Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute recently wrote an article arguing that libertarians should abandon any arguments regarding natural rights. As Lindsey sees it, the concept of natural rights is an intellectual dead end and that adherence to natural rights arguments should be abandoned. His perspective can largely be boiled down into two categories: strategic pragmatism and the inadequacy of the natural rights doctrine in constructing a libertarian legal order.

Libertarians always have and always will debate strategy. This question is not very interesting to me as it can ultimately only be answered empirically. Lindsey argues that Instead of spinning utopias, libertarians should focus instead on the humbler but more constructive task of making the world we actually inhabit a better place. Im very open to this argument, and as soon as the Cato Institute can demonstrate that it has actually effected change in government policy in a libertarian direction, I am willing to consider capitulating to Lindseys arguments for a more pragmatic strategy. As of yet, however, his constructive approach to libertarianism has had no more reductive effects in government than the purist approach to libertarianism he loves to attack, so it is objectively impossible for him to proclaim his views to be any less utopian than the radicals who stubbornly cling to their principles.

More interesting to me is the claim that natural rights are insufficient in determining a full-blown, operational legal order. This statement is interesting because I was not aware that any natural-rights libertarian scholar ever claimed that it could. Lindsey argues that the problem lies not with the concept of natural rights, but in that concepts overextension because these principles fail to determine the specific guidelines upon which all disputes would be precisely adjudicated.

The first correction that must be made to Lindseys argument is that no serious libertarian thinker argues that natural rights are the beginning and end of libertarian legal theory. What these principles allow us to do is to establish, first, a property ethic and, from this, a theory of justice. Hans Hermann Hoppe offers what is arguably the most complete natural rights doctrine known as his Argumentation Ethics. Even natural rights libertarians who do not accept the ethics of argumentation generally agree on the principles it purports to prove: The Private Property Ethic (or, the Libertarian Property Ethic) and its logical derivative the Non-Aggression Principle, which we may call the libertarian theory of justice.

This forms an ethical basis for libertarianism without which we would have no means of determining what constitutes a libertarian position to begin with. In fairness, Lindsey is not claiming that natural rights are necessarily wrong; he is just saying that libertarians should abandon these ideas whether they are correct or not for pragmatic reasons, of course.

Brink Lindsey may desire a libertarian community that is held together only by a label representing a hodgepodge of contradictory political positions after all, this is the formula that has made the Republican and Democratic parties so successful! but we nave purists often desire something more consistent and principled to associate ourselves with, and there is no means of establishing principles aside from ethical philosophy. What the ethical philosophy of natural rights allows us to do is direct our own individual behavior according to libertarian principles and to prescribe political solutions that are ethically consistent with these principles. This does not mean that there is a precisely determined, canonical position on every conceivable issue for libertarians, but these disagreements stem from the fact that ethical philosophy can (and should) be debated. But it cannot be dismissed altogether.

However, Lindsey is correct in arguing that the establishment of this theory of justice is insufficient in determining legal structure and answering certain questions regarding positive law. He does concede that more sophisticated presentations of radical libertarianism do take note of some of these complexities but adds the caveat that they present these open questions as minor blank spaces in an otherwise determinate legal structure, to be filled in by custom or common-law jurisprudence. The problem with his objection is that this demands natural rights theory to be something more than it is intended to be. Thus, it isnt the natural rights libertarians who are overextending the theory of natural rights; it is Brink Lindsey who is doing so.

Natural rights libertarian theorists such as Murray Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe also combine ethical principles with the economic methodology of Ludwig von Mises praxeology to determine what economic system is most compatible with the Private Property Ethic in maximizing prosperity (they determine, as anarcho-capitalists, that a purely free market is the most compatible with this end), and they derive from this economic framework the most compatible legal framework that, combined with the libertarian theory of justice, will most effectively handle disputes. The complete libertarian political framework provides both an ethical and a pragmatic answer to political questions, but Brink Lindsey appears to live in a world in which a libertarian must choose to deal exclusively with one category or the other. This one-sided approach to libertarianism is neither desirable nor possible (after all, even if one were to make an exclusively pragmatic argument, as Lindsey advises, then the assumption of any goodness of the results of the policies prescribed tacitly depend on some ethical value judgment to begin with).

Economic theory does not empower us to determine the specific manner in which a legal system will manifest in a given society. It simply tells us that on the assumption that human beings value peace above conflict institutions will emerge that will best facilitate the administration of justice according to the preferences of consumers. This is the economic basis for private courts.

Concomitant to private courts is the establishment of private law, which legal theorists will refer to as common law. As previously quoted, Lindsey assumes that no libertarian has ever offered any answer as to how common law will fill in the blank spaces of the otherwise determinate legal structure. This may be the case if one confines himself to the world of the Cato Institute, as Brink Lindsey appears to do in citing only Cato Institute adjunct scholars in reference to his arguments. But if he were to venture out into the wider libertarian world, Lindsey would find a plethora of scholarship on the issue of common law jurisprudence. Edward Stringham edited an entire collection of scholarly articles regarding anarchic legal theory. Bruce Benson has been conducting scholarship in this field since the 1980s, and his work The Enterprise of Law details the centuries-long Anglo-Saxon history of private dispute adjudication (this work is nearly three decades old, so it may be fair that Lindsey has not yet had time to read it). Even one of the Cato Institutes own senior fellows, John Hasnas, has written a great deal on the establishment of common law through the tort system!

Common law systems throughout history do not address rights violations in a uniform way, and it would be absurd to suggest that any theoretical system of private courts would do so either. However, what can be said is that in the absence of a coercive government, courts will manifest, there will exist an avenue for bringing perceived rights violations in front of an arbiter, and there will be a mechanism through which restitution can be enforced. Lindsey is perplexed by the fact that natural rights doctrines fail to determine the nuances of questions such as the specific boundaries of property rights (in a previous article attacking the Non-Aggression Principle, he asks How far below the surface should property rights in land extend? How high into the sky?), the extent to which a person may lawfully go in defending his or her property, or the precise magnitude of restitution paid to a victim in specific circumstances. These questions, of course, cannot be answered through natural rights theory (except for maybe the property rights one), but it is not a failure of the concept of natural rights that it cannot answer questions that lie beyond its scope! Such questions can only be answered by the individual arbiters in a given system (anarchic or not), and in the case of private law, a natural rights libertarian is in the position to contract with arbitration firms that best conform to libertarian ethics.

This last point was addressed in a simple but profound article by Ben Powell. In You Are an Anarchist. The Question Is How Often? Dr. Powell points out that, even for people who are classically liberal for natural rights reasons, No system will perfect human morality. And, because it is costly to monitor and prevent deviant behavior, some such behavior will exist under any governance system. So even a well-functioning anarchy would still have rights violations. The question remains one of comparative institutions. It would be nave to assume that even the purist libertarian political system (say, anarchy) would usher in a state of perfect and universal adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle; nirvana is not for this world. Muggers will still mug, and killers will still kill. The question is not how do we avoid these rights violations completely? The question is merely what society would best deal with them? What society would minimize rights violations? The natural rights philosophy does not give us the answers to how all the precise nuances of a legal structure will manifest, but it does give us a means of judging whatever legal systems emerge in the absence of government.

But to even ask these questions, one must first establish and defend the concept of rights at all. The libertarians who adhere to natural rights doctrines are simply arguing that in order to make the world we inhabit a better place, we have to have some means of establishing what that actually is, and that necessitates an ethical philosophy. These libertarians are not arguing for natural rights because they are libertarian; rather, they are libertarian because they recognize natural rights. Ignoring these ethics does not make libertarianism more practical, it just eliminates libertarianism altogether. All that is left in Brink Lindseys pragmatic world is the arbitrary political position that government should be smaller to some vague extent, and this would be good for reasons we have no means of offering.

Only in the world of Brink Lindsey is this approach to libertarianism more determinate than the philosophy of natural rights.

Read more:

Natural-Law Libertarianism And The Pursuit Of Justice - The Liberty Conservative

Viking, AmazonAs its title suggests, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Duke historian Nancy MacLean, is filled with all sorts of melodramatic flourishes and revelations of supposed conspiracies. Chains, deep history, radicals, stealthis this nonfiction or an Oliver Stone film? Even the cover depicts a smoke-filled room filled with ample-chinned, shadowy figures! This book, virtually every page announces, isn't simply about the Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan and his "public choice" theory, which holds in part that public-sector actors are bound by the same self-interest and desire to grow their "market share" as private-sector actors are.

No, MacLean is after much-bigger, more-sinister game, documenting what she believes is

the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance...[and] a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.

The billionaires in question, of course, are Koch brothers Charles and David, who have reached a level of villainy in public discourse last rivaled by Sacco and Vanzetti. (David Koch is a trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website; Reason also receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.) Along the way, MacLean advances many sub-arguments, such as the notion that the odious, hypocritical, and archly anti-capitalistic 19th-century slavery apologist John C. Calhoun is the spirit animal of contemporary libertarianism. In fact, Buchanan and the rest of us all are nothing less than "Calhoun's modern understudies."

Such unconvincing claims ("the Marx of the Master Class," as Calhoun was dubbed by Richard Hofstadter, was openly hostile to the industrialism, wage labor, and urbanization that James Buchanan took for granted) are hard to keep track of, partly because of all the rhetorical smoke bombs MacLean is constantly lobbing. In a characteristic example, MacLean early on suggests that libertarianism isn't "merely a social movement" but "the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history":

Could it beand I use these words quite hesitantly and carefullya fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?

Calling attention to the term's origins to describe Franco's covert, anti-modern allies in the Spanish Civil War, MacLean writes

the term "fifth column" has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and even sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest. It is a fraught term among scholars, not least because the specter of a secretive, infiltrative fifth column has been used in instrumental ways by the powerful such as in the Red Scare of the Cold War era to conjure fear and lead citizens and government to close ranks against dissent, with grave costs for civil liberties. That, obviously, is not my intent in using the term....

And yet it's the only term up for MacLean's job, since "the concept of a fifth column does seem to be the best one available for capturing what is distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the supremacy of capital." Sure, "fifth column" is a dirty, lowdown, suspect term among historians because using it trades in hysteria at the service of the ruling class rather than rational analysis intended to help the downtrodden. But come on, people, we're in a twilight struggle here, with a movement whose goals have included, among other things, ending censorship; opening the borders to goods and people from around the world; abolishing the draft and reducing militarism; legalizing abortion, drugs, and alternative lifestyles; reforming criminal justice and sentencing; focusing on how existing government operations, especially K-12 schools, have hurt poor and minority Americans; and doing away with occupational licensing and other barriers to entry for business owners, among other things. So much for hesitation on MacLean's part. Fifth column it is! As for carefulness, it's worth noting in passing that MacLean identifies former Attorney General Ed Meese and foreign-policy hawk Bill Kristol as libertarians, which must be as much of a shock to them as it is to, well, actual libertarians.

Clearly this sort of book, published by a major house (Viking) and written by an eminent historian (MacLean is a chaired professor at Duke and author of highly regarded books), is ideological catnip to people who dislike libertarianism and its growing influence in politics and culture. At the increasingly hard-left New Republic, Alex Shephard introduces an interview with MacLean by writing that Democracy in Chains "exposes the frightening intellectual roots of the radical right, as well as its ultimate ambition: to erode American democracy." At NPR, novelist Genevieve Valentine writes

As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.)

Let's leave aside the fact that Flint's water supply contamination was due to decades of local mismanagement and a stimulus project gone wrong, hardly the sort of thing that mustache-twirling libertarians espouse. And let's ignore the shibboleth Koch-funded for the time being (go here for a realistic appraisal of the Kochs' influence on the modern libertarian movement). Democracy in Chains is chicken soup for the souls of liberals, progressives, and members of the "resistance" who want to believe that libertarians don't just want to destroy or reform ineffective and inefficient public-sector agencies and institutions, but actually want to kill people or destroy them irreparably. Because really, how else can you make a buck in a free market, right?

If liberals and leftists are uncritically celebrating MacLean's attack, scholars and writers with specific and general knowledge of Buchanan's work and libertarianism are taking a more jaundiced view. Reason will be publishing a review-essay in the coming weeks but in the interim, here's a survey of some of the sharpest rejoinders to date.

Historian Phillip W. Magness, trained at Buchanan's former perch of George Mason University, takes particular issue with MacLean's linking of Buchanan to characters such as Calhoun and the poet Donald Davidson, the leader of the self-styled Fugitives and Agrarians in the 20th-century South. Like Calhoun, the Agrarians treated capitalism and modernity with contempt, as a sort of mirror image of an equally soulless and totalitarian communism. MacLean asserts that Davidson, who railed against an increasingly centralized "Leviathan" state, was central to Buchanan's worldview. But Magness notes that Buchanan never studied with him nor ever quoted him in his collected works. As with her non-hesitant, careless use of "fifth column," MacLean's real purpose in linking Buchanan with Davidson is to smear the former. Writes Magness:

MacLean has a very specific reason for making this claim, and she returns to it at multiple points in her book. The Agrarians, in addition to spawning a southern literary revival (the novelist Robert Penn Warren was one of their members), were also segregationists. By connecting them to Buchanan, she bolsters one of the primary charges of her book: an attempt to link Buchanan's economic theories to a claimed resentment over Brown v. Board and the subsequent defeat of racial segregation in 1960s Virginia.

In another post, Magness notes when MacLean tries to link Buchanan to Calhoun, she instead starts citing work by Murray Rothbard, who actually was harshly critical of Buchanan. This sort of slippery maneuver permeates Democracy in Chains, as Case Western's Jonathan Adler documents at the Volokh Conspiracy blog in The Washington Post. At Medium, Russ Roberts writes about MacLean's treatment of George Mason economist Tyler Cowen, who also directs the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. MacLean suggests that Cowen welcomes the weakening of governmental checks and balances because doing so supports her thesis that libertarians want to take over the government by "stealth." As Roberts points out, MacLean is guilty of intellectual malpractice:

MacLean left out the word "While" that begins Cowen's sentence. Then she left off the key qualifier that completes the sentencethe point that the downside risk of weakening checks and balances is substantial. There is nothing here suggesting Cowen is in favor of weakening democracy or the Constitution. By quoting only a piece of Cowen's sentence, MacLean reverses his meaning.

Unfortunately, MacLean does not just quote Cowen out of context. She ignores anything in Cowen's essay that conflicts with her portrayal of Cowen as a sinister enemy of American institutions and democracy.

MacLean's Duke colleague, the political scientist Michael Munger, has authored the most exhaustive and harshly critical review of Democracy in Chains to date. Writing for the Independent Institute, Munger damningly characterizes the book as

a work of speculative historical fiction. There is considerable research underpinning the speculation, and since MacLean is careful about footnoting only things that actually did happen she cannot be charged with fabricating facts. But most of the book, and all of its substantive conclusions, are idiosyncratic interpretations of the facts that she selects from a much larger record, as is common in the speculative-history genre. There is nothing wrong about speculation, of course, but there is nothing persuasive about it either, in terms of drawing reliable conclusions about history.

The entire essay comes as close to required reading as any libertarian would decree. Munger is not simply scoring points or picking apart the argument made by someone from a different tribe or camp; he's actually laying bare how ideologically motivated texts paper over gaps in evidence and logic by focusing on small details to the exclusion of actually giving an accurate view of the larger picture. In the grip of a thesis she wants to be true, MacLean simply sifts through huge amounts of data and evidence, keeping only small chips of bones and fossils that she can use to construct a skeleton with which to scare people who already agree with her.

The contribution of Democracy in Chains...is to do two things...: Identify James Buchanan as the focal point of the revolution, and identify the content of Public Choice research and teaching as anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic.... Buchanan did not believe in unlimited majority rule. But then, as Buchanan often rightly said, nobody believes in unlimited majority rule. Democracy is and must be a balancing of, on the one hand, the rights of minorities, and, on the other, the ability of the majority to have its way within the domain established as "political" by the constitution. That's another thing that is remarkable about Democracy in Chains: MacLean does not assign Buchanan a straw man position. She (correctly) gives Buchanan's position as being the mainstream view, the one that everyone actually agrees with. And then she tries to defend the straw man position, the one that no one actually believes. Remarkable. The position she assigns Buchanan is this: He thought that democracy should be limited, to protect minorities. Um...okay. Yes, that's right. We all believe that.

Which isn't to say that Munger finds no value in the book:

Democracy in Chains is well-written, and the research it contains is both interesting and in many cases illuminating. But as an actual history, as a reliable account of the centrality of the work of James Buchanan in a gigantic conspiracy designed to end democracy in America, it turns far away from its mark. It is the story of an alternative past that never actually happened.

Despite its central failings, I too found the book interesting, if mostly as a way of understanding the ways in which libertarian thought is considered by those hostile to it. Ultimately, Democracy in Chains reveals less about a not-so-shadowy group of people who, as a t-shirt puts it, are "diligently plotting to take over the World and leave you alone" and more about progressives and liberals who choose to live in a dream world.

Other takes worth a read include ones by Jonah Goldberg, David Bernstein, David Henderson, Steve Horwitz, and Jason Brennan.

Read the original post:

Is Libertarianism a 'Stealth Plan' To Destroy America? - Reason (blog)

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid theres that great bit about the super-posse that chases the outlaws. Theyre led by a legendary law man, Joe Lefors, and an Indian Scout (Lord Baltimore), who can follow horse tracks over rock and water.

I mention this because if I were Nancy MacLean, Id much rather have Lefors and Lord Baltimore coming after me than to have Don Boudreaux, Steve Horwitz, Jonathan Adler, Russ Roberts, and the rest of the libertarian super-posse on my ass.

You may have missed the story. The short version is that historian Nancy MacLean has written a book, apparently with some government funding, in which she argues that Nobel Prizewinning economist James Buchanan was part of a Kochtopussian Kabal of Konfederates who were direct intellectual descendants of the Southern Agrarians and the champion of slavery, John C. Calhoun.

I first heard about the book almost two weeks ago, and my immediate response was to roll my eyes (figuratively speaking). I figured the book would vanish from the radar because it all sounded so silly. David Bernstein had a similar reaction:

When I first came across this book and interviews with its author, I was immediately skeptical. For one thing, Ive been traveling in libertarian intellectual circles for about three decades, and my strong impression is that Buchanan, while a giant in economics, is something of a marginal figure in the broader libertarian and free-market movements.

Now, I am at best a fellow traveler in those circles, but Ive been writing about and, on occasion, arguing with, libertarians for a couple decades. And while Buchanans name came up every now and then, I had never once heard even the suggestion that he was a kind of intellectual lodestar for political libertarianism never mind that he was part of some reactionary Confederate tradition. He was that brilliant public-choice-theory guy. (As Bernstein notes, Buchanan gets a few respectful cameos in Brian Dohertys exhaustive history of libertarianism and thats about it).

MacLean has gotten herself into hot water because its already clear she cut a lot of corners, quoting people out of context, asserting intellectual lineages that do not exist, and other misdeeds. Russ Roberts, who is a kind of libertarian Gandhi strictly adhering to a policy of rhetorical non-violence started things off with his defense of Tyler Cowen, who MacLean essentially defamed. Worse, Don Boudreaux, the brilliant and tenacious libertarian scholar and cheeky letter writer, is now coming after her and her enablers like a spider monkey.

As my friend Steve Horwitz writes:

Finding examples of misleading, incorrect, and outright butcheredquotes and citations in Nancy MacLeans new book about James Buchanan, Democracy in Chains, has become the academic version of Pokemon Go this week.

Im all for fact checking her footnotes and outrageously misleading quotations. Every time I see a new one, I link to it on Twitter with the prediction, There will be more. And there will be. There will be for the simple reason that MacLean takes Buchanans life and libertarianism, generally out of context in order to argue that libertarianism is against democracy and that sinister libertarians have been scheming to tear it all down. In other words, you have to take quotes and facts out of context if you start with a premise that takes Buchanan out of context.

To be sure, theres an anti-democratic element in some corners of libertarianism, but as far as I can tell, that is true of every single political philosophy save pure majoritarianism. And, unlike pure majoritarians, libertarians are far more concerned with freedom and equality because they understand unrestrained majorities tend to treat minorities very poorly, particularly the minority of the individual.

Indeed, this is all downstream of the century-old effort to turn Herbert Spencer into some kind of monster because he opposed governmental social engineering. The idea seems to be that because the statists are good, anyone who opposes them must be evil.

The contemporary liberal obsession with claiming that their ideological opponents must be somehow in league with, or modern-day reincarnations of, Klansmen and slavers is just another manifestation of this old, self-indulgent smear. Its a bit like MacLean set out to reach that destination. When she realized she couldnt get there by conventional navigation, she put a magnet marked Calhoun! or Slavery! next to her compass, and that did the trick.

Conservatives are bit more accustomed to this sort of thing. Ramesh and I beat back a similar attempt to claim that modern conservatism is a Calhoun cult a few years ago.

But I think the assumption behind both efforts is very much the same: Anyone who disagrees with us must not simply be wrong, they must be evil. And taking shortcuts to expose evil is no vice.

Go here to see the original:

Nancy MacLean's Ideologically Motivated Shortcuts - National Review

Why aren't there more female libertarians? Is it because biology dictates that ladies love the state?

These are the sorts of tedious questions women in the "liberty movement" field at far too many events. So when some of us gathered last week at "Porcfest"formally the Porcupine Freedom Festival, an annual campground conference and party put on by the Free State Projectwe used a "Women in Liberty" panel to deconstruct myths about male dominance in liberty circles, the incompatibility of libertarianism and feminism, and libertarians' ability to make "emotional arguments."

Reason's Melissa Mann, along with libertarian activist and writer Avens O'Brien, Kat Murti of the Cato Institute and Feminists for Liberty, and Free the People CEO Terry Kibbe joined in a panel I moderated. Friends in the audience took video of the hour-long panel, which I have cobbled together. My editing skills might be sub-par, but my wise and off-the-cuff co-panelists make it worth your while anyway.

View original post here:

What Do 'Women in Liberty' Want? Five Female Libertarians Discuss - Reason (blog)

This page is about free-market individualism. Some people (especially in Europe and Latin America) use the word libertarianism to refer to "libertarian socialism" (see anarchism)

Libertarianism is an idea in ethics and politics. The word comes from the word "liberty". Simply put, libertarians believe that people should be able to do whatever they desire as long as their actions do not harm others. As a result, Libertarians want to limit the government's power so people can have as much freedom as possible.

Libertarianism grew out of liberalism as a movement in the 1800s. Many of the beliefs of libertarianism are similar to the beliefs in classical liberalism. It also has roots in anarchism and the Austrian School of economics.

Like other people, libertarians oppose slavery, rape, theft, murder, and all other examples of initiated violence.

Libertarians believe that no person can justly own or control the body of another person, what they call "self-ownership" or "individual sovereignty." In simple words, every person has a right to control her or his own body.

In the 19th century, United States libertarians like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lysander Spooner were all abolitionists. Abolitionists were people who wanted to end slavery right away.

Garrison based his opposition to slavery on the idea of self-ownership. Since you have a natural right to control your own body, no one else has any right to steal that control from you. Garrison and Douglass both called slave masters "man stealers."

If you have a right to control your own body, then no one has a right to start violence (or force) against you.

Some libertarians believe that all violence is unjust. These libertarians are often called "anarcho-pacifists". Robert LeFevre was a libertarian who rejected all violence. However, most libertarians believe that there are some ways violence can be justified.

One thing that justifies violence is self defense. If someone is violent towards you, you have a right to defend yourself with equal force.

The libertarian Murray N. Rothbard said that it would be wrong to kill someone for stealing a pack of gum. If you steal gum, this is an act of violence against the property owner. The owner has a right to use defensive violence to get the gum back, but killing the thief goes too far. That is too much force because it is not equal to the force used by the thief. Punishment must be equal to the crime. A student and colleague of his, Walter Block, said that a punishment shouldn't be equal to the crime, but rather enough to make up for the damage the crime caused plus how much it cost to catch the criminal.

Some libertarians believe that it is your moral duty to defend yourself and your property if you can. This belief is usually held by Objectivists. These people believe that pacifism is immoral. Most libertarians reject this view.

All libertarians believe that it is wrong to start violence against any person or against what he or she owns. They call this the "non-aggression principle."

Ownership is the right to control something. Property is the thing that you control.

Libertarians believe that property rights come from self-ownership. This means that because you have a right to control your own body, you also have a right to control what you make with it.

The English philosopher John Locke said that a person comes to own something by using it. So, if you turn an area that no-one else owns into a farm and use it, that area becomes your property. This is called the "homestead principle."

Libertarians also say that you can become a legitimate owner by receiving something as a gift or by trading it with someone for something they own. You do not become a legitimate owner by stealing. You also do not become a legitimate owner by simply saying you own something. If you have not "homesteaded" the thing or received it through trade or gift, you do not own it.

Libertarians are opposed to states (or governments) creating any "laws" that tell people what they can and cannot do with their own bodies. The only legitimate laws are laws that say a person may not start violence against other people or their legitimate property. All "laws" stopping people from doing nonviolent things should be repealed, according to libertarians. (These "laws" are usually called "victimless crimes" because there is no victim if there is no theft.)

In most countries, the state (or government) takes tax money from the people. All libertarians support cutting taxes back, and some libertarians believe the state should not take tax money at all. Libertarians think people can take care of the poor without the government. They believe that people should pay for the things that they want to use, but not have to pay for other things that they do not want. Tax evasion (refusal to pay taxes to the state) is a victimless crime. Libertarians would prefer to see taxation replaced with lotteries, user fees, and endowments.

Libertarians think everyone should be allowed to decide what is good or bad for her/his own body. Libertarians think if people want to drive cars without wearing seat belts, it is their own choice. They should not be forcibly stopped from doing that, not even by the state. If a person wants to donate all of her/his money to a charity, or waste it all gambling, that is also something she/he should decide for herself/himself. No one should be forcibly stopped from doing that, not even by the state. Libertarians even say that if adults want to use harmful drugs, they should be allowed to do that, even if it spoils their lives. It is the drug user's own choice because it is the drug user's own body. As long as the drug user does not start using violence against other people or their legitimate property, no one should use violence against the drug user or the drug user's legitimate property, not even the government.

Many libertarians also believe that families and friends should look after people so that they will not use drugs, drive without seat belts, or do other things that are dangerous for them. But no one can force others to do things that they do not want to do, or to stop them from doing nonviolent things that they want to do.

There are two basic types of libertarians. All libertarians fall into one of these two broad types.

Minarchists are libertarians who believe that society should have a state with very limited power. They typically believe that the only things the state should have are police and judges to make sure that people obey the laws. Some also believe in having a military to make sure that no one attacks the country. Some minarchists believe in having a small amount of taxation.

Two famous minarchist libertarians are Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand. Nozick believed that the only legitimate thing a state can do is have a police force. He called his legitimate state a "night-watchman state." Rand believed that the state should have a police force and a court system.

Libertarian anarchists usually call themselves anarcho-capitalists, free-market anarchists, individualist anarchists, or just anarchists.

Libertarian anarchists do not believe the state is needed. They believe that people can organise their own lives and businesses. They want to replace the state with voluntary organisations, including charities, private companies, voluntary unions, and mutual aid societies. They also want to end all forced taxation.

They say that state police can be replaced with "DROs" (Dispute Resolution Organisations) or "private protection agencies." They also say that state judges can be replaced with "private arbitration."

The most famous libertarian anarchist was Murray N. Rothbard. Others include Lysander Spooner, Benjamin R. Tucker, and Linda & Morris Tannehill.

Most libertarians fall under one of the two types of libertarians listed above. But there are other types, too.

See the original post here:

Libertarianism - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ...

Its easy for an individual that has been cringeworthy himself on many occasions even on a national stage (also, it seems you may be lacking some self-awareness with that egotistical prick comment, Mr. Ive Read 100 Books On This Ideology) to separate himself from any of the blame when it comes to how cringeworthy some libertarians are.

Aside from that, Charles Peralos assertion that libertarians are [] the cringe lords of Facebook stood out to me as a poor generalization. For example, in a world where regressive leftists showcase their poor understanding of economics, their abysmal critical thinking skills, and their hatred of the freedom of speech on social media (ironic, right?), its simply absurd to say that libertarians are the worst. All sides of the political spectrum have their cringeworthy members; libertarians arent unique in that regard.

In my opinion, Charless points were undoubtedly sloppy and this is not just because his articles are typically a poor read, both structurally and contextually. His article proves that he simply had an ax to grind, and instead of coming up with 10 compelling reasons not to make your friends libertarian, he just compiled a list of things he doesnt like about some libertarians.

So, heres a different list of 10 ways not to make your friends libertarian.

In America, liberals may have stolen the term for our political ideology, but that doesnt mean we are what they are; this is why I refer to leftists as such rather than liberals, and also because most leftists arent liberal they dont believe in things like the freedom of speech like they used to.

I dont want to focus too much on Charles and look like I myself have an ax to grind, since this isnt the time or place, but his content proves exactly my point on this particular issue.

Wanting to save social security, attack possible opportunities for secession, partner with a radical and violent leftist group like Black Lives Matter, support government paying off student loan debt rather than simply repudiating said debt, and advocate for universal healthcare are all ideas that swing left to varying degrees.

Moving away from the author at hand, there are plenty of other people that have done the same, from Gary Johnsons I agree with Bernie 73% of the time comments, to other liberty advocates pushing leftist ideals.

Lets stop making libertarianism about leftism. Theyre not compatible. As long as universal healthcare, universal basic income, and maintaining social security and the rest of the welfare state are on the table, libertarianism loses.

Part of the problem I have with the liberty movement these days is that many people have abandoned principle over party in favor of party over principle.

Sure, political strategy often simply revolves around winning. But attacking the wrong people is the worst idea for an up-and-coming party. I see libertarians within the Libertarian Party attacking Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie simply for being Republicans, without realizing that most of us would vote for these people if they were on our ticket in a heartbeat.

These people may be Republicans, but theyre an ally to liberty and libertarianism. Lets not forget that the Libertarian Party isnt the only mechanism for advancing liberty.

I could write an entire book revolved around the idea that libertarians shouldnt hate veterans just because they also hate that the government funds the military through taxation.

Whether or not you think our country should have such an expansive nanny state as it does, or whether you think the country should exist at all, military people havent done anything to you.

Attacking these people, who likely will be the easiest to pitch libertarianism, is a poor choice to make. These people have seen the disastrous effects of interventionist foreign policy, these people have seen why an expansive military doesnt need to exist.

These people also are just people, and theyre not baby killers. Theyre ordinary people, and most of them are reservists who never see combat deployment. Generalizing all the people who have served our country as killers, savages, and awful humans who want to steal your tax money to fund failed wars is not only an awfully poor and incorrect generalization, but also not a way to expand the libertarian base.

Anarcho-capitalists are the purists of the libertarian ideology. This one should go without saying: attacking the most devoted liberty minds doesnt do libertarianism any good. Theyre an important part of the ideology, and whether or not you agree with them, they have a lot of good things to say, if youll just listen.

If youre worried about the public image of libertarianism, and believe that people will generalize libertarianism as anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, then simply make it your mission to explain how thats not the case when youre pitching someone.

Life, liberty, and property; its clich, I know.

But that, in short, is libertarianism. The right to life, absolute liberty, and property, so long as you dont harm anyone else. The Johnson campaign was guilty of this, as well as many other libertarians. Property rights are integral to what libertarianism is as an ideology; if we abandon this integral plank, our ideology will fail.

We cant make our friends into libertarians if we dont have a philosophy. We also cant do it if we dont have a solid philosophy to pitch. Property rights are important, lets not forget that.

The abortion debate has always been murky when it comes to libertarianism, with both sides debating which provides more liberty. I tend to fall on the pro-life side, except when rape results in pregnancy since there was no consent and it is essentially self-defense by the mother. I stand firm that life begins at the first heartbeat, which is around six weeks. The debate, in my opinion, should be whether life begins at conception or not. I havent personally heard an argument that convinced me life begins at conception.

Whether we even need to have this debate anymore has recently been taken into question, but since we will for the foreseeable future, it makes its way onto this list.

Pro-life libertarians see the unborn life as exactly what it is a life. They argue that the mother and father had consensual sexual intercourse whilst understanding the possible consequences, and that the termination of said pregnancy is murder because it is the taking of a life; just because the life resides in a womans womb doesnt make it her property, rather she consented to the possibility of pregnancy by taking an action thats meant to begin a pregnancy.

Whether or not you agree with this, pro-life libertarians make good points. Not only can they attract a sizable right-wing electorate that tends to agree with libertarians otherwise, but these pro-life libertarians themselves are key to our cause.

Disagreements on abortion arent worth dividing the house over.

Some people cant get out and be real-world activists for liberty, and thats understandable they work full-time jobs that fill their days, have children, and so on. Not everyone can dedicate time out of their lives to get out and fight for liberty.

I had to turn down the chance to fly across the country and participate in a grassroots activism campaign this summer because I have to work my day job in order to save enough money before I transfer to an out-of-state college in the fall. I dedicate my time to being the news editor here at Being Libertarian, writing opinion pieces when I can, and using social media to spread the ideology. Once I have the ability to be a real-world activist, I will, but we shouldnt punish people who cant get out and be activists. Theyre doing what they can just because its not the medium you prefer doesnt make it bad or ineffective.

Even if someone has the time but doesnt want to be a real-world activist doesnt mean theyre not contributing by posting to social media. If you couldnt tell, social media is alive and well, and its an apt place to be a liberty advocate.

The only way to achieve everything in one fell swoop whether it be minarchism or anarcho-capitalism is to have some sort of civil war or revolutionary war. Thats a pretty drastic situation, and not one thats popular, for obvious reasons.

Anything other than that takes time. Even secession takes time; at least all 50 states would have to secede, and theres absolutely no way that happens all in one shot. Secessionism is one of the quickest ways to get what we want, assuming secession doesnt result in another powerful government, with the only change being territorial size.

Besides those two, we have to realize that as much as we may want it to not everything is going to happen all at once. We cant get everything we want right away, so we should push for every victory we can achieve.

By participating and contributing to a gradual move towards libertarian ideals, we allow our ideas to have exposure on a grander stage.

Its a win-win scenario we shrink government gradually (while not shutting ourselves off to other options to accelerate said shrinkage), and we give libertarianism more exposure.

To be honest, I think its pretty ridiculous that I have to even make this point.

Antifa are not anti-fascist, they are fascist. They are against free-speech and the freedom of association, and use violence to suppress speech and ideas. Libertarians, especially those within the party, have supported or sympathized with these people. Whether its to spite President Trump, or its based on pure ignorance, libertarians that side with Antifa are siding against everything they believe in.

Just because these people are anarchists (actually, theyre anarcho-communists), doesnt mean we should side with them. If anything, thats just going to reinforce the publics growing notion that these people are libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, which is absolutely not the case.

This final, most important point takes a direct shot at Charless point that we shouldnt remind people that taxation is theft, or discuss the non-aggression principle (NAP).

These are both key principles, like property rights, that make libertarianism what it is.

Sure, if all you ever say is taxation is theft, youre going to push people to click that ever-so-enticing unfollow button. However, we shouldnt just throw these slogans to the curb.

Make America Great Again and America First were key slogans that captured the attention of an otherwise silent and forgotten demographic. They were clich on the surface, and were great for a bumper sticker. But everyone knew what these things meant: they were essentially shorthand for some of the policies Trump advocated for. If we want to pitch our ideas to people, we can do the same with our slogans. As long as we dont say taxation is theft without expanding upon why its an issue and why we should fix it, these are things we can utilize to expand the libertarian base.

We dont advocate libertarianism for fun, we advocate it because we want to free ourselves from coercion, and seek the most amount of liberty attainable. Remember, we can win this fight. Liberty can win, and it will, as long as we dont forget our mission.

This post was written by Nicholas Amato.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Nicholas Amato is the News Editor at Being Libertarian. Hes an undergraduate student at San Jose State University, majoring in political science and minoring in journalism.

Like Loading...

See original here:

Response to 10 Ways Not to Make Your Friends Libertarian ... - Being Libertarian

Having begun my life in the libertarian movement as a bit of purist myself, I have become more pragmatic over time.

For example, I have come to a greater appreciation that the libertarian movement needs to be careful and prudent. However, in recent months, it has struck me that this call for pragmatism for an emphasis on gradual changes that will not alienate the masses is being undermined by a particular group: the anarcho-capitalists.

I do not mean all anarcho-capitalists of course, but there are a considerable number committed to opposing any move towards pragmatism, seeing it as a betrayal of liberty.

This refusal to be pragmatic is deeply harmful to the cause of freedom since it pushes people away from the libertarian movement and reduces the electability of libertarian candidates without such support and such candidates, there will be fewer pro-liberty advocates in the legislatures.

The main example of how the anarcho-capitalists often alienate people is through a refusal to allow any form of taxation.

For many of this political persuasion, reducing taxation is not enough; it must be abolished outright, and for more radical advocates it must be done immediately.

Now, I sympathize with this. Given taxation is theft; it would seem moral to do away with it outright and immediately. However, to the vast majority of people, the outright abolition of taxation is an obvious absurd decision and they are not wrong.

This is not something to view in the abstract; it would trigger an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression. This is not a controversial view among economists. Iceland provides an insightful case study from recent times, though the effect on the US would be magnified due to size.

If the US were to default, there would be a nearly $20 trillion black hole in the global economy (to put that into perspective, that is more than the GDP of the whole of the European Union), this would trigger inflation (likely hyper-inflation) as the dollar would quickly depreciate, unemployment would surge, investors would flee, and a major global knock-on would occur, because the US economy is an internationalist economy.

Likewise, it would default on its public spending.

The army would cease to be, courts would shut down, police officers would be laid off, schools would close, the millions dependent on welfare would become homeless, and so on. This is inevitable because there would be no finances to pay for them. Again, the general public know this which is why they see the anarcho-capitalist proposal of the outright abolition of taxation as absurd.

No-one wants to experience a default of either kind since it would put the US on par with the Venezuela for quality of life. Couple that with other absurd ideas often entertained by anarcho-capitalists, like the abolition of drivers licenses, and you have a cocktail of ideas that will keep libertarian candidates out of political office and out of legislatures where they can make real changes. I appreciate anarcho-capitalists dislike of government, but it is the only way that one is likely to make gains for freedom at this time.

Anarcho-capitalists often retort that, after this initial devastation (which, in fact, would likely never recover to pre-crash levels under their system), a freer society could be built without tax and government. However, the public likewise see this as a delusion.

If you have no government, and you need tax for that, natural rights are in peril. You cannot have your property rights upheld because there are no police to do so. You cannot have your court case heard as there are no judges. Indeed, even if you had judges, you would have no laws for them to enforce, for in the absence of government there would be no legal codification of natural rights.

The solution often proposed is that you could privatize these functions in a free market but again, this idea is utterly unconvincing to most.

Unless a court holds power over you, it can do nothing. How would the courts get power over you in an anarcho-capitalist system?

Are they chosen by the mutual consent of the population?

If they are, you just have established government; a system whereby a majority consensus empowers certain individuals to use force against others.

If not, then they rely on the use of coercion, of force, without individual consent. As such, the existence of a fair judiciary is incompatible with anarcho-capitalism.

This is no small problem: without a fair judiciary (to which everyone is held to account) there is effectively no law, and our natural rights and liberty are at risk. There is no legal redress for the violation of those rights.

It is not my intention to write in great detail here, but the central point is clear: anarcho-capitalist purism is as idealistic as Marxist utopianism. This utopian purism completely undermines the libertarian movement.

I, as well as other libertarians, constantly find ourselves having to say Im a libertarian, but not that kind of libertarian.

The motto taxation is theft, while true, is far outside the Overton window as it is. The last thing the libertarian movement needs is for radical anarcho-capitalists to push the cause of liberty further away from it.

I have for a long time now tried a more conciliatory tone with anarcho-capitalists because I do understand where they are coming from (philosophically speaking), but there is a real need for the libertarian movement to demarcate itself from those anarcho-capitalists who refuse to unify around a pragmatic, pro-liberty agenda.

The libertarian movement is increasingly being identified with this group, and we must break away from that equivocation. If the movement cannot do that, it will be perpetually regarded as a band of lunatics, committed to ideas that most people know would never work in reality and which would if implemented cause tremendous harm and risk huge losses to liberty.

I acknowledge I will be vilified for taking this view, Statist, Commie, Sell-out, and so on, will no doubt be terms of abuse hurled at me. However, ask yourself, have I said anything unreasonable?

All I have said is that the libertarian movement needs to unify around a pragmatic, pro-liberty agenda and demarcate itself from radical anarcho-capitalists who are increasingly bringing the movement into ill-repute.

Does that make me a statist, a communist, or a sell-out? No in fact, Im following in the footsteps of most great libertarian thinkers here.

Im all for free markets, for civil liberties, and so on, but government has a (small) role, and that necessitates low taxation.

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman supported the existence of small government. Must we call them commies too? Anarcho-capitalists need to either get on board with a pragmatic and moderate agenda that introduces pro-liberty changes at a pace that does not undermine the movement, or get off the libertarian train; because as it is, they are pulling the movement in a separate path.

Libertarianism should be about fiscally responsible government with great respect for rights and freedom thats an idea people can get behind, that can help make real gains for freedom, and we cannot let that be hijacked.

* Matthew James Norris is a history and philosophy graduate. He is currently undertaking historical research on Henry III and early modern social history.

Like Loading...

View post:

Anarcho-Capitalists: A Threat Within the Libertarian Movement - Being Libertarian

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean has published a new book, Democracy in Chains, that is getting a great deal of favorable attention from progressive media outlets and is selling quite well online. The theme of the book is that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, a founder of public choice economics and a libertarian fellow-traveler, was the intellectual leader of a cabal ultimately supported by Charles Koch intent on replacing American democracy with an oligarchy based on constitutional protections for property rights.

When I first came across this book and interviews with its author, I was immediately skeptical. For one thing, Ive been traveling in libertarian intellectual circles for about three decades, and my strong impression is that Buchanan, while a giant in economics, is something of a marginal figure in the broader libertarian and free-market movements. Sure, public choice theory has provided important intellectual support for libertarian views of government, but Buchanan was hardly the only major figure to work on public choice (which is basically applying economic theory to the study of politics). Many other leading public choice economists were decidedly liberal in their political views; consider, for example, Kenneth Arrow, whose foundational work preceded Buchanans. Even among the more free-market-oriented early public choice scholars, there is my late colleague Gordon Tullock (co-author of the book that won Buchanan the Nobel Prize; Tullock was stiffed because he was not formally trained in economics), George Stigler, Sam Peltzman, among others. Tullocks famous article on what came to be called rent-seeking strikes me as more influential on mainstream libertarian thought than the entire corpus of Buchanans later work.

Buchanans work on constitutional political economy was of great interest to a subset of libertarian-leaning economists, but was sufficiently obscure and idiosyncratic to have had relatively little influence on the broader movement. Ive met many libertarians who were brought to libertarianism by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, Julian Simon, Randy Barnett and others; Ive yet to meet anyone who has cited Buchanan as their gateway to libertarianism. Brian Dohertys Radicals for Capitalism, the best extant history of the libertarian movement, gives Buchanan approximately the attention Id think he deserves, several very brief cameos, all relating to Buchanans foundational work in public choice.

The other reason I was immediately skeptical of MacLeans take on Buchanan was because her portrayal of Buchanan did not mesh with my personal experience. I only met Buchanan once, at an Institute for Humane Studies gathering for young libertarian academics around 20 years ago. The devil himself (Charles Koch) was there. Buchanan gave the keynote address. What did this arch defender of inequality and wealth talk about? He gave a lengthy defense of high inheritance taxes, necessary, in his view, to prevent the emergence of a permanent oligarchy. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Democracy in Chains fails to note Buchanans strong support of inheritance taxes. [Update: He in fact publicly supported a 100% inheritance tax.]

My confidence in the book did not increase when I saw that MacLean tied the rise of the early libertarian movement to hostility to Brown v. Board of Education, and libertarian ideology in general and public choice theory to the work of John Calhoun, which did not jibe with my own research and experience.

When the book arrived, I eagerly looked for her sources supporting the notion that modern libertarianism owes a massive debt to Calhoun, a theme on which she spends her entire prologue; later in the book, she claims that the libertarian cause traces its lineage to Calhoun. It turns out that she cites two articles noting similarities between Calhouns theories of political economy and modern public choice theory, and also cites to two pages of Murray Rothbards 1970 book, Power and Market. To put the two pages from Rothbard in perspective, I have in front of me a volume with the entire run of the New Individualist Review, a pioneering libertarian academic journal published at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. The index has multiple citations to Mill, Friedman, Hayek, Hobbes, Montesquieu, von Humboldt, Smith, Rand and other classical liberal and libertarian luminaries. Calhoun, meanwhile, does not appear in the index. Not once.

Meanwhile, in Chapter 3, MacLean claims that contemporary libertarians eschewing overt racial appeals, but not at all concerned with the impact on black citizens, framed the Souths fight as resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states right and economic liberty. Nothing energized this backwater movement like Brown. MacLean identifies only two such libertarians, Frank Chodorov and and Robert LeFevre. I cant check her citation to LeFevre, because its from private correspondence that I dont have access to. But her citation to Chodorov fails to support her assertion.

The article she cites by Chodorov can be found here. In it, Chodorovpraises Brown: The ultimate validation of the Court decision,which undoubtedly ranks among the most important in American history, lies in the fact that it is in line with what is deepest and strongest and most generous in our historical tradition. Chodorov goes on to point out that merely prohibiting segregated schools wont lead to integration because of residential segregation, and concludes that hostility to integration may lead some southern states to open up publicly-funded education to competitive private schools, which would mean what began as an attempt to evade an unavoidable change in an obsolete system of racial segregation might turn into an interesting educational experiment. Chodorov does note that among opponents to Brown there is a very genuine feeling that education is a matter reserved for the states, but again this is in the context of him praisingBrown.There is nothing in this piece remotely celebrating southern resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states right and economic liberty. And there are more subtle errors as well. MacLean portrays Chodorov as being excited that Brown presented the opportunity to do away with the public school system, when in fact he specifically envisioned a larger network of private schools, denominational and non-denominational, side by side with the general public school system.

More to come.

[I wrote this post before I saw co-blogger Jonathan Adlers post detailing various other controversies over Democracy in Chains." I recommend that post, which anticipated a future post I planned.]

Continued here:

Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains' - Washington Post

The Fiscal Times

The Obvious Problem With the 'Simple' GOP Solution for Health Care The Fiscal Times The moment was valuable not because it revealed that a few Paul backers took their libertarianism to such an extreme that they cheered the idea of letting a sick man perish in the name of freedom, but because of the disgust that the rest of the country ... and more »

View post:

The Obvious Problem With the 'Simple' GOP Solution for Health Care - The Fiscal Times

Last September, I discussed South Park for the first time, and how it has taught libertarianism since its debut in 1997. At one point, I discussed how ReasonTV listed it as one of the 5 Best Libertarian TV Shows Ever. When briefly explaining this, I mentioned another show: Showtimes Penn & Teller: Bull****. This particular show, which aired from 2003-2010, starred the famous magician duo, Penn and Teller, and while they present the topic of each episode, they remain in their regular performance fashion where Penn does all the discussion and Teller stays in his mime persona while performing several magic tricks and gags in the background.

Even though in several episodes where they debunk things like detoxing, the apocalypse, and the link between childhood vaccinations and autism, there are other episodes where they discuss social and political issues, and within the episodes, Penn is not afraid to reveal his strong Libertarian views on the issues discussed. When I became a Libertarian four years ago, it was Penn and Tellers show that Zachary, my friend who introduced me to Libertarianism, pointed me to, and after I watched each episode that he suggested, we would discuss it. The episodes I remember that we discussed the most and which covered very strong Libertarian viewpoints where the episodes based on the War on Drugs, the death penalty, and taxes (which included an interview with Former Congressman Ron Paul). Several other episodes that I watched were based on the War on Porn, gun control, video games, and family values.

kAmtG6? E9@F89 E96 D6C:6D 6?565 D6G6? J62CD 28@ 2?5 s's 3@I D6ED @7 2== 6:89E D62D@?D 2C6 2G2:=23=6 E@ AFC492D6[ 72?D 2?5 G:6H6CD @7 E96 D9@H H6C6 ?@E 96D:E2?E E@ A@DE E96 >@C6 A@=:E:42= 5:D4FDD:@? 4=:AD @7 E96 D9@H @? *@F%F36]k^Am

kAm~?6 @7 E96 >@C6 A@AF=2C 4=:AD 762EFC6D !6?? 5:D4FDD:?8 E96 8@G6C?>6?E C68F=2E:@? @7 4@C? 4C@AD 2?5 4C62E:@? @7 9:89 7CF4E@D6 4@C? DJCFA H9:=6 %6==6C 😀 D:EE:?8 @? E96 E23=6 ECJ:?8 E@ AF== @77 >28:4 EC:4

kAmp?@E96C[ H9:49 92D 364@>6 2 >6>6[ 762EFC6D !6?? 5:D4FDD:?8 9@H D6=746?E6C65 2?5 C24:DE D@>6 :?5:G:5F2=D 2C6 H96? E96J 4@>A=2:? @? 9@H 4@F?EC:6D =:<6 @FCD 92G6 E@@ >F49 7@@5[ H9:49 6?5D H:E9 9:> D2J:?8 F?=6DD J@F 2?5 J@FCD 2C6 DE2CG:?8[ J@F ?665 E@ D9FE E96 YYYY FAPk^Am

kAm~7 4@FCD6[ E96C6 2C6 >2?J >@C6 4=:AD E92E E24<=6D H62=E9 C65:DEC:3FE:@? 2?5 8@G6C?>6?E C68F=2E:@?D]k^Am

kAmx? E96:C A6CD@?2= 2?5 AC:G2E6 =:G6D[ 3@E9 !6?? 2?5 %6==6C 92G6 5:D4FDD65 E96:C A@=:E:42= 36=:67D 2?5 92G6 DEC@?8=J 366? :?G@=G65 H:E9 E96 {:36CE2C:2? >@G6>6?E] q@E9 @7 E96> 2C6 >6>36CD 2?5 C6D62C49 76==@HD @7 E96 {:36CE2C:2? E9:?D6=7 H2D E96 >@56C2E@C 7@C E96 {2D '682D {:36CE2C:2? s632E6 5FC:?8 =2DE J62CD AC6D:56?E:2= 6=64E:@?]k^Am

kAm%96J 2=D@ 6IAC6DD E96:C 36=:67D @? D@4:2= >65:2 2D H6== 2D E96:C 72>@FD DE286 D9@HD] !6?? 92D 2=D@ 2AA62C65 😕 G:56@D 7@C *@F%F36 492??6=D E92E AC@>@E6 E96 {:36CE2C:2? G:6HA@:?E]k^Am

kAmtG6? 😕 9:D 3@@<[ v@5[ }@P $:8?D *@F |2J p=C625J q6 p? pE96:DE 2?5 ~E96C |28:42= %2=6D[ !6?? 5:D4FDD6D >@C6 @7 9:D {:36CE2C:2? G:6HD 😕 D6G6C2= 492AE6CD[ 2?5 2E @?6 A@:?E[ 96 4C:E:4:K6D $6E9 |24u2C=2?6 WE96 4C62E@C @7 u2>:=J vFJ 2?5 H6== @? D@4:2= =:36CE:6D[ @FC @G6CD62D H2CD[ ~32>2D 3:CE9A=246[ $2C29 !2=:?[ 2?5 E96 4@?DA:4F@FD 23D6?46 @7 E62 2E E96:C C2==:6D]k^Am

kAmx H@F=5 92G6 E@ D2J E92E x 2> 8=25 E92E !6?? 2?5 %6==6C 😀 DE:== 2 A2CE @7 E96 =:36CE2C:2? >@G6>6?E 2?5 AC@>@E:?8 =:36CE2C:2?:D> E@ E9:D 52J] (96E96C :E 36 E9C@F89 E6=6G:D:@?[ D@4:2= >65:2[ @C 6G6? 2E E96:C >28:4 D9@HD[ 😕 >J @A:?:@?[ !6?? 2?5 %6==6C H:== 36 @?6 @7 E96 36DE 5F@D @FE E96C6 5@:?8 D@]k^Am

kAmk6>m}@=2? $49>:5E 😀 2? :?56A6?56?E 7:=>>2<6C[ 2?5 96 D6CG6D 2D !F3=:4 #6=2E:@?D 7@C E96 vF252=FA6 r@F?EJ {:36CE2C:2? !2CEJ]k^6>mk^Am

Read more from the original source:

SCHMIDT: Political magic: The politics of Penn & Teller - Seguin Gazette-Enterprise

Obscuring census data to give "conservative districts more than their fair share of representation." Preventing access to the vote. Decrying "socialized medicine." Trying to end Social Security using dishonest vocabulary like "strengthened." Lionizing Lenin. Attempting to institute voucher programs to "get out of the business of public education." Increasing corporatization of higher education. Harboring a desire, at heart, to change the Constitution itself.

This unsettling list could be 2017 Bingo. In fact, it's from half a century earlier, when economist James Buchanan an early herald of libertarianism began to cultivate a group of like-minded thinkers with the goal of changing government. This ideology eventually reached the billionaire Charles Koch; the rest is, well, 2017 Bingo.

This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. It's grim going; this isn't the first time Nancy MacLean has investigated the dark side of the American conservative movement (she also wrote Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan), but it's the one that feels like it was written with a clock ticking down.

Still, it takes the time to meticulously trace how we got here from there. Charles and his brother David Koch have been pushing the libertarian agenda for more than 20 years. A generation before them, Buchanan founded a series of enclaves to study ways to make government bend. Before that, critic and historian Donald Davidson coined the term "Leviathan" in the 1930s for the federal government, and blamed northeasterners for "pushing workers' rights and federal regulations. Such ideas could never arise from American soil, Davidson insisted. They were 'alien' European imports brought by baleful characters." And going back another century, the book locates the movement's center in the fundamentalism of Vice President John C. Calhoun, for whom the ideas of capital and self-worth were inextricably intertwined. (Spoilers: It was about slavery.)

Buchanan headed a group of radical thinkers (he told his allies "conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential"), who worked to centralize power in states like Virginia. They eschewed empirical research. They termed taxes "slavery." They tried repeatedly to strike down progressive action school integration, Social Security claiming it wasn't economically sound. And they had the patience and the money to weather failures in their quest to win.

As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.) And it's painstakingly laid out. This is a book written for the skeptic; MacLean's dedicated to connecting the dots.

She gives full due to the men's intellectual rigor; Buchanan won the Nobel for economics, and it's hard to deny that he and the Koch brothers have had some success. (Alongside players like Dick Armey and Tyler Cowen, there are cameos from Newt Gingrich, John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and Antonin Scalia.) But this isn't a biography. Besides occasional asides, MacLean's much more concerned with ideology and policy. By the time we reach Buchanan's role in the rise of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (which backfired so badly on the people of Chile that Buchanan remained silent about it for the rest of his life), that's all you need to know about who Buchanan was.

If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be. The clear and present danger is hard to ignore. When nearly every radical belief the Buchanan school ever floated is held by a member of the current administration, it's bad news.

But it's worth noting that the primary practice outlined in this book is the leveraging of money to protect money and the counter-practice is the vocal and sustained will of the people. We are, Democracy in Chains is clear, at a precipice. At the moment, the first practice is winning. If you don't like it, now's the time to try the second. And if someone you know isn't convinced, you have just the book to hand them.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

View post:

'Democracy In Chains' Traces The Rise Of American Libertarianism - WPSU

I would have been fourteen or fifteen. I was at summer camp, and cabin inspections generated intense competition. And no wonderthe cabin with the lowest cabin inspection score each dayhad to clean the bathrooms at 11 p.m., while everyone else was in bed. One morningone of the boys cabins disabled their cabins fire detector, taking out the battery and labeling it an OSHA violation. Oh boy did they get cabin inspection points for that.As the week went on, rigging an OSHA violation before cabin inspections became a matter of course.

Perhaps I should explain. This was no ordinary summer camp. It was a camp that combined fundamentalist Christianity with libertarian political views. At the campfire each night wesang songs that made fun of the United Nation. In our daily sessions we learned that social security was an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, thatenvironmental protection regulations were a plot by the UN to turn the world into a dictatorship ultimately led by the Antichrist, and that farmers whoencounterendangered species on their land should shoot, shovel, and shut up to avoid losing use of their land.

But today, my mind is drawn to the disabled fire detectorand the praise the boys in that cabin received for their innovation in rigging up an OSHA violation. And my mind is drawn to something elsethe dozens of lives lost inGrenfell Tower, lives that might have been saved had the building had functioning alarm and sprinkler systems.

With Grenfell Tower, weve seen what ripping up red tape really looks like, George Monboit wrote on Thursday in an opinion piece in The Guardian. Grenfell Tower will forever stand as a rebuke to the right, Jonathan Freedland declared in the same publication a day later.It seems that in 2014, the U.K. minister of housing declined to require sprinklersbecause the Tory Government had committed to reduce regulations.We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation, he said.

I grew up in the U.S., not the U.K., but this rhetoric isachingly familiar.

One would think that the Grenfell Tower fire, with its colossal loss of life,would make clear the necessity of basic safety requirements like sprinklers. Not so.On Friday, U.S. libertarian journalist Megan McArdle wrote an opinion piece in Bloomberg. Perhaps safety rules could have saved some residents, she wrote.But at what cost to others lives? Theres always a trade-off. Hereis the core of McArdles argument:

If it costs more to build buildings, then rents will rise. People will be forced to live in smaller spaces, perhaps farther away. Some of them, in fact, may be forced to commute by automobile, and then die in a car accident. We dont see those costs in the same way as we see a fires victims; we will never know the name of the guy who was killed in a car accident because he had to live far from work because rents rose because regulators required sprinkler systems.

When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price theyre willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost.

Its possible that by allowing large residential buildings to operate without sprinkler systems, the British government has prevented untold thousands of people from being driven into homelessness by higher housing costs. Hold these possibilities in mind before condemning those who chose to spend government resources on other priorities. Regulatory decisions are never without costs, and sometimes their benefits are invisible.

McArdle still believes that sprinkler systems should be optional. But in her insistence that people can make their own assessments of the risk shes ignoring something elsethat the residents at Grenfell Tower wanted a sprinkler system. They organized and made demandsdemands that, if met, would have saved lives in last weeks fire. They were ignored. This isnt a case where people happily chose to live in a dangerous building because its rents were lower.

Im going to hazard a guess that no one wants to live in a firetrap, no matter how low the rents are. We as a society benefit from ensuring a certain minimum standard for our housing. Certainly, we can talk about overregulation. Where I live, I am required by city codeto obtain a permit to build so much as a porch. But requiring sprinklers in high-rises is not overregulation, and McArdles solution to homelessness appears to be dangerous slums.

Interestingly,experts have notedthatif the Grenfell Tower had been built four years earlier, it would likely have collapsed during the blaze, costing only more lives. After a gas explosion caused a high rise to collapse, new building requirements were put in place to ensure that a structure would not collapse in case of fire or a blast. Built several years later, the Grenfell Tower was constructed in accordance with thenewregulations, and thus did not collapse.

There are societal benefits to having minimum housing standards. Chicago learned this in 1871, when a single fire spread quickly due to substandard (or nonexistent)fire safety standards, destroying over three square miles of the city and taking 300 lives. A fire in one building can spread to another, meaning thatfire safety standards affect whole communities, not individual buildings alone. The same is true of indoor plumbing and disease, which like fire can easily spread.

Making safety standards optional leads to a system where low rent buildings are firetrapsone where only those with the ability to pay can avoid living in dangerous conditions. McArdle acknowledges this when she states that requiring builders to abide by minimum safety standards raises rents and makes people homeless. But while most respond to high rents with various rent reduction proposals, and to homelessness with shelters and transition to housing proposals, McArdle responds to both by suggesting that those who cannot afford to live elsewhere should be forced to live in firetraps.

McArdle frames the issue as one of personal choice. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price theyre willing to pay to allay them, she writes. This assumes that people have enough money to choose, which she admits (in her reference to homelessness) that they often do not. Thisadmission betrays her insistence on personal choice.

We can both ensure minimum safety standards in building housing and find ways to offset rising rents.We can both ensure that buildings have sprinkler systems and find ways to address homelessness. McArdle suggests that we handle homelessness and high rents by bringing back slums, but we live in a society that has the resources to upholdbasic safety standards while ensuring that affordable housing is available for those who need it. We have a social responsibility to do more than wash our hands of the issue and shrug when a high-rise fire claimsover sixdozen lives.

That camp I attended as a teen still takes place every summer, impartingthe samelibertarianmission and vision to new groups of children. It pains me to realize this, but it is unlikely that the Grenfell Tower fire will result in any change in whatstudents there are taught. For those who runthe camp, as for McArdle, it is government regulationand not fire, collapse, or diseasethat is the enemy.

Perhaps even now, as I write, campers are preparing for cabin inspection bydisabling their fire detectors and labeling OSHA violations.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!

View post:

The Grenfell Tower Fire and Political Libertarianism - Patheos (blog)

Conservative Review

Alex Jones does NOT represent libertarians Conservative Review Megyn Kelly made headlines this week for her interview with controversial broadcaster Alex Jones, a self-described libertarian. For someone like me, this is distressing for a number of reasons. First, there's just the shameless appeal to sensationalism ...

Read more from the original source:

Alex Jones does NOT represent libertarians - Conservative Review

Obscuring census data to give "conservative districts more than their fair share of representation." Preventing access to the vote. Decrying "socialized medicine." Trying to end Social Security using dishonest vocabulary like "strengthened." Lionizing Lenin. Attempting to institute voucher programs to "get out of the business of public education." Increasing corporatization of higher education. Harboring a desire, at heart, to change the Constitution itself.

This unsettling list could be 2017 Bingo. In fact, it's from half a century earlier, when economist James Buchanan an early herald of libertarianism began to cultivate a group of like-minded thinkers with the goal of changing government. This ideology eventually reached the billionaire Charles Koch; the rest is, well, 2017 Bingo.

This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. It's grim going; this isn't the first time Nancy MacLean has investigated the dark side of the American conservative movement (she also wrote Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan), but it's the one that feels like it was written with a clock ticking down.

Still, it takes the time to meticulously trace how we got here from there. Charles and his brother David Koch have been pushing the libertarian agenda for more than 20 years. A generation before them, Buchanan founded a series of enclaves to study ways to make government bend. Before that, critic and historian Donald Davidson coined the term "Leviathan" in the 1930s for the federal government, and blamed northeasterners for "pushing workers' rights and federal regulations. Such ideas could never arise from American soil, Davidson insisted. They were 'alien' European imports brought by baleful characters." And going back another century, the book locates the movement's center in the fundamentalism of Vice President John C. Calhoun, for whom the ideas of capital and self-worth were inextricably intertwined. (Spoilers: It was about slavery.)

Buchanan headed a group of radical thinkers (he told his allies "conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential"), who worked to centralize power in states like Virginia. They eschewed empirical research. They termed taxes "slavery." They tried repeatedly to strike down progressive action school integration, Social Security claiming it wasn't economically sound. And they had the patience and the money to weather failures in their quest to win.

As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.) And it's painstakingly laid out. This is a book written for the skeptic; MacLean's dedicated to connecting the dots.

She gives full due to the men's intellectual rigor; Buchanan won the Nobel for economics, and it's hard to deny that he and the Koch brothers have had some success. (Alongside players like Dick Armey and Tyler Cowen, there are cameos from Newt Gingrich, John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and Antonin Scalia.) But this isn't a biography. Besides occasional asides, MacLean's much more concerned with ideology and policy. By the time we reach Buchanan's role in the rise of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (which backfired so badly on the people of Chile that Buchanan remained silent about it for the rest of his life), that's all you need to know about who Buchanan was.

If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be. The clear and present danger is hard to ignore. When nearly every radical belief the Buchanan school ever floated is held by a member of the current administration, it's bad news.

But it's worth noting that the primary practice outlined in this book is the leveraging of money to protect money and the counter-practice is the vocal and sustained will of the people. We are, Democracy in Chains is clear, at a precipice. At the moment, the first practice is winning. If you don't like it, now's the time to try the second. And if someone you know isn't convinced, you have just the book to hand them.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

Read more:

'Democracy In Chains' Traces The Rise Of American Libertarianism - KRVS

Previously I interviewed my friend Michael, who identifies as a libertarian. Despite our ideological differences, I really appreciated Michael taking time to chat with me about politics! I certainly learned a lot from his answers and it definitely helped me understand libertarianismin greater detail. My goal here is to reduce political polarization through mutual understanding. This time Michael asked me some questions and here aremy answers!

Michael:In your view, what does the individual owe to society, speaking in terms of moral and practical obligations? Conversely, what does society owe to the individual?

Matthew: As you discussin your answers, humans are fundamentally social creatures. Because of this, I do think there are certain obligations the individual should owe for society for it to work more effectively. Broadly, we should aim to not harm each other and help each other when possible.

Ideally, I would like society to offer a space of equality for everyone where they can express themselves how they wish if it doesnt interfere with other peoples liberty. However, I also think that if we have more than enough for ourselves, we should feel morally obligated to give to those less fortunate. The income inequality in the United States is ludicrous right now and only getting worse. I would like to the super wealthy give more to those who they make their money from.

Of course, actually making sure the wealthy give up some of their wealth is tricky! Right now we have elevated tax brackets for the wealthy and I personally think they could be even higher. Its not a perfect system, but taxing the wealthy and funneling some of their money into programs who help those who need it is still better than not providing any help to those in need.

Michael: As I mentioned in my responses, one of the things I most admire about you and many fine folks on the Left is your concern for those in need. My question is, What do you see as the boundaries of this moral concern? In other wordsand this does tie into my last questionis there a point at which an individual should be left to face the consequences of bad decision-making, without society stepping in to provide for them? For the sake of clarity, let me specify that here I am particularly thinking of people who run up massive gambling debts, or who abuse alcohol and/or other drugs until they lose jobs, homes, families, etc., and show no sign of sincerely wanting to change.

Matthew: Practically, there has to be some point. Even the most socialist utopia wouldnt be able to solve everyones problems through societal intervention. I suppose I take a rather utilitarian approach to this. If we tried to pour resources in solving everyones issues, it would be impossible and we would run out of resources. But I do think spending resources on large problems (for example, making sure the sick and disabled receive health care) is a worthwhile cause. We should aim to help as many people as we can with as few resources as we can.

But yes, I do think there should be checks in place so people dont abuse the system. However, for every person who finds some loophole with food stamps to eat lobster, there are many more that use them to feed their children. As I said above, I dont delude myself in thinking tax funded programs are 100% efficient. Far from it. But an imperfect system is better than nothing.

Michael: To what extent do you see connections between economic freedom and social freedomor do you see them as very different? For the purposes of this question, I will define economic freedom in terms of the ability to buy and sell ones labor and goods with others who are similarly free, and social freedom as the ability to express ones self, live as one wishes, marry whom one wishes, etc.

A quick word on where Im coming from with this question: my experience from my time on the Left, and from things I have seen since, is that many progressive liberals have a strong and very commendable commitment to social freedoms, particularly for LGBT people, women, and minority groups, but a deep skepticism of the free enterprise and markets system (aka capitalism). To my eye, the two are connected: having the freedom to buy and sell with people in other countries without having to pay onerous tariffs, for example, seems logically of a piece with the idea that discrimination against people because of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation is wrong.

Matthew: This is a great question and one Im constantly reflecting on. On the left, I know plenty of people who think they are connected, but in the opposite direction! As I mentioned above, those federal programs that offer food and healthcare aim to help those in need. So we forfeit some economic freedom to help out the most vulnerable groups like the poor, elderly, and disabled.

Again, I concede these programs are not perfect. I can understand how it would be frustrating to see ones money be taken away for a program that has explicit flaws. But again, I consider this the best option with what we have to work with. I think having a system in place to give is still better than hoping people give on their own without any direction.

Michael: Out of all the various activities in which the government is involved, and on which it spends money, are there any that strike you as unjust and objectionable? Which functions, if any, would you eliminate entirely, and which functions, if any, would you reform or change to make them more desirable?

Matthew: Yes! I dont care for our massive military budget as I think too often America tries to be the worlds police officer and doesnt always do a good job. An example of something that should be completely eliminated would be abstinence only education (which I believe most funding is now gone thankfully). Or of course many of Trumps proposals like his infamous wall.

Perhapslibertarians and socialists can find a lot of common ground with reforming programs. The issue I always have with libertarianism is the intermediate steps. Yes, lets say that a particular program is not working super well, but is still helping some people.If we slash the program, those people who really need it get screwed. Maybe we can work on some intermediate steps to make sure the program becomes more efficient, but those who need the services can still get them somehow.

So I can relate to a more libertarian perspective orientation here. When I see the government spending my tax dollars on things I feel very strongly against, I definitely do not enjoy it. However, I am in favor of things like healthcare and education so while the government may not do the most efficient job with covering those things, I am much more content in paying taxes on them. My hope and goal is to shape the government to fund efficient and helpfulprograms and reform them with any new evidence that arises.

Michael: When you think about the current state of the Left-Right divide in our country, particularly after the election (shudder), what message or insights do you most wish conservatives and libertarians would take the time to understand and internalize about progressive liberals and Democrat voters? How would you like people on the Right to view you, and people with similar views, such that they might be more willing to engage with folks on the Left in a respectful and civil manner?

Matthew: In general I wish everyone would make a stronger effort to understand their opposition. Too often we are quick to use strawman arguments and demonize people with bad information for merely being on the other side. We should all be mindful that we are biased and make our best effort to reflect on our own positions. You may not completely shift your values, but sometimes listening to those you strongly disagree with can illustrate some weaknesses in your own position.

For example, I think too often libertarians think socialists just want free stuff without considering why we think socialized things are important. Its not that we are lazy and dont want to pay for anything, we think that the government providing healthcare, education, and other resources is the best way for everyone to get what they need to live a happy and healthy life. Additionally, I think its unfair when socialists claim libertarians are incredibly selfish that dont care about anyone. I think many libertarians do care, they just think liberty, above other things, is most important for the well-being of our society. So we may all want similar things and our society to do well, we often just disagree on the methods.

On a related note, I also feel like conservatives are too quick to demonize those who care about social justice and lump us all in one group. Yes, there are jerks in every group, but to focus on a handful of people is simply unfair. Try talking to a variety of liberals and social justice activists. Try making an honest effort to listen to what we are concerned about. You might even find that we agree sometimes!

PS: I now have a Patreon if youd like to support my writing and podcasting.

See the original post here:

A Socialist Answers Five Questions From A Libertarian - Patheos (blog)

"There's not a-vote-for-this-party type of politics" in progressive rock, says David Weigel, author of The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, "There is a utopianism about it....'Let's create a new world....It was very much a music and lifestyle where you tuned out, where you went to a festival, where you got into an arena. And a time where there were fewer distractions, as well.

Weigel's history of a musical genre that includes bands such as King Crimson, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and more is a rich journey into one of rock's least-appreciated moments. The former Reason staffer (archive here) who now covers national politics for The Washington Post argues that many subsequent forms of music owe significant but often-unacknowledged debts to the organ-centric sounds of prog rock.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Weigel weighs in on politics in the Trump era. "There is not a lot of space for libertarianism in politics right now...except on the issues where libertarianism intersects with the donors who have done the most for Donald Trump. I feel like my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are pretty happy about Trump's positions on climate. [CEI's] Myron Ebell [has] literally joined the administration," he says. "But the criminal justice reform side of libertarianism has kind of retreated to the states, where it's doing okay but has no clout in DC anymore."

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Don't miss a single Reason podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED RUSH TRANSCRIPT. PLEASE CHECK AGAINST AUDIO FOR ACCURACY BEFORE QUOTING.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie, and this is the Reason Podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there. Today we are talking with David Weigel, he's a politics reporter at the Washington Post, a former Reason employee, but the reason that we're talking today is he's the author of the incredible new book, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. Dave Weigel, thanks for talking to us.

Dave Weigel: Thank you for having me to talk about it. Appreciate it.

Nick Gillespie: All right, well let's get right to it. The rise and fall of Prog Rock, of progressive rock. What is the thesis of The Show That Never Ends?

Dave Weigel: It's that rock history, which I take pretty seriously, which honestly occupied a lot of my mind before I got into covering politics like I do now. That rock history had cut out what I thought was actually really dynamic, important, informative music, the progressive rock movement. And I also, I kind of lean in...right, the book in arguing that the progressive musicians, Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel. These people invented a lot of stuff that was happily taken by more let's say critically approved bands. You know, the stuff that is credited to electropop or to punk, I mean a lot of that these guys did first, and they did it in a very popular and arena-filling way that was left out once people said, actually that was garbage, we're going to go with punk. And by people I mean like...it's a really clear decision by the record industry and critics. We can get into that.

Nick Gillespie: Well, define...what are the core elements of progressive rock? You know, how do we...and throughout the book you kind of talk about how like Led Zeppelin, which in many ways certainly, probably the biggest selling band of the period from about '68 to '78 or whenever they broke up. But it's true that ELP, Emerson, Like, and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, they could fill stadiums as well, they were gigantic. But you point out that Led Zeppelin is not progressive rock. Even though they've got multi-instrumentation, a lot of experimentation, really long solos. Jimmy Plant using one of the other band members to play the bow on a cello or something like that. So what is progressive rock in its essence?

Dave Weigel: You mentioned Led Zeppelin soloist who I think a lot of people broke them in with progressive because lyrics about fairies and Tolken and stuff, and people think, oh that's what prog is, right? Not really. The way that I was happy defining it because people who played it and critics who wrote about it defined it is just extremely ambitious music that kind of started in western sixties garage rock forms, and expanded to include classical influences, eastern influences, electronic music, discordant music, but basically ambitious and technically proficient music based on rock. And so, it is a loose definition, as the last person who still organizes an iTunes and CDs, and you have those struggles, like is this post-punk, is this punk?

With progressive there are bands that also morphed during their lifetimes. Marillion started as a very progressive revivalist band in the early eighties, and by the nineties were something a lot more akin to alternative rock, although they were branded so they weren't really considered part of it. It's changeable, you can dip in and out of it, but I think it's just basically this music that was ambitious and it's defined in the book by other writers. These guys from the sixties and seventies who lifted this stuff up. Because this London scene, Hanneberry scene, little bit later western Europe. These bands coming out of these all-night parties and these festivals where writing extremely complicated music, where incorporating quotes from Brahms and Bach into it, were not just soloing, but trading off technical solos that were not just like ... there are solos in all of rock that are just, watching go up and down these scales. But solos that were moving from form to form, and style to style in a way that ... the whole thing is that music had not done that before then. Pop music had not done it before then, and pop music hasn't really done it since.

Nick Gillespie: You talk a lot about how progressive rock is fundamentally a British phenomenon. It seems ... and to put it in a time context, in all of this stuff you can go back to ... find earlier and earlier antecedents, but it really kind of explodes in the late sixties with bands like Soft Machine, and then especially King Crimson, and Yes, and Genesis. ELP. But talk a bit about the Britishness of it, and also the way that it departed from traditional rock and roll as a kind of rebellion against your father's music. Because this was kind of as you were so saying, there's quotations from Brahms and Yes would enter the stadium to strains from the Firebird Suite and whatnot. ELP actually put out a version of Pictures at an Exhibition. They were rebelling, I guess, against maybe the Animals, or Simon and Garfunkel, maybe, but they were also embracing their great-grandfathers. What's the Britishness element about in all this?

Dave Weigel: The thing that you hear the first when you're listening for it is the influence actually of Anglican church music. And just ... and these big sweeping chords you hear in Yes music, in a lot of what ELP does, you hear this classical English hymn is played on a pipe organ, piped through stuff like Hammond's and Mogue's. There's just this very ... I don't want to use the word pompous because it's negative, but pomp.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah ...

Dave Weigel: Music that contains pomp that these guys listened to.

Nick Gillespie: So this is Elgar on acid, basically.

Dave Weigel: Yeah. That was there. A lot of these guys ... I start the book pretty early in the nineteenth century with the classical music that introduced mania and spectacle to popular music.

Nick Gillespie: And this is particularly Franz Liszt who Ken Russell obviously did that. You know and had Roger Daltrey play Liszt and Lisztomania and ...

Dave Weigel: They had Rick Wakeman play Thor ... I go to the mid-sixties because these guys were just a little bit younger than the Beatles. The same generation, same cohort, so they're all listening to music and ... Against the stereotype, they're not all going to private schools. Or as they're confusedly called in Britain, public schools. They're usually pretty working class, coming out of the austerity of the ... of World War II, and they have a record player. They have church. They have these limited influences. Yeah, talk about Greg Lake rushing to ... well he might have over hyped a little bit because of the drama. The new records that the GIs brought back, things like that. So these same influences, but starting a little bit later. I mean, they go through a journey that's pretty similar to what the Beatles did, and the Beatles, Joseph Campbell's story is pretty ... has been parodied a bunch of times now. With the Vans discovering drugs and religion and sitars. But ...

Nick Gillespie: But it is fascinating ... you know, putting this in a historical context, which for those of us, even people who grew up in the United States, during World War II or the Depression had it easier than the Brits. Because on top of everything else you had actual bombing and wartime destruction of everything. It's kind of fascinating and it di remind me of books about the Beatles and early rockers in England in the fifties of just how hard it was even to get instruments. And that's a constant constraint, it seems for these guys because mellotrons and synthesizers were really expensive. So it's partly the church stuff, right, because the organ seems to be a vary ... organs and keyboards seem to be front and center in progressive rock in a way that they are certainly not generally in regular rock bands.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, and they just carry this sort of importance that ... it wasn't obviously there in the more derivative music I like a lot, but the more garage rock stuff that some of these bands were part of. Listen to Tomorrow or Sin or these first bands, really early Procul Harem and Moody Blues. They were pretty happy covering Motown sounds and just adding fuzz bucks to them. Like the who were.

And I leave ... I deal a little bit with the Who in here because they just ... these guys in their early and mid-twenties were having more fun taking their technical knowledge and saying all right, we've kind of mastered how to cover Martha and the Vandellas, and add some fuzz to it. So what if we're covering Rondo, what if we're covering classical musicians, what if we're covering Bolero, in the case of King Crimson. And finding that there's just ... one thing that I try to emphasize ... there's this idea of music being really gossamer, and impenetrable and too noodly to get into, but no it's always pretty anchored in melody and what the members found compelling.

It's also ... I don't deal a lot with drugs, except for later in ELP's career, because I asked them, and they really weren't on them. With the exception of some guys like David Allen and Soft Machine and Gong, they're mostly just pounding beer. I mean, I talk about Mike Oldfield writing Tubular Bells, having filled the champagne magnum with Guinness, and just pounding it. Like they were ... the style of creation that you would see when the Ramones were writing two-minute songs. Which I also like a lot, but it was just the way their heads went, where I am bored with the simple forms. I'm going to rebel against the three-minute pop structure and I want to write pop symphonies. Kind of in the way Brian Wilson did, but I think even with a greater ambition, and a little bit, obviously less burnout. Because these guys did it for years.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, you know speaking of beer as the kind of drink of choice, or the drug of choice, I remember ... I got into progressive rock. Mostly my brother, who's older than me, came home from college in the late seventies with Yes songs, the triple album, and we would always laugh because there's a picture of Rick Wakeman, who has like eight hundred keyboards around him, and there are beer bottles everywhere. Like where he can't swing one arm of his cape without knocking over a case of empty Millers. Or something. Or Schmitty tallboys. King Crimson really occupies the place of pride in the book. Explain what is so important about King Crimson.

Dave Weigel: They're a wellspring for a lot of what came in the late sixties, and then what comes important later. I mean decades later when progressive rock is just influencing music that sounds nothing like it. Like electronic music, heavy metal, things like that. It starts with Robert Fripp, the guitarist who kind of putting together a larger band from a smaller band with these two brothers, Michael Giles and Peter Giles, the drummer and the bassist. He adds woodwinds and keyboards in McDonald. He adds a full-time lyricist and lights manager, Peter Sinfield. And adds Greg Lake, who is a kind of barrel-chested, classic rock star signer on bass. And they become just for a very short moment, this enormous, big-next-thing band. One of those bands where the first album really is a statement that can stand on its own. Even though they did everything else ...

Nick Gillespie: And that is the In the Court of the Crimson King. With the ultimate rock album Nostril Shot, as I recall this.

Dave Weigel: This first song on the album, 21st century Schizo Man, there are metal elements to it. There are jazz elements that McDonald had kind of goofed around with when eh was playing woodwinds in the army. There are all these things just colliding against each other, and it's a popular album, and the band immediately falls apart. Just for the normal reasons that bands break apart, Greg Lake leaves pretty soon, Emerson, Lincoln Palmer, other members start dropping off. And the band becomes basically whatever Robert Fripp finds interesting at that moment.

And I spent a lot of time on Fripp because he just ... he's one of these characters you find sometimes in any kind of history who is extremely loquacious and so arch about his place in the moment. He's almost like a Lewis Carroll character. He's very good at analyzing his own sex appeal, and analyzing why he hates crowls, and whether the music he just produced is interesting and worth promoting or not. Just because reassembling the band so they ... through the seventies, just for the short period of five years, changed their sound multiple times. They break up with Red, which is a much more metal sounding album. And for that reason, very influential for bands like Tool and Perfect Circle, people like that.

He leaves and Fripp basically goes into seclusion in a ... what I will not call a cult, but it was sort of a religious tendency he picks up. Returns to becoming a much more avant garde performer and through that ... and also not somebody who likes the term progressive rock. He really ... he hates being classified as prog ... he's very happy to see punk come along and obliterate all this. And I have the scene in the book where he sees ELP at kind of the height of their ridiculousness, when they're touring with an orchestra in Madison Square Garden and just has it out with Greg Lake so much. Years after the guy had clearly succeeded beyond what King Crimson could ever do, that he just gets kicked out of his limo.

But he is much happier with looping experiments, with ... he produces a folk band, The Roaches, and opens up their sound. He's the guitar player on the song Heroes, which is I think a tone ... one of those songs where anything that sounds even a little bit it sounds like a rip off. Like a truly unique song that he plays. And then restarts in the eighties, bring in Adrian Belew who kind of sounded like him when he was playing with Talking Heads for a kind of art rock band. Several times over the decades, King Crimson just keeps inventing a different version of this music, which is never ...

And again, people who are not always comfortable calling it progressive rock but which is always taking ... okay, I guess the inspiration each time being okay, there's this music. We're pretty bored by that. How can we play with this, how can we structure our guitar solos so that they're interlocking, how can we ... stuff like that I cut out of the book because I just got so into writing about it. This whole album of tape loop experiments with David Byrne reciting the names of different philosophies over it. He becomes a very art rock guy.

And then ... he today, Robert Fripp is still touring with this band with a three drummer line up. Again, something he never did ... and I just, whatever they're in, if they're in politics, which I cover mostly. If they're in film, in they're in music, especially, just people like that who clearly just need to do the next thing and don't want to go back and play the hits. Like King Crimson will play songs they wrote 50 years ago, but they completely rearranged them because Fripp is not about to sit there and just bang out like the rift Satisfaction and have ... he sees the music needs to be fresh wherever it's played. And I think that is kind of the attitude that some of the classical composers that I write about in the very beginning. The book had ... it is got to be music that you can reinterpret. He can't just be a pop song for quick radio consumption that talks a little bit about how great it is to fall in love and to make love, and you're in and out.

Nick Gillespie: At the same time, and I agree that's an interesting way to put it. You talk about this in the book, The Show that Never Ends, which of course comes from an ELP opening track. But it's a time where rock music and it was obviously aping progressive jazz on a certain level. But it was like, okay we need to move beyond the ... it was really more like a two-minute pop song, and then it had merged by the end of the sixties into a three-minute pop song. We need to talk about stuff more than simple love and puppy love, and that type of stuff. Would you agree though that there is also an epic amount of silliness in the form, which is kind of entwined with it's seriousness? And I ... Keith Emerson's early band The Nice had an album called The Golden Apples of Emerless Daft Jack, which is anagram ...

Dave Weigel: their names, including a member they would soon kick out of the band because he kept getting hi on LSD and passing out during concerts.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah and I mean, there's so much silliness in, you know ... you describe ELP in a lot of ways I guess may have been the most successful in that the band toured the biggest possible stadiums, the name of the band was simply the letters of the last ... first letters of the last name of the band. Each of them was a virtuoso. I think of a song like Lucky Man, which was I guess their biggest single hit, which starts out as kind of a pirate-y song about channeling ... like a Paul Simon lyric about a man with white horses and ladies by the score. And then it ends in this totally inappropriate, to my mind, synthesized ... twenty minute, it sounds like synthesizer solo that has nothing to do with pirate ships. Pirates had nothing to do with it. I mean, what ... how does the silliness and the kind of you know baroque overexaggeration, how does that fit in with the seriousness of the music for you?

Dave Weigel: Well, they were aware of the silliness. Like that song ... I tried to explain in the book, the interplay ... how ELP got along. And it was not always well, I mean they were three very talented people. Palmer, the drummer, the most easy to get along with. But Emerson and Lake with gigantic egos, and Emerson had said explicitly several times through his life, Lake was bitter because he was playing with two virtuosos, and he was ... his name was in the same lights, but he clearly wasn't as good as they were.

And so this was a ... Lucky Man was almost a doggerel that Keith Lake wrote when he was a teenager, and Lake, Emerson threw this experimental Moog solo on it because he thought, I have a Moog, let me tool around with it. It was, not just experimental, but it was not pompous. It was fun, and with Yes. As serious, so John Anderson's lyrics by far are the most ... the most high-minded peace about Yes. John Anderson writes lyrics like he's writing the Bhavagad Gita every night, if you open up Tales from Topographic Oceans, for any of them. After listening to a lot of his music, one of the guys I find it hardest to place which lyric is from what song. So he takes it very seriously, but everyone else in the band was just basically a good rock musician who just thought this stuff was fun.

And you saw it when they break off in their solo careers for a couple of years in the 1970s, you know Steve Howell was playing classical guitar because that was ... that's what he wanted to get to from all this. So they were basically ... it was not we're going to ... There's forms of music I find a lot more pretentious. I mean, there's a lot of punk, like Crass and the Adverts that were trying ... Or even John Liden who always did this, in I think a really calculated way. They were trying to make their music the focal point of a better way of living. Better philosophy. We're going to take ... break down the system. And progressive rock was rebellious, but it was basically fun. And so yeah, they're very aware ... like even there are bands like Jade Warrior where their whole gimmick is everything sounds like everything is influenced by Japanese instruments. There's Gryphon, everything sounds like it's at a Renaissance fair, who had opened for Yes sometimes. Gentle Giant, they were all basically normal people who just ... this was fun to them. They'd be bored playing something less ambitious.

Nick Gillespie: Talk about ... yeah, that dimension of kind of pleasure and of self-challenging, and of also ... one of the things that I love about rock music in general, and by that I guess I mean more pop music in general, is that there are clearly rules and there are both aesthetic rules, that certain sounds and certain chords and whatnot work better in unison, but then there are also rules about ... it's all a business. And you're not supposed to have whole album-length side cuts, you know there's no air play for that. There's no play for that, and these guys all pushed all sorts of expectations and whatnot. Is there a politics to it, I mean you started out as a ... in a way, not quite but early in your career you wrote for reason, you identify as Libertarian leaning, at the very least. You were a self-conscious conservative in college. Is there a politics to progressive rock? And if so, not a partisan politics. And is there ... what ... how do you map the energy or the kind of impulses in it onto politics?

Dave Weigel: There's not a vote for this party type of politics. There is a utopianism about it. And I didn't say, let's create a new world, but these were generally artists in the 1970s in the time of greater environmental awareness, and that was ... when Yes wrote any kind of song, politics, I'm laughing because you've probably also heard, Don't Kill the Whale, their classic environmental funk-based ballad. When they got into politics at all, it was that. The big exception is Rush, who and I cut out this ... I talked to Rand Paul about Rush because they had condemned him for using his music and it really pisses him off.

Yet Rush basically when they were in their early twenties, and breaking big in the UK, did an interview with ... I keep going back to how good the British music press was. British music press analyzed and sometimes lionized and sometimes tore down these bands, with just tremendous aplomb. Lester Banks doing the same thing in the states. British press had a ton of those people. And they just got Neil Pert rolling about how great Iron Rand was, and how she influenced the lyrics like the trees, and 2112, they got away from that. They got more ... these bands all go pretty. So they were like many artists, annoyed with Britain's super high-tech race, but they were not super political. And they did have ...

Nick Gillespie: Although they were very individualist. I mean they were Byron-esque. They were breaking artistic form, breaking audience expectations and trying to create something bold and new. Not necessarily ... like you were saying, not to change the world. They didn't want a five-hour work week or something, but they did want to blow people's minds.

Dave Weigel: They did, and so they ... I kind of looked because I was interested in that. If there was any sort of big movement they got involved with, or benefit concert. You had Peter Gabriel a bit later get involved in some of that after he leaves Genesis. And Genesis themselves, Peter Gabriel himself becoming involved with Live Aid, but those are big classic celebrities...

Nick Gillespie: Well and also I always think of Gabriel as well with Steven Biko and calling attention to apartheid in South Africa and whatnot. I think a generation of Americans, certainly people my age in their fifties or older. The reason we knew who Steven Biko was was because Peter Gabriel had written a song about him.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, they took on these causes and ... at the same time a lot of other musicians were. But progressive music itself was just not ... a lot of it existed in this ... some of the European bands that I get into came from much more troubled politically countries in the seventies than the UK, from Italy, from Greece. They got a little bit more really about it. But the music was ... this was kind of before a lot of pop music felt comfortable getting directly involved in politics. It was kind of heartening. The period I'm writing this book in, and researching it is 2013 to 2016, which is even more tumultuous, than a lot of people thought the election could be. And there is a sense that a lot of this music was being created, we all now know is a period of Western decline. Right? There were the 25 good economic years after World War II, and then people are kind of starting to pick over the scraps, the pound sinks, the oil crash happens, etc., etc. so that's, I think ... those are among the factors why some of this music

Nick Gillespie: So it's kind of ... it's almost hedonism. I mean it participates in a seventies hedonism, but it's not ... it's really interesting that it's not about fucking. You know, per se. I mean the Rolling Stones become hedonists. You know, Bob Dylan disparages hedonists at the end of the seventies. And these guys are just trying to create kind of interesting new worlds that they can escape to.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. But always ... music was half happening on Earth, it was just not ... it was happening during a period of political tumult and economic decline and the music was pretty disconnected from that. Even Robert Fripp who was writing some of the most, I think musically dark and disturbing of it was ... it was pretty inward looking and pretty personal, pretty ... both personal sometimes and more often abstract. Like I said, I don't even think ... song like Starless or Fallen Angel is coming at a period ... America's going through Watergate has very little to do with that.

And so I think that's another reason why some of this music has not factored very large into music history, because there are bands and musicians who got involved in ways that you tell their story when you're telling the story of the seventies. It's one point I make in the book, I mean you tell the story of this period and if you're doing it in a movie or TV show you throw in disco or you throw on singer songwriters, maybe you throw on protest music. And they just didn't do protest music. It was very much a music a lifestyle where you tuned out, where you went to a festival, where you got into an arena. And a time where there were fewer distractions, as well.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. What ... Talk about how part of what the book is addressing really is that ... and you've mentioned it, that the critical contempt for a lot of progressive rock ... and you know they had their champions in the day and they still do, but in general you're right that people tend to write about rock music like a loose term for a lot of pop music. But as a means of social expression and dissatisfaction with the status quo and so you know Elvis disrupts the bland gray Eisenhower era. The Beatles bring something new and exciting to a post-Kennedy assassination America. And then blah, blah, blah. And Punk obviously, Johnny Rotten never misses an opportunity to talk about how he would doctor Pink Floyd tshirts and write I hate above them and walk down Carnebie Street and get attacked by people, and he ...

Dave Weigel: As soon as he can, he's playing like experimental bass music with Bill Laswell and stuff.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah well this is ... part of what's interesting ... yeah I agree completely, or the band The Germs. The LA post-punk band or late punk band opens their song No god with a snippet from Yes's Roundabout. You know there's clearly many more connections and according to if you read journalists like Nick Kent, the Sex Pistols in their early days, all they were doing basically were covers of The Who and of a couple of other bands that they publicly denounced. But ... the argument of the book is really that progressive rock ... it persists in a lot of ways that it's not recognized. And you talked about some of them there. And then it was that the critics really wanted to trash it after a certain point. And is it ... why these albums, certainly groups like Jethro Tull, Genesis, Yes, were selling millions of records. Was it simply that critics didn't like popular music, if something was really popular it couldn't be good? Or was it that they were turned off by this was a different type of rock and roll than they were comfortable celebrating.

Dave Weigel: Well I think some of it was that the music was getting less interesting. The Yes of I think Going for the One is kind of the last gasp of super interesting Yes music. By late 1977, 1978 it so happens that what is being offered to the market by some of these bands. If it sounds like the early 70s it is played out. They have run out of ideas, they're older, they're doing less. That's why the bands that make it into the 80s both commercially if you're talking about John Wedden performing in Asia or artistically if you're talking about King Crimson, they don't sound like they did at the end of the 70s. So part of it's the quality. Although as we all know, that's not necessarily determinative of whether something's popular or not. Part of it really is ... the artists I talked to, and the radio folks I talked to really do say this was a conscious decision of labels who just ... They had a different younger group of AR people. They found this music boring and they found punk exciting, so they elevated it...

Nick Gillespie: Punk in the US never sold many records. And I mean there were one-offs and things like that, but it's interesting ...

Dave Weigel: I'm thinking more the British ... the British side of this was much more direct. Where you had Harvest Records, which is producing all this, and Island, the guys who had been selling huge

Nick Gillespie: And in fact you mentioned Mike Oldfield, and obviously people know Richard Branson, but I don't think ... it's hard to appreciate the full measure of how Richard Branson has enhanced the 20th and 21st centuries. He both brought Mike Oldfield to a mass audience and in many ways progressive rock and then eh was the person who put out the Sex Pistols only a few years later. So it's kind of interesting to see even within that label the quick turnaround.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, they've been doing the quick turnaround ... at the same time, this music is more possible than punk in a lot of ways. I always go back to I read I think every issue of Sounds and Express, these British magazines. And end of the year polls in 1977, people still say their favorite keyboard player is Rick Wakeman, their favorite guitarist is Steve Howe. The concerts were bigger, the other side of everyone saying, well that one Sex Pistol Show, everyone who went to it started a band. Well the Yes show down the street had people at it. Those people didn't stay invested in music. They grew up and did something else.

It was I think the music was a little bit less good, some of the bands tuned out, and there was a decision by critics and labels to focus on other music. And it was really hard, going back for the research for the book, I have rarely seen a heel turn like this, where critics really were ready to praise the music and then six months later, say this was the problem with everything. That's why ... I think I could quote pretty liberally from Rolling Stone, and from magazines that eventually as part of their creation methos for rock had to condemn this stuff. They were like, oh Emerson, Lake and Palmer's as interesting as anything you're going to hear to they ...

Rolling Stone has a giant feature on Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1977 when they're kicking off they're world tour as a big important band with a following that needs to be understand. And by the end of that tour, their supposed to be a laughingstock. So ... some people know that different than others. As I said, Robert Fripp was really happy that all that stuff imploded. Greg Lake never really got over it. Greg Lake, who passed away last year always resented what he found to be interesting music was shoved aside for more basic rock music and punk and that. He thought it was just a really cynical and stupid and as you were saying, it didn't even sell that well so why'd they do it so

Nick Gillespie: I just wish Greg Lake had buttoned up on the cover of Love Beach. That image still haunts me of his kind of human veal physique. Nonetheless felt totally free to inflict on the record-buying public.

Dave Weigel: That's one of these albums, I looked at that and said I bet there is a story of drug use and decay and failure behind this, and indeed there was. That is like one of the more Spinal Tap-y albums in the book

Nick Gillespie: What ... I'm also thinking ... you interview a lot of people in the moment, which is great and this is great rock history because of the research that you've done but also the reporting that you've done. You talk a lot to Roger Dean, who is important. He's not a musician, but he's the guy who did the Yes covers in particular. And I just want to get this in because it cracks me up. And it may not to anybody else but you now Roger Dean's landscapes are constantly of planets that are being overrun by water and melting icebergs and things dripping and yet he's a global warming skeptic, right?

Dave Weigel: He is. I forget how we got into that, but I did some

Nick Gillespie: I'm sure he brought it up.

Dave Weigel: I think it was in the news, but I did some reporting that was in person where I went on the cruise, which I talk about at the beginning of the book. Which I actually ... the thing that I think David Foster Wallace gets wrong ... having written one book and criticize a legend. If you go onto a cruise with a theme actually it's very different from just bumping around with people who want to eat all day and pass out in front of the pool. The

Nick Gillespie: So tell the story. This the Yes cruise, right?

Dave Weigel: This is the cruise to the edge. Which was put on by the guys who did Monsters of Rock, and discovered that ... and a cruise based around the Moody Blues, and then they discovered that they should just around progressive music. There was a similar fan base to the rock one. They're pretty explicit. I talked to them at the beginning about how easy it is to commodify this. But I went to that for a week in the Caribbean. I went to a much smaller scale but really fascinating series of concerts called Near Fest in the Allentown area. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And that's where I think I talked ... I talked to Roger Dean at both. We actually had decent conversation at both of these. But this is the one in Pennsylvania where something stuck in his craw and he really wanted to talk about it.

Nick Gillespie: Oh yeah, it's coal country. Right, look what Al Gore hath wrought.

Dave Weigel: And I followed up the first article about that guy, so there are people who might be interested in what you have to say about global warming. I think he realized it's beyond being off-brand. Everyone who has a Roger Dean painting in their portrait room disagrees with him about this.

Nick Gillespie: I thought he would be in favor of global warming. Because you look at the cover of Fragile, it's water water everywhere. What's ...

Dave Weigel: Are you going to fly to ...

Nick Gillespie: Who was the most interesting person beyond Robert Fripp? And it is ... I go back and forth when I think about ... He's on one end of the spectrum of kind of performers who ... on the other I remember years ago seeing an interview with Neil Diamond where ... it was on CBS Sunday Morning or 60 minutes or something, and the interviewer said, do you ever get tired of playing your hits? And Neil Diamond looked totally befuddled. And I think it was genuine. And he said, why would I be tired of playing my hits? That's what the audience comes for. And of course Neil Diamond and I think a lot of rock performers have come over to his side of the equation, where instead of saying, I'm not playing that song anymore. Or I'm going to make it unrecognizable. They really in a way 20, 30 years ago rock stars didn't give a shit about their audiences. They would show up late, they would show up drunk, they would show up out of tune. They wouldn't have rehearsed. And now they're more like they want to give a great experience. Every night, each night, each concert. And then there's Robert Fripp. Beyond Robert Fripp, who was the progressive rock god that surprised you the most as you toured through this material?

Dave Weigel: Well I had never spent that much time talking to and then reading interviews with Keith Emerson who was just fascinating to me because he really was innovative and virtuosic performer who was seen like that for years and then dropped out of relevance pretty hard for decades. I remember even talking to somebody who was grimly noting a couple years ago how depressing it was to watch him scoring video game music. And he was right in this nether zone where he was very aware that he was famous for something that happened a very long time ago. Kind of quote him going around Moog Fest, which where he was sort of god, but it's weird that he's being worshiped for something where all the new interesting music is written by other people.

And so I thought he was ... without being terribly ... he was very English and not super interested in being introspective. He wrote in his autobiography. But he was who clearly wanted this ... if he didn't want the jet set lifestyle forever, wanted this music to keep evolving and it didn't. I think it was stuck in a between space for the last couple of decades of his life. Was pretty unhappy when ELP would have to reunite and go on tour. It was always done with just a label pressuring them to do it. Right, it was the label saying you'll make a lot more album if this is an ELP album versus a Keith Emerson album. They said fine. But watching someone with that much talent go along with these commercial instincts just because he had to was ... I wasn't entirely surprised but sad as I reported on it and wrote about it.

And then I think David Allen was kind of the other end of the spectrum. This guy who was Australian musician who literally hitchhikes on a boat across the oceans, gets to the UK. He friends much younger musicians, gets kicked out of the band because ... this is Soft Machine. He gets kicked out of Soft Machine because he has a drug record and won't ... can't reenter the UK. And then just starts a different French band which becomes ... Gong is a ... once I listen to more fusion and more kind of Herbie Hancock and stuff. I saw everything is ripping from there but this guy was making that kind of music and being completely blissed out about it right up until he died. A couple days before he dies of cancer. And so he was another one I didn't know what to expect. Two different extremes I'd say where one guy was deeply unhappy about what had happened to this movement he was part of. And the other guy said oh movement's gone, that's fine. I'm still singing about potheaded pixies and doing weird glissando noises on my guitar, so this is great. As long as there's ten people listening to this in a pub, I'm happy.

Nick Gillespie: Is progressive rock and this might have something to do with it's kind of fall from grace. But it is fundamentally a male thing? You know there aren't a lot of ladies in the book. There's a few who show up. But they're mostly ... to be honest they're the ones singing an alto soprano or a soprano talking about sea carpets. Or sun carpets of the sea and things like that. What was the role of women in progressive rock?

Dave Weigel: There wasn't as much of it. I've mentioned Annie Haslam from Renaissance, Sonja Christina from Curved Air, again if you read these magazines in the seventies, you're seeing them all being put on the same pedestal. Like check out the new music that's coming out of Curved Air. Check out this three-page spread about Sonja Christina. There wasn't a lot of it, and I think it was basically a function of who formed the bands. The bands that came together out of the London scene, there simply weren't that many women in it. Except for Hawkwind having a six-foot model covered in paint walking around during their shows.

Nick Gillespie: And Hawkwind of course is one of those great odd junctures or notes of history because out of Hawkwind also comes Motorhead of all things, and then they made a bid for popdom in the eighties with songs like Sigh Power and whatnot. You know traditional pop songs.

Dave Weigel: As did Jethro Tull,, I spent a little time on the Bid for Pop stuff, but I didn't want to make the book a mockery at all. When something is generally funny I was writing about it, sure. But when life gives you Spinal Tap, they smell the glove.

Nick Gillespie: Or when Yes gives you Tormado or yeah.

Dave Weigel: But I generally tended to back away and look at what the newer revival stuff like Marilion and Porcupine Tree. But no, not a ton of women in this. And I don't know how that affected the way they were viewed in history because they were ... select women you could point to but also not a ton.

Nick Gillespie: Rock in general is very much ... the audience is different. And certainly the Beatles had as many women or more women fans than they had male fans, but they were Liverpool lads, not lasses. It's a strange creative ... medium of creative expression.

Dave Weigel: Although you've got this character who ends up being like a creation figure and, because PP Arnold is the soul singer who brings together Nice as her backing band. And then they break off and do their own thing. So various points there are female artists who are important to this, but it is basically a story of men and their organs. To put it one way.

Nick Gillespie: Now that male organs have been exposed, let's talk a little bit about politics. You're the ... you cover national politics for the Washington Post. You got into political reporting partly at Reason and then you had gigs at Slate and a number of other places. What happened ... you came into this at the height of the Ron Paul experience. Where is Ron Paul and Rand Paul now? I mean Rand Paul is so unpopular that he can't ... with Rush that they won't even let him play the Trees for God's sake. Which, for people who don't know is essentially a story about a bunch of maple trees form a union to block the oak tree from growing taller than it.

Dave Weigel: Yeah, it's basically sake Rand's animal farm.

Nick Gillespie: But set in trees and I'm assuming. I always read the maples being bullies because that's Canda, and Canada is somehow anti-individualistic. And Rush are the oaks that want to grow taller than the rest of the forest.

Dave Weigel: There is not a lot of space for libertarianism in politics right now except for I think, being honest about it, the issues where libertarianism intersects with the donors who have done the most for Donald Trump. I feel like my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are pretty happy about Trump's positions on climate. Myron Ebell, especially is ... literally joined the administration. But the criminal justice reform side of libertarianism is kind of retreated to the states. Where it's doing okay but has no clout in DC anymore. The drug reform side of it ... I interviewed Rand right before Jeff Sessions was officially, right after and asked him a couple questions about why he disagrees so vehemently with Sessions on drug policy, to vote for him.

And his answer was honestly the Democrats forced his hand by being so cruel and by portraying him as a racist so ... doesn't have a lot. That was kind of a key answer because what we're finding a lot of politics right now is that you can't get the conservative voter base active not really around an issue but around being angry at the left. And libertarian policies by the balls is so idea based and you're angry in an elite that's failing the country, but you are not angry at how gross Hilary is or anything simple to mobilize against. And depressingly that's ... found that politics moves fewer bodies than getting people to laugh at Leonardo DiCaprio for using a plane or to be annoyed with Black Live Matter for blocking an intersection.

There's just a much lower quality sort of politics that replaced libertarian stuff. And the fatal thing is, I asked Rand this too, he said he was wrong. He thought that in order to win again, the Republican party ended to attract young voters and non-white voters who were giving up on hardcore nationalism and Trump proved that he can eke together a majority if he had just enough nationalists. And why would you go back? I think the only thing that would change ... give libertarians another moment is Trump being defeated, or Republicans being defeated in a massive way. It's not happening right now. I keep ... I make fun of how Trump unlike most presidents, has press corp ready to go to voters that voted for him, and say, "you're still with him right?" There are these stories, even he does his decisions that 70% of people oppose, stories about how he's doing it for his base. He's delivering. And so as long as you kind of prioritize the easily angered, easily activated nationalist base, then yeah libertarians don't have much of a place in politics.

Nick Gillespie: How do you ... as somebody who is in the main stream media. You're at the Washington Post that fears that democracy dies in darkness. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who owns the post is also a contributor to Reason at times, you know has been singled out by Donald Trump. The Washington Post, you're the fake news and all of that. How is that affecting you and your colleague's coverage? Because ... do you feel ... is the mainstream media giving Donald Trump a fair shake? Or are they, like a lot of people in America, so overwhelmed with their contempt or disgust for how he appears, the way he phrases things. Some of his policies but not all of them. Is it difficult to cover him fairly do you thinK?

Dave Weigel: I think factually you have to be tough on him because he will make a speech and make stuff up. He always has. When he was saying ... I think factually if you were writing aobut him when he was selling you on the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and ... factually you have to say that was a failure. He was lying about his finances. And he knows that now and so I think there's this trap I'm kind of worried about where there's ... I worry about it all the time when I see one of these studies where it's 90% of coverage of Trump has been negative. If you burrow into it, a lot of that is coverage of Republicans criticizing him. Not so much Democrats. It's not news when Nancy Pelosi doesn't like him. It's news when

Nick Gillespie: John McCain or Jeff Lake or something.

Dave Weigel: So that or it's him misstating something, or being embroiled in a scandal. And they're really not Democrats scoring any points on him. So it's not like we're slanting it to one party. But it's difficult ... I would argue that especially in the early years of Obama, and I worry that I was part of this. That there was coverage of the first black president a little bit too gauzy. And looking for ways in which he was inspiring people and looking past mistakes that were being made. And there's ... that's gone, but I feel like it's two factors colliding. One is that Obama had unusually good coverage, and the absence of Obama you're getting back to what you would have with Bush or with Clinton. With the first Clinton, the one who won. And that's colliding with objectively Trump just lies more than most presidents. It's been part of his strategy for years, and won him an election. And. But I do fret about people who are told by him not to trust the media and see us say, hey this is false what he just said. And say I don't believe you any more. I don't know how we unwind that.

Originally posted here:

The Rise and Fall of Prog Rockand of Libertarianism [Reason Podcast] - Reason (blog)

The LGBT lobby has its allies in the pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, pro-euthanasia, pro-drug-use advocacy groups, and its members have joined together in common cause to assert their 'rights', and they call upon the government to decriminalise, legalise, and normalise their favourite pastimes.

Philosophically, they are all in the same camp: they are libertarians, promoting the idea that consenting individuals should be free to do whatever they choose as long as it does no harm and does not infringe upon the 'rights' of others, but these 'others' and their 'rights', and any possible harm involved, are usually defined in a very narrow and often perverse way.

For abortion to be defensible, the existence of a human being in the womb has to be denied (despite scientific evidence to the contrary), otherwise their right to life would have to be defended. For prostitution to be defensible, sexual intercourse has to be defined as a commodity to be repeatedly bought and sold, implying no emotional involvement and causing no emotional harm. For euthanasia to be defensible, human life itself has to be devalued, especially the lives of the disabled and the terminally ill.

Libertarianism glorifies the freedom of the individual to choose what is good (and pleasurable) and convenient for himself or herself without any regard to the common good.

It suits the libertarian lobbyists to posit that libertarianism and the philosophy that underpins it are the most logical and sensible way to organise modern society, and that organised religion, whose principles, based on scriptures dating back several millennia (which are in profound conflict with libertarianism), are outdated and are holding back progress. Fundamentalist Christians play into their hands by thumping their Bibles even harder! Asserting the authority of a text Libertarians reject can advance the argument no further, and I wish fundamentalists would stop it.

It does no disrespect to the Bible or the Holy Qu'ran to use well-authenticated, wholly secular philosophical arguments to refute and discredit libertarian philosophy as being pathologically individualistic and selfish, and operating contrary to the common good, which is the end towards which society is to be organised and governed.

To speak about ethics is not automatically to speak of religion. Secular Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote his book, titled Ethics, around 350 years before Christ was born. Aristotle argued that political constitutions were right if they were in the common interest and wrong if they were in the interest of the rulers.

These ancient ideas were developed over the centuries by other secular political philosophers. John Locke declared that "the peace, safety, and public good of the people" are the ends of political society. David Hume contended that social conventions are adopted and given moral support by virtue of the fact that they serve the public or common interest. Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood the common good to be the object of a society's general will and the highest end pursued by government.

The fundamental building block of the society is the family. This is not a religious principle, but a socio-political one. Weak families lead to improperly socialised children, lowering their potential to benefit from education and increasing their potential for dysfunctional behaviour and the development of an unbalanced personality. Anything that strengthens the family strengthens society as a whole; and anything that undermines the family, undermines the integrity of society.

The common good is the good of all people and of the whole person. No group within society is to be excluded from its benefits, and integral human development includes the intellectual, physical, artistic and emotional facets of the human person. The task of the State is to work for the development of the whole person, and of all the people, and in doing so, the virtues of temperance, honesty, fairness, openness, and justice are brought into play.

The fundamental question we need to answer is, which of these two moral philosophies should we employ to govern Jamaican society? Libertarianism, which is directed towards satisfying the cravings of individuals or the philosophy of the common good?

If we choose libertarianism, how can we blame politicians for taking decisions that line their pockets? They would, after all, be taking decisions that are in their best interests rather than the common good.

The arguments being put forward by libertarians to legalise buggery, prostitution, and abortion should be rejected, not because they run against religious norms, but because they do not serve the common good.

- Peter Espeut is a sociologist and Roman Catholic deacon. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

Continue reading here:

Peter Espeut | Libertarianism or the common good? - Jamaica Gleaner

Freedom Philosophy: The Death of The Left/Right Divide Being Libertarian Libertarianism isn't a reaction to the left/right divide but rather it's merely the recognition that it no longer exists. It's a rejection of militarism at a time when militarism threatens our national security and it's a rejection of overspending at a ...

Follow this link:

Freedom Philosophy: The Death of The Left/Right Divide - Being Libertarian

June 12, 2017 by Steven Teles

Will Wilkinson has scaled the Olympian Heights of the New York Times for the cause of liberaltarianism and the greater glory of the Niskanen Center. But what is liberaltarianism? And who cares about it?

Speaking as a historically oriented political scientist, my first way of attacking this question is to ask where the object under examination came from. What is its origin? The term liberaltarianism was originally coined by my good friend, co-author, and co-conspirator Brink Lindsey over a decade ago in The New Republic. While Brinks objective in that article was to invite liberals into a coalitiona coalition that liberals like Jonathan Chait quite firmly refused to acceptI think the articles most immediate target was libertarianism itself. It defined a pole of libertarianism, around which those who were uncomfortable making common cause with conservatism could rally. Brink argued that libertarians should admit that they are not, as many of them had argued going back to the 1970s, equidistant from the two parties. They are natural allies with liberalsalbeit critical allies. Their alliance with conservatism was opportunistic, but their alliance with liberalism was on principle.

That pretty much describes where Will is coming from, as well as many of the other folks at Niskanen who came out of the libertarian network of organizations. For them, liberaltarianism is another way of saying post-libertarianism (a term first coined by our own Jeffrey Friedman). The purpose of liberaltarianism is to describe the political position you get to when youve become disenthralled with the mass of positions and alliances associated with institutional libertarianism but retain a substantial chunk of its underlying principles.

While Ive hung around with a lot of libertarians in my life and learned a great deal from them, Ive never been one of them. I am and (God willing) will always be a straight-ticket Democrat. So my path to liberaltarianism has a different trajectory than my co-conspirators here at the Niskanen Center. It is worth explaining why I now think liberaltarianism is a reasonable shorthand for my political positions, and what I think the philosophy has to offer for people who come more or less from my side of the fence.

I grew up knowing that I was a liberal, but also knowing that I was not quite like the other liberals I knew. This instinct was almost certainly hard wired, with sources that I may never get to the bottom of. But it meant that I was always drawn to liberals who got into fights with other liberals. In college that drew me to the Washington Monthly and its diaspora throughout the media landscape, and to the thinkers around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). In graduate school I read and was deeply influenced by William Galstons Liberal Purposes, which in a very vulgar way you could think of as higher DLCism. I had not thought through exactly what my program was, but I knew what my tribe was. Much of my subsequent intellectual career has been devoted to figuring out the program that should go with the tribe.

That program, such as I have been able to develop it up until now, can be characterized as left-liberaltarianism. That is just a fancy way of saying that I come to the liberaltarian project not as a refugee from libertarianism, but as an internal critic of modern liberalism. Liberaltarianism, as I understand it, is thus Janus-facedit is not the median between conservatism and modern liberalism, for it has criticisms of both. The core of left-liberaltarianism is an effort to combine liberal principles of social justice with a respect for limited government, and a preference for a relatively sharp line between state and market, and between levels of government.

By limited government, I mean a government that operates as much as possible through relatively simple, transparent, direct means that are susceptible to political oversight and citizen comprehension. The primary defining attribute of the state is coercion, and liberaltarians prefer that it use coercion out in the open. In contrast to the increasing attraction of those on the center-left for social policy nudges, liberaltarianism has a preference for shoveslarge blunt uses of social authority. Instead of a proliferating mass of regulations to combat climate change, liberaltarians prefer a tax on carbon. Instead of a variety of different tax subsidies and clever devices to encourage people to save, liberaltarians have a preference for good old-fashioned tax-and-spend social insurance. In contrast to the confusing welter of rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank, liberaltarians favor blunt limits on bank leverage. The defining characteristic of all these reforms is that they are simple and rule-like, replacing administrative discretion wherever possible with blunt applications of coercion specified in law.

Transparency and simplicity are themselves powerful limitations on government. With rare exceptions, liberaltarians want rules that avoid the excessive entanglement of the state and market, and the interweaving of levels of government. Instead of governments that, at many levels and in subtle ways, sneak up on involvement in a particular social domain, liberaltarians want definitive decisions by the national government to intervene (or not). This serves to enhance political deliberation, since the decision to act must be clear and responsibility for results unmistakably affixed. When the national government operates by steering or nudging or partneringwhether with private firms or state governmentsit is unclear precisely who is to be praised or blamed, and it can become nearly impossible for legislatures or citizens to exercise effective oversight. In addition, especially in the case of partnering with private actorssomething mistakenly referred to as privatizationthis kind of interweaving of state and market creates powerful temptations toward the corruption of both. These temptations can be seen clearly, for example, in the Trump administrations still-vague infrastructure plans, which promise to turn $200 billion of taxpayer money into $1 trillion in projects by creating incentives, guarantees, and inducements for private businesses, rather than using direct government spending. Something similar can be said of proposals like that of the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey, who advocatesa state investment bank for small businesses. The opportunities for the government to steer such projects to its political allies would be enormously temptingwhich is, in the Trump administrations case, almost certainly a feature rather than a bug.

This gets to a final feature of liberaltarianism, which is that it is especially sensitive to the ways that the state is not always an instrument of egalitarianism, but can be captured by the powerful and turned to their advantage. This is the subject of my forthcoming book with Lindsey, The Captured Economy. While the state is a potentially very powerful tool to enhance equal opportunity, it is also highly susceptible to the manipulations of those with economic and social power. As Brink and I argue, that influence is magnified in policy domains characterized by policy complexity and multiple, obscure institutional venues, which are easier for the wealthy to manipulate. Dentists, to take only one example out of many, are able to turn the regulatory system to their own advantage because the licensing boards that make the rules are so low-profile that they attract attention only from dentists themselves. Something similar typically characterizes other areas of upward redistribution, from financial regulation to intellectual property and real estate.

This vision of liberaltarianism, then, is primarily institutional in character. Back in the early twentieth century, Progressives who sought to increase the power of government to enhance social justice concluded that the only way to do that was to emancipate government at every level, to remove formal limits on the state (other than individual rights). But it turns out that a system of pervasive intertwining of the national and state governments, and the market and state, is one that is not particularly good for social justice, political accountability, or citizen engagement with politics.

One agenda for liberaltarianism, therefore, is to think about how to pursue important state functions in environmental protection, social welfare, and other areas in ways that are simpler, that sort out more cleanly who is responsible, and that involve the national government either in a way that occupies the field or that leaves matters for the market or state and local governments. We want a welfare/regulatory state governed as much as possible by law rather than administrative discretionrule-of-law big government, you might say. Often that will mean purer nationalization of functions, for example by nationalizing Medicaid (i.e., ending its status as a joint state-federal venture). But it will also mean reconsidering the mass of complex mandates and funding structures in K-12 education. It will mean trying to pull the national government out of the business of subsidizing private savings (through 529s, IRAs, 401ks) and just increasing social insurance. By doing soby sharply reducing the expectation of mass participation in private equity marketswe could also reconsider how we regulate finance, with less expectation that we need to protect unsophisticated investors. Other than preventing systemic risk (for example, through capital requirements) we could let markets rip more than we do now, since only the well-to-do would be significantly invested in them.

This is not the only vision of liberaltarianism. There are other visions that come more from the left, such as those that are primarily motivated by cosmopolitanism, or an aversion to paternalism. I am less convinced by those visions, although I think they are a necessary part of the larger conversations that should happen under the liberaltarian umbrella. I hope to address them in later posts.

Steven Teles is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is co-author (with Brink Lindsey) of the forthcoming The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Become Richer, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, and (with David Dagan) Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration.

Read more here:

How to Get to Liberaltarianism from the Left - Niskanen Center (press release) (blog)

Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have a free will; that there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will where philosophers must choose one or the other. This view is pursued in at least three ways: libertarians deny that the universe is deterministic, the hard determinists deny that any free will exists, and pessimistic incompatibilists (hard indeterminists) deny both that the universe is determined and that free will exists.

Incompatiblism is contrasted with compatibilism, which rejects the determinism/free will dichotomy.

Metaphysical libertarianism argues that free will is real and that determinism is false. Such dualism risks an infinite regress however;[1] if any such mind is real, an objection can still be raised using the standard argument against free will[clarification needed] that it is shaped by a higher power (a necessity or chance).[clarification needed] Libertarian Robert Kane (among others) presented an alternative model:

Robert Kane (editor of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will) is a leading incompatibilist philosopher in favour of free will. Kane seeks to hold persons morally responsible for decisions that involved indeterminism in their process. Critics maintain that Kane fails to overcome the greatest challenge to such an endeavor: "the argument from luck".[2] Namely, if a critical moral choice is a matter of luck (indeterminate quantum fluctuations), then on what grounds can we hold a person responsible for their final action? Moreover, even if we imagine that a person can make an act of will ahead of time, to make the moral action more probable in the upcoming critical moment, this act of 'willing' was itself a matter of luck.

Libertarianism in the philosophy of mind is unrelated to the like-named political philosophy. It suggests that we actually do have free will, that it is incompatible with determinism, and that therefore the future is not determined. For example, at this moment, one could either continue reading this article if one wanted, or cease. Under this assertion, being that one could do either, the fact of how the history of the world will continue to unfold is not currently determined one way or the other.

One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen". One major objection to this view is that science has gradually shown that more and more of the physical world obeys completely deterministic laws, and seems to suggest that our minds are just as much part of the physical world as anything else. If these assumptions are correct, incompatibilist libertarianism can only be maintained as the claim that free will is a supernatural phenomenon, which does not obey the laws of nature (as, for instance, maintained by some religious traditions).

However, many libertarian view points now rely upon an indeterministic view of the physical universe, under the assumption that the idea of a deterministic, "clockwork" universe has become outdated since the advent of quantum mechanics.[citation needed] By assuming an indeterministic universe libertarian philosophical constructs can be proposed under the assumption of physicalism.

There are libertarian view points based upon indeterminism and physicalism, which is closely related to naturalism.[3] A major problem for naturalistic libertarianism is to explain how indeterminism can be compatible with rationality and with appropriate connections between an individual's beliefs, desires, general character and actions. A variety of naturalistic libertarianism is promoted by Robert Kane,[4][5] who emphasizes that if our character is formed indeterministically (in "self-forming actions"), then our actions can still flow from our character, and yet still be incompatibilistically free.

Alternatively, libertarian view points based upon indeterminism have been proposed without the assumption of naturalism. At the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles,[6]quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, but still Lewis stated the logical possibility that, if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic, this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality (noting that, under a physicalist point of view, the non-physical entity must be independent of the self-identity or mental processing of the sentient being). Lewis mentions this only in passing, making clear that his thesis does not depend on it in any way.

Others may use some form of Donald Davidson's anomalous monism to suggest that although the mind is in fact part of the physical world, it involves a different level of description of the same facts, so that although there are deterministic laws under the physical description, there are no such laws under the mental description, and thus our actions are free and not determined.[7]

Those who reject free will and accept determinism are variously known as "hard determinists", hard incompatibilists, free will skeptics, illusionists, or impossibilists. They believe that there is no 'free will' and that any sense of the contrary is an illusion.[8] Of course, hard determinists do not deny that one has desires, but say that these desires are causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. According to this philosophy, no wholly random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. Determinists sometimes assert that it is stubborn to resist scientifically motivated determinism on purely intuitive grounds about one's own sense of freedom. They reason that the history of the development of science suggests that determinism is the logical method in which reality works.

William James said that philosophers (and scientists) have an "antipathy to chance."[9] Absolute chance, a possible implication of quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle, implies a lack of causality.[citation needed] This possibility often disturbs those who assume there must be a causal and lawful explanation for all events.

Since many believe that free will is necessary for moral responsibility, this may imply disastrous consequences for their theory of ethics.

As something of a solution to this predicament, it has been suggested that, for the sake of preserving moral responsibility and the concept of ethics, one might embrace the so-called "illusion" of free will. This, despite thinking that free will does not exist according to determinism. Critics argue that this move renders morality merely another "illusion", or else that this move is simply hypocritical.

The Determinist will add that, even if denying free will does mean morality is incoherent, such an unfortunate result has no effect on the truth. Note, however, that hard determinists often have some sort of 'moral system' that relies explicitly on determinism. A Determinist's moral system simply bears in mind that every person's actions in a given situation are, in theory, predicted by the interplay of environment and upbringing. For instance, the Determinist may still punish undesirable behaviours for reasons of behaviour modification or deterrence.

Hard incompatibilism, like hard determinism, is a type of skepticism about free will. 'Hard incompatibilism' is a term coined by Derk Pereboom to designate the view that both determinism and the sort of indeterminism that has a significant chance of being true are incompatible with our having free will.[10] Like the hard determinist, the hard incompatibilist holds that if determinism were true, our having free will would be ruled out. But Pereboom argues in addition that if our decisions were indeterministic events, free will would also be precluded. In his view, free will is the control in action required for the desert aspect of moral responsibility -- for our deserving to be blamed or punished for immoral actions, and to be praised or rewarded for morally exemplary actions. He contends that if our decisions were indeterministic events, their occurrence would not be in the control of the agent in the way required for such attributions of desert.[11] The possibility for free will that remains is libertarian agent causation, according to which agents as substances (thus not merely as having a role in events) can cause actions without being causally determined to do so. Pereboom argues that for empirical reasons it is unlikely that we are agent causes of this sort, and that as a result, it's likely that we lack free will.[12]

In recent years researchers in the field of experimental philosophy have been working on determining whether ordinary people, who aren't experts in this field, naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility.[13] Some experimental work has even conducted cross-cultural studies.[14] The debate about whether people naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions has not come out overwhelmingly in favor of one view or the other. Still, there has been some evidence that people can naturally hold both views. For instance, when people are presented with abstract cases which ask if a person could be morally responsible for an immoral act when they could not have done otherwise, people tend to say no, or give incompatibilist answers, but when presented with a specific immoral act that a specific person committed, people tend to say that that person is morally responsible for their actions, even if they were determined (that is, people also give compatibilist answers).[15]

Read the rest here:

Incompatibilism - Wikipedia