The Glories of the Freed Market

A few weeks ago Tex and I were discussing the question of whether it is correct to talk about libertarians on the left. Tonight I came across two groups that describe themselves as just that: the Center for a Stateless Society, and the Distro of the Libertarian Left.

It makes for interesting reading. Sometimes they really do sound just like Tex, except for an odd tic of using the term "freed" market instead of "free" market. (Apparently this has to do with a distinction they want to make between markets, which they think are good for just the reasons Tex does, and capitalism, by which they mean something like government/corporate cronyism. A "freed" market is a market restored to the glories of which it is capable before all the rent-seekers and bureaucrats got involved in carving out sinecures for themselves.)

Here, though, is a good example of them sounding much like our friend and companion:

Most people take it for granted — because they’ve heard it so many times from politicians and pundits — that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we’re told, is to find the right “balance.” Let’s examine this.

On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after some aspect of my security. To do its job the firm may need some information about me that I don’t readily give out. It’s up to me to decide if I like the trade-off. Nothing wrong there. In a freed market, firms would compete for my business, and competition would pressure firms to ask only for information required for their services. As a result, a minimum amount of information would be requested. If I thought even that was too much, I would be free to choose to look after my security myself. If I did business with a firm that violated the terms of our contract, I would have recourse. At the very least I could terminate the relationship and strike up another or none at all.

In other words, in the freed market I would find the right “balance” for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn’t be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the “balance” differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Actually, we can say that there would be no trade-off between privacy and security at all, because the information would be voluntarily disclosed by each individual on mutually acceptable terms. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to call what the firm does an “intrusion.”

But that sort of situation is not what Barack Obama, Mike Rogers, Peter King, and their ilk mean when they tell us that “we” need to find the right balance between security and privacy. They mean they will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the “security” side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That’s how these things work. (See “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.”) Unlike in a freed market, what the government does is intrusive, because it is done without our consent and often without our knowledge.

So there really are left-libertarians! Although they sometimes seem to prefer to call themselves "anarchists," they also use the identification.

Gathering up Some Threads

I had to go searching for these today for the next Aristotle post, so I thought I'd put the links all in one convenient spot.

Formal Logic, Part I

Formal Logic, Part II

Formal Logic, Part III

Aristotle's Categories

Negative Capability

More on Negative Capability

Although at this point it may not seem related: Rick Santorum on Art

Because it looks like an interesting tool: Quora.com

Anything else I should add on Aristotle or The Knowledge Problem?

How Do You Splint a Broken Paradigm?

Stories are powerful delivery systems for ways of looking at and interpreting the world. A while ago, Grim posted Terry Jones's explanation that the medievals never believed the earth was flat and that Columbus never proved it was round. What a powerful story that had been; many still believe it. Jones drew heavily on the work of Prof. Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose book Inventing the Flat Earth shattered that myth for me. But Russell went beyond a simple explanation of how the story got started and why we shouldn't believe it today. His real question was why, even though the flat earth myth was repeatedly debunked by a number of historians, it persisted for a century and a half.

Part of the answer is that it was too good a story; it fit too well with what many Americans wanted to believe. There are two aspects to that, religion and progress. From the beginning, the English colonists in the Americas were staunchly anti-Catholic. The flat earth myth catered to this by portraying the Catholic hierarchy as idiots. Similarly, from the beginning the colonists believed in progress, expansion, making things better, what some call "the improvement ethic". From that standpoint, the flat earth myth powerfully differentiated the modern man from the medieval one, not just in knowledge (we know more), but in attitude (we are open to discovery, so we can make progress; they were not, so they couldn't).  For many, of course, both of these aspects were useful in maintaining their world view. Now we know that it was all a big lie.

I was in graduate school in history when I discovered this. I started looking into other anti-religion, anti-faith stories from the past. Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial quickly fell; the details of both support very different conclusions than the common anti-religious stories tell. Religion vs. reason? One of the chief charges of the Renaissance humanists against the Roman Catholic Church was that it relied too much on logic. Aristotelian logic was one of the chief epistemological tools of the medieval Church for centuries. Any university-educated medieval bishop could out-logic most modern scientists, I believe. Additionally, most of the famous scientists up into the 19th century were sincerely religious: Kepler, Newton, and many others went so far as to believe science a way of learning about God and saw their scientific discoveries as evidence for God. For them, the practice of science was a religious exercise.

Learning all this initiated a paradigmatic crisis for me. The world obviously did not work the way I thought it did -- religion TOO reasoning? Science and faith supporting each other? All the stories that carried my belief in the science-religion dichotomies clearly lies? I had made some important decisions based on those myths.

It was a kind of insanity, but the evidence was all there. At some point, my world view fell off its shelf and fractured. So far, all of the king's horses and all of the king's men haven't been able to put it together again, not in any coherent form.

I tried out philosophy, but no matter what epistemology I found, it was always flawed. There are some very good systems out there, but at some point you have to step out on faith. In logic, there is that first unreasoned premise. In science, the unprovable premises of ubiquity and parsimony (not to mention scientific naturalism), and of course many scientists reject logic as a method of discovering knowledge. In religion, well, it starts for me with metaphysics.

So here I am, pondering the pieces, nursing my psychological fractures and a Bushmills, neat, wondering, what now?

I hope to flesh out the problem some more as well as make way toward some answers in future posts. Maybe you've had a similar experience, or know something that would help?

Eleven

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Love and Dying Summer

We've had the first cool weather of the year. The hummingbirds are hiding from the cold rain, but they have managed to drain the feeders again. We dug out our warmer covers for the first time since May.

If it would only stop raining, and yet stay cool, it would be perfect. But even with the rain, heart and mind turn to that perfection that lies in the Otherworld. We glimpse it twice a year, in spring and autumn, but especially in the cool that comes at the end of the year. In the first bloom you see the promise, but only in the last hours comes understanding.

Stasi State.

Help us break the law, or we'll prosecute you. It's gone beyond police state at this point.

Sea Storms and Fate

An article on the 717 siege of Constantinople raises a theme that occurs again and again in history:

Still, the Muslims’ troubles were far from over. Nature was not through with them. A terrible sea-storm is said to have all but annihilated the retreating ships, so that, of the 2,560 ships embarking back to Damascus and Alexandria, only ten remained — and of these, half were captured by the Byzantines, leaving only five to make it back to the caliphate and report the calamities that had befallen them (which may be both why the Arab chroniclers are curiously silent about the particulars of these events, and why it would be centuries before Constantinople would be similarly attacked again).

This sea-storm also led to the popular belief that divine providence had intervened on behalf of Christendom, with historians referring to August 15 as an “ecumenical date.”

How many such storms, so severe as to thrash a navy or an army traveling by sea, have convinced people of a divine hand at work? Salamis, Artemisium, Constantinople, the Spanish Armada, the kamikaze that broke up Kubla Khan's fleets...

Alleged Retired Marine Colonel: We're Building a Domestic Army, While Shrinking the Military

Any good reason to think he's not for real?

Fuel Tank

For Tex, who is waiting on them. We've got six at once at this one feeder alone.

A Variation on "Suspicion-less Searches"

So we just finished talking about the New York City Police's use of baseless searches. How about having the TSA do them nationwide?

The best part of the story is that these things are called "VIPR Teams." When you learn what the acronym stands for, you'll understand how far they were stretching to give themselves a scary, scary name.

The TSA sends out its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams to set up unannounced checkpoints used to “Dominate, Intimidate, & Control” American travelers. The purpose of VIPR teams is to maintain a presence in public areas and force travelers to submit to searches, including opening up bags and being patted down.... TSA records show that the teams ran more than 8,800 unannounced checkpoints outside of airports last year alone. These included searches at train stations, bus stations, the Indianapolis 500, the Superbowl, the Democratic and Republican national conventions, political speeches, and sports stadiums, more. CBS Los Angeles reported that TSA conduct an estimated 9,300 “suspicionless” spot searches of travelers in 2011.

("Dominate. Intimidate. Control." is apparently the motto posted at the TSA's Air Marshal training center.)

Does that change anything for anyone from our previous discussion?

Fool Me Twice

I understand how accidental 'unlawful command influence' can happen from the mouth of a President who is completely ignorant of the military, its law and its culture. But how does it happen from his Secretary of Defense, just a few months after the President had demonstrated the consequences by (bad) example?

Stop talking about it. Let the process work. You've done enough damage to the military justice system.

The Perils of Democracy

...are illustrated in a lighthearted way. Type "define literally" into Google, and see what you get.

Even mighty Oxford has fallen.

Quora

The other day I mentioned a site called quora.com that crowd-sources questions of all sorts.  I joined up and have been enjoying the occasional email alerting me to new posts.  Here's a link to a collection of suggestions for handy tips.  I can't quite make out whether you'll be able to access it without joining the site, but if not, I recommend joining.  The article is entitled "What’s something a reasonably smart person likely doesn't know but would find incredibly useful?" The first answer is a list of Google search tools. A couple of items down is a short video showing how to separate an egg yolk from the white by slurping it up with a squeezed-and-released plastic soda bottle.  Later on there are instructions for creating an amplifier for your smartphone/music player out of a toilet-paper roll and a couple of push-pins.  Or you can recharge your computer in a hotel room by plugging it into the USB port on the room's TV set.

Law and order

Or should I say, lawlessness and orderlessness?  In a three-branch system of government, how do we resolve disputes among the branches?  The Obama administration increasingly refuses to comply with laws that don't satisfy its lofty standards.  But courts are rousing themselves.  Will the next spectacle be the administration's flouting of the judicial decrees enforcing the laws?

...And Ride It To War

Douglas sends.

Two Peoples Separated by a Common Language, er, Game

h/t Mad Minerva

Hey, That Seems Reasonable...

...because it's not like there's anything sacred about the union of man and wife, right? I mean, isn't it important that we live in a secular society? Thank God! Oh, wait, no, we can't do that. But thank... something!

Water & Stone

August in Georgia is the month of greatest heat. The mornings are clear and humid, hot by ten, with clouds that mount all day until they are mountains of white and grey.

But in the heat, even the worst heat, there remains water and stone.

Walls

There is no fundamental difference between the NSA’s data mining and eavesdropping operations and a live in agent listening to all your conversations and downloading your browser history. We are all harboring a governmental presence in our homes, without our consent, in what I believe to be a direct violation of the Third Amendment; if our founders were here today I believe they would agree.

The obvious objection is that you have consented to bringing in the internet into your home, by taking the positive action of purchasing services to do so. You've agreed to impossible-to-read Terms of Service that may even say, "...and we'll spy on you relentlessly and sell your secrets to the government," for all you know because no one actually reads those things. On the other hand, nobody can prove it was you who clicked "OK," which makes it pretty dodgy as a contract.

Or maybe they can, since they can track your cellphone in real time to the room in which the "OK" box was clicked...

I don't know that there's a straight Third Amendment claim that can fix this, though I laud them for the attempt. But we do need walls. We need to think about just where and how to build them. The government is always more dangerous to us than our enemies are. It has already all the power over us that they only dream of winning at the conclusion of a long and painful war.

It's not a "defeat" defeat

Mark Steyn on the extended spectacle of the prosecution of the Fort Hood shooter:

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban.  Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.”  The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse.  After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse:  “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”  And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on. 

* * * 

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media.  Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot.  The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged.  Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.