Libertarianism.org

Are Social Networks Censoring Conservatives? (with John Samples & Matthew Feeney)

Aaron Ross Powell, Trevor Burrus, John Samples, Matthew Feeney — Fri, 29 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Matthew Feeney and John Samples join the show today to talk about how private companies are moderated their vast social networks. Recently, Facebook announced its’ new Oversight Board and Cato Institute’s very own, John Samples, is one of the members. The Board will effectively take final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.

Are big tech companies censoring conservative viewpoints? How should we talk about conservative bias? Can governments censor private companies? Does Facebook have to be transparent about what content they moderate?

Transcript:

COVID on Campus (with Bryan Caplan)

Bryan Caplan, Paul Matzko — Thu, 28 May 2020 06:00:00 -0400

While universities debate whether to re-open on schedule for the fall semester, it’s expected that hundreds of colleges that were in financial distress will shutter their doors. While that might seem like obvious evidence of decline in higher education, economist Bryan Caplan suggests otherwise. In his controversial book, The Case Against Education, he argues that higher ed does relatively little, well, ‘ed.’ COVID-19 might just help expose the systemic failures of higher education in America.

Could COVID-19 help us rethink how we do higher-ed? What was wrong with higher education before the pandemic that we could fix now? how is higher education just a signaling mechanism to employers?

Analyzing Economic Decisions in Two Questions

Steven Horwitz — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:03:34 -0400

In 1946, the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt published a book entitled Economics in One Lesson where he took the idea that the good economist sees the long-run, and unintended, consequences of choices and demonstrated how that principle could be applied to all kinds of particular questions in economics. With due acknowledgement to Hazlitt, I want to suggest that another way to look at economics is through two questions that capture what is distinct about the “economic way of thinking.” We might call this perspective “Economics in Two Questions.”

Good economists are constantly asking “is it worth it?” and “as compared to what?” Those two questions, which are deeply intertwined, provide the analytic framework for applying the economic way of thinking to a whole range of topics.

The “is it worth it?” question is at the heart of marginal analysis. Economists argue that when contemplating a choice, the question is, or should be, always about the benefits and costs that come with that specific choice. Imagine a student deciding whether she should spend one more hour studying for a physics test. Asking the “is it worth it?” question means asking what are the benefits of one additional hour of studying physics versus the costs of doing so. It’s not a question about the total time spent studying physics, or whether taking physics was a good idea. Those decisions have already been made. All that matters now are the benefits and costs going forward. Those are what we call the marginal benefits and costs, as they are the ones that come with the specific margin of choice faced by the actor.

As I noted earlier, whether something is worth it is closely connected to the “as compared to what?” question. We see this when we explore the nature of cost. For our physics student, the marginal cost of spending one more hour studying physics is whatever she gives up to do so. Perhaps the next best use of her hour was studying for chemistry. Perhaps it was hanging out with friends. Maybe it was folding laundry. Economists consider cost to be the next best alternative that we gave up to make the choice we made. (Technically, it’s the “expected subjective value of achieving the end associated with that choice,” but “next best alternative given up” will work for our purposes.) This is what we call “opportunity cost.”

Notice how opportunity cost is inherently comparative, and that means that our first question (“is it worth it?”) is also inherently comparative. Asking if making a specific choice is “worth it” means asking whether the net marginal benefits it delivers are greater than the next best alternative. Is studying physics for another hour “worth it?” It depends on whether the net benefits are perceived to be greater than those from any of the alternatives the chooser faces.

Key to the economic way of thinking is considering costs. All choices involve sacrificing resources from other uses. Just because something is “good” and we derive benefits from it doesn’t mean we should continue to do that thing until the gross benefits equal zero. We always have to think in terms of net benefits by considering the cost in terms of alternatives. The marginal cost might be greater than the marginal benefits, in which case it’s a bad choice.

Thinking this way is what economists mean when we say we are searching for an “optimal” solution. We want to find out where the net benefits of all choices just equal zero such that no rearrangement of resources could produce a better outcome. Even with just one choice, we are interested in the point at which the marginal benefits just equal the marginal costs.

This is why we say provocative things, such as “the optimal quantity of pollution is not zero” or “the optimal quantity of deaths or building collapses in an earthquake is not zero.” Although putting things that way might not get us invited to the best parties, there is an important truth about those statements that reflects the two questions that frame the economic way of thinking.

We could, if we put enough resources into it, perhaps reduce the level of pollution to zero or earthquake-proof every building to prevent all damage and death. But would it be worth it? And as compared to what? Devoting resources to pollution reduction means sacrificing other ends that we might value. The same with shoring up buildings. For example, doing the latter might indeed save lives in an earthquake, but perhaps the resources could have been better used to work on a cure for cancer or create safer cars. Those options might well save more lives than are saved on the margin by devoting additional resources to earthquake prevention. And perhaps we value the output we would have to give up by devoting resources to pollution reduction more than we value the marginal reduction in pollution. Pollution reduction has costs in terms of resources and wants sacrificed, as does preventing earthquake damage and deaths.

When economists say things like “the optimal quantity of pollution is not zero,” it has to be understood in terms of the two questions. Economists are always thinking in terms of decision-making on the margin and opportunity cost. “Optimal” here does not mean “ideal.” We all would prefer a world in which pollution and earthquake damages and death were all zero, if we could get there costlessly. But since all of the choices involved in attempting to achieve that end involve costs, we have to ask if it’s worth it and what the relevant comparison is.

“Optimal” means “yes, the net benefits are positive and no other alternative provides greater net benefits.” The optimal quantity of pollution is that amount at which neither less pollution nor more pollution would provide greater net benefits. The same with the optimal quantity of earthquake protection (or damage and death, to look at it from the other end). To a non-economist it might sound off-putting on the surface, but it expresses an important insight about both economics and the human condition: nothing comes without a cost.

One final point worth considering is that although economics is very good at asking these questions, economists qua economists have no special insight on what the answers are in any specific case. In order for me to even make a guess at the optimal quantity of pollution, I would need to know what every other person’s judgment of the benefits and costs of pollution (reduction) were. The subjectivity of costs and benefits prevents any one person or group of people from knowing a priori what the optimal solution is. We can say pretty confidently it’s not zero in the case of pollution because we know there are technological choices out there that could reduce pollution but that we simply find to be too expensive (“not worth it”) in terms of the marginal benefits they would provide.

One could say the same about increasing the safety of cars and the belief that the optimal number of auto deaths is not zero. The fact that we allow people to drive at 70 miles per hour is alone evidence that we don’t believe that reducing car-related deaths to zero is worth the cost.

The expertise of economists lies not in being able to provide definitive answers to the two questions, but in constantly asking them as a way to get citizens to engage in process of figuring out what the answers might be. Serving as a forum to help answer those questions is the role of markets in a liberal society. It is one place where we bring our subjective judgments into play and contribute to creating prices, which serve as indicators of the prospective benefits and costs of various actions. Market prices give us a way, albeit an imperfect one, of gauging whether an action is “worth it” by comparing its benefits and costs to various alternatives.

Generally speaking, most economists would love for all of these kinds of questions to be answerable through markets. Inevitably, however, some questions can’t be answered effectively in markets and we turn to either politics or community norms to resolve them. An ideal political system would be one with institutions that let us express our preferences, and have them aggregated to find a solution all would consent to, as well as the market does. Whether real-world political systems live up to that ideal is a question worth pondering, but at least in principle a well-structured and decentralized political system can serve as another forum for answering those two questions in certain situations. The same is true of small enough communities who can develop agreed-upon norms to solve problems that markets struggle with.

Unpacking these last couple of points would be an essay (or book) of its own. What matters is that they are all possible ways of finding consensually acceptable answers to the two questions of economics, and that they illustrate that economic expertise lies in asking the questions, not answering them. Economists are no more knowledgeable about what would make everyone happy than are the people who populate our theories and models.

Hazlitt’s “one lesson” of seeing the long-run consequences of our choices remains salient, but thinking about economics in two questions provides a nice window on the nature of those choices and how we reconcile the differing and conflicting answers that individuals might offer in response. Asking “is it worth it?” and “as compared to what?” is central to how the economic way of thinking helps us frame issues of social policy in a manner that enables us to discover collectively the best ways of addressing them.

Reconciling Libertarian and Leftist Views of Power and Equality

Akiva Malamet — Fri, 22 May 2020 11:49:16 -0400

Libertarians and leftists often see themselves as occupying different sides of a political divide. Market-oriented libertarians and liberals identify with the cause of liberty, while the socialist left tends towards the ideal of equality. However, there is far more commonality between these than might appear. Both libertarians and leftists are critical opponents of power and its myriad abuses, whether out of concern for equality, or for liberty.

However, there is a significant point of departure between these camps over the nature of social institutions and how they work. It is this difference among others that truly sets libertarians and socialist leftists apart. Crucially, I am not claiming that social science is the only dividing line (values are extremely significant) but rather that nuanced differences in normative theory become more pronounced when discussing institutions. Although the libertarian view offers a number of superior insights, we ought to recognize the depth of our common discourse and the possibility for bridging divides.

Shared Values, Shared Heritage

Libertarian and liberal thought usually begins with a strong commitment to the moral centrality of individual freedom and self-sovereignty. Libertarians in the Kantian and natural rights traditions argue that every person has inherent ownership over their own bodies. Ownership in my person confers the right to use my body to act as I wish, provided my actions do not violate the rights of others, and interactions are always consensual. Consequentialist libertarians argue that we ought to maximize each person’s ability to choose and direct their own lives. They argue that achieving good outcomes (or maximizing utility) requires advancing the capacity of each person to make independent choices.

Both camps hold that people should be largely allowed to act without being interfered with, and that coercion and physical force are grievous moral wrongs. This concern applies to all areas of life and human existence, from personal activities like expressing my gender identity, choosing my sexual partners, and consuming recreational drugs, to how I engage in commerce and what I can buy and sell. As a result, libertarians of all stripes are fiercely against any person being imposed upon by someone else without their agreement.

In this regard, libertarians are strong critics of social hierarchy. Liberalism (from which libertarianism originates) arguably begins with the critique of monarchy in the writings of John Locke and others, and via defenses of free speech and religious tolerance. Liberals have been critics of religious persecution and feudalism, abolitionists opposing slavery, supporters of free trade and private property, and fierce critics of both imperialism and colonialism. All of these efforts have been explicit attacks on an idea unfortunately now used mainly on the left—the privileges that some parties hold above others.

The leftist and socialist traditions bear a similar heritage, evolving as out of liberalism as a radical egalitarian critique of its ideological parent. They do so primarily around economics, but have also been critical of versions of liberalism that defend imperialism or limitations on rights of women and minorities. Many leftist and socialist conceptions of equality are arguably attempts at expanding freedom by dismantling hierarchies and increasing individual autonomy. This connection was raised by libertarian luminary Murray Rothbard in his essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.” Rothbard points out that leftists and libertarian share a historical resistance to monarchy and feudalism, and advocacy for universal rights, equality under the law, and economic and political enfranchisement. Liberal thinkers such as Frederic Bastiat sat on the left (anti-monarchical) side of the French National Assembly together with ardent socialists.

In this light, the divide between liberty and equality, libertarian and leftist, is far less substantive than often believed. As I’ll discuss later, true liberty requires equality among persons, in a society not fundamentally organized around divisions of power. This is a view held and defended by liberal and libertarian heroes such as Smith, Mises, Hayek, and many others, as well as by major thinkers of the left from Marx and Engels to Foucault and Butler.

Means of Production: The Property Fiefdom

However, similarities of ethical concern diverge considerably once integrated with institutional analysis. For many on the socialist left, a chief conduit of oppression and power over others is the ownership of property and capital. Socialists such as Marx classically stated that the key question of society is who controls the means of production. On this view, the finances and equipment to make goods and services allow you to shape or direct the actions of others by controlling their material conditions.

The socialist tradition sees control of resources as a monopolistic affair. A select group of wealthy capitalists, what Karl Marx called the bourgeoisie, or for Bernie Sanders the “millionaires and billionaires,” run all major businesses and own most natural resources. They can set the rules for how goods and services are distributed, who can work, how much people are paid, what they must do in their jobs, what things cost, and so on. This view often (though not always) relies on the labour theory of economic value, in which value is determined by the amount of work put in by the person who performed it. On the labour theory, capitalists exploit workers by not giving them the full profits, or surplus value, from the sale of their goods and services.

The labour-theory view is well-illustrated by Napalm Death, (the legendary humanitarian, social anarchist grindcore band) in “From Enslavement to Obliteration”:

“Committed to a life of slavery/
In the factories our own hands have built/
Where we must work twice the graft/
Before gaining the goods we’ve already slogged to create.
To consume all things material/
Stands above human compassion/
As we compete with our fellow man/
In the bid for a stronger position.
In our ruthless search for prosperity/
We become the tools of our own oppression/
Forming the backbone of a society/
That thrives on mass division.”

However, oppression can also simply involve control and dominance by the wealthy over the autonomy of workers. Elizabeth Anderson advances this point in “Private Government,” a highly critical but non-Marxist view of the contemporary workplace. Anderson argues that businesses and corporations often function as dictatorial environments, in which bosses are able to impose severe demands on workers.

Many leftists believe that capitalists manipulate politics by bribing politicians through campaign contributions and sometimes even directly. Capitalists can also pressure politicians to do as they wish in return for providing the state with resources. Leftists (particularly of the Marxist bent) frequently argue that capitalists coerce the public to support measures favouring their interests, either through fear of economic reprisal, or through ideological indoctrination that the system also benefits them.

From any of these avenues, the state is manipulated to act primarily on the behalf of the wealthy, shaping society for their benefit. We are thus ultimately faced with a class division of economic elites from everyone else. The central struggle of politics is to wrest resources from the hands of the wealthy, propertied classes and redistribute them to the masses, and to provide protections for the public from employer abuses.

Means of Predation: The Stomping Boot Heel

Liberalism takes a decidedly different approach. For this tradition, what is important is not control over the means of production, but rather over the means of predation. The central instrument for control and dominance over other people is not the market, but the state. Ownership of resources is less significant compared with the power to use violence, often imposed in a heavily predatory, bandit-like fashion. It is the state, with its territorial monopoly on the “legitimate use” of force which ultimately determines who has property and to what extent it is protected, who can act and decide, and who cannot. While control of a business will aid someone in impacting the behaviour of others, it still remains significant that in a free market, no person can be directly made to work for anyone else. It is only the power of government that fully grants the power to dominate.

As the sociologist Franz Oppenheimer argued in his opus The State:

“There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”

From a libertarian point of view, the true class struggle is not primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the wealthy and the poor. Rather as Randall Holcombe and others argue, it is between those who control the government, and those who do not. In the economic realm, we consensually exchange our services. In politics, we force others to obey our will. This is still the case even if as Michael Munger argues, not all exchanges are perfectly optimal.

Liberals argue that the chief political struggle is not about resources per se, but about limiting the power and scope of the state. This is made even more significant when we consider that economic value is not determined by labour, but by the subjective values and preferences of each individual. Thus, workers are not not forced to serve any particular employer, and an employer cannot extract any kind of surplus value or profit from their work. Furthermore, because preferences are subjective, the power held by business is contingent on efforts to to serve consumers. Leftists are correct to highlight that market dominance provides businesses with influence, but overlook how such power can rapidly shift if consumers decide to abandon certain products or services. Big companies, unlike states, are continually subject to competition.

Furthermore, political power is not garnered simply by having capital. Access to money does not automatically determine the ability to buy influence. Rather, political reach is directed by the extent to which extensive regulations and taxes encourage lobbying and rent seeking, establishing a market for political manipulation and corruption. It is important not only to look at the mere presence of money or lobbying, but on structures and processes in states that allow institutions, or the “rules of the game,” to be distorted.

As Mancur Olson observed, the combination of concentrated benefits to a specific group, together with dispersed costs across society, leads to incentives to lobby on the part of the former, but not the latter. More basically however, if the state is in the business of distributing funds and regulating industry, such groups have an immediate incentive to maneuver policy in to benefit themselves. As a result, it becomes possible to distort taxes and regulations to discriminate against others in your favour. Such activities often hurt poor and marginalized people the most.

These processes aren’t just occasional instances, but built in to the system. Rent-seeking and lobbying occur because state policy is universally applied. Thus, even ethically inclined actors are incentivized to lobby out of fear that others will gain and they will lose. Government policy inherently creates perpetual defection in an ongoing prisoner’s dilemma. As Frederic Bastiat argued in “The Law,” regulations and taxes enable socially sanctioned redistributive theft, or “legal plunder.” The power of state enables politicians and bureaucrats to steal property from ordinary people who are rightful owners, to interest groups to whom the resources do not belong.

No Masters: Together Against “The Man”

It is tempting for a pro-market, libertarian-identifying person to conclude the debate wholly on the side of liberalism. However, as I said at the outset, I think there are important insights both sides of this discussion might learn. The philosopher Roderick Long argues that the major issue in politics is not simply the relative virtues and vices of states or markets, but rather equality of authority, a view also held by Elizabeth Anderson. Whether we have the right to impose ourselves on people and create obstacles either to the actions they will or would like to take marks the divide between freedom and oppression. Being critical of hierarchical relations, of some choosing for others, is the central mission for all lovers of equal liberty.

Thus, what’s important to note in the leftist critique of markets is the possibility (though not inherency) of economic actors to sometimes eliminate or reduce the range and quality of choices available. This impacts where we can work, our job requirements, and the range and costs of goods and services. Even if an economic actor is not a monopoly, difficult life circumstances as well as costs and frictions in the labour market mean that sometimes the deal we accept isn’t one which we are fully or even largely happy with. Sometimes negotiating leverage is more heavily weighted to one side of the table. The opportunity costs people face can be brutal ones, and pro-market libertarians should be the first to acknowledge that reality, even if they remain skeptical that government action is the best, or even a permissible, way to address them.

In non-economic realms, civil society can sometimes impose values and norms which oppress people despite being nominally voluntary. Such informal pressures often become the justification for physical force. This is an idea shared by classical liberal stalwarts like John Stuart Mill as well as libertarian-leaning leftist heroes such as Michel Foucault.

More radically, property requires justification not only in terms of the fruits of one’s labour, but in terms of whether it contests or engenders coercion. It is certainly true that property rights are essential to a free society. They allow us to pursue a variety of independent plans and projects, to make free choices without permission from others, to innovate, and create economic surplus. In particular, property allows people to exit from situations and choose a variety of alternatives—what David Schmidtz calls “the right to say no.” It is highly significant that early fights by feminists and other equality movements have been over the right to own property.

However, as libertarian philosophers Matt Zwolinski and Kevin Vallier point out, property is upheld by norms and laws which protect and define its nature. All property, even that not governed by the state, coerces us by limiting our actions. In this regard, property and the laws structuring it coerce people both into accepting property rights, and into doing so in particular form. Entitlement to property must be justified not only by self ownership or personhood, but must also account for meaningful decreases in freedom and equality that may result. This is especially (but not exclusively) the case when property laws are a product of rent seeking. Overall, we should see institutions as an avenue to consider the contentious and difficult notion of “social justice.” Crucially, concerns about property are not equivalent to mandating any particular policy, but they do require a normative reckoning for any pro-liberty critic of power. Critiques of the state and of power must not end at the property line.

Crucially, despite the very real presence of private oppression, the largest coercive institutional monopoly of any kind remains the state. The guys with the guns still get to make the big calls. Diminishing (or even abolishing!) the state has the potential to achieve both freedom and equality. Vitally, as market friendly left-libertarians frequently point out, the state is often a direct oppressor of the poor and the marginalized. States routinely harm the least well off by distorting markets (raising prices, enforcing monopolies, and preventing mobility), stealing land and property, shutting down attempts to organize and form voluntary labour unions, and many other harms. Perpetual warfare, growing militarism, and utterly disastrous foreign interventions, as well as aggressive, violent policing and punitive criminal codes have all had especially negative and disproportionate impacts. These policies are compounded by and combined with horrific and deeply cruel migration restrictions, enforced by brutal and intensive border policing—what Bryan Caplan rightly labels a “global apartheid.”

However, for those leftists skeptical of libertarianism’s humanitarian commitments, Jason Byas asks some essential questions well worth considering. Similar observations about state power have been made by major scholars on the left. Marx’s view of political influence mirrors many ideas from liberal political economy, especially public choice. Likewise, the socialist historian Gabriel Kolko emphasized how lobbying and state privileges structure a class divide between business elites and the rest of society.

Overall, a commitment to equality of authority means a commitment to liberty for all, in which no one can force themselves or their will on anyone else. In recognizing this, anti-authoritarian and anarchist leftists and libertarians have the potential to join together in a bleeding heart movement; ending war, reforming criminal justice, and opposing cronyism and machinations by big business, but supporting freed markets, ethical exchange, and mutual aid. In this arena, both leftists and libertarians should be able to unite against many popular ideas about contemporary capitalism, regardless of broader ideological commitments. We can be joined in resistance to all forms of power and domination, fighting back against those who seek to impose themselves on the equal freedom and dignity of others.

The Radio Right (with Paul Matzko)

Aaron Ross Powell, Trevor Burrus, Paul Matzko — Fri, 22 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

When you list successful government censorship campaigns, like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Comstock laws, the censorship of right-wing radio in the 1960s should be right up there in the pantheon of the most egregious acts of government censorship in American history. Paul Matzko, author of The Radio Right, talks about this and more throughout the episode.

How has our mainstream media changed over time? Have Americans always mistrusted the media? Why were many radio personalities in the 1960s also members of the clergy? What were the Polish ham boycotts? What is the Fairness Doctrine and how did affect the radio landscape?

Auberon Herbert and Voluntaryism

Paul Meany — Thu, 21 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Summary:

Auberon Herbert was born into a wealthy English aristocratic family and started his political career. But after witnessing the horrors of war through Europe and America and witnessing the incompetence of parliament, he lost faith in the abilities of the state. Inspired by the writing of Herbert Spencer Auberon set out to articulate a political philosophy emphasizing the importance of consent and the voluntary state, which is strictly limited to the protection of our natural and self-evident rights.

An Introduction to Locke's Two Treatises

Paul Meany — Wed, 20 May 2020 14:31:26 -0400

Image Credit: Law Book Exchange

It is impossible to write a history of political thought without dedicating a chapter to John Locke. Today, Locke is often referred to as one of the founding figures of modern liberalism. His most famous political work, Two Treatises on Government, is the most prominent work on natural law theory in the Western world.

Biography

Locke was born in England in 1632 in Wrington, Somerset and was later raised in a small village called Pensford. His father was a legal clerk for a landed gentleman named Alexander Popham who would later fund Locke’s studies in college. Locke was by no means a gentleman or aristocrat from birth; his relatives were tanners and brewers. Thanks to his father’s aforementioned connections to Popham, Locke was able to attend one of England’s finest schools, Westminster. The curriculum was a balance between ancient pagan writings, religious scripture, and the writings of the church fathers. He would continue his studies at Oxford where he was not particularly enamoured with the medieval scholastic curriculum. But his readings of Rene Descartes inspired him to delve into natural philosophy, or what we today would call science.

Locke lived in an era of great upheaval and change. As a boy, Locke witnessed two civil wars and the execution of a monarch. During his adulthood, he would yet again see another monarch deposed. The intellectual life of England was also in tumult; Locke was exposed to the burgeoning revolution in the sciences as well as the establishment of colonies in America, which provided a blank canvas for political theorists.

Absolutism

During the 17th-century, European monarchies were centralizing power and justifying doing so by espousing a new ideology of absolutism. While there is a great deal of variety among absolutist thinkers, many focused upon two principles: firstly, that the monarch is divinely ordained and granted supreme authority and power by God, and, secondly, that the monarch cannot be legitimately deposed or resisted by his subjects. Kings were appointed by God, their power was not up for either dispute or debate, the only political responsibility of a citizen or more aptly, a subject, was to hold their silence and obey whatever commands the king issued from his lofty throne.

Absolutists may sound like cartoon villains to modern readers, but they were far from a joke in their own time. In England, King James wrote a treatise for his son on how to justly rule as a monarch in which he wrote that the king is “the absolute master of the lives and possessions of his subjects; his acts are not open to inquiry or dispute, and no misdeeds can ever justify resistance.” Across the channel, Louis XIV of France ,who reigned for 72 years and famously dubbed himself the Sun King, was a die-hard adherent to the divine right of kings.

There is a great deal of scholarly debate over why Locke wrote the Two Treatises, but many of these ambiguities arise from us now knowing exactly when he had completed his work. In the most general sense, it is likely Locke’s primary aim was to debunk the divine right of kings and the doctrine of unlimited subjection, a belief he had previously held before but had since rebuked. Famously Locke would then go on in his second treatise to replace the absolutist account of the origins of the state with a new idea legitimating political authority based upon natural law and the consent of the governed.

The most comprehensive theorist of absolutism was the English Royalist, Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote Patriarcha and which was posthumously published in 1680. As the most complete expression of absolutism, Filmer provided the perfect target for Locke, who dedicated his first treatise to tearing down Filmer’s argument and the second to make a positive case for his own theory of politics.

First Treatise

Generally, people tend to focus on Locke’s second treatise more than the first due to the obscure arguments and antiquated nature of Filmer’s writings. However, it is never harmful to see an authoritarian debunked so comprehensively, so even today there is still value in discussing Locke’s arguments against Filmer.

In Filmer’s eyes, all authority between people is grounded in patriarchy, i.e. bears the resemblance of the authority of a father over his family. According to Filmer, the whole earth was given to Adam, the first man. All political authority and ownership is a consequence of God bequeathing the earth to Adam. Adam subdivided his authority among his descendants resulting in a multiplicity of kingdoms, all of which are an expression of God’s will. If you are one of the chosen few, the descendants of Adam, then you have absolute power over your subjects, whose only job is to passively obey. God the Father, reigning in heaven, mirrored the paternalistic authority exercised by earthly kings and princes over their flock of subjects. Since all authority is derived from God, any sort of rebellion against royal authority is an attack upon God’s will. Thus, revolution or rebellion is never justified in Filmer’s theory.

Locke points out that the book of Genesis never actually states that God gave the world to Adam and furthermore he is never referred to as a king. Even worse for Filmer, Genesis never mentions any kingly authority derived from the lineage of Adam. Locke charitably argues that even if Adam was a king and his sons inherited his kingly authority, what does that have to do with kings in the contemporary world? The genealogical line of Adam is hopelessly lost to history and, to update Locke’s argument, ‘23 and Me’ didn’t exist in the 17th century to rectify the conundrum. Locke concludes that even being charitable to Filmer, the genealogical ties of Adam are not an effective method of establishing political authority.

State of Nature

After soundly refuting Filmer’s arguments, Locke begins to provide his own account of the origin of government. Locke believed that this was essential because men like Filmer promote the “dangerous belief that all government in the world is merely the product of force and violence.” Locke wanted to prove that the world is not a mere amalgam of violence and arbitrary authority and that there is something that separates a legitimate from an illegitimate government. To uncover this, Locke theorized how society would have looked before any political authority was established, when it existed in a state of nature. By analyzing how a political society first came into being, Locke believed that he could uncover how the state was founded and determine the functions of a legitimate state.

Locke was not original in this regard as previous thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes had also used the state of nature as a conceptual device. But Hobbes’ and Locke’s conclusions were radically different. Hobbes believed that without some form of sovereign authority, men in the state of nature would constant fear the schemes of others resulting in their lives being “nasty, brutish, and short.” Without that authority, mankind would degenerate into “the war of all against all.” Put simply, without the state there was little to no hope for a dignified life.

Locke firmly rejected this idea of perpetual war. Even if we lacked a framework of institutions to direct political power, Locke firmly believes that we would still be able to live in harmony due to principles of natural law which were bestowed upon us all by God. For Locke, the state of nature “though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence.” All people are “all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker” who has bestowed every person with similar faculties. Because of this equality “there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses.” In other words, our lives cannot be dictated by the whim of another; and no one is born to a status above or below the rest. This natural law is innate to the minds and hearts of all people and it teaches “all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

The state of nature is by no means perfect; people will transgress upon one another’s rights, resulting in conflict. In the state of nature, if one’s rights are violated it is perfectly permissible to use violence in self-defence, as Locke states (in quotation of the Christian Bible), “Who so sheddeth Mans Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed.” In the state of nature, we are all our own judge, jury, and executioner; we all have the right to enact the law of nature by punishing others when they infringe upon our rights. But by and large, Locke believed that the inhabitants of the state of nature would be mostly peaceful and cooperative as they followed the guide of natural law, which “willeth the Peace and Preservation of all Mankind.” Furthermore, Locke believed that in the state of nature we would even respect each other’s private property.

Property

How did Locke believe private property existed before a state existed that could enforce property rights? This had been a problem that political thinkers had wrestled with for quite some time. Absolutists like Filmer argued that property could only ever exist under a state, therefore the monarch or sovereign could do as they pleased with the property of others as it only existed thanks to their grace.

Unlike Filmer, Locke believed that God had given the earth to all of humanity. This leads to a paradoxical question: if everyone owns everything how does anyone own anything? Locke wanted to stress that people could own things privately without the universal consent of everyone. Instead, he believed “ “has a Property in his own Person” which “no Body has any Right to but himself.” Every person owns their own body and therefore every person owns their own labour, which is the natural result of using your body productively. When a person mixes their labour with the land by tilling, fencing off ploughing or by generally improving the land, they appropriate what was once the common stock of nature for themselves. Locke believed that without labour most of the products of human life would not exist “for ‘tis Labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing.” Looking towards America and the native tribes, Locke argued that the day-labourer in England is better off than a native tribe leader because of private property and the exponential value labour adds to nature’s bounty. But Locke puts some limits on the appropriation of property since we must leave enough for others to appropriate in the future and we should avoid hoarding goods that will spoil. These natural limitations on property ownership are sidestepped by the invention of money.

Money

But by Locke’s day, most land had been claimed and there was no limitation on how much land a person could own. Gentlemanly lords owned vast estates and were supported by small armies of landless tenants. How could Locke possibly justify the current state of affairs considering it violates both of Locke’s own limitations upon property ownership? For Locke the answer is money. The two limitations on property are that there is enough for others to appropriate, at a later time, and that what you take does not spoil due to hoarding. These are both avoided when people collectively use money and decide that shiny metals will be a form of exchange. Locke argues that people have tacitly consented to the use of money and could hypothetically stop at any time but that they will not because it benefits them greatly. By using money, “men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth.”

Locke’s theory of property is a mixture of different ways of thinking about property combined into one, making it hard to fully define Locke. In some regards, Locke’s theories are custodial and environmentally oriented, while on the other they have utilitarian and capitalistic tendencies with all being pinned to a doctrine of natural law.

Legitimate Authority

The state of nature sounds pretty great, for guided by natural law we would all live in relative harmony. Then why even create a state? Firstly, we are naturally biased towards ourselves and our own affairs. And although in the state of nature each person has the right to punish those who infringe upon their rights or property, some might vigorously punish people for minor transgressions and, without any standing rule, punishments would greatly range in severity. As commerce and property ownership expanded with the introduction of money, disputes began to intensify. What was once a simple society of farmers and hunters, had now become a complex web of economic relations filled with conflicts that need to be settled. Thus, we needed the state as a third party to help us adjudicate our conflicts and standardise laws. Secondly, without the state to protect our property, we would be “uncertain, and constantly exposed to the Invasion of others.” By establishing a state we can better protect our property because for Locke, “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”

Because of these issues, people in the state of nature would come together and, through consent, would first form a political society. After this proto-political society is established, the body politic would then deliberate and erect a particular kind of government, whether that be a republic, monarchy, or democracy. Consent forms the basis of all legitimate government because, for Locke, men in the state of nature are “all free, equal and independent” and no one can be “subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”

Legitimate Ends of Government

Thinkers such as Hobbes believed that when men entered civil society they relinquished their natural rights entirely and instead relied upon the positively enacted human law of their new sovereign. Locke, on the other hand, believed that only one right was relinquished, the right to enact the law of nature which was now replaced with a system of law.

The Lockean account of human nature depicts humans as natural bargainers who are always attempting to maximize their own situation. By this logic, no one would ever voluntarily enter civil society if it did not benefit them. Therefore “for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse.” Natural law provides the yardstick with which we measure the effectiveness of government; if our life, liberty, and property remain unmolested, then the state is pursuing its legitimate ends. The law is not in conflict with freedom because, in fact, Locke believed that the “end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”

Essential for Locke is that whatever government the people may choose to establish, all people are bound by the laws it promulgates; whether you are a peasant, a noble, or a king, the law binds all equally. If people in power exempt themselves from obeying laws, they will begin to act only for their own private advantage as opposed to acting for the common good, which is the only legitimate goal of political authority. Universality is always to be upheld, and particularity always to be shunned. For Locke, “Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins.” Locke is a strict constitutionalist in this regard, expecting well-established rules to govern the governors as well as the governed.

Right to Revolution

If a person in power acts by his own private will he ought to be demoted to a private person whom no one has any obligation to obey. Locke saw government as fundamentally a relationship between people and the trust they share with one another. All people are born equal and no one is innately fit to rule over another. Legitimate power can only be established by consent as trust is placed in those in positions of authority to use their power to pursue the common good. Tyranny is a complete subversion of this trust.

Locke identifies two marks of tyranny. Firstly, it is when rulers substitute the law with their own personal advancement and betray the trust of the commonwealth. In Locke’s eyes a public person “has no will, no power, but that of the law” and they cannot utilize the laws to achieve their own ambitions, ends, and schemes, nor do so without surrendering the political authority vested in them for the common good. Locke’s second version of tyranny consists of rulers exercising what he calls “Power beyond Right” or “the use of force without Authority.” God created all people as owners of their own person, therefore there are always limits on what can be done to other people who have not violated the laws of nature.

In these two scenarios, tyrants exercise their political power against the wishes of the people who gave it to them in the first place. Tyrants break the bonds of trust that underlie a political community. Locke argues that anyone who betrays the trust of the people violates natural law and brings themselves into a state of war with the people. The rulers are the ones guilty of rebellion, not the people, as the rulers are the ones who have reneged on their end of the deal. Remember that upon entering civil society people relinquish their right to enact the law of nature; but when civil society breaks down, due to tyranny, the people regain this right and are justified in overthrowing their rulers, either replacing them or establishing a wholly new state which they believe will better secure their rights.

Locke does not believe that just any minor infraction can justify revolution. He argues that revolution is an arduous affair that requires a degree of sacrifice and dedication. This means that “such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs” but when people observe “a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way.”

The Way Locke Thinks

Locke’s Two Treatises On Government articulate three principles of how we should think about the state. Firstly, we should not be overly grateful for the state. Locke shows us that we can live without a state. It may be at times an inconvenient life, but it is nonetheless one in which our rights are broadly respected. The state of nature is not to be simply replaced with a state, but only by one which is legitimated through consent and limited government. If given the choice between brutal authoritarianism and the state of nature, Locke urges us to pick the latter. Secondly, states are artificial, by which he means that they are invented by people; and like all things that are invented, they can be tinkered with, changed, or even scrapped altogether if the situation demands it. Finally, there is always a standard against which to measure the state’s performance. If we enjoy our natural rights more securely in the state of nature than in the state we live under, then we know something must change.

His Influence

Locke was by no means perfect as either a philosopher or a person. His philosophy has many unresolved tensions and issues. For example, the 20th-century philosopher has Robert Nozick challenged Locke’s theory of property with this thought experiment: would pouring a can of tomato juice into the ocean make the sea a person’s private property? Of course not, but under Locke’s conception of property it would. As a person, Locke invested in and benefitted from slavery, despite writing about the abhorrence of slavery in his own writings. It is important not to idealize Locke as a messiah of liberalism when he personally benefited from very illiberal practices. Regardless of these tensions, Locke’s writings are fundamental to the development of liberalism, so much so that Locke is commonly referred to as the Father of Liberalism.

In Locke’s own time, Two Treatises was not a widely debated and discussed text. However, by the 18th century, Locke’s political philosophy was brought to bear on wide variety of debates such as the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and, most prominently, in the revolutions in both America and France. America’s imagination was especially captivated by Locke’s political thinking. Famously Thomas Jefferson referred to Locke’s work as part of “the elementary books of public right.” Locke’s right of revolution became a cornerstone of American Revolutionary thought. Revolutionaries such as Samuel Adams, James Otis and Jefferson liberally quoted Locke, who they believed to be a genius of political philosophy. A 1773 advertisement in the Boston Gazette for the first American edition of Locke’s Two Treatises encapsulates the enthusiasm Americans had for Locke’s political thought. The advertisement ends with the following quotation: “This essay alone, well studied and attended to, will give every intelligent Reader a better View of the Rights of Men.”

Locke’s project remains incomplete and his writings are still hotly debated and appropriated by thinkers across the political spectrum. The famous analytic liberal and libertarian philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick both acknowledge a debt to Locke’s work, Rawls admiring his theory of the social contract and Nozick using his framework of natural rights.

From a historical point of view, Locke represents a massive shift in how politics was conceptualized. While he was by no means the first to articulate the role of consent in establishing political authority, the legitimate ends of the state and the right to revolution. However, he was by far one of the most cited thinkers in the American Revolution; he was also often cited by the French revolutionaries. John Locke’s theory of natural rights is a founding document for natural rights-based libertarianism. For both libertarians and non-libertarians Locke is still to this day a worthy read.

Harry Potter

Natalie Dowzicky, Landry Ayres, Lauren Sander, Emma Ashford, Tricia Beck-Peter — Wed, 20 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Image Credit: IMDB

Summary:

Our three favorite muggles; Emma Ashford, Lauren Sander, and Trish Beck-Peter, join the show to discuss the Wizarding World of Harry Potter created by J.K. Rowling. With the existence of magic, the Harry Potter series tackles many question about immense power and good versus evil. Is Hogwarts a public school? What is the role of the Ministry of Magic?

Mentions:

Music by SupraSound and Cellophane Sam

Transcript:

When Innovation Breaks the Rules (with Adam Thierer)

Aaron Ross Powell, Paul Matzko, Adam Thierer — Fri, 15 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Beyond boosting economic growth and raising our living standards, evasive entrepreneurialism can play an important role in constraining unaccountable governmental activities that often fail to reflect common sense or the consent of the governed.

What moves the needle for progress? How has the sharing economy exposed grotesque regulatory barriers? Could this be a moment of freedom and liberation, or are we gonna get a surveillance state out of this pandemic?

Homeschooling Goes Viral (with Kerry McDonald)

Paul Matzko, Kerry McDonald — Thu, 14 May 2020 06:00:00 -0400

Because of the COVID-19 shutdown, tens of millions of American households have suddenly been forced to do school at home. Education policy expert and homeschooling aficionado Kerry McDonald joins the show to discuss why she believes this experience will lead many more families to consider educational alternatives even after the shutdowns ease. Additionally, Kerry and Paul discuss the incendiary Harvard Magazine broadside against homeschooling, Tara Westover’s best-selling novel Educated, and why the history of public schooling should make us leery of critics who accuse homeschoolers of failing to be good citizens.

COVID-19 Should Make Us Grateful for Technology

Marian L. Tupy — Wed, 13 May 2020 12:50:11 -0400

“In a way, everything is technology,” noted one of the world’s greatest economic historians, Fernand Braudel, in his monumental study Civilization and Capitalism. “Not only man’s most strenuous endeavors but also his patient and monotonous efforts to make a mark on the external world; not only the rapid changes … but also the slow improvements in processes and tools, and those innumerable actions which may have no immediate innovating significance but which are the fruit of accumulated knowledge,” he continued.

Yes, land, labor, and capital (that’s to say, the factors of production) are important components of economic growth. In the end, however, human progress in general and global enrichment in particular are largely dependent on invention and innovation. That is surely even clearer now that humanity’s hopes for the end of the pandemic and for our liberation from the accompanying lockdown rest on further scientific breakthroughs within the pharmaceutical industry. Let’s take a brief look at the impact of technology on health care, food supply, work, and sociality in the time of COVID-19.

Healthcare

The impact of modern technology is surely most keenly felt and anticipated within the sphere of human health care. Consider some of the worst diseases that humanity has had to face in the past. Smallpox, which is thought to have killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, originated in either India or Egypt at least 3,000 years ago. Smallpox variolation, it seems, was practiced in China in the tenth century, but it was not until the late 18th century that Edward Jenner vaccinated his first patient against the disease. Smallpox was fully eradicated only in 1980.

Similar stories could be told about other killer diseases. Polio, which can be seen depicted in Egyptian carvings from the 18th dynasty, is of ancient origin. Yet the disease wasn’t properly analyzed until the year of the French Revolution, with Jonas Salk’s vaccine appearing only in 1955. Today, polio is close to being eradicated (just 95 cases were reported in 2019).

Malaria, probably humanity’s greatest foe, is at least 30 million years old (the parasite has been found in an amber-encased mosquito from the Paleogene period). It was only after the discovery of the New World that knowledge about the fever-reducing benefits of the bark of the cinchona tree spread to Europe and Asia. Quinine was first isolated in 1820, and chloroquine was introduced in 1946. Artemisinin drugs, which we still use, were discovered in the late 1970s. That’s to say that humanity lived with deadly diseases for millennia without fully knowing what they were, how they were transmitted, and how they could be cured. The fate of humanity, our ancestors thought, fluctuated under the extraneous influence of the “wheel of fortune” and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. One day you were alive and next day you were not.

Contrast that glacial pace of progress, and the fatalistic acceptance of disease and death, with our response time to the current pandemic. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported the existence of a cluster of cases of “pneumonia” in Wuhan on December 31. On January 7 the Chinese identified the pathogen (novel coronavirus) responsible for the outbreak. On January 11 China sequenced the genetic code of the virus, and the next day it was publicly available. That enabled the rest of the world to start making diagnostic kits to identify the disease.

To take one example, the first COVID-19 infection in South Korea was identified on January 20. On February 4, the first test kit (made by Kogene Biotech) entered production. On February 7, the test kit was available at 50 locations around the country. Other countries followed suit.

The World Health Organization, which declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, may have acted too late. Still, it is noteworthy that just two months expired between the first sign of trouble and the time when the entire world put measures in place to retard the spread of the disease. In the meantime, we have learned a lot about governmental incompetence and regulatory overreach. But we have also learned a great deal about the spread and symptoms of the disease. Instead of starting from scratch, medical specialists in Europe and America can draw on the expertise of their colleagues in the Far East. Before the telegraph appeared midway through the 19th century, it took up to a month for a ship to carry information from London to New York. Today, we learn about the latest COVID-19 news (good and bad) and research in seconds.

By mid April, thousands of highly educated and well-funded specialists throughout the world were using supercomputers and artificial intelligence to identify promising paths toward victory over the disease. Some 200 different programs are underway to develop therapies and vaccines to combat the pandemic. They include studies of the effectiveness of existing antiviral drugs, such as Gilead’s Remdesivir, Ono’s protease inhibitor, and Fujifilm’s favipiravir. The effectiveness of generic drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, is also being evaluated. Takeda is hard at work on convalescent plasma (TAK-888) in Japan, while Regeneron works on monoclonal antibodies in the United States. New vaccines, such as Moderna’s mRNA-1273, Inovio’s INO-4800, and BioNTech’s BNT162, are under development.

We don’t know which of these treatments (if any) will work, but here is what we can be sure of: There has never been a better time for humans to face and defeat a global pandemic. The world is richer than ever before, and money is what enables us to sustain a massive pharmaceutical industry and pay for highly sophisticated medical research and development.

Coronavirus may be deadly, but it is not the bubonic plague, which had a mortality rate of 50 percent. Luckily, it is a far milder virus that has reawakened us to the danger posed by communicable diseases. Once the immediate crisis is behind us, researchers will collect billions of data from dozens of countries and analyze the different governmental responses to the pandemic. That knowledge will be deployed by governments and the private sector to ensure that best practices are adopted, so that next time we are better prepared.

Food

When the Black Plague struck Europe in 1347, the disease found the local population ripe for slaughter. Following the close of the Medieval Warm Period at the end of the 13th century, the climate turned cold and rainy. Harvests shrunk and famines proliferated. France, for example, saw localized famines in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–17, 1330–34, 1349–51, 1358–60, 1371, 1374–75, and 1390. The Europeans, weakened by shortages of food, succumbed to the disease in great numbers.

The people of yore faced at least three interrelated problems. First, the means of transport and the transportation infrastructure were awful. On land, the Europeans used the same haulage methods (carts pulled by donkeys, horses, and oxen) that the ancients had invented. Similarly, much of Europe continued to use roads built by the Romans. Most people never left their native villages or visited the nearest towns. They had no reason to do so, for all that was necessary to sustain their meager day-to-day existence was produced locally.

The second problem was the lack of important information. It could take weeks to raise the alarm about impending food shortages, let alone organize relief for stricken communities.

Third, regional trade was seldom free (France did not have a single internal market until the Revolution) and global trade remained relatively insignificant in economic terms until the second half of the 19th century. Food was both scarce and expensive. In 15th-century England, 80 percent of ordinary people’s private expenditure went for food. Of that amount, 20 percent was spent on bread alone. Under those circumstances, a local crop failure could spell the destruction of an entire community. (Those who think that COVID-19 exposed the fragility of modern society should look up the Great Famine.)

By comparison, by 2013 only 10 percent of private expenditure in the United States was spent on food, a figure that is itself inflated by the amount Americans typically spend in restaurants. Speaking of restaurants, while most have been forced to close their doors, the restaurateurs use apps to deliver excellent food at reasonable prices. Moreover, months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the shops are, generally, well stocked and regularly replenished by the largely uninterrupted stream of cargo flights, truck hauling, and commercial shipping. Due to the miracle of mobile refrigeration, fresh produce continues to be sourced from different parts of the United States and abroad. Shortly before writing this piece, I was able to buy oranges from California, avocados from Mexico, and grapes from Chile in my local supermarket. Globalization may be under pressure from both the left and the right of the U.S. political spectrum, but should the pandemic impair U.S. agricultural production, many will be forced to acknowledge the benefits of the global food supply and our ability to import food from COVID-19-unaffected parts of the world.

This extensive and, at this point, still sturdy supply chain is, of course, a technological marvel. Computers collate information about items on the shelf that are in short supply, adjust the variety and quantity of items shipped between stores, fill new orders, etc. And so, commerce that’s still allowed to go on goes on. So does charity. Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks, feeds tens of millions of people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, etc. Since 2005, the organization has been using a computerized internal market to allocate food more rationally. Feeding America uses its own currency, called “shares,” with which individual food banks can bid on the foods that they need the most. Grocery-delivery services bring food to the doorsteps of those who cannot or do not want to leave their homes. The old and the infirm can also use phones, emails, and apps to call upon volunteers to do their shopping and delivery.

Work

The nature of work has changed a lot over the last 200 years or so. Before the industrial revolution, between 85 percent and 90 percent of the people in the Western world were farm laborers. Their work was excruciatingly difficult, as witnessed by one 18th-century Austrian physician who observed that “in many villages [of the Austrian Empire] the dung has to be carried on human backs up high mountains and the soil has to be scraped in a crouching position; this is the reason why most of the young people are deformed and misshapen.” People lived on the edge of starvation, with both the very young and the very old expected to contribute as much as they could to the economic output of the family (most production in the pre-modern era was based on the family unit, hence the Greek term oikonomia, or household management). In those circumstances, sickness was a catastrophe: It reduced the family unit’s production, and therefore its consumption.

The industrial revolution allowed people to move from farms to factories, where work was better paid, more enjoyable, and less strenuous (which is largely why people in poor countries continue to stream from agricultural employment to manufacturing jobs today). Moreover, wealth exploded (real annual income per person in the United States rose from $1,980 in 1800 to $53,018 in 2016). That allowed for ever-increasing specialization, which included a massive expansion of services catering to the desires of an ever-more-prosperous population.

The service sector today consists of jobs in the information sector, investment services, technical and scientific services, health care, and social-assistance services, as well as in arts, entertainment, and recreation. Most of these jobs are less physically arduous, more intellectually stimulating, and better paid than either agricultural or manufacturing jobs ever were. Crucially, many of these service-sector jobs can be performed remotely. That means that even in the midst of the government-imposed economic shutdown, some work (about a third, estimates suggest) can go on. The economic losses from COVID-19, in other words, will be astronomical, but not total.

My own organization, for example, shut its doors in mid March. Since then, everyone has been scribbling away at home or appearing on news shows around the world via the Internet. All of us are in regular contact via the phone, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Other organizations are doing the same. As we already discussed, a great deal of shopping is taking place online. Shipping and delivery companies are expanding, with Amazon hiring 100,000 additional workers in the United States. Home entertainment, of course, has grown tremendously, with Netflix adding millions of new customers and expanding its offerings with thousands of new films and television shows. With over 30 million American children stuck at home, online learning companies are booming, and educators from high-school teachers to college professors continue to perform their jobs remotely. Telehealth is expanding, allowing patients to see their doctors in a safe and convenient way. Even minor medical procedures, such as eye exams, can be conducted remotely, and multiple companies will deliver your new specs to your front door. Banking and finance are still going on, with many people taking advantage of low interest rates to refinance their mortgages. Finally, the often unfairly maligned pharmaceutical industry is expanding as we all wait and hope for the release of a COVID-19 vaccine or effective therapeutic treatment.

Sociality

Aristotle observed that “man is by nature a social animal” and noted that without friends we would be unhappy. But the role of sociality (that is to say, the tendency to associate in or form social groups) goes much deeper than that. As William von Hippel explained in his 2018 book The Social Leap, sociality is the mechanism by which Homo sapiens came about. When early hominids were forced down from the trees (perhaps as a result of a climatic change that dried up African forests), they became more vulnerable to predators. To cover longer distances between the fast-disappearing trees while maintaining a modicum of protection against other animals, our ancestors developed bipedalism, which allowed them to free their upper body to carry weapons such as sticks and stones.

Even more important was the invention of cooperation. While a stick-wielding ape is slightly better-off than an unarmed one, a group of armed apes is much better at dispatching predators. Individuals in more cooperative bands survived to adulthood and bred more often, resulting in more-cooperative species. Furthermore, since living alone was tantamount to a death sentence, selfish apes who didn’t care about being ostracized for not pulling their weight died off, resulting in a desire for communal cooperation and a deep-rooted fear of rejection by the group.

The early hominids had brains more like those of chimps than those of modern humans. That’s because the evolutionary pressures that created the former — such as predation and food scarcity — could be overcome without tremendous intelligence. These pressures to survive were part of the physical landscape — a challenging but static environment that didn’t require a lot of cognitive ability to navigate. The environmental pressure that resulted in modern humans was the social system itself. The social landscape is much more dynamic than the physical one. Once they had banded together in groups, our ancestors were forced to forge relationships with, and avoid being exploited by, individuals with divergent and constantly shifting interests. Those who couldn’t keep up with the increasingly complex social game either died or were unable to mate.

This new pressure created a positive evolutionary cycle: Banding together created more complex social systems, which required bigger brains; bigger brains needed to be fed; and the best way to get more food was more cooperation and a more sophisticated social system. The main cognitive development that evolved from this evolutionary cycle is known as the “theory of mind.” In short, the theory of mind is the ability to understand that other minds can have different reasoning, knowledge, and desires from your own. While that seems basic, the theory of mind distinguishes us from all other life on Earth. It allows us to determine whether an affront, for example, was intentional, accidental, or forced. It allows us to feel emotions such as empathy, pride, and guilt — abilities that are keys to a functioning society.

So sociality and human beings are inseparable, as we have all been clearly reminded by the sudden restrictions on our ability to interact with others. As we sit at home, working away on our computers or watching television, most of us feel a tremendous sense of isolation (“social distancing”) from our family, friends, and colleagues. The urge to be around others is innate to us. It is who we are.

Dissatisfied with impersonal modes of communication, such as email and texting, we have rediscovered the need for a face-to-face interaction with our fellow humans. To that end, we utilize digital platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook Live, and FaceTime to catch up on the latest news in other people’s lives, or simply to complain about the misery of loneliness and the pathetic inadequacy of our public officials (of both parties). Throughout the nation, people engage in virtual happy hours, dinners, book clubs, fitness classes, religious services, and group meditation. As my Cato Institute colleague Chelsea Follett recently wrote, “Technology has made it easier than ever to hold a physically-distanced ‘watch party’ synchronized so that viewers in different locations see the same part of a movie at the same time. For those who like to discuss movies as they watch, technology also enables a running group commentary of each scene in real time.” In the saddest of cases, technology enables people to say goodbye to dying friends and relatives. In a very real sense, therefore, technology keeps us sane (or, at the very least, saner).

Technology, then, allows us to cope with the challenges of the pandemic in ways that our ancestors could not even dream about. More important, technology allows our species to face the virus with grounds for rational optimism. In these dark days, remember all the scientists who are utilizing the accumulated store of human knowledge to defeat COVID-19 in record time and all the marvelous (not to say miraculous) ways the modern world keeps us well fed, psychologically semi-balanced, and (in many cases) productively engaged.

This originally appeared in National Review.

Answering Questions about Libertarianism

Trevor Burrus, Aaron Ross Powell — Tue, 12 May 2020 08:53:27 -0400

Join the hosts of the Free Thoughts podcast as they answer questions about libertarian philosophy and policy. What’s the best way to advance libertarian ideas? How can we better communicate with non-libertarians? How should libertarians respond to government limits on our freedoms during the recent health crisis? And many more.

If you enjoy Aaron and Trevor’s discussion, you can hear more from them every week on the Free Thoughts podcast.

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Forgotten Libertarians (with Paul Meany)

Trevor Burrus, Aaron Ross Powell, Paul Meany — Fri, 08 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

For too long history was just the study of great men, but with the rise of intellectual history we have focused more on how people have changed their ideas over time. In another sense, studying history is about studying the struggle for power. The host of Portraits of Liberty, Paul Meany, joins the show to highlight historical thinkers who may not have been strictly libertarian, but argued for a freer world. Portraits of Liberty celebrates a broader historical libertarianism.

What is valuable about studying intellectual history? Why do certain philosophers get completely forgotten? What is the difference between tradition and truth?

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Rights in the Time of Coronavirus

Neera K. Badhwar — Thu, 07 May 2020 09:53:22 -0400

In the last few weeks, most state and city governments have issued shelter-in-place orders and imposed a lock-down on educational establishments, gyms, and all “non-essential” businesses, in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus and avoid overwhelming the health care system. Some states and cities are now allowing some businesses to re-open, but in most of the country the restrictions continue. People may still not go out except to shop for groceries, see a doctor, pick up prescriptions, or exercise, while staying 6 ft. away from other people. Unfortunately, some “non-essential” businesses that pose no threat of harm to anyone, such as automated car washes, were and are also banned. Ditto for harmless activities such as attending church services from one’s car in the parking lot in some cities or states. Whereas banning automated car washes might just have been an oversight, this last seems merely like an exercise of power. As do the arbitrary orders of some governors, who have banned motorboats but not canoes, lawncare services but not hardware stores, and so on.

Are all these lock-downs and shelter-in-place orders a violation of our rights? Some libertarians think they are. They say that it should have been left to individuals to decide whether or how to protect themselves, and businesses to decide whether or not to stay open. The government has no right to restrict our liberties in order to protect us from harm. We have a right to harm ourselves.

This is true. Government paternalism that restricts our liberties is a violation of our rights, and thus plainly wrong. However, the restrictions are not merely paternalistic. Most of the liberties we have lost are liberties that, if exercised, could impose potentially serious harm on others. For given the high incidence of asymptomatic infected individuals, any of us might be infected without knowing it. Since we have no right to risk harming others, the banning of potentially harmful activities is not a violation of our rights. As the saying goes, “Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Moreover, most of the actions ordered are necessary for flattening the curve and preventing the health care system from being overwhelmed.

All the same, could we not have respected others’ rights without legal compulsion? The Swedish government, after all, simply asked Swedes to take responsibility for themselves and others, and keep each other safe by observing social distancing, frequent hand washing, and masks. But in spite of the fact that Swedes trust each other and their government far more than Americans trust each other or their government, many Swedes have not observed these measures. One result is that in spite of its far healthier population and lower population density, Sweden’s death rate of 275 deaths per million people is many times worse than that of the other Nordic countries, and even worse than ours at about 205 per million. In addition, according to some reports doctors are now refusing ventilators to anyone over 80, and even to people as young as 60 if they have underlying health conditions. In effect, those who violated the voluntary social distancing advice have led to a situation in which some Swedes will involuntarily have to die. No matter how indirectly or distantly, those who acted irresponsibly violated the rights of others. Had the same voluntary policy been followed here, our fate would have been the same or worse.

It might be objected that the legal restrictions here are unjust insofar as they penalize everyone who refuses to maintain a 6 ft. social distance from others, even if they have no reason to believe that they are infected. However, even if someone doesn’t know that she is infected, she knows that she might be, and thus that she might be harming others by deliberating coming too close to them. Her behavior is at least reckless, and thus a violation of others’ rights. So although some states are imposing unjustly harsh penalties for such behavior, warning a person who does this, or imposing a small fine on her, doesn’t seem unjust.

Some argue that if any of the restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic are justified, they are also justified during the seasonal flu. Like Covid-19, the flu is often lethal, yet no one has ever proposed imposing restrictions on our liberties during the flu season. However, there is a big difference between the flu and Covid-19. The flu kills far fewer people, there is a vaccine to prevent it and antivirals to treat it, and it doesn’t lead to permanent damage to the organs, as Covid-19 does in a substantial minority of the population that gets it. Nor does the flu lead to an epidemic every year resulting in a shortage of ICU beds and PPE, and killing doctors and nurses. In any case, it’s as true of those with flu symptoms as of those with Covid-19 symptoms that they should practice social distancing.

The more difficult challenge, however, arises from the fact that some people who get the flu are, like many who get Covid-19, asymptomatic. So if asymptomatic people with coronavirus violate others’ rights by not practicing social distancing, then surely so do asymptomatic people infected by the flu virus who don’t practice social distancing. However, there is a big difference between the two cases. Our social practices and expectations show that we accept the risk of getting the flu from asymptomatic people. In other words, they show that we waive our right not to get infected by such people. The costs of standing on our rights outweigh the benefits of waiving them. This is analogous to our social practices and expectations towards driving. When we drive, we risk our own and others’ lives and physical well-being for the sake of the enormous advantages that driving bestows on us. We expect others to drive competently and responsibly, but we know that human errors are inevitable and can lead to an accident. By driving, we waive our right to not risk our lives or well-being on the road.

To return to the issue of the legal restrictions during this pandemic: some are clearly unjustified. Banning businesses and activities that neither pose any harm to others, nor, therefore, burden the health-care system, are clear violations of our rights. In most cases, state-wide restrictions are also unjust if the conditions vary from county to county, or even city to city. Further, even the justified restrictions – the restrictions on liberties that are potentially harmful to others – have become necessary only because of prior violations of our rights. The health care system would not have been overwhelmed had there not been long-standing legal restrictions, in 35 states and the District of Columbia, on the number of hospitals and beds allowed, or on the immigration of more doctors. Closer to the present, we were told lies about the risks to our health or given wrong advice by those who knew better and had an obligation to tell us the truth. China did not acknowledge the threat of the novel coronavirus till many weeks after identifying it. The virus had already spread in Europe and reached our shores when the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that there was no need to restrict international travel. For a long time, WHO also claimed that masks were not necessary for the general population, and the CDC and the Inspector General followed suit. President Trump ignored all warnings of the threat of the virus and the economic and health costs of doing nothing even when his trusted economic adviser, Peter Navarro, alerted him to the dangers on January 29^th.. Indeed, Trump sent nearly 18 tons of donated medical supplies to China a few days after Navarro’s warning. He again turned a deaf ear to Navarro’s warning when the latter warned him on February 23^rd that 1-2 million people could die if Trump didn’t act. Instead of acting, Trump simply announced the next day that “the coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

A practical effect of the government’s failure to acknowledge the truth was that public health agencies and hospitals failed to order personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and respirator masks from manufacturers in a timely fashion. On top of that, the FDA and CDC refused to use the tests developed by the WHO or even to allow private labs and University labs to make any – a clear infringement of the right of these labs to be productive, and engage in mutually beneficial transactions with those who needed the tests. When the CDC finally released the tests, they turned out to be faulty, and it was many more weeks before University and private labs could make them. Had there been sufficient tests, public health authorities could have engaged in extensive testing and contact-tracing sooner, and quarantined those who were infected or might be infected, instead of shutting down businesses en masse, with disastrous effects on the economy.

The failure of the U.S. government to tell us the truth and prepare for this pandemic also led to another rights-violation: the right of hospitals, and of doctors in consultation with their patients, to decide whom to treat when. This happened when some Governors and mayors ordered hospitals and doctors to postpone “elective” surgeries to make room for COVID-19 patients. ‘Elective’ surgeries are so-called because they don’t have to be performed on an emergency basis. Yet some of these “elective” surgeries are crucial to the life or well-being of patients, including as they do surgeries for cancer, kidney stones, abortion, and organ replacement. The result of canceling them was financial difficulties for hospitals, and sick patients with worsening problems. For hospitals with hardly any COVID-19 patients there were also furloughed nurses, empty rooms, and even worse financial difficulties, including bankruptcies.

In some parts of the country we are past the worst in the rate of new infections and deaths. Some districts also have enough hospital beds and PPE for medical staff. Under these conditions, many businesses can reopen safely, with social distancing measures, good hand hygiene, and masks and gloves for their employees. Safety and the capacity of the health care system, of course, should always have been the basis of the restrictions. We are still missing an important step to safety in the country at large: widespread testing. Testing would enable people to find out if they are infected or not, and to quarantine themselves if they are. But most of the states that are cautiously opening up have adequate testing. However, any business anywhere that can reopen safely should be free to do so. Not allowing this is as much of a violation of a right as forcing a business that poses no threat to anyone to shut down. One thing is certain: we cannot wait for the virus to be vanquished once and for all before we start working and producing again, because it may take years to vanquish it. On the plus side, we now know that the fatality rate from COVID-19, though high, is not as high as previously thought. There are, of course, other serious health dangers to those who get the disease, such as strokes and blood-clots, neurotoxicity, and hepatotoxicity. But the solution here is for those who are vulnerable to COVID-19 – people with co-morbidities, and people who are above 65 - to take extra care and for everyone to continue distancing themselves when they leave their homes. The lock-down and social distancing have led to the desired flattening of the curve. But the lock-down has also led to a dangerous flattening of the economy and the prospect of serious damage to the health care system and, thus, to people. Continuing it also threatens the lives and well-being of young people now and for years to come.

Taking the King to Court, John Cooke

Paul Meany — Thu, 07 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Summary:

Despite being born into poverty John Cooke attained an education as a lawyer. While practicing law he realized the unfairness of the current legal system and wrote about how it ought to be reformed to be a system where a crime is a crime no matter who commits it. After the English Civil War King Charles I was put on trial for his heinous crimes, Cooke was the only lawyer in London brave enough to prosecute the king of the country. Despite his obscurity, John Cooke was a remarkable figure who ultimately led to way in articulating why even heads of state should be answerable to the law.

Hackers

Aaron Ross Powell, Natalie Dowzicky, Julian Sanchez, Landry Ayres, Eva Galperin — Wed, 06 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Image Credit: IMDB

Summary:

If you were to boil down the 1995 film Hackers, it’s a “wired ride with teenage cybercowboys” claimed Joe Brown in a 1995 Washington Post article. On today’s show we’re joined by the Cato Institute’s own Aaron Ross Powell and Julian Sanchez, as well as Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We hope it inspires you to hack the planet.

Music by Cellophane Sam and Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

The Covid-19 Economy

Aaron Ross Powell, Trevor Burrus, Ryan Bourne, Diego Zuluaga — Fri, 01 May 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Ryan Bourne and Diego Zuluaga come back to the show to talk about how fiscal and monetary policy are changing drastically to respond to COVID-19. We are operating in a world of radical uncertainty. We are still unsure of how many people have been infected by the novel coronavirus. Every uncertainty affects how the stock market responds. However, it is reasonable to expect the American economy to boom back strongly in 1-3 years.

How is the COVID-19 recession different than the 2007-2009 financial crisis? What industries are hurt the most by COVID-19? How do you define an economic recession? Is the market a discovery mechanism? Should individuals receive direct support from the government?

Decentralizing Social Media (with Bill Ottman of Minds.com)

Aaron Ross Powell, Paul Matzko, Bill Ottman — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 06:00:00 -0400

Complaints about the control that social media companies exercise over their platforms has risen over the past couple of years. Some users complain that platforms like Facebook and Twitter should remove more offensive content; others complain that they remove too much, resulting in censorship of politically unpopular views.

There is an alternative to this kludgy, top-down model of content moderation. Minds.com is a more decentralized social network with a First Amendment standard for moderation that allows users to appeal bans to a jury of their digital peers. Minds also has a different revenue model from the big platforms, allowing users to boost posts with proprietary cryptocurrency payments. Our interview with Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds, is a reminder that the future of the internet could look very different from the present.

What is the most successful social network? Who is innovating in the social media space? Why should you switch social media platforms? How does social media giants come between you and your audience?

Feminism in Liberty

Sharon Presley — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 11:41:52 -0400

If American anarchism has been ignored by most historians, anarchist feminism has been even more overlooked. Until the publications in recent years of An American Anarchist: the Life of Voltairine de Cleyre by Paul Avrich, The Sex Radicals by Hal Sears, and Anarchist Women by Margaret Marsh, 19th century anarchist feminism was neglected even by anarchist historians. But as the above works show, the anarchist feminists made significant contributions not only to the anarchist cause but to the intellectual heritage of the women’s movement as well.¹

The two major outlets for the promulgation of what was then called “the Woman Question” were Moses Harman’s anarchist and free love journal Lucifer and Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. Though Liberty was not as explicitly oriented toward women’s rights as Lucifer, in the 1880s it did devote considerable space to the “sex-question.”²

The major themes of 19th century anarchist feminism were explored in the pages of Liberty, most notably, abolition of traditional institutional marriage, support of free love, and calls for the economic independence of women. But, points out Marsh, the male and female writers in Liberty differed in their reasons for opposing traditional marriage and supporting free love:

… there was a clear difference of opinion between men and women concerning the purpose of free love, with the male writers emphasizing the importance of compatibility and the tragedy of personal unhappiness that resulted from unsuccessful marriages. The women, on the other hand, emphasized the belief that marriage precluded women’s economic independence and rendered her too dependent in other ways on men. The women argued that entirely different social and sexual arrangements must accompany free love, while the men foresaw no dramatic changes in the domestic roles to be played by a free love couple.³

The principal writer on sexuality and marriage in the 1880s was Sarah E. Holmes, who usually used the pseudonym “Zelm.” A radical feminist who went beyond even the standard anarchist call for abolition of institutional marriage, Holmes, like Voltairine de Cleyre in the next decade, argued against couples living together in arrangements where domestic responsibilities were based on traditional sex roles. “Her ideal,” writes Marsh, “was individual homes for men and women, for she believed that only physical separation could promote the economic and emotional independence so necessary for a free womanhood.”⁴ Holmes, like many other anarchist feminists and unlike the mainstream feminists of her day, also believed that true spontaneity in love required the option of sexual nonexclusivity.⁵

Most of the women writers in Liberty in the 1880s saw physical and economic independence as intertwined issues. Florence Finch Kelly, another important contributor, agreed with Holmes that “the separate individual existence of the man and woman” was a desirable goal but felt it was impossible till women were economically independent. “Not until a woman becomes a self-supporting creature who has ceased to beg alms of him and who can and does support herself as easily and with as much comfort as he does,” she wrote forcefully, “will he respect her as his equal.”⁶

Kelly also emphasized the connection between sexual freedom and economic issues. Without economic independence, marriage was, in her view, merely legalized prostitution. “The only important difference between the two conditions,” she declared, “is that prostitution gets better pay than marriage.”⁷

Though the connection between economics and women’s rights was a major theme for the women writers in Liberty, most of the male writers, particularly Tucker and Victor Yarros, failed to grasp its significance. A notable exception was Stephen Pearl Andrews, who, according to historian Charles Shively, “understood better than any other male contemporary the issues of sexual politics.”⁸ Like Florence Finch Kelly, he viewed institutional marriage as prostitution, condemning it and the corollary principle of male supremacy as a “house of bondage and the slaughterhouse of the female sex.”⁹ Understanding that the traditional family system made women “helpless dependents,” he argued for economic independence in his classic, Love, Marriage, Divorce and the Sovereignty of the Individual, which was serialized and expanded in Liberty in 1888.¹⁰ It was later reprinted by Tucker as a separate book in 1889.

The role of Benjamin Tucker himself in regard to feminism in the pages of Liberty was complex. Though sexist in his personal views toward women’s abilities, he did not flinch from the political implications of the Woman Question. Like other anarchists, he was opposed to institutional marriage, even going so far as to condemn the private non-State wedding of Lillian Harman and E.C. Walker.¹¹ Unlike some anarchists who were equivocal on contraception and abortion, his belief in equal rights for women extended to reproductive freedom. An “On Picket Duty” editorial in 1883, for example, expressed strong support for Ezra Heywood, who had been arrested for distribution of a tract on contraception for women.¹² In 1906, another editorial voiced opposition to a campaign against abortion.¹³

But Tucker, like most men of his day and even many other anarchist men, thought women to be intellectually inferior. In an “On Picket Duty” editorial in 1891 he wrote:

Apart from the special inferiority of women as printer (a rule to which there are many exceptions), there exists the general inferiority of woman as worker and employee (a rule to which there are few exceptions). Even the skilled women printers, as a rule, show the average woman’s lack of ambition, of self-reliance, of sense of business responsibility, and of interest in her employer’s undertakings.¹⁴

Tucker was not convinced, however, that women’s alleged inferiority was inborn. “That they will never acquire these qualities [of ambition, self-reliance, etc.] I by no means dogmatically assert … Should these deficiencies be overcome,” he continued, “I should be heartily glad to see such a result.”¹⁵

Though Tucker was not always sympathetic to the issues raised by the feminists, and indeed was on occasion callous, he was no enemy of women’s causes. Unlike male writers like Yarros and Jo Labadie who thought women’s issues should be secondary, Tucker devoted considerable effort to promoting women’s rights. He was editorially responsible not only for the publication of the many articles in Liberty, but for two articles in his earlier four-issue journal, Radical Review, and several feminist books published by his press.¹⁶ In 1891, he published The Strike of a Sex by George Miller, a novel about women going on strike for their rights, and The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations by Karl Heinzen, a historical review of the legalized prostitution of women through marriage. Tucker’s edition of Charlotte Bernard Shaw’s translation of Maternity by Brieux, a French play proclaiming the right of women to control her reproductive freedom and her right to choose not to be a mother, appeared in 1907.

A number of feminist books originally printed elsewhere were serialized in Liberty. In addition to Stephen Pearl Andrews’s treatise on marriage and divorce, Tucker’s translation of the Russian revolutionary nihilist classic, What’s to Be Done? by N.G. Tchernychewsky, first appeared in serial form in 1886.¹⁷ “The fundamental idea of Tchernychewsky’s work,” wrote Tucker in the preface, “is that woman is a human being and not an animal created for man’s benefit, and its chief purpose is to show the superiority of free unions between men and women over the indissoluble marriage sanctioned by Church and State.¹⁸

Tucker was also an enthusiastic promoter of the works of Olive Schreiner, the radical feminist South African novelist. Calling her novel, The Story of an African Farm, “one of the finest and most artistic works of fiction that has seen the light in many a day,” Tucker declared “so radical is it, especially in its attitude toward love and marriage, that I have determined to include it in Liberty’s propaganda … .”¹⁹ Schreiner’s novels and her beautiful feminist allegory, Three Dreams in a Desert (published by Sarah E. Holmes) were frequently advertised in Liberty and sold in Tucker’s bookshop.

A forceful contributor to the discussion of the Woman Question, even though he thought the issue should be secondary, was Victor Yarros.²⁰ His views were even more opposed to the women writers than Tucker’s. Unable to see that economic dependence was partly responsible for women’s legal and social inequality, he naively believed that free love and “intelligence” were somehow the solutions to the problem of women being treated as property in marriage.²¹ Though not unsympathetic towards women’s desire for self-control and personal freedom, Yarros assumed that women had maternal instincts that made them naturally unequal.²² This belief, coupled with his espousal of the traditional division of labor in familial relationships, led him to battle on several occasions with Zelm in the pages of Liberty.²³ Unlike Zelm, he believed motherhood incompatible with an independent and separate existence, declaring patronizingly, “Why a man should not make a room for the woman he loves, I am unable to see.”²⁴

Besides marriage, sexuality and economic independence, other feminist issues argued in Liberty included women’s suffrage and children’s rights. The vote for women, like the Equal Rights Amendment today, was controversial in libertarian circles not out of opposition to women’s rights but because of concern about the morality of the legislation. Those writers like Tucker and Lizzie Holmes, who were against woman suffrage, were opposed to all voting on principle.²⁵ Those writers, like Ellen Dietrick, who supported it, believed that suffrage was necessary to achieve legal equality.²⁶

Debated also was the question of children’s rights. On the one hand, Tucker viewed children as property while John Badcock, Jr., the author of Slaves to Duty, believed in equal rights for children.²⁷ “You are anxious,” Badcock wrote sarcastically in 1895, “to give all the liberties to the parents and none to the child. What equal liberty! What impartiality!” In that same issue of Liberty, A.S. Matter also argued that children should be free to leave their parents at any age.²⁸

By the end of the 1880s, Liberty’s concern with sexuality and marriage began to diminish. Zelm had disappeared from the columns along with Florence Finch Kelly and many of the other women writers. Thereafter Liberty only occasionally printed essays and letters on feminist subjects. Discussion of marriage, except for essays by John Beverley Robinson, mostly took the form of fictional sketches. These sketches by writers such as George Forest and Miram Daniell, presented unconventional views of marriage and divorce and questioned the possibility of the wife’s independence in marriage.²⁹

In the 1890s, John Beverley Robinson was one of the few essayists on women’s issues, and, according to Marsh, the only male writer to develop a theoretical framework for the abolition of marriage.³⁰ Though differing from the women writers of the 1880s in his belief that women did not need to support themselves at all times, he was genuinely concerned about the subordinate position of women in marriage and argued firmly for the abolition of male privileges in familial relationships. Though he assumed many women would stay at home to bear children, he believed that many others would choose outside careers. He was also a discreet but strong supporter of birth control, a position not universal among the anarchists.³¹

By 1895, Liberty’s concern with women’s issues was mostly limited to its continuing stand behind the campaign to eliminate the double standard and the right to sexual freedom and sexual pleasure for women. The controversies which raged in the 1880s in the pages of Liberty were never resolved. “After a decade of analyzing the issues of sex and marriage,” writes Marsh, “the men and women who wrote for Liberty remained in disagreement over the question of woman’s freedom within the free-love relation.”³²

Though Liberty ultimately offered few solutions for the problems of women, it had served women well as a major forum for the most radical feminist ideas of the day, providing an intellectual cornerstone for anarchist feminists like Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman who carried the battle into the 20th century. While the mainstream feminists continued to urge strong marriage ties and traditional domestic roles, seeing mere legal equality as the solution, the early 20th century anarchist feminists continued to question marriage and the State and their destructive effects on personal freedom and self-realization.

The anarchist feminist legacy to the late 20th century women’s movement, contends Marsh, is the raising of questions about the nature of marriage and family relationships. Political and legal rights are not enough; personal autonomy is crucial also, as the anarchist feminists realized so well. “For the most part,” writes Marsh, “contemporary feminists have not confronted the question of whether inequality may be inherent in our more intimate institutional arrangements, such as the family … . Among the anarchist women of a century ago we find the kind of serious probing of sexual and familial relationships that could serve as a preface to a new feminist analysis.³³

Nor have modem feminists come to grips with the role of the State in perpetuating not only legal inequality but traditional sex roles and power relationships as well. The 19th century anarchist feminists, unlike most feminists today, never failed to understand that the State is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian.

The recognition that the State is the enemy of women is the political legacy of the 19th century anarchist feminists and the questioning of the authority relationship in traditional marriage is their psychological legacy. Liberty played a significant role in fostering this intellectual heritage.

Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: the Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). Hal Sears, The Sex Radicals (Lawrence, Ks.: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1981).
Marsh, Anarchist Women, p. 77.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 78.
Zelm (Sarah E. Holmes), “A Reply to Victor,” Liberty 125 (1888): 6.
Florence Finch Kelly, “The Economic Freedom of Women,” Liberty 119 (1888): 4.
Kelly, “The Sexual Freedom of Women,” Liberty 121 (1888): S.
Charles Shively. Introduction to Stephen Pearl Andrews, Love, Marriage, Divorce and the Sovereignty of the Individual (1889; Weston, Mass.: M & S Press, 1975).
Cited in: William O. Rerchart, Partisans of Freedom, Bowling Green, Ohio, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, p. 92.
Andrews, “Love, Marriage, and Divorce,” Liberty 119 (1888): 2.
Tucker, “Not Compromise, but Surrender,” Liberty 88 (1886): 4.
Tucker, “The Value of the Heywood Victory,” Liberty 36 (1883): 3.
Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 302 (1906): 1.
Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 206 (1891): 1.
Ibid.
Radical Review, No. 2, Aug. 1877 and No. 3, Nov. 1877.
N.G. Tchernychewsky, “What’s to be done?,” Liberty 42 (1884): 2.
Ibid.
Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 134 (1888): 1.
Victor Yarros, “The Woman Question,” Liberty 124 (1888): 6.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., Liberty 125 (1888) and 133 (1888): 7-8.
Liberty 124 (1888) and 133 (1888).
Liberty 295 (1894) and Lizzie Holmes, “The Ballot in Colorado,” Liberty 362 (1899): 6.
Liberty 312 (1895).
Tucker, “L’Enfant Terrible,” Liberty 320 (1895): 4.
Liberty 322 (1895).
Liberty 205 (1891) and 238 (1892).
Marsh, Anarchist Women, p. 87.
Liberty 148 (1889) and 238 (1894).
Marsh, Anarchist Women, p. 91.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, p. 5.

This piece appeared in Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology, ed. Michael E. Coughlin, Charles H. Hamilton, and Mark A. Sullivan.

Everything Wrong with the Hayes Administration

Gregory Dehler — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 11:01:38 -0400

Rutherford B. Hayes, nineteenth President of The United States, who occupied the White House from 1877 to 1881, is among the least known chief executives in American history.¹ He is one of those Presidents that writer Thomas Wolfe dismissively lumped together as the forgotten “bearded men” of the mid-nineteenth century. In presidential rankings, Hayes consistently ranks among the bottom third.²

Two habits handicapped him throughout his presidency, the most important of which was the gap between his rhetoric and his actions. In other words, he talked much bigger than he was ever prepared to act. “What Hayes said was not what Hayes did,” noted historian Richard White.³ This was true in all areas, but especially with the controversial topic of civil service reform. In the latter case, his bold words infuriated his own political party’s leadership while his limited actions greatly disappointed reformers from across the aisle. One historian quipped that Hayes left the Republican Party more united when he left office because he equally angered all factions.⁴ Second, and related, Hayes seldom explained his actions, and rarely attempted to sell his policies. He thought that what he did was so inherently rational and sensible that everyone would clearly understand his motives. This was particularly deadly for a president who spoke aggressively but acted meekly.

Hayes entered the presidency under a dark cloud in 1877. Not since John Quincy Adams and the so-called “corrupt bargain” of 1824 had a president took the oath of office with such questionable legitimacy as had “Rutherfraud’ Hayes.

When Governor Hayes retired after a long night of monitoring returns on Tuesday November 7, 1876, he was convinced that he had lost the election to his Democratic rival, Samuel Tilden. Armed with reports of voter intimidation and fraud, Republican Party headquarters in New York City challenged the results from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina early the next morning.⁵

Party leaders sidelined candidate Hayes during the challenge. Initially, he thought it was a mistake to dispute the totals, but quickly convinced himself of the righteousness of the Republican cause. Because rival governing authorities in the three disputed states submitted alternative electoral votes, Hayes believed that Senator Thomas Ferry, president pro tempore of the Senate, should count the ballots. Presumably the loyal Republican from Michigan would accept only those results from the loyal state governments inclined to be favorable to Hayes. Democrats balked at this idea. Shouldn’t the election go to the House of Representatives, as stated in the Constitution (and which Democrats conveniently controlled)? Now Republicans cried foul.

Bypassing both candidates, leaders in Congress created a special electoral commission consisting of seven members of each party plus one Supreme Court justice. The justice was a Republican, giving them an eight to seven majority. Winning votes was one thing, but legitimizing their decision was another matter. The resulting agreement became known as the “compromise of 1877.” Among other things, Republicans promised that they would remove the last federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, thus ending Reconstruction and leading to the rise of Jim Crow segregation.⁶

Although Hayes played little direct role in the dispute or compromise that ended it, the outcome greatly tarnished his victory. Hayes never comprehended the delegitmizing effect of this on his presidency. Democratic control over the House of Representatives made the situation even worse.

If the bizarre circumstances of the disputed election and the strictly partisan vote by which the electoral commission awarded him the White House was not enough of a hinderance, Hayes compounded the difficulties with two other decisions. First, he pledged when nominated to serve only a single term if elected to office. Hayes was not the first president to do so. Dark horse candidate James K. Polk promised the same in 1844. Hayes considered it a good governance measure, as he explained at length in his acceptance letter:

Believing that the restoration of the civil service, to the system established by Washington and followed by the early Presidents, can best be accomplished by an Executive who is under no temptation to use the patronage of his office, to promote his own re-election, I desire to perform what I regard as a duty, in stating now my inflexible purpose, if elected, not to be a candidate for election to a second term.⁷

Hayes certainly deserves kudos for the sentiment, but he doomed himself to an instant lame duck term at a time when presidential power was already at its historic nadir. Members of his own party were too busy scrambling for the 1880 nomination to pay much heed to Hayes’s administration.

Second, since he felt beholden to no one in the party, he felt equally free to ignore Republican grandees when constructing his cabinet. In nominating the reformist and political independent William Evarts as the cabinet’s token New Yorker, he froze out powerful Senator Roscoe Conkling. Having alienated the stalwart leader of the party, Hayes rejected nominations offered by Senator James G. Blaine of Maine, leader of the opposing Republican half-breed faction. By appointing the former German revolutionary of 1848 Carl Schurz to secretary of the Interior, Hayes alienated whatever remained of the Republican establishment. The fact that Evarts served as President Andrew Johnson’s defense counsel during impeachment proceedings demonstrates Hayes’s ability to exasperate multiple groups with one appointment. Again, he deserves praise for forging an independent course, but as a result he found himself with little support in Congress.

Rutherford B. Hayes will forever be remembered as the president who ended Reconstruction.⁸ In the process he abandoned the Civil War Republican Party’s commitment to equal rights for the former slaves and doomed them to a century of discrimination and segregation. In the years immediately following the Civil War, Congressman Hayes voted with the Radical Republicans in support of military reconstruction of the defeated rebel states. By 1877 he came to believe that Reconstruction needlessly delayed restoration of the union.

Hayes professed that removal of troops must be contingent upon a good faith promise from southern states that they would respect and protect the rights of African Americans. “The permanent pacification of the country upon such principles and by such measures as will secure the complete protection of all its citizens in the free enjoyment of all their constitutional rights,” the new president proclaimed in his inaugural on March 5, 1877.⁹ Even though Hayes maintained that he was not bound by any corrupt bargains resulting from the backdoor conniving of the electoral commission, he moved within weeks of his inauguration to implement their provision ending Reconstruction. “It is not the duty of the President of the United States to use the military power of the Nation to decide contested elections in the States,” Hayes wrote in his diary after a March 23, 1877 cabinet meeting.¹⁰

There was another political calculation that underlied Hayes’s thinking on the South. He earnestly believed that once the issues of slavery, war, and reconstruction had been resolved that the white, pro-business, and pro-economic development Southerners who made up the antebellum Whig Party would join the Republicans. The actions of southern politicians seeking investment—which could only come from or through northern banks—to build railroads, factories, infrastructure, and other projects in order to advance their vision of an industrialized “New South” suggested as much. Northern financiers hungry for new business after the panic of 1873 encouraged this cooperative vision.

Wily Southern politicians recognized that they could exploit these beliefs to their own advantage and made the necessary overtures to leading Republicans and the White House. Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general and Democratic shadow governor of South Carolina, charmed the president in a personal meeting. Armed with a mere verbal promise that Hampton would ensure equal protections for African Americans, Hayes ordered federal troops to withdraw from South Carolina by April 10, 1877. Hampton was sworn in as governor the day after they departed.

Louisiana took a slightly different path, but politicians there too made the requisite overtures to Hayes’s belief in a Whig restoration and tendered the appropriate promises on upholding the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Hayes soon ordered the removal of troops. The irony was not lost on those who, like Senator Blaine, wondered aloud how it was possible for Hayes to reconcile his claim to have justly won those states in the recent disputed election with his contention that Republicans could command a minority therein and only govern at the point of a bayonet.¹¹

Reconstruction was over. “I am confident this is a good work,” he recorded in his diary on April 22, 1877. “Time will tell.”¹²

Time, of course, did tell and it failed to vindicate Hayes’s course of action. Critics within his own party charged him with overlooking attacks on blacks, but Hayes countered, with little evidence, that the ferocity and number of such incidents were declining. With no troops in place, weak federal enforcement statutes, and Supreme Court decisions that ruled in favor of state rights, southern white Democrats attacked black Republicans with impunity. Brazen assaults during the 1878 midterm elections clearly demonstrated the worthlessness of the promises made in the heady days immediately following Hayes’s inauguration. Moreover, it was equally clear that Southern whites would not vote for Republicans or to support the administration. Hayes’s fantasy of Whig restoration was dead. In the process, he eviscerated the loyal black Republican organizations in the South through his misguided effort to win over the whites.

In a rearguard action, Hayes directed Attorney General Charles Devens to prosecute violations of federal election laws in 1878. The president devoted significant resources to the efforts, but the federal government failed to secure convictions from unfriendly juries. Hayes vented to Congress on this lamentable situation in his 1878 annual message in December, but he had no recourse. He’d been had by wily southern politicians and there was nothing he could do about it now.

As a result, Democrats took over the Senate after the 1878 elections and thus gained control over both houses. In April 1879, the Democrat majority flexed their muscles and attached a rider to an appropriations bill to repeal a variety of federal election laws. Hayes vetoed the bill and rallied enough Republicans to sustain his veto.

In one sense it is unfair to blame Hayes for the ninety years of disenfranchisement, gross injustice, lynching, and racial segregation that followed. On the other hand, Hayes might deserve more leeway in regards to his role in ending Reconstruction if he had approached the problem of reconciliation with hard-headed realism. He made no attempt to put any mechanisms in place as a safeguard in case of southern duplicity. Once again, there was an enormous gap between obtaining a promise, and the reality of accepting whatever Southern politicians were willing to feed him. One is left to conclude Hayes was all too eager to sell out former slaves in a vain and unrealistic attempt to return to some pre-war political normalcy.

Believing that he had solved the question of national reconciliation in the first eight weeks of his term, Hayes felt confident in turning to his pet issue, civil service reform. “Now for Civil Service Reform—Legislation must be prepared & Executive rules and Maxims…We must be relieved of Congressional dictation as to appointments,” he jubilantly exclaimed in his diary.¹³

Hayes considered himself a genuine reformer in the age of “spoilsmen,” those who rose to prominence and wealth via political patronage. It was the first issue he addressed in his 1876 acceptance letter, and the reason for his pledge to serve a single term. In typical overstatement, Hayes declared, “The reform should be thorough, radical, and complete.”¹⁴Yet, on this issue more than any other, there was a gap between his lofty rhetoric and his more modest actions. His reforms might have appeared radical, but they were certainly not thorough and complete. He managed to unite Republicans of all stripes against him by outraging the bosses with his temerity in attacking them but simultaneously disappointing reformers for not going far enough. “In truth,” sympathetic historian Ari Hoogenboom wrote, “Hayes was not totally committed to the program of civil service reform.”¹⁵

The presidential campaign of 1876 was a harbinger of what was to come. Candidate Hayes heartened reformers during the campaign when he discouraged the use of assessments—kickbacks that politically-appointed civil servants made to the party as a gratuity for receiving their position. Outraged by Hayes’s gall, political bosses ignored the request. In a typical move, Hayes then softened his position on assessments when party leaders convinced him that there was no way to win the election without this vital source of campaign funds.

Hayes’s cabinet included the most radical civil service reformer in the party, Carl Schurz, as secretary of the Interior. Other members were not so dedicated to the cause and Hayes irritated reformers by backing questionable appointments made by his subordinates. With little chance for legislation in a Democratic-controlled Congress, the president relied on executive orders to implement reforms — including banning assessments, prohibiting officers from managing political campaigns, and eliminating superfluous positions, among others — but these rules were not universally applied or enforced. Hayes concentrated most of his efforts on transforming the biggest patronage plum in the entire civil service, the New York customhouse—which employed over 1,200 people and collected over three-quarters of the national revenue—into a showcase of civil service competency.¹⁶ Hayes relentlessly battled fellow Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling for control of this critical federal asset. The president exerted executive prerogative over the federal bureaucracy, while Conkling stood behind the tradition of senatorial privilege in “recommending” executive appointments. After a year of investigations and a botched effort to replace Arthur in the Fall of 1877, Hayes finally fired the collector in July, 1878. Replacing the collector and the naval officer, however, failed to bring about the total transformation that the president had hoped to accomplish. Once again, he dismayed the reformers.

Hayes acted similarly on a more personal level. When Mrs. Hayes lobbied for her brother’s appointment to the Marine Hospital Service, Hayes issued a blanket decree. “No person connected with me by blood or marriage will be appointed to office,” he boasted on March 24, 1877.¹⁷ Still, like other presidents Hayes made hundreds of appointments, including to those party functionaries whom he wished to reward.

Without comprehensive legislation, his rules lacked the necessary authority to reform the system. He liked to compare himself to John Quincy Adams, and it is true that Hayes was the least partisan president of any between the younger Adams and Theodore Roosevelt in regards to removals and appointments.¹⁸ However, coming into office after eight years of Grant’s Republican administration, Hayes had little cause for making mass removals of civil servants.

Little could Hayes have guessed that 1880 would see the nomination and election of Chester Arthur as the next vice president of the United States. Nor, in his wildest speculations could he have ventured that Garfield’s murder would propel Arthur to the White House just three years after Hayes had fired him. Perhaps, the most unbelievable of all for Hayes to grasp would have been the notion that Arthur would ultimately sign a major civil service reform law after the public outcry over Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office seeker. A betting man would have predicted Garfield’s brief administration would be dominated in the same exhausting fight over the customhouse with Senator Conkling as Hayes had; and they would have been wrong.

Nativism and xenophobia also marred Rutherford B. Hayes’s term in office. Having won the Ohio governorship the year before on a viciously anti-Catholic campaign, despite the Democratic high tide, Hayes believed a nativist, neo-Know Nothing policy during hard economic times was the key to victory in 1876. Powerful Senator James G. Blaine, another leading contender for the presidential nomination, took up the issue as well by introducing a constitutional amendment to ban public funding for Catholic schools. The amendment did not pass, but the mood infected the Republican Party.

But Hayes took little action against Catholics during his administration as attention shifted to Chinese immigrants. In the election of 1876 both parties appealed to Pacific coast voters with flagrant Sinophobia. In early 1879 Congress forwarded a bill to greatly reduce Chinese immigration to the White House. On March 1, 1879 Hayes vetoed the bill. Hayes droned on in his lengthy explanation about how, among other legalistic considerations, the bill violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China, which stipulated that the United States could place no restrictions on immigration. He made no mention of civil or human rights or discrimination. In fact, Hayes expressed sympathy for those suffering under siege of the “Chinese menace.”

Following the advice of George F. Seward, the American minister to China who happened to be in the United States at the time, Hayes initiated negotiations to amend or replace the Burlingame Treaty. The resulting Angell Treaty, which was ratified by the Senate after Hayes left office, allowed the United States to regulate and restrict Chinese immigration although not to totally ban it. Anger at the veto contributed to the Democrats’ narrow victory in California in 1880, but Hayes opened the door to the most restrictive and xenophobic immigration restriction measure up to that point in time, the exclusion of Chinese laborers, signed by President Chester Arthur in 1882.¹⁹

President Hayes dealt with several other major issues during his term. After inheriting an ailing economy still reeling from the 1873 panic, Hayes, an adovocate of gold-backed currency, fended off the pro-silver, pro-greenback inflationists as best he could. In early 1878 he vetoed the Bland-Allison Act to increase the amount of silver currency in circulation. Congress overrode the veto. This was the only one of his thirteen vetoes to suffer that fate. Hayes used his executive discretion to mint the lowest amount of silver possible under the law. This battle over the money supply dominated the economic debate in the United States until the Gold Standard Act of 1900 finally settled the matter, albeit only after thousands of strikes, historic deflation, another depression, the populist uprising, a war with Spain, and the discovery of enormous gold reserves in Alaska and South Africa.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 confronted Hayes with his first unexpected crisis in July.²⁰ Pay cuts by major railroad lines precipitated mass walk offs that halted traffic throughout the nation. Two days into the crisis, West Virginia’s governor wired a request for federal troops to the president. Just three months after withdrawing troops from the South on the grounds that the federal government should not interfere in state issues, Hayes issued a proclamation labeling the action an “insurrection” and ordering the strikers to disperse.²¹ The president dispatched a small contingent of regular soldiers to West Virginia. He issued identical statements for Maryland on July 21 and Pennsylvania on July 23.

Despite these proclamations, the president acted coolly and brushed aside demands that he issue a call for volunteers as Lincoln had done in April 1861. While he supported the states with shipments of supplies for their militias, Hayes sent few regular troops (not that he had many to send in any event as the army was largely tied down in the West), and he preferred to do his fact-finding via professional officers like General Winfield Scott Hancock, instead of local politicos and industrialists. Unlike poorly led, jittery militia troops who had a predeliction for firing on crowds of civilians, federal troops followed the lead of their commander-in-chief with greater restraint. When summing up his record after a year in office, Hayes celebrated his handling of the strike: “The Riots — not a man shot but order promptly and firmly upheld.”²² It is a little misleading. State and local militia and police killed at least 117 and wounded many times that. ²³

Hayes consciously modeled himself on John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States. He saw his hero as man of outstanding character, sound judgement, national sentiment, and integrity, all traits that Hayes aspired to. Yet, Adams was also a poor communicator who enjoyed little support in Congress, who came to the presidency with questionable legitimacy, and who likewise failed to achieve his major policy goals. Hayes might have bothered to learn that lesson and adjust his own presidency accordingly.

The standout biography of Hayes is Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). ↩
The most exhaustive account of the Hayes administration is Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988). For larger context, see also Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, The Oxford History of the United States (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). White is unsparing in his criticism of the 19th president. ↩
White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 334. ↩
Frank P. Vazzano, “Rutherford B. Hayes and the Politics of Discord,” The Historian 68, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 519–40. ↩
For more on the election see Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, American Presidential Elections (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). ↩
The classic account of the Compromise of 1877 is C. Van Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1951). Other provisions of the compromise included appointmet of a southerner to the cabinet, funding of internal imrpovements in the south, costruction of a southern transcontiental railroad line, and election of James A. Garfield to speaker of the House. Not all of these measures were implemented. Historians in the last generation are less convinced of the importance of the compromise. ↩
Rutherford B. Hayes, “1876 Acceptance Speech” https://www.rbhayes.org/hayes/1876-acceptance-speech/. ↩
For more on Reconstruction and Hayes, see Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998) and Mark W. Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction, The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Simpson points out the variance between Hayes’s words and deeds. Summers describes Hayes’s policy as “appeasement.” Both feel Hayes possessed few alternatives. ↩
James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 10 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 4394. ↩
T. Harry Williams, Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New York: David McKay Co., 1964), 85. The complete edition of the diaries are available online at https://resources.ohiohistory.org/hayes/. ↩
Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, 211. ↩
Williams, Hayes: The Diary of a President, 87. ↩
Williams, 87. ↩
Hayes, “Acceptance Letter.” ↩
Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President, 324. Richard White even goes so far as to argue that Hayes wanted the spoils for his faction and was not much of a reformer. See, White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 360. ↩
Gregory J. Dehler, Chester Alan Arthur: The Life of a Gilded Age Politician and President (New York: Nova History Publishers, 2007), 24; Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, 111. ↩
Williams, Hayes: The Diary of a President, 85. ↩
Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, 144. ↩
Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019). ↩
Michael A. Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently (New York: New Press: Distributed by Perseus Distribution, 2010); Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1959); David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). ↩
James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol.10, 4440. ↩
Williams, Hayes: The Diary of a President, 126. ↩
Bellesiles, 1877, 117. ↩

Is Homeschooling Dangerous? (with Kevin Currie-Knight)

Trevor Burrus, Aaron Ross Powell, Kevin Currie-Knight — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Kevin Currie-Knight comes back to the show to discuss different methods of homeschooling and how parents are handling the education of their children during the coronavirus pandemic. Many homeschooling families recognize that children learn when the children are guiding the learning, but that cannot happen when a school is sending home material. The more choice kids have in their learning, the better the learning outcomes.

What is the difference between homeschooling and un-schooling? How has homeschooling changed since the 1830s? Should we force students to learn certain subjects or classics? Should students only be taught subjects that have value later in life?

Adam Smith on the Benefit of Obeying Authority

Yahya Alshamy — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 16:19:39 -0400

Adam Smith was a philosophical and political anomaly on many fronts. He distinguished himself from other philosophers and political economists by opposing violations of commutative justice often perpetrated and legitimized by political authority. Commutative justice is defined as the rules and norms which govern our daily lives in a variety of transactions and exchanges. Smith discusses violations of commutative justice include colonization, slavery, and war, all of which Smith opposed. Comparatively, some classical liberals, such as the later John Stuart Mill, publicly supported colonialism and imperialism. Mill regarded the right to self-government as the right of civilized nations only: “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”¹ On the other hand, Smith neither accepted Mill’s proposition and regarded imperialism as a net cost on British citizens.

Given what I previously mentioned, Smith sounds like a radical, as anti-imperialism is a revolutionary idea to have in the 18th-century. In contrast with his opposition to the British empire, he regarded submission to political authority, which results from the natural admiration people have for the powerful, as a force leading us in the right direction. Smith is not contradicting himself. His opposition to violent injustices and his appreciation for the natural tendency to submit to political authority, which I call acquiescence, stem from his three pillars of development theory. The three pillars of development, according to Smith, are peace, easy taxes, and the tolerable administration of justice.²

Smith Challenges Imperialism, Slavery, and War

Smith was not romantic about political authority. In fact, he criticized empire using two public choice arguments. First, Smith critiqued the colonies based on the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Smith argued that there were major special interests involved in maintaining the colonies and that the primary beneficiaries of colonization were the British merchants who sold to the colonies. British merchants were able to make monopoly profits at the cost of British taxpayers because they enjoyed special privileges due to import restrictions from other countries.³ Second, Smith pointed out that the beneficiaries of the colonies have an incentive to maximize their usage of British resources to protect their rent-seeking from outside aggressors or to maintain their trade monopolies.⁴ Smith says: “Statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens to found and maintain such an empire”⁵ The behavior of the beneficiaries results in steadily increasing expenditures that raise the debt, raise the rate of mercantile profits, and harms British citizens.

Moreover, Smith also recognized the brutal and unjust violence imposed on slaves, and staunchly criticized slave-masters: “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.”⁶ Smith also hints that society cannot subsist if specific rules of conduct become normalized, directly talking about the murder of new-born infants in Athens, but even indirectly hinting at the horrible practice of slavery. Also, he highlights that the love of one’s own nation disposes us to the jealousy and hatred of other nations. The jealousy and hatred reflect what Smith calls “savage patriotism,” which fuels war and destruction of other nations.⁷

The Tendency to be Acquiescent

Smith suggests that men, even when they are mindful of the violent domination of political authority over them, are naturally acquiescent to it. An important question arises: why do we have a natural tendency to be acquiescent to political authority? Smith has two explanations for acquiescence.

First, as Smith explains, we tend to admire and revere those with great wealth and fame: “our obsequiousness to our superiors more frequently arises from our admiration of the advantages of their situation, than from any private expectation of benefit from their good-will.”⁸ Out of the same principle that we admire those with wealth, we revere and thus are acquiescent to those with political authority. Out of our admiration for the wealthy, people tend to draw attention to their righteous behavior and look past their injustice. The reason people admire the wealthy is that wealth is apparent in its owner. Also, almost everyone recognizes the value of wealth. Thus, it became a focal method of distinguishing and signaling one’s rank in society. Comparatively, wisdom is not focal, as what is considered wise to one man may be repulsive to another. Hence, most societies rank individuals based on wealth instead of wisdom. And, at least historically, wealth and political authority largely coincided.

Second, we also tend to be acquiescent to political authority because it is based on violence and domination. As defined by Max Weber, the state, the most obvious manifestation of political authority, is the organization that possesses a monopoly of the use of legitimate physical force in a given territory. The force and violence that those with political authority use requires a high degree of self-command. Smith says we naturally tend to overrate self-command-based qualities. We overestimate them because we are so enchanted by the valor they require to maintain that we become indifferent to the justice or injustice of the action brought about by self-command. In Smith’s own words, “the effects [of self-command] are too often but too little regarded.”⁹ Unfortunately, our admiration for self-command-based pursuits too often extends to unjust activity as well. “Great warlike exploit” attracts a degree of “esteem,” even when it is “undertaken contrary to every principle of justice” and by “very worthless characters.”¹⁰ For better or worse, our acquiescence to political authority is partly influenced by our appreciation of self-command while undervaluing its sometimes destructive consequences.

On the Benefits of Acquiescence

Smith goes further to say that our tendency to be acquiescent is, in fact, a fortunate nature, even in the face of the potential injustices and misevaluations previously mentioned. Smith highlights that by the admiration we have for political authority, “we are taught to submit more easily to those superiors” and to regard the perpetrators of “fortunate violence”¹¹ with “respectful affection.”¹² The respectful affection, which I call acquiescence, makes us more likely to submit with less reluctance “under that government which an irresistible force imposes on them.”¹³ Whether the government is being imposed by a “splendid character”¹⁴ such as Caesar or a savage barbarian such as Genghis Khan is irrelevant.

Ostensibly, Smith reconciles his belief regarding the dangers of violent injustice with his belief that submission to political authority is beneficial by underlining the negative consequences of challenging political authority. It seems that he is convinced that challenging political authority will disintegrate it and cause a fragmentation in the control of violence. According to him, such fragmentation will likely bring about unfortunate violence and more harm to people than had they submitted to the status quo.

Throughout his writings, Smith emphasizes the importance of a stable and integrated polity for economic development. He believes that a stable polity is necessary for the establishment of peace. According to him, peace is the first of three pillars of development. In a (now lost) manuscript quoted by Dugald Stewart, Smith says that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence, from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”¹⁵ Acquiescence to political authority, though it may cause people to give a blind eye to some or many injustices, usually leads to better economic outcomes because it maintains the peace necessary for development.

In Smith’s conception, the man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, or the man of public spirit, is the role model in advancing societal change. The man of public spirit respects “the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided.”¹⁶ He contents himself “with moderating what he often cannot annihilate without great violence.”¹⁷ Smith contrasts the man of public spirit to the man of systems, who is “enamoured by with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government.”¹⁸ He “seems to imagine he can arrange the different members of a great society.”¹⁹ Smith unfavorably viewed the man of systems, who wants to change his society radically. On the other hand, the man of public spirit, to content himself with merely moderating what he cannot change, must have been somewhat submissive to political authority himself. Smith saw himself as a man of public spirit as he never attempted to challenge political authority, particularly the chief magistrate, directly. From respecting the crown when discussing its colonies to asserting that the chief magistrate deserves undeniable public consideration, Smith actively appealed to political authority.

Some Smithians say he appealed to political authority for his ideas to be more widely accepted. The esoteric reading of Smith on his attitude regarding political authority has value. It would suggest that Smith recognized that he would not be able to advance what he called the liberal plan had he been transparent in his critique of political authority. Furthermore, it suggests that he wanted to make what we now call Pareto-efficient changes, these are actions that advantage some or all members of society while disadvantaging none, including political authority. The esoteric reading of Smith has its place in his writings, especially when a point he makes is inconsistent with the general body of his views. However, his appeal to political authority is consistent across his works; hence, there is no need for an esoteric reading.

Examining Acquiescence from the Public Choice Perspective

Smith was not ignorant of public choice problems with political authority. His critique of imperialism was based on two public choice arguments. However, public choice may offer a set of arguments against cultural acquiescence to political authority. Citizens are not immune from political authority’s expansion and encroachment on liberties. As John Philpot Curran, an Irish political speaker, said in his 1790 speech: “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”²⁰ An acquiescent citizenry will likely slowly lose its potency to engage in political change. It will become prey to political authority because politicians, as public choice intuition reveals, are self-interested like others and will use government apparatus to advance their special interests if they feel safe from public protest or retribution.

Another issue with acquiescent citizenries is that it will make the distribution of political power more concentrated in the hands of political authority, or more monocentric as opposed to polycentric. A monocentric order is one where there is a single unit of decision-making. A polycentric order is one where there are multiple units of decision-making, each of which operates with some degree of autonomy. An active citizenry makes a more polycentric order since citizens play a larger role in the decision-making process, whether through democratic means or not. Polycentricity in the control of violence may be dangerous. However, for the citizenry to have the potential power to bargain and to threaten political authority, in some way, it is almost necessary to keep it from being intolerably unjust. Polycentricity allows for more opportunities for peace because one of its defining characteristics is that it provides for “mutual adjustment of a large number of centres.”²¹

If we would like to constrain government while minimizing violence, as Smith desires according to the liberal plan, then cultivating cultural vigilance and skepticism against political authority is likely the best way to do that. Cultural vigilance and skepticism signals a credible threat to political authority, hopefully mitigating the expansion of their power, while not necessarily disrupting the peace required for economic development. The reason skepticism ought to be directed towards political authority, and not only political coercion is because we know political authority is drawn to coercion. The widespread cultural appreciation of liberty and the responsibility of citizens is particularly important to constrain the government effectively. In the words of Don Lavoie: “Political and economic freedom is not simply the absence of government controls over the economy and of dictatorial authority. It involves the emergence of alternative and more fragmented notions of authority in which participants in effect have to earn the always partial authority they have.” With their partial authority, which can be strictly non-violent, citizens can protect their rights from their government if it were ever to attempt to harm them.

Smith believes that challenging political authority will disintegrate it and ultimately result in more violence and harm to people than had they acquiesced to the status quo. Smith is rightfully concerned that without any political authority, the perpetuation of violence by private individuals will go unrestricted and will end civilization. However, we have seen across history that leaving political authority unchallenged may lead to even more violence. The 20th Century is one of the most excellent examples of the destruction that political authority has executed, including the murder of 260 million people.²² Comparatively, civilian-to-civilian murders accounted for the death of fewer than 3 million people.²³ The fear of tyrannical oppression by political authority is legitimate and statistically founded. Finally, Smith has a favorable view of the citizenry’s acquiescence to political authority due to his belief that it will maintain the peace necessary for development. A point to consider is that political authority that does not feel restricted by or accountably to its citizenry’s potential demands for justice will likely violate commutative justice so often that it will eventually lead to underdevelopment.

Conclusion

Smith belongs to the part of classical liberalism that highlights the importance of peace as its pinnacle and the source of development. Though he would admit that the violent injustices perpetuated by political authority are terrible, he would assert that protest or revolution could lead to worse outcomes. The problem of acquiescence is that it allows political authority to exploit its citizenry’s submission and further encroach on their liberties. The cost of doing nothing is seldom nothing. It usually harms the subsets of society with the least support, since harming them is less likely to alarm the greater part of the population.

The issue of acquiescence or resistance to political authority is incredibly complex and multifaceted. There are certainly good arguments to be made on both sides. There is a strong case for Smith’s position that peace is a prerequisite to development. A middle path between the submission Smith describes, and the rebellion of the man of systems is healthy. I believe the middle path would be for people to cultivate vigilance with political authority to the best of their ability, so they can demand justice whenever it is intolerably violated. Regardless of where we stand, Smith’s insights on political authority are enlightening and have a lot to teach both those who agree and disagree.

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, ed. Harry B. Acton (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972),73.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd (IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 687.
Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, “The Empire Strikes Back: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and the Robust Political Economy of Empire,” The Review of Austrian Economics, 363.
Ibid., 364.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 613.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael, A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007), 206.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 228.
Ibid., 52.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 264.
Ibid., 239.
Ibid., 253. Emphasis added.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 253.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 687.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 233.
Ibid.
Ibid., 234.
Ibid.
Suzy Platt, ed., Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 200.; The quote is usually incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 140n1.
Rudolph J. Rummel, “20th Century Democide,” Death by Government, November 23, 2002, accessed December 05, 2018, https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM.
Ibid.

Tiger King

Landry Ayres, Natalie Dowzicky, Paul Matzko, Andy Craig — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 04:00:00 -0400

Image Credit: IMDB

Summary:

The focus of our show today is no other than the self-proclaimed gun-toting gay cowboy who is the owner of the G.W. Exotic Animal Park. Joe Exotic is the main character in the new hit Netflix documentary, Tiger King, and throughout the show we see his very public feud with another small private zoo-owner, Carole Baskin. Their love for tigers in particular starts a feud that proves that there can only be one king in the world of big cats.

Do we learn anything about the exotic animal trade in Tiger King? Is Joe Exotic a good example of a libertarian? How does the show sensationalize the characters?

Transcript:

Rehabilitating Democracy, George Grote

Paul Meany — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:13:00 -0400

Summary:

For a long time, the word democracy was synonymous with anarchy due to the horror stories of ancient Athenian democracy. The self-taught polymath and enthusiastic democrat George Grote rehabilitated democracy by arguing that Athens, the birthplace of democracy, was a vibrant and liberal society. Grote was no mere academic; he was also on the frontline for the fight for democratic rights such as the secret ballot and a more inclusive voting system.

John Milton on Free Speech, Natural Rights, and Regicide

Paul Meany — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 09:11:40 -0400

John Milton is famous for writing the epic poem Paradise Lost. Written in the 17th century, when Milton was aged 60 and towards the end of his life, it recounts the biblical story of humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden due to Satan’s influence. Impressively Milton wrote this entire masterwork while blind. He was forced to dictate his poetry daily to several scribes who would transcribe his verse. He is regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the English language.

While Milton first and foremost considered himself a poet, he also had a career as a political pamphleteer in which he articulated a liberal philosophy based upon natural rights and emphasizing the right of revolution.

Milton’s Early Life

Milton was born in London, England on December 9th, 1608. Milton’s father (also John Milton) had been disinherited by his father for abandoning Catholicism and adopting the Protestant faith. Milton’s father made a prosperous living as a scrivener, which allowed Milton to study Latin and Greek at St. Pauls School in London, after which, in 1625, he attended Christ’s College Cambridge and was ranked highly among its students. Intending to enter the priesthood Milton stayed on an extra year at Cambridge to earn a master of arts degree. Milton disdained the university curriculum which he believed was based around obtuse debates on esoteric topics conducted entirely in Latin. Milton spent an additional six years in Berkshire studying philosophy, theology, literature, and science. In 1638 he embarked on a tour of Europe meeting the intellectuals of his day, such as Hugo Grotius, and observing the republican city-states of Italy.

Divorce Controversy

Milton returned home in 1639 and began writing on religious topics—he favored the Puritan cause—while teaching as a schoolmaster. In 1643, he became engaged to the 16-year old Mary Powell. After a month of living together, Mary moved back home, and, due to the outbreak of the English Civil War, she was unable to return. Milton began to ponder the possibility of divorcing his young bride. However, English law forbade this; divorce was only to be pursued on the grounds of infidelity, impotence, or cruelty.

Over three years and in a number of pamphlets, Milton argued that Christian scripture did not forbid divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. In short, he advocated for what we today call no-fault divorce, a highly controversial topic at the time; it provoked the ire of many religious authorities who sought to ban his writings on divorce. In 1640 after parliament challenged the king’s power, the Star Chamber and the High Court, which had previously restricted access to and censored printing, were abolished. For a brief period between 1640-1643 there was little censorship and as a result an explosion of literary activity followed. In 1643 this period ended when parliament passed an act which required authors to obtain a license from the government prior to publishing.

Areopagitica

After suffering ridicule for his views and failing to publish most of his writing legally, Milton decided to write an attack upon pre-publication censorship titled Areopagitica. In his own words, it defended, “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.” Areopagitica takes the form of a speech to Parliament that is separated into the distinct sections in which Milton laid out his argument.

A History of Censorship

Milton begins by discussing the history of censorship, beginning with the ancient civilizations of Athens and Rome. Athens, the birthplace of both democracy and philosophy where in Milton’s words “books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece.” (Athens was also the site of a hill called the Areopagus, where philosophers debated issues of the day and after which Milton named his book.) The only books the Greeks restricted were those which expounded atheism or which were considered libellous. Similarly, the Romans only punished blasphemous and libellous writings.

This changed in the Middle Ages with the rise of the Papacy. Milton was a staunch opponent of Catholicism, which he viewed as subversive religiously and dangerous politically, a common stance among Puritans at the time, although few were a match for Milton’s vitriol. Milton knew that by associating censorship with Catholicism he could begin convincing his Puritan contemporaries through an argument by association that would make them uncomfortable.

The Inseparability of Good and Evil

Milton’s next argument against censorship is less sectarian in nature. Many government regulators wished to impose their will on authors in order to avoid the possible vices of what they called“freewriting.” They wished to insulate the public from harmful or toxic ideas, but as Milton explains, this was an act against God, who trusts us “with the gift of reason to be his own chooser.” God has left us free will to decide our fates despite our fallen nature. It is our duty to overcome vice, not insulate ourselves from it. Insulating a person from vice does not make them virtuous; as Milton eloquently explains, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” To be truly morally virtuous, we must be left free to grapple with moral issues.

The Futility of Implementing Censorship

Next, Milton stresses how the actual implementation of censorship would be a difficult if not impossible task given that he himself had successfully evaded such laws. Laws are important, but they cannot be applied effectively to every social issue. Milton explains that we must instead rely upon the responsibility and self-discipline of the English people, what he refers to as the “bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth.” Milton explains that “if every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name.” Milton believes the licensing laws to be naïve, at best, in their utopian attempt at controlling every aspect of life and that this, ultimately, makes them bound to fail.

Our Inherent Design

The fourth and final part of Areopagitica is where Milton devotes most of his attention. His most intricate but essential argument is about the fundamental nature of humans. Censorship is uniquely degrading to a free people as it causes “an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation.” Censorship so thoroughly undervalues people it leads Milton to ask, “What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school.”

For Milton censorship is degrading not only because it disrespects us but because it sabotages God’s design for humanity: “The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.” We can only add to our knowledge through constant inquiry. Milton evokes the analogy of truth as a fountain. If waters do not flow in a “perpetual progression,” it will stagnate. Free inquiry is the gift God bestowed upon humanity despite our flawed condition; without it, we lack an irreplaceable part of our nature.

The Political Situation of Milton’s Day

In Milton’s day, the English Monarch was the supreme authority of the land and could call or dismiss parliament at a whim. Although only the Parliament could legitimately raise taxes, King Charles, I had little time for Parliamentary demands and so ruled without their input for eleven years, resorting to legal loopholes, hefty fines, and the granting of monopolies to raise money without the legislature’s say so. Tired of the king’s abuses of power, in 1641 Parliament passed, by a minuscule margin, the “Grand Remonstrance,” a resolution which it presented to the King that detailed a long list of grievances and demands for reform. Outraged by parliament’s demands, the king ordered the arrest of the five leading members of parliament (MPs). When his request was rebuffed, civil war erupted.

At the outset of the war, few if any parliamentarians wished to dethrone the current monarch, let alone abolish the monarchy. They wished to keep Charles as king, albeit curtailed by reforms and checked by an empowered parliament. The Earl of Manchester summarised the fundamental paradox of the first civil war, explaining, “The King need not care how oft he fights… If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be King still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone.”

Despite his eventual defeat by Parliament, the army of which was led by Oliver Cromwell, Charles would not agree to terms. After skillfully delaying any agreement for two years, Charles convinced the Scottish to invade England and reinstall him on the throne. But Parliament defeated the invading Scots and royalist rebels. It was the last straw for Charles. In an unprecedented turn of events, the king was brought to trial and executed for treason.

Justifying Regicide

After the beheading of Charles I, Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649, a position responsible for translating foreign correspondence, most of which was written in Latin. He was also charged with publishing his own writings to help legitimize the newly founded republic against its detractors. To this end, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in 1649, just two weeks after the king’s beheading.

Milton had his work cut out for him. Firstly justifying the king’s execution was no easy task given that monarchy was the norm of the time. Besides the Italian city-states, few in the European world did not live under some form of monarchy. From this comes Milton’s second problem, establishing parliamentary legitimacy. A minority had enforced their will upon the majority to enact the king’s execution. The more radical wing of Parliament and the military had wrangled their way into a dominant position and could impose their plans on the entire country. However, the majority of people in Parliament, let alone the general public, did not fully support the king’s trial.

Milton’s goal is to show that anyone in power, “be he King, or Tyrant, or Emperour,” that “the Sword of Justice is above him.” Before the death of Charles, there was a widespread belief that kings stood above the law. English critics pointed to an earlier example of this involving a confrontation between King Charles’s father, James, and the chief justice Edward Coke in 1608. In a council meeting, James exclaimed that since he was divinely ordained to rule, he could override any judges that he had appointed. Coke responded that this was not the case and that the law applies to all men. James flew into a rage, almost punching Coke in the face, who then abjectly apologized for expressing his bizarre belief that the law should apply to all men equally. The idea of monarchs being divinely ordained by God and thus the supreme authority was clearly an entrenched idea.

When to Resist a Tyrant

Many Englishmen had relied upon the Calvinist theory of resistance for formulating who was and was not qualified to depose a tyrant. Due to religious wars between French Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists begun to formulate theories legitimizing their opposition to Catholic monarchs. Foreign tyrants could be resisted and deposed by anyone, but domestic tyranny was a different more complex matter.

According to the Calvinists, all power was derived ultimately from God. Only those in power could depose another tyrant. Therefore, domestic tyrants could only be deposed by magistrates of adequate rank and dignity. Private individuals without some sort of official position had no authority to depose a domestic tyrant. Milton disagreed with the Calvinist position, and his departure from it leads to two important principles, that all authority is derived from the people and that a tyrant could be justly deposed by anyone who acts in harmony with natural law.

Our Natural Equality

Milton explained that in reality no one was ordained to rule anyone since “all men naturally were born free… and were by privilege above all creatures, born to command and not obey.” All men are created in the image of God, and none are destined to domineer over another. To establish peace and order, we give up our natural right to self-defence and vest it in one person “for ease, for order, and least each man should be his own partial Judge.” No public official is therefore chosen by God. They are chosen by the people who transfer their authority to magistrates or kings. Milton, in effect, secularized the concept of political power.

Because all people were born equal, Milton believed that any person could legitimately resist a tyrant needing more than “to be guided then by the very principles of nature in him.” Inspired partially by the writings of Cicero, Milton concluded that any person who became a tyrant had sacrificed their human dignity and became a “savage beast” that could be put down by any person of clear judgement.

Public Officials Serve the People, Not Vice Versa

When the people transfer their authority to an official by their own free consent, they also establish laws so no magistrate may abuse their newfound power. These laws curtail any possible encroachments upon the people they rule. Any authority that a public official holds is fundamentally derived from the people through their consent. Milton’s language transforms rulers into deputies or servants of the people who must act in the public trust and who are liable to be scrutinized and dismissed if found ineffective. Because of this, Milton believes a fundamental right of the people is to depose a leader who is not protecting their natural liberties or serving their best interest even if that ruler is not necessarily acting as a tyrant. A nation without this fundamental right is “’no better than slaves and vassals.”

Milton explains that even a just monarch can be permissibly replaced by another monarch if the people wish. Without the power of replacing or altering government, even if a monarch acted justly and fulfilled the people’s needs, he is dangerous as his power “though not illegal or intolerable, hangs over them as a Lordly scourge, not as a free government; and therefore to be abrogated.” Freedom is best encapsulated by a lack of any form of discretionary or arbitrary power an official might hold over others.

The Crumbling Republic

In 1658 the former leader of the Parliamentarian army, Oliver Cromwell, died. With his death, the newly found English republic began to crumble. The military protectorate government established by Cromwell was unpopular, and many were still loyal to the monarchist cause. Cromwell’s son took his place at the helm of the state but lacked his father’s energetic leadership and was quickly forced to resign. Many wished to reinstate Charles’s son as the new reigning monarch of England, thus undoing the republic.

While Milton had strong republican tendencies, in his book, The Tenure in Magistrates of Kings, he still accepted that there could be a just monarchy under certain conditions. By 1660, Milton had abandoned monarchy, which he describes as unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous.” He advises his fellow countrymen that it should be “justly and magnanimously abolished” Milton praises the virtues of a free commonwealth presided over by “a general council of ablest men, chosen by the people.” Additionally, in The Ready and Easy Way To Establish A Free Commonwealth, which he wrote in 1660, Milton argues that a commonwealth is superior to monarchy because it will secure the common good, respect the moral equality of people, and, most importantly, it will preserve liberty.

Securing the Common Good

Any person that wishes for the domination of one single person “must needs be mad or strangely infatuated” because it is inherently unsafe to rely solely on one person. Milton argues instead in favour of a “counsel of many industrious equals.” Decision-making in a monarchy is based upon the whim of one, while Milton’s commonwealth model benefits from numerous competing perspectives. The deliberation from the wisest and best of a country produces the best outcomes. Milton’s commonwealth would secure the common good through deliberation, not the whims of one individual.

Moral Equality

All people are created in God’s image, which implies a fundamental equality of all beings. Milton states that God “didst create mankind free!”, giving them no natural masters or rulers. Monarchy undermines this fundamental equality by arbitrarily raising one person above the rest of the world. Unlike monarchy, those who hold power in a commonwealth are not arrogant or vain; instead they “are not elevated above their brethren; live soberly in their families, walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration.” In Milton’s ideal commonwealth, there is a mien of humble dignity about those in power. Although they are moral exemplars for the people, they are not raised above the people but walk beside them without any incessant bowing to or by anyone.

Preserving Liberty

For Milton, protecting our freedom is the “one main end of government,”;for any form of government to be deemed worthy it must safeguard liberty. As articulated in The Tenure of Magistrates and Kings, a fundamental prerequisite for any free nation is the ability to remove those in power and to alter the structure of government. In contrast to a monarchy with its many shortcomings, Milton believes that “in a free Commonwealth, any governor or chief counselor offending, may be removed and punished without the least commotion.” The ease of choosing and removing rulers makes a commonwealth a more stable form of government. Those with political power in a commonwealth “are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges,” precisely the opposite of a monarchy, which is why it will, in Milton’s judgement, always be a better guarantor of liberty.

The Restored Monarchy

Despite his best efforts championing the “good old cause” of Republicanism, Milton was ultimately unsuccessful in convincing his compatriots to resist reinstating a monarchy. By May of 1660, Charles’s son, also named Charles, returned from exile and assumed his position as King of England. As an ardent supporter of the republic and an advocate for Charles I’s execution, it was unsurprising that an arrest warrant for Milton was quickly produced. Royalists burned his writings while Milton, now old and blind, lay in hiding. After a brief imprisonment, Milton was released due to the influence of politically connected friends. The blind, impoverished, and defeated Milton spent the rest of his days composing poetry and eventually producing his masterwork, Paradise Lost, although he remained unrepentant for his staunch beliefs.

Legacy and Relevance

Milton is mainly revered as a poet and rightly so given that that is what he wanted to be known as first and foremost. But his political writings deserve praise and Areopagitica deserves a spot alongside John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty as one of the great defences of free speech. Milton argued that the state is not some quasi-divine entity ordained by God but is instead an organization legitimized by the consent of the governed. Milton argued that might does not make right, rulers must conform to a higher law, and, if they fail to do so, those suffering under their rule are wholly justified in rebelling against their former leaders. His political thought bears a striking resemblance to John Locke’s writings. Both formed the core of their philosophy around natural law and the right to revolution. Unsurprisingly, Milton greatly influenced later radical British Whigs who would, in turn, inspire many of the American revolutionaries. Though he was not without his flaws—including his aristocratic inclinations, a disdain for democracy, and a rabid hatred of Catholicism—John Milton’s political thought is still a valuable addition to the classical liberal arsenal.

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