Moorfield Storey Blog

Myths, Lies and True Believers: Why Libertarians Should Be Cautious.

2012-02-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you never heard of David Shaw Alexander, and it may be with good reason. Anti-gay Christians circulated the story of Alexander as a counter-example to the Matthew Shepherd murder in Wyoming. You may remember that Shepherd was the young college student beaten and left to die in the cold because he was gay.

According to an email allegedly sent out by David’s mother, poor “Davey” was in a restaurant near his college when “these homosexual men came in” and hit on him. They supposedly refused to take “no” for an answer and became belligerent. Then on New Year’s Eve Davey went to a party and “these same homosexuals were there” and groped him in public and then followed him when he left. They allegedly attacked him, beat him and raped him in the parking lot. He supposedly died a few days later. The “mother” said, “This is what happens because our society doesn’t treat these homosexuals for the sick and perverse people they are.”

According to the emails circulated by Christians this took place in Edmonton, Canada. The problem was that the Edmonton police say there was no rape or murder reported to them. The university says no student by this name was enrolled, campus security says they never heard a word about such an incident. And, given that the temperature that night was -25 Celsius, pulling one’s privates out in public, a necessity for rape, would be a risky venture. In other words, it never happened.

When fundamentalists and conservatives claimed the Federal Communications Commission was being petitioned to make religious broadcasting illegal the FCC started getting 100,000 letters a month in protest. No such petition was circulated or submitted. It was a hoax.

Harold Hill, not the character from The Music Man, claims he was a consultant to NASA. According to him NASA was “checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be 100 years and 1000 years from now.” (Do they really worry about the sun moving?) The computers doing this “stopped and put up a red signal which meant that there was something wrong.” According to the email “They found there is a day missing in space in elapsed time. They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no answer.” But, then some wise Christian remembered that the Bible spoke of the sun “standing still” for one day in the book of Joshua. That was the answer and it conveniently proved the miracle claimed in the Bible, which still seemed to indicate the sun revolves around the earth and not the other way around.

Mr. Hill ran a company servicing generators for NASA, nothing more. He was never a consultant. But, he spread his story far and wide. NASA responded to Hill’s claims and said they simply have no need to do these kind of calculations, never did them, and don’t know anything about the “missing day.” They said Hill never had contact with their “computer facilities or teams engaged in orbital computations.” But, the story of Hill and his fictitious claims are widely accepted and still spread.

In 1989 the Trinity Broadcasting Network claimed a well was being dug in Siberia, and that scientists bored down nine miles before breaking through to a cavity. For some unknown reason they lowered a microphone and were horrified to hear screams of torment—they had broken through to Hell and were listening to people who died without Jesus. To this day some Christians are circulating the “sounds” recorded that day—sounds that were pulled from a 1972 horror film. There is no indication anywhere that this story is true. But it is still being circulated and can be found on Youtube.

A few years back I got an email from a libertarian friend that purported to be the account of a retired FBI agent who worked presidential security for Bill and Hillary Clinton. The FBI agent went into a rant about what awful human beings they were and how they routinely mistreated people. He spoke of how he served in this position in presidential security for every president from Kennedy to Clinton and had never seen anything like this.

I decided to look into this and discovered this was simply not possible. First, the numbers of years that the man had to serve, for this to be true, far exceeded the number allowed to agents in this capacity. Presidential security is rotated regularly and no one agent remains in that position for every long as it is considered high-stress. Second, there was a mandatory retirement age, according to the FBI site, for field agents and this man would have surpassed it long before Clinton was elected. The entire article was a hoax. During the Clinton years I received numerous such hoaxes from libertarians about Bill or Hillary.

More times that I can possibly remember, I’ve had libertarians claim to me that marriage licenses were created recently in human history and their function was to prevent interracial marriage. They usually cite an op-ed in the New York Times as proof. The column itself did not say marriage licenses were invented for this purpose, only that at points in time the license system had been used for that purpose. In fact, marriage licenses are hundreds of years old and were established in nations where, at the time, interracial marriage was of little to no concern. For instance, Shakespeare had a marriage license. One does not make the case for a “libertarian” solution to marriage issues by repeating falsehoods.

Very recently some on the Left spread a story that claimed that Ayn Rand was “literally a sociopath” and that she “worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of ‘ideal man’ that Rand promoted in her more famous books….” Another Left-wing writer ranted, in capitals, “ATLAS SHREIKED: AYN RAND’S FIRST LOVE AND MENTOR WAS A SADISTIC SERIAL KILLER WHO DISMEMBERED LITTLE GIRLS.” The truth was, as you might expect, very different.

What they were referring to was Rand’s notes for a short story about a criminal that she says was “suggested” to her by the case of William Hickman. They claim that Rand biographer Jennifer Burns wrote that Ayn was “smitten” by Hickman. Burns said no such thing. As for Rand’s journals, they don’t support these claims either. What she really said was that Hickman's story suggested a fictional story to her, but that Hickman “is not” the model for her character only “what Hickman suggested to me.” She wrote that Hickman was “purposeless monster” and said her character was one “without the degeneracy” of Hickman. In other words, she wrote almost the exact opposite of what was attributed to her. It appears that virtually all major Left-of-center websites repeated this claim. Recent claims about Rand seeking out a social worker to secure her Social Security because of poverty are equally false.

To this day there is no shortage of Left-wing commentators who claim that Milton Friedman was an economic advisor to the military junta in Chile. He was no such thing. He was invited to give a lecture at a university in Chile and agreed to do so. While there, General Pinochet asked to meet him, which happened to Friedman in many countries. He had one meeting with Pinochet, that lasted under an hour and that was his entire role as an “advisor” to the junta. Oddly, while he had longer meetings with the leaders of China he was never accused of being an advisor to “communists.”

In all of these cases individuals, with deeply held belief systems, perpetuated malicious or false claims that either ripped into opponents or which supposedly verified their weltanschauung. This is the risk of having a firmly held belief, be it religious or political. Ideology has a tendency to shut down critical thinking.

To some degree this is understandable. For instance, if you consider various views and conclude there is an objective reality, you need not reconsider that view for every claim you encounter. One function of principles is efficient thinking. If you have already discovered that price controls on apartments lead to shortages, and understand the principal behind it, you don’t need to waste time considering if price controls will do the same thing for food stuffs or labor. A properly established principle saves time when applied to multiple issues that are related.

The problem is that there are many false assumptions that people make. Two very common assumptions are, 1) that anyone who disagrees with you is either stupid or evil and 2.) your position is unassailable. Both of these lead one to accepting myths and hoaxes very easily.

Conservatives hated Bill Clinton because of his politics—these days they might consider his terms as the “good ol’ days”—so they were predisposed to believe he had to be an awful human being. The FBI story, though false, confirmed a view they already held. They were willing to propagate it because it told them what they already knew.

Similarly, the nonsense stories, that people on the Left spread about Ayn Rand, serve the same purpose. They confirm that she must have been a monster. Who else but a monster would dare disagree with them?

Fundamentalist Christians use both varieties of hoaxes to push their agenda. They readily buy into false stories about homosexuals because of their personal obsessions about gay people. And they happily buy into claims such as the borehole to Hell, and the NASA myth, because they seemingly support their “Bible-based” views of the world and history. I have had numerous fundamentalists tell me of “verified” resurrections as a result of prayer—none could actually produce evidence when I asked for it. At best, they pointed to others making the same claims, but also offering no evidence. Repeating a falsehood doesn’t make it true. Numerous citations of the same falsehood are not proof either.

We usually learn of such hoaxes from people who are friends or family. And, most people tend to hang out with people similar to themselves. We tend to assume that others, who share our views, are trustworthy and reliable sources. We take their word at face value. If they tell us something we already “know” to be true, their claims have to be true. So we don’t hesitate to spread the claims and usually make no effort to verify them.

The net result is that “true believers,” no matter what their belief is, tend to adopt falsehoods as truth and spread lies or misinformation. They are running into claims that confirm their world-view so they fail to analyze them critically. One libertarian friend was so regular at sending me these hoaxes, which he honestly believed, that I automatically assumed they were fakes when I got them. I would duly check each one and he never disappointed me. I would respond to him with the facts. He stopped sending them to me, though I don’t think he stopped sending them out, or stopped believing in them. He just didn't want his view challenged.

Of course, sending out such verifiably false claims makes one look the fool. Spouting claims about Agenda 21, the NAFTA “Superhighway” or the “Amero,” only makes one look foolish. Falsehoods, even those that appeal to your ideology, help neither your ideology nor you. They only make you and your beliefs look foolish.

Libertarians should remember that people tend NOT to verify something that confirms their beliefs. Since libertarians tend to have strongly-held beliefs they should be even more cautious than normal, lest they bring themselves and their beliefs into ill repute. A good rule of thumb is to check everything opponents claim and double-check the claims of allies. It will not be the untruths that others say about libertarianism that will do us in. Far more dangerous is the nonsense some libertarians spread in the name of the “truth.”And, the more you see yourself as a "hard-core" libertarian, the more likely you are to fall for such false claims.

Welcome to Matrimony Airlines

2012-02-12T18:33:00.000-08:00

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Libertarianism and the Dilemma of Bigotry

2012-02-10T16:21:00.000-08:00

If you want to destroy the movement toward greater human liberty, there is no better method than to poison it. And the poison I refer to is bigotry. Now, bigotry takes many forms. Some people only hate gays. Others only hate Jews, immigrants, women, or black people. But, in my experience bigotry, like other forms of human ignorance, tends to come in clusters. Someone who tends toward bigoted thinking toward one group, tends to hold similar positions toward other groups.

What Ayn Rand said about racism applies to all forms of bigotry. She said racism means, “that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions.” She said it “negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.” She called it the “lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”

All bigotry, regardless of the objects of its hatred, treats the individual based on some collective trait, not their individuality. It denies the groups so targeted the same rights that are granted to others. It singles them out as somehow, inferior based on who they are, not on what they’ve done, or more particularly, not on what they’ve done to others.

That last part is important. Libertarianism holds that individuals are free to make their own choices and act provided they do not violate the equal rights of others. This is what Herbert Spencer called the “liberty of each, limited by the like liberty of all.” This, he said, was the primary rule on “which society must be organized.” Practicing Jews act Jewish. Judaism is not just a set of beliefs, but of actions centered around this faith and culture. But, acting Jewish does not inherently violate the equal rights of others. It doesn’t infringe on the life, liberty or property of other people.

Similarly, being black, or Mexican, or gay, does not violate the “like liberty of all.” There is nothing inherent in any of these collective identities that violates the rights of others. As such, none of these groups should be treated unequally before the law.

Another “collective” group we can speak of is criminals. That is a different matter, especially when we are properly defining crimes. Lysander Spooner defined crime as “those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.” Thomas Jefferson said something very similar to all these voices: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of law’ because law is often by the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

Criminals are those individuals who violate the life, liberty or property of others. These actions do allow us to treat them differently than we do others, in regards to their liberty and their rights. It is right and proper that a rapist be denied the same freedoms of others.

But denying equal access to rights on the basis of non-criminal collective identities: such as race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc., is a very different matter. This is not upholding rights, but denying them.

One of the great attributes of the libertarian tradition, historically known as the classical liberal tradition, is that he was always bucking the status quo when that state of affairs was the enemy of equal, individual liberty and rights. Classical liberals were in the forefront of abolitionism—the movement to end slavery. They supported civil rights and the woman’s movement. They championed equality of rights for the poor, in nations where social status often determined the amount of liberty one had.

Certainly classical liberals, while in the forefront of such crusades for expanding human rights, were often prisoner of their own culture. During the early abolitionist movement you would find classical liberals on the wrong side of the debate, or conflicted by it. But, that this was the case in the early years any justification for such culture bound “traditional values” becomes increasingly unacceptable as time goes by. The tacit acceptance of slavery that was rampant in 1770 had long lost acceptability by 1860 and any purported “classical liberal” who would defend it today has lost the plot, and the right to call himself a classical liberal, or a libertarian.

As the moral consensus moves toward more equality of rights and freedom, the classical liberal who lags behind the culture is no longer a liberal, but a conservative clinging mindlessly to past prejudices.

Classical liberals fought to extend rights to Jews when “Christian traditionalists” were denying them their rights. Yes, the first steps were cautious ones, such as the abolition of the ghetto, or extending the right hold public office. But the classical liberal was pushing the culture in the right direction—toward greater respect of individual rights. If one were to advocate returning to ONLY those cautious first steps, that is not libertarianism, it is tyranny. Just because classical liberals of the past once held a position does not mean that it was the end of liberalism. The question was always: “In what direction do these policies lead us?”

If, at any time, the individual is pushing toward less individual rights, it is not libertarianism. This is true even if the position they currently take would have been considered radically liberal a century ago. Just because some opponents of slavery opposed interracial marriages doesn’t mean support for such laws can be considered “liberal” today. Any one who is pushing for less liberty, and for inequality of rights, in the culture in which he lives, is not a classical liberal, but a conservative. He is, in fact, an enemy of expanding human freedom and rights.

The bulk of the American people no longer hold these collectivistic views of people. They support the principles of individual rights and equality of rights before the law. This hasn’t always been the case, but to a large degree it now is. Even on the issue of equality of rights for gay people the majority of the population is taking a position that 50 years ago would have been considered extreme and radical. It is really a minority who wish to deny rights based on sexual orientation.

Our culture has moved and it moved in the direction that was laid out by the Founding Fathers—toward greater respect for individual rights and toward equality of rights before the law. This is not to say that there are not trend in laws against individual rights. Such trends exist. But they tend to be the kinds of violations that impact all of us badly, instead of targeting one group over others. We are all less free because of the TSA, for instance. Such laws must be opposed, but we can still be optimistic that most Americans no longer want to disadvantage people because they are black, Jewish, gay, etc.

The position of libertarians on individual rights is clear. Not so clear, however, is what libertarians should do about bigots in their midst. And there are bigots who dress in libertarian drag and parade themselves before the public as libertarians.

There are people who argued that blacks are an “inferior race.” There are anti-Semites convinced the Jews are out to control the world. There are people who spit and sputter vile comments about gays when given half a chance. What should we do about them?

Some libertarians tend to argue that unless these people openly advocate gas chambers, lynching or “fag bashing,” then they should be welcomed. But, for instance, we have one “libertarian” theocrat that wrote homosexuals should be stoned to death in a free society because God’s law demands it. He even goes so far as to claim stoning doesn’t burden the taxpayers, fosters community spirit, and is actually “libertarian” because it wouldn’t be the state killing these sinners, but the good Christian people of the community. Another “libertarian” theorist, who hangs out with neo-Nazis and white supremacists wrote that in a free society homosexuals would have to “physically removed.” There is at least one local Libertarian Party official who actively supports racist organizations.

Some libertarians will argue that one’s personal prejudices are immaterial unless the person is actually pushing for the violation of the rights of others. Yet, these same people turn blind eyes to the individuals just mentioned above, who clearly do recommend violating rights based on their own prejudicial viewpoints.

The problem with bigoted views is they inevitably lead to bigoted actions. How precisely can you argue that gay people are threats to the family, destructive of social order, etc., without actually having those views turn to actions at some point?

Bigotry today seems less toxic than it used to be because it constrained by the wider culture. When such constraints were absent—that is when those views were widely held—the actions taken were vastly different. That was a time when black people were lynched and gay people lobotomized or imprisoned.

Bigoted beliefs ultimately lead to bigoted actions, unless constrained by the wide culture, which means by the rule of law. When belief in witches was widespread the claim was that witches were malevolent individuals who harmed the greater society. When that belief dominated individuals believed to be witches were tried and executed. And the mob that did this believed they were acting in self-defense—something that almost sounds libertarian if you ignore the greater context. Today, “witches” are still routinely murdered by religious-inspired mobs in Africa; hundreds of such killings take place every year. The wider culture doesn’t restrain that belief and it is widespread enough that this happens.

What bigots want is to the removal of the culture of restraint. They want to return to some past time when a majority of the people supported their kind of prejudicial views about a group. Libertarians should remember, however, what follows when this is the case. When there is widespread acceptance of bigoted views, widespread violations of individual rights follow.

This is not to say that bigots should be legally constrained from speaking. I am still convinced that the remedy to bad speech is good speech. But the question is what should libertarians do with such people. Nothing! They should do nothing with them. They shouldn’t give them forums. They shouldn’t allow them to hold positions in libertarian organizations. They should frequent they websites, donate to their organizations or do anything to give them legitimacy.

Libertarians need to draw a line in the sand. If someone is a bigot they should not be welcomed in our circles. They are not legitimate representatives of the libertarian, or classical liberal tradition. They are, in fact, trying to push us backwards in a more conservative direction, not forwards.

And, we shouldn’t ignore that some of these people, who think themselves purists in libertarian circles, want a society that is both bigoted and one where individuals can pursue their bigotry with little, or no, restraint by the law. What they believe will happen in their “anarchist” paradise is that the prejudices they promote will dominate and blacks, Mexicans, gays, etc. will be driven out of the “tribe” or punished. This is precisely how one theologian argues that stoning gay people is really libertarian. There would be no state, the local Christian community will kill in the name of Jesus and that makes it “freedom.”

But the goal of libertarians is the protection of rights. Freedom is the means for protecting rights, but not always. We don’t allow rapists the freedom to attack women. We don’t allow the Klan the freedom to torch black churches. We don’t allow Nazis the right to push Jews into gas chambers. Freedom, in libertarian thinking, is that realm of action allowed when the rights of all people—even those you are bigoted toward—are respected. Many violations of freedom violate rights, but not all violations of freedom violate rights. Too many libertarians confuse the ends (rights protection) with the means (liberty). This is what all the great classical liberals quoted at the start meant by the “equal liberty” of others.

It is not a “libertarian” society that stones gay people to death, even if the state is virtually non-existent, or entirely missing. A libertarian society is measured by the respect of individual rights. Just because lynching in the old South were private affairs doesn’t mean they were consistent with libertarianism.

Individuals that advocate disparate legal treatment of individuals because of some collective, non-criminal trait simply should not be welcomed in libertarian circles. We simply should not sanction their bigotry by giving them outlets for their views, or acceptance in our ranks.

We are, I fear, too willing to tolerate bigots because they are “good” on some other issue, or even on most issues. Being good on taxes is no justification for turning a blind eye to racism. Just because someone wants to “abolish the Fed,” doesn’t mean we should tolerate their demands that gay people be denied equality of rights. Someone with brilliant epistemology, who rails against the transgendered, should be ostracized. Anyone advocating intolerance and hatred for Muslim-Americans, not because they are radicals but because they are Muslim, should not be embraced even if they can expound the intricacies of Austrian economics better than anyone else in the world.

We need, as libertarians, to say that such collectivist, bigoted views are not welcome in our circles. We need to recognize where such views lead and the end results that would come about if we managed to created the kind of free society we want, but one where the bulk of the populace were bigots. It would be a culture not dissimilar to rampant violations of rights that we saw in the Deep South. A libertarian society, to lead to the enjoyment of individual rights, is tied to specific cultural values and bigotry is not one of those values. Bigoted values lead to the violations of rights, not their respect.

But there is another practical reason that we should not embrace bigots, in spite of their views on other issues. It taints our message with their poison. The problem with hugging pigs is you smell like dung.

Most Americans no longer hold to the bigoted values of the past and they are growing increasingly unaccepting of those that do. Long term a strategy of accepting bigots is counterproductive.

The long-term trends in this country do favor the bigots. Even in regards to gay issues, where hatred is often cloaked in theology, the trends are clear. Acceptance of equality of rights is a majority viewpoint nationally, with strong majorities in the East and the West, though the South is more bigoted. And the demographics show that this acceptance will only grow as older people die.

There is no long-term viability for a movement that embraces prejudice. Even religious based prejudice is dying out. The most intolerant religious groups are evangelicals and fundamentalists. Yet, young people in these sects are far less intolerant than their parents. And, more importantly, young people are fleeing those religions and they face massive declines in memberships. Mormonism, contrary to the PR image they like to promote, has seen no increases in members, in spite of heavy missionary attempts to convert others. Apparently the converts are just replacing the numbers those who are leaving it, which again seems to be the young. Church support for the antigay Prop 8 in California spurred thousands to publicly denounce their membership in the church.

Religious-based bigotry is on the decline in this country largely because religion itself is on the decline. All surveys of religious beliefs show unbelievers to be the fastest growing “religious” group in the country.

Newsweek, in their cover story for April 13, 2009—The Decline and Fall of Christian America—said that the dominant, unifying ideology holding America together, is no longer faith, but liberty. The article stated:

Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them). This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty.

Libertarians should be in the vanguard of this movement, not standing at the back of it with grumbling conservatives, looking wistfully over their shoulders at the good old days when blacks were lynched, gays were closeted and women were obedient servants of their master and husband. Leading the charge against bigotry is not only the right thing to do, but also the most practical in terms of long-term political influence. Bigotry is a voice from the past and it is one that increasing percentages of Americans are rejecting. Libertarians should do the same.

Proposition 8 Invalid Says Appellate Court: A Synopsis

2012-02-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed the decision to overturn Proposition 8, which stripped gay couples of their right to marry. The Court said, “We consider whether that amendment (Prop 8) violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. We conclude that it does.”

The Justice noted that Prop 8 had only one intention: “It stripped same-sex couples of the ability they previously possessed to obtain from the State, or any other authorized party, an important right—the right to obtain and use the designation of ‘marriage’ to describe their relationships. Nothing more, nothing less. Proposition 8 therefore could not have been enacted to advance California’s interests in childbearing or responsible procreation, for it had no effect on the rights of same-sex couples raise children on the procreative practices of other couples. Nor did Proposition have any effect on religious freedom or on parents’ rights to control their children’s education; it could not have been enacted to safeguard these liberties.”

In essence, they found that Proposition 8 was intended to harm one class of people. They said it served no purposes except “to less the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationship and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow ‘for laws of this sort.’”

The Court narrowly ruled, saying that they did not have to consider the broader question of marriage rights. This was because California had “already extended to committed same-sex couples both the incidents of marriage and the official designation of ‘marriage,’ and Proposition 8’s only effect was to take away” this right “This unique and strictly limited effect on Proposition 8 allows us to address the amendment’s constitutional on narrow grounds.”

The court relied upon the Supreme Court ruling in Evans v. Roomer, a Colorado case. In this incident the state had granted gay individuals the same rights, in regards to anti-discrimination laws, that were granted to individuals in regards to gender, religion, race, etc. But Amendment 2 was proposed by anti-gay hate groups to strip this right, but only from gay people. In other words, they proposed, “rights for me, but not for thee.” Routinely we see the Religious Right argue that rights to discriminate do not apply when religion, which is a chosen condition, is involved. That is, you may not discriminate against a fundamentalist Christian. However, they turn around and argue that a right to discriminate must apply toward homosexuals based entirely on the fact that they have significant animus toward these people.

The Supreme Court ruled against Amendment 2 because “it is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort” that legislation that “single out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status.” They found that the reason for the law was not that it service some compelling state interest, but that it was based on hatred for one group of people. This, they said violated the equal protection of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Prop 8 ruling said that 8 “is remarkably similar to Amendment 2” in that in singles out only one class of people, gay people, for lesser rights. “Like Amendment 2, Proposition 8 denies ‘equal protection of the laws in the most literal sense… because it ‘carves out’ an ‘exception’ to California’s equal protection clause, by removing equal access to marriage, which gays and lesbians had previously enjoyed, from the scope of that constitutional guarantee.”

They noted that Prop 8 was, in a particular way, more of a violation of equal protection than Amendment 2 “because its effect is narrower… the surgical precision with which it excises a right belonging to gay and lesbian couples makes it even more suspect.” Consider a law that says one may not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. This treats all ethnic groups equally. A measure that repeals the entire law would not single out any group; again all ethnicities would have the same rights. But, if a measure were proposed to strip away this right only from individuals with Swedish, Italian, or German ethnic backgrounds, it would be considered invalid unless the state can show “a legitimate reason for withdrawing a right or benefit from one group but not others, whether or not it was required to confer this right or benefit in the first place.”

The Court also looked at whether there was any legitimate reason for withdrawing this right from same-sex couples alone. They said the arguments offered by the anti-gay organizations involved did not present any valid evidence that same-sex marriage violated the rights of others, or harmed a compelling state interest.

Prop 8 proponents had argued that the state has an interest in “responsible procreation and childbearing” and therefore should uphold the amendment. The court found this argument odd in that “same-sex couples are not at risk of ‘irresponsible procreation” and Prop 8 “is not rationally related… to either of these purported interests, whether or not the interests would be legitimate under other circumstances.” The Court also said it didn’t have to determine whether it is better to raise children with their two biological parents because “Proposition 8 had absolutely no effect on the ability of same-sex couples to become parents or the manner in which children are raised in California. As we have explained, Proposition 8 in now way modified the state’s laws governing parentage, which are distinct from its laws governing marriage.” In other words, the justification used by Prop 8 proponents was never actually addressed by the proposition itself.

As for responsible procreation, the Court noted, “Unlike opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples pose no risk of procreating accidentally.” So, the arguments used by the anti-gay lobby, regarding children and procreation, simply doesn’t apply to the case. There is no need to consider those arguments at all as the Proposition itself did NOT actually address those issues.

The Court also addressed another favorite bugaboo of the anti-gay Right: that of religious freedom. They did so, not because the litigants made this argument, as they did not, but because it was raised by various Right-wing anti-gay groups via Amicus briefs. The problem for them is that Proposition 8 did not address any of those issues either. In fact, what the Proposition 8 proponents did was write a proposition that did one thing, while campaigning on completely unrelated different issues. They attempted to do the same thing in their appeal.

They wished to divert the Court’s attention from the matter being considered in order. They did this with voters through their campaign. They whined incessantly about bogus issues, or matters entirely outside the scope of Proposition 8. While there is no legal requirement to be truthful in campaigns, and such tactics work there, they are not useful in courts of law that have to consider the actual law and the real impact of the law. The entire Proposition 8 media campaign was based on issues that Proposition 8 never addressed. That might have been good politics—in the sense that it worked—but that is not a good legal argument for court.

The Court also looked at the argument from tradition and quoted the Lawrence v. Texas decision: “[T] he fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice; neither history nor tradition could saw a law prohibiting miscegenation from constitution attack.” They said that a mere preference for the past “without any identifiable good that a return to the past would produce” is insufficient to justify an attack on the rights of one group.

The Court, after showing that Prop 8 did not address any of the issues raised by its proponents, argues that there is only one true motive left for the proposition is “disapproval of gays and lesbians as a class.” They said: “Proposition 8 enacts nothing more or less than a judgment about the worth and dignity of gays and lesbians as a class.” The Court noted that the proponents of 8 used a campaign that “relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships” and “focused on… the concern that people of faith or religious groups would somehow be harmed.” They noted that the proponents admitted that their strategy was crafted on the idea that there “were limits to the degree of tolerance Californians would afford the gay community” and that they had to convince them that marriage rights had “significant implications” pushing people beyond those limits. They noted that this sort of hate campaign, based on false stereotypes, was used in the Amendment 2 campaign as well.

There's nothing to crow about, Mr. President.

2012-02-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

Given the state of the economy, after the dual disasters of Bush and Obama, I’ll take good news if I can find it. But does that mean we should believe the White House regarding a recent small decline in the unemployment rate?

Alan Krueger, of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers crowed on a White House website that the recent decline in unemployment is “further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal.”

The unemployment rate, however, is a strange bird. The government doesn’t actually know how many people, who want to work, can’t find a job. Government statistics come from a survey of 60,000 households on a monthly basis. The same households get interviewed several times, on a monthly basis, until they are dropped after their 4th interview. Then, after eight months, they are back in the survey for another four months until they are dropped for good.

The government says: “Respondents are never asked specifically if they are unemployed, nor are they given an opportunity to decide their own labor force status. Unless they already know how the Government defines unemployment, many of them may not be sure of their actual classification when the interview is completed.”

If individuals were asked if they were unemployed they would use the common sense definition. Those without jobs would say “yes” while those with jobs would say “no.” The government doesn’t want to define unemployed that way—the numbers would really make them look bad.

Being jobless doesn’t mean you are unemployed. You must also be looking for work and available to work. If, like many unemployed, you spent months pounding the pavement without luck, you may stop looking. If you do, you cease to be unemployed according to government statistics.

In addition, if the survey discovers that the old lady across the street paid you $50 to clean her garden one day, you are now considered officially employed for the entire month, even if that $50 is the entire income you earned. The government says, “People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey week. This includes all part-time and temporary work…”

But, not so the employed. A person who spends the entire week off of work due to illness is still considered employed. So, an unemployed person who finds a one hour job is considered employed, while a person with a job, who doesn’t work a single hour during the same, is also employed. The definitions are skewed to make the unemployment rate as low as possible.

They even tell you that a teenager, who helps the family on the farm, but without any pay for doing so, is officially employed. If your spouse owned a business and you spend a few hours there helping, you are officially deemed employed—even if you are searching for a paying job the rest of the week.

If you are jobless—which does not mean unemployed in government lingo—then you must actively be seeking a job. If you send out 100 CVs in January, but are still jobless that month, you are unemployed. If more than 4 weeks pass since you sent out the CVs, and you didn’t send out any more, but are waiting to see if you get any nibbles, then you are no longer unemployed, you are “outside the workforce.”

Let me give an example of the convoluted way unemployment is defined. Betty applies for a job on the 1st of the month and is interviewed on the 15th. She is told that the company will let her know in about seven weeks time if she is being hired, but they tell her it looks good. On the 15th Betty tells the survey bureaucrat this information: she counts as unemployed. She sought a job and is available to work. Feeling pretty good about her application she doesn’t apply for another job as she awaits the final word. She is interviewed by the government four weeks later and is now determined to be “outside the work force” and is not unemployed, because it was more than four weeks since her last application. The next day the company calls and says they can’t hire her. If she puts in a new application anywhere before the next interview she will magically become “unemployed” again. Her actual employment status didn’t change one iota over the eight weeks, but she was unemployed, then not unemployed, then unemployed again.

Consider Phil as another example: Phil was employed at a business downtown. He went to work on Monday and was told the company had gone bankrupt and this was his last day. He lost his job. On Wednesday he is interviewed and tells them he lost his job and is now unemployed. But he isn’t—not according to the government. He worked on Monday so he is officially employed, even if he doesn’t have a job.

What this means is that unemployment figures don’t tell us what we think they do. They are skewed to underreport the number of people without jobs. The longer people go unemployed, the more discouraged they become, and the less likely they are to look for more work. They may have literally exhausted all the possibilities in their area. When this happens the government claims that they are no longer in the workforce and the unemployment rate magically goes down, even though the same person is as unemployed as he was a month earlier.

Now, if the number of people who were considered in the workforce stayed the same, yet the unemployment rate declined, we would say we are in recovery. But, if the number of people who participate in the labor market drops they no longer count as unemployed; that hides the true picture.

What about the declined in unemployment that the Obama administration recently bragged about? Did we really see unemployment decline? Or did the number of participants in the workforce decline due to despair?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we know the answer. The labor participation rate for January 2012 is the lowest it has been in the last twenty years. Here is a BLS produced chart showing the percentage of adults participating in the work force. You will see that in the pre-Bush era, labor participation rates were increasing. During the first term of Dubya they dropped from around 67% to 66%.

Let us look at the Bush years by themselves to get an idea of how well his economic stimulation worked.

You can see that during the Bush years there was a steep decline in his first term and then something of a plateau over the next four years. Now for Obama.

During the second wave of “economic stimulus” the labor participation rate fell steeply. It appears that the tiny drop in the unemployment rate is not due to the unemployed finding jobs, but due to definitional changes.

Throughout 2011 the government said that about 64% of all adults were employed. Adults are defined as those individuals over the age of 15. That is approximately 80% of the population or 245.6 million people. When the BLS says that the labor participation rate fell from 64% to 63.7%; that indicates 736,800 unemployed people stopped trying to find a job. They are no longer “unemployed” because they are no longer counted as being in the labor market.

What would be the unemployment rate had labor participation rates not fallen so substantially. Through most of the last decade the participation rate was around 66%. If you were to calculate unemployment based on that starting point instead, you would find it closer to 12% instead. That isn’t something to crow about, Mr. President.

Bullying in Public Schools Remains a Major Problem

2012-02-03T00:08:00.001-08:00

A Libertarian Approach to Black History Month

2012-02-02T17:57:00.000-08:00

The following article, by James Padilioni, Jr., originally appeared on the site for Students for Liberty.

The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! - Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Since 1976, the month of February has been promoted as Black History Month in the United States as an attempt to highlight the contributions and experiences of black Americans, long oppressed and exploited in American history. With the development of the “new school” of history in the 1960s, scholars began to explore the different perspectives of minority and subaltern groups in the retelling of the American narrative; the national month-long focus in February is one outgrowth of this new approach. While much work has been done in this field to reconstruct a forgotten history, libertarians by and large have not lent their voices to the dialogue. The libertarian focus on the primacy of the individual tends to obscure our view to collectivist constructions like race, but I would contend that in the discourse on black history this has been a shortfall of libertarianism historically and represents a fruitful area for the development and further refinement of libertarian ideas. Writing at his blog Austro-Athenian Empire, Roderick Long notes that black studies:

“…much like libertarian studies, tend[s] to be enormously insightful in some areas and vastly ignorant in others. (Indeed, much of the knowledge generated by libertarian studies tends to lie in…black studies’ zone of ignorance, just as much of the knowledge generated by…black studies tends to lie in libertarianism’s zone of ignorance.)”

Both black studies and libertarian studies have complementary areas that would be better served by an integrated approach, and I have written this article to take up the implicit challenge in Dr. Long’s words. For libertarians, Black History Month represents an exciting opportunity to bring the liberty message to a wider audience, and show the universal application of our ideas. One such area of integration is critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that focuses on the intersection of race, law, and power. Seeking to explain America’s illiberal racial history, CRT critiques the legal and justice systems, showing how the law has been used to define racial class and deny individual rights, thus institutionalizing racism. Critical race theorist Cornel West writes that “critical race theory compels us to confront critically the most explosive issue in American civilization: the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy.” The related field of whiteness studies goes one step further, arguing that the law created a racial distinction between individuals, and this racial division formed the basis for differential treatment; this variance in the law imbued whiteness with value, while denigrating the individuality of any American who was not white. Therefore, to be white functionally meant that the law respected your right to liberty, free speech, free movement, free association, due process, and property rights. In essence, the law recognized you as a fully-functioning, full responsible and autonomous human.

Indeed, whiteness as a social construct itself became the highest form of property, with a right to exclude, and the full power of the law ready to defend against any attempts at trespass by non-white Americans. Whiteness studies scholar Cheryl Harris notes that, “in ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset…whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law”—an exclusive privilege. When one considers the long history of blacks in America, legal inequality and oppression are inescapable realities that cannot be avoided. In fact, this inequitable treatment of individuals under the law remains the greatest blight to America’s promise as a liberal republic founded upon the contention that “all men are created equal” with inalienable rights.

As I have previously tried to stress on this blog, the history of American racism is inextricably linked with the power of the state. Certainly, this is most clearly demonstrated by black chattel slavery, a system that was wholly contingent upon legal coercion and tied to race. The 1857 Dred Scott decision confidently declared the sad truth that at the time of the American founding, blacks were “regarded as beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But even after emancipation following the Civil War, legal subjugation continued. In 1865, every single former Confederate state converted their slave codes into black codes which served the same end—social control through police powers that restricted black human rights and civil liberties. While the Union occupation of Reconstruction temporarily brought an end to these laws, Jim Crow quickly filled the void beginning in 1876. The end of the 19th century witnessed violence and terror increase against blacks who had no lawful recourse. Lynching scholar Ida B. Wells wrote in 1900 that “for all kinds of offenses—and, for no offenses…men and women are put to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.” Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois lamented “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

The Supreme Court Case case Plessy v. Fergusson decided in 1896 etched the idea of “separate but equal” into law, giving federal legal legitimacy to Jim Crow and segregation. This case resulted when Homer Plessy, a black man, challenged a Louisiana law that segregated rail cars by race. Most amazingly, Homer Plessy was only 1/8 black and 7/8 white, which highlights the great lengths to which the law was manipulated to protect the property in whiteness, complete with its right to exclude “trespassers.” The legal bias inherent in Plessy v. Fergusson would not be challenged until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.

The enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represents a rhetorical departure for American law, but the ushering in of the Great Society in 1965 and the beginning of the War on Drugs in 1971 have continued the legal plunder of the black community by destroying initiative and incentive within the community, enervating the organization of its civil society, continuing the gross violation of black civil liberties, and depopulating the black community of much of its human capital—young black men—through mass incarceration.

Former ACLU lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander informs her readers that the US currently leads the world in the incarceration of its ethnic minorities. She adds that the American government imprisons “a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” Also recently, the NAACP has begun a new campaign highlighting America’s enormous prison population of over two million people. The recent focus of black studies and critical race theory have moved towards an anti-state position, one that would greatly benefit from a libertarian perspective.

The future integration of black and libertarian studies can be seen in the work of economist Dan D’Amico on the prison system and mass incarceration, which he describes in this interview. Libertarians are acutely aware of the tendency for accumulated state power to lead to tyranny, and as such libertarians are perfectly suited to engage in this discussion. Black History Month is important because the long view of black history illustrates in grim detail the disastrous effects of a non-liberal approach to law and jurisprudence. Instead of shunning the collectivist elements of engaging in racialized discussions, libertarians are needed more than ever to compliment black studies. Writing at Libertarianism.org, Jonathan Blanks recently observed:

It is remarkable that American libertarians—so often eager to discuss freedom in nearly every conceivable iteration—rarely address African-Americans and the struggle for civil rights in America. Slavery is long gone, but it is hardly coincidence that the descendants of slaves have accounted for disproportionate percentages of Americans in poverty and incarceration in the 150+ years hence. Save Emancipation and America’s reluctant recognition of the 14th Amendment by way of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the government has consistently (though not exclusively) been a boot on the necks of African-Americans, hindering progress and true equality. Yet libertarians tend to shrink away from acknowledging race for fear of involving themselves in “identity politics” and thus rarely discuss the government’s legacy of racial oppression.

This libertarian will be silent on issues of racial justice no more. I will use Black History Month to speak truth to power, and I encourage all libertarians to do the same. The law has stolen black humanity, dignity, and liberty for four hundred years, and as Frederic Bastiat warned, “It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

An Open Letter to Anti-Feminist "Libertarians"

2012-01-31T22:45:00.000-08:00

Stefan Molyneux’s recent video, a defense of his statement that “feminism is socialism with panties” (from which he takes his title) is not so much an enlightening philosophical speech as an ill-informed rant. The title of the video is intellectually dishonest, dismissing generations of women and men struggling for equality as panty-wearing socialists. The title panders to vulgar misogynists and is insulting to all women, feminists or not, and to anyone else who believes in equality between the sexes. The ideas expressed in this video and other videos of his that discuss feminism in a negative way are not only inaccurate but also dangerous, negatively influencing society’s perception of what feminism really is.

Because Molyneux’s anti-feminist views are unfortunately shared by many libertarian men and some libertarian women, we think it is important to take a stand and point out what is wrong and misguided about these views. Each one of the individuals signing this document has seen libertarian and conservative men attacking feminism without knowing what it means; men who have read nothing more than a few newspapers articles or anti-feminist rants by others and have no idea of feminism’s rich and varied history. Their views, founded on little more than opinion, are merely knee-jerk “politically incorrect” responses that lack critical thinking and thoughtful analysis.

Anti-feminist libertarian and conservative comments abound on Facebook and other social media. These include the usual clichés such as “man-hater,” and “feminazis” as well as such claims as, for example, “feminists are so trapped in their victimhood thinking that they see potential male oppressors everywhere and blame everything that is wrong with their lives on ‘sexism’ and ‘patriarchy.’” Men who are supportive of feminist concerns are attacked as “little wussy boys” and “worse” than the feminists themselves. One man even called the Association of Libertarian Feminists an “oxymoron.” These childish and uninformed remarks by anti-feminist men not only show how little they know about feminism, but how little regard they have for women and women’s rights.

Some anti-feminists even call feminism “collectivist” because it is a movement. This is a strange misuse of the term. They confuse “collective action” with “collectivism.” The former simply means individuals working together for a common purpose, as for example, libertarianism or abolitionism. The philosophy of “collectivism” says that group goals are more important than individual goals. But the raison d'etre of feminism is to achieve equal individual rights for every woman; to allow individual women to pursue their lives as they see fit rather than submit to cultural stereotypes.
Feminism is, by common definition, “the belief that women and men are equal and should be equally valued as human beings and have equal rights.” From a libertarian point of view, this stance should not be in the least controversial since libertarians also believe in equal rights for all. Indeed, given this definition of feminism, all libertarians, if they are consistent, should also be feminists. This definition is the essence of feminism to which every stripe of feminist from Marxist to libertarian, from radical to liberal, will agree. What feminists differ upon is how to achieve this goal of equality and equal rights. But the anti-feminist libertarians, knowing little about the wide range of views within feminism, selectively choose those feminist views they find abhorrent and attack those views as if they represented all of feminism. Yet when liberals do the same to libertarians, misrepresenting a few of the most uncompassionate as representative of the whole, these same anti-feminist libertarians howl. This is an inconsistent, hypocritical, and unfair treatment of both of these rich and vibrant intellectual traditions.

Molyneux is only the latest in a long line of these uncritical anti-feminists. We use his videos as a starting point for analysis only because he is currently one of the most visible anti-feminist libertarians. Like other anti-feminists, he fails to actually define feminism before he attacks. He simply implies that the ones he selectively chooses to talk about constitute feminism. Though Molyneux admits it isn’t accurate to say that all feminists are socialists, he still defends his statement that “feminism is socialism with panties” and continues to talk as if all feminists are indeed socialists. This is more than an offensive accusation unsupported by sound reasoning; it represents the kind of sexist thinking feminism tries to combat. By using this sleight-of-hand, he continues to encourage his listeners to systematically categorize all "feminist" concerns as pitiful socialist garbage to be derided and dismissed.

In representing feminism as a primarily socialist-dominated movement, Molyneux ignores feminists of any other political ideology, including a long history of individualist feminists. His definition of socialism is as unclear as his definition of feminism; he uses the term interchangeably with “Marxism” without qualifying exactly what kind of socialists he is accusing feminists of being. What is clear is his belief that socialists of any kind are unappealing and deserving of ridicule.

Molyneux also uses the term “gender” incorrectly. He talks about the “two genders” but “gender” is not interchangeable with “sex.” Social scientists generally define “gender” in terms of psychological factors, i.e., societal views of gender, one’s self-perception, etc. In fact there is a whole range of non-binary gender perceptions; including “transgender” people who do not fit into the standard “male” and “female” categories. Even the term “sex,” which refers to anatomical distinctions, is more complex than simply “male” and “female” because some people are “intersex” with physiological elements of both female and male reproductive characteristics. These people may call themselves “male” or “female” for convenience but many do not feel comfortable doing so.
There is a belief among such anti-feminists that feminism is inherently sexist because it emphasizes women. This is like saying that those who oppose discrimination against people of color are racists. Such anti-feminist thinking then assumes that women must desire preferential treatment. This is a typical claim made by anti-feminist men in articles and posts in social media, couched under the misdirecting plea, “but we’re all individuals.” It is similar to the claim that LGBTQ folks want preferential treatment simply because they want the same marriage rights as anyone else. Yet it is important to note that it is not women who have created the gender rights gap; it is a culture and society that has long seen women as secondary to men. Both culture and the government have been the biggest challenges feminists have faced in seeking equality. Government, reflecting the historical cultural prejudices against women, has enforced laws (opinions backed with guns, as Molyneux muses) against women since the beginning of the United States. Feminists, in working for equality, are therefore not working to support the state but rather desire to change it in order to eliminate the need for feminism. However, if libertarians categorically reject every attempt to challenge the presence of privilege in our culture, we should not be too shocked when feminists believe that the force of law is required to create a more humane and bearable space in which to exist.

Contrary to what the anti-feminists such as Molyneux claim, feminists have in fact played a major role in some of the most significant triumphs for individual liberty against state and private aggression in the last two centuries. In the 19th century, they were in the forefront of major movements for individual freedom, including abolitionism, suffrage for women, individual conscience in regard to religion and sexual activity, and the protection of minority rights. Every woman today who has a college education, owns property, or votes can thank these feminists. In the 20th century, feminists were in the forefront of not only the vote for women and the civil rights movement, but also in the fight against discriminatory laws that kept women from having credit in their own name, police policies that treat victims of rape and domestic abuse as responsible for their own victimization, actions and laws that harm people whose identities, sexual preferences, and orientations do not match the mainstream, and let us not forget reproductive freedom!

The radical feminist activists that Molyneux and other anti-feminists so unthinkingly sneer at have almost always been primarily concerned with challenging and resisting patriarchal laws—abortion laws, rather famously—and with building non-state grassroots institutions (e.g., consciousness raising groups, battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers, underground abortion networks, women's self-help clinics, and an array of critical “awareness”/anti-sexist cultural campaigns and groups), a number of which, especially the medically-focused efforts, were in fact constantly targeted by the regulatory state for criminalization and destruction.

In his “feminists are socialists in panties” video, Molyneux states that feminists are state-serving “creatures” and “Frankensteins,” whose primary agenda is receiving preferential treatment from the government and society, an erroneous and insulting view. He commits the error that Frédéric Bastiat defines as the core error of socialists, by “confusing the distinction between government and society.” He misrepresents the feminist stance as categorically anti-family and requiring state intervention to fulfill. No matter that many feminists have actually long discussed how to apply their feminist views to marriage and family, with the intent to raise children in a non-stereotypical way that affords them the richest opportunities as adults. Their aim is not to raise children through the state as Plato asserted, but typically to raise them healthfully in an individual family with two parents. Only a handful of feminists have actually seriously talked about dismantling the family, primarily during the Second Wave, contrary to what anti-feminists like Molyneux claim.

Molyneux portrays feminists as ruthless women, quick to cut each other down and unwilling to support successful women who deviate from the underlying socialist ideology of feminism. He claims that this is why feminists never discuss Ayn Rand or Margaret Thatcher, who he sees as “neo-conservatives” that are “anti-government” and therefore can be dismissed. In actuality, Rand, is not a neo-conservative; her importance for women has even led to a scholarly book, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, published by a prestigious and well-known university press. In his rant against “ruthless” feminists, Molyneux even implies that because they did not rally to the cause of Bachmann’s candidacy that this is further proof of their cutthroat ideology. He thus implies that women should unconditionally support and praise each other despite differences in political views, even when the women themselves hold anti-feminist positions. The fact that Molyneux himself does nothing of the sort—he frequently attacks Ron Paul, a man, for example—is apparently beside the point. But unbeknownst to Molyneux, many feminists did in fact defend Bachmann, Clinton, and Palin from charges that veered from political disagreement to overt sexist dismissal.

In his video “The Life and Death of Radical Feminism,” Molyneux propounds the belligerently conservative argument that women taking on paid jobs won’t spend enough time with their children and thus will harm their development. This argument is fallacious on several grounds. First, it mysteriously leaves out one parent from the equation—the father. In fact, social science research shows that fathers have considerable impact on their children and that more interaction with their children is desirable. Second, there is a copious social science literature showing that children are not harmed when the mother works outside the home. A more important factor is whether the mother is satisfied with her situation, whether working outside the home or within. Third, it denies individual autonomy to women, chastising them for wanting to have a life or career outside the home and asserting that they should sacrifice their aspirations in order to allegedly achieve anti-authoritarian kids. Once again, this bears no resemblance to actual psychological research findings. The factors that have the most impact on authoritarian or anti-authoritarian views in children are warmth and non-punitive childrearing methods that teach empathy, not whether or not the mother stays at home. To blame moms for everything bad that happens to the children is yet another example of not only sexism but outright misogyny.

Molyneux, like many conservatives, seems to think that the 1950s was a golden age for families. The idea that the 1950s nuclear family was a model for liberated childhood or somehow ushered in the social movements of the 1960s is simply bizarre. Spanking, the abusive disciplinary action that Molyneux abhors, was far more prevalent in the 50s than it is now. In the 1950s, the spanking rate was 99%; the rate has been going down ever since. Isn’t this a curiously contradictory view? Furthermore, in the books and research about the student movements of the 60s, the main correlation between activism and parenting was having a parent who was also a political or social activist, not having a traditional nuclear family.

Anti-feminists have no idea what feminists really want. Feminists are not women who want to be treated as men. Feminists are people who want to be treated as people, people who should not be discriminated against. Feminism isn’t socialism. Feminism is actually more about individualism and the desire to be evaluated based on one’s merit’s and not on one’s sex or gender.

Yes, there are feminists who are socialists. There are also feminists who are anarchists and feminists who are libertarians and feminists who really have no political ideology but know that they deserve to be treated equally to men. There are feminists who wear panties and feminists who wear boxers because not all feminists have an underwear preference and not all feminists are women.

The majority of Molyneux’s arguments against feminism as well as his accusation that “feminism is socialism with panties” are grounded in flawed and misogynistic rhetoric as are the arguments of other anti-feminists. In reality, feminism attracts a diverse group of people just as any other idea or philosophy does. To attempt to diminish the impact of feminism and redefine it as an objectionable philosophy is repugnant. The statement itself is inherently sexist and is the kind of thinking that feminism—true feminism—works to change.

This is a collective rejoinder written and agreed upon by the following signers 1-31-2012.
Ankur Chawla, Amanda Davis, Christine-Marie L. Dixon, Nathan Goodman, Charles H. Johnson, Ross Kenyon, Matt Mortellaro, Nicholas O’Connell, James Peron, CBP, Sharon Presley

Also joining us:
Brad Spangler, Andrei Pemberton, Jeffrey Young, Thomas J. Webb, Kyle Bush, George H. Smith, Thomas L. Knapp, Keith Taylor, John L Robinson, Michael Scandirito, James Tuttle, Neil Ball, TheElMoIsEvil, Megan Arnold, Adam Reed, Tom Ender, Lisa Clanin, Andrew Taranto, Erin Miller, Mike J. Gogulski, Robert Steel, Dan Bier, Nick Ford, Grant Babcock, Jason Lee Byas, Lindsey A. Jacobs, Leah Farrow, Alex Strekal, Benjamin Nichols, Kaitlyn Emerick, Roman Pearah, Rocco Fama, Art Smith, Judy Purrington, Jim Davidson, Jason Bessey, Neha Sinha, Luke Clayborn Hopper, Vincent Patsy, Luca Gattoni-Celli, Natasha Shebeko, Julia Riber Pitt, D. Frank Robinson, Natasha Shebeko, Julia Riber Pitt, D. Frank Robinson, Jad Davis, Moriah N. Costa, Nick Saorsa, Matt Zwolinski, Mariana Evica, Don Pomeroy, Halina Reed, Isa Rizal Bufano, Lucy Betageek Hanouille, Jason Phillips Love, Teresa Warmke, Currer Bell, Jon Anselmo, Alejandro Oquendo, Kevin Carson, Corey Moore, Edgar Aroutiounian

Note: Our support of this open letter comes with only one hesitation—we support the content and the intentions. We merely question whether it should have addressed Mr. Molyneux except in passing. We do not find his arguments or his views particularly compelling, nor do we think he is significant. But the problems associated with his views are significant and a result of the influence of conservatives in corrupting modern libertarianism. Individuals who would like to add their signature to the open letter are encouraged to leave a comment stating their intention and we shall add them. Please add your email address, which will not be made public, so we can verify it with you.

Why Libertarians Need to Talk With the Left and How to Do It.

2012-01-29T21:33:00.000-08:00

Libertarians should talk with the Left and need to learn how.

First, allow me to define what I mean by libertarian. I use a broad definition to define libertarian. I’m an “old fashioned” libertarian, as I still hold the same basic principles of libertarianism that were present when I got involved with it back in the 1970s.

For me, someone who supports depoliticized markets is part way there, but only part of the way. Depoliticized, or free markets, also mean private property rights—including the right to collectively own property—voluntary exchange between consenting individuals, and the right to keep the fruits of one’s labor.

Someone who believes in a peaceful foreign policy is also part of the way there. They would oppose interventionist wars, support international trade and the free movement of goods, capital and labor.

The third leg of the libertarian stool, so to speak, is civil liberties. By civil liberties, I don’t mean just those civil liberties that conservatives could embrace, such as the right to bear arms, nor do I just mean opposition to the PATRIOT Act. I also mean things such as ending the war on drugs, opposition to censorship, supporting separation of church and state—even at the state level. I mean opposition to sodomy laws and opposition to restrictions on birth control and abortion, I am talking about opposing things such as e-verify as well. I mean the whole plethora of infringements on civil liberties, including regulations restricting the right of people to enter into marriage contracts.

By libertarian I mean someone who is good on economic policy, foreign policy and civil liberties. This is not a 2-out-of-3 game, where you are a libertarian if you are bad in one of these areas. I would accept someone as libertarian if they miss the boat here or there; but not if they are broadly bad in one category. They may be a progressive, a conservative, a paleoconservative, etc., but they are not libertarian.

Libertarianism is not a variant of conservatism.

Look at history. Libertarianism is the direct descendant of classical liberalism. Given how many “libertarians”—please note the “scare quotes” around that term—channel conservative arguments these days, I often prefer using “classical liberal” to describe myself rather than libertarian. I don’t want to be confused with militia-loving, Birch Society, bigoted fundamentalists who think that bed sheets are evening wear.

Classical liberalism was a revolutionary movement challenging the status quo of the day. It was not as consistent in application of its principles as libertarians would prefer, but it was a dramatic step forward in the history of liberty. Classical liberals opposed the alliance between church and state; they wanted to end the property system of the day, where might alone transferred property into hands of privileged, landed elites who grew wealthy out of monopoly privileges bestowed by the Crown. Classical liberals argued that rights were inherent in each person and were not political grants or privileges. They supported freedom of speech and the right to criticize common wisdom of the day—including teachings of the church. They wanted depoliticized markets and said that when government existed, protecting rights of the people its core, perhaps only, legitimate duty.

In opposition, were conservatives, who as conservatives tend to do, clung to the power structure of the day and defended the status quo, regardless of how unjust it was. Classical liberalism was a revolutionary system of thought that upset the entire social order of the day. It reduced the power of both church and state to control the lives of people. They didn’t support merely transferring state power to private institutions—for instance giving control of marriage to religion—they wanted the power of third parties to control people’s lives reduced, including privately-held power.

A third force entered the conflict between liberalism and conservatism, which attempted to achieve liberal goals through the use of state power. That movement was truly middle-of-the-road, even though some thought it more revolutionary. That movement was socialism. The socialist of that era believed that through state power the goals of liberalism could best be achieved. They were an attempt to compromise, to find a third way. In many ways socialism, as Oliver Brett in his classic In Defense of Liberty noted, was conservative. It sought to preserve the centralized power structure but turn it in a liberal direction.

Classical liberals found much to agree with socialists on and worked with them. There are risks in alliances, one of which is that you may be tempted to compromise principles to appease partners. Classical liberals started doing just that. Instead of liberalizing socialism, the alliance resulted in pushing liberalism in a socialist direction.

This alliance remained in place until the early 1900s. During this time, classical liberalism waned, losing its intellectual power and appeal. In the end, the progressives not only destroyed liberalism but made off with its name as well.

Just as classical liberalism ended up being corrupted by the Left, the modern libertarian movement has been corrupted by the Right. We have apologists for state restrictions on the free movement of labor, using racist arguments in the name of job protectionism. They claim to be libertarian while doing so, in fact, some even try to claim to be the only “pure,” “radical” libertarians, yet indulge in collectivist labeling of immigrants, other races, gay people, etc. They adamantly defend social conservatism as being part and parcel of libertarianism. They are harbingers of the conservative take-over of libertarianism.

That is why we need to speak to the Left. We need to counterbalance the corruption from the Right. Yet, we must carefully consider where we are allied. We can’t enter into wholesale alliances with either Left or Right. We must be selective in the battles we fight.

Between Left and Right, the reality remains that the Left is still closer to our ideals. They are more likely to agree with our social liberalism and foreign policy even though they are economic interventionists.

I have to define who I speak of on the Left. By Left, I don’t mean the party elite in the Democratic Party. I don’t mean advocates of private power structures that inhibit individual freedom, such as those who overly praise unions and want to give them state-sponsored powers. Just as private power of the church has to be opposed, I think the private power of unions has to be opposed, as well.

I am speaking of the average person who sees himself as a moderate leftist. They don’t like the gay bashing of Republicans and conservatives. They don’t care for the wars. They aren’t thrilled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric, aren’t fond of the PATRIOT Act, don’t wish to regulate abortion or ratchet up censorship. They aren’t libertarians by any means, but on the continuum between libertarianism on the left, socialism in the middle, and conservatism on the right, they are closer to the libertarian side of things than they are to the conservative side. I personally believe this is the bulk of the Left today.

However, this is not the general view of the Left leadership by any means. The political process guarantees that the worst get to the top, with few exceptions. The leadership of the Left is worse than the rank and file. Just as what passes as libertarian leadership has progressively gotten worse because of the corrupting process of politics.

Most rank and file members of the political left are not hard-core socialists. They aren’t particularly fond of high taxes, but they aren’t sure how else to achieve the just society that seek. Typically, their heart is in the right place, but they don’t understand economics and the incentives that Mises talked about in his book Bureaucracy. They want to do the right thing and don’t know any other way of doing it. They often believe people need to be helped and state power should be used to achieve that.

Contrast that with the modern conservative. Where the progressive often sees people as needy, the conservative often sees them as sinful. The progressive wants to wield state power to help people, but the conservative wants state power to punish evil-doers and enforce God’s law. As annoying as people who want to “help” can be, they are usually less offensive than those who want to punish us for our sins. One side thinks government is there to help people; the other side thinks it is there to punish them. Given that unpalatable choice, I prefer the Left.

Libertarians, however, are often shitty communicators when it comes to talking to the Left because they sound like conservatives.

The first thing you should realize about the Left is they are extremely well-intentioned, but naïve about the risks of state power. They honestly think they can improve the lives of people through political manipulation and judge others by whether or not they are similarly well-intentioned.

This means you need to establish your credentials with them, which means defending the rights of minorities faced with social oppression. You need to make it clear that you do want the poor to become wealthy, you do want medical care for all, you want homes to be affordable to people, etc. Remember that the conflict between liberalism and socialism was one of means, not goals. It was conservatives who opposed the goals of liberalism, not socialists.

This is why classical liberals were in the forefront of abolitionism and conservatives opposed it. Classical liberals, such Moorfield Storey, were active in the civil rights movement, along with socialist allies, while conservatives opposed it. Classical liberalism rightly promoted the equal rights of women, which conservatives opposed, and it supports the principle of equality of rights for gay people, which conservatives oppose.

Libertarians who see themselves as allied with conservatives play down their differences with conservatives which causes libertarians to ignore important issues that expand individual choice and freedom. During the period of alliance with the Right, libertarians, for the most part, were silent about the injustices that plagued the country. Nathaniel Branden noted this long ago in a Reason magazine interview:

But it would have been immensely important had Libertarians been the first to speak up on these problems. I think it’s unfortunate that Libertarians so often leave the initiative to the Leftists. For example, it was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to oppose our involvement in Viet Nam. It was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to oppose the draft. It was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to denounce racism in this country.

Libertarians don’t seem to know what the vital issues are, where the battle lines most need to be drawn, and which issues should be attacked first. They don’t seem to have a good sense of practical reality in these matters.

You need to let the Left know you care about these social issues and expansion of freedom in those areas. If you can’t do that you can’t talk to them. Your talk will be dismissed as nothing but words. Unfortunately, for many libertarians such talk is nothing but words.

If you want to get people on the Left interested in our issues, you have to show interest in their issues. It is a trade of value for value. Too many libertarians want something for nothing; they seek political welfare, where everyone pays attentions to their concerns while ignoring the concerns of others.

A local libertarian party group once complained to me that the gay community never showed interest in them. A few months later, the Pride festival was coming up and I suggested having a libertarian booth there. I said I would pay half the cost. They rejected the idea as too expensive, which I found that odd since every month they set up booths costing similar sums at gun shows with smaller attendance. I then offered to raise the funds for them, if they wanted, and said I would staff the booth most of the time. They declined all offers, preferring to direct their attention and resources to gun owners.

Why?

Because they are infected with what I call “Me-Libertarianism,” that myopic kind of libertarianism that only sees issues as important if they impact the typical libertarian. Who is that typical libertarian? A middle-aged, white, heterosexual male. Issues that don’t impact that demographic just aren’t important and many bluntly tell you so.

Abortion rights aren’t important. Immigration isn’t important. Equality of rights for gay people isn’t important. They just ignore all those issues because they don’t impact them. Their solipsistic view of liberty is, “If it doesn’t affect me, how can it be important?”

Worse, they start to sound like conservatives by not only ignoring issues that don’t impact them directly, but by attacking people who are affected. They criticize feminists who talk about women’s issues, whine about immigrants, and put down gay people, often using juvenile insults of the kind they heard in grade school. When it comes to the ability to see the state of liberty through the eyes of others, many libertarians have evolved no further than that of a playground bully throwing a temper tantrum.

If you want people to interested in your issues, be interested in their issues.

Also, try to listen to what people are saying instead of playing word games with them. For instance, many people discuss rights in a way that sounds as if they could mean that rights reside in groups. Libertarians like to play one-upmanship with them and pounce on bad use of language to score points. They aren’t out to change minds; they are out to “WIN” debates.

So, someone asks about “gay rights” and the libertarian says precisely the same thing the conservative tends to say. Rights don’t belong to groups, only to individuals, this is just asking for special privileges, blah, blah, blah. And I do mean blah.

They aren’t trying to understand what the person meant. Over the last 30 years, one thing I discovered is most people who say “gay rights” mean pretty much what libertarians mean, or what they should mean. Most on the Left don’t think gay people have “special rights;” they mean they should have the same rights.

The conservative, however, attacks this as pleading for special rights and then pulls a bait-and-switch by defining “special rights” as meaning the same rights. For the conservative, if you let gay people marry, just as straight people do, that isn’t the “same” right, it is a special right. The people who distort the meanings of words, in this case, are conservatives, yet, it is conservatives that many libertarians mimic in their reply.

The libertarian who pounces on the term ends up sounding like the conservative, and is interpreted in the same way as the conservative. Their little academic discourse on what rights means, comes across as saying: “No, gay people shouldn’t have the same rights.” That is the case even if they don’t mean it that way. If you do verbal imitations of conservatives, don’t be surprised when you are mistaken for one.

Look at political discourse with the Left as an investment. You accumulate capital and periodically spend that capital to get something in return.

When you talk about issues that matter to them, when you actually manage to show them you do care about these issues and about the rights of all people, not just those of white, middle-aged straight men, and when you are able to communicate ideas without sounding like some Tea Party bigot, you accumulate political capital. Then, when you raise your issues, you spend some of that capital. You can talk about property rights, or depoliticized markets, or deregulation, and they don’t immediately dismiss you. You have accumulated political capital with them. They don’t hear someone who is just another conservative. They remember when you stood with them, so when you differ, they are far more likely to listen with respect.

These progressives had other allies as well—communists. The Russian revolution created a state that many progressives praised at the time. That state did not wither away, as Marx had hoped. It was tyrannical and imperialistic. It took the conservative agenda to the logical conclusion of total (or near total) state power, but included none of the social goals of liberalism.

As the horror of communism became apparent, the few liberals remaining (or the Remnant, as Albert Jay Nock called them) started looking for allies. The conservative movement still had its love for state power, and still thought the state should be an arm of the church, and they still clung to the past. However, the past to which they clung was one with substantial liberal elements in it, no thanks to them. Between Bolsheviks and conservatives the latter was the least lethal.

Libertarians shifted their alliance from Progressive Left to Conservative Right. This led to many of them, such as H.L. Mencken, Nock, Oswald Garrison Villard, and others, being accused of changing their principles but they still had the same principles, when they only shifted allies.

That uneasy alliance existed until the collapse of communism and it did to libertarianism what the old liberal/socialist alliance had done. It corrupted libertarianism. Today, there are many people calling themselves libertarian who are anything but. They side with power structures, clinging to the concept that privatized power that oppresses people is permissible, and that religious values ought to be reflected in the laws. They are more conservative than libertarian.

NOTE REGARDING COMMENTS: It appears that a lot of people want this essay to be about something other than what it actually is about. I am trying to keep comments on the topics raised which is about why libertarians and the Left need to talk with each other. It was not meant to be an essay justifying any particular libertarian position. Conservatives reading it want debates on abortion here, individuals on the Left want to debate private property, markets, Ayn Rand and other issues. And essays on those topics will be forthcoming or have appeared already, so debate on the topics is welcome there. But there are at least half a dozen people wanting to discuss other topics. It is not possible in the comments section to address all those issues, especially given the range of them and the limited time available to do so. In addition there are a lot of presumptions about what I do, or don't believe, many of them wrong. Just clarifying them would take a great deal of time. I am sorry but it is not possible to cover everything that multiple people want to discuss and a comment section is a poor place to do it. So please keep comments on topic.

Having a Civil Conversation: Talking to Others About Ideas

2012-01-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Prof. Mark Osler discusses how to have a civil conversation about controversial issues.

Booze, Sex and Ayn Rand

2012-01-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

Last November the voters in Washington state wisely decided to abandon state liquor stores and allow the private sale of alcohol. Support for the measure was highest in those areas that routinely vote Democrat and lower in areas that are traditional Republican. Yet, the measure itself was to abandon state run agencies in favor private enterprise.

The general perception is that Democrats tend to like government running businesses and Republicans tend to support private enterprise. Yet, in this case the opposite was true.

Conservatives, in general, and Republicans in particular, claim they support deregulation and small government, with local control. Yet they are working to strip the states of the right to set their own marriage laws, oppose deregulation of marriage to allow same-sex couples to enter marriage contracts, and generally support government control of the love life of grown adults. The current debate in the Republican Party seems to be about which candidate supports the most state control of people’s private affairs.

On the other side the aisle, Democrats routinely oppose capitalist acts between consenting adults. They eloquently argue that a woman has the ability to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term, or not, and then turn around and claim she is incapable of deciding whether a labor contract is acceptable or not and needs government help in determining the content of the contract. Gay men and lesbians are competent to decide whom they will marry, but incompetent when it comes to making decisions about medical insurance. The GOP argues the exact opposite. Women who ought to be free to make decisions about labor are not competent to decide whether they wish to go into labor. Individuals who are competent to make decisions regarding medical insurance are not capable in deciding whom they wish to marry.

This apparent paradox was noticed by Ayn Rand back in 1973 when she gave a Ford Hall Forum lecture, Censorship: Local and Express. Miss Rand was unhappy with recent Supreme Court decisions allowing the censorship of erotic material. She dissected the Court’s ruling and noted that in this particular case: “It is Justice Douglas, the arch-liberal, who defends individual rights.” On the other hand, “It is the conservatives who speak of as if the individual did not exist, as if the unit of social concern were the collective—the community.”

This paradox is apparent in the debate on evolution vs. “intelligent design.” The Left tends to argue that complex orders of nature can evolve without centralize design while the Right tends to say a Creator, or divine central planner is required. Yet when the complex order, known as the economy, is mentioned they each abandon their position and take the opposite view. The Left insists complex orders required intelligent designers planning things and the Right is happy to accept evolutionary changes. Herbert Spencer noted that that many reformers simply “cannot be made to recognize the process of evolution resulting from men’s daily activities, though facts forced on them from morning till night show this in myriafold ways.”

Michael Rothschild, in his fascinating work Bionomics wrote:

Putting aside the details of genetic variation and natural selection, is it really possible that an unconscious, spontaneous phenomenon could have brought forth a natural world of such awesome diversity, beauty, and balance? We can see it. But it still boggles the mind.

Oddly enough, the same sense of incredulity underlies the widespread mistrust of free markets. Anyone who thinks carefully about capitalism must ask, how could such a vast and complex system emerge without the benefit of some grand design? Somewhere, somebody must be in charge. How else could, simple, self-interested components coalesce into an immensely complicated, well-coordinated economy? The notion that no one is in control—that economic order spontaneously emerges from the chaotic interaction of millions of individuals and firms—is quite simply, hard to swallow.

I can understand individuals accepting spontaneous order as a general rule and thus wanting freedom. I can even understand those who argue that intelligent design is required in the universe and the economy. What doesn’t appear to make sense, on the surface, is the contradictory views held by both Left and Right with the former demanding social freedom but despising economic freedom, and the latter taking the opposite view.

I have listened to numerous people attempting to explain this paradox. The only explanation that ever made sense to me was the one Rand offered in 1973. She said:

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, or trade, of business, or physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirits, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a government establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (not their concern with ‘academic freedom’). By they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property—they advocate it all they way down to total expropriation.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming this earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Yet is the conservatives who are predominantly religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body, who represent what I call the ‘mysticism of spirit.” And it is the liberals who are predominantly materialists, who regard man as an aggregate of meat, and who represent what I call the mystics of muscle.”

This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises.

One of the great virtues of classical liberalism, often called libertarianism today, is that it believed that both man’s physical nature and his mental nature required freedom. Our classical liberal forefathers (and mothers) were among the first to fight for freedom of conscience. They were opponents of flames and faggots that were used to burn heretics and argued that individuals had a natural right to believe as they wished, even if that belief included opposition to the established church.

On the other hand they were also advocates of land reform to end the dominance of land—the prime mode of production at the time—by the aristocracy and the church. They fought attempts to shackle either man’s mind or body, or both.

DOMA Threatens to Rip Family Apart

2012-01-14T20:43:00.000-08:00

Value for Value: A Short Story on Why Libertarians Fail to Communicate

2012-01-12T14:03:00.000-08:00

Joe Libertarian was having dinner with some friends and, as usual, turned the conversation into a lecture on the morality of free markets. Politely the friends listened as he argued that markets are the only fair means of distribution of goods because each individual trades value for value. Exchanges mean that each participant benefits, he told them, otherwise they wouldn’t make the exchange. “Remember,” he said, “value for value. No free lunches, each side brings value to the table otherwise the exchange doesn’t happen and probably shouldn’t happen,” he said as he sipped his beer, feeling superior to these less-enlightened individuals.

His friends nodded while waiting for him to finish. That sip of beer gave Marie a chance to speak up. Marie worked with Joe for years and had grown tolerant of his continual sermons.

“Well, some of us mothers are raising funds for the kids in Little League to cover the cost of uniforms. We’re doing a yard sale so anyone who things to contribute please let me know and I’ll arrange to pick them up.” Several of the others around the table gave Marie their phone number and encouraged her to call them to arrange a pick up. Fred, a neighbor of Joe’s mentioned it would give him a chance to clear out things from storage that he simply doesn’t use anymore. And then everyone turned to look at Joe, who seemed to be paying no attention whatsoever.

“Joe,” asked Marie, “are you able to help with anything for the fundraiser for the kids?”

“Well,” he said, pausing longer than usual, “the problem is that the Little League uses public parks. You know I don’t think its right to tax people to provide parks. Not everyone uses the parks. It’s value for value, you know. Why just the other day I was reading Mises and he said….” Marie looked out of the corner of her eye and saw a few exasperated looks on the faces of the others. But she waited until Joe had finished his latest sermon.

“That’s all good and fine,” she said when he finally finished. “But this isn’t about the park. It’s about uniforms for the kids who are playing.”

Joe then explained that he couldn’t sanction Little League because all these kids were using tax-funded parks. “It’s bad enough I have to pay for their education,” he said.

Fred tried to divert the conversation, “My brother and his partner got married last year. Now the legislature wants to repeal same-sex marriages. Some of us are circulating a petition calling on the legislature not to impose those old regulations again. Anyone willing to help out and sign? I’d appreciate it. He is my baby brother and we’re close.”

Marie grabbed the petition and signed with a smile. She agreed with Fred but she also remembered how quick he was to offer help for the fundraiser. She almost laughed out loud when she thought, “value for value.” She passed the petition to Joe who pushed it aside. She looked at him and he was just ignoring it and then she looked at Fred who looked hurt. “Joe,” she said, “how about you signing? After all this is about the freedom to marry.”

“If they want to ‘marry,’” said Joe, “it’s no skin off my nose. They can just go to any church that will allow it and marry. What they want is state permission to marry and I don’t think the state should be in the marriage business.”

Fred was getting restless. “You don’t think the state should be in the road business but you still use the damn roads?”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?” said Joe. “It’s a monopoly.”

“So is legal marriage. It’s a contract and governments regulate and enforce contracts,” said an angry Fred. “Anyway, you’re married. I know I was there, remember. And you got a marriage license.”

“Oh, that’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“I didn’t get married just because I want the benefits. These gays just want the goodies that government hands out to married people.”

“So,” a red faced Fred yelled, “You think gay couples are so different from everyone else that your motives for marrying are good, but their motives are all bad! That’s just bigoted thinking.”

Joe laughed, “Don’t pull that PC bullshit with me. I’m immune. I’m an individualist, I don’t believe in group rights and that means I can’t be bigoted.”

“Really?” said Fred, “You sure do a damn good imitation of a bigot when you put your mind to it. Anyway, my brother is an individual. He married his partner, who is also an individual. They did it because they love each other, just like you and your wife. He wouldn’t even know what ‘goodies’ you are talking about. All he wanted to do was marry the person he loved. Now some people want to take away his right to marry, not because he’s an individual, but because he’s a member of a group that we label gay.”

John saw this wasn’t going well and decided to come up with something he thought everyone could agree upon. “Hey, you know we are doing raffle tickets to raise funds for the service animal training project. Even Joe should like this as the program is entirely private and no taxes are used. So what does everyone say?”

Marie and Fred were nodding but Joe sat there silently. After a few long seconds he could feel the others looking at him, waiting.

“Oh, gee. John, I’d really like to help,” he said. “Really I would. But what with the taxes I pay I can’t afford to be charitable. You know if we just abolished taxes then there would be a lot more charity.” Joe didn’t hear Fred whisper under his breath, “Not from you, not from you.”

Marie interrupted Joe, “You know, we work together. We do practically the same job and I’m pretty sure we get the same salaries. I have two kids and you don’t have any. I know we can afford to help things like this. I can’t see why you can’t.”

Joe was feeling uncomfortable. He didn’t like discussing things that didn’t interest him and wanted to turn the conversation to something important. “Did you guys read about the new parking regulations for downtown. Now if you park illegally, “ his fingers made air quote marks when he said illegally, “they fine is going to double to $50, even if you do it just for a minute. Me and some of the other libertarians are going to protest at city hall and we’re going to park illegally just to prove a point that people ought to be free. You guys in?”

The three friends looked at one another, Fred’s mouth was hanging open. He just shook his head negatively. John said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Joe looked at Marie for a sign of support. She picked at her salad instead avoiding his stare. “Marie?” he said.

She put her fork down and looked at him, “I don’t think so, Joe. I don’t think so.”

“Why not!” he exclaimed, demanding an answer.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “but how about value for value.”

So Close You Can Taste It: Marriage Equality in Washington

2012-01-11T23:09:00.000-08:00

The state of Washington is literally on the verge of passing marriage equality. Governor Christine Gregoire has said she would sign such legislation if it passes. The state House has sufficiently strong support that it is expected to pass there. The real question has been the state Senate. The Senate needs 25 votes to pass the measure. The current legislature has 31 Democrats and 18 Republicans, but some conservative Democrats are reluctant.

The last few days two Republicans have announced their support for equality. Sen. Steve Litzow, who represents Mercer Island, was the first Republican to announce his support for a marriage equality bill. He says, "It's the right thing to do and it's very consistent with the tenets of being a Republican—such as individual freedom and personal responsibility." The Seattle Times suggested this "should prompt other Republicans to make the same decision. It is time to legalize same-sex marriage in this state."

A couple of days later Republican Sen. Cheryl Pflug, of Maple Valley, said she would support the bill as well. She said, "I have been a longtime supporter of human equality. I do not feel diminished by having another human being experience the same freedom I am entitled to exercise. I would feel diminished by denying another human the ability to exercise those same rights and freedoms."

Associated Press has surveyed the members of the senate and says that 22 senators have confirmed strong support for the measure and 18 are opposed. Two other Republicans are saying they are discussing the measure with constituents and are open to supporting the measure. Five Democrats are saying they are considering the measure. Two of them, Karen Fraser of Olympia and Rosemary McAuliffe of Bothell, said they were likely to vote for the measure.

The measure is expected to be introduced this week. Given that only three votes are needed and that two uncommitted senators are likely votes it really means that one additional senator has to support the measure for it to pass. There would still be five senators open to supporting the measure who are not officially committed but only one of them would be needed to pass the measure. It would appear that there is a very high chance of the measure passing by at least the minimum necessary, if not by a few votes extra.

1/14/2012 UPDATE: Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe has announced her official support of the marriage equality measure. There are now 23 of the 25 votes necessary that have been confirmed. Three Democrats who previously opposed such measures—Sens. Brian Hatfield, Jim Kastam and Paull Shin—are considering the measure and haven't announced one way or the other. Another Democrat, Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, says she is listening to her constituents and has not made up her mind. She is from the greater Seattle area where support tends to be highest. There are six senators seriously considering supporting the measure. Only two more are needed to assure passage.

Christian Right groups are promising to bus their people in from across the state to protest as they believe gay couples should have no legal rights to a civil marriage contract.

Now, more than ever.

2011-12-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

The Moorfield Storey Institute put in its application for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status a year ago. We were told a few days ago that it will be granted. But, while waiting for the IRS to process the paperwork, we went through our start up capital. To put it mildly, we are currently in financial distress. Waiting a full year before we could ramp up fund raising hurt our bottom line very badly.

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Uncomfortable Questions for the DOMA Defenders.

2011-12-17T10:09:00.000-08:00

There are numerous court cases that are investigating the legality of the sort of discriminatory policies which where imposed by the Defense of Marriage Act. The Republican congress passed a measure to spend millions of taxpayer’s dollars in order to defend this intrusive regulation. They even created a misnamed Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to handle defending the undefendable.

One of the cases winding its way through the coursts is Golinski v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The court that will be hearing the case has asked BLAG and attorneys for Golinski to address numerous questions in a hearing scheduled for December 16. These are all good questions and we are reprinting them here, though in shorter format geared for non-legal audiences. These questions get to the heart of DOMA and why it was such a radical assault on the traditional separation of powers between the states and the federal government. I shall be curious to see how the Republicans answer these question and what mental gymnastics will be required for them to justify this unprecedented attack on the federalist principles that apply to marriage laws.

1. Section 3 of DOMA “marks a unique department from the recognition the federal government historically has afforded to State marital status determinations.” So, “is there any authority for the Court to subject the statue to a more rigorous constitutional scrutiny, and “are there any historical examples in which Congress legislated on behalf of the federal government in the are of domestic relations?”

2. Why shouldn’t the Court subject DOMA to heightened scrutiny “for impacting marriage as a basic fundamental freedom and an exercise of personal decision-making?

3. Why does BLAG argue “that only the right to opposite-sex marriage is fundamental as opposed to the right to marriage generally?

4. Given that religious affiliation is treated as a suspect class and subject to heightened scrutiny how does BLAG “distinguish the line of authority treating classifications based on religious affiliation as a suspect class from classifications based on sexual orientation?

5. What authority does BLAG have? “Is this group actually bipartisan? Does BLAG have the support—and funding for the increasing cost of defending DOMA—from a majority of Congress or just from the House of Representatives? (Oh, I know the answer to that one. It’s only the Republican controlled House that voted to spend the money.)

6. How does BLAG argue that DOMA can pass heightened scrutiny when other coursts have found “that DOMA does not pass constitutional muster under even rational basis scrutiny?”

7. What is BLAG’s basis for upholding DOMA?

a. BLAG says it provides consistency but “for the first time federal officials are now tasked with determining the validity” of some legal marriages but not others. “How does treating some state sanctioned marriages different from others promote consistency or maintain the status quo?”

b. “Does BLAG have any authority for the proposition that codification of a long-standing tradition independently constitutes a rational basis?”

c. How does BLAG’s arguments differ from the claim that laws against interracial marriage were traditional as well?

d. “How does the withholding of federal benefits to children of families with same-sex parents encourage responsible parenting and child rearing?”

8. “[H]ow are heterosexual lawfully married persons affected by the sharing of benefits with lawfully married homosexual persons?

British Police Trample on Free Speech Apologize

2011-12-12T18:24:00.000-08:00

Jules Mattsson was 15 years old when he went to a parade of military cadets in Romford, England. The police immediately came after Mattsson claiming that he was committing a crime by photographing the parade.

Several things were involved here. First, was the paranoia about people photographing children. The cadets were under the age of consent presumably and thus considered children. You listen to the actual recording of the incident. Note how the paranoid officer is attacking the boy for taking "photographs of children." Next, the police officer tries to claim that the boy has no right to take photographs of "military personnel" in in a public parade. Are they children or military personnel?

You can hear Jules standing up for his rights below. This is a recording of the actual incident. The police try to intimidate him by demanding his personal details. They are telling him that they don't need a law to do what they are doing. The police then try to claim he must have permission from everyone in a public place to take their photographs. Next they return to the claim that he was taking photos of children. Next they claim that the "military personnel" have to have parental permission to be photographed.

The police claimed he was disturbing the peace, hazardous to the public and that the police "were concerned about terrorism and that photographing police and police officials is a criminal offense." When the boy asks under what law it is a criminal offense (there is none) the office says: "You are an agitator." Then the police officer just announces: "You know what. I consider you a threat under the terrorism act." He has the boy arrested for NO legal reason at all. The police officer steals the boy's camera and they they grabbed the boy. And when the boy asks: "Under what law am I being detained," the police refuse to tell him, push him down stairs and threaten. Once again they return to the bogus claim that he has no right to "photograph" children.

One officer, who was attacking the boy's right to take photographs, claimed the photography violated the officer's right to engage in "covert activity" in the future. The officer is really stretching for an excuse here. They claim Mattsson is breaching the peace, claim they are doing it for his own safety, and claim anything that comes into their mind at the time, including that he was "causing anxiety" to the public.

Jules was pushed down a set of stairs and then held by police officers to prevent him from doing his freelance job as a photographer.

Yet, the day before the attack on Jules by police, the Romford police had to pay two other photographers compensation for arresting them using similar dubious legal claims.

According to press accounts, police also told Mattsson he was "running around being stupid and gay." Mattsson accurately described the police actions: "It was like being in the schoolyard," referring to the insults the police were throwing out. Chez Cotton, an attorney for the boy, said the police inspector's remarks "were designed to belittle." Certainly if police think being gay is like being stupid, then the gay people of Rumford can't expect decent police protection there.

Once again the police were forced to apologize for violating the law and paid compensation to Mattsson along with legal fees for his attorney. The full apology from the police said:

“While reporting on the parade you were approached by Metropolitan Police Officers who prevented you from photographing the parade and subsequently arrested you for breach of the peace. The purpose of this letter is to apologise on behalf of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) for the distress you have suffered as a result of police actions. The MPS confirms its recognition that freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy and that photographers have a right to report freely. The MPS recognise that on 26 June 2010 they failed to respect press freedom in respect of yourself.”

A Randian Insight on Today's Prop 8 Trial

2011-12-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

Listening in to parts of the hearings today regarding the Prop 8 trial brought to mind something Ayn Rand had said, and how her insight could help make a decision about one factor of the hearing.

It wasn’t Rand’s thoughts on legal theory that came to mind. It was what she wrote about art and artists. She held that art and artists were very important as they indicate the state of the culture.

Rand said that art was a selective recreation of reality by the artist. This is not the part that I found particularly insightful, but her next observation was. She also noted that because as artist is selectively recreating reality that they are revealing what they find to be of metaphysical importance. There is much from which they can pick and choose, that they pick certain aspects of reality, over others, indicates what they find to be of importance.

So, how does this apply to today’s hearings?

Part of the hearing dealt with whether or not a video recording of the trial should be released to the public. Proponents of Prop 8 insist the videos must be kept sealed. I would be doing the same thing in their position. The videos are very damaging to their public claims.

Their problem is that the scare-mongering claims they made in their television commercials are entirely absent from their testimony in court. But they had little choice. Their television commercials were mostly dishonest, almost always exaggerated and pure, dishonest hype meant to terrify the public enough to support Proposition 8. In court, evidence can be scrutinized, there is cross-examination, and they have to back up their claims. They can’t. That is why they lost in court and was able to secure a very slight victory at the ballot box.

Reading the transcripts is time consuming and much of it is pure court procedure. But, if the videos were made public, important parts could be made public. When the public saw how weak the case for Proposition 8 was it could change perception about the measure even more.

Part of the debate about keeping this secret was based on the idea that the judge in the case, Vaughn Walker, had said he would use the video record to help him when it came to writing his decision. One of the justices in the case suggested that this made the video part of the deliberative aspect of the trial and judge’s deliberations, and material associated with it, are not part of the public record. But, testimony per se, is part of the record.

Without considering the other reasons offered for hiding the facts from the public we can now look at this question. Is the video part of the deliberative process, similar to judicial note taking? The answer is: No!

Like the artists, a judge, when taking notes, selectively writes down facts of particular importance, according to his own understanding and values. He will note issues that are significant and ignore those that are not. Note taking reveals the thoughts of the judge and are not public.

The video, however, are entire records of the transcription. If anything, they are more complete records than transcripts, as they reveal the nuance of speech, facial expressions and other bits of information that can’t be included in transcripts.

There is none of the selectivity that is found in a judge’s notes. As such they are transcripts of the trial and should be made public.

Rugby Star on Why He's Fighting Anti-Gay Bigotry and Bullying

2011-12-08T03:30:00.000-08:00

Why Life Expectancy Can't Be Used to Judge Health Care.

2011-12-05T22:08:00.000-08:00

Here is how the infamous Daily Mail, a paragon of tabloid journalism, reports on health care in the United States. “The study said Americans pay more than $7,900 per person for health care each…but still die earlier than their peers in the industrialized world.”

Now, perhaps this sort of bad reporting is not the Daily Mail’s fault. They do claim they get this from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It just doesn’t work to compare life expectancy rates to quality of health care. There are dozens of factors involved in life expectancy. The paper reports that in America the average life expectancy is 80.6 now. The highest in the world is 86.4 in Japan.

A lot of people are trying to claim that this proves that state-run health care is better because people in those nations live longer. Well, the nation that I keep having thrown at me regarding nationalized health care is the United Kingdom. Their life expectancy is lower than for the United States. While the Daily Mail mentions life expectancy in the UK, it never divulges what it is in the UK.

Using life expectancy to judge health care is similar to using the supply of apples to determine the price of oranges. Life expectancy is more about life style than it is about health care.

Obesity in the US is much higher than in many other countries. Higher obesity rates lower life expectancy. It does so regardless of whether health care is brilliant or pathetic.

Even something as mundane as driving cars impacts life expectancy. The reality is that a lot of Europeans can’t afford to drive due to high taxes, lower wages, and higher prices for cars and gas. When I lived in Europe I traveled by train, which was difficult, inconvenient and inefficient. Now, I drive in the United States.

For every 100,000 residents in the United States 12.3 are killed in car accidents. In the UK it is only 3.59. In Sweden it 2.9; Switzerland is 4.7; Germany is 4.5; and Netherlands is 8.6. Traffic accidents lower life expectancy. But few people would argue that the health care system causes car accidents. If you increase the number of drivers you will increase the number of people who die in car accidents. Because Americans are more able to afford cars, they drive more. And the more they drive the more likely they are to be killed in car accidents. And when they are, the life expectancy rate goes down.

Crime is not caused by health care, yet crime rates directly impact life expectancy, sometimes dramatically so. According to the Daily Mail, the ten nations with the highest life expectancy rate are Japan, Spain, Switzerland, France, Australia, Korea, Israel, Finland, Sweden and Iceland. They all exceed life expectancy in the U.S. What are the murder rates in those countries? Surely murdering people lowers their life expectancy, and the higher the murder rate, the lower the life expectancy.

According to Wikipedia, here are the murder rates per 100,000 people for those nations versus the United States.

United States 5.0
Japan 0.46
Spain 0.87
Switzerland 0.71
France 1.31
Australia 1.20
Korea 2.9
Israel 2.1
Finland 2.3
Sweden 1.0
Iceland 0.31

Crime rates directly lower life expectancy. Clearly the fact that ten times as many Americans, per 100,000, are being murdered than Japanese has an impact on life expectancy rates. Even Korea, which comes closest to the U.S. in this unfortunate race, has a murder rate almost half what it is in America.

Even Americans, in the same health care system, have dramatically different life spans. Unlike most the countries listed at the top of the life expectancy chart, the United States is a very diverse country. At the top of the global list are the Japanese. Asian Americans live longer than Americans in general, though both have the same health care system. They don’t have the same diets, don’t have the same habits, and don’t behave in exactly the same ways. A study from Harvard found that “15-year-old blacks in high-risk city areas were three to four times more likely than Asians to die before age 60, and four to five times more likely before age 45.”

Here is what Harvard said about the differences within the United States:

The researchers attribute such gaps to injuries and chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. These killers, in turn, are a consequence of well-known and largely controllable risk factors such as smoking, alcohol use, obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. In high-risk urban black communities, male mortality is increased by homicides and exposure to AIDS.

Not only do the nations at the top of life expectancy charts have different lifestyles, they are also more likely to be culturally and ethnically homogeneous. What the Harvard study found was: “Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by international standards.” In other words, differences in life expectancy within the US are greater than the differences between the US and other wealthy nations. And they say, “Observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income or basic health-care access and utilization alone.”

When they started looking at subgroups within the US they found huge variations. Asian females in America had an average life expectancy of 86.7, for Asian females in Bergen County, New Jersey they found it was 91. Both are better than the average life expectancy in Japan, which tops the list in the Daily Mail. In fact, if you were to compare only those Americans most like the residents of the nations at the top of the OECD list—that is white Americans—the differences in life expectancy rates disappear.

The chart below is from the Harvard study. America 3, which is the top line, is for white, Middle America. At the bottom is America 8, which is defined as high-risk urban blacks. Their average life expectancy is 15.4 years lower than that of Asian Americans.

Another factor, which dramatically impacts life expectancy rates, is infant mortality rates. Now, if all infant mortality were caused by health care issues, and all countries defined infant mortality the same, there would not be a problem. But that is not the case.

The U.S. has a higher infant mortality rate, which means lower life expectancy overall. One reason for this is that we define infant mortality more strictly than do other nations. Let us compare a child that is born weighing just under a pound in the United States, who dies shortly after birth. That is counted as a live birth and added to the numbers that determine life expectancy. The same child, in Austria or Germany, is not considered a live birth and has no impact on life expectancy rates. In Switzerland, which has a higher life expectancy than us, a newborn who dies, but is less than 30 centimeters in length is not considered live born and doesn’t go into their life expectancy rates. In the U.S. the same child is included. In both Belgium and France (high on the list) a birth before 26 weeks of pregnancy is considered lifeless, even if the child is breathing. In the U.S. the child is considered alive and counts against our life expectancy rate.

Factors that lower infant mortality include “fewer teen pregnancies, married as opposed to single mothers, less obesity and smoking, more education and moms pregnant with babies that they are utterly intent on having.” These are not controllable by the health care system in any direct manner.

That many, many factors determine life expectancy is indicated by life expectancy rates in two U.S. territories. I doubt many people would say that the health care system in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands is inherently better than it is in the mainland of the United States. Yet the life expectancy in both places is higher than the average on the mainland.

What is meaningful are other measures. For instance, how does the treatment rate for Americans compare to other nations, such as Canada, for instance? Or, how about using cancer survival rates? These things directly measure the amount of care Americans receive and outcomes. In the first, you will see Americans, with the diseases being investigated in the study, have higher treatment rates than do Canadians. In the second, we see that cancer treatment in the U.S. is more effective. These measure health directly, and don't mix in messy factors like accident rates, obesity, teen-age pregnancy, different definition of infant mortality, and the like.

Fundamentalist Church Defends Marriage: Bans Interracial Couple

2011-12-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church in Johns Creek, Kentucky recently faced something they just never considered before. Stella Harville, 24, a member of the church brought her fiance to church and he was black! Not even a good ol' American black, but a genuine negro from darkest Africa. The fiance, Ticha Chikuni is from Zimbabwe. The couple came to the church and sang—once.

The pastor of the church, Melvin Thompson, then banned them from further performances. But Thompson resigned due to health and a new pastor said they could perform. But then Thompson proposed that the church pass a resolution condemning interracial marriage. It said "parties of such marriages will not be received as members, or will they be used in worship services" or other church activities, unless it is a funeral. A meeting was held and by a 9 to 6 vote the proposal was passed. The proposal claimed to be a measure to enhance unity.

Of course, Rev. Thompson insists he's not racist. He said he is "not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil about a race. That's what this being portrayed as, but it is not." Stella's father, Dean Harville, asked: "If he's not racist, what is this?"

Where have we heard this before?

When it comes to marriage equality for gay couples the fundamentalist opponents insist that inequality of rights must remain firmly entrenched. But they aren't bigoted, they insist on that. They "love the homosexual" often followed by "enough to condemn their sin."

The ban on interracial couples got a lot of media attention since most folks haven't seen something like this in some time. But, fundamentalists tend to be behind the culture, not leading it. Fundamentalist Bob Jones University only allowed blacks to enroll in 1975 and it forbade interracial dating until the year 2000. But the media attention is intense and the current pastor is trying to get the church to revote on the issue. He's hoping that most church members, who sat on the sideline and refused to vote on the issue at all, will back him. And the denomination is pushing for the church to reverse itself.

But, fifty years ago such a policy would be common. There are plenty of fundamentalist churches where interracial marriages are still taboo, even if they have no official policy on the matter. The churches I attended preached against interracial marriage. Interracial relationships were not an issue in the Christian high school, or the seminary that I attend. But that because they were all white schools by policy. Other fundamentalists push against interracial marriage but don't want to get caught openly in a racist stand. One example of that is the Heritage Baptist Bible Church in Walnut Grove, MN.

The pastor answers how to deal with interracial marriages. He says that if an interracial couple comes to the church they should welcome them and first get them "saved." "Forget counseling until they accept Christ as their Savior and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Trying to counsel the unsaved in spiritual things is difficult..." That seems to imply that interracial marriage is a "spiritual thing" that does need counseling but that it only works on those who are "saved." He says if they are already married they can't be rejected but that if they are not "I would surely point out the negatives they may encounter by such a marriage." In other words, try to discourage them. Now, what if they want their church to perform the marriage. Most Americans would say that's fine. Not this fundamentalist pastor. He advises other pastors "to make the decision [to perform a marriage ceremony] based on whether you think the marriage is in the best interest of both parties." He even says, "These are not easy decisions for a pastor." Wrong—it is an easy decision for most pastors, it is only "not easy" for fundamentalists.

At Bob Jones University the sinfulness of interracial marriage, contrary to claims by the university, was actually preached in mandatory chapel. Bob Jones III, who claimed the policy was not so taught, actually did so himself in chapel in 1996. Jones told press at the time that the ban was based on the Bible. The university bookstore sold a booklet by Marshall Neal of their Bible Department outlining why interracial marriage violated Scripture. The university went as far as firing two staff members for attending Southside Baptist Church because their church admitted an interracial couple. And BJU announced the church was "off limits" to all BJU students. And evangelist John R. Rice published an editorial defending the ban on interracial marriage in his fundamentalist newspaper, The Sword of the Lord.

Rice previously had said, "most intelligent people would prefer to have Jim Crow laws than to have unrestrained intermarriage between the races. Wilderness Church tells us: "Twice in Holy Writ. A double witness. Marriage is the most fundamental covenant of all, and the Bible is double witness condemn (sic) it. God does not approve of interracial marriage, and many great fundamentalist Baptist preachers also teach/taught against it (Dr. Jack Hyles, deceased; Dr. Bob Gray, etc.)"

It is useful to note that these two "great fundamentalist Baptist preachers" ran into problems. Jack Hyles, who I knew, was revealed to be in a adulterous relationship that lasted years, with his church secretary. He even had the woman sit in the choir immediately behind him when he preached. He preached against divorce, interracial marriage and gay people. But he also preached about adultery without batting an eye. And Bob Gray was eventually exposed for having molested very young girls when they were members of his church. Jerry Falwell called the arrest "a bump in the road."

What is mind-boggling to many people is that fundamentalists are still debating amongst themselves on issues that the nation, as a whole, settled almost half a century ago. What the Supreme Court settled in Loving v. Virginia, in 1967, was only accepted in principle by Bob Jones University a third of a century later. And it is still be debated at the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church today. Now, I suspect the negative publicity will result in this church reversing its decision. But there are plenty more such churches out there practicing the same backwoods racism.

When you understand the phenomenon of fundamentalism, of any religion, it is clear why they will be lead opponents in the fight for equality. They were against the civil rights movement, women's rights and against equality of rights for gay people. To attempt to placate them is impossible. To try to win them over with logic and reason is spitting in the wind. In the fight for equality of rights the only way to deal with these people is to ignore them. They believe what they believe, they were not reasoned into that belief, and won't be reasoned out of it.

The one useful function that they serve in the long-term battle for civil rights is that their prejudices are often so blatant and ugly that they shame their less extreme allies in deserting their cause. Perhaps, half a century of so after the rest of the nation has made peace with marriage equality, American fundamentalists might start to debate the issue.

"Family Values" and the Crisis of the Welfare State

2011-11-25T21:31:00.000-08:00

In 1995 I wrote a small book, Exploding Population Myths, the purpose of which was to debunk the very popular theory that the world was grossly overpopulated and headed toward disaster. I believe the evidence was compelling then, and now, 16 years later, the case is actually stronger than ever. If the book had a flaw, it was that I, considered an optimist, was too pessimistic.

The book debunked claims of catastrophists of the day, all predicting doom and gloom with spiraling birth rates, resource depletion, and population growing with no end in sight. I showed that the reality was that the world was not overpopulated in any meaningful sense of the word; that population concentrations are not the same thing as overpopulated; that birth rates were actually plummeting at great rates, and that it was only a matter of decades before world population would begin declining. The main force for growing populations, as I noted, wasn’t the birth rate, so much as the much applauded decline in death rates.

The political Left hated the book and the Right loved it. Now, oddly, I find some extremists on the Religious Right trying to whip up fear and doom over the very pattern I had shown: declining birth rates.

Janice Crouse is a spokesman—I use the term intentionally as I’m sure she is offended by feminist values—for the Concerned Women of America, a fundamentalist political group. She lists a lot of political material about herself, but, while she touts herself as “Dr. Crouse,” leaves out exactly how she got a doctorate and in what field. The only credentials she mentions are her conservative credentials and writing for Right-wing organizations. Even her own website biography neglects to offer this information. She did work at a Christian college as a debate coach, but that doesn’t say very much. All I can find is she graduated from a Wesleyian-Holiness college in 1961, and then went on to another fundamentalist university.

What drew my attention to Crouse, was a recent piece she wrote in which she seemed to insinuate that population declines in Europe were do to the result of the much exaggerated “death of the family.” Crouse lamented:

...economies aren’t the only things shrinking; unfortunately, their populations are also on the decline. The future looks bleak for these countries that are undoubtedly facing demographic time bombs, with dismal fertility rates and an increase in the so-called old-age dependency ratio (OADR), which means, “fewer working-age people to pay for the health and pension benefits of a growing older population.” Of the PIIGS [Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain], Ireland has the brightest fertility outlook, with total fertility measured at 2.1 (children per woman) and Greece, following at 1.5. Italy, Portugal, and Spain all have fertility rates of 1.4 children per woman, which is a growing concern in terms of exasperating (sic) the old-age dependency ratio. [Note: apparently her Holiness university didn’t teach her the difference between exasperating—to annoy greatly—and exacerbating—to increase in severity.]
Throughout the years, what we have learned, to our sorrow, is that the consequences of the decline in marriage and breakdown of the family have not only negatively affected generations of individuals on a personal level, the decline of marriage has undermined social institutions and shaken the stability and economic viability of nations.

U.S. Fertility Rates since 1800

The facts are technically correct, but they aren’t related to “decline of the family” or the evolution of marriage. Let’s first note where she is correct. Populations in Europe have been in decline, as have been birth rates. This has been going on for a very long time indeed and the decline we are witness to is NOT new. Thus, changes in the last few decades are not responsible for trends of well over a century. In other words, correlation is not causation. Perhaps if Crouse had gone to a real university, instead of one based on theology, she might have learned that. (See the chart on the right for the long trend in U.S. fertility rates showing quite clearly that the trend Crouse laments has been going on for two centuries. Source)

She is also correct that Europe faces a demographic time bomb. It started when short-sighted governments created welfare states using the premise that populations would increase forever. The time bomb started ticking practically the day the first welfare state was created. As long as babies were being born faster than old people were collecting benefits, the system was safe. However, from early on this wasn’t the case. First, old people started living longer and longer, meaning their numbers started accumulating and doing so quickly. Old people are the fastest growing population group in the world. Secondly, birth rates had been in steady decline ever since nations went through the Industrial Revolution. As nations became prosperous, birth rates plummeted.

The welfare state relied on a large number of workers funding a small number of recipients, but the numbers of recipients were growing, while the number of workers, in relation to recipients, was in steady decline. “Optimists” on overpopulation, such as Julian Simon and I, were warning people that the welfare state was headed for disaster.

In 2003 I wrote, “This huge drop in birth rates, coupled with longer life spans, spells disaster for the welfare states of the world, especially for programs that support the elderly.” I warned:

What is even more troublesome is that these trends are most pronounced in the welfare states. Sweden will see its elderly (60-plus) increase from the current 22 percent of the population to 33 percent, while the percentage of children (up to 14) will be just over 15 percent. Just 51 percent of the 2050 population will be of working age (15–59), and many will not be employed. A minority of the population (subtracting the unemployed) will be trying to support a majority. In the United Kingdom the percentage of elderly will increase from 21 percent to 30 percent. In Slovenia only 45.6 percent of the population will be of working age. The rest will either be elderly or children. In New Zealand the over-60 crowd will almost double—from 15.7 percent to 29 percent. Children under 15 will comprise just 16.3 percent.
…Like a pyramid scheme, in a welfare state the number of payers has to grow faster than the number of recipients. As long as that happens the illusion that the system works can be maintained. But current trends indicate that the opposite is happening. UN projections for the developed world, where most welfare states are, show that the working-age group will see its numbers shrink by 0.32 percent per year. In the same countries, however, those over 60 will see their numbers grow by 2.29 percent per year and those over 80 will grow by 3.39 percent.

My 2003 warnings were not based on any evidence showing “decline in marriage and breakdown in the family,” but rather on decades worth of data showing that in nation after nation prosperity brings a decline in birth rates. In a pre-prosperous, pre-capitalist society, birth rates are high but balanced out by high death rates. The “natural” state of affairs is one where deaths are significantly high and as a result, so are births. Because physical labor is the main means of wealth production, having children was a cheap means of gaining “capital.” For the poor, children were labor and a future retirement program, however, since infant mortality was so high, and death rates for adults were so high, the only means of making sure enough children survived was to have lots of babies.

In the early stages of an advanced economy, high levels of wealth resulted in greater levels of education, advances in sanitation and medicine, reduction of famine and disease, and a safer world in general. The result was that death rates started dropping dramatically. It took time before the greater guarantees of living to adulthood took hold and birth rates started to plummet as well.

All of this was well over a century ago; it all started well before the social changes religious conservatives whine about. The decline in birth rates is not the fault of “the decline in marriage and breakdown of the family.” If you want to blame lower birthrates on anything—if you believe that is a problem—then don’t blame gay marriage or divorce. The real causes are interrelated to one another: capitalism, economic development and prosperity, advances in birth control, higher levels of education for women, equality of rights for women, and other logical outcomes of liberal capitalism. Perhaps Crouse wishes to return to the days when woman were having six children, instead of just under two, but most women, concerned or otherwise, don’t.

Considering the emphasis groups such as Concerned Women for America put on same-sex marriage, I thought it useful to check birth rates in nations at the time they instituted marriage equality and compare them to today. Has there been a difference in trends already in place?

Canada’s first same-sex marriage was in 2001. The total fertility rate at the time was 1.51 children per woman. After eight years of same-sex marriage, birth rates saw an increase to 1.7 children, but this is around where they were 10 years before marriage equality, so there was no significant change. Belgium legalized same-sex marriage in 2003. Ten years earlier, the TFR was 1.6. The last statistic the World Bank has on TFR is for 2009, when it was 1.8. After same-sex marriage, birth rates in Belgium increased. The Netherlands first started looking into marriage equality in 1995 and eventually passed a law in 2000. Ten years prior, in 1990, the TFR was 1.6. It stood at 1.7 in 1995 and today it is 1.8, so birth rates increased in the Netherlands since marriage equality.

The reality is that most “welfare states” still don’t have marriage equality. Those that do, such as Norway and Sweden implemented those policies very recently; 2008 for Norway and 2009 for Sweden—much too soon to make any legitimate pronouncements. The earliest Scandinavian state to come close to marriage equality was Denmark, which created “registered partnerships” in 1989. At that time the TFG was 1.7, after 20 years of gay partnerships the TFR rate stood at 1.8.

These facts are even clearer when we look at the nations Crouse singles out, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. In Portugal same-sex marriage has only been legal for one year—hardly long enough to be responsible for anything and too soon for any statistics to be available. In Ireland same-sex marriage is not yet legal, nor is the crisis in Ireland due to total fertility rate since its TFR is on par with that of the United States: 2.1. In Italy same-sex marriage is not legal and thus not related to their economic woes. In fact, in the last few years Italy has had a very slight increase in the TFR, from 1.3 to 1.4. The economic crisis in Greece is unrelated to marriage equality since there isn’t any. Spain did legalize same-sex marriage in 2005. Ten years prior the TFR was 1.2. By 2009 it had increased to 1.4. In fact, most of the nations that implemented marriage equality saw slight increases in their birth rates, not declines.

Yes, the welfare states face demographic disasters. They do so because birth rates are not high enough to cover the costs of extended life spans. But these two demographic trends predate any of the policies that the Religious Right blames for the “crisis of the family.” They may lament marriage equality, unmarried mothers, divorce rates, or even welfare, but none can be held responsible for creating the conflicting trends in the welfare state that concern Crouse.

The Welfare States were largely constructed by short-sighted politicians during the short-lived “baby boom” that followed World War II. They assumed birth rates of their day were a given and that a growing workforce would be able to sustain the welfare programs they planned. That they foolishly assumed a perpetual baby boom is the reason these welfare states face not a crisis. It has nothing little to nothing to with family values.

Note: All data concerning TFRs for the various nations is sourced from the World Bank.

Our Top Ten Columns at Huffington Post

2011-11-20T01:47:00.000-08:00

The following are the top ten columns we have at Huffington Post as judged by the number of Facebook "likes" each column has received. We do not necessarily agree that these are the ten best columns. There are others which, in our judgment, should have been higher than they were. Here is each column by name, with a link and short description. These are in reverse order.

#10 The Artificial Imposition of Poverty: Deals with the reality of poverty in Africa and how the African people themselves are industrious and hard working but that corrupt governments impeded their economic progress and plunder their wealth.

#9 Baby Samuel Finally Comes Home: This was our first column. It told the story of Samuel Ghilain and how Belgian bureaucrats forced the child to stay in an orphanage for two years because he was born to a surrogate mother. His father's repeated requests were rejected because they had no "policy" to deal with the issue.

#8 Drug Warriors Gun Down Young Father: How a bad drug raid lead to the gunning down of an Iraqi War verteran in Tucson, Arizona.

#7 Gays, Lies and Videotape: Video of the Proposition 8 trial in California exists, but the advocates of Prop 8 are trying to keep the video under wraps. Why? The video will show how their campaign was a tissue of lies and how they couldn't substantiate their accusations in court.

#6 How Texas May Accidentally Legalize Same-Sex Marraige: Texas passed a new law refusing to recognize sex change operations. We argued the result would be that some same-sex marriages would be allowed provided one partner is transgendered. Some time later that actually happened.

#5 F.A. Hayek Against the Conservative: Hayek was not a conservative and outlined his precise problems with conservatives, something conservatives try to overlook.

#4 Why Atheists Aren't Afraid to Die: It is precisely because atheists do not believe in life after death that they do fear it.

#3 Gay Marriage Poll Touted by Mormons Seems Dubious: A poll that the Deseret News said showed a majority of Americans oppose marriage equality was, in simple terms, rigged through a selective polling process. The actual poll results showed how it was done.

#2 The Gay Marriage Revolution Started Centuries Ago: Discusses how the rise of classical liberalism changed how marriage is viewed for the better, setting the groundwork for today's debate about marriage equality.

#1 Can a Pro-Gay, Pot Legalizing, Fiscal Conservative Win the White House?: Discusses the unique, libertarian positions of Gov. Gary Johnson and his bid for the White House.

Two New Loans Through Storey Institute's Benevolent Fund

2011-11-17T20:12:00.000-08:00

Charity is too important to be left up to government. Since its inception the Moorfield Storey Institute has operated the Adam Smith Benevolent Fund. Portions of all donations to the Storey Institute, and a portion of sales through our book distribution service, Fr33minds, go into the fund.

We put most of these funds into micro lending projects targeting worthy recipients in developing countries. We try to find individuals who have already shown a willingness to work and who are budding entrepreneurs. In the long term our hopes are that such entrepreneurs, through expansion, will reach the point that they are creating jobs for others, and not just for themselves.

We have two new recipients for our loans: Yony Vicente of Ica, Peru, and Rosemary Clementina, of La Paz, Bolivia.

Yony began a taxi service a year ago with a motorcycle taxi. He has been renting a motorcycle to conduct business but now wants to invest in the capital of having his own motorcycle instead. His goal is to eventually own a car for his taxi service to use instead. The repayment plan is to have all his loans repaid by December 2012.

Rosemary Clementina is a single mother with four children in school. Two of her children are now attending college. She sells shoes to the public. Her plan is to use the loan to buy sneakers for the end-of-the-year season. Loan repayment begins in February with the loan being paid in full by January 2013. Rosemary has been in the shoe business for sometime and has paid previous loans for inventory.

The policy of the Storey Institute is that as loans are repaid funds are rolled over into new loans. New funds are added but we do not intend to ever remove funds, just make additional loans to further economic development at the ground level.

Wilber Alexander, a photographer in El Salvador, used one of our early loans to expand his business. His loan is now fully back. Nidia Pereira of Paraguay was a fish seller that we loaned to earlier. Her loan is now 90% paid. Temuujin Myagmar of Mongolia has a loan for his popcorn business that is now 54% repaid. Hamza Vahobov of Tajikistan had a loan for his business selling spare car parts. His loan is now 46% repaid. And Vafa Huseynova of Azerbaijan, borrowed money to expand the beauty salon she ran. Her loan is now 40% paid back.

So far 43% of our loans have gone to female entrepreneurs and 57% to males. Approximately 28% of loans are in the food sector, 28% in retail, 28% in services, and 14% in transportation.

Your contributions to the Institute help us spread the libertarian message about individual rights and freedoms and supports economic development. Remember that at www.fr33minds.com you will not only find excellent libertarian books, at discounted prices, but all profits further the goals of the Institute, including our Adam Smith Benevolent Fund.

Anti-Marriage Right Bets the Farm and They Can Lose It All

2011-11-17T13:35:00.000-08:00

The hateful Prop 8 campaign has placed an all-or-nothing bet on their initiative. If they win, they win nothing more than what they already have. But they also have the potential of losing absolutely everything.

Prop 8 was challenged in the courts. During the trial the Prop 8 campaign had tried to defend their bigoted initiative but failed miserably. They had a couple of problems. One was that the rules of evidence exclude 99% of the claims they were making in public. They couldn’t come into court and make the same claims without having to prove them.

Given that the campaign was engaged in one “big lie” after another, this removed most of their claims. In court, they could be cross-examined if they made the same dishonest assertions. Their campaign lies wouldn’t stand up to cross-examination. What the court saw, instead of the confident assertions made in TV commercials, was a lot of bumbling replies. When openly asked what harms would come from marriage equality their legal counsel couldn’t answer the question. He didn’t know. Neither did the Prop 8 proponents, which is why they resorted to lying.

Prop 8 lost that round and the ruling went into great detail as to why they were wrong and why Prop 8 was a discriminatory piece of legislation. At this point the state of California said it did not want to pursue defense of Prop 8. Since it was a state law, under California’s ill-conceived initiative process, it would be their job to defend 8. But they did not want to do so. Neither the governor nor attorney general wanted to be associated with that law. The bigots behind the law demanded the right to step in, in place of the state, to defend their law. Today the California Supreme Court said they have the right to try to defend their legislation in the courts.

If the matter would have ended here marriage rights would be returned to same-sex couples in California. That is all the anti-equality movement could possibly lose in the case. But, if the matter goes further they are in deeper trouble than they can imagine.

Losing at higher levels ups the ante. It means they lose more and more as the move forward while gaining no additional ground. They have let their raw hatred of gay people overwhelm common sense and have literally bet the farm on the measure. If the matter reaches the Supreme Court they have to win. Any loss there will speed the demise of their bigoted movement.

The matter now goes to the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. What happens there depends on the court ruling. The court can hold that trial judge decided correctly and therefore Prop 8 is repealed. This is already where Prop 8 stands legally at this time—though implementation of that ruling is on hold while the matter works its way through the courts. Or, it could get worse. The court could rule more broadly and note the ways in which Prop 8, and laws similar to it, violates the 14^th Amendment. If the court rules that 8 violates fundamental rights the bigots have just managed to put all anti-marriage laws in the 9^th Circuit’s jurisdiction under attack. This includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Instead of losing only California they risk losing a lot more, yet a win gains them nothing; it only reinstates ground they previously won.

At this point it is possible that they unintentionally put anti-marriage laws in jeopardy in the states listed above. Depending on the language of the ruling they could surrender a whole lot of territory to the advocates of marriage equality. In other words, they could lose a lot to gain nothing. If the opponents of 8 lose they merely lose what they already lost. They lose no new territory.

Now, it is possible the court ruling would be written so narrowly as to only apply to Prop 8. The bigoted coalition that ran 8 would get their law back on the books until repealed by the voters, which appears more likely every year. Public sentiments are moving against the Mormon/Catholic/fundamentalist coalition and their law. Their victory was a flimsy one and just a tiny percentage shift would send 8 to defeat. With public opinion trending against them the 8 proponents would, at most, gain the law back for a few years. A victory further up would bring the petitioners out and a ballot initiative to repeal 8 would quickly be back before the voters. I’m not at all sure the bigots could lose a second time.

I think they know this. While the entire trial was videotaped the Prop 8 campaign has been fighting to keep those court records from going public. They know that will face another campaign if they win, and that trial shows them unable to actually substantiate the lies they told previously. If voters see that they had nothing to support their dire claims about marriage equality, it could be the death knell of the anti-marriage movement. So, while they know people won’t read the transcripts, they may watch video. And some documentarian would piece together the trial into a condensed version that thousands and thousands of people would watch. Prop 8 backers can’t afford for the public to see them as they really are. So they are also fighting a battle to keep the videos under lock and key.

If the bigots lose at the 9^th Circuit they could appeal to the Supreme Court. But all they would do is up the possible loses without further possible gain. It is unlikely that any higher court is going to rule in way that gains them ground in their fight to keep gay couples from marrying. A court might rule that Prop 8 can stand, until repealed, but they aren’t going to rule that no state has the right to pass marriage equality.

The worst-case scenario for the bigots is that they end up in the Supreme Court and that the Court rules that Judge Walker, the trial judge, ruled correctly. And Walker’s ruling is carefully argued and covers all the bases. He wrote a decision that is unlikely to be overturned. Depending on the court’s ruling it is entirely possible that the Court could rule that Prop 8, and all other laws like it, are unconstitutional. That would kill the anti-marriage completely.

Sure they would rage and rant and bitch about judicial activism. But they are the ones taking the cases to the higher levels. They have chosen to take the chance that they could lose everything.

And the American Foundation for Equal Rights, with a liberal and libertarian as co-chair, has their eyes set on taking this to the Supreme Court, where they can win everything. They wrote: “The Ninth Circuit is the largest appeals court in the nation, stretching the entire west coast and as far east as Montana and Arizona. This is an essential and critical step to bring our case before the U.S. Supreme Court and achieve our ultimate goal: full federal marriage equality.”

Their plan, all along, was to push this into the Supreme Court to try and win the entire battle in one swoop. They couldn’t do it without the cooperation of the anti-gay crowd who, as I see it, were lured into a sucker bet, a sort of con game, where they wager a great deal in order to win nothing back. Con games rely on the emotions of the “mark.” In most cases that emotion is greed. In this case it is hatred. The Prop 8 proponents really do hate gay people, and not just a little bit either. They are obsessed with it. And it is this hatred that compels them to enter into sucker bets. They simply can’t resist an opportunity to try and beat up gay people—no matter how much they stand to lose.

The Artificial Imposition of Poverty

2011-11-16T22:56:00.000-08:00

Most of the world's poverty is not self-inflicted, yet apparently many seem to think it is.

My experience, living in Africa, tells me otherwise. Much of global poverty is imposed and I don't mean by evil "multi-national corporations" or "globalization." Those myths are easily debunked. The real causes of poverty in these nations are not hard to find.

First, however, I'd like to start with what is not the cause of poverty. People in poor nations are not poor because they lack ambition or are lazy.

When I first moved to Africa, I lived in small apartment. Almost immediately upon moving in there was a knock on the door. A woman asked if she could have a job cleaning for me. The idea was foreign to me. I even had negative emotions about people "exploiting" the poor and hiring them at low wages. I declined, but she begged. She insisted she was a hard worker. My dilemma was that I didn't have a lot of money. I told her that. She named a wage that seemed ridiculously low.

I could not pay her what I thought to be a decent wage. Yet, by refusing her services I was sending her away with nothing. Clearly, she did not agree with my evaluation of the situation. I relented and hired her.

When I moved to a house, the same thing happened. A woman with a child appeared at my door looking for work. She had no home and was staying in a small "maid's quarters" with another women she knew. The child was a grandchild that she cared for. I agreed to hire her without a second thought and then she asked if I had a place for her to live. There was a small building behind the house, with storage on the ground level and two rooms above it. I thought it insufficient but it was all I had to offer. She thought it fantastic and started clapping her hands with joy when she looked at it. It was a huge improvement for her.

I regularly had people asking for work, while few asked for hand-outs. These people were willing to work. In the streets of the city, I would pass hundreds of hawkers, with blankets on the ground, or just cardboard. They would have paper plates of tomatoes or potatoes or some other vegetable. Some sold handicrafts. They would sit on the ground from early morning until it was dark, trying to earn what most Westerners would see as small change.

Outside the cities, the industriousness of the poor was more apparent. In rural areas, women would walk long distances for water. Their homes, sometimes barely shelters at all, were built by themselves, as best they could. There were villages I would drive by, with every home built by the people who lived in them. People would plant small gardens to grow food. Some just planted flowers to make the desolation a bit more bearable.

But here is what else I saw. Periodically, the police would sweep through the cities confiscating all the goods hawkers were trying to sell. Hundreds at a time would lose everything they had, because they didn't have permits to sell their goods. Nor did the legal system recognize their property rights. It was not unheard of for governments to send in bulldozers and level entire villages because no land titles were held.

Read the rest of this column at Huffington Post.

Who is Hated When Hate Crimes Are Committed?

2011-11-14T21:40:00.000-08:00

The FBI has released its report on reported incidents of hate crimes in the United States. The report allows to determine who the victims are in these cases.

The largest category of hate crimes remains those that are racially motivated. They accounted for 47.3% of all such incidents in the country. Of those 69.8% of the victims were black, 18.2% were white, 5.7% were mixed race, 5.1% were Asian or Pacific Islander and 1.2% were Native Americans.

In spite of what conservatives may say the majority of hate crimes were not committed by blacks. Whites made up 58.6% of offenders in racially-motivate hate crimes.

Hate crimes based on sexual orientation and religion were neck-in-neck for second place with religious hate crimes barely taking the lead. They accounted for 20% of all hate crimes. Now, groups on the Religious Right have claimed that fundamentalists are frequently hate crime targets. The National Organization for Marriage has refused to reveal who is funding them on the basis that they will become targets of hate crimes. But the actually hate crime incidents don't support their hysteria.

Two-thirds of all hate crimes, 65.4% were directed against Jews. Another 13.2% were directed against Muslims. Just 4.3% were anti-Catholic and 3.3% were anti-Protestant. The rest were undefined or against non-beliebvers.

Attacks based on sexual orientation made up 19.3% of all incidents. The main victim were gay men, making up 57.9% of all cases. Anti-lesbian attacks made up 11.4% of the cases while 27.4% were directed at gay people in general. Only 1.4% of cases indicated an anti-heterosexual bias and 1.9% were directed at bisexuals.

Two-thirds of these crimes were classified as crimes against persons and one-third were crimes against property. In 46% of the crimes against persons it was an act of intimidation, in 53% of the cases someone was the victim of assault. There were seven cases of murder and 4 cases of rape that were hate inspired.

In crimes against property the vast majority, 81% were incidents of vandalism or destruction of property. The rest were crimes involving robbery motivated by hate.

The report probably underestimates actual hate crimes in the United States. The classification of a crime, as a hate crime, requires the local police agency to cooperate. If they do not report it as a hate crime it is not included. Given the document racial biases, and anti-gay attitudes of law enforcement officials, they are more likely to exclude legitimate cases from the classification than they are to included incidents that don't belong there.

Catholicism and the "Intolerance" Hoax

2011-11-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post says that Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput “painted a bleak picture of a nation increasingly intolerant of Christianity.” Chaput, who achieved an ecclesiastical position superior to Christ himself, says, “The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past.”

Please note the bait-and-switch here. One may be unfriendly to a dogma without being intolerant. Merriam-Webster defines intolerant, in the religious sense, as “unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression especially in religious matters.”

This sort of “intolerance” is not actually an issue. What the Archbishop whines about is not any attempt to prevent representatives of the Vatican from expressing a viewpoint, or even from practicing their faith, within their churches, as they see fit. This simply is not happening. What the Catholic Church complains about something is quite different. The areas where they are most upset have to do with granting equality of rights to gay people. The Church is quite intolerant of men who have romantic/sexual relationships with other adult men, for instance. They desire that the law reflect their religious views.

That is an entirely different issue; they are the ones being intolerant. Tolerance implies the granting of equal freedom to others. It does not require that one be “friendly” to ideas that one finds distasteful, whatever the reason for the sour taste. Disliking gay marriage is not "friendly," wanting to ban it is intolerant.

The Catholic Bishops, are “feeling under siege: from a broader culture moving toward accepting gay marriage.” This is correct, but when they say that is “chipping away at religious liberty” they have engaged in semantics of Orwellian proportions. They have completely reversed the facts. The Church, when gay couples are given equal rights, can still practice its faith. No religious group has ever been forced to perform a marriage to which it is religiously opposed. The Church can also set its own policies for who may, or may not, hold ecclesiastical office—and one would think the Bishops would be looking at the choices they have made for the priesthood before worrying about the marriage contracts of others.

But, what the Church, has also demanded is that gay couples not have “equal rights” to the marriage contract. The Church argues this goes against their faith. So what! In a pluralistic, free society, any policy is bound to be contrary to the faith of someone. If public policy had to correspond with everyone’s faith, there would be no law whatsoever and no such thing as rights. But the United States is not a theocracy, and law was meant to defend the equal rights and liberty of each individual. While it is true the U.S. has often failed in this endeavor—women, slavery, blacks, gays, Native Americans, Japanese-Americans, etc.—it remains equally true that this ideal has always been the philosophical lodestone for the nation. It still points the direction in which the country should go, whether or not our course has been rapid enough, and whether or not we have periodically veered in wrong directions.

The bigger problem for the Bishops is that most American Catholics have little faith in Vatican doctrines. American Catholics, in large numbers, oppose Catholic doctrine opposing birth control or the use of condoms, even if meant to stop the spread of venereal diseases. Catholic Americans are far less opposed to a woman’s right to choose than is the Vatican. And Catholic Americans are not as comfortable denying gay couples legal rights, as is the Vatican. The real problem for the Bishops is that they have lost the allegiance of their own members, and their handling of the massive child abuse scandal within Catholicism, is a major reason why. As the man they claim as their founder said: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

The bishops are unhappy that Catholic doctrines on abortion and marriage are not part of the law. What upsets them is that the law is not intolerant, not that it is. The law grants individuals more freedom than the bishops think proper.

The second area where the bishops pretend they are victims of intolerance revolves around access to tax funds, not the denial of rights. The Post writes of the issue of “government officials working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster-care placements.” This has happened several times, but no private charity, even a religious one, has a right to tax funds. The casebook example, that was used repeatedly by anti-rights activists in the Prop 8 campaign, was that of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts.

The Catholic Church closed their adoption service because the state was unwilling to fund them. The state argued that when tax funds were used the charity could not discriminate against gay people, who were being forced to fund the charity. However, if the charity chose to not take tax funds they were free to discriminate on the basis of their own religious dogma. At issue was not them being forced to give up their religious beliefs, but whether or not they could take funds from unwilling gay taxpayers while discriminating against them at the same time. They were free to do one, or the other, but not both.

The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial on the lies behind Prop 8, wrote:

Take the story of Catholic Charities. The service arm of the Roman Catholic Church closed its adoption program in Massachusetts not because of the state's gay marriage law but because of a gay anti-discrimination law passed many years earlier. In fact, the charity had voluntarily placed older foster children in gay and lesbian households— among those most willing to take hard-to-place children— until the church hierarchy was alerted and demanded that adoptions conform to the church's religious teaching, which was in conflict with state law. The Proposition 8 campaign, funded in large part by Mormons who were urged to do so by their church, does not mention that the Mormon church's adoption arm in Massachusetts is still operating, even though it does not place children in gay and lesbian households.

How can this be? It's a matter of public accountability, not infringement on religion. Catholic Charities acted as a state contractor, receiving state and federal money to find homes for special-needs children who were wards of the state, and it faced the loss of public funding if it did not comply with the anti-discrimination law. In contrast, LDS (for Latter-day Saints) Family Services runs a private adoption service without public funding. Its work, and its ability to follow its religious teachings, have not been altered.

This time the bishops were howling about Illinois and claiming that Catholic religious freedom was impinged. The Post wrote: “In Illinois, government officials stopped working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster-care placements after 40 years because the agency refused to recognize a new civil union law.” That is actually a bit misleading. It was not the civil union law per se; it was the same issue as in Massachusetts. The Chicago Tribune reported that the “the state cut ties with the agency that balked at placing children with gay and unwed couples.”

In Illinois Catholic Charities was placing foster-children on behalf of the State using tax funding. In essence, the charity was acting as an agent of the state, funded by all the taxpayers of the State, including gay people. State officials were not thrilled about “religious agencies that receive public funds to license foster care parents” acting in a discriminatory way at the expense of taxpayers. The question was not whether Catholic Charities could practice their religion, but whether, when acting as Agents of the State, they can ignore the rights of all taxpayers and discriminate along religious lines.

The Catholic Church noted that the civil unions law granted religious exemptions and then, in another bait-and-switch, claimed they were thus allowed to discriminate against gay couples using tax funds. But, when the Charity is acting as an Agent of the State, with taxpayer funding, it is not acting as a religious organization. Again, if Catholic Charities did its work without tax funds, it would be free to discriminate to its heart’s content. As in Massachusetts, the Church announced that unless they were free to take tax funds AND discriminate, they would close down. This implies the charity relied almost entirely on tax funds to exist, at least in relationship to these programs. If the amount of taxpayer funding determines the extent to which an agency is a government agency, this would imply that Catholic Charities was almost wholly an agency of the government. It they can't survive absent state funding they have ceased to be private in any meaningful sense of the word.

The bishops want their cake, while gorging themselves on it at the same time. They want to claim the rights of a private, religious organization while feeding at the public trough. If they wish to act as a religious group they need to do so at their own expense. This is what they are unwilling to do.

A representative of Catholic Charities said that religious practices include “the rendition of social services. That’s what the Gospel and the Sermon on the Mount are all about. Frankly, we’ve been incredulous.” But, nothing in the Gospel, or in the Sermon in the Mount, implies that Christian charity is to be tax funded. The charitable message that is scattered in the New Testament was about private actions, not state welfare. The Gospel story of the widow contributing a “mite” (small change) to the Temple praised her because her contribution represented all that she had. She wasn’t donating at taxpayer expense.

Another issue, where the bishops pretend they are being oppressed is that Health and Human Services “decided not to renew a contract held since 2006 by the bishops’ refugee services office to help victims of human trafficking.” The issue was whether tax funds could be used to fund an organization that imposed restrictions on reproductive health issues with the clients. That is, can the state fund a group that demands women not use condoms in order to receive the services that for which the State is paying?

Whether or not the government should be funding such programs is a different issue. But while they are, should they give these funds to agencies that are best able to serve the needs of the victims for whom the funding was made? Health and Human Services said that agencies that were not restricting their medical care based on religion were better fits for the program. An extreme example might be if the government decided to fund private national defense. Surely giving those funds to an Amish group might not be the best fit.

The Post, noted, “the vast network of Catholic social service nonprofits, including the bishop’s conference, receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding in amounts that have increased in the last couple of years.” This raises the real issue for libertarians: Should Catholic organizations be receiving hundreds of millions in tax funds at all; and not just Catholics, either? Should any religious organization be funded with taxpayer funds?

Religious organizations already have privileges denied to individuals: they are tax exempt. One purpose of that tax exemption is to encourage private donations to charitable projects run by these religions organizations. Apparently, the Church feels it should not just have an exemption, but subsidies as well. And it thinks that the subsidies should come with no strings attached.

There is a religion called the Church of the Creator, it is part of what is known as Identity Christianity, which argues that white people are the chosen people of God, that Jews are the literal children of Satan, and that blacks are “beasts of the field,” or animals. If the Church of the Creator were to open a “foster care” program, would it have the right to take tax funds, while denying any services to non-whites or Jews?

Yes, they are extreme. But the principle doesn’t change. If, as the bishops are arguing, there is some right to tax funds, while practicing religious-based discrimination, then it shouldn’t matter whether the victims of that discrimination are gay, black, Jewish, or even Catholic. Surely a fundamentalist Protestant sect would have the right to take tax payments made by Catholics while refusing adoptions into Catholic homes. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, what is good for the Catholic is good for the Baptist, or even the Muslim. The bishops, however, would not see it that way. Their concept of equality of rights means privileges for themselves at the expense of unwilling individuals.

Scott Appleby, a historian at the University of Notre Dame says that Catholic leaders have adopted “a more pugnacious style, much more of a kind of culture-war attitude.” But the culture war of fundamentalists was different, for the most part. Fundamentalists fought a culture war that demanded the right to impose their religious values on others, but rarely demanded the right to pig-out with tax funds—the “abstinence” movement was an exception. The bishops appear to want a culture-war where they are given “hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding” while claiming the exemptions of private religion at the same time.

What then is the “intolerance” they are complaining about? It the complaint of rent-seekers acclimated to public funding, who are demanding that taxpayers subsidize their religion. The bishops are seeking a private right to discriminate, but at public expense. Their religious rights are not being impinged at all, only their “right” to pick the pockets of people against whom they wish to discriminate.

Tea Party Group Tells Objectivists Where to Go

2011-11-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

Some Tea Party "patriots" got bitchy about an Objectivist group that wanted to join their coalition. Surprise, surprise. A group of Minnesota Objectivists tried to join the coalition that made up the local Tea Party. The Christians that control the Tea Party had fits and eventually the Objectivists withrdrew. Had this "Objectivist" group had paid any attention to Rand they would know that the Tea Party is not a group that they should join and would not have the humiliation of retreating.

Rand thought multi-issue coalitions were unstable and bad ideas and that one would get dragged into the mud on the issues where one’s allies were bad. Second, she despised conservatives, especially religious conservatives. She referred to them as the "God-Family-Tradition swamp." Third, Rand thought that attempting to justify capitalism or individual rights on the basis of religion would backfire because it implied there is no rational justification for these ideas, only mystical inventions.

Now, one Tea Party writer, Walter Hudson, tries to defend Rand to the Tea Party. What a crock! He claims that the reason these advocates of irrationalism attacked the Objectivist group is because "attacks upon religious expression by a relentless secular minority have placed many religious people on the defensive.” For people on the defensive, they spend a lot of time being offensive, in every sense of the word. I would like to see a list of these attacks on religious expression.

What the hell does this even mean? In my experience, what they mean is either that people don’t agree with them, and say so, or that people complain when parasitical religionists want to use tax-funding directly or indirectly to promote their fantasies. If you laugh at the absurdity of their faith they will claim that is an attack on their rights—it isn’t. No one has the right to escape ridicule, especially when they are being ridiculous. Free speech means that rationalists can say unpleasant things about Christians and Christians can lie about rationalists to their heart’s content.

What is normally at stake, however, is that they insist on the right to use government funding to spread their “gospel.” So they want displays on public land, maintained by the taxpayers. They want the Ten Commandments on display in government buildings. They want prayer imposed in taxpayer built schools. What these people want is the right to reach into the pockets of people who don’t agree with them, help themselves to money, and then use those funds to promote their poorly scripted fiction.

I know of no incident where anyone has managed to get the state to use government funds to shut a religious viewpoint being expressed in the private sector. Churches, in fact, get tax reliefs that other organizations don’t get. Objectivists might meet in a home regularly but they will pay taxes on that home, while faith-addicts call their meeting place a “church” and are automatically relieved of all taxes. Religious freedom is not under attack and hasn’t been.

Every example I’ve seen promoted by the Religious Right was either their demand to have tax funding used for them, or them attempting to use state power to impose their religious beliefs about sex, marriage, drugs, censorship, divorce, abortion, etc. Trying to paint the Religious Right as victims of some crusade is just a lie.

The author then selectively quotes Rand, ignoring material that doesn’t support his thesis. He mentions a letter Rand wrote in 1943 regarding morality—not politics, which was a separate category in her thinking. For Rand politics was derived from moral principles but not from religion. What she wrote was that if a religion teaches free will then that principle corresponded with her own view of morality. “My morality is based on man’s nature, on the fundamental attribute of this nature which distinguishes him from the animals—his rational faculty.” To the degree that religion adopts free will then this jives with what Rand said about free will. This was quoted, what the author selectively left out, was the rest of what Rand said, “It will not hold with a belief in a God as a deterministic ruler” because “such a belief would make all morality impossible.”

Certainly some branches of Christianity argued for free will, but many did not. Consider the idea of “original sin” held by most Christian traditions. In this doctrine man is born guilty. Guilt is not earned; he is already guilty merely by existing. Many Christians historically argued that this guilt means man is naturally a sinner and as such is incapable of choosing the good. His tendency is to sin and reject God. Thus the grace of God is needed. God grants his grace to some and with this grace they are able to accept the salvation offered them. But this is not free will by any means. Calvinists, one of the largest braches of Protestantism rejected free will entirely.

Calvin was not alone. Martin Luther’s tract The Bondage of the Will was meant to dispel the notion that man had free will. Luther, the most prominent founder of Protestant Christianity wrote, “Man has lost his freedom, and is forced to serve sin, and cannot will good.” He explicitly reject free will: “Let all the ‘free will’ in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength.” He wrote, “Man can receive nothing unless given him from above; so free will is nothing!” Jesus seemed to reject free will as well. He said: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

Other Christian doctrines beg the believer to dispel with free will. For instance, if God is sovereign then nothing happens without God willing it. But if God wills it, then can anything otherwise possibly happen? Can one actually overpower the will of God and impose an outcome contrary to what God has chosen? If the answer is “no” then in what sense does anyone, if this theology is true, have free will? Allow me to quote a church web site: “Now if future events are foreknown to God, they cannot by any possibility take a turn contrary to His knowledge. If the course of future events is foreknown, history will follow that course as definitely as a locomotive follows the rails from New York to Chicago.”

Similarly, the idea that God knows in advance what will happen implies that outcomes are set. If outcomes are set then there is no free will, just a predetermined outcome. The New Testament says: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to conformed to the image of his Son.”

The idea that man is a depraved sinner by nature implies that only a drawing of the Spirit can make him spiritual. But whether the Spirit moves on him or not is not man’s choice at all, but God’s alone. Man, according to St. Paul is incapable of seeking God on his own: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks God.” In Corinthians he said: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” Paul did not say that man is unwilling to understand these things but that he “is not able to understand them.” The ability of understand entirely depends on God granting man the grace. Man cannot make that choice himself.

In other words, when one speaks of Christianity one is actually speaking of Christianities. There are multiple faiths and beliefs and what might be accurate to say about one is not accurate about others. There is damn little, if anything, that one can say about Christianity that applies to all the sects operating under than label.

Rand was not saying that Christianity was a good thing; she thought it evil. Nor did she argue it was consistent with her political beliefs—she said it was contrary to her beliefs. All she said was that IF it taught free will then it could go along with her idea of morality, which is that man must choose to do the right. And, she also made it clear that aspects of Christianity make true morality impossible. She wrote:

“If, however, we assume a cosmic destiny working toward some purpose of its own which man cannot change or influence—then man is not free; then he can only act as prescribed and, if so, cannot be held responsible for his actions, nor considered either moral or immoral.”

Rand, like many atheists, was simply untutored in Christian theology. What she knew she knew from the general culture and from her own reading. But Rand’s understanding of Christianity was not nuanced. Based on that understanding she said that Christianity “proclaimed the supreme sacredness of the individual” because “the first duty of the Christian is the salvation of his own soul.” This is, in fact, not precisely accurate. As stated earlier, there is nothing you can say about Christian doctrine that applies to all Christian sects. The idea that there is a duty to save one soul’s is simply not universally believed. Certainly, as already pointed out under the doctrines of man’s depravity, foreknowledge and predestination—doctrines that were widely held—the individual could not have the duty to save his own soul because he was incapable of doing so. In addition many sects, which do think free will is compatible with other Christian doctrines, often say may is totally incapable of saving his own soul except in the sense that accepting the grace of God makes it possible. But they argue that it was the death of Jesus that saves souls, not any works the individual believer does or doesn’t do.

One of the problems with large coalitions is that one is tempted to play down differences. The original alliance between classical liberals and socialists, against the alliance of church and state under conservative regimes, tempted classical liberals to surrender their principles. In the end classical liberalism was weakened significantly and the socialists even walked off with the label “liberal” in the process. The alliance with conservatives tempted many libertarians to play down their differences with their political partners. The same issue would be true for Objectivists. The only thing that saved the Objectivists, in this case, is that they withdrew their application for membership in the Tea Party group because they discovered that the true soul of the Tea Party, the Christian Right, was totally intolerant and didn’t want them.

The Politics of the Clock: Daylight Saving Time is a Bad Idea

2011-11-06T17:03:00.000-08:00

I am not a daylight saving time skeptic, but rather a full out atheist on the topic. That’s right, I don’t believe in daylight saving time. To paraphrase some dead hillbilly: “I’m agin it.”

I have lived in places that practice this ritual and places where the twice-yearly ritual of changing the clocks is not practiced. I preferred the latter.

Each Spring, the government has deemed we all go through the ritual of setting the clocks ahead. For most of us, that meant losing an hour of sleep, getting up the following day a bit more tired than usual and still driving around as normal, just with less sleep. I had to wonder if anyone has looked at the traffic accident rate for the day following the loss of one hour of sleep in order to placate the gods of time, also known as slime-sucking, pocket-picking, war-mongering politicians.

Well, a little research shows that the Journal of Applied Psychology published a study entitled: “Changing Daylight Saving Time Cuts Into Sleep and Increases Workplace Injuries.” This isn’t a study of traffic accidents, but I would suspect the same cause and effect applies there. This study found that “on Mondays directly following the switch to Daylight Saving Time—in which 1 hr is lost—workers sustain more workplace injuries and injuries of greater severity.” And it doesn’t even out when we go the other way. “On Mondays directly following the switch to Standard Time—in which 1 hr is gained—there are no significant differences in sleep, injury quantity, or injury severity.” So, once a year, to placate our gods of time, we increase the number of people injured and we make their injuries worse than normal. Apparently these gods of time require blood offerings.

If you read the JAP article it seems the increased accident rate in workplaces should be duplicated by increased traffic accidents as well. The paper in question actually says that studies done into traffic accidents “generally found a great risk of traffic accidents” as a result of DST. Stanley Cohen told the New England Journal of Medicine that his study of traffic accident patterns in Canada showed “that small changes in the amount sleep that people get can have major consequences in everyday activities. The loss of merely one hour of sleep can increase the risk of traffic accidents.”

Studies in Australia noted that disrupting sleep patterns with Daylight Savings Time also impacts mental health. One study to determine "the impact on the number of suicides of a 1-h time shift due to daylight saving" found "small changes" could destabilize vulnerable individuals. They found that "male suicide rates rise in the weeks following the commencement of daylight saving time." A Swedish study of daylight saving time found, "These transitions can disrupt chornobiologic rhythms and influence the duration and quality of sleep, and the effect lasts for several days after the shifts." They found that each Spring "the incidence of acute myocardial infraction was significantly increased for the first 3 weekdays after the transition to daylight saving time" In the Fall, "only the first weekday was affected significantly."

The Monday after DST is implemented is one of the least safe days of the year. Apparently, centrally planning people’s sleep schedules has negative consequences.

Of course, the gods of time come up with many excuses to justify forcing this ritual on the public. They claim it saves energy. Some counties in Indiana refused to join the rest of the state in this ritual, but eventually the petty gods of time in the state legislature decided to force them to do so due to a federal mandate laid down by their masters, the gods of time in Congress. An economist and environmental scientist studied the impact of the change in Indiana for the National Bureau of Economic Research. What they found, was that electricity consumption increased by $9 million because of the law.

UC Berkley’s Center for the Study of Energy Markets explored the issues as well in 2007, when the gods of time extended DST an extra four weeks, claiming it would cut electricity consumption by 1%. This study found most claims regarding electricity savings “rely on simulation models and extrapolation rather than empirical evidence.” And, we all know, that means making assumptions and adjusting data based on those assumptions. That introduces bias into the issue, unless of course, the issue in question is global warming, in which case only deniers worry about “simulation models and extrapolation.” The UC Berkley paper, in contrast, looked at a “detailed panel data on half-hourly electricity consumption, prices, and weather conditions” and showed “the extension failed to reduce electricity demand.” Then for fun, they took the simulation models that were used, applied them against actual data that now existed and found the models “significantly” overstate electricity savings.

This isn’t to say that DST didn’t save some electricity on Summer evenings. They found that it actually did so. But what was saved, and then some, was used up by “the increased demand in the morning.”

In addition, the extra hour of daylight we get in the summer does encourage more driving around. This increase in gas consumption doesn’t seem to get factored in, it runs contrary to the theology of the gods of time. This is one reason they don’t talk about energy consumption, but electricity consumption only. They need to ignore increased consumption of gasoline in order to even sound plausible. The UC Berkley study says that while they only tested the theory that DST saves electricity, when it comes to energy as a whole, their study probably makes DST look better than it is, even though they show it wastes electricity. They warned: “Including gasoline demand in the analysis may increase the estimate of DST’s effect on energy consumption, as longer and warmer evening hours drive an increase in evening leisure travel.”

The only argument that really made any sense was the one that said the change prevents kids from walking to school in the dark. With DST, the only time kids are in the dark now is in science class, sex ed class, history class, and so on. Personally, I thought the whole purpose of public education was to keep kids in the dark as long as possible. But we don’t want the little ankle biters to cross streets in the dark. Instead, we change their schedules so that they play in the dark after school. They are more likely to run into the darkened street playing, than going to school; few kids are in a hurry to get to that state institution for the criminal insane—to which I mean the teacher’s unions and bureaucrats that run those educational prisons not the students, whose disdain is fully rational.

Given the permanent panic-mode of many parents, fed the drivel and hysteria spewed out by American media about molesters, kidnappers, school shootings, rapists in the bushes, not to mention the fears pushed by conservatives—gays and Mexicans—it appears many parents are too terrified to allow their little delinquents to actually walk to school. At the end of the day the schools around here get surrounded by anxious parents in cars, waiting to chauffeur their child home safely, to lock them away from imaginary monsters that the Lords of Information have spoon-fed them

Now, if we really think these kiddies would be better off walking to school—the few who do walk—when it is lighter, then why not just change the starting time of school by one hour come the Autumn? Why must every clock change, when all we need do is change the starting time for the educational inmates?

Of course, there is much political lobbying regarding DST and its “benefits.” Golf clubs got together to lobby for an extension of DST in 2007, saying that it would increase their revenues by $200 million to $300 million, as more people would golf in the evenings. The Sporting Good Manufacturers Association lobbied as well. On the other hand the television industry saw reduced viewership and as did movie theaters. All these changes do is redistribute spending patterns, it doesn’t make people richer and increase overall spending, it only changes spending patterns. But that is precisely the reason politicians love such laws, redistributing wealth enhancea their own well-being because various lobbies donate to their campaigns to try and secure an audience with the gods of time.

In reality, we have bogus claims about energy consumption and the desire of some businesses to redirect consumer spending, fueling the desire for DST. Urban legends and wealth redistribution are the real reasons behind this bad concept today.

The High Cost of Government-Mandated Discrimination: DOMA and the Regulatory State

2011-11-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

Conservatives frequently talk about the cost of regulations. For instance, Freedomworks, a well-known conservative organization, published a piece called The Hidden Cost of Regulation. It said: “Complying with regulations is not cheap,” noting that regulations aren’t paid for by just corporations, but by “the entire economy.” It notes that consumers pay higher prices as well, due to these regulations, and that they “act as a drag on economic growth.”

Allow me to add two other points Freedomworks did not mention, but which I believe they would agree with. 1) Motives of the regulators do not change costs imposed by the regulations. That is, costs are not lower if the motives of regulators are good. 2) Costs are not changed if regulations are imposed by one political party rather than the other. In other words, the cost of Republican-imposed regulations would be just the same if Democrats had been the guilty party.

With this in mind, let us turn to a set of regulations Republicans put into place, with the claimed motive of “protecting the family:” The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

On the surface, DOMA doesn’t appear to create new regulations. It says: “In determining the means of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” It sounds simple, but then some of the worst results come out of the simplest of regulations.

Until DOMA, for the entirety of American history, marriage was defined at the state level. Over the last couple of centuries the federal government and the states have woven a web of rules and regulations around the marriage contract. Until DOMA the federal government accepted state-recognized marriages as valid on the federal level. Now there are federal regulations that don’t correspond with the laws in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

Federal regulations control everything from health insurance options to pension plans when it comes to employees. Absent DOMA, an employer in states with marriage equality could treat all married employees the same way. With DOMA, they are forced to establish a dual system of employment where one set of employees is treated one way, and a second set another way, when it comes to federally regulated issues such as taxation and pensions. But, on the state level, employers treat employees identically. Having to comply with DOMA, imposes direct regulatory costs on employers.

Don’t take my word for it: consider an amicus brief filed in the case of Massachusetts vs. United States Department of Health and Human Services currently before the US Court of Appeals, First Circuit. A group of 70 corporations, trade organizations and non-profits signed the amicus, including Aetna, Levi Straus, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, CBS, Microsoft, Chubb Corporation, Google, Starbucks, Xerox, Time Warner Cable, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Retailers Association of Massachusetts and twelve law firms.

In the amicus, they lay out precisely what negative impact DOMA regulations have on their ability to do business. They note that the law forces them to impose a “dual regime” for legally married employees: one set of rules for those with opposite-sex spouses and another set for those with same-sex spouses. This requirement “put us, as employers and enterprises, to unnecessary cost and administrative complexity, and regardless of our business or professional judgment forces us to discriminate against a class of lawfully-married employees, upon whose welfare and morale our own success in part depends.

The brief notes that the 10th Amendment “protects certain state powers from federal intrusion” and that states have the “power to regulate marriage.” Historically employers “look to state law to determine which employees were married for purposes of administering workplace benefits.” But DOMA intrudes with federal regulations on some legal marriages that are different from the norm. The amici note: “Absent DOMA, employers could treat all employees married under the law of any state in a consistent way. Our burden arises because federal law intrudes to conflict with state law, forcing the employer to create two groups of married employees, and to treat one group different from another.”

The amici noted that 86% of full-time employees have health benefits through their workplace and 74% have an employer-provided retirement plan” that “are a direct contributor to employee loyalty.” Under DOMA requirements, they have to “investigate the gender of the spouses of our lawfully-married employees and then to single out those employees with a same-sex spouse.” They are required to tax health-benefits of spouses of gay employees, but not those for the spouses of straight employees. Forcing the company to treat employees in a discriminatory manner harms good will between employer and employee and—when it comes to pension benefits—requires them to ignore the same-sex spouse of an employee who dies—something employers do NOT wish to do.

When employers try to compensate gay employees for the higher taxes they must pay, it requires them to pay those employees more than similar straight employees, just so things even out when the paycheck is cut. Social Security and unemployment taxes based on the income of employees. There is no method for calculating these taxes for health benefits given to an employee’s same-sex partner. Yet, they are obligated to pay the taxes without knowing how to calculate them. They complain, “The I.R.S. declines to provide official guidance, and instead puts the burden (and risk of error) on the employer.” This is how it is with simple regulations such as DOMA

Another method by which employees cover health care of spouses is that an “employer may allow a married employee to reduce his taxable income by paying, on a pre-tax basis, the cost of coverage for a different-sex spouse, but not for a same-sex spouse.” This means that W-2 forms for married gay employees have to be calculated differently than those of married straight employees, with gay employees “on average” paying an extra $1,069 more in federal taxes” than that of similarly situated straight employees.

Companies also are required to treat gay employees differently when it comes to a family crisis. Federal law permits employees “up to 12 work weeks of unpaid, protected leave to care” for a sick or injured spouse. “In emergencies, she may use a pre-retirement ‘hardship distribution’ from her 401(k) plan to pay his medical expenses. While the distribution is taxable, the employee will be exempted from certain penalties that would otherwise apply.” However, if the employee is in a legal same-sex marriage they will be penalized if they use funds from the 401(k) plan to pay medical care for their spouse. In other words, the federal government will punish gay people for caring for their partners during times of need.

Trying to achieve some level of fairness, some employers extend similar rights to employees with same-sex spouses but they have to create these workarounds “entirely at the employer’s direct cost.” Without the employer footing the bill, “the employee will lack the flexibility—enjoyed by her colleague with a different-sex spouse—to care for a same-sex spouse in times of crisis or illness.”

But, even the workarounds may not work. Given the complexity of regulations in numerous fields, a workaround that appears legitimate may accidentally be in violation of other regulations. “Workaround may attract attention from regulators or cause tension with shareholders or investors, all of which consumes time, resources and goodwill. However enlightened and necessary, such voluntary policies perpetuate a caste system among married employees, resting on unhelpful distinctions inimical to teamwork and by extension, to the success of the enterprise.”

Larger companies also “recruit certain highly qualified scientists, business executives and scholars” who are foreign nationals or attempt to transfer employees from overseas offices to domestic employment. DOMA treats opposite-sex spouses of these employees very differently than it does same-sex spouses. Same-sex spouses are not considered married at all. “A recruited or transferred foreign national married to a same-sex spouse must either leave the spouse behind or secure an independent visa status for the spouse (at personal expense and effort), and thereafter live with the risk of the expiration or rescission of that visa.” In practical terms, it will be almost impossible for them to bring their spouse with them. The amici note “this is a considerable impediment to attracting foreign nationals.” They also say this “subjects the foreign national, and accordingly the employer, to special taxation problems” as well.

Employers are also required to spend extra money to treat gay married employees differently than straight employees are treated. Federal laws ensure “that an opposite-sex spouse may receive a portion of his spouse’s benefit unless he expressly waives that form, and most retirement plans must provide opposite-sex spouses with special rights to the participant spouse’s benefit if the participant dies while still employed.” The only way to do this for married gay employees is to create new workarounds that still don’t have the same protections and benefits because of unequal taxes imposed on gay couples.

The amici complain that DOMA intrusion into marriage means they “treat employees with same-sex spouses as (1) single for the purpose of federal tax withholding, payroll taxes, and workplace benefits that turn, as most do, on marital status, and (2) married for all other purposes under state law. This requires amici in effect to maintain two sets of books—one for married employees with same-sex spouses, another for married employees with different-sex spouses. The double entries ripple through human resources, payroll, and benefits administration.”

This means their financial recording keeping systems must be “capable of separately tracking married employees by reference to the gender of the spouse. Confusion abounds, and even sophisticate employers struggle.” They give the example of Yale University that didn’t realize it had to withhold higher taxes from married gay employees than it withheld from married straight employees. This meant they had to take double deductions from employees the next year after their failure to comply with the different rules DOMA imposed was discovered.

The unnecessary complexity introduced by DOMA has “spawned an industry of costly compliance specialists” and employers “pay vendors to reprogram benefits and payroll systems, to add coding to reconcile different tax and benefit treatments, to reconfigure at every benefit and coverage level, and to revisit all of the modifications with every change in tax or ERISA laws for potential DOMA impact. Attorneys and ERISA advisers must be consulted. Human resources, benefits and payroll personnel must be trained and retrained as tax or ERISA laws change.” Of course, they must be adjusted to reflect two methods of calculating all these costs, with a status for gay employees that while separate, is not equal. The employers say that the “complexity and uncertainty saps critical time, and energy from the human resources and benefits administration function.”

Of course, as bad as this is for the large corporations, “the burden on the small employer is especially onerous.” They can’t afford specialists and are not likely to have entire departments dedicated to dealing with the dual set of regulations required by DOMA. This leads to a new, especially destructive aspect of DOMA: “Such burdens, standing along, might chill a smaller employer from employing an otherwise qualified employee because she happens to be married to a same-sex spouse.”

The dual set of books required under DOMA in regards to the many federally regulated issue of taxes, health benefits and pensions, means that the cost of hiring someone who is gay is considerably higher than the cost of hiring someone who is heterosexual. A small business that has no married, gay employees doesn’t face all the regulatory costs of DOMA. The moment they hire their first gay employee they either have to deal with them being married, or the possibility that they may marry, and that hits them with massive costs to adjust their finances to reflect the unequal status of gay employees. In other words, the state imposes what amounts to massive fines on employers who do NOT intentionally discriminate against gay people. By selectively raising the cost of employing gay people, the state is encouraging employers to actively discriminate.

In small businesses, where finances are tight, the costs of hiring a gay person, over hiring a straight person, may be so significantly different, that it could mean marginal small companies go out of business. This traps some employers between state law and federal regulations. State laws may punish them if they discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation while federal regulations will impose massive costs on them if they don’t discriminate.

This is no different than if the Republicans who pushed DOMA had directly stated that all employers will be fined for hiring gay employees. The insidious effects are not different in any meaningful way.

The final complaint of the employers is that DOMA literally “conscripts” them “to become the face of… discrimination.” It is the employer who must treat one employee differently than another” while simultaneously obeying laws that forbid them to discriminate. “We must do all of this in states that prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and demand equal treatment of all married individuals. This conscription has harmful consequences.”

They note that this means they must engage in conduct that otherwise would be illegal in Massachusetts. “DOMA forces the employer to determine, at its own risk, where DOMA supersedes state law and where state law continues to protect the employee.” Not getting it right opens them up to legal problems.

But these employers also note that DOMA requires them to violate their own codes of conduct. It forces them to be “the unwilling agent of federally-required disparate treatment of lawfully-married employees.” This disparate treatment “fosters workplace distress, and practical experience teaches that workplace distress increases the risk of the employer’s having to respond, at its own expenses, to claims of the aggrieved.”

It is the employer, not the federal government, who “becomes the fact of DOMA’s discriminatory treatment, and is placed in the role of intrusive inquisitor, imputer of taxable income, withholder of benefits. The employer is thus forced by DOMA to participate in the injury of its own workforce morale.”

The amici point out that 94% of Fortune 500 companies “provide nondiscrimination protection for their gay and lesbian employees.” They argue these principles “spring from hard experience. Our enterprises are engaged in national and international competition—for talent, customers, and business. That competition demands teamwork, and teamwork thrives when the enterprise minimizes distracting differences, and focuses on a common mission. DOMA’s core mandate—that we single out some of our married colleagues, and treat them as a lesser class—upsets this imperative.”

They state that their “principles are not platitudes,” but “our agenda for success: born of corporate experience, tested in laboratory, factory, and office, attuned to competition. Our principles reflect, in the truest sense, our business judgment. By force of law, DOMA would rescind that judgment, and direct that we renounces these principles, or betray them.”

DOMA forces employers to act in discriminatory ways, and in a manner that their own business judgment tells them is unproductive and counter to good business sense. These are companies that do not wish to discriminate against gay employees yet are forced to do so by federal law. DOMA doesn’t just force the companies to act against their own moral principles. It also harms gay people by making them more expensive to employ requiring employers to act against their own rational self-interest by harming good employees.

Freedomworks wrote: “Continued overregulation will only drag the economy down. On the other hand, pursuing a policy of deregulation, would free up the economy to grow and prosper.” I couldn’t agree more and an easy place to start is repeal of DOMA, an unnecessary regulation that intrudes on the powers of the states. Returning to the federalist approach that was pursued in regards to marriage for over two centuries is a deregulation that long overdue. So, what are the Republicans doing about DOMA? Instead of deregulating they are wasting millions of dollars in tax funds trying to defend a law that violates the 10th Amendment, that imposes massive costs on private employers, that destroys jobs, that encourages discriminatory behavior and which violates the basic principles on which this country was founded.

Book Review: 100 Voices—An Oral History of Ayn Rand

2011-10-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand with husband, Frank O'Connor

Anyone who has read the biographies of Ayn Rand, such as Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand, or Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made, will find 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, a wonderful companion.

What we have is a collection of excerpts from interviews with 100 people who dealt with Rand over the years, including friends, relatives, and business associates. And much of the information is refreshingly new and offers new insights into a complex and controversial figure in American history.

There are, however, caveats to consider. Scott McConnell of the Ayn Rand Institute conducts these interviews and they are not entirely free of an agenda. But, for the most part, they seem fairly balanced and individuals are quoted saying things that are not always pleasant. But neither are they always accurate.

These are first person accounts of Rand and all first person accounts tend to be prone to errors and personal agendas. Rand’s sister, Nora, for instance, is particularly bitter and unpleasant. A few other relatives make claims that sound utterly absurd to this reviewer. One insists that the penniless Rand promised to buy them a Rolls Royce if she made good, another seems to believe she promised a mink coat. Additionally, you will find a few interviewees who seem to insist that Ayn Rand’s career was assured because of them. Had she failed in her endeavors I’m not sure they would be so quick to claim credit for her efforts.

Another relative recounts a story that she insists is true, where she and Rand were discussing a pen name for Rand—Ayn was born Alyssa Rosenbaum. The relative says that she suggested taking the name from a Remington-Rand typewriter. After rejecting Remington, Rand was supposedly chosen.

However, it has been pointed out that Remington-Rand typewriters did not exist in the year where this was alleged to have happened. The company was created in 1927 and the incident that is recounted would have happened one year before there was such a thing as a Remington-Rand typewriter. This story was also told to Barbara Branden for the biography she wrote.

The flaws in first person accounts don’t make the book valueless, but it is more valuable when read after one is already familiar with Rand’s life.

One interview that particularly fascinated me was with June Kurisu, who worked for Rand as a secretary in the late 1940s when Rand was living in Chatsworth, California. It became quickly apparent that there was much more to the Kurisu story than I originally knew. I never knew that June’s parents were in the employ of Rand as well and lived at the house with her.

As I read the interview it seemed that the whole picture came into view. June and her family were Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in FDR’s concentration camps for Americans for Japanese descent. When the federal government rounded them up, they lost everything. June’s father was a small business who lost his business. After the war these people found it difficult to start all over again as the federal government felt no need to compensate them for the confiscation of their property and their unconstitutional incarceration due entirely to their ethnicity.

Rand hired June’s father to work on the ranch with her husband, Frank O’Connor. June also mentioned that her mother was hired by Rand to be a cook, in spite of her having limited cooking skills. And June, who was a high school student attending a church boarding school, was hired to come to the Ranch on weekends to do typing for Rand. June’s younger brother also lived in Rand’s home. While June never said so, it appeared to me that Rand had hired the entire family, except for a 10-year-old brother, in order to help people who had been unjustly treated. At the same time, June recounts the presence of an elderly Russian woman living at the house as well.

This woman would have been Ayn’s English teacher from Russia who Ayn tracked down after the War. Ayn sponsored bringing the woman to the United States and allowed her to live with Rand for about a year.

Numerous other accounts show the side of Rand that her critics pretend didn’t exist—her benevolence. We read of children who meet Rand and said she was kind to them and would actually stay in touch with them, often calling them to see how they were doing. Another girl recounts how she lived with Ayn and Frank in a one-bedroom apartment when her parents were having marital problems. Over and over individuals recount an Ayn Rand who was benevolent and gentle.

There is much to glean from this collection. And beyond the account of Nora the only other interview that seemed bitter was that of Cynthia Peikoff, an ex-wife of Leonard Peikoff, who inherited Rand’s estate. Cynthia’s bitterness is not directed at Ayn but at Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Leonard has waged a bitter war on the Brandens for decades and Cynthia seems all too happy to continue snipping at them.

What seemed particularly sleazy in that interview is that Cynthia makes accusations against Barbara Branden about an incident where Cynthia was not actually present. She attributes the claims to Eloise Huggins, Rand’s cook. Oddly the interview with Huggins is devoid of these claims. So we have a person, who wasn’t present quoting someone who herself did not make these claims in her interview, and is dead. It is also questionable whether what Huggins allegedly recounted would have taken place in her presence as well. But, out of 100 interviews, it is really only this one and Nora’s interview that struck me as bitter, perhaps vindictive.

Taken as a whole, the 100 interviews contribute a great deal to the reader’s understanding of Ayn Rand as a person. They have to be read critically because of the problems of first person accounts and personal bias. But certainly if they are read along with either the Branden or Heller accounts, if not both, they help flesh out one’s understand of Rand’s life. You will find accounts of incidents that are utterly charming, compassionate, funny or heart moving. I recommend the book strongly, with the caveats expressed here.

Note: The Moorfield Storey Institute has a low-priced book service which discounts books to the public to further education regarding the virtues and values of a free society. All proceeds from sale fund Storey Institute projects. For more information on the books we offer, including those we publish, go to our website.

Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism

2011-10-05T13:16:00.001-07:00

Three Myths About Immigration

2011-09-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

One Photo That Explains Why the Wars Should End Now!

2011-09-29T01:50:00.000-07:00

The Tragedy of Urban Renewal

2011-09-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

About six minutes.

Michelle Bachmann on Separation of Church and State

2011-09-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

In the Florida Republican debate Michelle Bachmann was asked about her claim that separation of church and state are a myth. This position is popular with conservatives, even Ron Paul, who purports to be a libertarian, has said the same thing.

Bachmann defended her ahistorical views by appealing to the letter that the Danbury Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson. She claimed the Baptists were concerned about a "national church" and that was all. This is important for the revisionists because it was Jefferson's reply to the Baptists in which the term "a wall of separation between church and state was coined." The Supreme Court later quoted that phrase to illustrate the system the Founders established, which is why theocrats always point out the term in not in the Constitution. That term is not, the principle it explains, is in the Constitution.

The reality is that the Danbury Baptists never once asked about a national church. What they did was point out that the importance of freedom. They didn't make demands, or ask anything of the President. They merely noted that they supported individual freedom of choice and knew that Jefferson did so as well.

And one huge difference between them and the modern Religious Right was that they defined the purpose of government in Jeffersonian terms. They said that no man should "ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religions opinions..." This part seems to refer to the smear campaign that the Religious Right of Jefferson's day imposed on him. It was widely disseminated by the big government Federalists that Jefferson was a heathen under the control of a secret conspiracy run by the so-called Illuminati. It was then claimed that Jefferson's philosophy of individual rights and limited government were a plot by heathens to attack Christianity and Government itself.

The Danbury Baptists also explained how they saw government, "the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors." This is a very Jeffersonian concept, and it is one that runs very much contrary to the moralistic views of Michelle Bachmann. The Baptists of Danbury were saying that the one and sole purpose of government is to prevent one person from violating the rights of others. It was not about imposing prayer on students in state educational establishments. It was not about controlling the private lives of "sinners" in order to promote morality. It was not about policing books, or patrolling bedrooms. As they said, the power government does not extend pas the point of preventing people from harming one another.

Jefferson himself had said very similar things and the Baptists knew this. They were telling the president they supported his view of government, a view that is alien to the one that Bachmann, Paul and others take regarding separation of church and state.

And what concern these Baptists expressed was NOT over a national church, but entirely about their rights in Connecticut. They felt the Connecticut constitution did not explicitly grant them freedom. Jefferson's reply concerning that indicated a view of the Bill of Rights, which Paul and Bachmann seem to reject. He wrote, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religions, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

Note that while the Danbury Baptists mentioned the problem, it was state of Connecticut that concerned, not the federal government. Jefferson, in reply, cited the Bill of Rights, noting it was an "act of the whole American people."Jefferson seemingly felt that the Bill of Rights protections applied to the states. Certainly, why numerous people of Jefferson's day held that view, the passage of the 14th Amendment made it quite clear. After the passage of the 14th amendment, there is little doubt that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution are guaranteed against infringement by the states and federal government both. This is quite different from the conservative views of Ron Paul, who said, "The notion of rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of the Founding Fathers.

Paul also said that the Constitution was "replete with references to God," when in fact the Constitution doesn't refer to God at all. Paul, like Bachmann, claimed that the "First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the erection of an official state church," and here he means an official national church. As Paul sees it, and I suspect Bachmann would agree, the Bill of Rights simply doesn't apply to the states, which is why he said the Kelo decision was properly decided. The idea that the Bill of Rights being incorporated" by the 14th Amendment, was called "phony" by Paul.

Coincidentally, the debate about the 14th Amendment is one that Moorfield Storey, after whom our institute is named, was intimately involved with. Storey worked as a personal assistant to a major proponent of the 14th Amendment, Senator Charles Sumner. Storey was a staunch supporter of equal rights for all Americans and argued that the 14th Amendment was meant to make clear to all that the Bill of Rights were guaranteed to all Americans against all levels of government. Storey stood before the US Supreme Court in 1917 and argued, according to Howard Meyer's The Amendment That Refused to Die, "that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade a state or city from creating a 'ghetto'—perhaps the first time the name of the Jewish restricted areas of feudal Europe was applied to the areas in democratic America..." Storey was there when the Amendment passed. He worked in the Senate office of a major proponent of the Amendment. Storey did not doubt that it clearly stated that rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, must be respected by the states and lower levels of government as well. The Supreme Court agreed with Storey and ruled so: "We think this attempt to prevent the alienation of property in question to a person of color was not a legitimate exercise of the police power of the state, and is in direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law."

The Libertarian Case for Marriage Equality

2011-09-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

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Robert Levy, president of the Cato Institute, discusses the libertarian case for marriage equality for gay couples. About 11 minutes.

The Largest Boatlift in History and It Was Here

2011-09-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

So many people remember the evacuation at Dunkirk, when hundreds of private boats crossed the English Channel to rescue trapped soldiers, their backs to the sea and the Nazi troops in front of them. The Dunkirk Boatlift rescued over 300,000 soldiers. But on 9/11 500,000 people were evacuated from Manhattan.

There was no government plan to evacuate. In fact, the people trapped on Manhattan were trapped because the authorities had shut down mass transit and closed the bridges. People were stuck and afraid. Many had no idea what was going on. All they knew was there was an attack, the Twin Towers were down and the lower part of the island was covered in dirt and dust from the collapse, the air was difficult to breath. And they wanted to go home.

One Coast Guard official, witnessing the throngs of people who had fled to the water's edge put out a radio message. He simply asked the public, the people the politicians don't trust in these circumstances, to help. He urged anyone with a boat to please come to Manhattan and help these people.

And they did, by the hundreds. Yet, when we watch disasters unfold, inevitably the politicians and bureaucrats rush in and try to order the "civilians" to cease all assistance immediately and "leave it to the experts."

I was in San Francisco the day the earthquake hit in 1989. Throughout that day the "civilians" were putting out fires, directing traffic, and shuttling commuters around the city. In addition, they were the ones rescuing people from the collapsed highway and from buildings that had pancaked. They did so while the "professionals" were standing around debating whether to do anything, and, what. Here is a short documentary about how civilians shuttled 500,000 people out of Manhattan on 9/11.

If libertarians are selfish, how do you explain him?

2011-09-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

Libertarians are selfish, self-centered, mean people only out for themselves. Well, that’s what I’ve heard. Critics on both the left, and the right have said so. It must be true. But how do they explain John Perry?

John Perry, like President Obama, is the offspring of an interracial marriage. And like Obama he had a strong interest in politics and even went to law school, befriending John F. Kennedy, Jr. there. It hadn’t always been clear that John would go to law school, or any university for that matter. As a child he was believed to have a learning disability. He was nine before he learned to tie his shoes or to read. But he discovered a passion for learning. After studying French he went to learn Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and Swedish.

After law school, John and a friend specialized in helping immigrants find their way through the legal labyrinth constructed by xenophobes to keep them out. John helped many of them file for political asylum. Then John did something odd, he went to the police academy and became a police officer, taking a job investigating police abuses after his graduation. He became active in the New York Civil Liberties Union and a board member. Executive director Barbara Bernstein remembers him as a passionate defender of the rights of others. She said: “At board meetings… he sort of out libertarianed us. If someone thought it wasn’t the right timing or wasn’t winnable, he was an idealist. He made us justify what we were doing.”

One life-long friend, Alfia Wallace, said: “John simply had a heart of gold. He gave and gave, never expecting anything in return.” She was right. In addition to his work with the local ACLU, John volunteered with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as an investigator. Wallace said that when she became active in the campaign for adoptee rights John joined her to help hand out flyers because it was important to her. Wallace, no doubt, found John’s wedding gift to her a bit odd—a copy Human Action, the economic masterpiece by Ludwig Mises.

Other kindness was more obvious. When a friend found himself in trouble with accumulated parking tickets he thought calling a cop for help could get matters “taken care of.” John told him not to worry; he’d handle it. Only later did the friend learn that John paid the $1,700 in fines himself. When John befriended a homeless man he allowed the man to move into his apartment so he would have a roof over his head. And, in his spare time, he did bit roles in various TV shows and movies, including Die Hard III.

An avid opponent of the war on drugs, John was often urged to run for office as a Libertarian by his fellow party members. But as a police officer that wouldn’t have been prudent. But John decided to retire from the force and even had a new job lined up at a Manhattan law firm so maybe a candidacy would be possible.

John went to 1 Police Plaza to turn in his badge and finalize his retirement from the force. All he had to do was sign the papers and leave. That was when the first plane hit one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. In civilian clothes, with a new job awaiting him, John took his badge back and quickly bought a police shirt that he changed into. From there he rushed to the Tower to help evacuate civilians from the burning building.

He entered with two other police officers and they began ushering panicked civilians to safe exits—directing them away from the main plaza where falling debris of bodies could kill them. An older woman had fainted and John was helping her, but she couldn’t move quickly and John would not desert her. It was then that the tower above him collapsed. That was the last time he was seen. The two other police officers, just ahead of him, got out safely but John stayed with the woman and lost his life.

To be a libertarian is to respect the rights of others. It means nothing less than that. John Perry spent his life, and died, doing precisely that. When he worked to rescue abused children, he was respecting the rights of others. When he volunteered with the ACLU, he was respecting the rights of others. When he campaigned against the war on drugs, he was respecting the rights of others. And, when he rushed into the Twin Towers he was respecting the rights others. He lived consciously as a libertarian and he understood what it meant, even if so many critics are clueless.

And, if you would like to honor John, do what he would do. Fight for the rights of others.

Why Does Los Angeles County Hate the Poor?

2011-08-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

A short drive from the offices of the Moorfield Storey Institute is the region of California known as the Antelope Valley. When we go to Los Angeles we drive through the area. It is one of the least densely populated areas of the greater LA region, with around 5,000 people spread out over 442 square miles. About a third of the residents are black or Latino. The population is older than average, less educated than average, and less wealthy.

Many of these people live miles from their nearest neighbors. Like us, these are people who enjoy life in the high desert. But the Los Angeles Country is doing its best to drive these people off their land and make their lives miserable. The county insists it has nothing to do with confiscating property later for a boondoggle of a transportation project that is being planned.

These are people who live in isolated happiness. They are not problems to anyone. But government is sending armed "Nuisance Abatement Teams" to order people off their land and ordering them to destroy their homes. The government says they can own the land, just not live on it. (That would certainly lower the value when they pay for property stolen through eminent domain later on.) The county makes repeated demands on people to "fix" their property with expensive changes that most simply can't afford.

Now, let us assume the worst, and let us assume that these people have substandard homes that need repairs. If they don't have the fucking money, they don't have the fucking money! But the politicians, like Mike Antonovich, are used to spending other people's money and simply can't relate to what they are doing to poor people. Forcing these people off their land will ONLY make their lives worse, not better. If these people could better their lives by moving they are likely to have done so already. They aren't out to hurt themselves. They are out trying to make the most with what they have. And unrealistic demands by uncaring politicians and armed bureaucrats will NOT improve their lives. It is government run amok. I should note that the politician behind these attacks on property rights are "small government" Republicans.

Why Can't They Tell the Truth?

2011-08-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

One of the most disheartening aspects about the debate regarding marriage equality, other than the fact that there is a debate, is the dishonesty of opponents. In particular, the Christian Right simply seems unable or unwilling to tell the public the facts. They always seem to twist or distort facts in order to try to panic people into supporting their agenda.

Recently, Baptist Press published a series of falsehoods by Dale Schowengerdt, who works for the far right Alliance Defense Fund. The article is entitled Religious liberty & the case against gay ‘marriage.’” Even in headlines,, they can’t resist the urge to put “scare” quotes around marriage when it refers to gay couples. I guess it is like the Klan saying, “Blacks want their ‘human’ rights.”

The real problem with this article is that it is entirely based on the deceptive practice of bait & switch. It claims to contain evidence as to why marriage equality threatens the rights of fundamentalists to their “religious liberty.” But none of the cases they use to prove it are actually about same-sex marriage, and none of them are germane to religious liberty either.

We should be clear that what they mean by religious liberty, and what normal people mean, are two different things. They basically believe any action a religious person takes, and justifies due to their religious beliefs, qualifies as religious freedom. So, when a business throws out customers because they are gay, and the owner hates gays because he is convinced God wants him to, that is religious freedom. Actually it isn’t. It may be business freedom, or freedom of association, but it is not religious freedom. The business is not a church and the business owner is not acting in a religious capacity.

Consider the far right religious groups that are part of the Identity cult, which believes in the superiority of the white race as God’s chosen people. They hate Jews, as the children of Satan, and argue that non-whites are the “beasts of the field” that the Bible talks about, only fit as servants (slaves) to their white masters. If an Identity-owned café threw out black “beasts of the field” people would normally see this as a discrimination issue, not a religious one.

I happen to support the freedom of non-government, private businesses to discriminate for any stupid reason they wish, and would boycott them for doing so, and urge others to follow my lead. But ADF isn’t trying to defend that. They don’t want a business owner to be free to throw out Baptists for instance. They won’t go to court to defend an anti-Semite’s rights to refuse to serve Jewish customers. In fact, they demand laws to protect them as a special class, because they are religious. For instance, they would want laws that make it illegal to fire people who won’t work on whatever Sabbath day they think some deity mandates. They do NOT support either liberty or equality of rights. They want one set of rights for themselves, which they then want denied to the LGBT community. Moral hypocrisy, sadly, is pretty much standard practice in fundamentalism.

Let us look at every single incident used by Schowengerdt to “prove” marriage rights for gay couples are a threat to him and his fellow bigots.

The first case is the resignation of Peter Vidmar, who took a position with the U.S. Olympic team. Vidmar, it turned out, had a record of anti-gay political positions. Here is how USA Today reported the Vidmar story: They said that when the Chicago Tribune broke the story that Vidmar had been an activist against civil rights for gay people ,“reaction was nearly immediate—and almost entire negative—within the USOC.” Please note the immediate, negative reaction came from within the US Olympic Committee, because ADF claims otherwise.

Olympians, former and current, said Vidmar was supposed to represent all people and that his activist role in denying some people rights made him unfit for the job. Vidmar resigned his position almost immediately. ADF used this case to substantiate his claim that “if efforts to redefine marriage through the law are successful, orthodox Christians will be subject to persecution.”

There are numerous problems with this. First, Vidmar was NOT an orthodox Christian, he was a member of the Mormon sect, which most religious right churches would call a cult and non-orthodox. This includes most supporters of ADF and readers of Baptist Press, which may be why they left out the fact that Vidmar was a Mormon. Second, what is meant by persecution? No one attacked Vidmar, denied him any of his rights, threatened him physically, wanted the state to arrest him, etc. Individuals within, and some without, the USOC did nothing more than express their First Amendment right to free speech and criticized the selection of an anti-rights activist to this position. Vidmar then resigned.

Apparently the ADF thinks that free speech is persecution, implying that any criticism of them is persecution. This is how they exaggerate “persecution” to make it fit where it doesn’t fit. There is NO persecution of Christians in America. There are Christians who pretend they are persecuted, who play the victim card with the slightest provocation, but there is no real persecution of Christians. Now, these Christian may want laws to persecute others, such as Mormon polygamists, or gays, but the law does not persecute them for being Christian.

Also note that it was Vidmar’s anti-gay views in general that upset people. ADF pretends this how gay marriage persecutes “orthodox Christians” because Vidmar was an activist in the campaign to strip gay couples of the right to marry in California. But that law was overturned and doesn’t currently exist. It did not exist when Vidmar was hired, it did not exist when he resigned. He may be criticized because of his views on marriage rights, but marriage law did not “persecute” him.

Here are some other examples: A photography company in New Mexico was hired to take photos at a same-sex commitment ceremony. They refused and ran into the state’s anti-discrimination laws. New Mexico did not then, nor does it now, have marriage equality. Anti-discrimination laws are an entirely different set of laws and do NOT require marriage equality to be in place in order to have this impact. Instead of talking about how anti-discrimination laws are what they are whining about, ADF instead pretends this is about marriage equality.

In Vermont, an inn refused to host a same-sex wedding. Like New Mexico, this was a violation of anti-discrimination laws. Unlike New Mexico, Vermont did allow same sex marriage. But what got the inn into trouble was NOT the marriage law but the anti-discrimination law. They would NOT have been in trouble if Vermont merely had marriage equality; it took the anti-discrimination laws to create an issue. So again, it was NOT about marriage equality.

ADF claimed: “In New Jersey, the state has vigorously prosecuted a Methodist group for not allowing a same-sex couple to use its facilities for (sic) civil union ceremony.” This is another distorted, and dishonest, description of the facts. New Jersey, which does not allow gay marriage, did not prosecute a Methodist group. They removed a tax exemption, for a very specific reason, and it did not involve a church.

The situation was that the Methodist group owned a pavilion on a beachfront, which was used by the public for various functions. The property in question was never tax exempt until 1989 when New Jersey passed the Green Acres Program to encourage private land owners to make their property available for public recreational usage. In return for a tax exemption property owners would make the property in question available to the public, there were no exceptions that said the public didn’t include gay people.

When a the issue came up of a same-sex couple renting the open-air facilities the owners suddenly had a change of heart about making it available “to the public.” They basically told the state that they no longer would abide by the terms on which the pavilion had been made tax-exempt in the first place. Property owners with the tax exemptions file to renew them every three years. The owners did that and found their exemption for the pavilion was denied. All the other properties that they applied for exemptions had those exemptions renewed. That is the full extent of the “vigorous” prosecution.

It should be remembered that had this been a church, New Jersey law would still allow it to discriminate and it would still remain tax-exempt, as is the case with all religious worship places.

ADF says that a “Virginia municipality’s human-rights commission ordered a video-duplication business to copy two documentaries promoting homosexual behavior, even though the business owner said that producing the material would violate his religious and ethical values.” Virginia does not have marriage equality. Again a city anti-discrimination ordinance was involved and there was nothing in the case that would be different because of marriage equality, if it existed there.

I also note that when Christian fundamentalists claim something is “promoting homosexual behavior,” they almost always mean something that normal people do not mean. A video that argued that gay people had the same rights as everyone else would, in their mind, constitute promotion of homosexual behavior. In fact, the case was about a woman who went to a public service video store and asked them to duplicate a DVD of a gay rights rally, which is not the same thing as “promoting homosexual behavior.”

This illustrates the selective use of principles by ADF as well. The law, which was passed by the Arlington city council, states that that it was unlawful to discriminate on the basis of “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, age, marital status, or disability in places of public accommodation.” The law later added sexual orientation. The ADF appears quite happy with all the other anti-discrimination clauses. They are NOT defending the freedom of association of private businesses. The only right they are interested is the right to treat gay people, and only gay people, badly.

ADF also reran the debunked lies about “adoption agencies being forced to close in Boston, Washington, DC, and Illinois “rather than place adoptive children with same-sex couples in violation of their religious beliefs.” This is an out and out lie.

In all three places, the organization Catholic Charities was taking tax funds to place for adoption, children who were in state. They were recipients of tax money and were acting as agents for the state. They were told that if they wanted to continue to receive tax funds they would need to comply with anti-discrimination rules that properly apply to government agencies. No state agency should have the right to discriminate against the people who are forced to pay for its existence.

In all three cases, Catholic Charities said they would rather discriminate against gay people than receive tax funds, which is their right. But they also then said they would close, since they needed public support to stay afloat. If they needed government funding to operate, they are, for all practical purposes, an agent of the state and NO LONGER operating as a private, religious charity.

It was widely reported that in Massachusetts, when Catholic Charities made a big stink and closed, that a Mormon adoption agency continued to operate and was quite free to discriminate against gay couples, according to the dictates of their church leadership. But they were privately funded and not acting as an agent of the state.

These cases were about how tax monies may or may not be used. And it was about how agents of the state must treat the people who are forced to fund their organization. It was about anti-discrimination laws and tax funding; it was not about gay marriage per se.

None of the examples offered by the hysterical ADF actually involves an infringement of religious freedom related to gay marriage. Even if we define “religious freedom” as widely as they do, which is inconsistent with the definition of religious freedom in every other area of law, none of the cases were about gay marriage. ADF purposely confuses people by using examples of anti-discrimination laws and then pretending it was about gay marriage. That some of the examples they use are in states where gay marriage is illegal proves this is not about gay marriage.

What ADF dishonestly does, is claim the issue is about religious freedom and gay marriage, but then brings up issues of public services and anti-discrimination laws instead. These are not the same thing. They offer a litany of examples that apply to the latter category and no examples that apply to the former, even as they pretend to be talking exclusively about the former. In marketing, this is called bait and switch, and considered highly unethical and deceptive. In politics it is the same thing.

Marriage Equality in New Zealand?

2011-07-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

Research New Zealand did a poll of Kiwis asking them about their support of same-sex marriage there. Currently Civil Unions are allowed but marriage is restricted and regulated to opposite sex couples only. The most recent poll found that 60% of Kiwis said they were accepting of same-sex marriage, only 34% said they opposed the idea. Two percent felt there was no difference between marriage and civil unions and 4% were not sure what they thought.

The numbers showed that women, more than men, supported marriage equality, with 66% of all females supporting it where 54% of men supported marriage equality.

As all polls in the United States indicate as well, there is a clear and strong difference in support according to age. Kiwis between the ages of 18 and 34 support marriage equality 79% to 19%. Even among those between the ages of 35 and 54 support exceeds opposition by 61% to 32%. Only older Kiwis, over the age of 55 oppose marriage equality and even there they are close to being evenly split: 44% to 49%.

Kiwis often identify racially into two groups. Pakeha are Europeans or non-Maori citizens. The second group is the ethnic Maori and Pacific Islanders. Interestingly the poll showed higher support for same sex marriage among Maori residents than among Pakeha: 66% for Maori/Pacific and 61% for Pakeha. People who identify with other racial groups were also supportive: 49% to 36%. I would assume this is mainly Chinese, Indian and other Asian groups.

The poll also looked at support geographically. The highest support came from resident of South Island, the most rural of the two main islands. There 64% supported marriage equality to 30% who were opposed. On North Island the poll looked at support in upper North Island, versus the rest of the island. I am not able to find how they define these regions. The problem with not knowing their boundaries is that Auckland, which contains 25% of the population of New Zealand could be seen as being in upper North Island or Central North Island depending on the dividing line used. Lower and central North Island saw support at 62% and upper North Island saw support at 57%. Depending on where Auckland is located this may indicate that rural kiwis are more accepting of marriage equality than urban kiwis. But more information would be need to determine that.

Support for marriage equality increases with income, which is what I would expect. For those earning under NZ$40,000 support was at 59%; for those with income between that and $80,000, support rose to 60%; and for individuals earning more than $80,000 support was 61%.

Classical liberalism as a Form of Progressivism

2011-07-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

The following is by Prof. Steve Horwitz. These are notes from a speech he gave on the role of classical liberalism as a form of progressivism. This is not a finished essay but the material is in sufficient form that it is easily understood by the average reader. His views represent well the views of the Moorfield Storey Institute and are added here you consideration and distribution.

My title is meant to provoke. I want to make a case for what has recently been termed “bleeding-heart libertarianism.” Or, put differently, I want to argue that libertarians should more consciously attempt to think of themselves as “on the left” rather than “on the right.” Some libertarians say we should be “neither,” but I want to argue that history suggests we have a home on the left and that many of our ideas suggest that too. I also want to take a short detour to ask how “progressive” the Progressives of 100 years ago really were.

Who really IS on the side of the poor? Who really IS on the side of African-Americans or women? Who really IS on the side of the innocent victims of American imperialism? I’m going to try to argue that historically classical liberalism was and so was libertarianism for much of its history, and I’m going to argue that we SHOULD be and need to recapture that spirit of progressivism.

It’s also important that libertarians NOT allow our friends on the left to claim a monopoly on the moral high ground. They don’t get one. We also care about the least well-off among us and we believe our preferred social order would do better by them than the alternatives. We need to be unafraid to push back when leftists accuse us of not caring about the poor or being racists or sexists on the basis of our policy preferences. We should not let them get away with arguing in bad faith that way. Most of our disagreements, though not all, are not about ends but about means. We share many of their ends – we disagree on what policies will best achieve them. Let’s force them to debate the empirical effects of policies, not whose motives are more pure.

Classical liberalism in the 19th century

Making the case that classical liberalism, especially the defense of free markets, was historically considered “progressive” against the conservatism of the day is actually not that hard. On three issues, our 19th century intellectual ancestors were the ones on what today would be called the “progressive” or “left” side of those topics. Let me list them first and then explore some of the arguments of the time:

▪ Racial equality

▪ Gender equality

▪ Anti-imperialism

Racial equality

David Levy’s work: How the Dismal Science Got its Name. In the great debates over racial equality in the mid 19th century, the combatants were the conservative Romantics such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlysle and classical liberals such as J. S. Mill. The Romantics argued in favor of tradition and hierarchy and believed that the commitment to markets and capitalism would destroy tradition/hierarchy because it treated everyone as equal, what Levy calls “analytical egalitarianism.”

NOTE: the 19th century liberals understood, correctly, that equality was central to their world view. This point has been lost and denigrated by too many modern CLs.

When everyone’s money is green, race becomes far less important and the ability to please consumers replaces old markers of status and hierarchy. This is what Mill and others argued about capitalism and why it was good. The Romantics thought this would lead to a chaotic society in which no one knew “their place,” hence the reference to economics as a “dismal” science. Why it was dismal was because it promised a world of equality before the law in which race and other hierarchies didn’t matter.

Gender equality

Two points here:

1. Throughout the 19th century, there were a number of writers, both male and female, who made strong feminist arguments but from a classical liberal/individualist perspective. There were other feminist traditions at the time, of course, but there was a strong CL one as well. Much of this centered around sexual issues as well as married women’s rights questions. Remember that this was a time that it was illegal to sell contraceptives, or in some cases even talk about them. (And yes, they did exist.)

The debates over women’s rights were often part of the debate over slavery, as individualist feminists compared women’s second class status to that of slaves and tried to persuade abolitionist men to work for their cause.

Voting rights were an interesting issue given the split in the individualist movement between the anarchists like Spooner (who thought women would be better off going to the state capitols and burning the law books than working to get the right to vote) and the more mainstream classical liberals. People like the Grimke sisters and Voltairine de Cleyre, as well numerous men, took up the individualist side of the emerging feminist movement.

2. Capitalism, as an economic system, liberated women in a whole variety of ways

▪ Transformed marriage from yokemates to soulmates, making consent and love the center of marriage. “From Status to Contract.”

▪ Slowly took wives out from under their husbands by ending coverture (though the job really wasn’t finished until the 1970s with end of marital rape laws).

▪ Created the wealth that made possible technological and market substitutes for household labor, enabling women to more easily enter the workplace

▪ Created the wealth that created the demand for labor that made women more valuable as employees

▪ Created the wealth that enabled families to educate their children more, including girls

▪ Created the wealth and changed ideologies in ways that made divorce both more acceptable and more feasible, enabling women to exit abusive marriages more easily

Did 19th century classical liberals forsee all of this? No, but they did glimpse it. As the race debate shows, they understood the equalizing/leveling effects of a vibrant market economy and they glimpsed how it would changed women’s roles and their relationship with men.

J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor here.

Anti-imperialism

Often lost is the long classical liberal tradition of anti-imperialism, much of which has its roots in the late 19th century and saw a revival among the “Old Right” of the 1930s and 40s. Herbert Spencer, the much misunderstood great libertarian of the 19th century, was one of the best on this, arguing for the fundamental equality of all citizens of world and the immorality of our imposing by force our “way of life” on others across the globe.

If “analytical egalitarianism” was good enough for human beings within the borders of the UK or (eventually) the US, it was good enough for humans elsewhere. Again, classical liberalism was cosmopolitan and progressive.

Of course peace is intimately linked with free trade, and classical liberals didn’t just argue that imperialist conquering was wrong, they had an alternative. They were not “isolationists;” they were “cosmopolitans,” but not at the point of the gun, rather through the free movement of goods, services, ideas, and people.

Bastiat: “where goods cannot cross borders, armies will.”

As with race and gender, here too trade and markets are the means toward progressive ends, in this case peace.

The Progressives weren’t very “progressive”

Late in the 19th century saw the split between the “classical liberals” and modern liberalism, with the latter taking the form of the Progressive movement. These were the progenitors of modern American liberalism as they largely combined the classical liberal commitment to progress and stated concern for the poor with the view that these goals could best be accomplished through activist government that could scientifically manage society in ways that would achieve those goals. Much of the regulatory legislation of the late 19th and early 20th century came out of these beliefs, hence “the Progressive Era.” Everything from anti-trust to the FDA to the Fed were products of Progressivism. At the state level, they supported minimum wage laws and other labor market legislation designed to protect “the weak” against exploitation.

The general tale today is that these folks were the heroes who saved us from the ravages of laissez-faire capitalism by bringing the market under the regulatory control of the state.

However, the truth is a little bit different.

Many, though not all, of the progressives were fascinated with eugenics and saw their use of government, especially in labor markets, as a way to eliminate workers who were not smart or skilled enough to survive, namely blacks and, to a lesser extent, women as well as the “mentally defective” etc.

Economists have long argued that minimum wage laws, for example, will harm lower-skilled workers by pricing them out of the market. We’ve pointed out that if minority groups have fewer skills due to historical discrimination, minimum wage laws will harm them most of all. So classical liberals today argue against minimum wage laws on “progressive” grounds. We are mystified why modern progressives support them. And we are baffled when WE are called racists for wanting to get rid of them. We tend to assume they just don’t get the economics.

Note the historical irony: the original progressives correctly understood the economics but LIKED the consequences that we today think as negative ones. Modern progressives are taking the same position as their racist intellectual ancestors, and the policies they support are having the same effects even if they don’t intend them.

He quotes Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s statement that “this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.”

Further, he quotes Henry Rogers Seager of Columbia University, who suggested that minimum wages were necessary to protect workers from the “wearing competition of the casual worker and the drifter.”

A.B. Wolfe, who would one day be a president of the American Economic Association, wrote in the American Economic Review in 1917 (quoted in part by Bernstein and Leonard): “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by minimum wages,] so would the ineffective workers. I am not disposed to waste much sympathy upon either class. The elimination of the inefficient is in line with our traditional emphasis on free competition, and also with the spirit and trend of modern social economics. There is no panacea that can ‘save’ the incompetents except at the expense of the normal people. They are a burden on society and on the producers wherever they are.”

You can find similar comments about women and much of the “protective” legislation that limited women’s access to the labor market was all about keeping them in the home to raise the kids and ensure the superiority of the white race.

A good number of major Progressive era figures were deeply involved in the eugenics movement – hardly a mark of what we today think of as progressivism.

So how did we get on the right?

Why then is classical liberalism today so often seen as “on the right?” The answer is: socialism. When Progressivism morphed into socialism, classical liberals opposed it. Socialism was seen as the new “progressive” view and got the left, while classical liberals was seen as clinging to the past and became viewed as conservative. Read anything from the 1920s and 30s and you’ll see this – including that forgotten progressive Herbert Hoover.

At the same time, classical liberal opponents of socialism found common cause with traditional conservatives in their mutual opposition to socialism and this alliance became stronger at the end of WWII with the advent of the Cold War. Plus, true classical liberals were few and far between after the Great Depression, so allying with the Right was the lesser of two evils and necessary in some fundamental sense.

By the 1960s, during the libertarian revival, there was a real attempt to separate libertarians from the Right, provoked to a significant degree by the Vietnam War and the draft, two related issues that pushed libertarians left, along with the civil rights movement. (The LP was the first political party to have a gay rights platform, and that was no later than 1980.) Murray Rothbard and others had some briefly successful alliances with the New Left and the 70s looked like a time when those might blossom.

But along came Reagan and changed this dramatically. His classical liberal rhetoric and the growing free market presence in the conservative movement and the GOP led many classical liberal types to see the Right as their home.1970s libertarians were often very counter-cultural and hippie-ish, but by later in the 1980s, the transformation to the mainstream, if not the country club, was quite clear. Those 70s libertarians also tended to be a-religious if not anti-religious, but the 80s brought more believers into the broad classical liberal tent, if not the more narrow libertarian one. All of these things together pushed libertarianism to the Right, particularly as the Reagan years saw exacerbated tensions with the USSR.

Today and tomorrow: Bleeding-heart libertarianism

That world is gone. The world we inhabit today looks a lot different, and in many ways more like the 60s with war being a major issue, not to mention the related invasion of privacy and 4th amendment issues. Throw in things like same-sex marriage and techno-freedom and many libertarians are making common cause with issues that resonate more on the left. The possibilities for alliances have never been greater and some, like antiwar.com, have been pretty successful.

Beyond that, the way in which we argue for libertarianism has shifted, with more and more people making the case that a classical liberal world better satisfies the demand for “social justice” that’s normally associated with the Left. You can call this “Hayek’s world meets Rawls’ criteria” or you can call it “bleeding-heart libertarianism” or you can just call it smarter, more socially-concerned libertarianism. Whatever you call it, it’s here and it’s allowing libertarians to see ourselves as “on the left” in ways we haven’t before.

And as I’ve argued, this is true to our longer history. The 20th century may well have been an aberration, brought on by the anti-socialist alliance with the right and the corresponding hyper-individualism that emerged out of both Rand and Rothbard. Too often over the last few decades, libertarianism has been sold as “Leave me alone, so I can get mine and you worry about yours.” That was perhaps historically understandable, but it’s not true to the history and it’s also not good strategically.

Classical liberalism began as a progressive movement and it should be so again