Free Thoughts Blog

It’s Tuesday and that means a new ​Excursions​ from George H. Smith. This week, Smith shows how the Coercive Acts led Americans to blame the king for the conspiracy to strip them of their rights and liberties.

Some nagging questions remained, however: Who was behind this conspiratorial plan?  Given the changing faces of various administrations, what was the constant factor that accounted for the unremitting efforts to subordinate Americans to the sovereignty of the British government in “all cases whatsoever”?

After passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774, one answer became increasingly common, namely: The king himself was the culprit. It was not some power behind the throne, but George III – the despot who sat on the throne — who had been at the center of the conspiracy all along. The king was the constant in a sea of variables. 

Read it here.

Imagine you’re an expert in some field of technical knowledge. Your field impacts quite a lot of people but most of them don’t understand the details the way you do. One day, Congress proposes legislation called the Make Things Better Act, which, its sponsors say, will make things better.

But wait. The Act happens to deal with exactly the field you’re knowledgeable about. And you know what? It won’t make things better. In fact, it will make things far, far worse. Not only will it make things worse, but any benefits the legislation does create will accrue exclusively to a small but powerful interest group.

So you and your other technically-minded friends mobilize against the Make Things Better Act and, through coordination and outcry, succeed in killing it. Two days later, Congress proposes another piece of legislation called the It’s Good for the Children Act. Except this time the law deals with an area outside your expertise. If you applied the lesson learned from the Make Things Better Act, you might react to this new proposal with skepticism. After all, when you were in a position to evaluate what Congress was really up to, you discovered that it wasn’t working in the interests of the American public but, instead, of a tiny and powerful minority. Couldn’t it be possible the new bill is just be more of the same?

Most likely, though, based on the way people typically react in these situations, you won’t apply that lesson. Instead you’ll say, “Boy this new law is great because my favored political party wrote it and, well, it’s good for the children.”

Drawing on a recent example, the opponents of SOPA appear to have avoided the skeptical conclusion. Many of them are calling for increased regulation of political speech by way of campaign finance restrictions. How money and speech work within the byzantine rules of political campaigns is a field every bit as complex as name servers and Internet protocols. These same folks who laughed at the late Ted Stevens’ characterization of the Internet as “a series of tubes” have no problem ignoring their own ignorance when it comes to judging regulations outside their expertise.

The skeptic’s lesson—that we should be skeptical of laws we don’t understand when we so often discover how bad those are that we do understand—goes a great distance in explaining why some of us find libertarianism compelling and others don’t.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy grounded in a set of principles about rights and their impact on the permissible scope of government. But it’s also an attitude of skepticism in the face of claims by the state that, if only given more power, it can fix whatever ails us.

It’s true that proponents of state power often have well-polished pitches for why their favored program will work. Yet we usually lack the knowledge to fully evaluate their claims. How many of us understand the economics of health care markets or the details of the global investment banking system? How many of us have the training it takes to know how interest rates impact employment or potential ways law enforcement might use the records from cellular phones? And even if we turn to the experts to explain to us why we should or shouldn’t support a given policy, those experts rarely agree and often have competing interests. After all, SOPA’s proponents were able to present “expert” arguments for their positions, too.

This ignorance—which we all suffer, for there is just too much for any one person to know—forces us to either accept at face value what our legislators tell us or to adopt a general attitude of skepticism. The latter leads in the direction of libertarianism. The former leads to bigger, more damaging government—and government more and more in the pockets of those very interest groups we hope it would instead work against.

One hopes that next time a nice-sounding bill comes along (something like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), those millions of geeks who applied their expert knowledge to SOPA and found it wanting will look past the name, will recognize their own ignorance about the particular policy area, and will instead evince a heavy dose of libertarian skepticism. SOPA was not the exception to the rule. Instead, it was just how things are done in Washington.

The new issue of the Cato Journal is out and its book review section has been taken over by Libertarianism.org. All three of the reviews are by our bloggers and all three deal directly with topics of interest to Libertarianism.org’s readers.

John Samples reviews Richard Brookhiser’s ​James Madison​, Trevor Burrus critiques Thomas Patrick Burke’s The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just?, and I look at Jason Brennan’s excellent-though-not-entirely-satisfying The Ethics of Voting.

You can download all three reviews—as well as other great articles from the new issue—on the Cato Journal’s website.

It’s Tuesday, and that means another ​Excursions​ essay from George H. Smith. This week, Smith looks an under-appreciated but key link in the chain that lead to revolution.

The Boston Tea Party has often been called a pivotal event that led to the American Revolution, but it would be more accurate to say that the British response was the true catalyst.

Beginning in March 1774, in retaliation for the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, Parliament passed four pieces of legislation known as the Coercive Acts. (Some historians include a fifth, The Quebec Act, among the Coercive Acts, but this had been in the works for some time and was not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party.) These measures, which many Americans called the Intolerable Acts, amounted to a declaration of martial law in Boston. They left Americans with no plausible course of action between the extremes of total submission and revolution.

Read it here.

Libertarians joined much of the country in honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on Monday, the national recognition of his transcendent fight for liberty and civil rights. Countless quotes attributed to King streamed on Twitter and peppered Facebook walls of people of nearly every ideological strain. Not at all coincidentally, most of the quotes reflected the political thinking of the sharer—implying a post facto confirmation that the sharer’s deeply held beliefs would comfortably answer the question “What Would MLK Do?” As much as I respect Dr. King’s heroism, dedication, and belief in justice—and I would like to think there would be issues where he and I would be in solid agreement if he were alive—I am quite sure my views and his would sharply diverge on many of the issues today. This doesn’t mean I don’t admire him or think he shouldn’t be commemorated, but I’m not going to pretend or imply he’d espouse or condone libertarianism. Nevertheless, Dr. King seems to be the lone exception to an unwritten rule that libertarians should embrace only strictly classical liberal or free market understandings of liberty. Consequently, many of today’s libertarians are notably silent about the most profound fight for liberty in the history of the United States.

My problem with MLK Day has always been that making it so explicitly about him overshadows the countless thousands who preceded him in “the Struggle”—the continuous fight for civil rights of which the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20^th century was a part—and those who were his contemporaries and, at times, adversaries. Much like I have been deeply critical of the cult of personality that surrounded Obama in 2008 or that has been associated with the Ron Paul R3VOLution since then, I find the elevation of men to virtual sainthood is detrimental both to the individuals at the center of the admiration and to the causes they purportedly represent. Furthermore, in the cases of MLK and other historical figures, it is all the more unfair that we try to map ancestral leaders onto modern political or ideological movements in order to give gravitas to current efforts. At best, efforts to co-opt a dead hero to a cause of which they were never made aware seems anachronistic and insufficient. At worst, it’s pandering. In between, there is a range of self-righteous ignorance and ahistorical self-service that denigrates both the subject and the co-opting party.

Individuals are complex and imperfect. Admirable acts are sometimes done by less-than-admirable people and vice versa. Any references to long-gone heroes should be made in context and without the implication that they would stand with the people of today doing their idea of ‘the Lord’s work.’ To that end, I would like to try to bring the ideas and history of African-Americans’ fight for freedom to a libertarian audience without saying these heroes of liberty would necessarily fit within the traditional libertarian framework. Indeed, much of the Struggle was fought from abject poverty and enforced illiteracy, concurrent to but wholly separated from (and thus ignorant of) the classical liberal tradition and free market economics. Yet, this could not possibly mean the Struggle was demeaned or less valid because of it.

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 14^th 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.

If libertarianism is to be something more than free markets—libertarianism’s guiding principle is, after all, liberty—then its adherents should recognize that liberty is the end of, not just the means to, a better society. Thus, when looking for people to hold up as exemplars of liberty, we need to stop thinking “Was ______ a libertarian?” and start thinking: Did ________ fight for liberty? Is there something we can learn from him about what it means to be free? What exactly was he fighting against—and what did his denied freedom teach him? What mistakes did he make— and what mistakes by others resulted in the denial of his freedom? How did the government fail him? How did society fail him?

These questions are all eminently more interesting than assertions that Frederick Douglass was a libertarian or that certain putatively libertarian writers were on the right side of the Struggle—true though they may be. Such discussions amount to libertarian trivia—much the way “black history” is treated each February: 30-second sound bites between segments of How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men. The context in which people found themselves as they struggled for their own freedom invariably colored their perception of the world around them, and these perceptions must be taken into account when looking back upon them from a modern vantage point. This is not to necessarily excuse their behavior or opinions that we may hold in low regard today, but in order to understand what the world looked like to them and how they chose to engage it.

Whether Libertarianism.org is the best venue to tackle these questions and contextualize the Struggle for liberty within the ‘Land of the Free’ remains to be seen, but I look forward to the conversation so long as Aaron will have me. I thank him for the opportunity to share some of this history—and my perspective on it—with you.

For Saturday, we’ve got a new video from the Turney Collection. This one, originally recorded in 1997, features a talk by Bruce Benson, chair of the economics department at Florida State University and senior fellow at The Independent Institute. Benson discusses the origin and subsequent development of legal systems. He starts by reviewing Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between two means to wealth—economic and political—and theorizes about the development of cooperation in society and the creation of systems of private property.

Watch it here.