Okay, the question I want to consider this morning is whether libertarianism requires widespread acceptance of certain cultural values.
And this is something that libertarians have been long divided on across the spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, you have someone like Ayn Rand who thinks that in order to have a free society,
You have to have agreement on a fairly specific set of cultural values, that certain views about the nature of reality, of knowledge and of value
have to be fairly widespread in order for you to have a successful free society.
And one of Rand's criticisms of the libertarian movement is that the libertarian movement tries to focus directly on
on the other hand you can have the view that libertarianism doesn't really require any particular set of cultural values
that is equally consistent with any view that doesn't specifically require you to initiate force against people
and Walter Block has defended something like this view
It's not part of libertarianism to advocate any other particular set of values.
You can certainly advocate other sets of values, but it's not as a libertarian to do that, it's just sort of an extra.
And that libertarianism itself is not committed to any particular story about even about what values make libertarianism true.
All that libertarianism is committed to is simply the view that people have a right not to have force initiated against them.
Well, I'm going to defend a kind of intermediate view, which I call generic universalism and specific pluralism,
by which I mean that I think that there's a broad family of values,
such that a libertarian society is going to need fairly widespread acceptance of values from that set.
But by specific pluralism, I mean that it's not the case that you need most people in society to be converted to some very specific version of those values.
There can be disagreement on all sorts of things, but there are limits.
Now, when I say that a libertarian society is going to need agreement, I obviously don't mean...
I say obviously, but people sometimes thought I was meaning that libertarian society is going to have to require people to have values from this set.
Well, no, if they're requiring people to have certain values, it's not libertarianism.
So when I say that libertarianism requires this, I don't mean that you go around and force this by law.
I just mean that libertarianism is, for one reason or another, going to need these values.
But let me be more explicit about exactly what that means.
What exactly does it mean to say that if you're a libertarian, you need to favor or advocate or promote certain other values?
Well, here I'm going to draw from a distinction that Charles has drawn between different forms of thickness,
in the sense of this distinction that some people use between thick and thin libertarianism,
where thin libertarianism is that you advocate, libertarianism is just about advocating a particular doctrine like non-aggression, not aggressing against person and property.
Whereas going to thick libertarianism, libertarian values are or need to be embedded in some broader framework of values needed to promote the whole package.
The question of exactly what is meant by thick libertarianism Charles draws a distinction among five things that might mean.
So the first one is entailment thickness, and there the idea is simply that libertarian principles directly entail some value.
And this is the sort of thickness that, you know, the thin libertarians are generally going to have no problem with.
You could wonder whether it's even a form of thickness or not, but just to make sure that we have all the possible meanings on the table so we don't confuse them with each other.
There's just some case where libertarianism directly requires you to have some value.
An example Charles gives is that if you're in a culture that practices human sacrifice, or at least involuntary human sacrifice,
Then, adopting libertarianism requires you to give that up.
A different case is application thickness.
This is going to be cases where, although the value may not be directly entailed by libertarianism,
Unless people have the value, they're going to have a hard time seeing how or why to apply libertarianism.
They're not going to understand, even if they accept the principle, they're not going to be able to see how to apply it.
So, for example, certain kinds of collectivist ideologies, even though not strictly consistent with libertarianism,
Libertarianism, you could be a collectivist who's simply against promoting collectivism by coercive means.
Nevertheless, a certain kind of collectivism might make it very hard for you to recognize taxation, say,
or conscription, say, as a form of aggression.
In fact, there's a famous Supreme Court case where, I don't remember the name of it,
There was a case where the question of whether military conscription counts as involuntary servitude under the 13th Amendment
And the court said something like, to suggest that the duty to serve your country in battle counts as involuntary servitude is absurd on its face
Well, so if someone holds a view like that, they can accept the principle.
You can't force, you know, you can't aggress against people, you can't, you know, force them to serve you and so forth.
But if for some reason you're in the grip of some collectivist ideology that prevents you from seeing that conscription is a form of force,
then you're going to have trouble applying that principle.
Likewise, I was recently having a debate by email with someone who was saying,
there's nothing in the Bible that says anything against taxation.
And so I was saying, well, what about, how shall it not steal?
And he said, anyone who thinks that taxation is theft is just, that's just crazy.
No one could think that.
Well, you could have some kind of argument that it's theft, but it's justified,
or you could have some argument that it's not really theft,
In this case, it isn't really the person's property or it ceases being their property once the government needs it or something.
You could run some kind of story, but he wasn't running any kind of story.
It's just that he was so in the grip of a certain way of looking at things that he couldn't even see how anyone could think that taxation was that.
So, I gave you a case where you could accept the principle that no one should have things forced on them.
You shouldn't force people to do what you want.
You shouldn't aggress against people.
So you shouldn't take their property. You can get lots of people to a sense of those principles, but for various ideological reasons, they don't see how they apply.
You can even get them to a sense of the principle that people in government should be bounded by the same moral rules as everyone else.
A lot of people happily nod their heads. But, you know, they accept the premises, but they just don't see how the conclusion applies.
You know, it's pretty easy to find statements of libertarian justice all over the place.
If you go and look at Justinian's Digest, the Byzantine collections and codifications of Roman law,
if you look at the open preamble to it, it describes what justice is all about,
about giving each his own and protecting people against violence and so forth.
Well, it sounds very libertarian, but then you go and read the rest of the Digest
and it's clear that they weren't seeing how to apply this.
Another version is instrumental thickness. This is a case where, unless there's a widespread acceptance of certain values, you're going to have a hard time implementing libertarianism.
This might not be stable, because in many cases it's going to be difficult for people to maintain their commitment to libertarianism if there's something else they care about that is going to sorely tempt them to violate libertarian rights.
might not strictly entail that they do, but in a society where people are firmly convinced that the best thing possible is something or other that they suddenly seek to be easily brought about just by doing a little coercion, it's going to be hard to resist that temptation.
Or likewise, if you've got a society where people place great stress on values like conformity and obedience and so forth,
where there's no strict conflict with libertarianism there, you could embrace values like conformity and obedience
and get nevertheless, well, I won't obey any commands to violate rights, but I'll obey all the rest of the time, and so on.
Now, you can do that. It's not logical and consistent, but it's going to be hard for society to maintain the kind of vigilance you need to prevent government from extending its power or re-establishing itself if you think that, you know, if your main focus is on these values.
So it's a little bit different from application thickness. It's related to it, but application thickness is thickness where you accept the principle, but these other values you've got make it hard for you to see how to apply it.
In the case of instrumental thickness, people accept the principle, but these other values they have are going to tend to undermine their commitment to the principle.
So it's a subtle distinction, but they're both there.
A different, though again closely related, kind of thickness is grounds thickness.
This is a case where there's some value that is not itself entailed by libertarianism,
but that it is entailed by perhaps the best reasons for being a libertarianism, for being a libertarian.
So for example, suppose that you, you know, suppose that you're a certain kind of environmentalist
The Human Race is a cancer upon the earth and that everything would be better if the human race were wiped out.
But you're a libertarian and you think we will not use any coercive methods to wipe up the human race.
We will try to persuade people to commit suicide.
Every member of this group takes a vow that I will commit suicide within 10 years,
but during those 10 years I will do my best to persuade as many other people to also undertake this commitment.
So you try to bring about a kind of voluntary euthanasia of the entire human race,
but you're committed to doing it by strict libertarian means.
Well, that is logically consistent.
You could have those values and be committed to solely libertarian means of doing it,
but it would be odd.
It would be odd to care so much about respecting people's rights
if you think that it would be better if people didn't exist than if they did.
That's going to apply to both application thickness and...
That's going to apply to both instrumental thickness and grounds thickness.
In the case of instrumental thickness, what it means is
in a society where most people are convinced that it would be better for the human race to be wiped out,
They're going to have trouble having a stable commitment to libertarian values.
That would be instrumental thickness.
But it's also the case that, and that's sort of a causal worry,
that you're going to have a hard time causally keeping libertarianism going if people have these values.
But also, this sort of more purely logical point, that even if you don't have the causal worry,
you might think it's irrational to be a libertarian
if you think that the human race should be better off wiped out.
It's not inconsistent, but it just doesn't make any sense
to have such a strong commitment to something if you think the most important value
is something that goes completely against it.
So it's not just that it will be unstable, which is the instrumental point,
but in some sense it ought to be unstable, which is the grounds point.
Then finally, there's conjunction thickness, which isn't suggesting any particular connection
between the value and libertarianism, but just saying that there's some value in addition
to liberty that's also good, and that you should promote both.
You might say, well, how is that a kind of thickness, you know, just as very few thin
Thin libertarians are going to deny entailment thickness, so very few thin libertarians are going to deny conjunction thickness.
Well, true enough, but nevertheless you could say, well look, at least it's going to have this implication.
You don't necessarily want to make common cause with the pro-universal death libertarians.
You want to sort of welcome the movement and stand side by side with them.
Certainly, it makes sense. You don't want to take sort of the strict Randian position that you shouldn't make alliances with anyone whose values differ from your own.
But if it gets extreme enough, you say, well look, yeah, you guys are libertarians, but you don't want to, if what they're advocating is really bad, then you don't want to ally too much with them.
and you don't want to start borrowing their arms.
Suppose they come up with some argument that in fact you could more efficiently wipe everyone out if you accepted it to market for your market.
It doesn't seem obviously true to me, but suppose someone comes up with a clever argument like that.
We don't want to start using that as part of your argument for libertarianism, just by buying.
So certainly it can be possible for people to miss the entailment thickness or conjunction thickness points.
But I think it's the other three that are sort of the main things that I think people might miss.
Because in all these cases, in application, instrumental and grounds thickness,
in all these cases it concerns values that are perfectly consistent with libertarianism,
but never as some kind of other conflict.
So the idea is that there can be a tension between libertarianism and another value,
Even if libertarianism doesn't actually entail that that other value is wrong,
nevertheless, either that value is going to make it hard to implement,
either it's going to make it hard for people to see how to apply their libertarian values,
or it's going to make it hard for people to have libertarian values in the first place,
or it's going to make it hard to see why you ought to have libertarian values,
and rightly so, it's just going to make it seem odd.
So it seems that there might very well be some values that are going to be ones that a libertarian, as a libertarian, ought to adopt.
Just obviously, if you think that people's welfare is of no value,
I think that people's well-being doesn't matter.
Again, it would be very odd to have this kind of commitment
to libertarianism.
Well, so there are some fairly straightforward values
like rationality and toleration
that were not strictly entailed by libertarianism,
except perhaps in the sense that rationality
is entailed by everything in some sense.
But there are some things that it would be very odd for a libertarian to consistently not care about.
Now, Chris Cabara talks about what he sees as the radical and dialectical aspects of libertarian tradition.
What does he mean by radical and dialectical?
Well, by radical, he doesn't just mean thorough going.
So it's not just that a radical libertarian is one that's more thorough going, more thoroughly pro-liberty than a non-radical one.
And that's certainly one way of using the term radical, and I think it's connected to the meaning he has in mind, too.
But he's thinking of radical in the sense...
because the word radical is going down to the root.
He thinks that part of the idea of radical is seeing that you can't regard social change
as a matter of some merely local fix, where you can make some slight adjustment to keep
everything else just the way it is.
The part of the idea of it being radical is that social change is going to involve change
all over the place, that in order to bring about a political change, there have to be economic and cultural changes as well.
And I think one reason someone might want to resist that is they might think,
oh, that just makes it sound even harder to bring about libertarianism.
Can't we just, you know, get some libertarians elected and they'll fix everything we've done?
And if it turns out that in addition, you have to engage in this, you know,
This attempt to change the culture, I think it just seems more daunting.
But of course, again, remember that I'm not saying that, and I don't think that
Scabara would say that it has to be the kind of thoroughgoing change
in detail that some Randians have held.
Scabara is a Randian, but I don't think he holds a view as extreme as...
Summary is really unless everyone is converted to romanticism in art and rejects both intrinsicism and subjectivism and value theory and various things,
unless they hold a bunch of fairly specific values that you're not going to be able to implement liberty.
You're not going to be able to, or it's not going to be worth doing, or whatever.
But it's not necessarily anything that specific.
With regard to the notion of dialectical, well, excuse me, a lot of people associate the term dialectical with marks,
As does Skabara, but Skabara thinks that a number of libertarian thinkers can also be found in this tradition.
In fact, his first book, which is on Marx and Hayek, argues that Hayek actually does a better job of implementing the dialectical method that Marx recommends.
He thinks that Marx recommends a dialectical method, but doesn't actually follow through with it.
So what's a dialectical method? Well, part of the idea of it is attention to context, not ripping things out of context, not thinking you can understand something all by itself apart from its broader relations.
If you try to rip something out of context, you get sort of a fragmentary abstraction that doesn't really capture the nature of the whole.
And so if you try to focus on political relations as if they were just matters of what politicians are doing,
you don't see how what politicians are able to do supported by economic factors and by cultural factors and so on.
Or if you just focus on some cultural factor and you ignore the way in which that's influenced by economics and politics,
then you are being undialectical.
So, for Scarbera, this notion of radical, this notion of dialectical go together.
If you have to understand something in terms of its relationship to a broader whole, in terms of its relationship to other things.
Now, Scarbera warns against, you know, trying to extend this too far.
If you get to some sort of Hegelian picture where you can't understand the nature of this glass unless you understand the nature of the history of the Byzantine Empire or something where everything is internally connected to everything else.
And so, you can't understand anything without somehow being omniscient.
He thinks that there's always a danger of falling into that sort of view.
And that's not what he's saying.
But he's saying that you should always be alert for context.
And he thinks that those versions of libertarianism that have had this kind of alertness to context
are the ones he favors, and ones that he thinks have not had this kind of other, it's the context of ones that he, to some extent, criticizes.
So he thinks that there's this interaction with political, economic, psychological, cultural factors.
Well, I want to connect this with the 19th century libertarians, and have in mind, on the one hand, classical liberals like
These are people like Herbert Spencer and they want to hand individuals to anarchists like Benjamin Tucker.
These are people who likewise thought that state oppression was part of an interlocking system with non-state forms of oppression.
And I'll say in a minute what I mean by non-state forms of oppression.
But they thought, for example, they were racial, sexual and managerial non-state forms of oppression.
Before I explain non-state forms of oppression, let me first explain what I mean by interlocking system.
Well, you could have the view that some of these things just go one way.
You could say, you know, there are these bad things in society, but they're all caused by something the state is doing.
And if you could just stop the state from doing these things, then these bad things in society would completely vanish.
You know, libertarians sometimes think that, and I think it's often true about many things.
I don't think it's necessarily true about everything.
On the other hand, you could think that these bad things in society are completely independent of what the state is doing.
And sometimes that's true too, but often it's not.
Often it's the case that there'll be bad features of society that draw some of their strength from what the state is doing,
but they also have some independent strength, and that likewise these reinforce what the state is doing.
State is doing. So the state is partly enabled by the existence of these economic and cultural
factors. It's better enabled to do what it's doing. So the state depends to some extent
on these other things, but it doesn't depend solely on them. So they're not so mutually
dependent that if you zapped one, the other one instantly, poof, out of existence. On
the other hand, they're not so independent that if you could zap one, the other one would
would stand unchanged, it's more of a mutual determination, but each one has some nature of its own.
Well, if you accept these notions of application and instrumental and grounds thickness,
it seems that you're going to be led to embrace the value of having generally an aversion
into dependence and conformity.
Now again, there's nothing directly inconsistent
between libertarianism on the one hand
and the values of dependence and conformity on the other.
You could have the view that we should all be timid conformists
and we should all depend on some sort of authority,
but that it should all be done through non-coercive means.
But I think that there's application, instrumental, and grounds conflict in all these cases.
If you embrace these values of dependence and conformity, you're going to have a hard time remaining committed to libertarian values.
You're going to have a hard time seeing how to apply them.
And it's not going to be clear that it would make sense to be committed to libertarian values if these other values really are genuinely valuable.
Likewise, it seems that libertarianism tends to favor an aversion to some people having a dominant say over other people's lives.
Now again, there's no direct conflict there.
There are cases where one person can have a dominant say over another person's life in a way that does not strictly violate any libertarian rights,
and that therefore it's a way that should not be combated by force.
But you might still think it's something bad, but you might not.
You might think, you know, it's bad when authority is backed up by force,
but as long as the authority is merely backed up by economic pressure and things like that,
it's just fine and dandy.
Well, I mean, that's a consistent view, but I think it's going to be unstable,
both causally and conceptually.
It's going to be hard for society to maintain a commitment to libertarian values
so they don't see anything wrong with dependence and conformity.
It's also going to be easier for these non-state forms of authority to become or give rise to
state forms of authority or violent forms of authority if people generally don't have objection to them.
And also, on sort of the ground-sickness point, it would be odd for you to think it's so important for people to be free from government control.
And yet think that other forms of people having a dominant state over people's lives is completely unobjectionable.
Yeah, it's consistent, but it's sort of odd.
Part of the reason people find libertarianism attractive is they don't like being pushed around and told what to do.
You know, being literally compelled by force isn't the only way of being pushed around and compelled what to do.
Now sometimes libertarians resist the notion that we should care about forms of being pushed around other than actual violence or coercion or aggression.
Because they think that if you care about those, that means you have to be committed to using state or violent means of combating them.
Of course, that doesn't follow either. You could think that violent forms of oppression commit by violence and non-violent forms of oppression commit with something else.
Now, see, people sometimes say that libertarianism doesn't include any of the reasons, either
the economic or the philosophical reasons that are being offered in favor of non-aggression.
Libertarianism simply includes the non-aggression principle and whatever it entails, but it
But it doesn't include the reasons for accepting the non-aggression principle.
I think Walter Block holds that, although yesterday I said Stefan Kinsella holds something
and I got an email from him saying, why, that's not precisely what I hold.
So I don't know whether, you know, so all my attributions should be taken with a grain
of salt.
I'm relying on the murky contents of my memory.
But anyway, some libertarians do hold that none of the arguments for the non-aggression principle are themselves part of libertarianism.
And I think I understand why they say this, because they're thinking,
well look, if you say that the arguments for the non-aggression principle,
that any particular argument for the non-aggression principle is part of libertarianism,
then you're going to have to say that someone isn't a libertarian unless they hold the principle for that reason.
like the wrong thing to say. We don't want to deny that someone is a libertarian simply because their argument for libertarianism is utilitarian when we're not utilitarians, or it's not utilitarian when we are, or whatever.
But there would be something odd if you want to say that really all there is to libertarianism is just the non-aggression principle and what it directly entails, and not any of the ethical or economic arguments for it.
Because that means that most of what we think of as libertarian literature is not actually, you know, part of libertarianism at all.
You know, we've got these thick volumes of human action and man economy and state and so forth.
You thought that was part of the literature of libertarianism.
But, you know, if, for example, you could say, well look, isn't someone a libertarian if they think, if they hold the economic view
They knew that freedom would cause poverty, but they're in favor of poverty.
Suppose I think there'd be mass impoverishment if libertarianism were enacted,
but I'm in favor of mass impoverishment, and therefore, would someone like that be a libertarian?
Yes, they're not, probably not the ones that we should invite onto our lecture circuit,
but they would be libertarians, and so you could say,
Well, that shows that free market economics is not part of libertarianism.
Well, I would say that libertarianism is a body of thought, and I think that libertarianism is a body of thought
that includes all the major arguments that have been made for it.
Some of those arguments may contradict each other, but there's a difference between saying something is a part of libertarianism
I think it's an essential part, non-aggression is an essential part of libertarianism.
Maybe some of the arguments that are offered for it are not essential,
but something can be part of you without being an essential part.
If I've got a tumor, that tumor is part of me, it's just not an essential part of me.
So I'd be willing to say that libertarianism is a historical doctrine that has an essential core.
An essential core is in some sense ahistorical.
Nothing at any time or place could count as libertarianism if it didn't have the central core.
But in its historical contingency, it also has these other things, some of which may be good,
some of which may be bad, some of which may be sort of more libertarian and others less so,
just in the sense that they cohere better with libertarianism than other things.
So I think that the major works of libertarianism count as being part of libertarianism.
Now, I think that there are two kinds of mistakes that people can make about non-state or, more broadly, non-initiatory force forms of oppression.
And it's worth saying that those aren't the same things either.
After all, there may be forms of oppression that are violent and are actually violations of libertarian rights that are not by the state.
Violence can occur outside the state.
For example, if domestic violence against women, if you think that's part of what sustains
a certain kind of social inequality between men and women, well that's not by itself a state form of oppression,
but it is a non-initiatory force, I mean it is an initiatory force form of oppression.
But I want to talk about things that are neither state nor initiatory force forms of oppression.
Although I think those things are often closely linked in interesting ways with the other kind.
But I think there's an error that tempts statists and then there's a related error that tempts libertarians.
The error that tempts statists is to say, well, first of all, any form of oppression is a rights violation.
If I'm oppressing you, then I'm violating your rights. Let's take that as the first premise.
Second premise is to say, look, there are non-initiatory force forms of oppression.
There are lots of power relations in society that don't actually depend on anybody using violence.
Well, therefore, there are rights violations, the conclusion would go, that do not involve the initiation of force.
And then from that, it's a short step to saying, therefore, the law should do more than simply protect people's libertarian rights.
and Rights, the law should also protect these other rights,
not just rights against being aggressed against,
but rights against these other non-violent forms of oppression.
Once you do that, then you're well on the way to endorsing
all kinds of government programs.
Now, there's a different argument
that I think tempts libertarians,
but I think is also erroneous.
This starts with the same first premise,
All forms of oppression are rights violations.
And it says, look, there's no such thing as a rights violation that doesn't involve the initiation of force.
And they feel, too, you know, standard libertarian arguments as to how you got the right to do whatever you want,
as long as you're not initiating force against anyone else.
And from those premises, the conclusion follows that there are no forms of oppression that don't involve the initiation of force.
Well, I think both these arguments are mistaken.
And I think they're mistaken in the same place.
They're mistaken in the first premise.
Once you identify oppression with a particular form of oppression,
mainly oppression involves violence, then you're going,
then that sort of forces you either to want to treat all power relations
on the same model as violent ones.
and therefore, you know, start wanting legal control over all sorts of things
or else you just want to deny the existence of them, but I think that if you deny the first premise
then you can easily recognize the existence of non-state forms of oppression or non-violent forms of oppression
without thinking they're rights violations and without thinking that, therefore,
without thinking that these are things that should be competitive by force of law.
Now again, some people are going to say that that would be an odd position to hold because let's say, well look,
if you hold this, if you hold the view that there are forms of oppression, genuine serious forms of oppression,
that are not violations of libertarian rights and therefore that cannot be combated by law,
then you're saying we've got a problem when we're not allowed to solve it.
It seems as though it might be much more attractive to say, either, yes, these forms of oppression are a problem but we are allowed to solve it because we can make more things illegal than just aggression and so we can have lots of government programs.
Or, on the other hand, to say, you know, that would be a problem if they existed but we're not allowed to solve problems like that and therefore it's much more comforting to think that they don't exist.
However, I think that this, this conclusion seems, this argument seems to rest on an un-libertarian premise, namely the premise that the only way to solve serious problems is through the use of force.
I'm so surprised the statists would think that, that's the sort of thing statists think, but it seems as though libertarians have good reason to think otherwise.
Part of libertarian social theory is precisely to show that violent solutions are much less effective and voluntary solutions are much more effective than we thought.
And that's what a lot of libertarian social and economic analysis is devoted to showing.
To showing that government works less well than you might have thought and that private solutions, market solutions, voluntary solutions work better than you might have thought.
Alright, well what implications might this have?
Well, let's take the case of the workplace.
A case of what someone might want to call oppression there.
What do you mean by that? Well, being pushed around,
we're given lots of stupid arbitrary commands, having your life made unpleasant.
made unpleasant and we know that this is a pervasive feature of the workplace.
One reason that the cartoon strip Dilbert is so popular is because it's so familiar.
That's what life in the workplace is often like. Not always, but often. Often you have these petty tyrannical rules that make no sense being imposed on you.
Now, sometimes libertarians want to resist that idea because they think either this would, if that exists, that would show that the market doesn't work, and as libertarians you don't want to say that,
or you think it means that you're asking the government to step in and do something about it, and we don't want to do that, but it doesn't necessarily have either of those implications.
For one thing, a libertarian can think, and I think there are good libertarian reasons
for thinking, that partly, not entirely, but in large part, this situation depends in various
ways on government intervention.
As I was saying, I think it was yesterday, the more that government regulation intervenes
is in ways that systematically benefit employers at the expense of employees, the more this
sort of thing is likely to happen. For example, if you pass regulations that make it harder
for poor people to start their own businesses because you have all these regulatory hoops
they have to jump through. I mean, a perfect example would be a taxi service. A taxi service
is an ideal form of work for a person that doesn't have much capital to get into because
doesn't acquire a lot of capital, you know, you need a car and a phone, but a lot of places where a license to start a taxi company costs $100,000, which a lot of poor people don't have handy lying around, well that makes it easier to start a taxi service if you're rich than if you're poor, but like with lots of things, licensing, there are lots of cases where you can't start doing something unless you get a license, you can't get a license until you take a course of a certain kind and the course is often very expensive,
And then the license fee is expensive.
And another perfect example is hair braiding services
in the inner city.
A lot of people offering those services
have been shut down by the government on the grounds
that you can't offer hair braiding services
unless you have a license as a hairdresser.
You can't get a license as a hairdresser
unless you take a hairdressing course,
which includes not only hair braiding,
but lots of other things that they actually weren't
especially interested in doing.
And that costs money, and then the license costs money, and so on.
In Louisiana, you can't be a florist unless you have a license,
because God forbid that you should get a flower arrangement from an unlicensed florist.
It might explode.
And, of course, in Louisiana, Mises was a story like a year or so ago.
I don't know whether anything's changed since.
The story was that in order to pass the very demanding floral arrangement test,
You had to pass that in order to get the license, and it turns out to be very difficult to pass that because the judges, as to whether you've succeeded or failed in passing the flower arrangement test, are existing florists.
So the florists are in charge of licensing the competition, and that's why it turns out to be such a gruelingly difficult task to figure out how to arrange flowers in Louisiana.
Well, so the harder it is to start your own business, the more you're forced to work for someone else, and so that obviously makes it harder for you to quit your job.
Likewise, the less competition there is among employers, the harder it is for you to quit your job.
So anything that slows down the economy, anything that makes it harder to start new businesses and so forth,
that's obviously going to make it harder for workers to quit their job.
And that in turn means that employers can get away with more irrational behavior and more abusive treatment and so forth.
Now the status solution is to keep all those laws in place, but to bring in other laws that are supposed to restrict the employer's options.
And so you get some laws oppressing employees, you get other laws oppressing employees, and then each side says that the other side is doing more oppressing, and well, there are better ways than that.
So what I want to say is that some of this oppression in the workplace depends on government intervention, but I don't think it all does.
For one reason, we think about things like the optimal size of firms.
I think this is a good illustration both of how government is partly responsible for the problem
and an example of how it's not completely so.
In the size of a firm, there are both economies of scale and diseconomies of scale.
Up to a certain limit, companies can get bigger and become more efficient by getting bigger.
A big factory can make a thousand of something for less than a thousand times as much as a small factory can make a hundred of them.
But there are also diseconomies of scale, and one reason for the diseconomies of scale is Mises' Socialist Calculation Argument.
Mises showed that when you depart too far from a price system, you have no rational means of allocating resources.
Well, that's true in a state socialist economy, but also to some extent true in a corporation.
The fact that the state socialist economy is coercive is not the decisive fact there.
Because you can imagine a voluntarily formed corporation that would be the size of Soviet Russia.
And although it might not have been established by violence,
still you'd have very much the same kind of calculational problems.
You have certain things you have to allocate to one department, certain resources you have to allocate to the other, and how much of which should you do?
For the same familiar reasons that you run into problems with the state, you also run into problems with the corporation.
You could say, well, yeah, but the corporation has external market signals. Well, so did the Soviet Union.
It's because of the external market signal the Soviet Union had that it was able to survive as well as it did.
If the Soviet Union had covered the entire globe, it would have melted down much more quickly.
Not that the Soviet Union ever entirely succeeded in abolishing market relations internally either.
To some extent, the black market may have been able to survive.
But nevertheless, the constraints on bureaucratic growth, the constraints on non-market allocation apply as much within firms as within the state.
Therefore, under market system, you'd naturally expect that firms would increase, to tend to increase so long as the economies of scale offset the diseconomies of scale.
When they get to the point when this economies of scale starts setting in,
then it will be much harder for them to increase in size beyond that point.
They tend to start competing less well once they reach that sort of size,
and then they have to scale back.
However, anything that government does to insulate a firm from competition
will encourage it to grow beyond its optimum efficient size.
So, in taxes, regulations, and cartelization, and monopoly privileges, and subsidies, anything that makes it harder to compete against a firm is going to make it tend to grow beyond the point of its efficiency.
And so that is certainly a case where government intervention is relevant to explaining this sort of power.
However, I think that there's also a sense in which there would be room for a certain kind of problem without government intervention.
People sometimes say, well, look, you're never going to have the problem of...
In a free market, you're never going to have the problem of systematic discrimination or systematic underpayment and that sort of thing of employees
because employees' wages are going to be determined by their marginal revenue productivity.
And if one employee is more productive than another, then you're going to have an economic incentive to pay them more.
And if you don't, then you're going to get zapped by competition.
Well, I think that what that ignores is that within a firm,
the market signals don't generally come in and point to some particular employee.
The market signals tell you that your firm as a whole is doing something right or something wrong.
But they don't tell you exactly which of your employees are more productive and which ones aren't.
Now, you can experiment, but you can't try to serve every possible combination and move all your employees around.
Doing all that would have effects on their productivity too.
So, employers often have to go on their best guess as to who's more productive and who's not.
and their guess might be influenced by racial bias or gender bias or cultural bias or who knows what.
Also, of course, it's not the case that every inefficiency is immediately directly punished by the market.
If you're a boss, you will spend some of your revenue in consumption goods.
You might have a fancy carpet for your office and so on, and nothing wrong with that.
You don't expect all the people working in the firm to huddle in little hovels.
But the fact that you can afford some consumption goods, well, certain kinds of discrimination could be your consumption good.
And as long as you don't do so much of it that you wreck your company's productivity,
Because firms are not sort of instantly zapped every time they depart from maximum market efficiency,
there are room for various kinds of adverse power relations within the firm that the market will not automatically correct.
I don't think the solution is that we have to bring in the government,
particularly because I don't think the government is going to be a very efficient solution.
We've got this hierarchical and oppressive system here, so let's bring in this other, much more hierarchical and oppressive system to fix it.
Well, it just doesn't seem very plausible.
It's like taking one poison to drive out another.
So, there's going to be room for, you know, building, you know, certain kinds of institutional structures, you know, you could say unions, but what I have in mind by unions is not exactly the sorts of things that pass as unions today, which I think partly for reasons of governmental intervention,
And partly for various sorts of cultural reasons and economic reasons have largely become co-opted into the state apparatus.
But various sorts of mutual aid among workers, various sorts of cultural things that make it easier for workers to cooperate with each other,
make them more willing to resist certain kinds of things, make employers more embarrassed at requiring certain kinds of things.
So it's sort of a combination of economic and cultural and ideological movement and that's why I think a lot of these 19th century libertarians saw themselves as part of the labor movement.
Although they were sort of, to some extent, oddball members of the labor movement compared to some of the other folks who had more authoritarian plans in mind.
Now, Spencer draws a nice distinction between three kinds of other regarding virtue.
I think it may not be sort of as nuanced and rich as something like Aristotle's list of the virtues,
but I think you can combine it with that.
Spencer distinguishes between justice, negative beneficence, and positive beneficence.
So, justice is not violating people's rights.
Negative beneficence is not harming people.
Well, that's a different concept.
It's one of the reasons I like Spencer more than Mill.
Mill was kind of shaky on the difference between
not violating people's rights and not harming them.
I think that Mill sometimes grasped the distinction,
but other times not as well.
There are lots of ways you can harm people
that don't violate their rights.
and lots of ways you can make people worse off.
And positive benevolence is offering people positive help.
Now, I think these virtues involve different sorts of requirements.
For example, justice is a fairly absolute prohibition on aggressing against people.
Negative beneficence, I think, is not going to have a prohibition on harming people.
It's going to have a prohibition on harming people wrongly.
But there are lots of cases where, if by harming you're just making someone worse off,
there are lots of cases where you can legitimately make someone worse off.
You know, if two people want to marry the same person,
and the person marries one of them, the person in some sense makes the other one worse off.
Now, it makes them worse off in a way that they, you know, can indirectly endorse from the interneutral standpoint and so forth, but nevertheless, you know, they are worse off.
So not all making is worse off. So I think what negative beneficence requires is weaker than what justice requires.
Justice is new. No rights violating ever. Negative beneficence requires something weaker. It doesn't say no harms ever, but it says, you know, try to avoid harms if you can.
I think positive beneficence is still weaker. I think that we have a duty to help other people. It would be odd if we didn't.
It would be odd that people's interests matter so much that we should not, you know, steal even a penny from them.
and yet so little that we're not obligated to throw them a rope if they're falling into a well.
Now again, when I say obligated to help them, I don't mean that we should be forced to help them,
because that would be a violation of justice, but that we ought to help them.
But again, I think that's going to be weaker than negative beneficence in the sense that the number of harms you ought to refrain from
is probably greater than the number of cases where you ought to help people.
You can't help as many people as you possibly could, or you just have to spend every waking hour helping people.
It's much easier to avoid harming people than it is to actually give them positive help.
So I think that positive beneficence is not as demanding as negative beneficence.
Negative beneficence is not as demanding as justice.
But I think it's a mistake to think that this difference is based on the seriousness of these things.
People sometimes think, not just libertarians, I think libertarians too, often think that the reason justice is more demanding is that it's more important, or that it's worse to violate rights than it is to harm in another way, or that it's worse to harm than it is to fail to benefit.
I think it's often going to be true, especially if you think of some sort of paradigm cases, but not always.
Suppose I spend years systematically undermining your confidence, systematically tearing away at your self-confidence in subtle ways
so that you become less and less sure what you should do, you gradually become more and more dependent on me,
you don't go and seek the career you want to because I sort of subtly convinced you that you'd be no good at it,
And gradually you become sort of my, you know, my cringing, fawning servant, but I haven't violated your rights, but I've done some bad stuff.
Suppose on the other hand that I go into Kroger and I steal a grape. Stealing a grape is a rights violation. Systematically undermining your confidence is not.
But it seems that this story of this non-rights-fighting thing I did is much worse than stealing the grape.
I think the reason people often want to think the reverse is they tend to think that if you think it's worse, then you think it's more justified to use force to stop it.
But I think that's a mistake. The wrongness of using force against an evil is not because the evil is not so serious.
Sometimes, though, well, well, anything that doesn't involve force is not that important.
But, you know, the reason that you should have the right to force me not to steal the grape,
but you shouldn't have the right to force me to do this other thing,
isn't because stealing a grape is really, really important and everyone isn't,
but rather because stealing a grape is itself an act of force.
By stealing a grape, I am, you know, forcing my way into the rights boundary of whoever runs Kroger, actually.
If I look more closely into the title of Kroger, it might become very murky, but I assume an ideal Kroger.
I forced my way into the rights boundary of Kroger, and so it's legitimate for them to force me out again.
Whereas in the case where I systematically undermine your self-esteem, I haven't forced my way anywhere,
and so you're not justified in forcing me out.
Now, I think that also there are consequentialist reasons for dealing with force by means of force and dealing with non-force evils by means of non-force.
But I think even apart from consequentialist reasons, there's just this kind of a symmetry.
It's not that we should meet force. It's not that the reason we should ban certain things by force is because they're so evil.
It's just that evils that involve force should be met with force, and evils that don't involve force should be fought with other methods.
Now, as I said, I think it's not just libertarians who sometimes make this mistake.
I don't think libertarians ever make this mistake.
I don't think libertarians very often make this mistake sort of fully or thoroughly.
I think most libertarians, if pressed, will say, of course there are wrong things other than using force.
and Force.
People often accuse Walter of having the view that nothing is wrong other than the
initiation of force.
That's not true.
If you ask him, he'll definitely say, of course there are wrong things other than force.
So I'm not saying that libertarians are ever likely to make that mistake and serve a thorough
going way.
But nevertheless, you'll find throughout libertarian literature, phrases like, well, there's nothing
wrong with it so long as it doesn't involve force or so long as it doesn't involve the
state.
And if you press them, they'll say, well, what they mean by nothing wrong with it is
is Nothing Rights Violating. That's fine. But sort of the flavor of the tone suggests
that they're tending to emphasize the importance of rights violations and other things. You
have to say, well, it can be misleading to use the phrase, there's nothing wrong with
it as long as it doesn't involve force, because there are lots of things that there's nothing
wrong with in that, in the sense of nothing unjust, but nevertheless might be very wrong.
And it certainly can sound to people as though we are indifferent to all sorts of people
if we think that we say things like there's nothing wrong with them.
But statists also make this mistake, and I think statists often make it much more thoroughly.
Statists often think that to say that you don't want to deal with something by force
just is to say that you don't think it's important.
And so statists think that anything that's important is something they want to deal with
by force.
And since they rightly think that lots and lots of things are important, they quite naturally
draw the horrendous conclusion that government force should be sort of all-pervasive in our
lives. Every time there's a problem, violence is the solution. Though for reasons of, I
think, application thickness, they often don't recognize themselves as people who are saying
saying that violence is the solution and most status would think that they're against violence
but they have trouble seeing state violence as violence because they've accepted this
sort of an incantational picture of the state where when the state decrees something it
just happens and of course they know in principle it happens because people are forcing it but
they have this idea that somehow things happen if the state says so and it's just sort of
There's a lot of random if things happen without the state saying so and so status often want to know well what guarantees that this would happen without the state and so the state saying something guarantees it you know there are lots of things the state would like to guarantee but can't manage to do you know so of course status think that you know have great faith in violent methods and very little faith in non-violent methods and so of course
From their point of view, a serious evil should be fought with force, whether it's an evil that involves force or not.
If you really care about some problem, if you really think it's worth addressing, then you need to address it by prohibitive means.
But if you're a libertarian, you think, well, you know, you have greater faith in voluntary means.
I think there's a question of exactly what voluntary means means.
Voluntary means means.
Because on the one hand you might think, well,
by voluntary means you mean the market.
By the market you mean sort of the sum total of voluntary human interaction.
But then you could think, by market we mean buying and selling.
But I think there's sort of a broad and a narrow sense of the market,
and we need to be careful not to confuse them.
There's a broad sense in which the market just means the entire range of voluntary transactions,
There is a narrow sense in which by the market we mean voluntary exchange, cash exchange, prices, commercial transactions.
And then somehow comes the danger is that non-coercive but organized and in some sense political modes of organization become invisible.
There's an old joke, I don't know, probably not that old, but anyway, well, it goes back to the last century.
There's a joke, how many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?
The answer is none, the market will take care of it.
Well, there's certainly something right about that.
Libertarians understand the power of invisible hand solutions.
They understand that there are lots of things that will,
there are lots of good results that will be brought about
without anyone consciously aiming at them,
as long as you simply let people freely interact.
And that's something that statists have a very hard time understanding.
So it's certainly appropriate for libertarians to sort of
specialize in pointing out that there are these ways of bringing about results that don't involve consciously aiming at things,
but simply allowing them to arise through spontaneous order.
However, focusing on that very important insight, because then there's blindness to another important insight,
Insight, which is that invisible hands are not the only hands in the market. There are
visible hands too, namely ours, and that not everything we do is in the market, not everything
we bring about is the result of simply letting market forces operate and let them bring about
results that were no part of our intention. That's an important aspect of the market.
Another important aspect of the market is entrepreneurship.
Another important aspect of the market is that we see a need and we consciously go out and intend to fill it.
Now, Hayek is famous for emphasizing this idea that we shouldn't think that all order in society has to be the product of rational planning.
and he's absolutely right about that but it doesn't follow and I don't think that Hayek intends to infer
although you know I think that you know Rothbard takes to Hayek to task for thinking that sort of
everything just happens sort of robotically and no one plans anything I think Rothbard is a little
too harsh on Hayek but I think he's on to something there is certainly a danger of focusing on that
aspect that Hayek's also you know had such good insight into but focusing on that to the extent of
of downgrading this other sign of things, rational planning, rational coordination of people
consciously getting together and trying to do things. That's not un-libertarian. That's
not un-market. After all, you're not against the firm. You're not against there being such
things as firms, and firms precisely are people rationally coordinating. Of course,
you could say, well, they're rationally coordinating to bring about profit to themselves. They're
You're not rationally coordinating to bring about social goals.
Well, maybe not, but what about the libertarian movement?
The libertarian movement is not primarily about trying to make libertarians richer.
But anyway, think about the libertarian movement.
The libertarian movement is not a movement of people who are hoping that liberty will
emerge without anyone aiming at it.
We're all aiming at it.
Libertarian movement is not primarily about trying to bring out our own personal profit, there might be other more efficient ways of doing that.
So libertarian movement is not something we're just letting the market take care of.
We are the market, we're engaging in a kind of social entrepreneurship.
Libertarian movement might not be the only kind of movement worth engaging in.
Once you think that social goals can be promoted not just by the market automatically doing things, although that certainly is, thank goodness for the market, that certainly is one thing it does, one clang from there.
But also, if you think it makes sense to try and organize people to promote libertarian values,
it also makes sense to organize people to try and promote other kinds of values that you might
think are in some sort of interesting connection in one or another of these kinds of thickness
with Libertarian Values. And that's why I think it makes sense for libertarians to worry about things like
like racial discrimination or gender discrimination or people being pushed around on the job.
A lot of libertarians feel reluctant to worry about those things because they think that,
either they think, oh, well that's what left-wing statists worry about, to which the answer is,
Well, you're not going to let them determine your agenda, are you?
Or they worry, well, that means that we think that there's market failure.
But I don't think it means there's market failure.
Suppose the market by itself can't guarantee good results.
Suppose we had a free market tomorrow and we all just committed suicide.
Which we could do.
And we say, oh, we tried a free market and there were bad results.
They tried a free market and there were bad results.
Well, how good the results are depends not only on what you're free to do
And so, the fact that there are evils that might not just pop out of existence if you get rid of statism, I don't think that's any sort of critique of the market.
It's not as though we're saying that the state methods of combating these evils are especially effective or useful.
So that's that's my brief for trying to promote a package of libertarianism with
other values. Questions? Yes.
and or falls into the era that we described about hunting libertarians.
Especially now schools tend to use the original and the original important and combined.
And also it's unimportant for people of interest in some libertarians such as Emerson and Durel
who emphasize virtue as a part of a larger life path.
All right, so the question is, why might it be that so many libertarians don't see things in terms of this kind of unity of virtue or unity of some values with others and don't specifically lay more stress on people like Emerson and Thoreau who saw virtue as part of the whole package?
Well, I don't have any sort of detailed sociological thesis to offer here, but I can see some, often mistakes, and obviously I think it's a mistake, often mistakes can be motivated by reaction against things that are quite legitimate to react against.
So, given that some of these values I'm talking about, about being concerned about race and patriarchy and the workers and so forth,
have been so long associated in people's minds with the status left and with authoritarian state solutions to these problems,
You can see why, for many libertarians, as soon as you hear anything that sounds like that, you just have this natural reaction, and ehh.
Also, I think, as opposed to sort of the specific content of the values, I think a lot of libertarians had a kind of reaction against the Randians,
because the Randians, I think, they don't make this mistake. I think many Randians make other mistakes,
but they tend not to make this mistake of separating liberty from other values.
They do want liberty to be sort of incorporated into other values, but because many Randians have sort of a very specific set of values and they're very dogmatic about insisting that you're just a whim-worshipper if you don't sign on to the whole package that a lot of libertarians have sort of a reaction against that.
We don't want any more of that. We don't want to be told that we're not allowed to advocate liberty unless we prefer Mickey Spillane to Emile Zola or something.
So I think that's part of it too. In the 19th century libertarians were often much more associated with some of the sort of the lefty values.
values, but the rise of state socialism both in the form of you know Soviet
socialism abroad and then various kinds of well really fascist but often
described as socialist sort of New Deal type stuff at home sort of drove
libertarians and conservatives into an alliance and so I think that sometimes
explains why libertarians had sort of a reaction against the lefty values and
and a lot of them have sort of reaction against the conservative values too is that alliance frayed apart and so they saw this sort of breaking away from all this bad stuff but of course some of it's bad and some of it isn't.
Do you think that will harm the libertarian position if we don't start to see more of the unity of the kind of cases?
What I think is reasonable is a kind of libertarian attitude in true libertarianism.
So the question is, will it harm libertarianism if we don't try to unify it with other values?
I couldn't tell if you were for or against the reason thing.
I think that has a tendency to be a reason for the problem, and it tends to see libertarian action as being a symbol of our acceptance of libertarianism.
And I have a tendency to think that they would see somebody like Madonna as more of a promoter of libertarianism, than somebody like Thoreau, who is very moralistic.
But again, I'm just wondering how much do you think that will keep our use of libertarianism from each other? How deadly is it to each other?
virtue, and then there's the question specifically about reason, whether reason
having a kind of a libertine attitude toward libertarianism and trying to
think that sort of generally libertine values are more supportive of
libertarianism so they would tend to see Madonna as a more libertarian figure
than a stern moralist like Thoreau.
Well, the reason thing is complicated
because I don't think either emphasis on libertinism
or emphasis on anti-libertinism is either of those
is exactly sort of libertinism I would most like to see.
But, yeah, Reason's version of libertarianism is often pretty watered down, but I think one of the main things is that just in terms of trying to,
you know, if you just leave aside the question of what's right, just think in terms of trying to convince people,
A lot of people think that, a lot of people's main objection to libertarianism is that we don't care about the poor, we don't care about these non-state forms of oppression, we deny their existence, or we say, so what if they exist, it's fine, whatever.
And I think that that, just purely on strategic grounds, if nothing else, I think that hurts us, I think that hurts us a lot.
Now, I've been told when I push my sort of lefty libertarian line, a lot of people say to me,
yeah, well, you know, to the extent that that's really strategic, you know, maybe if you think of values or genuine values, go ahead and embrace them, which I do.
But to the extent that it's really strategic, it's hopeless, people tell me.
They say, you know, the leftists don't, you know, are always going to hate you no matter what you advocate.
Which the answer is that I, you know, I think through experience it's not true.
Not true. A lot of people I've talked to who had a fairly negative attitude toward libertarianism
have a much more positive attitude toward it now once I give them the left-lipped song
and dance. So even on purely strategic grounds, I think it's more effective than people think.
But in the interest of devil's advocacy, let me give you an argument against the libertarianism
that I haven't mentioned. And although I don't think it's right, I think it's worth thinking
Some people have said, look, I think I've given this argument at some point in the past in some other context without thinking about its full implications.
Some people have said, look, one reason that libertarian movements have often failed in the past is that they bundled libertarianism together with a bunch of other goals and then they were always tempted to sacrifice libertarianism if they thought they could promote some of these other goals.
And if all you care about is libertarianism, you're not focusing on all of these other goals,
it's much harder to tempt you away from them.
Spencer, for example, thinks that a danger of traditional liberalism was
it was focused not just on liberty, but it was focused on helping the masses.
And that was why they adopted these various liberal measures, was to help the masses.
And they started thinking about helping the masses as being their goal,
And so then the liberty part drops out and then they start adopting government mechanisms of helping the masses.
That was part of Spencer's diagnosis as to how liberalism moved from a libertarian movement to a status movement.
So that's a kind of argument for thin libertarianism, which is that you're in danger of losing the goal if you lump it with other goals.
So what I would say to that is, well first of all, if you think the other goals are important too,
if that's the reason to dump the other goals, it would be an equally good reason to dump libertarianism,
because libertarianism might distract you from these other goals.
Well I think they're all worth promoting.
Then you should try to promote all of them and just be aware of the danger
that you might end up focusing on some of them and forget the others
and forget the ways in which you think that they go together.
But, you know, if there are two good things, there might be a danger that in pursuing one you'll forget about the other one.
But that doesn't change the fact that they're both good things, and therefore you should, you know, try and keep in mind that they're both worth promoting.
Yeah.
What would you say to this argument that is kind of poorly formed and did not matter to anyone, but I can speak to it in a different way, kind of radical individualism, which is at least a ground business, which is probably an application business, and so that while there may be, if on the set there's a race of worker affection, that banded together in this context is, you know, that's really my say too far, like collective ideology, like, you know,
______
Yeah, so here's a possible objection I'm going to have.
I can say, look, one of the values that, although not strictly entailed by libertarianism,
is going to be related to it through probably applications thickness and instrumental thickness
and grounds thickness, is something like radical individualism.
There's a group for debate on exactly what radical individualism is, but in some sense of radical individualism you might think that's the sort of value that needs to be part of what libertarians are promoting.
But you might think, well, some of these other sort of left libertarian things like combating racism and sexism and bossism and so forth might involve certain kinds of involvement in collective action and interest group politics,
whether on racial or gender or class lines in ways that you might think are at least potentially in conflict or in tension with the radical individualism.
You start thinking of yourself primarily as a member of a certain kind of group rather than as an individual.
You start identifying your interests with a collective or something, isn't that a danger?
Well, certainly I do agree that something like radical individualism is an important part of the libertarian package.
Now, of course, that phrase can mean different things, and certainly I'm defending a version of radical individualism that thinks that other people's interests are incorporated into your own.
So it's certainly not what some people might mean by radical individualism, but I'm happy to call it that.
And that certainly means that there is a possible danger in certain kinds of collective action, but I certainly don't think that it rules them out.
These are reasons for caution and vigilance rather than reasons for avoidance.
I mean, this is a wonderful line from Foucault, who was first an interesting talk about left-libertarian connections.
But Foucault, someone was interviewing Foucault and said,
Foucault was talking about all these different power relations in society and so forth,
and someone said to him, well, you've got a very pessimistic view of society, Foucault.
You think that everything is bad.
And Foucault's answer was, no, I don't think everything is bad. I think everything is dangerous.
Which is an interesting answer. So the idea is, it's an interesting distinction.
If something is bad, that just means, you know, don't do it.
And you might think, well, something's either good or bad. If it's good, then it's fine to do it, no problem, no worries.
If it's bad, then stay away from it. But there may be things that are dangerous, meaning
it's not necessarily the case that you shouldn't do them.
Because there might be the case that, you know, not doing them would be dangerous too. It just might be that
There are certain ways in which you have to be cautious.
Certain things involve certain dangers, and maybe not doing them would involve different
dangers and you just have to pay attention.
Yeah.
I kind of noticed when libertarians argue about this, they seem to have a good connection.
For libertarians, you look at your choices and if you're free to pick among them, then you're free, you're not a threat.
But let this kind of freedom of being a function of the number of choices you have.
And I was wondering, the left libertarian, what do you think?
His oppression, how do we define it? Is it more, I could choose free, or do I have to be the member of options that I have?
Alright, so the question is, should we think of oppression in terms of being able to choose freely, which is the way libertarians often think about it, or should we think about it in terms of the number of options you have, so that a poor person would be more oppressed than a rich one or less free than a rich one, as many left-wing statists think about it?
Well, again, I want to distinguish different senses of oppression.
I think that if your options are limited, not just by, you know, sort of natural facts,
but by various sorts of systematic social relations, I think that counts as a form of
oppression, but it's a different kind of oppression from the specific kind that's rights violating.
Now, not every case where your options are fewer is a form of oppression.
But if the options are fewer because, I mean, there's this example from Marilyn Fry of the, which gives us birdcage example where it's no one bar of the cage that stops the bird from getting out, but it's all the bars together.
Discrimination might not be a serious problem if, say, just a few oddball people practice it.
Suppose that there's one person somewhere who discriminates against people with an even number of freckles on their face.
We won't hire anyone with an even number of freckles, but they hire people with odd number of freckles.
If we found out this person existed, we wouldn't be terribly worried about this regard as a serious social problem.
But if this becomes sort of a pervasive pattern, then people are systematically disadvantaged by it in a way that is not unjust.
It's not rights violating, but nevertheless it's a, you know, it's a bad thing.
It would be better if, you know, we could do things to prevent this.
Free markets certainly give incentives to prevent it.
They don't sort of magically prevent it, but they do kind of give, you know, make it economically
costly for people to engage in discrimination, which suggests it's likely to be less of it,
but nevertheless, you know, people can be willing to pay the costs, and so you might
Looking at liberalism since the middle of the 19th century, there's a progression downward
in human behavior, and that's because these liberals have become pseudo-liberals, but
The pseudo-liberal is just the, I mean he's a phony liberal, and one of the definitions of catholic is liberal, in other words, considering all things in order to make a judgement overall, this is catholic, I mean, that's what catholic means.
considering all things, but these people constantly, they have, first of all, they're, they're, they're, they're poorly educated. Secondly, they take what they, it's, it's, it's infinitely better to learn a few things well and truly than to learn many things badly. And that's what these liberals have, have been doing for years.
Yes, so the point is that from the movement from the 19th century through the 20th and on into our own, there's been a decline in liberalism.
Yes, I certainly agree with that. The classical liberals were much more libertarian and the current ones were much more state intervention.
I wasn't sure whether Catholic with the small c was something you were advocating or something you were against. Which was it?
Well, I mean Catholic, well, the definition of Catholic was a small thing. In other words, the sense of Catholic is all embracing. And they, the liberals, a true liberal, he embraces everything and he thinks deeply about it, then he comes to a conclusion that's much more liable to be right than wrong.
All right, so Catholic means the same thing as dialectical, in the sense I was talking about earlier of Catholic meaning, dialectical meaning refusing to simply consider a few things ripped from their context, but considering them in their relationship to the total context.
No, no, I don't quite understand. You can't take things from their context, otherwise then you stop thinking.
Exactly, yeah, so the dialectical approach advocates viewing things in their context rather than ripping them out, yeah, so dialectical Catholicism.
Yeah so that's a very nice point. The question is,
does the sort of Chris Cabrera dialectical approach necessarily lead to left libertarianism
or might it lead to something very conservative where you talk about the sort of the groundedness of things
and specific time and place and specific cultural context
and that might lead to the view that you should limit the amount of radical change you're asking for
and might that lead to blunting the edge of radicalism?
Yeah, and I think that's right. I think it's a legitimate worry
I don't worry, although obviously I think that the right way to work it out won't have that upshot.
I mean, certainly it's true that you have to take account of these contextual things
and certain kinds of programs for radical reform would be silly.
There's a little question of if there's a button on here that would abolish the government, would I push it?
Well, I need more information. If it just makes the existing government go away
but everyone stayed around with their existing preferences, we'd have a new government very quickly
and who knows what it would be like, you know, I want the button to make it go in, stay away and even then I might want more information, but yeah, so it's certainly true that there are limitations on, you know, the dialectical contextual search of limitations on the kind of radical reform, but yeah, I agree that I don't think it does, you know, require us to, you know, to just sort of resign ourselves to existing
and things, because I think that we should work to overcome existing cultural problems
as well as we can.
And we know we can't achieve it overnight, but that's not a reason for trying to do
less than we can.
And there's the line from William Lloyd Garrison that Rothbard liked to quote, that gradualism
in theory is perpetuity in practice.
And people say we shouldn't agitate for these changes right now, we should do it gradually.
He says, well, it's probably going to be gradual, but I should agitate right now.
And I think we are out of time.
Thank you very much.