I’ve just started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and I found a lovely example of how fuzzy language obscures what the state is and how it differs from “society.”
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Rothbard: 1, Fuzzy Language: 0
Tag: freedom
We liberty-lovers face a powerful and dangerous foe: the modern state. Yet we seem to end up fighting each other more often and more angrily. It’s a fact that in an ideological movement, small differences are crucial, but we really should try to be smart enough to avoid infighting as much as we do.
Consider: the two major parties are split into two or three different wings, but they mostly aim their invective across the aisle–at least in public. Libertarians and other adversaries of the state aim nearly as much at each other as they do at the state and its flunkies.
After having some time to think about what I wrote about using the “freedom from fear” to justify gun control, I kind of tripped and fell into an even more interesting conclusion:
What if the gun control isn’t the end goal?
Audio/video version of my recent article over at the Tenth Amendment Center!
Also available at Bitchute!
My latest over at the Tenth Amendment Center! Today I’m debunking the idea of a right to “freedom from fear,” which has been widely used to justify mass civilian disarmament.
Turns out, #1) That’s not even what FDR was *!&^ing talking about, and #2) We’d have to give up a huge number of valuable common-law and Constitutional protections to enforce such a right!
Worth it? I think not.
I might–nah, should–do a video version of this, because I thought some parts are pretty fire. We’ll see.
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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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!
(Video also available on Bitchute.)
A recent article by Jon Miltimore over at FEE about Russell Brand’s demonetization got me thinking about this phenomenon. I think we’re all aware that there are some very shady people who really want to pull the strings of society, but even so I feel like Neo-Feudalism is one of those terms that gets treated as whack-job but really isn’t when you think about it.
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Anonymity Is Worth It
One of the tools necessary for a relatively free (but not stateless) society to function is free speech. Free speech allows for vigorous arguments to flourish and help people understand contentious issues. As a state becomes more censorious, or as people become more vindictive about those presenting differing opinions, it is natural for people making arguments that counter the narrative to want additional protection. The use of anonymity or pseudonyms provides this additional protection for dissidents.
The other day I read an article over at Mises that makes an interesting, if somewhat obvious point: that despite incentives which encourage long time preferences in monarchical rulers compared to democratic rulers with limited terms, other circumstances can encourage rulers of all kinds to have different time preferences.