Month: November 2023

Categories
Essay Political

Stop Calling It “Hoppean Monarchy?”

There’s a funny story–possibly apocryphal–about how the fuel in nuclear reactors came to be called “piles.” The way I heard it, Enrico Fermi was showing off his new, experimental reactor to some of his benefactors, and they asked him what he called it.

Fermi, lacking a cool or new name to call it, said it was a “pile,” and the name stuck.

I get the feeling that the same thing is happening with people reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.

In the book, Hoppe goes over the incentives that monarchs have, compared to democratically-elected political leaders, and concludes that monarchs have better incentives that are more forward-looking. Fair enough. I think his points are solid.

The problem is that this ignores one of the implications of monarchy, namely that most monarchs in history attained their “ownership” through conquest, which political theorists began to recognize as illegitimate only in the late seventeenth century.

This implication colors people’s perception of what monarchy is, whether we like it or not. Therefore, when we say “Hoppean Monarchy,” the average member of the public thinks of a guy with a crown who claims ownership of some territory by conquest, as well as powers such as taxation, conscription, etc. of people within that territory.

It’s true that in a Hoppean Monarchy, the monarch has gained his territory by purchasing it with wealth he earned by serving consumers. It’s true that he doesn’t have plenary power over the people living on his land. But that detail is easily missed or deliberately obscured by our disingenuous detractors.

So, I’m here advocating for a different term. I like Hoppe’s “private societies” way better than “Hoppean Monarchy,” but I’m open to other ideas.

What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree, or am I making sense?

Categories
Political

Spooner on Guns: Apocryphal, or Mistaken Cite?

I stumbled into an interesting situation the other day while doing some research for a new essay on the absurdity of treating “freedom from fear” as a right (coming soon!).

I’ve seen this quote cited as from Lysander Spooner by several reasonable-looking sources:

“To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless.”

But for my essay, I wanted to track down the original source in Spooner’s writing. And guess what?

I couldn’t find it.

I found some collections of Spooner’s work and did text searches of everything I could find, and it wasn’t there.

As I continued to look, I got more suspicious. The language was oddly modern for Spooner. Could it be a misquote?

It turns out that this quote is not by Spooner at all, but was written by Jeffrey Snyder about the 1994-2004 Assault Weapons Ban.

So, if you’ve used this quote, it may be time to update your citation. Apparently this is from an article that was in the American Rifleman and the Washington Times. Neither makes archives available that far back, so the best I could find is two sites that get the citation right.

Hat tip to Joe Huffman and the Weapons Education Forum for hanging on to proper citations.

Categories
Political

The Background of the American Revolution

A friend of mine recommended this episode of the Dangerous History Podcast, and I thought it was really interesting. It’s the first in a mini-series talking about the American Revolution.

One point made by Prof. CJ is that there was a peculiar strain of religious belief, held more by the common people of the colonies than the aristocratic founders, that helped move the revolution forward.

Basically, the belief developed that the failure to defend one’s natural rights was a betrayal of God’s grace, as manifested in oneself. There is a lot of good info in the podcast, but this point was something I hadn’t heard before.

There are a few episodes in the mini-series, but I’ve only listened to this one so far. Worth a listen.

Categories
Political

Why Covenants Cannot Be Constant

In my recent piece over at the Tenther Blog, it wasn’t the focus of the essay, but I state:

“even with the best intentions, the interpretation of a long-term compact like a constitution will drift over time, as its interpreters change and as the language changes”

It would have made the essay too long to include the detailed reasoning behind that conclusion, so I thought a small supplemental post, explaining the reasoning, might be helpful.

I will quickly cover three reasons why long-term covenants are never going to hold the same exact meaning over time:

  1. Even without the malicious influence of power-seekers, language changes over time and all such covenants and contracts must be interpreted by currently-living people.
  2. In the same way that Friedrich Hayek observed that economic knowledge is spread out over multiple people and there are so many details that it would be impossible to give them all to a central planner, the understanding of a covenant is distributed. Even if a judge wanted to pass on his understanding of the contract to a successor, the knowledge passed on could be incomplete.
  3. In John Hasnas’s paper The Myth of the Rule of Law, he observes that large bodies of law may contain self-contradictions, and precedents are never perfectly applicable, such that two reasonably similar precedents may conflict when applied to a third case. As any judge of a covenant must rely on some combination of his own understanding of the covenant and precedent, it is impossible to guarantee that such interpretations will always be consistent.

These three reasons mean that long-term covenants, which are expected to last longer than a person’s lifetime, will always shift somewhat in how they are interpreted. In fact, these changes are often significant over the life of a single person. Therefore, it is impossible to guarantee that anyone who joined a covenant will not find fault with some later interpretation and disagree with it.

Therefore, covenants must either recognize the ability of members to leave at-will or provide terms for exiting the covenant. Failing to provide terms implies that the covenant is at-will.

Categories
Essay Philosophy Political

The Founders and the Supreme Power of the People

I wrote a short piece about the basis of power in the American constitutional system, and the Tenth Amendment Center was kind enough to publish it on their Tenther Blog!

Click here to read it!