Internet Commentator

Voluntary City

Marginal Revolutions points to a very interesting blog: Peter Gordon's Blog which, among other things, takes a free market look at urban design and development.

One of the principles to which I adhere is the primacy of the voluntary nature of social interaction. This is why, for example, I cannot share John's view that individuals must be forced to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good of society. It is also why I think any kind of central planning is wrong. This raises a potential conundrum for large scale urban planning: Received wisdom is in favour of central government control of infrastructure and urban development and a planning oversight. The thinking goes, without planning controls, chaotic shantytowns would replace ordered development. Peter Gordon links to a fascinating book which seeks to demonstrate that this view is fallacious: The Voluntary City

The case for civil society is stronger than most of its enthusiasts realize. As the authors of The Voluntary City show, history is replete with enough examples of well-functioning voluntary institutions to merit a radical reconsideration of the presumed need for government involvement in many areas of civic and commercial life. Roads and bridges, education, housing, social welfare, land-use planning, commercial law, even policing and criminal prosecutions have been provided effectively by the non-governmental sector at various times and places in the past.

Nuts

I have a post over at Samizdata on Libertarianism and Flavour Encapsulation

Why I'm not a revolutionary.

Perry de Havilland has a post over at Samizdata on Mugabe's which proposes arming those opposed to the tyrant. A comment, now mysteriously disappeared, chided Perry for this and compared his position to the defenders of the IRA. Yet if it is reasonable to arm the self-styled defenders of the victims of Mugabe's clique, then the same rationale would apply to those who styled themselves as defenders of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland from sectarian attacks. I believe it is wrong in both cases.

There is a crucial difference between intent and outcome and there is a further distinction between declared intent and actual intent. When the government says it is going to "ban" any activity, for example fox-hunting, it doesn't mean that fox-hunting will cease to take place. It just means that this activity will henceforth be punishable. If you arm a militia group with the intention of ousting Mugabe this is not the same as saying that Mugabe will be ousted by that group. It means that the group might attempt to oust Mugabe, assuming they stick to their declared intention.

There are unintended consequences which are unpredictable and there are unintended consequences which are clearly predictable. One predictable outcome of arming a militia sufficiently that it might oust Mugabe and his cronies is that such new rulers, as they would surely be, of Zimbabwe have no disincentive to behave in exactly the same way as Mugabe himself.

There are certainly problems inherent with democracy. In itself it is insufficient for liberty. It is no consolation to someone subject to the whim of a tyranny that this tyranny acts with the consent of 51% of that person's compatriots. Churchill understood this when he declared democracy to be the least worst system. Yet democracy is immeasurably superior to feudalism. Contemporary feudalism is represented by the phenomenon of the warlord. The warlord obtains and retains power not by consent of those he rules but by force.

In the course of our recent discussion about Cuba, Dick O'Brien described the contemporary appeal of Che Guevera thus

Che's idealism about overthrowing the corrupt regimes of South American robber barons

Yet, how do we know Guevara acted with the support of the people, Must we take his word for it? I cannot differentiate between Che and contemporary warlords whose "popular support" is ensured by threat of violence. What was wrong with Che Guevera's revolucion was not only that it was in the furtherance of an enforced collectivist dictatorship but that it was backed by force. It may have been a popular revolution, but how can we know? This is the revolutionary conundrum: If the people really want it, there is no need for violence to ensure its success. The only option available for those who would support revolution is the "vanguard theory". Thus a small group of radicals declare that they act in the interests of all, except that by some sort of mechanism, "all" don't realise this yet. The theory states that once the revolution has taken place "all" will see its benefits and support will be retrospectively be granted.

The vanguard theory is the justification for assorted groups, from Al-Qaeda to Marxists. It is even validated by the official version of the founding of the Irish State which accords primary importance to the 1916 rising instead of the 1919 election which elected Sinn Fein on a separatist mandate. The vanguard theory is, however, a trap which merely provides an echo chamber for one's ideology and a post-hoc justification (the omelette) to kill those who resist your vision (the eggs). It further relies, implicitly, on a vision of society divided between a lumpen, mouldable mass and an elite. This should be contradictory to Libertarianism which stresses the voluntary nature of the myriad interactions which make up society. There is no place in Libertarianism for social engineering or violent coercion for purposes other than self-defence or proxy self-defence.

Ditto, Dick

For once, I cannot disagree with a single word of Dick's. And it's not about Manchester United, but Gay Marriage:

Of course, these days, marriage is a civil institution also. While plenty of people opt to get married under the eyes of their god and the state, many others opt for a civil marriage. Why get married if you're not religious? After all, there's nothing to prevent a couple living together and having children. There's obviously a personal aspect. A couple want to make a public statement of commitment to one another. There are also a number of legal issues. For example, in the event of an emergency, you'd like your partner to be immediately recognised as your next of kin. Straight people can take this for granted. Why not gay people?

IRA a state-backed monopoly?

I have a post on Libertarian "conundrums" at Samizdata.

Drugs

Melanie Phillips might like to note that you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose drug prohibition. Kevin Myers, hardly the anarcho-capitalist, has a great piece in today's Irish Times:

The idiocy of our drugs laws is matched only by the idiocy of the refusal of our elected representatives to discuss them intelligently - an idiocy mirrored by our media's fulminations on the subject. Instead, most voices in Ireland can be relied on to enter a denunciation sweepstake, thundering on about how drugs ruin lives, squander fortunes and lead to prostitution, mental illness, crime and misery....So nobody's saying that drug-taking's a good thing. It's not. Often enough, it's a bad thing; and usually a really stupid thing. But it's not as bad as banning all narcotics, and thereby handing a monopoly on drugs supply to criminal conspiracies.

There is a very good philosophical argument against drug prohibition which is based on self-ownership. If you own yourself, you have the implicit right to do whatever you like what that "property". If the government punishes you for "damaging" that property, it is asserting a right to it. It should go without saying that Libertarians reject such implicit serfdom.

There is also, however, a very good utilitarian argument against drug prohibition, which should appeal to a wider constituency. Even if you are a hardcore statist and are blasé about government intervention into the intimate quotidian lives of its citizens, it should be possible to recognise, as Myers has, that whatever the intentions of the war on drugs, the outcome is the enrichment of monopolist criminal gangs, and a parallel "service industry" of prostitution and ordinary crime to fund drug-users' habits. Put simply: the "war" does more harm than the "drugs".

Party Line

Jon asks that I remind Gustave La Joie that there is nothing libertarian about banning the hijab.

Well, Jon: I did already but it didn't seem to make much difference!

Liberty for me but not for thee

It is undoubtedly the case that the best test for someone's true feelings is how they act and not what they say. The next best test, in the absence of action, is to examine the conflict between two stated positions to see which one wins.

Over at Slugger O'Toole Sinn Fein councillor Eoin O'Broin makes the case for Sinn Fein supporting "human rights". It is possible to debunk this without specifically referring to the human rights of those unfortunate enough to be on the end of the republican movement's rough justice. That is by looking at which SF considers more important: Group rights or Individal rights. Nobody who considers the rights of the group to supercede those of any individual can be truly said to support "human rights". One example of this is the notion that communities have a "right" to "police themselves", this assumes the right of anyone, accused of a crime, to equal treatment under the law should be subservient to the "rights" of the group.

Similarly, over at Samizdata many "libertarian" comments-posters demonstrate the depth of their libertarianism by supporting the French state's mandatory dress code for schools. In a typically self-deluding, self-defeating manner, the French government's answer to the Islamification of certain banlieues is to ban schoolgirls from wearing headscarves. This ban, whose sole purpose is to create an illusion of assimilation, is analogous to the creation of these separate Islamic ghettos in the first place and will, if anything, exacerbate the alienation of sections of France's muslim population from mainstream society.

The effectiveness of the ban, however, is hardly the issue for Libertarians. No Libertarian should cheer such a state restriction on individual freedom for the benefit of the collective: French society.