to donate $5 for C4SS: your contribution is what allows us to keep reflecting upon and promoting the idea of a society based on voluntary cooperation. Please donate $5 today!

¡Salud y libertad!

Ivan Eland discusses the different responses to terrorism in West Africa and the Middle East.

Ivan Eland discusses why Israel needs tough love.

Charles Pierson discusses drone proliferation.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses conservative blindness on Iran.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses separating charity and state.

Veronique de Rugy discusses the import-export bank, corporate welfare, and the Democrats.

Matt Peppe discusses Israeli aggression couched in defensive rhetoric.

James E. Miller discusses conservatism against rolling back the state.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses Venezuelan sanctions, U.S. dominance, and the power elite.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses ill fated wars and their supporters.

James Peron discusses why there is nothing libertarian about conservatism.

Patrick Cockburn discusses life under ISIS.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the story of a Jihadi who left ISIS.

Patrick Cockburn discusses an ISIS siege.

Linn Washington discusses the U.S. failure to address police brutality and racism.

Touraj Daryaee discusses warmongers who refuse to learn from history.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses a nanny state failure.

David Axe discusses Andrew Cockburn’s book on high value targeting.

Wendy McElroy discusses how America became the world’s policemen.

Belen Fernandez discusses Blackwater and the Iraq War anniversary.

Mitchell Plitnick discusses why the recent victory of the Israeli right is troubling.

Sanford Ikeda discusses trading with the “other”.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the good and bad of drones.

Bionic Mosquito discusses political mass murder.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the Islamic State as a Western thing.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses whether it matters who is elected president or not.

Joseph R. Stromberg discusses a book on Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke.

Kelly Vlahos discusses America’s warlords in Afghanistan.

Jeffrey St. Clair discusses torture.

Leonard C. Goodman discusses Yemen as an example of the failure of Obama’s drone policy.

The Benjamin Netanyahu on display in the days before and after Tuesday’s Israeli election is the same one who has been in power all these years. Right along, he was there for all to see, so no one should have been surprised by his performance. I seriously doubt that anyone really is surprised. Americans who slavishly toe the Israeli and Israel Lobby line may act surprised, but that’s really just their embarrassment at having to answer for the prime minister of the “State of the Jewish People.” (If Israel is indeed the State of the Jewish People, it follows that the lobby may properly be called the Jewish Lobby, though that seems to offend some people. The term need not suggest that every person identifying as Jewish is pro-Israel or pro-Likud. I have known religious Jews who are severely anti-Israel and anti-Zionist.)

Democrats especially are in a bind. They can’t afford to distance themselves from Netanyahu and alienate Jewish sources of campaign donations, yet they are visibly uncomfortable with his so openly racist fear-mongering about Israeli Arab voters — “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.” The Democrats’ defense of that ugly appeal as merely a way to get the vote out is disgraceful. (Imagine something equivalent happening in the United States.)

Democrats are also nervous about Netanyahu’s declaration that no Palestinian state will be established as long as he heads the Israeli government. (His post-election attempt to walk it back somewhat was not well-received.)

Life was so much simpler for people like Hillary Clinton when Netanyahu didn’t say things like that in public. Meanwhile, hawkish Republicans — that’s redundant — are unfazed.

For anyone paying close attention, Netanyahu’s racism and ruthless opportunism are not news at all. A few years ago a candid video from 2001 surfaced in which he cynically described Americans as “easily moved,” i.e., manipulated. The Israelis, he said, can do what they want with the Palestinians because the Americans “won’t get in their way.” These are the same Americans who are forced to send Israel $3 billion a year in military assistance so that it can regularly bomb and embargo Palestinians in the Gaza Strip prison camp and oppress Palestinians in a slightly more subtle manner in the shrinking West Bank and East Jerusalem.

With Netanyahu, you really do know what you get, which arguably makes him a better choice to run Israel than the left-of-center Zionist Union because the Laborites share most of Likud’s beliefs about the Palestinians; they’re just more circumspect and therefore more comforting to so-called Americans “liberals.” Saying you support negotiations toward a Palestinian state is not the same as actually being for a viable Palestinian state. Palestinians have little left of the walled-off West Bank and East Jerusalem because of Jewish-only towns built over the years by the two dominant parties, Likud and Labor. And Gaza is a bombed-out disaster area. (Even for many two-state advocates, justice is not the concern. Rather, demographic circumstances make one state untenable for these pragmatists because out-and-out apartheid, which the world would frown on, would be seen as the only alternative to a genuinely democratic state with a Jewish minority. The one-staters have their own solution to the Palestinian problem, the one used in 1948: transfer.)

The prime minister is a sophist extraordinaire; he says whatever he needs to say to gain his objective of the moment. When he ruled out a Palestinian state before the election, in a bid to shore up his right-wing base, he was interpreted as reversing a commitment he made in 2009, after he had returned to power, the same year that Barack Obama took office. The campaign reversal put Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in a most uncomfortable position, since they had made the fraudulent “peace process” a top priority, until talks broke down last spring, a failure they pinned at least in part on Netanyahu. Once the election was over and some reconciliation with the U.S. government was required, Netanyahu “clarified” his remarks, saying his 2009 position had not really changed; only the environment has.

I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change. I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.

I never changed my speech in Bar Ilan University six years ago calling for a demilitarised Palestinian state that recognises the Jewish state. What has changed is the reality.

What has changed? Netanyahu probably has a few things in mind. The Palestinians reject a new demand that they formally recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people (everywhere). Decades ago the Palestinian leadership accepted Israel’s existence within the pre-1967-war borders — that is, it relinquished claim to 78 percent of pre-1948 Palestine. (Even Hamas has said it was willing to defer to the secular Fatah and the Palestinian Authority). But in a goalpost-moving action, Netanyahu recently added the new demand, something he knows the Palestinian leadership cannot accept if it is to maintain legitimacy (or whatever legitimacy it still has). Such a concession would be prejudicial to Israel’s non-Jewish Arab citizens and would favor Jews who have never set foot in the country over native-born Palestinian Arabs who were driven out of their ancestral home and who are forbidden to return.

In other words, Netanyahu knowingly placed an impossible precondition on the negotiations. But it is he who has insisted there be no preconditions whatever. When the Palestinians demanded that Israel stop seizing Palestinian-owned land on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish-only neighborhoods, Netanyahu refused on the grounds that this was a precondition. (The Palestinians relented and gave talks a chance, no doubt under American pressure.) But it was not so much a precondition as a recognition that the land being seized was precisely the subject of the negotiation. In what universe is it reasonable for two parties to negotiate over territory while one is busy annexing it and building permanent settlements?

It is this sort of thing that exposes Netanyahu’s (and most Israelis’) bad faith regarding the Palestinians. He sabotages the “peace process,” then blames the Palestinians for failing to be an earnest partner for peace. (Now he’s trying to sabotage multilateral talks with Iran. See a pattern?)

Netanyahu may also be saying the timing is wrong for a Palestinian state — which would be a rump state completely at the Israeli government’s mercy — because ISIS is creating turmoil in nearby Iraq and Syria, and Iran is expanding its influence in the region. The sophistry here is that much trouble in the Middle East can be traced to Israel’s injustice against the Palestinians and belligerence toward its neighbors, especially the repeated devastating invasions of southern Lebanon. Ethnic-cleansing, massacres perpetrated by Zionist militias at the time of independence, unrelenting occupation of the West Bank since 1967, the repression and impoverishment of the Gazans, and the routine humiliation of Israel’s Arab second-class citizens have created deep grievances that are only made worse by Netanyahu and those who support him.

This of course has spilled over onto the United States, since Democratic and Republican regimes stand by Israel no matter what and no matter how many times its government humiliates American rulers. When former Gen. David Petraeus told a Senate Armed Services Committee in 2010 that the U.S.-Israeli relationship “foments anti-American sentiment,” he was merely repeating what many other officials had acknowledged before. “Meanwhile,” Petraeus added, “al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas….” The attacks of 9/11 were in part motivated by anger over America’s relationship with Israel. Osama bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war makes clear that this relationship was at the heart of his hostility toward the United States. Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, joined the cause after Israel’s 1996 assault on Lebanon, James Bamford writes in The Shadow Factory. (Open discussion of these facts is discouraged by spurious charges of anti-Semitism against anyone who raises it.)

So, again, Netanyahu cites reasons for not making peace that he himself helped create or is now perpetuating. That he is taken seriously in American politics is a testament to the power of the Lobby.

Netanyahu’s apparent reelection and the egregious circumstances under which it was accomplished should prompt a reconsideration of the special relationship. Although it should have happened long ago, now would be a good time for the U.S. government to end the relationship and start seeing Israel as a rogue and aggressor nuclear power. (Of course the United States is hardly one to talk.) No more excuses. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Let’s have one moral standard for all.

Not that I think it has a chance of happening, but the U.S. government should cease all taxpayer aid to the Israeli government, stop vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that condemn Israel for its daily violations of human rights, and stop impeding Palestinian efforts to set up an independent country (with membership in the International Criminal Court, etc.). The United States should withdraw from the Middle East and enter into a detente with Iran (which is not developing a nuclear weapon). This would have an immediate dividend: we would not be driven to war with Iran by Netanyahu, the Lobby, and its neoconservative Republican and Democratic stooges in Congress.

In an anti-libertarian rant titled “You’re Not the Boss of Me! Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham,” David Masciotra charges that libertarianism amounts to the petulant selfishness of a child who resents all restrictions on his or her behavior.

Masciotra conveniently focuses on libertarians’ saying “you have no right to impose stuff on us,” while ignoring its corollaries “we have no right to impose stuff on you” and “you have no right to impose stuff on them.” But then it’s a bit harder to spin the latter two as childish selfishness.

Judging from what he writes and where he writes it, I reckon Masciotra fancies himself a man of the left. There was a time when “Dump the Bosses Off Your Back” was a popular leftist slogan. But the idea of a society without bosses seems to carry no charm for Masciotra.

It’s also telling that Masciotra sees libertarian opposition to being bossed as in tension with “bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity.” Apparently, for Masciotra empathy and solidarity are impossible among equals, and can exist only between benevolent shepherds and their docile, subservient flocks. Libertarians, by contrast, see empathy and solidarity as realized in their fullest and healthiest form between free and equal persons in voluntary, uncoerced, unbossed association.

It seems a safe bet that anyone who ridicules resentment against bosses either is a boss, or aims to be a boss, or wants to curry favour with the bosses. But here at C4SS, our attitude toward bosses — be they politicians and bureaucrats, or corporate beneficiaries of state privilege — is: dump ’em. In a truly libertarian world, no one will be the boss of anyone else.

Andrew Bacevich discusses the national insecurity state.

Melvin A. Goodman discusses the CIA’s double standard.

Ahmad Barqawi discusses Libya, ISIS, and the luxury of hindsight.

Roger Annis discusses Ukraine’s extreme right.

Logan Albright discusses private enterprise vs free enterprise.

Laurence M. Vance discusses what conservatives get wrong about healthcare.

A. Barton Hinkle discusses ISIS, communism, and the lure of utopianism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses for profit prisons and the War on Drugs.

Heather Gray discusses the militarization of American police forces and foreign policy.

Jim Lobe discusses the message behind the Senate GOP letter to Iran.

Jeff Mackler discusses Obama’s new “War on Terrorism”.

Sheldon Richman discusses the lust for war with Iran.

Andrew Cockburn discusses why Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State will fail.

Arun Gupta discusses how ISIS became the face of evil.

Kevin Carson discusses treason.

Sheldon Richman discusses a critique of libertarianism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses whether Obama’s sanctions on Venezuela are really motivated by human rights or not.

Justin Raimondo discusses whether Venezuela is a threat to U.S. national security.

Ryan McMaken discusses taxation and the draft.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses whether Russian aggression in the Ukraine occurred.

David Gordon discusses a book on Lincoln.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses business and corruption.

Peter Maass discusses atrocities committed by U.S. trained Iraqi forces.

Steve Horowitz discusses using constitutional protections for liberty friendly purposes.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses a potential war with Iran.

Daniel Larison discusses the case for an unnecessary war with Iran.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the lack of conservative outrage over Ferguson.

Josh Harkinson discusses right-wing Israeli settlers and U.S. subsidies.

Scott Shackford discusses how Terry Pratchett made him a libertarian.

William Pfaff discusses the Ukraine as a foreign policy disaster