We have a tendency to treat the past as some sort of ideal world where historical actors played out their ideal scenarios under ideal conditions. We grant Lincoln the superhuman powers of creating the war all by himself and being responsible for everything done in the Union’s name. We go to some wild efforts to place historical agency in the hands of particular people or groups to avoid blaming the historical actors with whom we identify personally. There was a time when historians found it both easy and convenient to present the Confederacy as an exercise in Jeffersonian liberalism.

Was Lincoln both the Great Emancipator and the shredder of the Magna Carta? How did the Civil War have libertarian underpinnings? How did Frances Whipple use poetry to describe the Civil War as a movement?

Further Reading:

Sarah O’Dowd, A Rhode Island Original: Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall, 2004.

“Elleanor Eldridge: Folk Hero of African American Feminism”

“Let Usurpers Tremble: The Unrepublican Anomaly”

Related Content:

The Possession of Frances Whipple, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

Liberty Chimes: Free Speech, the Tyrant-Slayer, written by Frances Whipple

Liberty Chimes: The Slave Mother, written by Frances Whipple

William Henry Harrison was president from the time of his inauguration on March 4, 1841 until one month later (April 4, 1841) when he died of a combination of pneumonia and enteric fever. Libertarians, of course, often like to joke that Harrison is their favorite president because he did not have time to screw anything up. Well, I am here to tell you that Harrison’s tenure was no laughing matter. He did, after all, begin by taking the oath of office, which committed him to protecting a wretchedly iniquitous constitutional regime that protected slaveowners in the South and corporatists of all description in the North. Then, Harrison tempted fate by trying to reassure the public that despite his age (68), he was still vigorous enough to be president. With neither coach nor cloak, Harrison rode his own horse through the cold, wet, bacteria-rich streets of Washington, DC to deliver the inaugural address. He did not know it at the time, but Harrison the great Indian fighter, the great protector of the American people against the British, opened himself right up to assassination by microbe. Add to that his rambling, excessive and tiresome two-hour speech and Harrison immediately started off on an awful path.

In his speech, Harrison finally committed himself to various policies in a way that he never did in the 1840 campaign. Essentially, he endorsed Henry Clay’s “American System” of protective tariffs, national banking, and national funding for internal improvements projects. This was of course music to Clay’s ears and exactly the sort of tune congressional Whigs were hoping to hear from the Hero of Tippecanoe. Harrison was their political deliverance from Jacksonianism, and now eager Whigs flooded Washington to reap the harvest. Senator Clay more or less expected Harrison to act as his puppet president, dutifully signing Whig legislation into law and overturning the Jackson-Van Buren years. When Clay petitioned Harrison with a set of his own Cabinet nominees, Harrison famously slashed back, “Mr. Clay, you forget that I am the President.” Harrison spent his month primarily entertaining an endless horde of Whig office seekers, potential Cabinet nominees, and social calls. He also called a special session of Congress to (once again) display his vigor and executive energy by immediately getting to work. I can barely imagine a worse start to a new presidency than calling Congress into session more than they had to be.

The 27^th Congress met mid-month to confirm a few Cabinet positions, including Massachusetts’ Daniel Webster as Secretary of State and Kentucky’s foremost Clay man (after Clay himself), John J. Crittenden, as Attorney General. From the beginning, the Cabinet was as divided and factional as the Whig Party itself, and Webster biographer Robert Remini recounts a tense moment when the Cabinet attempted to strongarm Harrison into appointing a Webster man for Governor of the Iowa Territory. Harrison refused in preference of his original choice and the president made his point by handing his Secretary of State a simple note during the meeting. He ordered Webster to read the note aloud: “William Henry Harrison, President of the United States.”

Well, not for long. That was March 25. The next day he caught a cold and the 19^th century doctors went to work. Their cures (including leeches and castor oil—which induces diarrhea) were worse than the disease and the president died nine days later. He left his party in a mess, sharply divided and its leadership contested from all angles. Even Harrison, with a mere 30 days under his belt, did everything wrong.

The Introduction to this series can be found here.

Readers, we have a special treat for you this President’s Day. Normally today is supposed to be reserved for some sort of “national recognition” that the President nobly and disinterestedly rules over us for our own good. Through the magic of constitutionalism and the mystical force of statism, the President is said to represent us all, marching the nation forward to a singular tune. Of course, no one actually seems to celebrate President’s Day this way. Instead of using it as intended—to worship at the altar of government—it is a day when students escape from their standard forced servitude in public schools, when government workers enjoy vacation time or extra hours at taxpayer expense, or the day when (for some reason) furniture goes on sale everywhere.

Check out the first installment of this series about William Henry Harrison here. 

Why the disconnect between ideology and action? Could it be that American nationalism—and with it, the outsized influence of statism throughout our culture—is truly past its prime? In its original 19th century strands, nationalism meant simply a proclivity to identify oneself with or through the national unit into which you were born. In world historical terms, nationalists ran the gamut from anti-imperial independence activists to hyper-militaristic fascists. There were democratic and republican nationalists every bit as much as there were imperialistic and genocidal nationalists. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Americans increasingly identified themselves, their personalities, and their cultures with reference to the larger nation-state. Their widespread beliefs in “Manifest Destiny,” racism, and herrenvolk democracy placed them somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

Whether the United States ever achieved anything approaching the 19th visions of Manifest Destiny is here immaterial; for at least five decades all Americans have supposedly shared the burdens and responsibilities of government equally. Yet we all know that this is still no government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and an ever larger number of people seems to be questioning whether there is an American people at all. The very suite of technologies which nationalists believed would homogenize us has encouraged an explosion of subcultures and alternative lifestyles which have fundamentally disrupted the nationalist project. So could it be that people now instinctively know that the president cannot possibly live up to the ideal we are all taught in school? He cannot possibly represent us all and any identity we share with him is fictitious at best. In the light of modern technology and social integration, not even President Obama can match the demi-gods we have enshrined in marble and the impulse toward iconoclasm seems to grow with each election cycle. Every president fails somewhere. Every president is despicable somehow, to someone, for some legitimate reason. All you have to do is look closely enough at the record. 

So!—I come now to our special surprise. Today we launch an exhaustive survey of the Presidents of the United States and everything they did wrong while in office. “Everything Wrong with the Presidents” will be a sharp departure from your standard presidential histories, rankings, surveys, and biographies. Here, we have no interest in criticizing the man while maintaining “respect for the office.” The office itself is the problem, after all, and practically anyone you could throw into it would make a proper mess of the whole affair. Endlessly, we hear of the godlike heroes who presumably salvage the reputations of the rest; and endlessly, we hear long trains of scholarly hedging about how people are “products of their time” or limited by circumstance. We’re told that Washington and Jefferson were hardly cruel despots and hypocritical aristocrats—they were captives of British colonial policy and extremely sticky racial politics which their generation inherited and at least tried to correct. We hear that Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the country; our teachers rarely discuss the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation positively protected slavery in Union territory. And far less often do we hear that the Thirteenth Amendment still allows government slaveholding so long as the slaves have all been “duly convicted” of a crime. We hear that Teddy Roosevelt electrified audiences with his robust personality, that Woodrow Wilson made the world safe for democracy, that Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself and the whole world from fascism. We learn that Truman had to drop the bombs on Japan, that the United States had no choice but to defend the “free world” from atheistic communism, and that without the most massive government the world has ever seen liberty would not exist anywhere on the planet.

Well, perhaps some of us have learned better history than all that. But nonetheless, these are our great national myths of the presidency—these and many, many more.

It’s high time to take on the myths, shred them, and finish the job by tackling each and every other president along with the “greats.” The more people realize that the office itself is the problem—that the concentration of power into the hands of a single individual is necessarily toxic to liberty—the closer we may come to reclaiming those liberties we have lost and the many more we have failed to recognize. No American president has managed to wield the power of their office and do so within the limits of both the Constitution and the rights, liberties, and interests of the people. In fact, this task is impossible and the attempt is more damaging than helpful. Even those few presidents who have entered office with the best of records, the best of intentions, and the best of methods have been abject failures in their own ways. In the end, we hope, after a thorough survey of American presidential history, audiences of all kinds will be better able to see through the mystique of office, the cloudy fog of nationalism, and undo the historical brainwashing they have experienced at the hands of a power-worshipping educational structure and political culture.

Every president was awful. Every president should be remembered as an infamous and immoral rogue who unjustly claimed to rule many millions by arguments no better than magic. Every president deserves either our scorn, our disgust, or at the very least, our criticism; some deserve trials for war crimes and others have escaped all scrutiny by hiding in relative obscurity.

No longer.

Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes are legal activities, but politicians use the law in order to discourage people from doing these things that may seen as poor for your health. This is inconsistent with John Stuart Mill’s famous principle that people should be free in the sense that they should be able to do whatever they like as long as they are not harming others.

What is paternalism? Should we take care of those who do not know any better for themselves? Are there different types of paternalism? What is considered coercion? Should the government enforce vaccinations for the purpose of collective action? Should the government worry about public health?

Further Reading:

Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism, written by Christopher Snowden

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, written by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Related Content:

“Libertarian” Paternalism?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Paternalism and Barbarism, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Against Paternalism, written by Neera K. Badhwar

Today, more than a third of long-term relationships are started through online dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony. (And the percentage is even higher for LGBQT communities.) During the early years of online dating, critics suggested that the apps would lead to either sexual hedonism or the formation of shallow, unstable long-term relationships. Well, some of the first major longitudinal studies are finally out and we can see how those concerns panned out. Join us as we discuss the vast cultural ramifications of online dating and why it’s been a net positive for modern society. Oh, and we also talk about Bristlr, a dating app for the facially hirsute and those who love them. Let’s be honest; that’s the real draw for the episode!

How do dating apps work? Do dating apps have a stigma attached to them? How do dating apps reenforce the silos in which we live our lives? Can we actually have an algorithm that creates the basis of love?

Further Reading:

Dating App for Trump Supporters Says it Will Sue Liberals Who Try to Join, written by Moran Gstalter

Pheramor: New Dating App Matches Users Based on Their DNA, written by Olivia Petter

How the Internet Has Changed Dating, the Economist

Related Content:

“Rape Culture:” Yea or Nay?, written by Sharon Presley

Free Love: Victoria Woodhull, written by David S. D’Amato

Wearable Tech: Health Care of the Future, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Michael Braddick joins us to discuss John Lilburne’s legacy of political activism. Lilburne did not want to be considered a martyr. He fought for what we now understand as the English legal tradition, which is really the backbone of American democracy. He defended political freedom when very few mechanisms existed to mobilize support.

Who is John Lilburne? What influence did Lilburne have on the English legal tradition? What is Christian Egalitarianism? How did mobilization work during the English Civil Wars? Is John Lilburne a martyr? Were the Levellers the first modern political party?

Further Reading:

The Common Freedom of the People, written by Michael Braddick

John Lilburne- Leveller Leader, by the UK National Archives

Related Content:

Radical Weirdness in the English Civil Wars, Anthony Comegna and Caleb Brown

Agenda for Liberty: A Biography of John Lilburne, written by Jim Powell

Profiles in Locodom: William Cullen Bryant, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

Today, originalism is all the rage, embraced by conservatives and progressives alike. It is, as legal scholar Eric Segall argues in his new book Originalism as Faith, a shared judicial faith, interpreted in different and competing ways (as are, of course, all religions), but shared nonetheless. Justice Elena Kagan, during the second day of her confirmation hearing in 2010, famously remarked that “we are all originalists.” The struggle to define originalism is intimately related to the cultural identity crisis that has long afflicted the libertarian movement, for it underscores the differences between conservatives and libertarians.

Originalism might translate to a robust, arguably activist standard of judicial review, called by its proponents “judicial engagement,” premised on the notion—itself entirely exterior to the “original public meaning” of the Constitution’s words, we should add—that the document’s “spirit” is identifiable as, roughly, libertarianism. This enormously controversial premise, precariously balanced on strange blend of tendentious legal, historical, and empirical claims,¹ is ironically just the sort of opportunistic theory the libertarian originalists say they oppose, the kind of theory that allows a judge to pursue his “own extraconstitutional preferences.” Then again, to many or most of its historical advocates, originalism means approximately the opposite of this, standing for the proposition that “judicial engagement” of the variety championed by the New Originalists amounts to imperiously deciding what the government’s policy ought to be—that is, to legislating from the bench. Of the Warren Court, for example, Judge Robert Bork wrote that while previous “Courts had certainly made policy that was not theirs to make,” the Warren Court “stands first and alone as a legislator of policy.” Today’s conservatives (and many originalists) continue to trot out the decisions of the Warren Court for special vitriol when the subject of Supreme Court nominees is again occupying headlines. For all libertarians’ contorted assurances that originalism entails essentially libertarian legal conclusions,² their conservative bedfellows seem to know better, to understand that, as a matter of practice, originalism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” to borrow William F. Buckley’s infamous words.

For example, in the New York Post, conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argues that none of liberals’ “major cultural victories of the past half-century” were “won at the ballot box, going back to the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold decision, which recognized a constitutional right to contraceptives. From abortion to gay marriage, plus a host of less titillating issues, modern liberalism has lived by the Court.” Pieces like Ahmari’s are important and enlightening insofar as they give away the game: conservatives really do want to overturn the Warren-era right to privacy decisions, including, of course, Roe v. Wade, because they regard these decisions as “democratically illegitimate” judicial usurpations by liberal judges. They believe that judges like Brett Kavanaugh are the pathway to correcting these judicial overreaches.

Nothing of this is particularly surprising to anyone who has followed American conservatism, which pretends to care about limiting government even as it attacks the very cases that protect from government the most personal and intimate aspects of one’s life. What is, perhaps, surprising is the decision of self-styled libertarians to cozy up to conservatives and, yes, conservatives’ originalist judicial appointees. Libertarian legal scholars have, for some reason, allied with a conservative legal movement whose entire history has been a round rejection of the libertarian vision of robust, individual rights-protecting judicial engagement as illegitimate liberal activism—a history that consistently scorns substantive due process as, in Justice Scalia’s words, an “oxymoron” and a “contradiction in terms.” The content of the mandate carried by judges—the question of what exactly judges are supposed to do—is at the center of the debate about originalism. And it’s not necessarily a partisan political debate, as, again, there are both conservatives and progressives who have adopted originalism, who see it as protective of (or at least consistent with) their preferred political programs. It is important to point this out, the near-perfect alignment we observe between one’s politics and his understanding of the conclusions demanded by originalism. Ultimately, originalism is always a normative project, a philosophical one, and must always point to, or implicate, or rest upon exogenous factors—factors other than the text of the document itself. Though they often will if pressed, admitting this is uncomfortable for originalists insofar as they prefer to see originalism as a straightforward application of a fixed legal rule. New Originalism purports humbly that it merely “seeks to discover an empirical fact about the world,” the idea being that, in principle, the original public meaning of the Constitution’s words is discoverable as a single coherent legal message.

Originalists have long argued that the normative superiority of their position is bound up in the fact that it is one position, a coherent, unified theory that tells us how to interpret and apply the Constitution. They contend that living constitutionalism, on the other hand, is not one view, but hundreds or thousands of them, incapable, for that reason, of serving as a guide.³  For example, according to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, “Perhaps the most glaring defect of Living Constitutionalism, next to its incompatibility with the whole antievolutionary purpose of a constitution, is that there is no agreement, and no chance of agreement, upon what is to be the guiding principle of the evolution.”

The picture painted by originalists, that their doctrine is “a consistent, coherent theory that has stood the test of time”⁴ against a host of unprincipled attempts to speciously shoehorn a certain set of policy commitments into the Constitution, is extremely self-serving and fairly obviously at odds with the facts. Originalists, no less than non-originalists, see their preferred theory playing out in several competing (and indeed incompatible) ways. At the very least, then, bringing clarity to the discussion would require that we follow law professors Thomas B. Colby and Peter J. Smith in acknowledging that originalism is a “disparate collection” of “theories that share little more than a misleading reliance on a common label.” Everyone, originalists and non-originalists alike, seems to be rather shamelessly reverse-engineering a constitutional theory that will lead to some desired result, rather than merely calling balls and strikes, as it were. New Originalism is especially perplexing in light of the normative justifications of Bork-style Original Originalism. Where Justice Scalia rejected “the modern living Constitution” for the “wide discretion” it affords judges, the New Originalists have embraced bold judicial activism, euphemistically restyled “judicial engagement,” to a degree that would make even most living constitutionalists blush. Whatever their approach is called, libertarian New Originalists would have judges strike down reels of duly enacted statutes as violative of individual rights nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

Among the most conspicuous hints at originalism’s incoherence as a project is this, the stark divide among its practitioners as to the question of its practical meaning. While originalists have, as discussed above, long associated their doctrine with a conservative judicial deference to the decisions and actions of the political branches of government, today’s New Originalists have argued that, as a practical matter, originalism entails “judicial engagement.” And if conservative jurists have been the most prominent originalists on the bench, there is an ever-growing movement among progressives in the legal academy to claim originalism as their own. Everyone sees the cover of originalism as a way to legitimate his project. It’s not so much, therefore, that originalism is a bad position, but instead that it’s a hollow, meaningless one, to which its adherents point after the fact as a justification for their real, underlying beliefs—that is, their normative politics. Ultimately, one’s describing himself as an originalist is a form of intellectual vanity, a way of taking cover: it enables the judge to say, I am following the law, its mere servant, not engaged in anything so dirty and contentious as politics. As Chief Justice Roberts stated, with a priest’s pious humility, at his confirmation hearing in 2005, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Surely there are cases in which the justices of the Supreme Court are quite like the plate umpire in a baseball game; indeed, in so many of the Court’s less sensational cases—cases, perhaps, that do not so clearly implicate their political values—its nine members decide unanimously (or close), drawn to the same conclusion about how to fairly and correctly apply the legal rules at issue.⁵ But we shouldn’t pretend that this way of applying the law, neutral, empty of value judgments, detached, is even possible when human beings are attempting to give meaning and application to general phrases like “equal protection of the laws” and “due process of law.” There are, ultimately, several plausible readings of many of the Constitution’s vague or ambiguous provisions. Originalists ask us to accept the facially ridiculous notion that there a single correct answer that we can find and neatly apply.

Even setting aside controversial constitutional questions, this way of seeing the judge’s role, as a sphere only of application, in which the judge is narrowly limited to mechanically finding and applying the law, is fundamentally incorrect; that is, it is both impossible to achieve this ideal as a practical matter, and were it possible, it would be undesirable.⁶ As Richard Posner observed in Overcoming Law, “for reasons rooted in the nature of law and legal institutions, in the limitations of human knowledge, and in the character of a political system,” judges are constantly being asked to legislate, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this; indeed, this manifestly true proposition is particularly central to common law legal systems like the one in the United States, in which judicial opinions are a key source of law. Judges invariably hear the hard cases that test the applications of legal standards, reduced to words, to messy, real-world circumstances, unforeseen by drafters of constitutions and legislation. The judge in such a position, argues Posner, is bound to render “a creative decision, involving discretion [and] the weighing of consequences” (emphasis added). Originalists argue that a judge who aims at particular consequences has overstepped his mandate or abused his discretion. But a careful analysis of consequences is inherent in judging as a matter of course, for it is often only by considering consequences that we could know whether “equal protection of the laws,” to take one example, has been afforded.

Originalist law professor William Baude seems to recognize, at least tacitly, that many of the most common arguments for originalism are hopelessly circular and weak. His claim that originalism simply is the law is a somewhat simpler and admittedly more compelling move, one that dispenses with “conceptual [and] normative justifications” for originalism in favor of the claim that we have, as a matter of fact, adopted the convention of originalism in “our interpretation of our Constitution” (emphasis in original). Philosophically speaking, this is a descriptive claim: whether originalism ought to be the case or not, it is the case—and is the law—and is thus entitled to a certain amount of deference, provided “we agree that government officials should obey the law.” As Segall points out, though, Baude’s “inclusive originalism” thus amounts to something “virtually indistinguishable from the non-originalist, ‘living constitution’ approach that supported the liberal Warren Court decisions that the Original Originalists criticized.”

In the final analysis, justice is, as Ronald Dworkin famously argues in Law’s Empire, “a matter of outcomes,” and the law serves justice—or, perhaps more precisely, it ought to. Disconnecting the law and the judge from political theory and empirical social science, from considerations of justice and outcomes, makes of the law a dead, empty husk. Even the jurists who say that they believe the law to be just that (Scalia, for example⁷) do not act as if they believe it; they rather fill the husk with their own extra-textual opinions and values. As we have noted, the idea that the Constitution’s text ought to be read in the light of certain normative principles (which, for many New Originalists, happen to be roughly consistent with modern libertarian political philosophy) is a supplementary gloss that comes from without. And for all of the New Originalists’ talk of faith to the original public meaning of the words themselves, it is this gloss, this philosophy, decidedly exterior to the words themselves, that imparts the substantive aspects of their view of the law.

Certainly libertarians might find accepting this position—the pleasant idea that properly interpreted the Constitution just does protect our unique and controversial view of individual rights—to be quite gratifying. Perhaps we should. But we shouldn’t, for that reason, pretend that we’re not simply working backward from a set of normative commitments. Instead of all this transparent dissembling and motivated reasoning, we should be honest about the role that ethical values play in our understandings and interpretations of the law. The obvious and, importantly, necessary connection between the law and the ongoing normative project of ethics is, after all, nothing to be ashamed of. The law’s authority, if it has any, is of a distinctly moral character. Stripped of that character, the law is worthless—worse than worthless, in fact, a positive impediment to justice and social progress. And law has been just that for most of its history, a mere memorialization of might-makes-right, the tool some people use to dominate and control other people. Treating the law as a vital—yes, ongoing and living—philosophical project, rather than as the mere application of dead words, will be the law’s salvation form its dark history, if indeed it is salvageable.

1.  I have considered those claims and Randy Barnett’s version of originalism in more depth here. ↩
2. Again, this is interesting in itself, because libertarian originalists will then turn around and swear up and down that they’re not pushing for a political reading of the Constitution. One can be forgiven for being confused. ↩
3. See, for example, Thomas B. Colby and Peter J. Smith, “Living Originalism” in Duke Law Journal, Volume 59, Number 2 (November 2009). ↩
4. Id. ↩
5. See, for example, the Court’s recent unanimously decision in Henry Schein, Inc. v. Archer & White Sales, Inc. ↩
6. See Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law (Harvard University Press 1995), page 230. ↩
7. During his time on the Court, Justice Scalia rather famously and repeatedly insisted that the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead.” ↩

Once an adult content honeypot, Tumblr has cleaned up its act - to the dismay of many observers. Tumblr’s new porn ban, which bars “real-life human genitals” and “female-presenting nipples” has sparked talk of the social media firm’s impending demise, and, more broadly, the limits of the platform internet.

Social media platforms remain the predominant means of communicating online, however, this sudden crackdown traduces the Internet’s original spirit. At the dawn of the net in the mid-1990s, the mega-network with pleasingly unobtrusive defense department roots and a dazzling interface appeared as a font of content for all. “At its inception the world wide web seemed to promise an escape from corporate and governmental powers, an egalitarian free-for-all,” writes Guardian analyst Stuart Jeffries.

How exhilarating it was to log on to the information superhighway as it was idealistically called at first, a quarter century ago. The name of the browser that popularized the new libertarian highway, Mosaic, reflected the variety of content it served up. In Mosaic’s wake came smoother, bolder options - Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, whose names emphasized that the global information-sharing network was all about discovery driven by ground-breaking search engines like Altavista, whose name implies scope. Likewise, search engines like Magellan and Copernicus cemented the sense that this new space, created by a public-spirited English physicist, allowed anyone to embark on a virtual adventure of the mind.

Cyberspace enabled first-wave netizens to read about “weird stuff”, from frogs raining down from the skies to drive-through condom stores. You could expand your general knowledge just through punching your queries into the growing search engine armada or Encarta, the Microsoft encyclopedia soon to be eclipsed by its open-source successor, Wikipedia. Plus, suddenly, newspapers that had been out-of-bounds on geo-location grounds mushroomed digitally, offering insight on everywhere from Amiens to Zagreb. Plus, the first oddly offbeat porn sites, including Wasteland and GameLink surfaced untrammeled.

In today’s world, where the internet hosts over a billion web pages and counting, it seems like the frontiers of freedom are retracting, as with the “Tumblocalypse.” On December 17, Tumblr began scrubbing its site of pornography: tens of billions of photos, GIFs, and videos were flagged.

In prim, politically correct style, the only remaining content with any remotely sensual vibe that merits toleration is that which is seen as valuable to the cause of social justice. That is, supposedly vital LGBTQ+ conversations, discussion exploring sexuality and gender, and GIFs of gender-confirmation surgery. “Examples of exceptions that are still permitted are exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding, birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery,” Tumblr’s clinical policy FAQ says.

The new draconian constraints fall under the rubric of that inescapable buzzword, “diversity.” This begs the age-old question; who is not supportive of diversity? However, the libertarian approach differs from Tumblr’s for a simple reason; nobody has proven that porn is harmful. 

Psychology Today encapsulates matters nicely when it poses the question of whether any evidence exists that porn harms relationships and answers with three terse words: “No; there isn’t.” Even the argument that not-safe-for-work content can be addictive seems iffy. Porn addiction is not listed as disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, effectively the bible of psychiatry.

According to Nicole Prause, Chief Executive of Liberos, a brain-centric biotech firm, porn use should not be likened to drug or alcohol addiction. When someone views porn, their brain only resembles that of a person afflicted by a recognized addiction up to a point. Then divergence arises.

In the case of, say, gambling addiction, when a cue occurs, addicts’ brains respond markedly. By contrast, with porn, the magnitude of response is far more limited. The evidence suggests that porn addiction is not a genuine phenomenon; nor does it appear to fuel sexual assault.

While anti-porn activists in the Julie Bindel camp claim that X-rated content turns men into maniacs, if anything, ironically, the reverse appears to be true.

Porn has become widely available in large part due to the internet, but rape rates have dipped sharply, just as violence has dropped despite violent video games being more available than ever.

In the Czech Republic, Denmark, Japan, China and Hong Kong, more porn has been found to mean less rape, according to sex researcher Michael Castleman. Additionally, UCLA researchers found that, across sex criminals’ lives, they consume less porn than other people, curiously putting them in the same bed as the anti-porn puritans.

In a Scientific American Mind article titled The Sunny Side of Smut, science writer Melinda Wenner Moyer confirms that for most users, porn use has no ill effects. In fact, in another mighty irony, it may even deter sexual violence. She quotes human sexuality expert Milton Diamond as saying: “There’s absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative. It’s a moral issue, not a factual issue.”

Wade through research on the issue and you will be left with the overwhelming impression that the anti-porn lobby are not critical thinkers but puritanical dogmatists. The evidence that the content cranked out by the multibillion-dollar­ porn industry screws men up is mostly anecdotal: witness the tales of predators like Ted Bundy who had serious porn habits - just like many men. Amusingly, in 2009, it emerged that University of Montreal scientists who embarked on a quest for men who had never seen porn failed to find a single abstainer.

The Canadian researchers had planned to contrast the outlook of men in their 20s who had never seen porno with that of routine consumers. Alas, the Canadians’ initiative wobbled at the first hurdle. “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography. We couldn’t find any,” said the study’s head researcher Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse.

His findings raise the question of how, if a case existed for doing so, porn could be stopped when its viewership is so widespread. Stopping it would be a tremendous waste of resources for law enforcement officers who may feel that their time could be better used catching thieves rather than hunting down habitual porn viewers.

Despite the strong case for letting porn be, censorship is rife and surprisingly stringent. Delicate souls have their sensibilities protected via widespread low-key corporate self-censorship. For instance, nudity generally is kept off Facebook. “We restrict the display of nudity or sexual activity because some people in our community may be sensitive to this type of content,” the social media giant says, adding that its Nudity Policies have gradually grown more nuanced, though they are no less legalistic.

Facebook permits nudity in protests and awareness raising activities and allows for nude images in educational or medical contexts. The nuanced rules are best exemplified by the general prohibition on images featuring female breasts or nipples, modified by the following caveats; breastfeeding and post-mastectomy photos, along with pictures from topless protests, are permitted. Photos of paintings, sculptures and other art presenting nude bodies are similarly given a seal of approval.

On one hand, you must give Facebook credit for having the courage to map its criteria, Tumblr-style – it is hard to detail censorship rules without sounding a bit silly. On the other hand, its criteria seem pretentious, given the wide latitude afforded to highbrow artistic expression.

Across the valley at Google, by default, Moderate SafeSearch is switched on, excluding explicit images from search results. More surprisingly, the privacy-geared search engine DuckDuckGo automatically presents the same conservative setting, which as Google, can be tweaked should the user wish to step outside the walled garden that excludes hardcore content.

In an example without an easy op-out, the subscription crowdfunding platform Patreon has suspended adult content creators. Reportedly, in Patreon’s caring, sharing economy space, mere implied nudity was enough to cause a fall from grace – a big blow, especially for sex workers touting their wares.

I am not making the case that real and threatening obscenity – child abuse photographs and footage – does not require rigorous censorship. Rightly, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the filth is not shielded by the First Amendment. The 1982 precedential Supreme Court decision known as New York v. Ferber found unanimously that the right to free speech only goes so far, with reason. Arguing for the total removal of censorship seems seriously out of line.

But the problem lies in walling off porn from the rest of public online life. Through this separation, porn’s more lurid elements are amplified and exacerbated. As the internet pornography market has matured, it increasingly caters to the tastes of the median paying viewer. Platform porn bans accelerate this process by driving more internet users toward whatever pornography Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, has decided to produce.

It isn’t that we can’t find pornography on the internet. All manner of hardcore tube sites exist. However, spaces for alternative and artsy porn, Tumblr in particular having served as valuable repository of this kind of content, are disappearing. Regardless of the veracity of complaints about the effects of pornography, it is exactly the sort of airbrushed, professionally scripted pornography advantaged by this dynamic that most frequently spurs concerns about porn teaching unhealthy sexual behavior. So the trend towards barricading niche porn sites is counter-productive as well as a betrayal of the early Internet’s halcyon spirit.

There are cases where censorship is needed, but America has never maintained an ironclad barrier between sexuality and public life. No less a personage than Constitution contributor Gouverneur Morris, who coined the phrase “We the People”, penned erotica.

Morris’ journals are laced with accounts of his escapades that he mapped graphically, rejecting the code that other early Americans used in regard to sensual subjects. Most of the Bronx-born maverick’s flings happened while he served as an ambassador for the new nation in revolution-era France. His chief squeeze – a married woman - lived in The Louvre back when it was a palace and hangout for friends of the king. Naughtily, the risk-taker and his love interest used the venue as a stage for trysts with an exhibitionist side, as logged in his explicit diaries.

“Go to the Louvre,” Morris writes. “We take the chance of interruption and celebrate in the passage while [Mademoiselle] is at the harpsichord in the drawing room. The husband is below. Visitors are hourly expected. The doors are all open.” Were the US founding father with a pronounced candid streak around now, he might upload his antics to one of the web’s myriad voyeur sites.

Today, the web’s founding father Tim Berners-Lee is on a mission to decentralize it, spurred by a belief in the importance of freedom from interference. “I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. In many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, though it has been a recurring battle to keep it open,” Berners-Lee told the Guardian in March 2017.

The truth is we can do without nanny state-minded corporates banning clips and GIFs of naked flesh. While private censorship undeniably provides for greater exit opportunities than state censorship, it is motivated by the same paternalistic instincts. In many cases, state policy, from the UK’s soon to be implemented porn filtering requirements, to FOSTA in the US, tip the scales against the private toleration of nudity, incentivizing firms to censor content they might have otherwise left alone. An open internet is not aided by additional anti-nudity lobbying, much less lobbying in the service of discredited porn addiction claims. 

So, it may well be time to call a halt on the sanitization - the insidious censorship creep, because we are adults. We can cope with female-presenting nipples, genuine genitals and much more. However nuanced they purport to be, policies of wide-ranging regulation and private bowdlerization should be scrapped

In Candice Delma’s book A Duty to Resist she highlights a theory of resisting injustice as a duty in of itself. This specific duty could require breaking the law. She also defends uncivil disobedience and where it is limited in feasibility. Throughout this episode she makes us question how far we should go in order to fight an injustice. Delmas argues that the duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and political association impose responsibility to resist under conditions of injustice.

What is civil disobedience? How did John Rawls shape our understanding of civil disobedience? What is a just society? What are the principles of justice? Should disobedience always be civil?

Further Reading:

A Duty to Resist, written by Candice Delmas

Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience, written by Candice Delmas

Related Content:

Resisting the State Injustice, Free Thoughts Podcast

Do We Have a Duty to Obey the Government?, Free Thoughts Podcast

What’s Fairness Got to Do With Obeying the Law?, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Every new entertainment medium—from the 17th century novel to 21st century video games—has had its share of scolds who panic about the social implications. Those moral panics are always misguided, but entertainment can indeed shape its consumers. This week, Aaron, Paul, and Will debate the ways that video games, by engaging players with compelling narratives and giving them a feeling of player agency, can change peoples’ beliefs and values. Along the way, they discuss what features would make a game ‘libertarian’ and what makes games fun.

What is player agency in video games? Are video games a vehicle for narrative stories? What makes video games valuable? Do video games inspire youth to act a certain way in real life? Is Minecraft a libertarian video game? What kind of video game player are you? 

Further Reading:

Video Games Should Always Let You Win, written by Aaron Ross Powell

As Gamers Age, The Appeal of Competition Drops The Most. Strategy is The Most Age-Stable Motivation, written by Nick Yee

6 Video Games Every Libertarian Should Play, written by Peter Suderman

Related Content:

Communicating Liberty Through Film and the Making Of “Freedom on Trial”, Free Thoughts Podcast

Introducing Libertarianism: A Reading List, written by Aaron Ross Powell

In today’s episode, we shift to the radical end of the spectrum to investigate the life of another Locofoco archetype: William Cullen Bryant, who played the role of venerable, wise, old sage, whose ancient knowledge and cool demeanor kindled radical flames for generations. We explore his early life that led him to write for the Evening Post. Also, we explain how he formed a mentor relationship with William Leggett, which inspired the Evening Post to turn to radical views of politics.

Who was William Cullen Bryant and what inspired him to start writing? How did Bryant change the Evening Post? How was he able to be a mentor to William Leggett? What were the political views of William Leggett and William Cullen Bryant and how did they portray them through the Evening Post?

Further Reading:

William Cullen Bryant, Poetry Foundation

William Cullen Bryant, written by John Bigelow

Related Content:

Ep. 87: Profiles in Locodom: Fernando Wood, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

William Leggett, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

Property, Real & Imagined: Leggett on the Ownership of Ideas, written by William Leggett

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 to a middle-class family in England. While her father Edward had at one point enjoyed significant financial comfort, he eventually squandered a large portion of his wealth on a variety of projects that failed to yield returns. Frustrated at his prospects, Edward became an abusive drunk who viciously beat his wife Elizabeth. Wollstonecraft was deeply affected by the tyrannical nature of her abusive father who completely subjugated and emotionally destroyed his wife. During her teenage years, Wollstonecraft used to sleep outside of her mother’s bedroom to protect her from Edward’s beatings.

Weary of her troubled home life, Wollstonecraft decided to take up work. She began her working life as an attendant to a widower and then as a governess to a rich Anglo-Irish family. Growing tired of being a governess, Wollstonecraft resolved to pursue her dream of becoming an author. She wrote to her sister that she wished to become “the first of a new genus.”¹ Her literary career quickly took off and she became a respected intellectual. Today, Wollstonecraft is renowned for two main works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, written in 1790 in reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous work, which followed in 1792. The primary focus of Wollstonecraft’s literary career was to envision and propose a social and political order in which women were treated as rational, autonomous beings capable of independence and virtue. For that reason, many feminists consider Mary Wollstonecraft to be a foundational figure in feminist thought.

The Plight of Women

To understand the radical nature of Wollstonecraft’s work, we must understand how desperately subjugated women were in the past. The recognition of equality among genders is a relatively new political idea. For most of history, women were considered by many thinkers to be irrational and intellectually hollow beings who merely existed for the sake of beauty and procreation. The subjection of women was considered justified, given women’s supposed lack of rationality and their physical and emotional frailty.

Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers in Western thought, believed that “the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled.”² The debasement of women was not merely an ancient phenomenon, however. Medieval Church Father Thomas Aquinas, one of Aristotle’s dedicated adherents, described women as defective men.³ Even the Enlightenment era had thinkers who did not think women were fit for much except to be pretty distractions. Immanuel Kant thought that “laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroy the merits that are proper to her sex.”⁴ Kant believed intellectual women “might as well even have a beard.”⁵

Despite prevailing misogynistic attitudes towards women throughout history, there were nonetheless some rebellious thinkers who advocated for a more equal treatment of the sexes. For example, Christine De Pizan, in her 1405 work The Treasure of the City of Ladies, proposed a novel stance on education, namely that it should be available to women of all social standings. Sadly, Pizan’s views did not represent the traditional wisdom of her time.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft articulated an account of the natural equality and liberty that all women deserved. Most of the piece is focused on the education of women. For Wollstonecraft, education was the key to women’s liberation.

This was because Wollstonecraft adhered to the Lockean idea of people as “blank slates.”⁶John Locke posited that we are born without any prior knowledge and that everything we become is a result of our upbringing and education, both of which Locke believed to be of great importance. Wollstonecraft, concurring with Locke, believed that we are under the influence of “the effect of an early association of ideas.”⁷ Since we have no innate qualities, all of what we are is simply learned through habit or education. This idea of humanity as a blank slate led Wollstonecraft to believe that there is no justification for hierarchies and that “God has made all things right.”⁸

During Wollstonecraft’s life, women’s education was starkly different from men’s. Women were taught skills such as sewing, singing, and being charming in conversation. This frustrated Wollstonecraft to no end. She believed “the most perfect education…is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attach such habits of virtue as will render it independent.”⁹ Since the mind can be shaped by education, Wollstonecraft believed that women’s oppression was not natural but rather completely arbitrary; women had not been given a chance to pursue the same goals as men.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft replied to Edmund Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke sternly believed that social and political progress could be achieved by approaching the matter slowly and adhering to traditions shared with our ancestors. Like many political thinkers during the Enlightenment, Burke entertained the idea of a social contract, the idea that political obligations are formed through a kind of mass bargain of each person in a society with everyone else. However, Burke argued that this contract was “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”¹⁰ Because of this idea, he adopted a cautious conservatism. He believed that the French Revolution was being orchestrated by intellectuals who had very little know-how or experience and no respect for society as a project spanning many generations. In Burke’s view, this could only result in disaster: “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”¹¹

In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft aggressively argued against monarchy and hereditary privileges as upheld by the Ancien Regime. She believed that France should adopt a republican form of government.¹² She argued that by abolishing hereditary privileges, France could become a fairer society in which all compete on an equal footing. Throughout both of her Vindications, Wollstonecraft cites the importance of self-discipline, hard work, and the principled morality that could be achieved through the adoption of a commercial society. She agreed with Adam Smith’s idea that commerce would make a gentler and more equal world in which individuals treated equally by the law could cooperate on agreeable terms.¹³

Religious Influences

Under the influence of Richard Price, Wollstonecraft became part of the religious movement known as the Rational Dissenters, a sect of Protestantism. Rational Dissenters believed in the primacy of reason in tandem with scripture, instead of tradition and what they believed to be superstition. Many Dissenters were committed to very radical opinions for their time. They argued for the separation of church and state, the rejection of church hierarchies and even the denial of the doctrine of original sin.

What Makes Humans Special?

Wollstonecraft believed that there was a hierarchy of beings: animals were the lowest form of being and angels were the highest.¹⁴ On this spectrum, humans lie between angels and animals. However, they share more characteristics with the former. This is because animals act on instinct, which is an involuntary reaction to given surroundings. Consequently, animals will tend to behave in a uniform manner with little variation. Humans, with their capacity for reason, are different. Wollstonecraft explained: “In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason.”¹⁵

Reason allows for thoughtful reflection and, most importantly, self-improvement. Wollstonecraft described reason as “the simple power of improvement, or more properly speaking the discerning of truth.”¹⁶ Reason allows us to pursue and maintain virtue, which was, for Wollstonecraft, the primary goal of life. Virtue, for Wollstonecraft, is the adherence to reason unhindered by passions, coercion, or the opinions of others. Wollstonecraft believed that “to be made virtuous by authority…is a contradiction in terms”.¹⁷ For a person to become virtuous, they must be free to make use of their faculties without external coercion.

Because virtue can only be achieved by those who enjoy freedom, Wollstonecraft said, “political associations are intended only for the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.”¹⁸ The chief concern of politics, then, is the establishment of a society that allows for the moral flourishing of independent individuals—and for Wollstonecraft, that implied Republicanism.

Republicanism, a Radical Tradition

Wollstonecraft belongs to a tradition of Classical Republicanism.¹⁹ Republicanism is a nebulous and multi-faceted concept that can cause confusion at times. Broadly speaking, Republicanism aligned itself with a classical tradition of republican freedom as articulated in the writings of Roman authors such as Livy, Polybius, and Cicero. Their ideas were developed further by Italian, British, and (eventually) American thinkers.²⁰ British authors including John Milton, Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, and the aforementioned Richard Price were all committed to Republican ideals. Republicanism in this sense of the word can be defined as a commitment to three core ideas: the upholding of a mixed constitution; the importance of civic virtue and vigilance; and finally, the idea of freedom as non-domination.²¹

Freedom as Non-Domination

In Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, the main character Nora is married to her loving husband Torvald in a 19th-century Norwegian town.²² According to the law, Torvald has great power over Nora; he can choose how she dresses, who she associates with, and how she runs the house. Luckily for Nora, Torvald worships his wife and imposes no restrictions on her except for a ban on eating macarons, a minor imposition at best. Even though Nora is allowed by Torvald to act as she wishes in most areas of her life, the lingering power Torvald has over her subtly denies Nora true freedom.

Republicans would say that Nora was not free because of the arbitrary power hanging over her head. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon aptly wrote that “liberty is to live upon one’s own terms, slavery is to live at the mere mercy of another”.²³ Even if one has a benevolent or permissive master, they are not free. Algernon Sidney argued that “he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world as well as he who serves the worst”.²⁴ The Republican ideal of freedom is an absence of arbitrary power, which is, by its very nature, unlimited and discretionary.²⁵ For Republicans, freedom was to be ruled by reason, not by whim, an ideal embodied in James Harrington’s maxim “an empire of laws and not of men.”²⁶

Wollstonecraft shared this conception of freedom as non-domination with other Republicans and it plays a major role in her political thought. Wollstonecraft concurs with Sidney, writing that “man is debased by servitude of any description”, because “to subjugate a rational being to the will of another…is a most cruel and undue stretch of power”.²⁷ Our nature as rational beings entitles us to liberty which, in Wollstonecraft’s words, is “the birthright of every man.”²⁸ Wollstonecraft believed in a society of equals, writing, “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”²⁹

Arbitrary power creates dependence and subordination, while freedom from arbitrary power cultivates independence and equality. Throughout Wollstonecraft’s works, she often compares women’s situation to slavery.³⁰  Dominated individuals are not in control of their own destiny, and therefore cannot achieve a semblance of virtue, even in the best of circumstances.³¹

Wollstonecraft believed that the life of a slave would produce slavish behaviour. Slaves trick their masters and attempt to curry favour with them in order to live comfortably. In her view, marriage was scarcely better than slavery. Because of this, women would act poorly; “whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands, woman will be cunning, mean and selfish.”³² Wollstonecraft thought that it was “vain to expect virtue from women until they are in some degree independent of men.”³³ There was no reason, she argued, to “expect virtue from a slave.”³⁴

Independence: The Blessing of Life

Wollstonecraft called personal independence “the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue.”³⁵ But when Wollstonecraft said that women should be independent of men, she did not mean that they should be without men’s support or companionship. According to Wollstonecraft, there are two kinds of independence: independence of mind and civil independence.

Independence of Mind

Independence of mind is the ability to think freely and unhindered by others. As Wollstonecraft asserted, “it is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything.”³⁶ This kind of independence can only be achieved by gaining a proper, rigorous education, something most women had been denied for centuries.

Women, said Wollstonecraft, were “educated like a fanciful kind of half being,” taught to care about their looks, charm, and manners instead of learning how to discern truth, formulate ideas and arguments, and become resilient people.³⁷ Life would always be a struggle, explained Wollstonecraft, and virtue could only ever be achieved by hardy people willing to test their minds and spirits. But because “men have increased the inferiority of women till they are almost sunk beneath the standard of rational creatures,” Wollstonecraft believed that women could not cultivate the independence of mind that virtue demands.³⁸ Women could and would become rational, robust, and independent beings when allowed to partake in an education that promoted resilience and free thinking instead of dependence and frivolity.

Civil Independence

However, this lofty ideal of independence of mind would all be for nought if women did not have the means by which to act upon their convictions. Our beliefs and thoughts are important, but virtue is achieved through action.³⁹

At the time, women were forbidden to work most jobs, denied a proper education, excluded from politics and were wholly dependent on their husbands. This made it impossible for them to live virtuous lives. Wollstonecraft declared that “virtue can only flourish amongst equals…among unequals there can be no society”.⁴⁰. She lamented that “many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practiced as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry”.⁴¹

Since we are all born as blank slates, there is nothing innate in us that entitles any person to authority over another, explained Wollstonecraft. To submit to any authority other than reason is degrading to our character; thus all arbitrary power must be abolished. Women, Wollstonecraft said, must be given the same range of choices as men.

As such, Wollstonecraft argued both for women’s right to own property, as well as the ability to make contracts, in order to have the option to earn an income separate from their husbands. Wollstonecraft also wished to see women play a role in government, both as representatives and voters. She asked, “who made man the exclusive judge, if women partake with him the gift of reason?”⁴²

The Legacy of a Trailblazer

Histories of political philosophy tend to be composed mostly of men, with few women featuring prominently. This has resulted in many philosophers articulating polities that completely ignore women’s existence.

Wollstonecraft is one of the founding feminists. Her inspiring vision of a world in which women are treated as rational and autonomous beings inspired a wide variety of thinkers within the early feminist movement. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first ever women’s rights convention in America, had both read and admired Wollstonecraft’s work. Diverse authors including Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and even Emma Goldman had positive opinions of Wollstonecraft.⁴³

Even if we set aside Wollstonecraft’s massive influence on later thinkers, her works express a unique and compelling perspective on the essence of freedom. Virtue is life’s primary goal, but for virtue to exist, so must freedom. A lack of freedom also implies a lack of virtue, as servility degrades and corrupts our character. To cultivate virtue, one must have independence of mind and civil independence. Independence of mind is the ability to think and act for one’s own betterment by striving towards new ideas and opportunities. Civil independence is not only an absence of coercion, but also a guarantee that no arbitrary powers might encroach upon one’s rights. A robust intellectual and moral character can only be carved out by those who are allowed to enjoy their natural and just freedom.

1. Mary Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft, London, 7 November [1787], Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp.163-165. ↩ 
2. Aristotle, Politics 1259 b4-6. ↩
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 92, a. 1, Obj. 1. ↩ 
4. Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (Routledge, 2014) p.48. ↩
5. Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (Routledge, 2014) p.48. ↩
6. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (,1992) p.53. ↩
7. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009) p.190. ↩
8. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.78. ↩
9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.86. ↩
10. Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” 1790, The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, vol. 3, p. 359 (1899). ↩
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 2 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864), pp. 515-516. ↩
12. Chris Jones, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications and their political tradition” p.53 in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002).p.43. ↩ 
13. Chris Jones, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications and their political tradition” p.53 in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002). ↩
14. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (,1992) p.77. ↩
15. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.76. ↩
16. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.122. ↩
17. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009) p.276. ↩
18. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.355. ↩
19. Philip Pettit, “Republican Elements in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft” pp.135-148 in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft E.D Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford, 2017). ↩ 
20. Mortimer Sellers, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: Republicanism, Liberalism and the Law (Macmillian, 1998) pp.7-11. ↩
21. Philip Pettit, “Republican Elements in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft” p.136 in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft E.D Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford, 2017). ↩
22. Philip Pettit, Republican “Elements in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft” p.138 in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft E.D Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford, 2017). ↩
23. Trenchard and Gordon (1971), Cato’s Letters, vol. 2, pp. 249–50. ↩
24. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government III.21, pp.349-350. ↩
25. Alan M. S. J. Coffee, Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life Hypatia Volume 29, Issue 4 Fall 2014 p.908. ↩
26. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana I.2.
    This phrase was first coined by the Roman historian Livy. It became a popular slogan of republicanism and was commonly quoted by John Adams. ↩
27. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.235. ↩
28. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.7. ↩
29. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.133. ↩
30. Chris Jones, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications and their political tradition” p.45 in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002). ↩
31. Alan M. S. J. Coffee, Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life Hypatia Volume 29, Issue 4 Fall 2014 p.915. ↩
32. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.222. ↩
33. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.221. ↩
34. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.141. ↩
35. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.65. ↩
36. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009) p.197. ↩
37. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.106. ↩
38. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.101. ↩
39. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (,1992) p.73. ↩ 
40. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.59. ↩
41. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.230. ↩
42. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford, 2009)  p.67. ↩
43. Cora Kaplan, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies” p.250 in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002). ↩

In 1776 the Second Continental Congress took up the idea of independence from England and from this emerged the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration was not merely a protest over taxation. It was a justification for leaving the British Empire and as such Jefferson paid particular attention to the list of grievances that occupies the latter two-thirds of the document. The colonists saw themselves as free Englishmen, and as such were heirs to the rich tradition of rights that Englishmen enjoyed. The grievances of the Declaration of Independence were meant to show how George III had betrayed the colonists’ trust.¹

That trust—the rights and liberties of the English—was encapsulated in the documents that made up the English form of government. Winston Churchill wrote, about the U.S. Constitution that it was “a reaffirmation of faith in the principles painfully evolved over the centuries by the English-speaking peoples. It enshrined long-standing English ideas of justice and liberty.”² Those ideas and principles have their foundation in the Magna Carta.

What lead to the creation of the Magna Carta?

The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, was sealed in 1215, by King John I, at a meadow some twenty miles west of London along the River Thames, but the seeds of the baron’s revolt that led to it were planted during the reign of John’s father Henry II.

When Henry came to the throne the kingdom had been torn by a civil war between Henry’s mother Matilda, who was the daughter of Henry I, and Stephen whose mother was the daughter of William I. Matilda was named heir by her father but during the war Stephen wrested control of the kingdom away from her. When Stephen’s own heir died, he agreed to the Treaty of Winchester in 1153, which named Henry II as heir to Stephen. This arrangement ended the civil war, but Henry inherited a kingdom which was in disarray. When he became king, Henry had already inherited the duchy of Normandy, along with the counties of Maine and Anjou. He also acquired the duchy of Aquitaine by marrying Eleanor, whose marriage to the French king had recently been annulled. He possessed more land in France than even the French king, and then he inherited the kingdom of England.³

Henry’s inheritance came with a variety of financial challenges. The Welsh and the Scots had both taken advantage of the anarchy of the civil war to make incursions into England and Henry needed to gain those lands back. In addition to this, the French king, who did not appreciate Henry occupying such a strong position and possessing so much French land, made holding on to the French lands into a never-ending process. Henry’s attempts to maintain control over his lands would require greater demands on his barons. He increased knight service in order to increase scutage, the payment a baron could make in lieu of sending knights to serve.⁴

The demands on the barons only increased after Richard I became king. He was very different from his father. Where Henry II had been an able administrator, Richard was more interested in adventure and war. Henry had reformed and improved the royal system so it was more efficient at raising money and operating in his absence. Richard increased the demands for overseas service and extended service, which resulted in increased scutage payments, as well as continuing the increases instituted by Henry.⁵

Richard’s demands for more money came from his desire to travel to Palestine for a Crusade to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims, having sworn to go on this crusade with the French king Philip Augustus. Philip, claiming illness, returned to France and began working to undercut Richard and deprive him of his lands, coopting Richard’s brother John in the process. Richard returned to England, having successfully retaken Jerusalem, to put his kingdom back in order. As he travelled through Austria, Richard was taken hostage, and a large ransom demanded of England. When the ransom was paid, Richard embarked on the long process of reconquering and restoring his lands. The crusade, ransom and reconquest, as Richard’s accounts show, were expensive and England paid heavily for it.⁶

Richard died while reconquering his lands, leaving no heirs, and thus giving John the chance to become king. John did not have the military abilities of either his father or brother, but he did understand the working of the royal administration. When he lost his French lands, he used his knowledge of the administration to increase the royal treasury to an extent his father and brother had not even imagined. John increased scutage and required it more often, required higher returns from the sheriffs in the administration of the shires, and claimed more lands as royal forest land, which allowed him to profit from all administration of justice on those lands. John also administered justice arbitrarily, denying many people access to the courts and selling his justice to others. John also increased the fees noblemen paid to receive their inheritances and deliberately drove others to the brink of financial ruin.⁷

John’s excesses led to increased dissatisfaction among his barons. John’s character did not inspire loyalty among his barons, in part because he had shown them an insatiable greed and a lack of military ability. The more John schemed to return to the Continent to win back his French lands, the more restless the barons became. While many of John’s moral failings were also common in Henry II and Richard I, they spent so little time in England, trusting the kingdom to govern itself in their absence, that these failings were less noticeable. John remained in England full time and in unscrupulous nature of his character were fully exposed to the barons.^[8]

By the year 1215 the barons had had enough. There had already existed some resistance, when barons were slow to send requested troops or to pay scutage, and on occasions there were absolute refusals to fulfill these feudal obligations, but in 1215 this resistance was becoming more organized. This resistance became a full civil war, with the barons taking control of London and preventing John from having access to his treasury. This civil war culminated at the meadow at Runnymede where John sealed the Great Charter his barons wanted. The goal of this charter was force specific policy changes on John as well as to place some more general limits on the monarchy and guarantee certain rights that John was obligated to protect.⁹

How was the Magna Carta revolutionary?

The Magna Carta dealt with a variety of issues in its clauses. There were a few of them that were very specific, dealing with problems that only mattered to those barons at that time. Clause 33 require that all fish-weirs, or barriers that were designed to trap fish in a river, to be removed from the Thames and from throughout England. Clause 50 demanded that certain men be removed from their offices in England. Clauses 58 and 59 dealt with the return of hostages to Wales and Scotland respectively.¹⁰

Another type of clause in the Magna Carta were those that dealt with specific policies. One prime example of this is Clause 17, which established a permanent home for the common pleas court. This clause meant that the barons would no longer have to chase the king’s court around England in order to find justice. Clause 35, set a standard of weights and measures for wine, cloth, ale, and grain.¹¹

The most important clauses were those that led to bigger principles, the type of principles of which Churchill wrote. In Clauses 12 and 14 the barons extracted a promise that extraordinary feudal aids could only be granted by the common counsel of the kingdom and then set a procedure for calling together a council for that purpose. Similarly, Clause 16 guaranteed that no one should be forced to give greater service than that required by their feudal oath. In Clauses 28, 30, and 31 the king’s officers could not take grain or chattel, horses or carts, or wood for castle repair, without either paying for them or gaining the owner’s permission.¹²

There were several clauses in this category that deal with justice and would be far-reaching. Clauses 20 and 21 specified that a free man could only be amerced, or fined, according to the degree of the crime committed, and only on the oaths of “good men from the neighbourhood,” and that earls and barons could only be amerced by other nobles. Clause 38 forbade the king’s officers from putting any man through an ordeal without trustworthy witnesses. Clause 39 promised that “no free man shall be captured or imprisoned or disseised [sic] or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” The king promised in Clause 40 that he would not sell justice or deny justice to anyone.¹³

From these few examples it is possible to see that the Magna Carta was, in many ways, foundational for future English and later American constitutional development. The document was reissued several times during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to reinforce the arrangement it made. When it was reissued in 1225, for example, Clause 37 made the nature of the political bargain clear by showing that it was a promise from the king to maintain the customs and liberties of the people and to remedy grievances in exchange for tax revenue.¹⁴

The nature of this agreement, and the specific liberties and rights mentioned in the Magna Carta over the various versions were the root of arguments made by later legal experts seeking to make reforms on the British form of government. These legal experts, such as Sir Edward Coke, saw the Magna Carta as a bulwark against tyranny. To them it had saved England by establishing basic civil and political rights, and that it had placed the king himself under the law. They spoke of rights such as parliamentary consent for taxation, due process of the law, and trial by jury. Coke, speaking before the House of Commons in 1619, condemned Stuart attempts to tax without Parliament as an abuse of royal government and a contravention of the clauses of Magna Carta.¹⁵

William Blackstone also viewed the Magna Carta as “the principle bulwark of English liberties.” Even the elder William Pitt, revered in the colonies as a great Prime Minister and friend to the colonies, referred to the Magna Carta as the “Bible of the Constitution.” These were men who were highly influential on the colonial intellectuals. Coke was an important part of the standard legal education, and legal scholars throughout the colonies frequently cited both Coke and Blackstone in their writings about the common law.¹⁶

One could argue that Coke and Blackstone, among others, were merely using the Magna Carta to further their own political reforms and that it did not do everything they purported. Clauses 12 and 14, which forbid the demanding of scutage without common counsel and then set a procedure for calling the barons for that counsel, were cited as the requirement that the king must ask the representatives of the people for taxes, and as the beginning of Parliament. These clauses, however, merely set a procedure by which the king could summon his barons and ask them for extraordinary feudal aids, and, therefore, was not really the beginning of Parliament.¹⁷ While Parliament as we know it today was not truly established until the Model Parliament of 1295,¹⁸ there were certainly many in the seventeenth century who saw Magna Carta as its inspiration, such as Coke and Blackstone.

Whether or not Blackstone and Coke were merely using these arguments to further reforms, or they believed that they were advancing arguments based on the history of the Magna Carta, they did sway others that certain rights were established by the document. Rights such as trial by jury and taxation through representation would find their way into the political lexicography, even forming the basis of the American Revolution.

Clauses 20, 21, 38 and 39 can easily be interpreted as establishing a right to trial by jury. These clauses make it clear that free men could not be punished for crimes without the testimony of good men from their neighborhood, or from other barons if they were members of the nobility. In fact, these clauses could be merely reinforcing more ancient customs. Under William I the royal court had responsibility to try all cases where his vassals had a right to trial by his peers. This court authority was also extended to the lesser courts for smaller claims as well. Before the Norman invasion, the Anglo-Saxon court system included plaintiffs making oaths accusing a defendant of an offense, the plaintiff supporting that claim with oaths from local men, the defendant making a counter-claim of innocence through an oath, and the defendant supporting that claim with oaths from local men as well.¹⁹ These clauses in Magna Carta might have been a reminder to the king that a defendant could not be found guilty without these oaths.

Likewise, Clauses 12 and 14 have often been interpreted as the establishment of Parliament as they demand that the king must ask a council of his barons for extraordinary feudal aid. While one could suggest that this is a requirement that the king get consent from representatives of his subjects for taxes, this would be incorrect. Feudal oaths taken by the barons already promised certain obligations to the king and these clauses, along with Clause 16, merely reinforce to the king that he can not take more simply by demanding it.

These misinterpretations of the clauses of Magna Carta can be seen in Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson argued that George III obstructed the administration of justice (Clause 40), imposed taxes on the colonists without their consent (Clauses 12,14), and deprived them of trial by jury.²⁰

The real significance of Magna Carta, however, is in general theories. For one, the barons were successful in forcing the king to grant a written charter of rights, proving that kings could be brought to terms. Another important result of this document was that the king was not only the man who made the laws, but was also under the law, an idea that Jefferson would revisit. As the Magna Carta was reissued over the years it became an assurance of good faith, that the king would respect certain rights contained therein, and, in return, he could expect loyalty from his subjects. Finally, the original issue of Magna Carta contained a security clause, Clause 61, that stated that if the king violated the terms of the charter then the barons could revolt and force him to comply.²¹

These principles became an important influence for the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson had previously argued that “his Majesty…is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers.”²² Thus, is was a logical progression for Jefferson to suggest that after violating so many of the rights of the colonists, the colonists had a right to choose a new chief officer. He stated this in the Declaration by stating that “a Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People”

The Declaration of Independence was the colonists’ opportunity to explain why they had a right to leave the British Empire. Jefferson argued that George III, like John several centuries earlier, had violated the trust of the people that he, a chief executive, owed to them. The Declaration could only be seen as justification for revolt because of the barons’ success in forcing John to issue the Magna Carta and the rights contained in that great document.

As the American “foodie” culture grows, it will clash more and more with previously established USDA and FDA rules and regulations since they typically promote uniformity. The USDA has taken it upon themselves to enforce standards of identity laws which allows them to basically enforce cosmetic standards. These laws encourage farmers to produce foods that are uniform and look gorgeous, but neither of these measurements have anything to do with the quality or taste of the product. Throughout history the FDA has certainly made the food we eat safer, especially now that it can perform a mandatory recall of any food that they know contains an illness, but that was not always the case.

How does the USDA affect the way that we produce food in the U.S.? Should USDA laws and regulations be imposed subjectively by inspectors? Can you challenge USDA regulations? What is the Food Safety Modernization Act? Does regulating how we produce food actually make food safer to consume? Should the FDA have a preemptive or reactive approach when it comes to food? Should farmers receive subsidies?

Further Reading:

Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, written by Baylen J. Linnekin

The State of Food Freedom Around the Globe, written by Baylen Linnekin

Deregulation of Local Foods Is a Winning Idea That’s Spreading, written by Baylen

Related Content:

How Food Regulations Make Us Less Healthy, featuring Daniel J. D’Amico

Regulations Gone Wrong, Free Thoughts Podcast

Jim Cantrell is a mechanical engineer and the co-founder of Vector. He has worked with the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, the French space agency (CNES), and was a co-founder of Space X. He received a NASA innovation award in 1989 for his Mars Balloon Technology. He is also a liberty advocate who pursues road racing in his spare time. Spencer Neale, a correspondent for Libertarianism.org, had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Cantrell about Vector, cryptocurrency, the future of space, and Elon Musk.

Can you give our readers some idea of your mission at Vector?

Cantrell: We are essentially trying to create the technology for the space commerce of the 21st century. If you look at New York City, for example, 100 or so odd years ago the skyline was pretty flat because there weren’t any elevators. Once elevator technology came along, you quickly got the skyline that you have today along with the commerce that attaches itself to that. What we’re trying to create is infrastructure for the new space economy.

We believe that consists of launch vehicles that can put physical assets in space more frequently and more conveniently. The second part of that is that we will transform the space economy to a digital economy. We have to help bring space from what it’s been over the last 50 years, which is a government dominated industry, to something that’s more akin to the modern tech industry. That’s why we have a lot of Silicon Valley investors attached to our project. They agree with the same vision that we have. Vector intends to be the space access company of the 21st century.

You have spoken about how, in the past, there was a feeling among young engineers and scientists that governments weren’t making the best financial decisions in regard to space innovation.  How have inefficiencies in government-run space programs led to this new era of space innovation and exploration?

Cantrell: The answer is quite simple. The government-run space industry is so risk-averse that it has become corrosive to the individuals that are attracted to it. As much as people don’t like to hear it, governments are inherently corrupt. They are doing something that I think is immoral at the base which is taking your money and then giving it back to you. This whole entire circle rears its ugly head when you get these idealistic young people who get out of college and want to go work for NASA. They get there and find that it’s a complete shitshow of bureaucrat slowness, tied up in rules and regulations.

All of these things are the antithesis to youth and enthusiasm and creativity. It’s a giant killjoy. The commercial industry is where it’s at. Our tech industry is very vibrant in this country and it’s not because of government investment and it’s not because of government regulation. It’s because bright people are out there doing it and investors are putting money into it. We are doing it in spite of the government.

What are your thoughts in regards to the military-industrial complex operating in space and how do you feel about Donald Trump’s ‘space force’?

Cantrell: I think his enthusiasm is well placed. I appreciate that. He’s one of the first presidents in a long time that has genuinely seized the promise of the space economy and that is to be commended. Obama didn’t see it. Bush certainly didn’t see it. Reagan actually did and he made some strong and bold moves in that direction. Clinton didn’t really see it. But Trump, and maybe it’s generational, but he and Pence both see it and are big supporters of it. I give him an A+.

Space Force, I think, is Donald Trump’s venture into what the military industrial complex is all about. It’s not needed. We don’t need a whole new branch of the military. What I think has truly happened is that the military-industrial complex lobbyists have found their way to these guys’ ears. This is just another way to redistribute wealth from taxpayers to people sitting in offices at the big three aerospace companies. I used to be in that game and one day I woke up and thought, “Not only is this immoral but I feel like a slimebag.” I know how these guys think. There’s a lot of money to be made and on the one hand that’s kind of attractive, but on the other hand it’s just wrong. It’s a misplaced motivation but it’s true that we will be fighting the future of our wars in space. We don’t need a special space force. It’s a waste of money.

You have called the cellphone a weapon. What do you think is so important about the devices we all carry?

Cantrell: Over the years, one of the panaceas or nirvanas that the military would look for was the ability to communicate 24/7 with their troops. A real-time command and control system. Here, we civilians have developed it and it’s called the cellphone. We’ve got a command and control system in civilian hands and you see this with the revolutions in the Middle East that were fueled by social networks. If you look at where tyrannical governments put their control in place, first and foremost it’s on social networks.

This enables the power of the people in ways that have never been available to us, ever. Therefore, it’s a weapon of the people against tyranny. Now, on the other hands, the tyrants see it as a weapon to track and trace us. People say, “We’ll never let these people chip us.” Guess what? They’ve already chipped our asses. We carry it in our pocket. You can’t even be assured that your cellphone isn’t listening to you and that the IRS isn’t on the other end of it stirring up their next audit because I’m saying things about the government that aren’t very friendly. So it’s a tool and a weapon that works both ways. It can be used against us and it can be used by us. But it’s absolutely the most incredible source of our thoughts, our political leanings, and everything that’s intimate to who we are. It’s a scary thing.

Your son Colin is the software architect for Nexus Earth, one of the most promising cryptocurrency projects at the moment. What are your thoughts on cryptocurrency and blockchain?

Cantrell: I originally just thought it was a bit of fad and I figured I was throwing my money away. But, I found that it is actually the most unique way to transfer value that’s been devised by mankind. I think it’s far better than minerals you dig up out of the ground or paper you can print that someone says is worth a lot of value. This is a way that is agreed upon by those who are doing the trading instead of those who are dictating how the trading is done. It’s most similar to gold but it’s digital so it’s fungible in ways that gold never could be.

You go back to the cellphone. Not only is it a weapon but it’s also an ability to transfer value. Your freedom of speech, your freedom of movement and your freedom of property are the three fundamentals of your freedom. I think what cryptocurrency is missing is something that’s stable enough to allow for a transactional replacement for FIAT currency. I see blockchain ingrained in our society in ways that will be irreplaceable. I think it’s translating from a speculative market into something that will become more of an industry.

What was the effect on you of seeing the first man land on the moon?

Cantrell: I was very young, but I still remember it. I was with my grandfather and he and I watched it. I can remember it was a ghostly thing on the TV. I remember watching it and it was hard for me to understand that this was a person on the moon, but I understood that it was something very important to humanity and that our people had left this place where we lived. It seemed like a great adventure. It speaks to the exploratory gene in all of us.

If you’ve ever read The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, he captures it magnificently. He talks about how we started out as nomads and when the food ran out or the climate went bad, we would move. It was always that sense of moving that propelled us forward until we advanced enough that we found it easier to bring the food to us than go to the food. He points out that sedentary life isn’t suited to us as a species. We’re meant to move. We got to do things, or we are useless as a species. 

You have worked with Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, in the past. I think it’s difficult for the public to perceive a figure like Elon Musk. Hype or Genius?

Cantrell: Elon is the real deal. Transformational people come from ordinary walks of life. He is certainly a transformational person. He represents that nomadic part of our species that is enormously powerful. He’s unlike anyone I’ve ever known. He’s by far the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He’s also the most motivated and ambitious person I’ve ever met. His desire, as he puts it, to make humanity a multi-planetary species is deeply ingrained, and he will either do it or die trying. 

Wearable tech includes everything from wearable thermometers to robotic exoskeletons. It’s a hot investment area for Silicon Valley venture capital funds. But most startups in the wearable industry are very careful to avoid claiming that they are producing “medical devices.” Yet the divide between these wearables and medical devices seems incredibly arbitrary. After all, how is a traditional thermometer that you place under your tongue a medical device, yet a patch that you place on your skin to monitor your PH levels not one?

As this episode explores, that arbitrary distinction is made to avoid regulatory scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for medical devices. That regulation has perversely encouraged stagnation in the medical device industry, especially when compared to the bewildering array of new products and innovations coming out of the unregulated wearable industry.

Where is wearable tech heading? What counts as essential and non-essential medical care? Why are health tracking wearables claiming to not be medical devices? How does the FDA regulate medical devices? How can you circumvent having to do a full review of a new medical device? How do FDA processes stifle innovation?

Further Reading:

L’oréal’s New Clip-On Sensor Tracks Your Exposure to UV Rays, by Wired

UVM Study: Wearable Sensor Could Detect Hidden Anxiety, Depression In Young Children, written by Brian Owens

Behind the Boom in Breast Pump Innovation, written by Heather R. Johnson

The Top 10 Mental Health Apps, written by Hannah Nichols

Related Content:

We Got Your Black Friday Shopping List, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Emerging Tech, Free Thoughts Podcast

Health Care without Health Insurance, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Economic history is an interesting if undervalued field often avoided for its dependence on interdisciplinary analysis. Africa’s economic history is especially interesting and undervalued compared to other subdivisions of economic history and it is probably the area of our history with which Africans are least familiar.¹ This is perhaps the reason why there is much outdated knowledge about how the early Africans engaged in trade and the characteristics of their economic cultures. But studying the economic history of Africa is central to understanding the early evolution of trade and commerce more broadly. As such, though, most of the non-mythical knowledge we have on the early African civilizations almost entirely comes from archaeological discoveries and analysis.

In this new series on Market Economies in Ancient Africa, we will look at the earliest known African civilizations: ancient Egypt, Kush, and Aksum, how they practiced international trade, and their economic cultures.

The Market Trading and Market Economy Hypothesis

To understand human behavior, economics often depends on history, and history is sometimes a product of archaeology. In the case of Africa, if there are no consistent economic interpretations of new archaeological discoveries to update our knowledge of the past, our mere theorizing will not do justice to the true economic foundations of the continent and its people.

For instance, before the excavations in 19th century Egypt, historians believed that the economy of ancient Egypt revolved around the cultivation of cereals like wheat and barley, and their rationing among citizens. This led many economic historians to believe that the ancient Egyptian society was most likely communist. However, excavations in the last few decades disprove this and we know that rationing of yields only happened among workers on public projects. This was partly because the ancient Egyptians struggled to store water to support farming through the dry seasons and yields were often low,² not because their society was based on common farming or some sort of sharing according to need. Citizens always kept their harvest and government officials only took surpluses—when there were any—to share among public workers as a form of payment. If facts had not been updated, we would still interpret this aspect of Egyptian history wrongly.

Prior to the millennium, economic historians only went as far as writing on the economy of medieval Africa telling the remarkable stories of mighty kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Ghana and others—most of which gained prominence from their large open markets and commercial exploits. Only a few went earlier than that as the scarcity of evidence limited the scope of their analyses. However, with new interests in Africa’s past and the many successful excavations since the early 1990s,³ we now know more about early African civilizations—enough to allow for a scientific study of their economic lives. Perhaps the exhausting requirement for an interdisciplinary approach to understand Africa’s economic history is the reason why there has not been sufficient economic interpretation of archaeological discoveries. So, how did these early Africans organize commerce? And do we have sufficient evidence to categorize their economic processes?

All the early African civilizations considered in this series had complex economies, and there is sufficient evidence to conclude that their economic cultures were largely based on market trading in a market economy. Also, contrary to misconceptions that Africa has always had a backward role in the international trading system, these early African civilizations shaped global trade. They stood at the same level in terms of economic strength as the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans.⁴ The ancient Egyptians, the Kushite kingdoms, and the Aksumites defined commerce and pioneered some of the enduring inventions in banking. But to justify the use of the term ‘market trading’ in qualifying their process of exchange, and why we might even call them market economies, we must first understand both terms in their historic contexts.

In his monumental work, Trade And Market In The Early Empires, Austro-Hungarian economic historian, Karl Polanyi, suggested that there were three main types of trade in the ancient world: gift trade, administered trade, and market trade. To Polanyi, market trading was central to almost all prosperous civilizations in the ancient world—including the early African civilizations. And he roughly explained how to identify one when he noted:

Commercial trade, or, in our terms, market trade, arose as a burning issue out of the circumstances of the ancient world. Money was now being earned by respectable citizens through the simple device of buying and selling. Such a thing had been unknown, or rather, was restricted to low-class persons, known as hucksters, as a rule metics [non-citizens], who eked out a living by retailing food in the marketplace. Such individuals did make a profit by buying at one price and selling at another. The organization of market trade follows the lines traced out by the supply-demand-price mechanism. The market mechanism shows its immense range of application by being adaptable to the handling not only of goods, but of every element of trade itself—storage, transportation, risk, credit, payments, etc.—through the forming of special markets for freight, insurance, short-term credit, capital, warehouse space, banking facilities, and so on.⁵

From the foregoing, Polanyi clearly identified the key features of what he considered market trading, which includes the organization of a market that follows the supply-demand-price mechanism, and that such a mechanism adapts to elements of a trade like risk, means of payments and storage. As we will see, all three early African civilizations considered in this series exhibited these features, albeit the justification for a market economy is even more straightforward. In a definitive explanation of the market economy, theoretical economist, Ludwig von Mises argued:

The imaginary construction of a pure or unhampered market economy assumes that there is [a] division of labor and private ownership (control) of the means of production and that consequently there is [a] market exchange of goods and services. It assumes that the operation of the market is not obstructed by institutional factors. It assumes that the government, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, is intent upon preserving the operation of the market system, abstains from hindering its functioning, and protects it against encroachments on the part of other people.⁶

To relate Mises’ explanation to the ancient world, we can take a cue from economic historian, Peter Temin. In testing the hypothesis of his claim that there was a market economy in the early Roman Empire, Temin argued on two premises: that “many individual actions and interactions are seen best as market transactions,” and that there “were enough market transactions to constitute a market economy [in Rome], that is, an economy where many resources are allocated by prices that are free to move in response to changes in underlying conditions.” Temin also writes that “markets were equilibrated by means of prices.”⁷ Equally, the economy of ancient Egypt, Kush, and Aksum exhibit the attributes identified by Polanyi, Mises and Temin. Although we cannot have a complete knowledge of economic life in these early African civilizations and future archaeological discoveries might even dismiss some arguments made here. Starting with Egypt, the economic prosperity of each of the three civilizations considered in this series was triggered by the fall of the other.

The Economic Evolution of  Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was probably the first civilization in Africa.⁸ It was a northern African territory that succeeded Prehistoric Egypt. Its creation was the result of the unification of two separate kingdoms around 3000 BCE by Narmer, who is considered as the first Pharaoh of Egypt by most Egyptologists.⁹ The White Land in the south and the Red Land in the north both existed as separate entities. King Scorpion of the south had attempted to bring the north under his control but failed and Menes—also a southern King at a different time—succeeded and created the first dynasty with Memphis as administrative capital. Ancient Egypt flourished until its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE then completely declined in 2 BCE.

Many historians date the start of trade in ancient Egypt to the Predynastic Period (6000 BCE - 3150 BCE).¹⁰ This is relevant considering this period corresponds with the earliest dated archaeological evidence that illustrates a pattern of exchange among the ancient Egyptians contained in paintings and wall inscriptions. But, the culture that made the Egyptians flourished in the Predynastic Period dates even farther. This is more significant because of the innovation of the first occupants of the Nile River—ancestors of the ancient Egyptians—that changed the cultures of farming and hunting. The changes from simple stones to a combination of complex stone tools like the large pear-shaped weapon often called the Acheulean hand axes, and natural fibers like jute and flax made hunting more efficient. Other inventions like mud shelters created storages for excess yields and food rationing. Prior to these innovations, the Nile occupants had no means of saving their kills for long. There were also no durable shelters for human aside from the caves. The Egyptian society improved drastically in the last part of the early Neolithic Period—the period before Predynastic Egypt—around 6,000 BCE. The changes marked a new phase in the organization of human society from hunter-gathering to the domestication of animals and a more sophisticated agricultural process. It marked the invention of tools and weapons that made the construction of durable settlements easier marking a shift to a pastoral culture. The creation of granaries and mitigation of river water around the territories eased cultivation. It also means that the ancient Egyptians had claims to abundant land with which they cultivated and made an extra harvest. It is from these changes that the first division of the ownership of the means of production emerge between the state officials and the nobles. In General History of Africa Volume II, French Egyptologist, Jean Yoyotte,  explained this divide when he noted:

Average yields were good (in ancient Egypt): the surpluses fed the large numbers of government officials and the workers in medium-sized places of employment (shipyards and weapon factories, spinning mills attached to certain temples, etc.). Through their control over food resources, which varied according to the period, the temple authorities and high officials exercised powers of patronage.¹¹

The improvements in the means of food production and storage meant that less labor was needed on the farms. This allowed ancient Egyptians to spend time on new endeavors that led to the many craftworks and artifacts we associate with the ancient Egyptians today. They also designed new shelters and build metallic tools better than those made from fibres and stones. They started to exhibit numerous skill sets with each individual providing solutions to the most fundamental needs, especially in food and security. This watered the grounds for the emergence of a domestic economy while the desert also offered an abundance of resources including dyes and hard stones.

The green and black dyes were used in optical treatments and the hard stones like the fine limestone from Toura, Silsila sandstone, Aswan granite, and Hatnub alabaster were used in architecture and sculpture.¹² Gradually, one Egyptian desired the commodity or services of another and both would agree to a barter trade. Through these small exchanges, a market emerged in the most rudimentary form. As the Egyptian society developed, its social system became class-based with a central administration which did not control the barter trade. The Pharaoh was the political head, and power was devolved among institutions like the temples, the harems and the local administrative councils. Interestingly, this was not reflective of the economic life in ancient Egypt, which was highly decentralized. Since the economy was based on the large-scale cultivation of cereal and grains, citizens consumed their harvest to their satisfaction and stored excess harvests in public warehouses when there were no proper storages for them at home. They could collect their items whenever they pleased. To create their own wealth, local administrators acquired surpluses from harvest and store them in granaries separate from the citizens’. These surpluses were in turn used as means of payment for laborers and craftsmen on public projects.

Perhaps the most significant part of the economic evolution of ancient Egypt was the permission for citizens to harvest and store grains, which created a middle class. Since the economy was based on grain ownership, we can also see the granaries as an early version of banks. Oftentimes, peasant families worked extra hard on their farms during the good seasons and saved most of their grains for the bad seasons. During a famine, for instance, they would barter with the nobles by exchanging their stored grains for higher commodities like land. This, coupled with an open local market system, made poor hard-working citizens wealthy. More significantly, storage in these warehouses was not forceful but voluntary. The prosperity created by exchange and the ingenuity of the ancient Egyptians led to a desire among the early Pharaohs to improve their civilization by initiating trade expeditions.

Trade and Commerce in Ancient Egypt

Following the unification of the northern and southern territories, Menes initiated trade between ancient Egypt and other civilizations along the Nile River. Succeeding pharaohs followed his path, especially during the reign of Hatshepsut. She was the fifth pharaoh of Egypt with important accomplishments that shaped intercontinental trade. Hatshepsut sanctioned and led the most famous Egyptian expedition to the land of Punt in 1493 BCE. Puntland was a coastal land most likely along modern-day Djibouti, Eritrea or Southern Arabia. Based on the productive outcomes of Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt, most historians consider Punt the traditional trade partner of ancient Egypt.¹³

Also, during her reign, Queen Hatshepsut initiated the construction of large sail ships that crisscrossed the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula in large flotillas carrying items like linen, grain, and papyrus in exchange for Punt’s ebony, obsidian (volcanic glass), wild animals and incense.¹⁴ Her expeditions also reached other cities along the Dead Sea and Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba. This commercial outlook was sustained by her successor, Thutmose III who traded for rich loot in Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. Under both monarchs, the Egyptians sailed anywhere they could find new commodities that may improve the abundance of their kingdom. Some commodities were artworks and treasures used to beautify tombs and temples, and a rare but expensive commodity, myrrh. Myrrh can be compared to gold in the ancient world based on its rarity. It is a resin used in making incense, which was necessary for devotion in early pre-Abrahamic religions. Archaeological evidence shows that burning incense was a common temple ritual in ancient Egypt and its importance and rarity contributed to the increasing number and size of trade missions.

Once myrrh and other goods reached the ancient Egyptian ports, merchants collected them in dozens of carts attended by laborers and camels that hauled the items away to different cities. The merchants traded with locals who in turn displayed these goods in the open markets. Anyone with the capacity to buy or exchange by barter was free to engage in such markets without control from the Pharaoh or local administrators (except when necessary to maintain peaceful order). On the state level, ancient Egyptian pharaohs realized very early that public constructions, grains, and natural resources from the desert alone cannot deliver civilization, hence their various trading expeditions to kingdoms near and far. These were integral to the economic domination of Egypt and its territorial expansion. It is possible that they made the same commercial strides into the heart of Africa going by the details of some discoveries in modern sub-Saharan Africa, although evidence that Egypt traded south of Nubia is still contentious.

A statuette of Osiris from 7 BCE was discovered in Zaire (modern-day Congo) on the banks of the River Lualaba. Archaeologists have discovered a statue inscribed with Thutmose III’s cartouche south of the Zambezi River. There was also a likelihood of trade contacts between Byzantine Egypt and the Empire of Ghana—also known as Wagadou in modern western Mali and southeastern Mauritania.¹⁵ But according to Hamid Zayed, who was part of the UNESCO study team on ancient Egypt’s relations in Africa, “the circumstances in which these objects were discovered makes it impossible at the present time to conclude that they indicate the existence of relations in the seventh or fifteenth centuries before our era between Egypt” and inner Africa.¹⁶

Even if the ancient Egyptians were not as involved in trade with inner African kingdoms as they were with those across the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, their domestic economy was impressive. Unlike other civilizations that succeeded the ancient Egyptians, they did not have the luxury of a coinage system or any means that combine the functions of a unit of account, means of payment and store of value. Trade was conducted through a barter system. Each commodity had a fixed price or worth, so every actor in the market knew what would be exchanged for which item. According to some study, early Egyptians also conducted trade by measuring the proportional value of products through the shat system and other forms of proto-currencries. The shat was most likely a gold ring of a fixed weight worth about 7.5 grams of gold. Evidence of exchange in shat can be seen in a recorded conversation between two traders around 2600 BCE:

I acquired this house against payment from scribe Chenti [crocodile-god sometimes identified as the falcon-god in ancient Egyptian religion], I paid ten shat for it, namely fabric (worth) three shat; a bed (worth) four shat; material (worth) three shat.” To which the defendant declared: “You made the payments (of 10 shat) completely by ‘conversion’ through items representing these values.”¹⁷

Ancient Egyptians also used another weight unit called deben in trading value of a commodity. Unlike the shat, Deben was made of copper and it was for the most part of ancient Egypt’s history, the primary unit of measurement, not the shat—the reason might be because of its portability. One deben was worth 20 shat and 90 grams of gold. Deben was used in measuring the value of food and household accessories. For instance, a liter of wine was worth 1 deben, a shirt was 5 deben, a bird was 1/4 deben, 25 fish was 1 deben, sandals were 2 deben, 24 for the lease of land, etcetera. This commercial culture was sustained far after the decline of ancient Egypt by other civilizations like the New Kingdom of Egypt.

In Part 2 of this series, we will examine the Kushite civilizations. Kush was an ancient Nubian kingdom that flourished in the late Bronze Age in Africa and succeeded the New Kingdom of Egypt. It was probably the second earliest African civilization after ancient Egypt with which it shared some  cultural and commercial similarities.

During the winter of 2017, I travelled to Poland with a Jewish student group to learn about the Holocaust. Little did I know that the trip would bring me face-to-face not only with historical anti-Semitism, but also its modern incarnation.

I later learned that a woman on the trip was encircled and shoved by a group of Polish men. I was horrified that no one in our conspicuous group was able to avoid the anti-Semitism.

I am fearful that anti-Semitism is spreading in Poland. While I am well aware that anti-Semitism was alive and well in Poland even prior to the Holocaust, I worry that Poland’s current governing party, the conservative, nationalist-leaning, Law and Justice Party (PiS), may be enabling and emboldening anti-Semites and other bigots among the far right.

After the PiS gained control of the Polish government in 2015, the already-poor treatment of minorities in Poland worsened. In the Social Progress Imperative’s ranking of different countries’ overall toleration of immigrants, Poland dropped from 138th place out of 156 countries in 2014 to 159th place out of 160 countries in 2017. Similarly, according to data from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, in 2016 there were 874 reported hate crimes in Poland, a jump from 266 in 2012 and 778 in 2014.

Although I had experienced hatred for being Jewish before visiting Poland, never in my life had I felt like the “Other.” I certainly never expected to see anti-Semitism as a form of commerce in Poland.

I was surprised that there is still a wave of anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland in the 21^st century.

Naively, I assumed that these anti-Semitic incidents were isolated incidents in Krakow. I did not expect the hostility to follow us in other parts of Poland.

Prior to World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. According to data gathered by the United States Holocaust Museum, an estimated 3 million Jews lived in Poland in 1933, which made up 9.5% of Poland’s total population. Data from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, uncovered that the Jewish population plummeted to 380,000 following the end of World War II. Most of Poland’s Jewish population were murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. Since then, the number of Jews in Poland has dwindled further. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that by 2016 only 3,200, or .008% of the Polish population, remained.

The Holocaust in Poland is treated like the country’s ugly secret. Whether it be by fancy housing developments 20 feet away from the window of a gas chamber in Majdanek with Christmas advertisements across the street, or an upscale housing development in Tarnow which encloses a mass grave site of children murdered by Nazis, Poland desperately tries to hide its past. The creation of various upscale tourist attractions at Auschwitz only reinforces the tendency for Poland to not only hide the past, but to also downplay what occurred there during World War II.

However, Poland does not refrain from commercializing Holocaust sites if they can make a profit off it. For example, at Auschwitz, you can eat at a fancy cafe at the entrance to the concentration camp, buy a souvenir at their extensive gift shops, or stay at an upscale hotel near the gas chamber.

Even a year later, the memories at Auschwitz still haunt me, and are bound to for the rest of my life. I am fine with that, considering the alternative. I fear that younger generations are not being adequately informed about the Holocaust. A 2018 study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany surveyed 1,350 American adults and found that millennials are less informed about the Holocaust than American adults in general. For example, whereas 40 percent of those surveyed did not know what the German concentration camp Auschwitz was, which is alarming enough, 66 percent of millennials did not know as well.

But if young Americans lack knowledge, young Poles are at an even greater risk of ignorance, since the PiS suppresses the right to speak out about Auschwitz and other death camps. The PiS also passed stricter laws limiting speech that refers to concentration camps in Poland as “Polish death camps,” thereby minimizing Poland’s role in the Holocaust. While I acknowledge that these are Nazi German death camps in Poland, the law states that a person can face up to three years in prison if they question Poland’s complicity with the Nazis. The bill was passed January 26^th 2018, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The law sparked justified criticism that Poland was attempting to whitewash its controversial history. Following backlash from Holocaust survivors, the United States, and Israel, the law was amended in June to eliminate the prison sentence element. This was a step in the right direction, but Poland continues to bury its past whenever the opportunity arises.

A year on from my trip to Poland, I fear that the PiS is still not proactive enough in fostering a more inclusive place for Jews in Polish society. In fact, it seems to be doing the opposite; white nationalist sentiments are continuing to grow in Poland. In November 2018, when Poland honored the 100th anniversary of its independence, the celebratory march of over 200,000 participants included several far-right white nationalistic groups from Poland and around Europe as well as prominent PiS politicians like President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. While a nation and its leaders naturally have a right to celebrate their country’s independence, the extreme, exclusionary nationalist sentiment surrounding this celebration is cause for concern. Other world leaders were absent from the celebrations for just that reason, according to The Wall Street Journal.

President Donald Trump lauded Poland’s fierce sense of nationalism during a speech in Warsaw in 2017. During the speech, he praised Poland for not accepting refugees, garnering cheers from many Poles in the crowd. At the time, I did not think much about it. After my experiences in Poland, it’s clear to me that instead of giving the PiS a pass, the Trump administration should instead express concern about how their practices are making Poland an inhospitable place for Jewish people once again.

I am still hopeful for the future. I hope that the more people continue to speak out about Poland’s current wave of nationalism, skepticism of minorities, and anti-Semitism, the more that will be done about those problems.

Poland exhibits remarkable resilience, having survived invasions from both Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Persevering through wars, Nazi brutality, and communist control led the country to develop a strong sense of nationalism that fostered an identity separate from their invaders and occupiers. On the back of that nationalist sentiment, Poland developed into a functioning sovereign nation following the fall of communism, an achievement that should be celebrated.

That same nationalism, however, has an ugly side. My experience in Poland shows how frightening being a minority can be when a government embraces a nationalism based on ethnic homogeneity. The PiS’s policies in turn propagated a stronger nationalistic sentiment from its citizens.

There were also many brave Poles who also risked their lives during World War II to save Jews. I have tremendous gratitude for the Righteous Among the Nation. Many Poles were also the victims of the Holocaust, and people should recognize and honor their memories as well.

Unfortunately, when the PiS came to power, the progress of Polish and Jewish relations came to a grinding halt and has even regressed. While my experience as a Jewish traveler in Poland does not and cannot support any sweeping conclusions about Poland and its people in general, it does show that there are still significant issues with anti-Semitism in Poland. The PiS should reverse course and encourage more inclusive values, including religious tolerance, to make Poland a better place for Jewish people and other minorities to live. If it doesn’t, the people of Poland should vote it out.

Lincoln was a proponent of gradual compensated emancipation. He hoped that between 1860 and 1900 that slavery would be eliminated. However, he wanted the the dissolving of slavery to be tied to colonization abroad. He believed that slaves who would willingly move to the Caribbean and Central America would not only give the former slaves a place to go, but would also strengthen America’s present abroad.

Did Lincoln view slavery as the the irritant that culminated in the Civil War? Why did the Emancipation Proclamation not include anything about colonization? How did Lincoln’s view of colonization get taken advantage of by other political actors? What did Frederick Douglass think of colonization? Should we continue to put Lincoln up on a pedestal, when in reality, he was a proponent of relocating freed slaves to the Caribbean and Central America?

Further Reading:

Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, written by Phil Magness

Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections, written by Michael Burlingame

How Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump, written by Andrew Prokop

Related Content:

Lincoln the Colonizationist Part 1, with Phil Magness, Liberty Chronicles Podcast

Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists, written by George H. Smith

James Birney, Colonization, and Abolitionism, written by George H. Smith

As more states aim to legalize marijuana, whether it be for recreation or medicinal purposes, there is an on-going talk debate about if public policy should determine what pleasures are okay to indulge in and which ones are not. Jeff Miron joins us today to discuss drug prohibition actually hurts the naive drug user the most. 

Are drugs an economic good? What is the economic logic of prohibition? How much does drug prohibition cost? Did alcohol use go down during prohibition? Are drug companies trying to make their products more addictive in order to drive revenue?

Further Reading:

The Budgetary Effects of Ending Drug Prohibition, written by Jeffrey Miron

Data Confirm That Marijuana Decriminalization is Long Overdue, written by Jeffrey Miron and Sietse Goffard

Related Content:

Is the DEA Trippin’?, with Rick Doblin, Free Thoughts Podcast

How Drug Prohibition Caused the Opioid Crisis, Free Thoughts Podcast

The Case for Legalizing Hard Drugs, written by Jarrett Wollstein

Cryptocurrency advocates often praise its decentralized nature, which promises to strip out intermediaries that both slow and function as a tax on private exchanges of goods and services. But even the most decentralized cryptocurrency still needs go-betweens in order to function for a mass consumer audience. Simply put, most consumers are willing to give a little on transparency and privacy in order to get more convenience and ease of access.

Even so, cryptocurrency should provide significant improvements in multiple venues, including international payments. Also, as Matthew Feeney notes, crypto-fueled alternatives to popular payment processing platforms could be a needed response to the rise of de-platforming and corporate censorship by tech giants like Apple and Google. However, to succeed, cryptocurrencies need to effectively respond to a wave of “double spend” attacks that exploit the dive in crypto prices over the past year for fraudulent ends.

What is a decentralized currency? How do consensus and virtuous behavior relate to cryptocurrency? What is the problem with intermediaries? Does crypto-technology have potential applications for anti-corruption schemes and programs? What is a double-spend attack? Does Alex Tabbarok possess mystical, prophetic gifts?

Further Reading:

Should Cryptocurrencies Be Regulated like Securities?, written by Diego Zuluaga

The Future of Financial Services: Disintermediation, Decentralization: A Familiar Tune for Credit Unions?, speech delivered by Diego Zuluaga to Michigan Credit Union Economic Summit

Ripple

Jordan Peterson is leaving Patreon, Should You?, written by Nicole Russell

Related Content:

The Future of Money, Free Thoughts Podcast

What’s in Your (Crypto) Wallet?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Is Bitcoin the Future of Money?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Ask a friend how much that hamburger cost him and his response might be something like, “It cost me $5.”  If he were economically savvy, he might include in his response the value to him of what he would have spent that $5 on if he hadn’t bought the burger plus the time it takes him to consume it (which he could have spent doing something else).

By contrast, ask the manager of the restaurant where your friend bought the hamburger how much that burger cost and her response might be “It cost me $0.50s worth of labor, $0.50 in ingredients, and $2.50 in rent, insurance, overhead, gas, electricity, maintenance, and equipment.”  And if the manager had taken a good economics course she might include the value to her of other things she could have spent that money on and also the value of what she would have done had she not decided to sell hamburgers.

These costs involving our alternative choices are called “opportunity costs.”  In economics, all costs that are relevant to decision-making, unless otherwise specified, are opportunity costs.  But which perspective should you take if you’re trying to answer the question, “How much does that hamburger cost”?  Whose point of view, even if we rightly include opportunity costs, is the “correct” one?  How might this help us to analyze issues of public policy?

A Cost Is Always a Cost to Someone for Something

The problem here is that asking “How much does that cost?” is itself ambiguous.  A cost is never disembodied but is always connected to a specific person who is making a particular decision.   

To avoid the ambiguity, you would need to ask “What does that consumer have to give up to buy that hamburger?” or “What does that seller have to give up to sell that hamburger?”  Possible answers might be, in the case of your friend, to buy a bowl of sprouts or to save for the future, or in the case of the manager, to sell a taco instead or to update her equipment.

Cost is one of those concepts that we each use in daily life but that can create misunderstanding, even harm, if everyone isn’t on the same page.  Fortunately, to avoid most of the confusion all you need to do is understand the following:  A cost is always a cost to someone for something.

When you put it this way two things become clear about the nature of cost.  First, a cost is always borne by a specific person at a particular time and place:  Either your burger-loving friend or the restaurant manager.  And if that’s the case then those costs are not only different for different people, but they can be and almost certainly are different for the same person at different times and places.  (Ask your friend or the manager what they would be willing to give up for a hamburger tomorrow or in a different location and you’re likely to get a different answer from each.)

Second, a cost is necessarily tied to what a person plans to do:  In the case of your friend that would be to eat a hamburger and for the manager to make one.  But those plans are dependent on time and place, as well:  For your friend it would depend on, say, whether you want a burger that is fresh or stale; for the manager on whether it’s worthwhile freezing an already-made burger overnight and reheating it tomorrow or selling it at a discount today.

These two ideas together mean that costs are changeable and do not inhere in a particular object such as a hamburger but, like all economic value, reside in the mind of the actor.  In other words, costs are subjective.

Why Does It Matter?

Okay, so a cost is always a cost to someone for something.  But what confusion or harm might arise from not understanding that?  Here are a few examples.

Costs Are Not Accidents

If you buy a tainted hamburger and unexpectedly get sick from eating it, that’s a pity (at least for most people) but it is not a cost.  It’s an accident.  On the other hand, if you buy a hamburger expecting that it will likely make you sick then whatever value you expect to lose from being sick is indeed a cost.  In other words, a cost relates to the value of what you, at the moment of decision, expect to sacrifice because of your decision, in this case your well-being.  Accidents and unintended consequences are not costs in a relevant economic sense.

Say, however, one morning you get into a car accident with another driver, resulting in repairs of $5,000.  The $5,000 is not a cost because it is unintended.  But if you had paid, say, $100 into an insurance policy to cover the $5,000 in repairs, the $100 would be a cost (to you of driving) but any ensuing pain, suffering, and uncovered expenses is still not a cost but an unfortunate by-product of driving.  Again, a cost influences your choice – here, to drive that morning – and it isn’t a consequence of that choice that you do not foresee.

Losses Are Not Costs

If after you buy a hamburger you regret doing so because you realize later that that $5 would have made you feel better off had you spent it on bowl of alfalfa sprouts, that would be a loss but it is not a cost.  Losses and profits are what’s left over after you subtract costs from benefits or revenues:  You have to take into account both costs and benefits.  More generally, what you might have done but now can’t undo, what we sometimes call “bygones” or “sunk costs” are not costs relevant for making a choice now.  Like choices, relevant costs are forward-looking, not backward-looking.

Save the Trees!

There’s an old electric hand dryer in a public bathroom I sometimes use that has a message pasted onto it that says “Use this dryer and save the trees!”  The perspective of whoever wrote that message is from the “supply side,” i.e. in terms of the cost to the producer of drying a wet hand.  Although it’s not clear whether using such a drier will actually use fewer trees or other resources than a paper towel (e.g. the metal casing and equipment and electricity may require using even scarcer resources than a manual paper-towel dispenser), let’s say for the sake of argument that it does use fewer trees.

What the message-writer omits, however, is the cost to the user of drying her hands.  Most hand dryers, even today’s very powerful ones, take significantly longer to dry a person’s hands than a paper towel does.  (There’s also the added benefit of the towel that you can use it to mop up spills, wipe your face, or blow your nose, but let’s keep our focus on the cost side.)  Only by taking both perspectives into account, the producer’s and the user’s, can you begin to determine whether the dryer is better for the environment than paper towels.  Also, because costs are subjective there’s no way to know without market prices to reflect relative scarcity whether the trees saved are worth more or less than the other resources used by the electric dryer.  Similar issues arise when examining the cost of the policies of “sustainability” or “recycling.”

Stop Being So Wasteful!

We often hear that so-and-so is being wasteful.  For example:  “Jill wastes so much time on Facebook!”  First of all, “waste” is an economic concept that, like the hand dryer example, takes into account benefits as well as costs.  But if we just focus on the cost side again, that person would need to know the value that Jill places on what she is giving up by spending, let’s say, an hour a day on Facebook.  How would anyone besides Jill know that?  Answer:  They can’t because they are not Jill, and they don’t know what Jill is using Facebook for and how she values both that option and her alternatives.  At best, they are expressing their opinion that Jill should be doing something else with her time.  Now, at some point Jill will determine for herself whether it’s worthwhile to spend another moment on Facebook or whether from her perspective she could be doing something more valuable (such as getting off the internet to stop others nagging her about being on the internet).

Because costs are subjective and therefore always in the eye of the beholder, only the person making the choice can best determine what the cost of that choice will be.  And that’s true even though the world is uncertain and she may be mistaken about the true value of those costs, or unaware of all the costs relevant to her decision, which could make her regret her choice.  Still, no one else is in a better position to decide than she.  Even if she lets someone else pick for her, it’s still she who makes that decision.

Expenditure Accounting vs. Economic Costs

But what about the expenses you record in your household budget or your business’s spreadsheet?  Are they costs?  The data you record in on such ledgers may indeed help you to make buying and spending decisions in the future, but they are not your true, economic costs.  If costs are dependent on the person and your subjective plans for the future, the $1,000 you plan to spend on rent is not your cost of housing; the cost is the value of what you think you might do with that $1,000 if you don’t spend it on rent, perhaps some dental work that you might otherwise have to postpone, and that value changes over time and from place to place.

Policy Implications

Finally, while these examples are about choices people make in a market, understanding the contextual and contingent nature of cost can also help to clarify issues of public policy.  For example, what is the cost of building a border wall between two states?  The answer of course depends on for whom and for what.  For the politician the cost might be sacrificing the value of improving public schools, to the taxpayer perhaps the health care that she cannot now afford, to the citizen-consumer and the undocumented immigrant the productive work that now won’t get done.

Conclusion

These are all economically important perspectives on the cost of the policy.  Sadly, whatever the issue – e.g. immigration or environmental sustainability – political debaters, if they take costs into account at all, typically highlight only the ones that support their case and ignore the others.  Too often the result is that people suffer and no one is held to account.

For a reasonably accessible and more thorough explanation of the nature of cost, see James M. Buchanan’s excellent book, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory.