Conservative Principles: Liberaltarian Afterthoughts

There is a question of standpoint here. If Jim Crow laws existed socially since time immemorial without coercive imposition, in an institutional regime that otherwise supported individual rights for all, then who exactly are the people finding it ugly? It just would be a consensual order of a really weird kind. Why would anyone who found themselves in charge of the levers of power be the sort of person to change it in that situation, unless there was actually something coercive about it.

It also seems implausible that such a situation could be maintained. It would be very exposed to agitation as soon as someone pointed out the absurdity of sticking to those norms (so long as free speech were respected). Since those norms could not be enforced through Government, you would see alternative norms emerging fairly quickly, just as was actually happening during the civil rights movement independently of Government policy.

Ok, I guess I would bite the bullet in this historically unblemished case. I would say that it is incumbent on us to protest and challenge this scheme of norms using non-coercive means (as of course, actually happens). With their property rights and free expression fully respected, this group will have the resources to set out their alternative way of blacks interacting with whites on socially equal terms and demonstrate its moral superiority.

So basically, Nick would vote against the Civil Rights Act. Which is the consistent libertarian position. Which no libertarian involved in practical politics can espouse.

Well the actual Jim Crow was the product of loads of coercion, both legal and illegal. So there was certainly plenty of kinds of Government intervention that was justified.

So I could have wholeheartedly have endorsed Titles I, III, IV, VI, VIII, IX

If the whole act were presented as a bundle, it would be a touch choice.

OT, but Rich, do you happen to live in the Pioneer Valley? South Hadley or Easthampton or thereabouts?

“It’s odd, isn’t it, that all such exceptions are safely in the past. Clear sailing for libertarianism from now on!”

Are they? I would say that there is the death penalty. And while I think the moral absolutist arguments against it are bad, the “government screws things up all the time, why should you trust to to kill only the right people” argument is pretty strong.

So what we’ve got here, in the conservative approach that may or may not be libertarian, is a decision-making system that allows one to be right about some of the critical issues of our time decades after crucial decisions have been taken, and which reliably puts one on the wrong side of any pending issue. Really, it seems like the evidence suggests it: whatever a whole lot of intellectual-aiming conservatives say is right about the issue of the day, do the opposite, and the chances are good that you’ll come out on the side of decency and humanity.

(The heuristic becomes essentially perfect if you include “centrist” Democrats. Anything that the Heritage Foundation and the DLC agree on is wrong, while either one might be right by itself.)

Being an analytic philosopher, I guess I’m not really supposed to diss thought experiments; but I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to be imagining when I’m asked to imagine a society with Jim Crow but without the history that led up to it.

It seems like many of the oractices and attitudes involved in Jim Crow were what they were, both sociologically and morally because of the history that informed them.

@15, 16 – it really isn’t hard, you just need to go back in time beyond the modern, to when it was pretty darn normal to assume that people weren’t equal, and could be divided into groups distinctive by their relative inferiority to the really top-notch people. After all, the British aristocracy were pretty cool about the whole taxation-without-representation-and-fuck-you-yankee-doodle thing. The really interesting question is why the French aristocracy, who really did live lives of legally-consecrated privilege, atop a society where most people lived in shit and were stuck there, took to American liberty so eagerly [though more fool them, as it turned out].

@12 (Lemuel Pitkin), the flaw in libertarianism isn’t (just) an intellectual one, it’s its complete inapplicability to the real world

I don’t think this is a particularly good critique. Sure, libertarianism is an idealistic vision that doesn’t work in the real world, but it certainly affects the real world. It doesn’t work as a policy, but it does affect policies. You probably won’t sneer at the idealistic visions you sympathize with, so why should you sneer at Nick’s?

Unless, of course, it’s somehow hideous, hideous on its face. Well, is it? That is what Nick is asking in #10. And I too would like to know: if you’re a liberal, then was the Title II a cut-and-dried, “must have” sort of thing?

can you conceive of a pervasive system of bias and oppression that has lasted so long that its historical origins are invisible to us? one in which the oppression does not seem to be the result of any particular governmental arrangement, and is sometimes even thought to arise from consensual arrangements on the part of the oppressed?

man. none of us dudes here can conceive of such a thing. we could ask the girls, i guess, but they’re kinda stupid. i dunno, john; how ’bout you ask belle and see if she has any thoughts?

If Jim Crow laws existed socially since time immemorial without coercive imposition, in an institutional regime that otherwise supported individual rights for all, then who exactly are the people finding it ugly?

I believe this is called “separate but equal”. And the thing about Separate But Equal is that it may work as a thought experiment, but in reality, as Rocky J. Squirrel would say, that trick *never* works.

Yes yes, SBE can work for trivial matters. But whenever the area of life covered is actually important, it fails — and its failure on major issues infects any trivial application of SBE to make it a failure there, too.

For instance, it’s theoretically possible to have SBE water fountains, and for them to be actually identical — as in the regular-height/wheelchair-or-child-height paired fountains you often see, which are the same fountain at different heights. But if the separate water fountains correlate with a distinction that is truly important to the society, they will not be equal: even trivial segregations will take on the character of the larger one.

So the question for you philosophers is, when does a thought experiment become a lie?

John, alex, kid:

I didn’t say that I couldn’t think of some kind of caste-based system coming about without being the result of slavery, or without us knowing how it came about. That would be, as you so rightly point out in your different ways, silly.

What I said was that I couldn’t imagine *Jim Crow* apart from its own partıcular history. In other words, that it was a very particular form of oppression, tied to a particualr time and a particular place, and with a particular history.

Now, I’m quite prepared to agree with John and say – looking at that particular form of oppression, what strikes me as objectionable about it is the effect that it had on the lives and opportunities of the people living under it; and not that it was the historical reflection of something even more horrendously oppressive. (Mind you, I am, as kid bitzer so delicately hints, a white European male. Ask someone who actually lived under and fought against Jim Crow, and they might have something more complex and nuanced to say. )

But I’m inclined to say, when invited as I was by John to imagine ‘something just like Jim Crow, but without the same history’, that my judgment that this would be terrible is a reflection of that belief, rather than something that proiveds independent support for it. Because, as I’ve said, if I’m invited to imagin that in any detail, I don’t really know where to start.

So look, maybe this was a bad place to bring this up; because I’m really not all that much in favour of defending libertarianism. I’m really trying to say that I don’t find appeal to thought experiments of this sort terribly illuminating. And, while I suspect that Rand Paul may be arguing in bad faith, I don’t think its absurd for someone’s response to Jim Crow should depend on its having the history that it did. (Of course, the next question I’d ask a libertarian who thought like that is: do you feel the same way about the expropriation of Native Americans -ie that its a stae perpetrated injustice which the state can legitimately be called upon to undo.)

Nick asks what’s wrong with his position (that being, as far as I can tell, doctrinaire libertarianism). Nick can take the thought experiment of a non-governmental Jim Crow and describe it as “without coercive imposition […] a consensual order […] unless there was actually something coercive about it.” That’s because to libertarians, there can only be governmental coercion: other forms of coercion do not exist. Which makes most of government intervention incomprehensible, would cause many living people to die quickly if implemented, and is a cover, in the American case, for overt racism. The other libertarians aren’t any better than Nick, they are just writing under their real names, therefore hypocrites.

Let’s take age discrimination as an example — a libertarian in another thread mentioned it. Should the government interfere in private business decisions in order to act against age discrimination? Yes, it should. But there’s no history of slavery there, no need for libertarians to preen in their half-century-after-the-fact acceptance of black civil rights. So they will oppose it. Their set of proposed exceptions to their own scheme count for nothing, in every relevant real-world case.

Sebastian brings up the death penalty. Well, of course the death penalty is something the government does, therefore wrong to libertarians. Not that they have any *moral* argument against it, as Sebastian says. Which combines evil and stupidity in one stinking package, but I guess I that I should still point out that the death penalty, worldwide, has become less and less acceptable. Is that because of libertarians? Libertarian sentiment? No, because libertarians really exist only in the U.S. It’s because distrust of governmental action is not specifically a libertarian idea, no matter how much libertarians say that it is. The victories against the death penalty have been won by people who e.g. hold to universal human rights — which concept is essentially a liberal one. Here, I’ll quote from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights at random: “Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”

Thanks for nothing, libertarians.

LP:

“Don’t you ever wonder, in a proper Burkean spirit, why almost no one shares your view of the world? or where’s the libertarian paradise? Why is it every rich country—and especially every rich and democratic country—has a big and growing public sector? Are we all just stupid? brainwashed? what?”

People get sufficiently rich that they can put up with a larger state. This happens after the institutions of free trade and the rule of law have made everyone a lot richer anyway. It is not worth their bother to oppose its growth. I am content to help curb the excesses of powerful states rather than reject them utterly, through things like constitutional government and constantly renewing the seperation of powers.

Anyway, why would I be interested in agreeing with everyone? How could I help change the world for the better and freer without taking a radical and consistent position that puts me on the edge or outside the mainstream now and then? For example, it is pretty much impossible for mainstream elected representatives to talk about legalising drugs (Rand Paul, again) even though that is probably one of the biggest civil rights issues currently going. When they are eventually legalised, it will become one of those things that EVERYONE important was against before suddenly they were in favour. Or perhaps sound money policy, putting an end to inflating fiat currencies that silently robs people of their labour. These important things just don’t get discussed enough by mainstream liberal theorists. Libertarianism has that critical bite for me. I don’t need to be on the winning team all the time.

And we get pay-offs occasionally. The neo-liberal revolution inspired by libertarian thought helped make much more prosperous those who were part of it: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=5164

RP: I hate to break up your cozy view of libertarians but:

1. I am not American.

2. I believe there are things besides Government coercion. Government action is legitimate in order to curb private coercion. But freedom is association is not coercive, and asking someone to act in a weird and deferent manner before they can associate with you is not coercive (it is just really ugly). That is why I would have supported aspects of the CRA that addressed problems of coercion (people being violently denied the right to vote) and denied people equal and fair access to public services and courts.

The bit you quoted from was about a thought experiment so wasn’t perfectly relevant in the real world case.

You realize, Dan, that you could have done absolutely anything with your free time. And yet you’ve chosen to spend it trolling this comment section. Is it raining where you are, or something?

John @ 29

No, I’m not quite sure that I’ve got this right but I think the good idea is outside the cave; but if you look at it directly you get dazzled, or something like that.

Here’s that guy running out onto the field of play again. Isn’t someone going to taser him?

ajay:

I hadn’t realised Paul Krugman was discussing it. Obviously we are having some impact:)

People are rationally ignorant of politics. There is very little chance of any one person being able to determine or effect the outcome of a policy debate or election even if they had discovered their own interests. So whats the point in them going out of their way to discover their interests? They would be better off spending more time shopping for the best mobile phone or holiday (which at least they can definitely choose for themselves) than educating themselves about the nuances of the best way to provide collective goods. So when people vote or agitate politically, it is usually on sentiment.

So to say that people are ignorant of the best policies for them (limited government and robust free market economy), is not to denigrate them. It is specialised knowledge that most people are better off not taking the trouble to find out. Fortunately, in a democracy, people seem to get enough of the taste of policy outcomes such that something like a market economy gets sufficient support to be maintained, allowing continued prosperity despite the depredations of the state.

I hadn’t realised Paul Krugman was discussing it. Obviously we are having some impact:)

Frequently. Just go to his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com and search for “gold bug”. He’s discussing it not because it’s an interesting idea but because, to be blunt, “sound money” keeps being suggested as a policy by people who are ignorant of the damage it has caused and would cause again.

Fortunately, in a democracy, people seem to get enough of the taste of policy outcomes such that something like a market economy gets sufficient support to be maintained, allowing continued prosperity despite the depredations of the state.

That’s interesting reasoning there.

Rich @26 notes the non-contribution of libertarianism, but Nick @30 tells us:

When [drugs] are eventually legalised, it will become one of those things that EVERYONE important was against before suddenly they were in favour.

And it’s true! When fiat currencies are abolished, the economy collapses, the globe heats up and we all reside in sweaty, segregated hovels, the armed-to-the-teeth survivors will have libertarianism to thank for the fact that they can ingest all the drugs they want to.

In all seriosity, Nick is right that the drug war is a huge social problem, and that the libertarians really have stood up for social progress there. So that’s one thing.

“Frequently. Just go to his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com and search for “gold bug”. He’s discussing it not because it’s an interesting idea but because, to be blunt, “sound money” keeps being suggested as a policy by people who are ignorant of the damage it has caused and would cause again.”

Sound money does not necessarily involve gold (and certainly does not involve the intrernational gold standard which was tied to major problems). As for Krugman’s scorn, sound money’s value as a policy might be true, but just not yet ‘in the true’ as the po-mo’s sometimes put it.

“So why isn’t libertarianism steadily gaining ground?”

I don’t go in for that kind of historical inevitability, but I think libertarianism as an ideology and philosophy is perhaps stronger than it has been ever before. Compare even mainstream liberal discourse with the collectivist progressivism of a few decades ago, and you’ll see much more emphasis on individualism than before. There is an increasingly widespread acceptance that people usually know their own interests from day-to-day better than other agencies. Sensible people think that markets should provide even fairly essential goods. People are generally more sceptical of Government than before.

“When [drugs] are eventually legalised, it will become one of those things that EVERYONE important was against before suddenly they were in favour.”

Isn’t that how most important social changes play out? You start out with a very small group talking/complaining/working against what they see as an injustice. They get mostly ignored for a long time. At some point their arguments resonate with a much larger percentage of the population (often because of some ridiculous action that really drives their point home). There is more contentiousness and political struggle, often with this original small group and some of their more moderate sympathizers. Something really nasty happens (often provoked or directly caused by a fairly large group that agrees with the present social norm). This pushes just enough people to oppose the current situation that change can happen. Fifty years later, a much larger group of people pretend they always felt that way.

Since we are talking about slavery, abolition was much like that. I don’t think it ever had a clear majority until after the war. It isn’t clear that Lincoln would have abolished it without the South forcing his hand. And the small group actually opposing it isn’t particularly associated with what you would think of as ‘liberalism’ now. They were radical Christians for the most part who took the idea of the equality of God’s creations very seriously and who never had much political power themselves.

So if libertarians fill that role in drug legalization, GREAT. The fact that everyone else came around eventually (and some of them will radically change positions and pretend to have always thought that way) doesn’t change any of what I just discussed.

People get sufficiently rich that they can put up with a larger state. This happens after the institutions of free trade and the rule of law have made everyone a lot richer anyway. It is not worth their bother to oppose its growth.

The similarities between Marxism and libertarianism are sometimes quite astonishing. This is Lenin on trade union consciousness, redux.

Sensible people think that markets should provide even fairly essential goods.

But not *unregulated* markets — anyone who suggests outright abolishing, say, the FDA is regarded as a lunatic. (And if you look at the history of food contamination before regulation, you can see why. The market notably failed to solve this important public safety problem.) And we all saw what happened to California with deregulation of the energy industry. Etc.

Other essential services it’s now essentially settled that the market can’t provide them effectively (road networks and similar infrastructure, law enforcement), or that they need to be provided even to people who can’t afford to buy them (education, and in most countries, health care).

The working-out of a Hegelian dialectic can’t fairly be claimed as a victory for either side, IMO. “Pure” libertarianism is left in the dust today precisely because most of society has already settled on a variety of happy mediums. (Pure totalitarianism is even more disregarded, except by dictators. But ISTM that dancing on its grave has little relevance to modern political disputes, precisely because it *actually has* been left in the trash heap of history and the modern “statist” side of a real debate will be nowhere near totalitarianism.)

(phritz reads awful like the Troll of Sorrow: just sayin like)

“People are generally more sceptical of Government than before.” You do realise skepticism is sometimes the result of stupidity and ignorance, don’t you?

You keep your gummint away from my Medicare!

“And we all saw what happened to California with deregulation of the energy industry. Etc.”

This is a really bad example for your side. California specifically outlawed the use of long term energy contracts to smooth the price out over time. Instead it mandated buying at the spot price every day. No electricity provider would have ever gone to 100% spot pricing on their own. Regulators were so worried about getting screwed in the long term contract that they screwed themselves even more by prohibiting the use of any long term pricing contract. Now did Enron take advantage of this fact from outside the state? Yes. But if California had permitted the most routine market mechanism for long term supply contracts, the whole debacle wouldn’t have been possible.

And libertarians as the vanguard against the drug war is nonsense too. There are a whole lot more liberals against the drug war in the U.S. than there are libertarians against it. Why? Well, in part because there are a whole lot more liberals than libertarians. So a subset of liberals is still a larger number of people than the whole of libertaria.

Why, then, hasn’t there been any significant movement against the drug war in Democratic administrations? Because anti-drug-war sentiment as a whole is still a minority position in the U.S., even if a good chunk of liberals support it. Obama didn’t ask his base whether he should dismantle the drug war any more than he asked us whether he should start assassinating people, or whether he should start offshore drilling up everywhere.

That’s a problem, certainly, but it’s not one that’s going to be solved by libertarians. After all, their record with pushing the Republicans in that direction is even worse. And their philosophy, with its connection to racism, encourages the drug war, because the drug war in the U.S. always was a mechanism for racial oppression.

“People are generally more sceptical of Government than before.” (Nick@48)

As others have said, I don’t think the history of the past couple of centuries shows this at all.

What also troubles me is the odd way it presents human actions: that we are somehow increasingly unwilling to let government tell us what to do and how to do it, but yet are perfectly content, even eager, to have our ever-larger corporate entities tell us exactly that. That’s an illogical view of human nature.

So control of what we do becomes less of a philosophical issue and more of a starkly political one. Libertarianism, whatever it is, seems to have been captured by the right wing for its own purposes.

“And libertarians as the vanguard against the drug war is nonsense too. There are a whole lot more liberals against the drug war in the U.S. than there are libertarians against it.”

Rich, you are being far to liberal triumphalist here. Name ONE liberal with even the small influence and focus of libertarian Radley Balko. Just one. Thanks.

“Well, in part because there are a whole lot more liberals than libertarians. So a subset of liberals is still a larger number of people than the whole of libertaria.”

Your liberals aren’t very loud. I can’t hear them at all. And I’m pretty sure that vanguards are almost never the majority.

Name the liberal Radley Balko. Or hell even the liberal with the prominence and similar drug legalization openness of Andrew Sullivan.

Your same criticism would have applied to slavery abolitionists.

(BTW I think the closest you can come is probably Mark Kleiman. Who isn’t really for legalization, but I’d give you him anyway. But he isn’t nearly as read as Balko. And a large part of his early prominence came from links from Megan Mcardle, who I’m pretty sure isn’t one of your favorite libertarian leaning people either.)

Sebastian @65 and Rich @63, I think it’s fair (for the purposes of this discussion) to judge libertarians and liberals by their philosophies rather than by the politicians who represent them.

Liberals and libertarians are opposed to the drug war. Politicians and individuals who favor the drug war are acting illiberally, and not in accordance with libertarian views.

Rand Paul the racist is behaving consistently with libertarian views. Rand Paul the drug warrior is not.

(None of this is intended to dispute Rich’s point that it’s also relevant to judge an ideology by the outcomes that are generated by its favored policies.)

I don’t think it is at all clear even philosophically that the drug war is particularly illiberal. It follows a fairly long tradition in liberalism of trying to stamp out bad self harming personal behavior. The temperance movement and progressives were closely linked for most of their history in the US.

Sebastian @73, I suppose that in some sense, anything that involves government action could, in some theoretical sense, be labeled liberal. So you could call, for instance, restrictions on gay marriage “liberal.”

But, of course, that’s a pretty strained reading of the term. Civil liberties in general have been a preoccupation of liberals, as has drug law liberalization. I have no direct knowledge, for instance, of whether the medical marijuana movement in California was spearheaded by liberals or conservatives, but I’ve got a pretty strong intuition about which of the two was more responsible. Am I wrong?

(And further to Rich’s point in 63, are you really prepared to argue that libertarian legislators have been more prominent in the medical marijuana movement than liberal ones?)

Since Nick brought her up, I want to note something about Deirdre McCloskey: She’s transsexual. She had the wealth and job security to make her transition without fuss and remain a productive, respected member of her chosen field. Most transsexuals don’t. Right now there’s debate about the terms of a broadening of non-discrimination law to cover sexual orientation and gender identities, so that someone who happened to share McCloskey’s gender dissonance but not her wealth or status wouldn’t have to condemn themselves to a life of third-class status, poverty, greatly increased exposure to violence (including official; half of transgendered people who die violent deaths do so at the hands of cops), and the like.

No libertarians I’m aware of approve of anything like ENDA. But then I don’t know any poor or middle-class transsexual people who think much of libertarians, either.

The poorer you are, the more every bit of marginalization hurts, because you start off with fewer options and have fewer alternatives when any of them is taken away. There’s a reason so many transsexual people end up spending time in the sex trade, and it’s generally not a love of that work above all others. It’s that there they can find the money it takes to address their medical needs and maybe then see about getting on with any other life. In countries where transsexual identities are given medical attention, even second-rate attention, that happens a lot less, unsurprisingly. Just another gift from the advocates of laissez-faire to the rest of the society.

Well, Bruce, that’s why propertarianism is a club for well-off white males. All it really amounts to, as we see endlessly, endlessly repeated in their laughable attempts to make arguments a 5 year old would have trouble refuting, is “I’ve got mine, fuck you”.

Who’s Radley Balko?

Who is Radley Balko? /snark

Meanwhile, dear, sweet, stupid Oxonian Nick, who learnt his history from an economist, thinks that “Then something relatively unintended happened. People became incredibly rich and prosperous but also more moral.” So moral that they reinvented slavery for the industrial age, designed workhouses to imprison the indigent, and carved up the globe at the barrel of a gun. So, so moral, really. I assume, that is, you’re talking about the rise of the bourgeoisie; you seem to be. If you’re actually talking about something more recent, then I’ll just go back to laughing so hard I can hardly see straight.

@80: Well, first of all, most people’s sexuality isn’t a public accommodation. The CRA doesn’t force you to invite black people to dinner in your home, either.

Aside from that, though, society and I think the law are more willing to give a pass to sex discrimination that has some reasonable basis; separate but equal restrooms are pretty much the norm, for example, or differential treatment of maternity and paternity leave/accommodations/etc.

74: Basically, there was a core notion of respect for the individual that came as a reaction to various abuses of arbitrary power. This reaction developed a set of institutions (seperation of powers, a right to trial by a jury of one’s peers) that generated something akin to a space for negative liberty. Then something relatively unintended happened. People became incredibly rich and prosperous but also more moral.

This seems wildly unlike the history that actually happened. Your “core notion of respect for the individual” is coextensive with slavery and with marriage customs tantamount to slavery, for example. But respecting only certain individuals is aristocracy in practice.

More fundamentally, though, you’re attributing the fruits of technological progress to a set of political institutions? I’d draw the arrow of causality the other way: printing leads to cheaper books, which leads to more people learning to read, which leads to more interchange of ideas and public discourse (at least among the middle class and petty nobility), which leads to pressure to liberalize (in the classical sense) political institutions. Clearly the Magna Carta didn’t create Gutenberg (for one thing, he was in the wrong country). Heck, the whole concepts of bourgeoisie and proletariat rely on technological change driving greater urbanization and a shrinking fraction of the labor force engaged in agriculture.

The fact that you can’t keep out technology (it’s too useful and too easy to smuggle and if you succeed in spite of both of those, you’ll probably be conquered/overthrown by a less Luddite neighbor/revolutionary who will bring in the technology anyway) explains why the societal trends were contagious if technology was driving them. But if you consider technology the dependent variable, why does everyone else follow suit when they can just buy or plagiarize the technology and stay monarchic? (If the answer to this is that technology enables things like Bastille-storming, then we’re back to technology being in the driver’s seat.)

I haven’t agreed with Nick on much in this thread but on this he is 100% right. It is a mistake to treat all drug use as a “public health problem”.

Who treats all drug use as a public health problem? I’m inclined to think novakant’s correct in identifying Nick as a know-nothing.

Nick:The state should concentrate on punishing those (including its own officials) who attack transexuals, and ensuring that services it claims to provide are available equally to transexuals. I don’t think it either should nor is it necessary for it to tackle discrimination by private actors.

I can’t figure out a useful distinction between ‘discrimination by private actors’ and ‘attacking transsexuals’. The only way I can make sense of it is if the former means something like ‘not having transsexuals over to watch TV’ and the latter means something like physical violence, but from what I know of reality there are far more possible interactions with all kinds of consequences, rapidly blurring the line between ‘private discrimination’ and ‘attacking’. I raise the point (a) because I think it parallels the Jim Crow discussion and (b) I think it is at the core of many libertarian positions, upon which libertarianism founders (i.e. the ‘non-initiation of force’ principle and how it can’t deal with ‘soft’ coercion or influence, economic force, and so on).

Government is a necessary evil….that is not the problem….it’s controlling government so that freedom can prevail for us. To be against government, in any form, is not logical.

I raise the point (a) because I think it parallels the Jim Crow discussion

It does; Nick is taking the position analogous to the one Rand Paul first took and then backed away from, that if everyone just happens to not want to hire a certain group of people, serve them lunch, let them use public* restrooms, etc., that may be lamentable but it’s certainly not something government should get involved in.

* In the sense of open to the public, not owned by the public (the latter would make them government facilities, which Rand Paul and Nick do favor nondiscrimination policies for).

@Phritz: Occasional attempts to out-Herod Herod notwithstanding, it’s clear where the pressure against non-“tough” approaches to the drug issue is coming from. A substantial number of liberal non-politicians support legalization of at least some drugs or some other kind of dialing down the fearmongering (e.g. more treatment less jail), but don’t discuss it much because they know the issue is politically DOA.

Also, I can’t believe anyone would seriously hold up DiFi as an example of liberalism. She’s practically the Platonic form of DINO (now that Lieberman isn’t a Democrat even in name) and the liberal wing of the party constantly talks about primarying her (although I don’t know if they’ve actually attempted it, not being from CA myself).

The fact that in heavily blue states many of the local politicians (including some decidedly non-liberal ones) are Democrats is really not that surprising, especially given the purging of the Rockefeller Republicans. Local officials still have to follow federal criminal law and sentencing, though, regardless of their own political beliefs. Although I think it would be cool to see massive civil disobedience by local law enforcement in the form of refusal to enforce the drug laws, I’m not dumb enough to think that’s a _plausible_ scenario. Even the states that have tried to pursue legalization (all of them blue) have been beaten down by federal coercion (and where was Rand Paul then, I’d like to know — seriously, this would be a great question to ask defenders of states’ rights, and I really don’t know how he would answer it).

Greg B: Yes, exactly. Sufficiently intense and pervasive hostility to a group, manifested purely through private means, can nonetheless amount to small-scale genocide, even if the actual organs of the state were all to be available on equal terms to the group and the rest of society. At this point there are two options:

#1. The law imposes significantly on every bigoted member of the privileged population, compelling them to associate peaceably with people they find scary, abhorrent, or whatever, and also imposes noticeably on the entire privileged population with a burden to understand the consequences of their choices toward others and sometimes to take corrective steps.

#2. The law allows every member of the non-privileged group to face risks ranging from embarrassment and the denial of otherwise available opportunities up to violent death, with the only relief being the individual purchase of escape via wealth or status.

This is another no-brainer, to me. When a group is getting abused badly enough, I’ve got no problem imposing corrective measures on the surrounding society.

“Even the states that have tried to pursue legalization (all of them blue) have been beaten down by federal coercion (and where was Rand Paul then)”

– and “federal” mostly meant GOP-controlled. Also, I raised the point before about Reagan forcing states to raise the legal drinking age. Where were the “states rights” crusaders then pray tell?

This arguments on this thread are is as shallow as those on the last one.
And I say that as a leftist who has more sympathy for social conservatives than economic liberals or libertarians. But in this case the libertarian policy is the correct one:

For Immediate Release
May 25, 2010
Independence, Ky. – The Libertarian Party of Kentucky strongly condemns the hurtful comments of Republican senate candidate Rand Paul. [“hurtful” sounds like a dodge doesn’t it?]
Rand Paul belongs to the Republican Party of Kentucky, an association which he makes of his own free will. Dr. Paul’s sole libertarian credentials come from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former adversary Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson, and many in the mainstream media. In an effort to clear our good name, we make this public statement.
Rand Paul is not a libertarian. There are clear differences between the Libertarian Party, including the philosophy upon which is it based, and the philosophy and campaign rhetoric of Rand Paul. While the Libertarian Party shares some stances traditionally associated with the Republican Party, the LP also shares common ground on positions traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, and not always for the same reasons. We are an alternative to the two party system, not constrained by the model that defines both major parties.
Libertarians want a complete repeal of the PATRIOT Act, closure of Guantanamo Bay, and an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rand Paul has stated that he wants to continue military detentions at Guantanamo Bay, a retroactive official declaration of war by Congress, and has denied that he seeks to overturn the PATRIOT Act.

It goes on a bit more.

The federal libertarian platform seems to preclude a Civil Rights Act.

“The fact that you can’t keep out technology (it’s too useful and too easy to smuggle and if you succeed in spite of both of those, you’ll probably be conquered/overthrown by a less Luddite neighbor/revolutionary who will bring in the technology anyway)”

Only if the overall political environment is fragmented. In both China and Japan prior to the nineteenth century significant technology, including military technology, could be and was suppressed.

Hmmm, how to put this…

Dianne Feinstein is a wretch — absolutely awful on every level. A shining example of the Democratic Party at its worst.

You, on the other hand, are a lunatic.

“Look up the voting record of GOP vs DEM legislators wrt drug legalization, for example medical marijuana laws. It is true that you can dig up drug hardliners in both parties but I’m pretty sure that Dems are way way more likely to support some sort of legalization than Republicans.”

Piglet, I’ve got to think you are projecting what you wish were true onto this. Look up the voting record of GOP vs DEM legislators with respect to drug legalization and you’ll be lucky to find a 1 or 2% of either party supporting it. So your ‘way more likely’ may or may not be true, but whatever the actual number is it would be much more accurate to just say “essentially zero”.

So in this case, it isn’t that I have to drag up “drug hardliners” in each party. They both *really really really* suck on the issue. You can sometimes find the occasional Democratic legislator who wants to soften up on punishment a little bit, but that is the best you can hope for.

In California–the place where drug legalization has made it the furthest in the states–the Democratic party has essentially nothing to do with it.

“Look up the voting record of GOP vs DEM legislators with respect to drug legalization and you’ll be lucky to find a 1 or 2% of either party supporting it.”

Sigh. If you look for legislators supporting outright legalization, you won’t find any because it would be political suicide for any career politician to be “soft on drugs”. Nevertheless there are meaningful differences between state legislators voting for or against medical marijuana laws for example. Now don’t tell me there’s no difference between the parties. Let me also remind you that by your theory, “small government” conservatives should be expected to be more sympathetic to drug legalization than “big government” liberals. The fact that reality is exactly the opposite of what you claim it is doesn’t make any difference to you does it? The fact that most individuals who speak out against the war on drug are squarely in the liberal camp doesn’t matter I guess. That Oakland city council has voted to endorse the California taxcannabis proposition is – what – an outlier, or would you describe Oakland as a libertarian stronghold? Shall we mention the Netherlands, that hotbed of libertarianism? Once again, you are DENYING that liberalism is characterized by concern for individual rights. It is your claim that liberals tend to sacrifice the individual on the altar of “social engineering” or whatever BS you are inventing. Then try explaining why societies governed by liberal consensus tend to have more, not less individual rights than exist in the US.

Interesting, is the ACLU full of libertarians?

http://www.aclu.org/drug-law-reform/against-drug-prohibition

Substance and Bianca, it does seem to me that the Clegg in the linked article is treating drug abuse almost entirely as a public health problem and not at all like a legitimate lifestyle choice (with the exception of a brief mention of medical marijuana). When Nick said for some it was a lifestyle choice, novakant replied that he did not know what he was talking about. I don’t see any way of reading novakant’s comment than as a rejection of the notion that drug use can be a legitimate lifestyle choice. If you agree with that, fine, but neither of you seem to, yet seem to be taking novakant’s side. Why?

Libertarians were a lot more entertaining when they were planning space colonies at L5.

Logern (147): the ACLU describes itself as civil libertarian.

It’s my impression that most of the states which have decriminalized marijuana use or legalized medical marijuana or instituted gay marriage are reliably blue states.

Would you mind linking a few posts from Kos on drug policy?

When Nick said for some it was a lifestyle choice, novakant replied that he did not know what he was talking about. I don’t see any way of reading novakant’s comment than as a rejection of the notion that drug use can be a legitimate lifestyle choice.

At least be honest: Nick didn’t say “for some”, but “for a lot of users”.

Of course you can always find “some”, which can refer to any number greater than one. And even if we assumed that e.g. obesity might be a conscious lifestyle choice “for many”, that doesn’t make it any less of a public health problem.

You should also be aware that addiction and choice are concepts rather at odds with each other, and if you deny the fact that “for many” substance abuse involves addictive behaviour, than you indeed don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Here it comes down to who precisely we are talking about. Most street drug users are potheads – marijuana is all they use on a regular basis (at least in the US, though I would be surprised if this were different in Europe). None of those are addicts in any strict sense, and their behavior is a lifestyle, though one with drawbacks for heavy use. So I would say that “most” covers “a lot”. Some “hard” drugs are also not addictive, e.g., mushrooms and Ecstasy. And even the addictive drugs also have casual users. For example, over a third of heroin users are classified as “casual”, as opposed to “heavy” users. Even stipulating that all the heavy users are addicts, that’s a significant minority, and this ratio is skewed towards addicts by virtue of being a snapshot. Addicts generally continue using heroin longer than casual users, so the cumulative percentage of casual users will be considerably higher than this. I would call that a non-trivial value of “some”. None of that denies the public health aspect, but I think saying that it is not a public health issue “for a lot of users” implies there are those for whom it is, although it is sloppy phrasing.

I don’t even know who Balko is. But figures and institutions like Milton Friedman, George Schultz, The Economist, The Cato Institute, and the Libertarian Party have all called for drug legalization. I’ve seen no opinion leaders of comparable stature on the Left do this. I think this is largely because the drug war was initially targeted at least as much as the counterculture as at racial minorities (Nixon was explicitly at War with the hippies, and Reagan’s initial major target was the pot growers of Humboldt county), and the counterculture has been associated with liberals, to liberals’ dismay. If Milton Friedman advocates drug legalization, no one imagines it is because of a personal interest. Let Barbara Boxer do this, and the media will fill with salacious speculation about her misspent youth in the hot tubs of Marin. So that’s why, in my view. Nonetheless, I think liberals have been somewhat cowardly on this. To be fair, it is possible to oppose drug legalization from a liberal view, whereas it is hard from a libertarian one, precisely because the liberal view allows for more weighing of conflicting values, and drugs do cause a lot of harm.

It feels a little odd to be defending Nick on this point, as I’m not sympathetic to his general argument at all.

Oops, misread a digit in my cite. Should be slightly under a third. Really, about a third, since these are clearly round figures.

It feels a little odd to be defending Nick on this point

What point?

Martin Bento:
You usually seem like a reasonable person, so I’m surprised that you are able to read my comment as agreeing with Novakant that Nick doesn’t know anything about substance abuse. I can’t quite figure out precisely what point either of them is trying to make; neither of them was very explicit. Nick left two points open: what moral judgment he thinks should apply to a “lifestyle choice,” and what kinds of drug use he thinks fall into that category. At least it seemed so to me. It seems Novakant thought he was pretty specific, though, and s/he made an objection that one seems to most often hear from people associated with Alcoholics Anonymous: that the line between addictive behavior and normal, proper behavior should be drawn about where the line is drawn between people who are and are not subject to Original Sin. I have no idea whether or not Novakant intended to mock AA by doing so. And I find it puzzling why you would say I agree with Novakant merely AFAICT because I made a criticism of the same person he did–as I already said, what both Nick and Novakant said seems to me to be too vague to draw that conclusion.

” States with a generous, which is to say liberal, approach to drug use are generally those which are comparably generous, which is to say liberal, concerning sexual practices.”

This is confusing a bunch of things together all at once. They are also states (see especially California) where libertarian philosophy has seemed to have quite a bit of resonance. Some of them are also the states with much of the nastiest history in drug criminalization (see especially California where the SWAT team was invented and routinely used for aggressive drug investigation).

It really isn’t controversial that Democrats don’t have much to do with drug legalization in the US. The fact that quite a few of you seem to need to insist that they do, and reach for basically ineffective one offs as your evidence (Oakland city council, a single Assembly committee that didn’t go further than a single recommendation to open investigation and whose members explicitly denied actually wanting to legalize, and pretty much nothing else) suggests that something strange is going on here. But I honestly have no idea what.

Sebastian, moving goal posts and not responding to direct challenges. Game over. I don’t need to repeat myself from 105.

Martin Bento: “But figures and institutions like Milton Friedman, George Schultz, The Economist, The Cato Institute, and the Libertarian Party have all called for drug legalization. I’ve seen no opinion leaders of comparable stature on the Left do this.” Chomsky? Nader? Ehrenreich? The Green Party? Can you point us to ANY prominent left liberal intellectual of stature who publicly supports the drug war? The fact that the drug war is a failure is so commonplace among the left that you won’t find much debate about it, precisely because there is really no disagreement about it. There is certainly some debate about the degree to which legalization is desirable but there is virtually no debate about the need for some degree of legalization.

Btw did George Shultz publicly advocate drug legalization while he was a member of Reagan’s cabinet? I don’t think so.

I am not going to research the claim that very few officeholders who are members of the Democratic party have publicly supported drug legalization. But I’ll bet the number is higher than the number of officeholders who are members of the Libertarian party who have done so.

In other words, Sebastian is comparing apples and oranges (a cliche, but exactly apposite to the situation).

Ahh, piglet is of the “no true liberal” variety. I guess I can’t argue with that.

As the wise man used to say, libertarians are just Republicans who want to do drugs.

The idea that the drug war is driven by liberals is absurd, but for someone like sebastian it’s a necessary fiction, and no matter how many times you provide the correct information, he’s going to tell you that you didn’t.

Similarly, the libertarians often tell us that a free market with no government coercion would have sorted out Jim Crow expeditiously.

These are silly things to believe, but beliefs like this solve an important problem: How can one vote for drug warrior racists without admitting to being one.

Can you point us to ANY prominent left liberal intellectual of stature who publicly supports the drug war?

Bill Clinton, Tom Foley, and George Mitchell. At least by Sebastian’s standards of argumentation.

““Bi-partisan” and “driven by liberals” are two different things, Sebastian. ”

Absolutely. But “driven by liberals” was just other people putting words in my mouth. My claim was that the main thrust of the push against the war on drugs comes from libertarians in both parties, not from the liberals in the Democratic Party nor the conservatives in the Republican Party.

Then we had a bunch of people trying to pretend that oh no, it really is a liberal project–some of them even suggesting that the libertarian push isn’t even the big deal, that is MAINLY a liberal project. Which is just crazy. You can argue that the libertarian push is small and ineffective, but you can’t argue that the main thrust of it has come from liberals.

That’s all I’m saying. I think some see that as an attack on liberalism, but it only should seem so if you believe that all good things have to originate from liberalism.

It’s a neat trick to just define anybody opposing the war on drugs as “libertarian”, and then to conclude that only libertarians oppose the war on drugs. Enough already. There is really no debate here, only obfuscation.

But there’s an implicit acknowledgement in there that IF drugs really were net evil, and nothing else worked, government intrusion WOULD be necessary.

You forgot “and if government intervention *did* work”. The ease of creating black markets in drugs and the highly harmful side effects of such black markets weigh pretty strongly against government intervention regardless of any of the other considerations. Government intervention that worsens already-bad outcomes is not necessary or justified even if nothing else would improve those bad outcomes.

Also, it’s difficult to define “net evil” in this context. Many people derive considerable enjoyment from recreational drug use (I include the currently illegal in the US drugs as well as alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine). It also has recognized dangers. But doesn’t that make it analogous to dangerous hobbies like motorcycling or skydiving? They also have recognized dangers and no utilitarian function, so could be considered a “net evil” if you ignore subjective enjoyment, but we allow people to participate in them for fun (with perhaps some safety standards).

“Smoking a joint does you more harm than good” is not a statement that can be evaluated without an *inherently subjective* weighing of the various effects. IMO, strictly speaking, it’s not even truth-apt as written.

I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette, and (even in the absence of the legal restraints) I’m not sure I’d smoke a joint, but I see no sufficiently strong reason to quarrel with people who want to do either. (And yet I do see a reason to quarrel with unregulated mortgage lenders, oil companies who disregard and falsify safety standards, etc., and I think society *and* most individuals within it would be better served by a higher return to labor and lower return to management and capital, so I’m still a liberal on those types of issues.)

So (many) conservatives actually believe in the straw-liberal who thinks the answer to every problem is more big government

To be fair, many conservatives have a much more nuanced view, and are fully aware that in addition to big government, liberals also support high taxes.

@146: So, basically, you’re saying liberals are basically utilitarians and libertarians are basically deontologists? No wonder it’s so difficult for them to have rational discourse or understand each other!

I’m not sure I’d go that far. For one thing, I think it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between truly adamantine deontological rules and very durable but ultimately utilitarian “rules of thumb”. A lot of liberals probably at least seem pretty deontological about say, human rights, to the point where there’s no practical distinction.

Likewise, I think a lot of ‘libertarians’ might say that they are simply very skeptical of government, and that their ‘principles’ are actually something more like not-quite-inviolable rules of thumb. Sort of liberal with their “distrust of government” knobs turned up to 11 (and maybe a bunch of others turned all the way down to 0 or 1).

So maybe it’s more about the number of principles. Liberals tend to have a lot of factors they consider important, and they inevitably conflict to some degree. Even fairly deontological liberals have to be comfortable doing a balancing act and living with some inconsistency. I.e., it’s fundamentally about weighing tradeoffs.

The promise of libertarianism, on the other hand, is that the principles are very simple, and supposedly completely consistent and utopian. You just need to apply them.

Yes. That was what I was intending to get at in 148. The goal was to bring the discussion back around to Title II of the 1964 Act, where it started,* and to wonder why libertarians are still upset about it, since hardly anybody to whom it applies would want to discriminate on the basis of race any more — the statute having been a very clear win-win in utilitarian terms.

* Because I actually know a lot about Title II, unlike most of the subjects that come up on this blog, where any post by me is a tightrope walk over a bubbling lava pit of ignorance.

And yet the same liberals were willing to deny even the most basic human right to Terri Schiavo, simply because she had irreversibly lost brain function and therefore had no further use for her human rights.

There may be some good acid tests out there, but I’m not sure that’s it.

The debate in that case was not over whether someone ever ought to be denied life, the debate was over whether or not the “someone” in question was already just a warm corpse on a ventilator.

I myself used to travel for weeks without being fed in restaurants (albeit voluntarily);

That’s quite a set of muscles on that parenthetical. Which would be expected, given all the heavy lifting it’s doing.

“Maybe so, but they aren’t pushing for drug legalization.”

“They” the liberaltarians are, but realize that it is practically futile at this time. “They” the party establishment are not, for reasons already explained. Do you have some kind of perceptual disorder that prevents you from seeing nuance?

In any case, the Republican Party has a lot to do with drug legalization — namely, they’re vociferously against it and demonize anyone who even vaguely hints that throwing addicts in prison isn’t the most helpful possible response. The US political system being what it is, some people are going to opt for the lesser evil and there’s really no doubt which major party that is.