Of course Glenn Reynolds gave the ol’ heh-indeed to a pair of blog posts lionizing Antonin Scalia as a champion of women’s rights and gay rights in virtue of his Heller decision. Inasmuch as the right to own a gun not only trumps every other right in civil and common law, not only encompasses and entails every other right there is, but actually, in its indescribable majesty, is the content and the way and the truth of every possible right in every possible world, it follows that expansions of gun rights are a triumph of human rights in which every human being on earth has a share, and in which the vulnerable and the oppressed and those in greatest need of the protection of rights have the largest share.

So let’s run with the thought: Heller is the greatest victory for black civil rights in decades, since it expanded the right of black people to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Latino rights since Latin America’s independence from Spain, since Latinos finally won el derecho de llevar armas, which no one can force them to call “the right to own guns”; Heller is the greatest victory for immigrants’ rights there has ever been, since no previous immigrants were ever guaranteed the right to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory ever for Muslim-American rights, since it gives Muslim-Americans the right to join the mainstream of America by owning guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Zimbabwean rights since the overthrow of UDI Rhodesia, since Zimbabweans who come to the US would acquire the right to own guns; Heller is the greatest victory for Darfurian rights in the history of human habitation of Darfur, since it gives Darfurians who can make it to the US the right to buy a gun, go back to Darfur, and defend themselves from the Janjaweed; Heller is the greatest victory of Iraqi rights since…well, if you’d been reading up your Instapundit you’d know every day is a glorious triumph of Iraqi rights. And Scalia, as the author of Heller, is clearly the equivalent of Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Scoop Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Norman Borlaug, Nelson Mandela, Bernard Lewis, Yitzhak Rabin, Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Hayek, Golda Meir, Barry Goldwater, Abraham Lincoln, Bayard Rustin, Victor Davis Hanson, Aragorn, Eowyn, Anakin Skywalker, Margaret Thatcher, Irshad Manji, Tony Blair, the Porkbusters bloggers, and Simon Bolivar all rolled into one, only better. (more…)

Last week, Noah Millman wrote a long meditation on the issues raised by the SCOTUS decision banning the death penalty in child-rape cases. Leaving aside how persuasive it was (hint: it does more to bolster confidence in the future of the conservative movement than Matthew Continetti’s assay of the same controversy), I was struck by something in Millman’s closing:

I’m comprehensively skeptical, as I’ve noted before, of our rights-based discourse. I don’t think we have inalienable rights; I think we have inescapable duties.

Disclaimer: I haven’t read Millman’s previous critique of the “rights-based discourse,” but I think there is enough evidence in the death penalty post to make an educated guess about what he’s getting at. Here is how Millman cashes out what it means for something to be inalienable: “If our humanity is inalienable, that really does mean that nothing we do can take it away from us.” In traditional metaphysics, the way to put this thought is that humanity is an essential property of anything that possesses it. (more…)

David Brooks has the admirable and rare quality for someone in his position of not being the least bit stingy in helping young writers he feels are talented get ahead in their careers, nor does he expect any sort of quid pro quo. Unfortunately, Brooks’ nose for talent has a very spotty track record, and the result is sometimes that the world would have been better off if he were more self-involved. For example, several years ago, after Brooks spent a semester guesting at Yale, he gave a plug in his Times column to the then unfinished biography one of his students was writing about Charles Hill, most recently late of the Giuliani campaign, a warmongering non-scholar and non-intelligent man who seems to have secured some sort of legacy lectureship ‘neath the elms. Anyway, because of Brooks’ plug, the book garnered attention from publishers that would have been unimaginable otherwise, and the author eventually cashed out for something in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The ultimate product of Brooks’ generosity, however, was perhaps the worst “Yale book” ever written, and bear in mind that’s a class that includes God and Man at Yale.

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Alright, fair warning. This is going to be long. And it’s probably not organized optimally. That’s the nature of blogging, I’m afraid. I think there’s a payoff to getting to the end, namely seeing what’s really rotten about the Heller decision (hint: it’s not that it overturns a handgun ban).

Let me preface things by noting for the record a) that I approve the substantive outcome of Heller, b) that you’ll know I’m planning to run for office in 5-10 years when I join a gun club, and c) the Democrats’ push for gun control, as Jim points out, has been the most idiotic tactical maneuver since the Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad last deployed, yet Democrats and liberals appear still not to have figured it out. Handgun bans are infringements on liberty that accomplish nothing besides fostering a (kinda justified) siege mentality among gun owners that will perpetuate their mistrust of the left indefinitely. Maybe once liberals get tired of whining about Heller, they’ll recognize what an enormous blessing it was for the political fortunes of the Democratic party.

That said, both Scalia’s majority opinion and Stevens’ dissent are really atrocious miscarriages of jurisprudence, and for parallel reasons, failing both as historical and conceptual analysis. (more…)

A lot of today’s fighting young progressives probably won’t really believe that movement liberalism ever did have any genuine “excesses” that helped turn voters away from the Democratic Party. But my God, the hysteria greeting the Heller decision among some parts of Netrootsia and Greater Liberalism makes me think some of today’s progressives are determined to repeat even the pointless mistakes of Leftism Past. The practical legal effect of Heller will be minimal. The practical effect on crime will be likewise. Mark Kleiman has made this case for years, persuasively to my view. (Unfortunately his current post on the topic is not link-rich, so you’ll have to do your own digging.) I say this as someone who was disposed to find evidence on the other side - statistical proof that more guns, as they say, meant less crime. What I could see of statistics from Britain and the US and elsewhere was that gun laws had no material effect whatsoever on the level of violent crime. The effects of gun control on the one hand and shall-issue concealed-carry on the other were utterly swamped by other factors, especially demographic ones.

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Jim did a very fine job dispatching the Douthat-Carter contribution to number theory and set theory: “[J]ust as ‘a lot of people would say’ there is ‘similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you’re married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification,’ there is also similarity between ‘having sex with a prostitute’ and having sex with your spouse. Hey, it’s sex, right?” Right. The point generalizes. In a classic paper called “New Work For a Theory of Universals,” David Lewis (sort of my intellectual hero, so be prepared to hear more about him) wrote: (more…)

As I wrote yesterday over at Unqualified Offerings:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is working eagerly with a Democratic-controlled Congress to grant George Bush all the power Bush wants to intercept Americans’ telephone calls and emails without warrants, and to retroactively grant immunity from civil or criminal sanction to the telecoms that have been assisting with Bush’s illegal eavesdropping for years — telecoms that heavily contribute to congresspeople of both parties, and which are in the middle of lawsuits they’d dearly love to see rendered moot by Hoyer’s efforts.

[...]

To fully understand how sickening and outrageous this all is (and tell me, why did I vote a straight Dem ticket in ‘06 again?), read Greenwald. (Brief ad click-through.) I can’t do better than he does, as he has been working on this issue feverishly and my re-explaining it could only be a paraphrase of his posts. Then, contribute to this fund to put heat on Hoyer and the other Democrats who are acting like good little authoritarian GOP-bots.

Strange Bedfellows Unite to Fight FISA Deal (6/18/2008)

Contact: (202) 675-2312, media@dcaclu.org

Washington, DC — A sham spying deal could be rammed through both the Senate and House this week. It’s moving that fast. If we don’t stop this, telecom companies that broke the law by supplying mountains of personal information to the government without a warrant will be let off the hook.

A broad alliance of strange bedfellows is now forming to support a campaign to fight the gutting of FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) with the intent to work together on all civil liberties, constitutional rights and rule of law issues.

The ACLU is joining with activists from the Ron Paul campaign, represented by Break the Matrix, Rick Williams and Trevor Lymon, and civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and leading liberal bloggers including, Jane Hamsher of firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny, Digby, Josh Nelson of The Seminal and activist Josh Koster to tell Congress that we will not let them ignore the Constitution or give immunity to telecoms which deliberately broke our laws for years.

This group of Strange Bedfellows is mobilizing a broad-based left-right coalition of office holders and candidates, public interest groups and individuals who are devoted to preserving basic constitutional liberties to join in the fight. The goal is to work together to impede the corrupt FISA/telecom amnesty deal.

Glenn Greenwald said, “The Beltway establishment has made clear that they support the Bush administration’s assault on our basic constitutional protections and the rule of law. Constitutional rights and the rule of law are not liberal or conservative principles. They’re American principles, and this broad-based alliance is devoted to defending them from the bipartisan political class that wants to trample upon them.”

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On reason magazine’s website, it’s Kerry Howley versus Michael C. Moynihan on Sexism versus Hillary Clinton. Howley gets much the better of the argument when she writes

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Do not vote for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr — if you are a libertarian, you’d have to be schizophrenic to do so. Do not vote for him even if you decide Obama can’t win, or even if for some unfathomable reason are in the tank for McCain and decide he cannot prevail. For if there is one defining attribute of libertarians of any stripe, it is opposition to drug prohibition. Yet, as Radley Balko observed in 2005, Barr has advocated that: (more…)

Jim Henley launched a very instructive discussion below on the point that F.A. Hayek, among other libertarians, was open to social-safety net legislation. Certainly with regard to Hayek this was so. From Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (bear in mind that in this work Hayek employs the term “liberal” to essentially mean what today in America is commonly thought of as “libertarian”), my emphasis: (more…)

Interesting review/column from Camilla Cavendish on Nudge, a book advocating for a better world through better defaults: (more…)

As a youngster, my far-right and oppressively Roman Catholic parents indoctrinated me to believe all manner of nonsense, and they monitored my television viewing according to criteria that were simply absurd. (Casper the Friendly Ghost ‘toons were out, because they were Communist-inspired.) But very oddly, they paid almost no attention to what I read, especially as I hit adolescence and the local library and bookstores. Thus it happened that at 13, I devoured A. E. van Vogt’s novel, Slan, and forevermore became hooked on the Sci-Fi (or speculative fiction, if you prefer) genre. Voraciously did I consume Asimov*, Robert Silverberg, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert’s Dune series — and somewhat later the Niven/Pournelle collaborations, Greg Bear (especially Queen of Angels, which is way under-rated), and Vernor Vinge. Oh, and so many others, including Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain trilogy (which is so amendable to libertarians I learned of and ordered the first in the series from Laissez Faire Books in the 90s).

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Greetings to the readers of the Art of the Possible. Some of you may know me from the blog Freedom Democrats, an online community occupying the niche of libertarianism within the Democratic Party. For those readers who are encountering me for the first time, I have been an amateur activist in libertarianism, the Democratic Party, and blogging off and on for several years now. I am very thankful for the opportunity to blog here at the Art of the Possible and wanted to take advantage of the timing of Mona’s most recent blog post on this site’s purpose to introduce myself, and my views, more fully.

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With some new readers here, it seems timely to quote from AoTP’s About page, and ask what folks think about the possibilities therein entertained:

The Bush administration has been extreme enough in its authoritarianism, flagrant law breaking, and flouting of basic human rights norms to cause fractures in the old GOP coalition. There is now the possibility of new political alliances forming. Speaking broadly, it may be that many of the factions in the Democratic Party, and some of the factions that call themselves “libertarian,” collectively represent a kind of loose anti-authoritarian coalition, or rather, the possibility of one. This site aims to facilitate conversation among those factions.

We bring together liberal and libertarian writers who agree on certain politically and morally enlightened essentials. Their discussions here serve to delineate the reasons why basic human rights must always be defended. Their disagreements, by contrast, will illustrate why forming new alliances is hard, and perhaps serve as a reminder as to why new alliances are so rare.

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Especially Kip Esquire and Brad at the Crossed Pond, who are not fond of my characterization of libertarianism as “the court jester of politics.” Here’s the part that surprises me. Kip writes
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The blogs respond to my post of yesterday. I respond to the blogs responding. That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!

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Hello everyone. My name is Jim Henley and the brain trust here at AOTP has honored me with an invitation to guest-blog here for a bit. My home blog is Unqualified Offerings. If I have a claim to fame, which is doubtful, it is becoming pretty much the first “warblogger” after the atrocities of September 11, 2001 to represent the anti-interventionist tenets of libertarianism in what came to be called the blogosphere. Back then I thought of myself as a man of “the Right,” though not a “conservative,” and pitched my arguments against promiscuous war, untrammelled security prerogatives and nationalism in “right-wing” terms, trying to explain how militarism, hegemony and torture contravene libertarian and conservative principles of limited government, humility and prudence.

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Libertarians and liberals probably aren’t going to persuade each other on their basic philosophical starting assumptions. Libertarians aren’t going to convert liberals to the non-aggression principle, and liberals aren’t going to convince libertarians that government intervention is ever desirable.

But we don’t have to agree on fundamental principles to cooperate in the areas where we agree. All our disagreements, as many as they are, leave a lot of room for common ground on areas where both sides agree that more liberty is desirable.

And in establishing this common ground, both sides may be a partial corrective to each other’s shortcomings.

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Madeline Kara Neumann was only 11 when several weeks ago the she died of entirely treatable diabetes, even as her parents eschewed medical science for prayer. According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madeline died due to: (more…)

My friend Alex Marshall, in his newest post up on Governing magazine, asks “What’s up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?” Alex is highly critical of right-wing libertarians whose policy preferences are a simple Rorschach test of their own personal biases - people who label their preferences with the language of freedom, individualism and happiness, whereas any policy they dislike is labeled “socialism” or “tyranny”. Thus, if these people like to drive big cars, then any government action that supports their ability to drive big cars is a bold stroke for glorious emancipation, whereas any policy that interferes with their ability to drive big cars is a form of Stalinism so black that even Stalin himself would have thought it excessive. I encourage you to read the whole post. This is how it starts: (more…)

In the comments to Angelica’s post “Fannie’s Follies, Freddie’s Foibles,” an interesting discussion developed in the comment thread about the order in which to scale back the different forms of state intervention. We also discussed the possibility that particular regulations, even though nominally a form of state intervention, might not actually be a net increase in statism; they might be, rather, a case of the state limiting its own previous grant of special privilege, and amount substantively to a reduction in statism. In such cases, nominal deregulation may actually result in a net increase in statism. In “Public vs. Private Sector,” I discussed the class nature of the state and the meaninglessness in many cases of the distinction between nominally “public” and “private” organizations.

Both of these issues involve what Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, called… well, “dialectical libertarianism.”

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This post starts where the first half left off: with Rothbard’s disillusion with (and abandonment of) his New Left alliance. Now I want to look at some of the people who continued the left-Rothbardian tradition.

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In “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right,” I mentioned Left-Rothbardianism as one possible basis for finding areas of agreement between market libertarians and the Left. I’d like to go into that in more depth now.

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As one of those penitents who came to initially support the invasion of the Iraq and now regards it as the most irresponsible political decision she’s ever made, I well appreciate my Unqualified Offerings’ host and co-blogger, Jim Henley’s, disdain for those who got it wrong, when he was dismissed as unSerious for opposing the mad venture. Jim posits an alternate universe in which he  meets Kenneth Pollack, who inquires of Jim with regard to Jim’s having been right: “What the fuck was so special about you, anyway?” A few excerpts from Jim’s post, which ought to be read in its entirety: (more…)

In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I gave my opinion of what was wrong with both mainstream libertarianism and mainstream liberalism (”wrong” in the sense to presenting an obstacle to an anti-authoritarian coalition of liberals and libertarians). In my last post, “Liberalism: What’s Going Right,” I discussed some reasons for hope within movement liberalism: some individuals who show signs of thinking outside the box when it comes to abandoning the worst features of the liberal establishment and finding common ground with free market libertarians. Now I’d like to do the same thing on the libertarian side.

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Mulling over Kevin Carson’s superb post below, I’ve been contemplating why it was that I tilted conservative/GOP in the 80s, and even supported the Robert Bork nomination to SCOTUS. For me, it came down to federalism, and a complete aversion to the manner in which the High Court and liberals had been abusing the Commerce Clause to intrude the federal government into matters that were at least Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon’s Commerce. FDR’s court-packing threat (which enabled the jurisprudence of the Commerce-Clause-means-any-area-in-which Congress-legislates) was not, to my mind, something cute to be winked at — if George W. Bush suggested such a measure his critics would rightly decry it as outrageous.

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Since the general theme of this blog is an anti-authoritarian entente–or even coalition–of diverse liberal and libertarian elements, one question that comes to mind is: “What are the most objectionable features of both establishment libertarianism, and establishment liberalism, from the standpoint of achieving such a coalition?”

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In my post, After Greed comes Fear, I excoriated the role of the unregulated market in the current sub-prime mess we’re in. Quasibill cried foul, pointing out quite rightly that the whole concept of mortgage-backed securities started off with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and all the rest of those cutely acronym-portmanteau-ed government-sponsored enterprises. To quote ‘Bill directly, “to lay this turd at the feet of “unregulated markets” has the causation entirely backwards.”

My response? I both agree with ‘Bill, and I stand by my post. It is possible for there to be both simultaneously too much government influence AND too little regulation. Read on… (more…)

To the discontent of some of his regular readers, Glenn Greenwald deviates from his usual analyses of FISA issues, neocons, the pathologies in the media & etc., and posts about the sheer inanity of the public’s giving a tinker’s damn who Eliot Spitzer has sex with per se – but he carves out the exception for harping on the hypocrisy factor, and withholds personal sympathy for Spitzer who has prosecuted “prostitution rings” — and with those caveats in place, he asks in his title: Who cares if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes? Then inquires: (more…)

Go to the average mainstream libertarian venue on any given day, and you’re likely to see elaborate apologetics for corporate globalization, Wal-Mart, offshoring, Nike’s sweatshops, rising CO2 levels, income inequality and wealth concentration, CEO salaries, Big Pharma’s profits, and Microsoft’s market share, all based on the principles of “the free market”–coupled with strenuous denials of all of the perceived evils of corporate power because (as Henry Hazlitt explained at some place or other in Economics in One Lesson) the principles of the “free market” won’t allow it.

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The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

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Below I set forth my position as a non-conservative, Hayekian libertarian with recourse to excerpts from Hayek’s own rejection of conservatism. I further pointed out via an interview with the former publisher of National Review, William Rusher, that during the Cold War era libertarians and conservatives co-existed in the GOP, in a “fusionism” that was always tense.

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My liberal co-blogger, Angelica, raises the excellent point that not all libertarians adhere to the same set of values. So true, that. When encountering one who claims the label one may in fact be meeting a “glibertarian” apologist for neocon authoritarianism, as well-exemplified by Glenn Reynolds. To put it mildly, I’m not a Reynolds type “neo-libertarian.” Nor am I a Republican (or Democrat).

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