If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then.

Well now that libertarianism has been subjected to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, and has been definitively refuted (since Caplan’s posts can never be topped in the self-refutation department), what do we do now with all this extra spare time we have?

This might be a good time to point the theoretically inclined to Samuel Freeman’s excellent (in my opinion) article from a few years ago, “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism is not a Liberal View” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30, 2 (Spring 2002), 105-151. It’s long, but does an excellent job of showing how Caplan-style views (Caplan’s not discussed himself) differ from liberal views, even from classical liberal views that are often confused with libertarianism. The non-theoretically inclined can just read Caplan to see how libertarianism isn’t a liberal, or even a plausible, view.

Are you saying, Popeye, that this is yet one more example of blithe Dunning-Kruger ?

Personally, I think Belle’s comment says all that needs to be said. After all, what is the logical response to blind recourse to non sequitur ? A long and tedious dissertation on the reasons why what Caplan says have no applicability to this planet and this (our) species ? Or gracious segue into a forceful, and highly applicable, sequitur ?

It’s just bizarre.
Women had no legal recourse against marital rape and no way of contracting independently. Just like women of today (!), if they were unhappy with these matters, they could talk them over with their husbands. (“Dearest, about this raping me thing…”)

And if that didn’t work… well, divorce was much harder, so, er…

On the plus side, women couldn’t own anything, so no taxes! In your face, the state!

This post makes it even more crushingly obvious than the last that Caplan has no actual historical knowledge to bring to bear on this topic. Every one of his “I thinks” or “I doubts” or “But how manys” is a pontoon-bridge of assumption over an abyss of fact. He doesn’t know. Hey, I don’t either! Late 19th-Century social and legal history isn’t my field. (My field is, um, full of pretty butterflies!) But Caplan has the economist’s disease of imagining that pesky “facts” are irrelevant in the face of economistic inference.

As a method of doing empirical history…

This Caplan leaves to his critics. His is speculation, deduction from doctrine, and the occasional Google search. It’s good to be a Cato scholar!

Fun fact: marital rape was criminalised in the UK in 1994.

Here’s the view of a senior High Court judge, Glanville Williams, writing in 1991: “Occasionally some husband continues to exercise what he regards as his right when his wife refuses him, the refusal most probably resulting from the fact that the pair have had a tiff. … The fearsome stigma of rape is too great a punishment for husbands who use their strength in these circumstances.”
He went on to say that he’d talked it through with his wife, and she agreed entirely.

And here’s the view of John Stuart Mill, writing in 1869:

“However brutal a tyrant [a woman] may unfortunately be chained to … he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclination.”

But presumably if she hadn’t wanted… no, not funny.

What was that about the greasy black mud again?

The astonishing thing about this, for me, is the way Caplan argues a factual case as if it were a counterfactual one. It’s one thing to say ‘if the world were like this, then (eg) women would be better off …’ But it’s quite another to make specific claims about a very well-documented historical period, when there’s plenty of evidence that directly contadicts such claims. One commentor at his blog even tries to refute him on counterfactual terms. Nice try, but really there’s no need. Caplan isn’t talking about a notional Desertopia; he’s talking about actual countries and actual people.

This is the kind of thing that I hesitate to say in a CT comments thread lest I become the red meat, but: in my view Bryan is clearly wrong *even on libertarian grounds,* and even on narrowly-formal libertarian grounds (e.g. without invoking Kerry Howley’s culture-of-freedom idea). The contortions he’s having to go through in order to deny that massive restrictions on formal, legal, individual liberties actually count– the selective invocation of extra-formal considerations like marital comity, without admitting in extra-formal considerations like a patriarchal public culture– are very telling. His mistakes (at least in this case) aren’t libertarian mistakes per se.

Someday I have to argue with Matt about that Freeman article– but I don’t even think it’s relevant here, because I really don’t think what’s going on has much to do with libertarianism.

I don’t think Caplan is quite done yet — he’s only been discussing the 1880s. But he’s supposedly making a comparison between the 1880s and today. So I eagerly await his discussion of how women are not as free today. His insights into Sex and the City must be spectacular.

Oh, I take that back. If it’s scathing and funny, fire away.

Jacob:

I agree with you that Caplan is wrong on even the most narrowly, property-focused libertarian grounds. I disagree with you about whether this has anything to do with libertarianism: I think it does, and it is most revealing.

Caplan is trying to argue that Gilded Age women weren’t made unfree by restrictions on their economic and legal freedom. Yet the ostensible core of his (and the Cato Institute’s) version of libertarianism is perfect economic and legal freedom for all. His worm-like wriggling is because he’s trying to paint a lack of libertarian freedom as a high point of libertarian freedom. Naturally, this is a problem; perhaps he hopes to distract the onlookers by his wriggling. (hint: ew.)

It will be interesting to see if anyone wakes up and realizes that the Cato Institute is pushing plutocracy, not libertarianism. My bet is that it won’t be Caplan.

You realise he has never actually seen an episode of Sex and the City, right?

In this context, that’s a plus not a minus.

I sometimes wonder why many so libertarians appear to inherently assume they’d actually move up the food chain in their dream society.

Unless yer a super survivalist/deep green/Unabomber hermit type, you do have spend some time co-operating with others for more to your life than just bargaining with grunts and gold for vital resources.

You need social hacking attributes like empathy, imagination and persuasion – all noticeably missing from the output of many prominent libertarians theseaday.

Really, just fucking amazing.

If some 21-year old bombed on schnapps was posting on his blog at 2am from his mother’s basement about how he totally googled it and there’s nothing on the internetz about men raping people in the long-timey ago when there were gas lamps and Sherlock Holmes and shit like that and so down with the governments because back when they didn’t have any governments and shit life was much better oh no gotta go night shift job at Walmart is starting in a minutes bet some cop is going to bust me for drunk driving FUCKING governments that didn’t used to happen either back then you could drink schnapps all day and drive your horse anywhere you wanted

Well, you could understand it.

But really, that you don’t instantly have your Ph.D revoked for saying, “I googled for ’19th Century marital rape’ and didn’t find it! So not an issue!”… I wondered if maybe somewhere deep down inside there was some tiny bit of capacity to feel professional or personal embarassment for saying such a thing. Then I looked at his homepage. No, no there is not. It’s enough to make one wish for a nanny state that would at least exercise totalitarian control over the choice of page backgrounds, fonts and color schemes.

Belle Waring, meet Timothy Burke. Timothy, Belle. I believe you two know who each other are, at least? I’m afraid that Belle’s wise words on mud will have to share with Timothy’s wise words on revocation the honor of winning this whole discussion. Sorry. Maybe you can have some sort of ideal competition for a sole victor?

But in Caplan’s own mind he’s some kind of brilliant intellectual, maybe in the 99th percentile of the IQ distribution, and his commitment to the truth is so strong that he’s not afraid to embrace unpopular realities. So there.

Apropos of Caplan in particular and libertarians in general (ie, this is entirely relevant), what happens at this point is that he will crow that the fact so many people disagree with him on this issue just proves that he really is eversomuchmore smarter than the rest of us.

And contrary to what someone has implied above, I do think that libertarians carry this refusal to admit error to extremes not found in more reality-based groups.

“It will be interesting to see if anyone wakes up and realizes that the Cato Institute is pushing plutocracy, not libertarianism. My bet is that it won’t be Caplan.”

Wasn’t this ball set rolling in the first place by the Cato Institute’s Will Wilkinson critiquing the idea of ‘the golden age’?

Adding on to Bloix and Ceri B.’s comments, note that Bryan stated: “While it’s a heinous crime, I seriously doubt that more than a small fraction American women in 1880 worried about being raped by their husbands. ”

I understand that his blog post was not expected to be a peer-reviewed article with pages of cites, he doesn’t give *any* reason for believing what he said – he’s making a comment from a totally uninformed personal opinion about how women felt about marital rape, in a very different society, under very different rules. In a time when the idea of ‘marital rape’ would have been seen as an laughable oxymoron to the people who ran society, and made/enforced the rules.

Look people, it’s 2010. Crooked Timber and its antecedents have been humiliating this kind of vapid bullshitter for almost a decade. He surely could not have written what he did not knowing what was going to happen, right? It has to be a spoof.

I’m betting that he threw up that retro home page in the last couple of days just to make the overall performance more vivid and outrageous.

Right?

“Crooked Timber and its antecedents have been humiliating this kind of vapid bullshitter for almost a decade.”

Libertarians. The lab rats of comment threads. Because there’s some arguments even a rat won’t make with straight whiskers.

I disagree with you about whether this has anything to do with libertarianism: I think it does, and it is most revealing.

That’s my own take; I can believe that Prof. Levy, if he be a libertarian, holds that position on ascetically intellectual grounds, but I suspect the libertarian hoi polloi of just wanting to elevate selfish assholery to a political dogma. Ordinarily I have some misgivings about this suspicion’s being a mere prejudice, but then for instance I see these Bryan Caplan posts.

he’s making a comment from a totally uninformed personal opinion about how women felt about marital rape, in a very different society, under very different rules

In one sense I agree with Caplan – I too doubt that more than a small fraction of American women in 1880 worried about being raped by their husbands. What fraction of American women in 1880 actually were raped by their husbands – or, more to the point, submitted to what we would now regard as being raped by their husbands – is a completely different question. But presumably Caplan wouldn’t take the “if most people think [neutral X] means [coercive Y] then it’s reasonable for that to be the default rule” trick that far…

“I see Jacob Levy is up there saying that Bryan Caplan is NO TRUE SCOTSMAN”

He might be as Scottish as a Mars Bar pickled in Buckfast, but Boaz and Wilkinson are presumably as entitled to the clan tartan as he is and they fundamentally disagree with him, so these particular issues cannot be defining of Scottishness, can they? In other words, Jacob is right, no?

He might be as Scottish as a Mars Bar pickled in Buckfast, but Boaz and Wilkinson are presumably as entitled to the clan tartan as he is and they fundamentally disagree with him, so these particular issues cannot be defining of Scottishness, can they? In other words, Jacob is right, no?

Well no, Jacob is not right. Otherwise, like with HCR where there was a designated MOTW (Monster of the Week) to block crucial reforms, what you have is a group of people who take turns not being a “real” libertarian. So today Caplan is the Outkast, tomorrow it will be someone else and he’ll be magically restored to a member in good standing. If you want Caplan to be set apart from the real Slim Shady’s, I would think that at a minimum you’d have to have other “real” libertarians say that he isn’t one of them. Do you think that’s going to happen?

John Meredith:

Do we really think that legislation against marital rape has significantly reduced its incidence? I really don’t know.

Good grief. That’s not how it works, dude. Legislation against marital rape is only *possible* because it has already been reduced in both incidence and acceptability. The law is helping along a social change that has already done most of the work.

But since libertarians don’t believe in society or human relationships, only laws and contracts, I don’t know if they can even perceive social change.

My scientific curiousity does wonder what’s in Caplan’s graphic novel, and if it is indeed porn, and how a professor can have porn on his personal website. Did the tenure committee read it? a horrifying thought. Or is it up there because he has tenure already? I’m not looking, because I figure a graphic novel put together by someone whose website is styled in Vintage 1999 Geocities will make my eyes jump out of my face and run for shelter.

“Has anybody seen Bryan Caplan’s website? It’s pretty awesome
From said website:
“Read my graphic novel Amore Infernale”

Just downloaded it and AIEEE!!??!! Teh goggles, theyz do nothing!!??!

It’s impossible to convey just bad it is in every possible way. And just bad bad, not even cheap shot funny campy bad.

Tho’ I reckon just a few snippets of the dialogue and directions should impart a solid whiff of just what a glutinous decaying mess it is.

“I doubt the story is that simple, Khoklov. Her rescuer said he saw two humans fall in. Why can’t anyone find the body? ”

“The Ambassador’s right. The Verona fire department dredged the river – nothing. I want some answers. ”

“Then I suggest we suit up. Poor little rich girl’s psychiatrist will not allow three nobodies to question her.”

*Brain wave effect coming from head.*

“I cannot wholely agree. I peered into his backpack. He’s got a month’s supply of grass inside. We are wasting time. I’m going back to work. I suggest you two do the
same. According to Italian labor law, is still possible to fire us.”

*Van smashes into Juliet. Romeo disappears from sight.*

“How do you say, “Stick fork in her because she is done”?”

*Pull back. Heroes in costume behind doctor.”

“You kept your head longer than any girl in the past six centuries. After all, he was Romeo.”

And coming soon from the same creative fountainhead – “The Train Of The Nibelung”!

I’d like to think it was some kinda knowning Cremaster Guy Maddinesque grotesquerie but the utter absence of any aesthetic nounce, wit or energy in the execution belies this.

I want to know more about this greasy black marsh mud. How did it get so greasy?

Nabokov has moved into a tie with Belle Waring and Timothy Burke for the best comment on this thread. I will steal this line, “Libertarians: the lab rats of comments threads. Because there’s some arguments even a rat won’t make with straight whiskers.” for future use.

Thankee rickstersherpa. Y’know it’s actually quite surprising no libertarian movement has adopted that irresponsible, irrepressible survivor the rat as their emblem.

But yes, that would involve self-deprecating humour, another social hacking attribute that most libertarians sorely lack.

Still waiting for someone to write the parodic missing link between Atlas Shrugged and Flowers For Algernon.

“Sometimes I think that libertarians don’t actually want icky girls in their awesome space clubhouse.”

But what about “comfort women” shuttled in. Bound to be a market for that.

Still waiting for someone to write the parodic missing link between Atlas Shrugged and Flowers For Algernon.

I suppose I’m the only one here who ever saw “Ayn Rand Gives Me a Boner” at the Annoyance Theater in Chicago?

chris y:
It was clearly a sufficiently well known problem for Galsworthy to make it a central plot device at the beginning of the next century.

Not only did Galsworthy make it a central plot device, but his point in using this device was to link the husband’s legally sanctioned physical dominion over his wife with the era’s private property absolutism; the marital rapist of Galsworthy novel was none other than the book’s eponymous “Many of Property.”

Detaching myself for a moment from the prevailing snark to address Jacob Levy on his own terms: What does a true libertarian believe? Specifically, must or may a libertarian believe that it is a terrible infringement on individual liberty for the State to prevent A from voluntarily contracting to be B’s slave in perpetuity? (Topic recently referenced in some thread here, I can’t be bothered to hunt it down.)

Alternatively, I see people in kilts arguing on the internet that A should be allowed to sell a kidney to B. Why would a libertarian not also believe that A should be allowed to sell his heart to B (nor immediate delivery, that is, not as a future interest) — thereby validating the Yiddish saying that “If the rich could pay other people to die for them, a poor man could make a nice living”?

Jacob,

What exactly differentiates libertarianism from Millian liberalism besides recognizably libertarian mistakes?

There is an extremely strong elective affinity between right-conservatism and contempt for violations of some people’s rights

The problem for DeLong’s argument here is that any number of Good Guys can be adduced who had contempt for various peoples and their rights. Kant for instance had no good opinion of black people. Seizing on weaknesses is questionable rhetoric.

The better question is, for instance, did Oakeshott’s or Burke’s own principles convict them of their prejudices, and do Caplan’s own principles refute his weird defense of coverture?

I’ve been avoiding these libertarian threads, despite being at one time a persistent anti-libertarian arguer (or flamer, if you prefer). Ask Henley.

Why? Because I think that U.S.-libertarianism effectively died during the last Bush years. I mean, you’d think that this would be a great time for libertarianism, right? Obama is proving to be just as bad as Bush was on civil liberties, so people should be signing up for libertarianism in droves. Well, no. Because when it came time to show what they actually supported, a large majority of libertarians showed that they really were pretty happy with Bush-style conservatism, aggressive war, and all the rest. Going libertarian now because of civil liberties would be like deciding that you should look into Christian-identified politics because you’ve heard that they really support peace. The Bush years demolished their market fundamentalism while also revealing their supposed care for civil rights to be a fraud.

Given that they now, I think, have definitively no chance of getting anywhere with their deluded doctrine, I don’t see the point in snarking at them. Sure, Caplan’s views on women are pretty icky, but people don’t go to KKK Web sites and repost their claims and critique them. His historical views are pretty nutty, but people don’t go to Flat Earth sites and say “Look — the Earth is really round!” Just let him do his thing and go on to someone who actually matters.

What possible profit is there in arguing that the 1880s in America were a libertarian paradise? None.

In the US context, it’s pre-Progressive Era and pre-New Deal so it just has to be better, empirical evidence be damned.

“The fact that an economics professor is saying that he can show that a law is irrelevant because there weren’t many prosecutions under it, makes little baby Jon von Neumann cry.”

dsquared, thanks for that– as far as I’m concerned, the most entertaining moment of the whole exchange (in part because it’s clearly right).

I think, just to back away from larger arguments, there’s one that’s worth paying a bit of attenton to.

Namely, has Caplan had a normal relationship? I have no idea if he’s straight, married, or whatever. But assuming he’s done something like the normal thing, pair-bonding with someone, at least for a time, he must be aware that the desire to fuck is not automagically concommitant.

Now, there are a lot of negotiations involved here, and I do think that there is good reason to not look at other’s arrangements too closely. But if, for instance, Levy is willing to accept that slavery happened to be co-incident with white masters fucking black women, then I think it isn’t strange to ask how other matrimonial arrangements worked. And, for the record, it is worth notiong that fucking slaves against their will was the norm.

From the latest post: Marriage was voluntary, and voluntarily-accepted constraints do not infringe liberty, so appearances notwithstanding, married women were as free as unmarried women.

Uh huh. I’m getting a little tired of this thought experiment of deciding whether the world would really be a much worse place if my husband could rape me with impunity. Seriously? I’m not sure why I engaged in good faith in the first place, but – as someone who has met rape victims and is from a traditional culture where these concepts aren’t all that academic – I’m really, really done. At this point, I find this is more offensive and hurtful than it is interesting.

Crooked Timber book event: Bryan Caplan / Amore Infernale

Please? Pretty please?

“Fun fact: marital rape was criminalised in the UK in 1994.”

Is this really entirely accurate?

It strikes me as being like saying that assault occasioning actual bodily harm was criminalised in England in 1861. True in a sense: a specific law made that specific act a specific crime in 1861. But at the same time also false: in that the implication that you could lawfully assault someone occasioning actual bodily harm prior to that date isn’t correct.

It’s true that husbands could only be prosecuted for rape quite recently, but people are pushing it too far when they try to make out that women had no legal defences against being raped by their husbands until recently. There were other laws contraining people’s actions. There’s a whole load of myths being set up about the past by both sides here.

I think you are mistaken leederick. There was for example the famous case in the 1980s where a man smashed his wife’s front door down and raped her, and the police prosecuted him for damage to the door. You are right that there are other laws, and I imagine that technically successful prosecutions could have been brought on other charges of assault and bodily harm, in perhaps ever single case. However, I think the police and prosecution service were not minded to make these prosecutions. You may remember the great hostility there was to the change in the law, and this hostility reflects the widespread, if not majority, feeling that to prosecute these cases was wrong, disruptive of family life etc. It is my recollection that the change in the law preceded the change of values, at least among more conservative parts of society such as the police and the church (and the judiciary – see Phil’s quote).

Alison,

It’s worth noting that this was a change instituted by the judiciary, not one that they reluctantly responded to. The 1994 Act merely gave statutory recognition to that decision, it doesn’t take away (for example) its retrospective effect. But I agree with you that the effect of the rule, while it existed, has to be considered in terms of the chilling effect on police investigations, prosecutions and even reporting rates; not just actual convictions.

the chilling effect on police investigations, prosecutions and even reporting rates

Reporting rates most of all – what would you report? There would have had to be serious violence involved before the police or the courts would take it seriously.

Some time in the 1950s or 1960s, my mother once told me, she was counselling a friend who’d made a bad marriage: he drank, he abused her, he beat her, but what could you do? And he raped her when he felt like it, but what could you do? There seemed to be no prospect of prosecuting the guy or even getting a divorce. Until she confided in my mother that he raped her anally, whereupon my mother told her that that was a different matter; the same laws which legalised marital rape made anal intercourse illegal even within marriage. (It was legalised in 1994, symmetrically enough.) Happy ending: she got her divorce.

“I seriously doubt that more than a small fraction American women in 1880 worried about being raped by their husbands.”

What do you think that fraction was? 20%, 30%? Let’s take another form of sexual abuse in another time — the present. In the United States around 1/4 of all females are sexually abused by the age of 18. Around 1/6 of all males are sexually abused by 18. That means around 1/5 of the population (20%) should do jail time. Now cast your mind back to when women had no rights and no voice. 50%, 60%?

Sorting through the crap in these comments is unbelievable. Speaking as an academic and first-time visitor, I suppose it would be awesome to accumulate groupies to mock people I don’t agree with. Ho ho–libertarians! They don’t like girls! Ho ho! Hey Caplan….NERD!! Ho ho! Hey McArdle–I mean, McStooopid!! Ho ho!

Killer blog!

The Reagan-Thatcher narrative pegs it to the Rise of Licentiousness in the 1960’s. Didn’t a conservative writer just bring that out again, to explain the abuse by priests? I fear that in reality all statistics of sexual abuse may be nearly constants, and lack of voice has equalled lack of reportage. There is a reportage problem now, so we can surmise that history even recent history is quickly remote. The Church and the 60’s both taught love.

We’re not done with coverture as a de facto effect — a lot of widows still find themselves saying, “Oh, Henry always handled all the financial things.” And I find our damn California tax return refers to the first person on the tax return — traditionally the husband, as the “taxpayer,” and the second person — traditionally the wife of course — as the “spouse.” Wot, I don’t pay taxes too?

Liberty peaked back in eighteen and eighty.
Droit du seigneur was the joy of the laity
Power implied the consent of the lady.

Liberty dripped down in tropical trickles,
Riches were pooling in puddles of nickles,
Sausages, side arms and jars full of pickles.

In the United States around 1/4 of all females are sexually abused by the age of 18. Around 1/6 of all males are sexually abused by 18. That means around 1/5 of the population (20%) should do jail time.

Hold on a minute — aren’t you confusing the number of victims with the number of abusers? I don’t see any reason to assume that they would be the same number — serial abusers are pretty common AFAIK. (Although, of course, it’s possible for the same victim to be abused by multiple abusers, too.)

Belle, thank you – actually I like thinking about greasy black mud and oyster shells, since it brings me into the saltwater marshes which in a state of nature are quite appealing places. It was a refreshing change from thinking about the continued flourishing of libertarians..

@97: Wait a second—you moderate these comments?

I think they just check our punctuation.

Might there be a libertarian argument to make against making fun of libertarians?

Easy. To attack libertarians is to attack economic freedom so blah blah.

chris @107 – Fair enough and I don’t know the statistics on serial abusers. I just guessed that repeaters would tend to be complained about more, even by their own families, and so there would be more arrests and trials. About one in five people is victimized, but I feel that I don’t read a commensurate amount of headlines! Almost an apparent lack of sensationalism in other words. Serial actors could be protected by institutions of course, but even in the Catholic church’s “current” scandal, it is a very small number of priests.

If you add the people who know about it but don’t take action, I’ll bet there are even more guilty.