RoR: Forum

Ed, the three glaring errors are:
1. general welfare
2. regulation of interstate commerce
3. allowing amendments that contradict the intent of the document.

Post 21

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 9:44pm

Mike,

You are correct! Though, I had #3 down in my mind as a two-parter:

-Explicitly state that Individual Rights are the goal and standard
-Include property rights explicitly

Ed

Post 22

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 9:50pm

Of special note:

The 16th (income tax) and 18th Amendment (liquor ban) couldn't have even gotten off of the ground with Individual Rights as the standard.

Ed

Post 23

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 6:33am

Ed, of course, if individal rights had been understood as we know them today, many problems would have been avoided. Like alternating current in the home, Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism was an invention of time and place and it is unfair (unrealistic) to expect people of the 18th century to know what they did not know.

Also, a bit of a fine point, but 2nd Amendment arguments sometimes focus on the word "regulated." If you read Shakespeare -- and I have been trying to hack my way through Milton's Areopagetica -- the meanings of words change over time. Regulating interstate commerce may not have meant controlling it when the Constitution was written. And, at least according to populat academic myth, commerce stopped at the borders of states. How would you prevent that in a (con)federation in which states are supreme over the federal government.

Speaking of (con)federation, I was browsing some speeches from the 1840s and 1850s and that word -- confederation -- was formally applied to the USA. "Federalism" (so-called) was not what we think of it today. The Civil War changed much about how we view ourselves as a nation.

To go back to the point above, though. I had an honors history class in high school and the teacher was a pretty good liberal, challenging, encouraging, etc., but nonetheless invested with his ideology. Most of the conservatives in class took the bait and we liked to argue and usually lost -- he was the teacher for a reason. However, there was one guy who had the right stuff. He had the highest grades in both honors classes, in accumulated test points. He also said very little. When he spoke it went to the core -- and often over everyone's heads. So, one time, Mr. Cox was going on about how we needed the federal government because the states had trade barriers. We had just watched an Britannica film -- This carter was trying bring his goods into New Jersey and he had to pay a toll. "That's New York money. It's no good here." Mr. Cox came back to that point. And Mike Cheatham said, "They wouldn't take his money even though New York was on the other side of the line. That's hard to believe."

Modern anti-federalists and libertarians (including real academic historians, not just the Von Cato Guys) point to evidence that by 1789, the confederation was beginning to work as trials and errors revealed the right ways to do things. Some state currencies were weak, for sure, but others were strong enough to be used up and down the seaboard. Massachusetts silver, of course, always passed and New Jersey coppers served their purpose as small change. But even in terms of paper money, frugal states enjoyed a privilege that their squanderous neighbors could not buy.

So, all of that is to say that what happened, happened. We cannot go back and fix it now. We can only look to the present and future.

A better constitution is possible specifically because we now have a better philosophical foundation.

Post 24

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 6:28pm

"But don't let that get in way of implying that minarchy has been tried and didn't work. Don't let that get in way of throwing out unproven assertions that government can never work, how did you put it, 'the inevitable mission creep that is part of minarchism kicked in.'"

Steve -- care to point out a minarchist government that has stayed minarchist over long periods of time? Because I made what is known in scientific circles as a rebuttable theory -- I said something that could be proven wrong by a single counterexample. So prove me wrong, if you can, or admit I have a point here about this mission creep aspect of minarchy.

I'm not saying that minarchy is bad -- I would in fact love to live under a minarchist government. I'd love to live in an anarcho-capitalist society, too, but hey, either one of these would be great places to live in.

And it's possible that some genius in the future will figure out how to prevent this sort of mission creep that I'm talking about -- or that some catastrophic series of failures of minarchies devolving into socialism and then catastrophic failure will finally convince the public to quit trying socialism.

But, unless I'm missing some historical example, there hasn't been any stable, long-term minarchy of any sizable country in the history of this planet. You get a revolution, establish a minarchy, and then the statists start nibbling away at liberties bit by bit, until in the best case scenario the next revolution reestablishes minarchy for a bit.

If you've got a counterexample, I'd love to be proven wrong -- and then move to that country.

I think that to get to a stable minarchy, one necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) step would be abolishing the mob rule that passes as democracy, the notion that 50.1% of the politicians can vote their supporters carte blanche access to everyone else's pocketbooks and freedom. Ramp that up to requiring 80% or 90% or 95% of the politicians to agree before passing a law or an appropriation, and you'd almost certainly get minarchy. The problem is preventing changing that 80%+ rule back to 50% -- you'd need most of the population committed to freedom to keep that rule in place.

Post 25

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 8:35pm

Jim,

Why should anyone take your arguments serious, when you are asking for an example of a lasting minarchist government when we haven't had one yet, and when you are ignoring the fact that there has been NO anarcho-capitalist systems that you can point at that work.

Post 26

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 2:09am

SW: ... there has been NO anarcho-capitalist systems that you can point at that work.

We are back to the airplane thing again. Aerodynamics is not just for the design of airplanes. It explains bird flight and the long pass in American football and an arrow's flight, and a frisbee's, and so on. In fact, I just had a medical checkup and they gave me this breathing capacity test and when I examined it, I could see that it, too, worked on Bernoulli's Principle.

So, it is with anarcho-capitalism: this is not how the world should be, but how the world is.

We have true "competing governments" as when Germany invaded Poland and Hamas and Hezbollah shoot it out in Gaza. We also have all of those alternatives that I listed above: private defense agencies, property patrollers, body guards, armed response teams, etc., and physical security systems -- burglar alarms, electronic card passes, etc.-- and then adjudicators, arbitrators and negotiators. We have a large body of merchant law (the Uniform Commercial Code) and of private international law, laws that are independent of governments, laws that are agreed to voluntarily.

The American Arbitration Agency has offices in Dublin and Singapore. There exists is a global marketplace in alternative dispute resolution, hence their address www.adr.org.

Again, in terms of the real world, read a contract. It will say whose laws the contract is to be interpreted under. You can negotiate that. Certainly corporations do. I got a package from UPS for someone else delivered here by accident. While waiting on hold to get rid of it, I read the fine print. "Governed by the Warsaw Convention." Did you know that? The Warsaw Convention of 1929 is an agreement about overland freight, a voluntary set of rules that people agreed to and now follow because it is in their interest to do so. They announce that, albeit in fine print. Read your contracts. This is how the world really does work.

What putative "minarchists" really want is one goverment to rule over the entire world with one set of laws for everyone and with the power to force everyone to obey those laws.

The existence of nominal "private armies" like Pinkerton and Burns in America (now both brands of Securitas of Stockholm) is relatively peaceful in the USA, not because the government in Washington is able to prevent them from fighting but because they have no desire to do so. In 100 years, guards at Ford Motor Company never attacked guards at GM because they had no desire to do so.

That cuts to the real question, of course: why is one society peaceful and prosperous and another suffering from poverty and open warfare? It has nothing to do with whether or not there exists a sole agency with a monopoly on force.

It has everything to do with whether and to what extent the individuals in those places recognize. even implicitly, that each person has the right to live their own life by their own standards as long as they respect the same right in others.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 9/25, 2:31am)

Post 27

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 9:38am

Michael,

So much nonsense. We do NOT have competing governments in any sense that resembles anarchy. We have separate governments, each with its own territory - they interact with each other peacefully or not - but there is no territory with multiple governments unless we are talking about the period during a civil war. And, yes, if it went on for a while and had a degree of "stability" AND the people could choose which of the warring governments to be governed by, that would be anarchy. Never going to happen. The closest to anarchy would be the territory of Lebanon, during those times it is torn up with war, most of which is waged by terrorist groups - but it still doesn't meet the anarchist description where people get to choose a protective agency and things go just swimmingly - instead it is like what all the minarchists say anarchy will result in - bloody chaos.
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You say, "We also have all of those alternatives that I listed above: private defense agencies, property patrollers, body guards, armed response teams, etc., and physical security systems -- burglar alarms, electronic card passes, etc.-- and then adjudicators, arbitrators and negotiators. We have a large body of merchant law (the Uniform Commercial Code) and of private international law, laws that are independent of governments, laws that are agreed to voluntarily."
- We do not have private defense agencies that can be chosen instead of the government whose jurisdiction they are acting under.
- You have left the world of reason altogether to suggest that "burglar alarms, electronic card passes, etc." constitute 'anarchy.' Isn't there a government and laws against trespass and burglary and robbery that are the foundation for those devices?
- "adjudicators, arbitrators and negotiators" all work within and under the law - government created and enforced law.
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You said, "We have a large body of merchant law (the Uniform Commercial Code) and of private international law, laws that are independent of governments, laws that are agreed to voluntarily."

Uniform Commercial Code is adopted by the different states, every one of them - it is not some freely chosen set of laws that replace laws attached to a government and whatever private international laws your refer to do not operate voluntarily and outside of government jurisdiction.
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Referring to a treaty, you said it was, "a voluntary set of rules that people agreed to and now follow because it is in their interest to do so." No. It is ratified by the American Government and according to the Constitution it becomes law lf the land - no voluntary about it after that and only voluntary before that in the sense that we are a representative government. If there were rules in some treaty that we did not ratify but two parties agreed to use as a condition of their agreement, it would be voluntary but it would not be anarchy if they, and their agreement, exist under the jurisdiction of a government (contract law - civil courts).
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You say, "What putative "minarchists" really want is one goverment to rule over the entire world with one set of laws for everyone and with the power to force everyone to obey those laws. " ('putative'?)

Mind-reading, Michael, or can you give me a reference for that? I don't think you can because what I want is a government based upon individual rights - that is the only element of government that is primary for me - as to the territory it controls... well, the larger the better, duh!
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You say, "In 100 years, guards at Ford Motor Company never attacked guards at GM because they had no desire to do so."

Aren't you even a little embarrassed to have that 'argument' out there where anyone can point out the obvious: They don't attack each other because in a nation of laws (one set, NOT competing) that are enforced by a government (one NOT competing) they can gain nothing and loose much by attacking? And without that government and its laws they might thing they could gain something and then they would be operating under different desires.
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That cuts to the real question, of course: why is one society peaceful and prosperous and another suffering from poverty and open warfare? It has EVERYTHING to do with whether or not there exists a sole agency with a monopoly on force [based upon laws derived from individual rights].

Such a government can only exist to the extent that a sizable number of people understand the proper role of government and maintain that proper government. But the electorate with an imperfect understanding can still have a good life, under an imperfect government - we are doing so today.
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You said, "It has everything to do with whether and to what extent the individuals in those places recognize. even implicitly, that each person has the right to live their own life by their own standards as long as they respect the same right in others.'

This is just saying that if there were a society where people did not, and would not, engage in theft or fraud or initiation of violence, then we wouldn't need a government - True, and until that day arrives, we do need one.
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Michael, look at how feeble those argument you made are. It really isn't worth anyone's time to make or answer arguments like that. You point out these processes and technologies that exist under a system of laws and government and say THEY ARE anarcho-capitalism systems - that level of context dropping is astounding.

Once again, it is clear that the first set of laws that anarchists choose to throw away are those of logic.

Post 28

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:10pm

Gangs and other criminal enterprises, operating in the U.S. and throughout the world, pose increasing concerns for the international law enforcement and intelligence communities. Today, gangs are more violent, more organized, and more widespread than ever before. They pose one of the greatest threats to the safety and security of all Americans. The Department of Justice estimates there are approximately 30,000 gangs, with 800,000 members, impacting 2,500 communities across the U.S. The innocent people in these communities face daily exposure to violence from criminal gangs trafficking in drugs and weapons and gangs fighting amongst themselves to control or extend their turf and their various criminal enterprises.
Statement of Chris Swecker, Assistant Director, Criminal Investigative Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, House International Relations Committee April 20, 2005.
http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress05/swecker042005.htm

Apparently, the presence of a geographic monopoly operating out of Washington DC has not stopped the formation of 30,000 criminal gangs ... and so, therefore, I have to ask, why would Ford and GM not shoot it out, if that is what they wanted? The obvious answer is that it is not in their interest to do so because -- unlike criminal gangs -- they operate according to the Trader Principle, whereas gangs (including governments) operate according to the Taking Principle.

The Gambino crime family is one of the "Five Families" that controls organized crime activities based in New York City, United States, within the nationwide criminal phenomenon known as the Mafia (or Cosa Nostra). Based in New York City, the group's operations extend to much of the eastern seaboard and all across the nation to California. Its illicit activities include labor and construction racketeering, gambling, loansharking, extortion, drug trafficking, money laundering, murder for hire, solid and toxic waste dumping violations, construction, building and cement violations, fraud and wire fraud, hijacking, pier thefts and fencing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambino_crime_family

Anyone want to sing a chorus of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof?

By the 1870s a wave of Italian and Jewish immigrants were settling into the area as criminal gangs were beginning to vie for control of the money to be made from illicit activities. Irish gangs such as the Whyos, replacing the Dead Rabbits, were composed mainly of Irish members and they fought with the predominantly Jewish gangs such as Monk Eastman's Eastman Gang, who were also terrorizing New York neighborhoods. Italian immigrant and criminal Paolo Antonini Vaccareli, also known as Paul Kelly, formed the Italian Five Points Gang. This group would become the most significant street gang in American history and ultimately change the way criminal groups operated in America. During the gang's later years, Kelly's second in command was a brutal criminal named John Torrio, who would help form a national crime syndicate in the United States. The Five Points Gang had a well-earned reputation for brutality, and in battles with rival gangs they would often fight to the death. Kelly and Torrio recruited members from other gangs in New York to join the Five Points organization, looking for the most capable and brutal members from rival gangs to join their own. From the James Street Gang came another notable recruit, Al Capone, later to become one of the most notorious criminals in the country. It was John Torrio who initially sent for Capone to come to Chicago to help him with racketeering he had established there. The man who would later become the most powerful criminal in the country, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, also joined the Five Points crew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_Gang

Where is that darned old monopoly on retaliatory force when you need it? The Wikipedia entry above includes an illustration of a policeman leading upperclass people through Five Points. There is a lot to that picture.

And yet, bank guards did not shoot it out with each other as banks competed for territories and customers. Perhaps if they had some minarchists on their boards...

Today's BNSF railroad is the result of a series of mergers and acquistions.
Burlington Northern (BN)
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q)
Northern Pacific Railway (NP)
Great Northern Railway (GN)
Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (SP&S)
Frisco
Santa Fe
And in 150 years, they never opened fire on each other, even though they often operated in competition through lawless territories of the American west. Apparently, it is a good thing that they did not have any minarchists in their legal departments.

For the essays here on RoR on the Trader Principle and the Taking Principle, follow the link and also for The Origins of the Taking Syndrome and The Origins of the Trading Syndrome. Minarchy is just the taking syndrome minimized, which is not at all the same thing as trading value for value.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 9/25, 8:45pm)

Post 29

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:31pm

"Why should anyone take your arguments serious, when you are asking for an example of a lasting minarchist government when we haven't had one yet, and when you are ignoring the fact that there has been NO anarcho-capitalist systems that you can point at that work."

No, Steve, try and pay attention to what I actually said. Let's go to the tape:

I said that minarchy isn't stable and suffers from "mission creep", gradually turning into big government socialism.

You said, "Don't let that get in way of throwing out unproven assertions that government can never work, how did you put it, 'the inevitable mission creep that is part of minarchism kicked in.'"

I said that I had given you a rebuttable assertion, and that you could prove I had made a false statement about the instability of minarchy by pointing out just one counterexample of a stable minarchy.

You then admitted that you couldn't give even one example of a stable minarchy in all of human history, thus tacitly admitting that I was right in asserting that premise, and then asked why anyone would take my arguments seriously RIGHT AFTER CONCEDING THE TRUTH OF THE ARGUMENT I HAD MADE.

/exasperation

Anarcho-capitalism is a special case of minarchy -- it is minarchy with the last few government services privatized. A-C hasn't been tried on a large scale in any geographic area because to get to it, you first need to get to a stable minarchy, and then start trying to pull out the remaining government services one by one and privatizing them. That is immensely difficult to do when every time minarchy gets tried after a revolution, statist politicians try (and succeed) in doing the exact opposite, taking services that are privately provided and turning them into government functions, bit by bit.

Or, to rephrase it another way: minarchy is essentially our current government downsized to maybe 5% or 10% of its current powers, basically only occurring after a revolution, after which it starts creeping upwards again bit by bit -- 15%, 20%, 25% and so on of the current powers of our government. And so it isn't possible to realistically attempt to get to 0% government before we first figure out how to stabilize a government at 5% or 10%. Something has to first be done to convince the public that socialism, in all of its manifestations and in every degree that it is used, is inferior to minarchy. Only then can anarcho-capitalism be realistically attempted.

Post 30

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:38pm

SW -- You have left the world of reason altogether to suggest that "burglar alarms, electronic card passes, etc." constitute 'anarchy.' Isn't there a government and laws against trespass and burglary and robbery that are the foundation for those devices?

So, do you think that the reason that alarms were invented was to actuate the laws against theft?

I believe that in the absence of laws, you really need those alarms all the more.

Post 31

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 8:40pm

Michael,

The gangs and criminals that exist in spite of our current government and our law... those are your argument against government. And your argument for anarchy is the fact that bank guards don't shoot at each other in our system of government and laws?

I don't need to say anything!

Post 32

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 9:05pm

Steve, the fact that criminal gangs are differentiable from the private service of property protection is the essence of the problem.

You think that governments supress gangs and enable private guards. I think that government has not much to do with either. Governments are incapable of dealing with crime -- often they are crime. When people choose to get along, they don't need government.

If you have something to protect -- your property, your life -- you are better off going to a market service that will prevent a loss than you are waiting to suffer a loss and then calling on the government to change the past.

Even people who are engaged in exchanging value for value still need adjudication. Contract disputes are negotiable exactly because they stem from a common perception that a misunderstanding is in place. That is not the same thing as the Taking Syndrome. Again, the difference defines the problem. Dispute resolution does not mean punishing the guilty party. Adjudication, arbitration, mediation, and negotiation are all different modes for finding a balanced solution.

Post 33

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 9:05pm

Jim,

Read what I wrote again - you got so excited thinking I had conceded your point (which I hadn't) that you mis-read me again.

You claimed that minarchy creeps into socialism. You asked for an example of a stable minarchist government that didn't go that way. I said, there is no such example because there has never been any kind of minarchist government - yet. Are you following me, we haven't had one yet.

There is no way to rebutt your assertion because there has not yet been a minarchist government. History is still going in that direction, slowly, and maybe we are going into a long downturn before continuing the trend towards minarchy. But we have never had one of them yet.

There was never an airplane till last century did that prove that it was impossible?
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Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms. You can't have minarchy that is also anarchy and you can't have capitalism under anarchy. Anarcho-capitalism is also known as "free market anarchy," a phrase where it is easier to see the contradiction since you cannot have a "free" market without the laws and the government that will prohibit the initiation of force, fraud and theft and make the market "free" of force. There is no way that justice will come into being in the absence of the commons set of laws appropriately enforced.

Post 34

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 9:24pm

SW -- There is no way that justice will come into being in the absence of the commons set of laws appropriately enforced.

Jawohl.

And, Steve, all kidding aside, regarding your post 27 answering my #26, it is obvious that we explain the same facts according to different models. I see the world -- the same world you see -- differently than you see it. As von Mises said about socialism and individualism in economics, there is usually good agreement that at such and such a place on such a date, a certain commodity had a known price. The argument is not over the facts, but what they mean.

The Berne Convention on Intellectual Property goes back to 1886 (formalized 1896), but the USA did not join until 1989, one of the last acts of the Reagan Administration.

In all that time, no shots were fired over the Berne Convention. No one held American poets hostage nor were visiting Bohemians kidnapped from coffee houses in Greenwich Village. Ireland --- which does not tax the profits from works of art -- did not send waves of bombers to liberate American authors and painters.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 9/25, 9:52pm)

Post 35

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 9:47pm

Michael, someone quotes the talmud and you accuse him of smuggling in religion like a dealer giving out free joints - and now this abominable (to Steve and the millions dead) slander. How many times have you accused Objectivists of being Nazi sympathizers and then said you didn't really mean it? You obviously lost your medication while moving. Maybe you should be quarantined until you regain your health? I would still read you from Dissent.

Post 36

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 10:00pm

Michael,

There was no need to recommend those articles by Robert. I've read them. And I read Jane Jacob's book, Systems of Survival, many years ago.

In a post following one of those articles you mention, Robert says, "I admit to taking from a multitude of disciplines, synthesizing them, as a generalist, into a comprehensive whole." He is taking Jane Jacobs two syndromes and giving them different names and theorizing on them in ways that extend, and modify, Jacobs original theory. His characterization of the two syndromes is very different than Jacob's exposition.

Jacobs called one of them the Guardian syndrome, not the "Taking" syndrome, and the view of it certainly isn't the animal level of behavior in her book. Nor does she paint it as exclusively belonging to criminals. It is at the heart of administration, of the making and enforcing of laws, armed forces, police, courts, aristocracy, landed gentry, religion, and criminal organizations. What they all have in common are acquiring, controlling, protecting and maintaining territory. For example, the syndome has a moral precept that says, "shun trading" - that includes "don't take bribes" - if you are in government, for example, or in the military, you are not supposed to not be doing business - and you need to value loyalty. The acts that make someone a good Guardian are different from the acts that make someone a good businessman. Police officers, soldiers, judges, and legislators have different virtues.

She did not use the name "trading syndrome," she called it the "Commercial syndrome." Robert had a different take on her ideas and differentiated the two syndromes differently from Jacobs. Note that if a person is attacked and need to defend themself, they might want to adapt Guardian precepts to be effective and if someone wants to be in business they might want to adopt the Commercial precepts. But she is not proposing that these be adopted - these are discovered, existing features that evolved out of early human history. She believed that they are both valuable and the only danger was in attempting to mix them - that Commerical precepts should not be mixed in with government, for example, and that Guardian precepts should not be attempted in a commercial environment.

Post 37

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 10:13pm

Michael,

Here is your argument: "When people choose to get along, they don't need government."

Well, when people choose to get along, they don't need security guards, locks on their doors, signatures or codes to protect bank accounts.

But you know what, there have been sufficient incidents through the course of history and in today's news and in the experiences of anyone you talk to that tell us about serious deviations from getting along - so we badly need a government.

Post 38

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 10:35pm

Ted, when you were new here, I recommended Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and you thanked me for the suggestion. On the basis of that -- and despite all that has gone on since, including that post from you -- I will explain what I meant by what I said. I beg off at some level because this is a blog, not a book. Perhaps we can discuss this in a different topic.

I see a fundamental conflict, a dialectic, between order and freedom. On the one side (order), you have the maxim, "Obedience to law is liberty." On the other, "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order."

Some people come to Objectivism (see the polls here on RoR) because it resonates with their desire to live their own lives by their own standards. Other people find consonance in the known and knowable laws of reality, the objective and objectively verified rules for living.

Ultimately, like all such yin-yang spins, it is an amoral issue. For a more complex assessment of personality, consider the Meier-Briggs Type Indicator. Some people are extroverts; others intraverts. It is not a matter of right and wrong.

To want a constitutional government, limited in powers, and authorized only to protect and defend in the narrowest terms (Steve) is very much like seeing the world as a complex and dynamic interaction of persons and other entities acting in their own interests and all of it moving more or less toward the betterment of all (Mike). Both of those are truly opposed to both the worldview that people must be told what to do for their own good as well as to the worldview that our society is totally corrupt and must be destroyed (or will destroy itself).

Just as there is a set of common assumptions across the American Left, so, too, does the American Right exist across a spectrum of increasing (or decreasing) intensities on certain key issues. The USA was born in a revolution against a lawfully constituted authority. The nation had two complete consitutions in a short time. So, it is very easy for radicals on both sides to claim that the present government is illegitimate. I see the government as fully legitimate. The income tax is as lawful as the direct election of senators, votes for women and votes for 18-year olds.

There is a common belief shared by the radical right and radical left that you are morally justified in disobeying an unjust law. Again, that is part of the American poltiical tradition -- and it has religious roots: according to US Military Protocol, no flag flies higher than the American flag, except the chaplain's flag while services are being held. We subject our government to a higher law. Objectivists are not along among secular philosophers for whom that higher law is natural, rather than supernatural.
That may all be true. However, I also know from criminology that juvenile delinquents in particular, and criminals in general, engage in thinking (or, to Objectivists, non-thinking) that justifies their crimes. Sykes and Matza called it "techniques of neutralization."

Denial of responsibility. Delinquent will propose that he/she is a victim of circumstance and that he/she is pushed or pulled into situations beyond his/her control.
Denial of injury. Delinquent supposes that his/her acts really do not cause any harm, or that the victim can afford the loss or damage.
Denial of the victim. Delinquent views the act as not being wrong, that the victim deserves the injury, or that there is no real victim.
Condemnation of the condemners. Condemners are seen as hypocrites, or are reacting out of personal spite, thus they shift the blame to others, being able to repress the feeling that their acts are wrong.
Appeal to higher loyalties. The rules of society often take a back seat to the demands and loyalty to important others.
http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/CURRIC/soc/crime/sykes_ma.htm

Each of these can be found in the propaganda of the Eco-terrorists as well as the Super-patriots, or for that matter within the civil rights movement. The funny thing is about these law-and-order types is that they are often unconstrained by the very laws they claim to be defending as they follow the dictates of their "conscience" in obedience to that "higher" law.

Myself, I approach these problems from a totally different perspective and I point yet once more to Robert Malcom's essays on the Trading Syndrome and the Taking Syndrome.

Post 39

Friday, September 26, 2008 - 6:29am