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Arguments Against Eminent Domain and Its Use for the Benefit of Private Parties (2005) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

July 26, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 4 comments

G. Stolyarov II

July 26, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2005 and published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007. The essay earned over 8,300 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.

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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 26, 2014

The power of eminent domain has had a lengthy history, first originating in the Middle Ages and becoming enshrined in British common law. It is included in the U.S. Constitution as a means of government appropriating private property if this appropriation serves a “public use.” However, under the 5^th Amendment, the government is obligated to provide “just compensation” for any property thus taken, which is usually interpreted to mean that the government must pay the market value of the property to the owner from whom it is taken.

Recently, however, governments at all levels have begun to stretch these powers to encompass one private party’s land being taken for the benefit of another, especially if the other is a larger business that has the potential of bringing in greater tax revenues. This is a measure of questionable constitutionality, and even far more questionable morality. It is desirable to abolish such seizures of private land for the purposes of redistribution to other private entities, and to at least limit eminent domain powers to seizures that will only be directed toward benefiting government projects and infrastructure. That is, the power of eminent domain might still be invoked to build a public road or school, but not a shopping mall or apartment building. The arguments in favor of this restriction are overwhelming, even though it does not go as far as complete eminent domain opponents such as myself would like.

First, for somebody who values property rights, private property is an absolute, not to be contingent on “the public interest.” If the individual sees the benefits of keeping his property as outweighing those of selling it, he can either refuse to sell it or ask for more compensation. Anybody but the owner should be allowed to take the property only with the owner’s consent.

Often, current governments do not even give market value to “compensate” for seizures, but, even if they did, there are subjective values that owners associate with their property which are hard to quantify and which only the owners themselves can enumerate accurately. As the story of certain homeowners in the 2005 Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London shows, some of them have built their dream homes out of places that were run-down when they first purchased them. And, after they had invested their lifetime’s work into those houses, the houses were condemned by the government. Surely, a coercive demand that they accept “market value” is not sufficient to compensate such a deeply personal investment.

Furthermore, “the public interest” is a collectivist notion, which ignores the fact that only individuals exist and that invoking “the public interest” in fact implies that the government should coercively back some private interests over others.

The policy of eminent domain has, recently, been used with blatantly power-hungry justifications. Business X brings in less tax money than Business Y might, so X must be demolished to give way to Y. Y is also a larger business that might create more jobs, so this justifies putting out of work those individuals who are currently employed by X. The flaw with this reasoning is that it views individuals as fungible, or substitutable for one another. It should not matter how many other individuals benefit from a government policy if it ruins the livelihood and property of even one innocent person. Individual rights are absolute.

Advocates of eminent-domain redistribution of property to private parties will attempt to state that the government can actually bring about “efficiency” through the use of eminent domain power to achieve “urban renewal.” However, economic theory from Adam Smith on has shown that the free market achieves any goal more efficiently than the government. A business that thrives because of government favors through eminent domain is not thriving because it functions better than others in market competition. As a matter of fact, that business might well not be favored by supply and demand, and has therefore not been able to acquire the land it seeks under a mode of free, voluntary market exchange. Therefore, its owners are seeking to gain what they have not earned by expropriating it from those who have earned it.

The kind of eminent domain supported by the Supreme Court in Kelo v. New London is pure legalized theft. It is time to recognize it as such.

Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions on Road Privatization (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

July 25, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

Originally Published September 12, 2009

as Part of Issue CCVII of The Rational Argumentator

Republished July 24, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCVII of The Rational Argumentator on September 12, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.

~ G. Stolyarov II, July 24, 2014

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I recently received a series of questions pertaining to my articles, “The Necessity of Road Privatization” and “How to Privatize the Roads.” I make my answers available to the public, as I have heard the same questions frequently posed to advocates of turning roads over to free-market competition.

Issue: Unavailability of Electronic Technology

Question: “You suggested that electronic tolling can be used for private roads, but what if this technology is not available for some countries? If the technology were not in place, would privatization still be desirable?”

Answer: Road privatization is desirable no matter what the technological level of the society adopting it. There are several justifications for this:

1) In a private, competitive road market, the requisite technologies for providing easy, convenient access to roads for customers will develop quickly, as entrepreneurs will be motivated by profit to invest in them. After all, if customers must spend a lot of time waiting at toll booths to get on the road, they will take their business elsewhere.

2) At any level of initial technology, it is possible to have superior organizational and logistical methods that maximize user convenience. For instance, if we assume no electronic technology whatsoever and physical cash collection as the only feasible means of obtaining payment, we can still conceive of entrepreneurs having large numbers of toll booths at each checkpoint to ensure that customers can pay quickly and be on their way. Alternatively, entrepreneurs can always charge road users regular membership fees and issue members identification papers that would be checked anytime the user enters the road. It is not always possible, of course, to predict the specific form an organizational innovation will take. However, tens of competing producers, each working under the hard budget constraint of a private enterprise, are much more likely to come up with innovative, efficient solutions than a monopoly producer with a soft budget constraint.

3) Historically, some of the first major roads in the United States – the turnpikes of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries – were privately built and operated, in an era long before today’s advanced technology. The roads functioned quite well for their time, facilitating inter-state commerce and the westward migration of large numbers of settlers. Private roads have existed with much more primitive technology than is available anywhere today, and so there is no reason to suppose that a given technological level is required for them to be viable. Technology certainly improves quality in this area, as in virtually all others, but the laws of economics function in a society of any level of advancement.

Issue: Different Ownership and Different Rules

Question: “If every road is owned by different people and different rules are imposed, would it not be too confusing?”

Answer: Standardization of rules often happens to a significant extent in private markets. For instance, railroads standardized many of their practices in the 19^th century by mutual agreement of private railroad companies. In any business, it is useful and profitable to enable the customers to rely on some common and well-known elements and practices, and it is quite likely that many rules of the road will be extremely similar. On the other hand, this similarity will not be of the rigid, ossified sort that currently exists on government roads – where the rules are uniform and immutable, irrespective of how well they actually work in facilitating safe and efficient roadway use. Entrepreneurs would be free to experiment with new rules and arrangements, and if consumers do not like a particular arrangement, they would always be free to use a competing road. Entrepreneurs will be aware of this and so will hesitate to adopt measures that would be difficult for users to understand and to follow. Roads that do things differently and continue to attract traffic will likely need to prominently advertise the aspects that make them unique, so that potential users are well aware of the peculiarities in advance and in a concise, easy-to-understand manner. The best road innovations will take hold among other entrepreneurs and will eventually become part of a new set of evolving standards.

Issue: Private Road Monopolies

Question: “Can a road monopoly be allowed to charge exorbitantly if there’s no alternative to a place?”

Answer: It is extremely unlikely that any individual business would be able to purchase all possible access routes to a given place, as this would be extraordinarily expensive. If any alternative route exists, and a non-coercive monopoly currently charges exorbitant prices, this will be a strong signal for competitors to enter the market, buy up land on the alternative route, build their own roads, and charge lower prices than the former monopolist. If there is a single provider of a road to a particular place, even the potential of this kind of competition would keep such a provider charging reasonable prices.

In the odd event that competition does not enter the field, people might simply choose not to go to the place for which the only road requires an exorbitant fee for its use. In this case, many individuals will come to see the benefits of going to the place in question as being outweighed by the costs, and so the place will cease to become popular, and the road provider’s revenue will diminish greatly. At that point, the road provider will either need to lower its prices to attract more business or go out of business entirely.

It is important to recognize that a road monopoly is precisely what exists virtually everywhere in many countries today. This monopoly, unlike to transitory monopolies that may sometimes occur on the free market, is supported by law. The consequences of a coercive monopoly in the provision of any good are easy to foresee and identify: lower quality at a higher price. It is reasonable to believe that taxpayers are already being charged exorbitantly for the use of government roads today.

Click here to read more articles in Issue CCVII of The Rational Argumentator.

Writers Can Prosper Without Intellectual Property (2010) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

July 23, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

Originally Published January 13, 2010

as Part of Issue CCXXXI of The Rational Argumentator

Republished July 22, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was previously published as part of Issue CCXXXI of The Rational Argumentator on January 13, 2010, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator. The fundamental concepts in this article remain sound, but the specific references to content sites – such as Associated Content, Helium.com, and Today.com – which previously allowed writers to monetize their works, are now obsolete, due to the closures of these sites. This should be a lesson to writers: utilize external sites for revenue generation if you need to, but always keep all of your writings hosted on sites you control as well!

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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 22, 2014

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(This article was originally published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A free MP3 audio file of this article, read by the author, is available for download.)

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It is commonly supposed that, whatever its moral and theoretical standing, intellectual property is necessary for creators of written works to make a living and – even more importantly – to continue to create. Here, I will set aside the theoretical status of copyright, which is amply discussed in Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property and Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly. I will focus on existing and emerging possibilities for writers to earn a living in a world where no copyrights exist.

By way of real-world examples and suggestions based on observations of existing and historical practices, I seek to assure writers and other intelligent laymen of all persuasions that writers would not starve, and writing would continue to flourish, if copyrights disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow. I hope to foster an appreciation of the breadth of human creativity and the multitude of possibilities for innovative endeavors.

The popular, copyright-inspired model of revenue generation for writers entails contracting with a publishing company for a combination of payments: (1) a modest initial advance on the written work, typically paid at or prior to publication, and (2) a continual stream of royalties, typically paid as a proportion of the written work’s earnings. The royalties comprise the greatest share of revenue for most “traditionally” published writers under the copyright system; most authors and publishers within this system perceive copyright as necessary to ensure that the royalties continue for a prolonged period of time.

Even without copyright, there is a first-mover advantage to simply having released a work to market before anyone else could. Moreover, if the work is reasonably priced and attractively presented, there would be little reason for potential buyers to feel dissatisfied with it in a manner that would render it lucrative for competitors to enter the market.

For competitors, the investment of publishing the book and the considerable risk in competing with an established producer would cause them to think twice before undertaking this venture. Unless the original publisher has failed significantly in packaging, marketing, and pricing the book, its first-mover advantage is likely to last far into the future.

As for digital downloads of the book, considerable evidence exists that these do not cannibalize hard-copy sales. Indeed, book sales have skyrocketed since the emergence of easy copying possibilities on the Internet. Downloads likely also furnish a marginal gain to the author’s reputation in excess of the marginal costs of any revenue foregone directly due to a download – especially if those who download a book today would likely not have purchased it if it were not available for free online.

But suppose that the defenders of copyright are correct in their assumption that the first-mover advantage is ephemeral. Suppose that this advantage could not be relied on as the competition seized on a good work and began to market it at equally advantageous, or more-advantageous terms than the initial publisher. What other recourse could writers have?

1. More Frequent Publication of New Works

If there is a first-mover advantage that lasts several months or years, irrespective of whether intellectual property exists, then a given author who chooses to adhere to the “traditional” publishing system could pursue the strategy of writing and publishing a new work every time the first-mover advantage of the previous work has been exhausted. This would lead to a necessary change in expectations: an author could not expect to live off the royalties from a single work – even a widely popular work – forever but would need to keep creating in order to maintain his revenue stream.

Nonetheless, this is not far off from the current situation; after all, most published books do not sell nearly well enough to assure the authors even a modest stream of lifetime earnings. Moreover, such a system would incentivize creation of further works.

Indeed, prior to the introduction of copyright, European classical composers found it necessary to continually create music, as their older and already-famous pieces were often performed internationally without any compensation given to them. Even so, some of these composers managed to be phenomenally prosperous as well as prolific.

The most famous composer of the early 18th century, and one of the most prosperous, was Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), who is thought by some to be the most prolific composer in human history, with over 3000 works to his name. Telemann’s status is rivaled by Simon Sechter (1788-1867), who wrote over 8000 works, many of them short fugues, and who endeavored to create at least one short composition every day. Neither composer lived under a copyright regime.

Indeed, virtually all of the big names of classical music – Bach, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Berlioz – composed without copyright and were not dismayed when their works were performed without their participation or consent. Composers through the Romantic era would often borrow passages from their peers and predecessors and develop creative orchestrations and variations thereof. This was not considered to be theft but rather the ultimate compliment: a demonstration that a composer had been able to cultivate a musical idea that could now thrive independently of his efforts.

If composers could set still-unmatched records of productivity without copyrights while managing to earn a living, imagine what writers could do in an environment that did not give them the hope of forever subsisting off past accomplishments.

2. Larger Initial Advances

Writers seeking to publish their works via the “traditional” system could come, in an environment of no copyright, to expect larger initial advances from publishers as a tradeoff for smaller, less stable, and generally diminishing royalty streams. There is no reason why this could not be lucrative for publishers. The publisher could pay the writer a larger one-time fee, getting in exchange the first-mover advantage over the competition.

When the competition catches up and resorts to publishing a book that has been well received by the public, the original publisher has at least the potential of competing on even terms with regard to expenses; the competitors would not need to pay a substantial fraction of their earnings to the author, and neither would the original publisher.

The tremendous proliferation of British novels in the United States during the 19th century can give us a glimpse of what such a world might be like. British authors had copyright on their works in Britain since the enactment of the Statute of Anne in 1710, and American authors had copyright on their works in the United States since the passage of the Copyright Act of 1790.

However, as the era of international copyright had yet to be inaugurated (via the Berne Convention of 1886), British authors did not have copyright on their works in the United States; instead, they typically sold the rights to a first printing of their work in the United States. Thereafter, the original US publishers of these authors would not owe them royalties and would therefore not be obligated to pay this additional expense, putting them on par with potential later publishers of the same works. The British authors made more money selling their works in the US in this manner than they did under the copyright and royalty system in Britain. Moreover, their works became significantly more popular in the United States than those of their American contemporaries.

3. Patronage 2.0

Some of the greatest works in history have been created by writers and artists working under the patronage system, in which wealthy and influential individuals supported creators in exchange for a consistent and high-quality output, often used to advance the patrons’ interests and public image. The historical patronage system also exhibited numerous genuine flaws, including significant restrictions on the creativity of artists by overbearing patrons. Yet the flaws of the system were due not to the institution of patronage per se, but to the structure of preliberal, preindustrial Western societies.

Patrons were extremely scarce, and most of them had financial resources not due to personal merits or economic achievements, but due to political power. For writing in particular, this was a hindrance, as writing for a patron typically meant avoiding the expression of ideas that would upset the established political order, on which the patron built his wealth and power. On the other hand, if one’s patron was subversive of the established order, like the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-1683), the patron and sole patient of John Locke, some radically provocative work could result.

Some creators were fortunate to find reasonable and enlightened patrons, but even these had idiosyncrasies that needed to be catered to. This bred extensive resentment of the patronage system and inspired a reaction and shift to its polar opposite: mass marketing to as broad a consumer base as possible. Yet this approach, too, has numerous evident shortcomings.

In our time, the fundamental flaws of the historical patronage system need no longer persist, because the distribution of potential patrons is so much greater. Indeed, most people who are established in “white-collar” occupations can afford to become patrons of the arts today. In addition, because of computers and the Internet, writing and publication cost very little except for the time and effort spent actually putting the words and ideas together. Not only has the capacity of most people to fund writers increased dramatically, but the exertions and materials required for writing have diminished considerably as well.

Any patronage system would necessitate some manner of creator compliance with the patron’s wishes; that is what the patron is paying for. However, with a large number of potential patrons on the market, a given writer does not need to feel dependent on financial arrangements with a particularly disagreeable patron; he is free to find another patron – or even to work for a multitude of patrons simultaneously.

Patronage can be expressed monetarily, but it need not be. In-kind patronage – such as that performed by numerous online magazines that publish essays by contributing authors – is another mechanism by which writers can find resources to support their endeavors.

4. Self-Patronage

“Self-patronage” is a concise way of expressing the concept of writing during one’s leisure time while pursuing another occupation as a primary income generator. If another person with an above-average income can serve as a patron for a writer, then it is just as easy for the writer himself to earn an above-average income in a profession of his choice and then use it to subsidize his writing.

This is a promising option for many writers today, myself included, and it should not be dismissed as a viable long-term model for the creation of quality output. Self-patronage is tremendously efficient; it frees the writer from having to get clearance from any external entity to write or publish what he pleases. Moreover, it frees the writer from needing to satisfy a mass audience; he can make his works as sophisticated, specialized, or controversial as he pleases. If they gain notice and admiration, this can result in some added bonuses for the writer; if they fail to catch on, he is not endangered in his livelihood and can always try again.

With the ability to publish for free on the Internet, writers no longer require access to large institutions or wealthy individuals in order to spread their ideas to a large audience. They do, of course, need to compete with a much larger pool of creators than has ever existed – and this may result in difficulties for quality work in getting notice commensurate with its merits. However, because self-patronage eliminates the costs of getting external clearance, a writer can be as productive as he is motivated to be. By releasing vast quantities of works, he greatly enhances the probability that one of these will be noticed and will motivate some readers to explore his other works.

5. Online-Content Sites

A remarkable development on the Internet in recent years has enabled hundreds of thousands of writers to earn modest income streams from advertisements that appear on the pages where their work is published. (In reading this section, some might wonder about the frequent mentions of my activity on the various sites to which I refer. This is done in part to comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s recent guidelines on the disclosure of writers’ institutional affiliations. Thank you, FTC, for requiring me to boast of my work more than I otherwise would have.) Large commercial websites typically contract with numerous advertisers and establish an infrastructure for writers to conveniently publish a variety of works. Associated Content, where I have been publishing my writings for over three years [2007-2010], [formerly paid] contributors both initial small advances for articles that pass editorial review and performance payments on the basis of how many page views contributors’ content receives. The performance payment is not enough to earn a living – $2.00 per 1000 page views – but several hundred articles can provide a decent supplement to one’s monthly income.

Helium.com, another site where I have published, [formerly invited] authors to write competing articles under a given title and then to rank other authors’ contributions. The authors who regularly participate [formerly received] a bonus based on the page views their articles receive. Yet another site, Today.com, the [former] host of my blog, The Progress of Liberty, [formerly paid] some bloggers a dollar for one post on any given day and supplements this with a performance payment based on visitation. Other commercial enterprises with a variety of compensation mechanisms have evolved over the last several years to enable layman writers to earn small revenues from their work without needing to have expertise in marketing or salesmanship.

The above methods of income generation, too, have their shortcomings in terms of which kinds of writing are most rewarded. But they are still in their infancy, and six years ago they did not exist at all. Within several decades at most, it will surely be possible for large numbers of authors to earn a living by writing and publishing their works on the Internet without being members of any syndicate or media organization’s staff – unless, that is, established interests successfully lobby governments for restrictions on creative Internet activities.

6. The Best Option

The best option for promoting a writer’s creativity while assuring him a stable and adequate income is a combination of the approaches above. Each approach, like most techniques in life, has its strengths and its shortcomings. For instance, patronage might result in the need to meet idiosyncratic tastes, while online-content sites that pay on the basis of unique visitors might incentivize writers to focus on breadth of appeal rather than depth. Self-patronage, on the other hand, is limited by the writer’s existing resources and technical training in other fields.

In a relatively advanced, quasi-market economy with widely available, remarkable publishing technologies, it is possible to viably combine these approaches for an overall strategy that keeps one both fed and writing. Moreover, as the marketplace continues to evolve, and technological possibilities combine with human creativity to render new options available, writers should be willing to experiment with yet more ways of delivering their content to audiences and receiving corresponding compensation.

As is typical with markets, it is virtually impossible to exactly predict the way in which patterns of behavior will emerge, especially as one looks out into the long-term future. But this should not discourage writers; indeed, it should highlight to them the importance of being open to new possibilities. They should not simply expect that existing business models – such as the copyright-based, royalty-heavy compensation system of “traditionally” published authors – will continue in perpetuity as a matter of right for the parties involved.

It is never necessary to cling to a single legal mechanism or institution as the sole path for any given peaceful and productive human activity. Human beings are much more inventive and resilient than the defenders of copyright would suggest.

Click here to read more articles in Issue CCXXXI of The Rational Argumentator.

Putting Randomness in Its Place (2010) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

July 23, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

Originally Published February 11, 2010

as Part of Issue CCXXXV of The Rational Argumentator

Republished July 22, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCXXXV of The Rational Argumentator on February 11, 2010, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.

~ G. Stolyarov II, July 22, 2014

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A widespread misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “randomness” often results in false generalizations made regarding reality. In particular, the view of randomness as metaphysical, rather than epistemological, is responsible for numerous commonplace fallacies.

To see randomness as metaphysical is to see it as an inherent aspect of reality as such – as embedded inextricably in “the way things are.” Typically, people holding this view will take it in one of two directions. Some of them will see randomness pejoratively – thinking that there is no way reality could be like that: chaotic, undefined, unpredictable. Such individuals will typically posit that, because reality cannot be random, it must therefore be centrally planned by a super-intelligent entity, such as a deity.

Others, however, will use the metaphysical perception of randomness to deny evident and ubiquitously observable truths about our world: the facts that all entities obey certain natural laws, that these laws are accessible to human beings, and that they can inform our decision-making and actions. These individuals typically espouse metaphysical subjectivism – the idea that the nature of reality depends on the person observing it, or that all of existence is in such a chaotic flux that we cannot ever possibly make sense of it, so we might as well “construct” our own personal or cultural “reality.”

But it is the very metaphysical perception of randomness that is in error. Randomness is, rather, epistemological – a description of our state of knowledge of external reality, and not of external reality itself. To say that a phenomenon is random simply means that we do not (yet) have adequate knowledge to be able to explain it causally. Based on past observational experience or some knowledge of aspects inherent to that phenomenon, we might be able to assign probabilities – estimates of the likelihood that a particular event will occur, in the absence of more detailed knowledge about the specifics of the circumstances that might give rise to that event. In some areas of life, this is presently as far as humans can venture. Indeed, probabilistic thinking can be conceptually quite powerful – although imprecise – in analyzing large classes of phenomena which, individually, exhibit too many specific details for any single mind to grasp. Entire industries, such as insurance and investment, are founded on this premise. But we must not mistake a conceptual tool for an external fact; the probabilities are not “out there.” They are, rather, an attempt by human beings to interpret and anticipate external phenomena.

The recognition of randomness as epistemological can be of great aid both to those who believe in biological evolution and to advocates of the free market. Neither the laws of evolution, nor the laws of economics, of course, would fit any definition of “randomness.” Rather, they are impersonal, abstract principles that definitively describe the general outcomes of particular highly complex sets of interactions. They are unable to account for every fact of those interactions, however, and they are also not always able to predict precisely how or when the general outcome they anticipate will ensue. For instance, biological evolution cannot precisely predict which complex life forms will evolve and at what times, or which animals in a current ecosystem will ultimately proliferate, although traits that might enhance an animal’s survival and reproduction and traits that might hinder them can be identified. Likewise, economics – despite the protestations of some economists to the contrary – cannot predict the movements of stock prices or prices in general, although particular directional effects on prices from known technological breakthroughs or policy decisions can be anticipated.

Evolution is often accused of being incapable of producing intelligent life and speciation because of its “randomness.” For many advocates of “intelligent design,” it does not appear feasible that the complexity of life today could have arisen as a result of “chance” occurrences – such as genetic mutations – that nobody planned and for whose outcomes nobody vouched. However, each of these mutations – and the natural selection pressures to which they were subject – can only be described as random to the extent that we cannot precisely describe the circumstances under which they occurred. The more knowledge we have of the circumstances surrounding a particular mutation, the more it becomes perfectly sensible to us, and explicable as a product of causal, natural laws, not “sheer chance.” Such natural laws work both at the microscopic, molecular level where the proximate cause of the mutation occurred, and at the macroscopic, species-wide level, where organisms with the mutation interact with other organisms and with the inanimate environment to bring about a certain episode in the history of life.

So it is with economics; the interactions of the free market seem chaotic and unpredictable to many – who therefore disparage them as “random” and agitate for centralized power over all aspects of human life. But, in fact, the free market consists of millions of human actors in billions of situations, and each actor has definite purposes and motivations, as well as definite constraints against which he or she must make decisions. The “randomness” of behaviors on the market is only perceived because of the observer’s limited knowledge of the billions of circumstances that generate such behaviors. We can fathom our own lives and immediate environments, and it may become easier to understand the general principles behind complex economies when we recognize that each individual life has its own purposes and orders, although they may be orders which we find mistaken or purposes of which we disapprove. But the interaction of these individual microcosms is the free market; the more we understand about it, the more sensible it becomes to us, and the more valid conclusions we can draw regarding it.

The reason why evolution and economies cannot be predicted at a concrete level, although they can be understood, is the sheer complexity of the events and interactions involved – with each event or interaction possibly being of immense significance. Qualitative generalizations, analyses of attributes, and probabilistic thinking can answer some questions pertaining to these complex systems and can enable us to navigate them with some success. But these comprise our arsenal of tools for interpreting reality; they do not even begin to approach being the reality itself.

When we come to see randomness as a product of our limited knowledge, rather than of reality per se, we can begin to appreciate how much there is about reality that can be understood – rather than dismissed as impossible or inherently chaotic – and can broaden our knowledge and mastery of phenomena we might otherwise have seen as beyond our grasp.

Click here to read more articles in Issue CCXXXV of The Rational Argumentator.

Why I Do Not Adhere to Anarcho-Capitalism (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

July 3, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 2 comments

G. Stolyarov II

Originally Published August 9, 2009,

as Part of Issue CCII of The Rational Argumentator

Republished July 2, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CII of The Rational Argumentator on August 9, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator. The arguments in it continue to be relevant to discussions regarding minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, and therefore it is fitting for this publication to provide these arguments a fresh presence.

~ G. Stolyarov II, July 2, 2014

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As one of the many libertarians who loves individual freedom and free markets but nevertheless perceives an important role for government, I have been challenged numerous times on my stance. The best way to describe my position is that I am a minarchist in theory; I happen to agree with Thomas Jefferson that “that government is best which governs least,” and yet I recognize that an active government is necessary for combating force and fraud and for ensuring that the natural rights of individuals are not transgressed upon by other private parties. In practice, I am an incrementalist – a strong supporter of evolutionary change rather than revolutionary change of any sort. I believe that real-world political reform is a delicate process, and that the sequence of transitions matters just as much as the abstract desirability of any given transition. We want to implement the right changes, but we also need to implement them in the right order – just as a doctor who wishes to cure a patient using theoretically sound procedures cannot just apply the procedures in an arbitrary sequence and hope to succeed.

Following Murray Rothbard (who, unlike me, was a noted anarcho-capitalist), I believe that liberty is the most desirable political end, but it is not necessarily the most desirable end of all. The length, prosperity, and security of every individual’s life are to me much more important – and I see liberty as the surest means of attaining those ends to the greatest extent. However, it is possible for those ends to also be partially and tolerably well attained – at least in the short term – in an environment that lacks complete liberty. This is why I developed a rough system that “measures” degrees of government oppression using a mixture of cardinal and ordinal approaches. Irrespective of the particular criteria of comparison, any reasonable thinker will agree that some governments today are much more tolerable than others – and a few are quite innocuous and even outright beneficent, especially when we consider governments over smaller jurisdictions, such as states and localities, and particular agencies of those governments which do not employ coercion to any substantial extent. Metaphysically, I agree with Ayn Rand that there is an objective reality, where A = A – i.e., every particular thing is what it is and not what one’s mental model of it happens to be. Thus, I believe in judging every particular instance of government or governance not just as “government or governance in general” but rather as precisely what it is specifically – which means that a government is nothing more than the sum of the people who compose it and their actions, which need to be judged on their own merits or lack thereof. I am therefore open to the possibility that some governments may be able to solve some problems without infringing on natural rights at all. I am equally open, of course, to the possibility that those problems may be solved on the free market without government participation.

Here, I will present a basic outline of my objections to anarcho-capitalism as it is typically presented today. Anarcho-capitalism can be defined as the position that government is unnecessary altogether and that market-based services can provide all of the essential functions of government recognized by the minarchist as legitimate – including police protection, protection from foreign invaders, enforcement of contracts, and adjudication of disputes.

My Foremost Political Goal

I define a state of complete liberty as the absence of the initiation of violence or coercive dishonesty by any individual against any other individual. By “violence” I mean the physical disruption of either the integrity of an individual’s body or that of the material things which that individual owns. The term “coercive dishonesty” encompasses fraud, breach of contract, bad-faith dealings, and failure to fully disclose information that would affect the decision of a party in a business transaction. By “initiating” violence or coercive dishonesty I mean being the first party to inflict such acts on another, without having had such acts inflicted on oneself by that other and without defending some other innocent party against those acts inflicted by that other. I do not consider retaliatory force – provided that it is a proportional response to the initiated force and does not harm innocent parties – to be illegitimate or undesirable.

Thus, I believe that the state of the world which minimizes violence and coercive dishonesty as much as possible is the most desirable state. To be sure, both many governments and many private parties throughout history have engaged in these heinous acts – and I am not defending any entities that have. My position does not embrace governments as they currently are, but as they can be and ought to be. Anarcho-capitalists may object to my position by arguing that few, if any, governments in history have subscribed to minarchist principles and initiated no violence or coercive dishonesty. To this, I will reply by quoting John Lennon: “You may call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” Few, if any, societies in history have been viably anarcho-capitalist, either. Neither my position nor the anarcho-capitalists’ has any existing real-world incarnation. The question before us, then, is which of these positions would result in less overall violence and coercive dishonesty if implemented in practice?

Objection 1: Lack of an Ultimate Arbiter

Anarcho-capitalists posit that dispute resolution – be it of the character of police action or judicial proceedings – can occur among entirely private entities on the free market without any government involvement at all. For sake of conciseness, I will call the entities that engage in this manner of dispute resolution DRAs – or dispute resolution agencies.

It is true that many forms of dispute resolution can occur without government participation and do occur in this manner today – within families and business arrangements subject to private arbitration. If a private dispute is resolved satisfactorily by the relevant private parties themselves, then there is no need for recourse to government. However, there also exist instances – all too many today, as evidenced by the overwhelmed American judicial system – where private parties cannot reconcile their differences solely through private means. Anarcho-capitalists’ typical response to this is that in a wholly free market (as they define it, that is, with no government altogether) ex ante arrangements would exist whereby, if DRA X and DRA Y – representing two different and opposing parties in a dispute – could not reach a mutually satisfactory decision, the power of decision would be delegated to a third DRA – Z. This is conceivable, but it is by no means guaranteed that such an arrangement would occur in all cases. Thus, under anarcho-capitalism, there is nothing theoretically preventing there being no ultimate resolution to a dispute – ever – from the standpoint of legitimacy, in which case there would be no recourse left but to the principle of “might makes right.” If a dispute cannot be resolved peacefully, then it will devolve into violence – which is the least desirable of all outcomes. Anarcho-capitalism lacks an ultimate arbiter that would step in irrespective of prior contractual arrangements or lack thereof in order to quell the initiation of violence if it were to occur.

It is conceivable that a government could leave most dispute resolution to the private market – unless the market has demonstrated its failure to achieve lasting, peaceable resolution. In that case, the government, as the ultimate arbiter, would need to intervene and offer a resolution, either through a decision of its courts or through the interposition of armed agents whose presence would prevent violence from erupting. It is important to remind my readers that my foremost objective is the prevention of violence breaking out. If two private DRAs were about to begin a miniature war – and they happened not to have contractual procedures in place for preventing it beforehand – then it is desirable for a third agency with greater powers than a mere private entity to decisively put an end to such coercive and damaging behavior.

Objection 2: Lack of Legitimate Enforcement against Violent Non-Parties to Contracts

The way an anarcho-capitalist society would work – according to most of its advocates – is that all members would bind themselves by contracts in their mutual interactions, and the contracts would stipulate consequences for non-compliance. This raises an interesting issue: What if a person within the society refused to bind himself by any contracts whatsoever and simply raided, stole, and murdered as he saw fit? If there is no law other than what individuals choose to bind themselves by, then what legitimate recourse do other non-coercive members of the society have against this initiator of violence? Moreover, if this person were to team up with a host of others who similarly chose not to bind themselves by any contracts that prohibit initiation of force, could not a formidable criminal gang form and terrorize – if not overwhelm – the peaceful portions of the anarcho-capitalist society? Of course, somebody in the anarcho-capitalist society could always simply kill or detain the aggressors in practice, without regard for whether the aggressors broke a contract or not. However, such an act would not be legitimate in an anarcho-capitalist society. Illegitimate acts can and do occur – both with and without governments – but what counts as an illegitimate act matters. Under a government, murder can and does happen, but murder is considered illegitimate. Under anarcho-capitalism, murder by non-parties to any contracts is not illegitimate, but punishing by force a person who commits such a murder is illegitimate. A system where legitimacy fails to apply to actions with obvious morality and desirability is a troubling system indeed.

Objection 3: The Oxymoron and the Danger of Markets in Force

A market arrangement is an arrangement based on voluntary participation of all parties – an arrangement where trading is substituted for compulsion. On a free market for a typical good or service – such as an item of food or a construction job, for instance – no individual is required to buy and no individual is required to sell, except on terms mutually favorable and explicitly agreed upon. However, the term “market” no longer applies in this sense when any element of compulsion is introduced. When a “market service” involves wielding weapons and enacting violence against individuals who do not wish to have this violence inflicted upon them, it ceases to be a “market service” and becomes something quite different. This does not necessarily make such a service illegitimate, of course – as the potential for retaliatory force is a necessary component in minimizing the initiation of force. However, this difference does invalidate the application of typical principles of analyzing markets to such “services.” There can be no market-based analysis of a service that does not entirely rely on voluntary consent from all parties involved.

One of the glaring dangers of a “market service” specializing in the use of force is that such a service could simply use the force it “produces” to extort or steal other people’s wealth instead of earning it in voluntary trades. Without an external authority to enforce a prohibition on this behavior, there is no guarantee that such behavior would not occur. A free-market DRA would not always do this, of course, but there are conceivable scenarios where every incentive would favor such behavior. Only when there are substantial disincentives to the use of force from other armed parties on a free market or when the DRA administrator is particularly humane, benevolent, and enlightened could a DRA be reasonably expected not to violate individual rights. There are two ways for such incentives to arise without reliance on anyone’s personal virtues. Either 1) there could exist a “balance of power” among the DRAs such that each of them is afraid of transgressing against clients of the other or 2) there could exist an authority external to the DRAs that would always protect the parties unjustly aggressed upon, irrespective of the power differential between the aggressors and the targets of aggression. I favor solution 2), because it is not as contingent on a particular balance of power being in place.

Moreover, many anarcho-capitalists claim that one of the problems with government is that it has a monopoly on the use of force and that, as a monopoly, it necessarily offers a lower quality and lower quantity of its product at higher prices. I urge the reader to recall, however, that we are not here discussing a monopoly on otherwise entirely voluntary transactions. It is useful to ask the question whether it is desirable to have force offered in “higher quality,” higher quantities, and a lower price. I, for one, would prefer it to be more expensive to kill a person rather than less – and for the methods of killing to be both of lower quality (i.e., less reliable at killing) and available in lower quantities. Perhaps a monopoly on force has the potential to minimize the use of force compared to “competition” in force. This, I believe, is an empirical question – but even the question itself challenges many anarcho-capitalists’ assertions that governments are necessarily bad because they are monopolies on the use of force.

Objection 4: Each Person a Judge in His Own Case

This objection to anarcho-capitalism comes from none other than one of history’s first libertarians – John Locke. Locke believed that a government is necessary to resolve disputes and decide on punishments, because no individual is qualified to be an impartial judge in his own case. Virtually all of us, when we feel wronged, have a tendency to exaggerate the magnitude of the injury we have suffered and to demand a punishment that is likely to be disproportionate to the offense. On the other hand, when a person has wronged somebody else, he has an incentive to maintain his innocence or to argue that his act was not as grievous as was truly the case. A third party, not itself a victim or a perpetrator of the wrongful act, is needed to ascertain both the facts of the case and the apportionment of guilt and punishment. Sometimes, such a third party could indeed be a private arbiter. However, it is entirely possible for two private DRAs to each be vested – either emotionally, financially, or both – in the interests of their particular clients in a manner that would detract from objectivity in reaching a decision. In that case, I believe that an indispensable role exists for government to provide the desirable impartial arbitration.

Objection 5: Over-Emphasis on Names, Under-Emphasis on Reality

My concern with anarcho-capitalism is it substitutes consideration of the names of political arrangements for the reality of those arrangements – i.e., the physical actions performed by physical people in the physical world. Whether a function is called a “market” function or a “government” function is not as important as the physical movements involved in carrying out that function. If the physical movements involved do not cause disruption of body or property (as in violence) and do not involve the formation of chemical reactions corresponding to false impressions of reality in the brains of parties to a transaction (as in coercive dishonesty), then the action is legitimate from the standpoint of natural law. On the other hand, if the physical movements of individuals correspond to acts of violence or coercive dishonesty, then these actions are illegitimate – irrespective of whether the individuals call themselves (or are called by others) government officials, free-market DRAs, or private gangsters.

Anarcho-capitalists might respond here by noting that, in the 20^th century, governments have killed more people than possibly all private crime in human history. This is true – but it does not undermine the case for any government whatsoever. The killing was done by some governments – such as the governments of Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Maoist China – but not others, such as many of the governments of American cities, towns, and villages. Moreover, even in the governments that perpetrated the killings, only some of the officials were responsible for either ordering the killings, promoting them as desirable, or carrying them out. Millions of government employees have never committed a single coercive action (and yes, that even includes their mode of earning a living – as quite a few government positions are not tax-financed). It does not seem fair to lump a peaceful bureaucrat doing research or mediating consumer complaints at his desk with an NKVD officer massacring villagers in the Ukraine. Both are “government” functionaries, but they could not be farther apart in terms of what they do, and the atrocities of the latter do not de-legitimize the former. The anarcho-capitalist characterization of all government as violent, coercive, and unnecessary is a poor substitute for a thorough consideration of reality. Moreover, it is a violation of the principle of methodological individualism, which evaluates the actions of each person as an individual person, and not primarily as a member of a collective. Collectives do not act or think; only individual people do – although the incentives people face depend on the institutional structure to which those people are subject.

Objection 6: No Practical Application

To date, I have not found a single viable proposal for the attainment of anarcho-capitalism in the real world. Anarcho-capitalists have tended to spend most of their time on either 1) describing what an ideal anarcho-capitalist society would be like or 2) discussing why government, in its various manifestations, is undesirable. At the same time, some anarcho-capitalists have disdained and even actively discouraged participation in “the system” as it currently is, because that would grant “implicit recognition” to existing power structures. During the 2008 Republican Primaries, for instance, many anarcho-capitalists (though, of course, not all of them; I do not mean to offer a blanket characterization) endeavored to actively dissuade people from supporting the Ron Paul movement, arguing that attempting to reform the U.S. government from within would grant legitimacy to the structures of the U.S. government. These anarchists were preoccupied with formal structures over the substantive functions of the government – which could be better or worse than they are today. Moreover, these anti-Ron-Paul anarcho-capitalists undermined a movement that had the potential to eliminate many of the abuses of the U. S. federal government against its subjects’ liberties.

I happen to believe that political theory is more than a mind game; it has relevance to the real world, and it ought to have real-world implications for how we act in our own lives. It is not enough to simply state that one would like the world to be a certain way. Rather, a specific, technical, and quite involved series of steps is necessary to transition from the status quo to any state considered desirable. To simply contemplate the end outcome without any idea of how to attain it or even approach it is to divorce one’s political thinking from reality. We find ourselves today with a highly imperfect political system – one that involves numerous violations of individual liberties and also jeopardizes the economic prosperity and technological progress of the Western world. To solve today’s political problems, we cannot but participate in government in some way for the purposes of reforming it or at least protecting ourselves. To reject government altogether instead of endeavoring to improve it is to hide from the real, pressing problems of our time.

Perhaps the anarcho-capitalist ideal will be realizable in some distant future time, once human beings have progressed morally and technologically to such an extent that the initiation of force is no longer lucrative to anybody. I even suggested that this would happen in my short story, “The Fate of War.” In that enlightened time, violence would altogether not be within the realm of human consideration, and a viable anarcho-capitalism would be the natural corollary to that state of affairs.

Meanwhile, however, we are alive today – and if we do not have that which we consider good within our lifetimes, we shall not have it at all. If it is liberty we want – and the anarcho-capitalists have not come up with a viable way to have it without government – then we must have liberty with government. This endeavor will require working through government as well as through private channels; it will require not rejecting the existing system, but modifying it incrementally to move it toward more liberty and less violence. At the same time, a revolution against government is the least desirable course of action, because it would devastate our current levels of prosperity, health, and stability. Individuals who are wealthy, productive, and in control of their lives will come, over time, to civilly demand increasing amounts of independence from centralized control. On the other hand, individuals whose livelihoods have been ruined and whose prospects for upward mobility have been thwarted by an unstable macroeconomic and political climate – which inevitably accompanies revolutions – are easy prey for demagogues and would-be tyrants. Advocates of freedom must be patient, civil, and cautious. While challenging abuses of government authority as such abuses occur, freedom-loving people ought never to do anything that would undermine the standard of living or the safety and comfort of people in the Western world.

Transhumanism and Minarchism Are Compatible: A Response to The Sliceman – Article by G. Stolyarov II

April 28, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

April 27, 2014

Recommend this page.

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This essay is part of a debate with The Sliceman on whether transhumanism and minarchism are compatible. For prior installments of the conversation, see the following essays:

– “Why I Do Not Adhere to Anarcho-Capitalism” by G. Stolyarov II

– “In Response to G. Stolyarov II and his Transhumanist Minarchism” by The Sliceman

I appreciate that The Sliceman has taken the time to post his thoughts on the question of the compatibility of transhumanism and minarchism, and I thank him for his good words regarding my work. If, as he writes, we agree on 90% of the issues, “with the lone exceptions being minarchy and monogamy”, then we have plenty of common ground that could also be used to reach some points of agreement on the question of transhumanist minarchism.

My aim in this discussion will not be to discredit or refute anarcho-capitalism; instead, I will strive to show that transhumanist minarchism is a fully reasonable and logically consistent position. Empirically, transhumanist anarcho-capitalism also clearly has articulate adherents and holds out promise for the incremental improvement of the human condition. The Sliceman writes of my views, “Your stance is that, [anarcho-capitalism] would be better than normal statism, but not as good as minarchism.” This is correct, meaning that I would see transhumanist anarcho-capitalism as an improvement over the status quo both politically and technologically. However, transhumanist minarchism would be superior still, because it would contain a method for resolving tensions and disputes that would have escalated into violence under transhumanist anarcho-capitalism.

The Sliceman writes in response to my statement that anarcho-capitalism has no practical application in today’s world that “yes, there has never been a practical application of Anarcho-Capitalism replacing a state but there has never been an economic powerhouse minarchy that didn’t evolve into totalitarianism either. We are BOTH in the realm of theory here, my friend.”

In an important way, I agree. I wrote in “Why I Do Not Adhere to Anarcho-Capitalism” that “Neither my position nor the anarcho-capitalists’ has any existing real-world incarnation. The question before us, then, is which of these positions would result in less overall violence and coercive dishonesty if implemented in practice?” However, in another important way, I disagree with the argument that an empirical refutation of minarchism can be offered by observing formerly freer societies that have devolved into totalitarian or near-totalitarian ones. The Sliceman is correct that the United States has undertaken this trajectory over the past 238 years, while in the meantime facilitating considerable prosperity and economic growth through political structures that were freer than most. However, at no point in history was the United States minarchistic – not even by a long shot. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were closer to the libertarian ideal than the governance structures of 18^th-century Europe, to be sure, so they constituted steps in the right direction for their time. But the very language of these documents – including the “Commerce Clause”, the “General Welfare Clause”, and the “Necessary and Proper Clause” – opened the floodgates for extensive centralized intervention as these clauses were interpreted to have increasingly expansive and open-ended meanings. The devolution of the United States to the near-totalitarianism it exhibits today is not the result of minarchism, but israther due to the infusion of non-minarchistic elements into the US political structure at its founding. (The recognition of slavery certainly did not help, either; it paved the way for the bloody Civil War, which led to the first round of attempted totalitarianism by central governments under Abraham Lincoln in the Union and Jefferson Davis in the Confederacy.) I also note that the non-minarchistic nature of the early United States can be clearly seen in such travesties against liberty as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (which effectively forbade criticism of the government) and even Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807 (which effectively forbade all overseas trade) – neither of which would be conceivable even in today’s United States.

So the historical trajectory of the United States is no more an argument against minarchism than the brutal infighting and miserable standards of living in Somalia today are an argument against anarchism. The argument presented by The Sliceman that bureaucracies tend to try to grab more power for themselves may be true, but, if so, its only implication is that non-minarchistic elements of a government will tend to expand over time, changing the proportions of an initial mix of coercive and non-coercive government functions to be more heavily dominated by the coercive functions over time. However, if a minarchist government lacks the coercive functions (which involve non-retaliatory use of force) to begin with, and both the constitution and public opinion provide strong barriers to the emergence of such coercive functions, then the trajectory toward totalitarianism need not occur.

The Sliceman writes, “In fact, I believe minarchy to be much more theoretical than anarchy. Anarchy can be seen all over the world every day in the form of capitalism and voluntary association and order. Minarchy is almost never seen in all of history.” Both minarchy and anarchy are similarly theoretical, in my view, because, just as there has never been a completely minarchist government in history, there has never been a complete anarcho-capitalism in any society. Because every person encounters some dose of coercion in going about his or her daily life, that coercion necessarily shapes individual incentives and the kinds of markets and goods and services that arise in the society where the coercion exists. It is true, for instance, that unregulated black markets arise virtually everywhere that a government attempts to prohibit a good or service, but the content, environment, and limitations of those black markets are very much determined by the fact that the prohibition exists in the first place, as well as the extent and manner of the prohibition’s enforcement. Just as a true minarchism could only exist if a government did not have any legitimate power to initiate force, so a true anarcho-capitalism could only exist if there were no need to develop workarounds for the limitations imposed by a centralized authority.

This leads me to the conclusion that what matters more is the incremental direction of political change that one advocates – rather than one’s desired theoretical destination. For instance, abolishing NSA surveillance of the general population, dismantling the TSA, repealing the income tax, withdrawing all overseas US troops, halting the War on Drugs, and ending the requirement that the FDA approve all medicines prior to their availability for purchase by the general public, would all be measures favored by both minarchists and anarcho-capitalists. Their implementation would greatly increase the liberty enjoyed by people in practice, and such measures would also dramatically accelerate the rates of technological progress and economic growth. Whether the changes could be best accomplished by working within or outside the political system is an empirical question, and various strategies can be, at their core, compatible with both minarchism and anarcho-capitalism.

The Sliceman writes: “how dare you consider yourself a transhumanist, yet scoff at that which hasnt been tried yet[?] The automobile has not yet been created, but that is no reason to think the future is a faster horse. If history has taught us anything, it’s that someone’s lack of imagination does not deter future technological advancement in the areas of industry, economy, religion, or government.”

My argument regarding the lack of practical application for anarcho-capitalism does not hinge on the fact that it has not been tried yet in its full form. In fact, I would encourage some group of people to try it – perhaps on a seastead, a small island, or a space colony. The results of such an experiment would provide valuable empirical evidence and fuel for further thought and work in political philosophy. As I have previously stated, my preferred political system of minarchism also has not been tried in its consistent form, so my preference for it does not stem from any aversion for the new and untried.

Rather, when I say that anarcho-capitalism has no practical application today, my exact meaning is that I have yet to see a viable proposal for bringing it about through a transition from the status quo. Unlike minarchism, for whose attainment a sequence of political reforms can be articulated, many strains of anarcho-capitalism reject working within the political system, period, so it is unclear how exactly the transformation from a militaristic welfare state to an anarcho-capitalist society is envisioned to occur. As I wrote in “Why I Do Not Adhere to Anarcho-Capitalism”, “I happen to believe that political theory is more than a mind game; it has relevance to the real world, and it ought to have real-world implications for how we act in our own lives. It is not enough to simply state that one would like the world to be a certain way. Rather, a specific, technical, and quite involved series of steps is necessary to transition from the status quo to any state considered desirable. To simply contemplate the end outcome without any idea of how to attain it or even approach it is to divorce one’s political thinking from reality.” It also appears to me that, when an anarcho-capitalist does propose ways of working “outside the system” – including seasteading, cryptocurrencies, informal markets, and digital communities – these ways are also perfectly compatible with minarchism. They involve the use of technological innovation, jurisdictional competition, and civil society to motivate a reduction of political power from without. Yet, unfortunately, too many anarcho-capitalists let the perfect (in their minds) be the enemy of the good, and they reject or resist any attempts at bringing about incremental change (even outside of politics proper), for fear that those attempts are somehow intertwined with and corrupted by the existing political or social order. I do support the practical efforts of anarcho-capitalists to achieve their vision in peaceful ways. However, if and when they do this, they do not engage in any activities that are exclusively anarcho-capitalist or that would require adherence to anarcho-capitalism to pursue. A minarchist could undertake those same actions just as effectively.

I note that the lack of a concrete proposal to achieve anarcho-capitalism is quite different from what one observes with transhumanist projects and aspirations. Virtually every transhumanist vision, from indefinite life extension to various incarnations of the technological Singularity, has an associated detailed sequential plan for attaining it or view of the unfolding events that would bring it about. Consider, as examples of this, Aubrey de Grey’s SENS roadmap to reversing all the types of age-related damage, or Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, forecasting the continued exponential growth of emerging technologies. I certainly see the amount of centralized control in a society as capable of having a powerful impact on the rate at which these transhumanist aspirations can be realized; the more centralized control, the slower the rate. However, neither minarchism nor anarcho-capitalism would impose coercive restrictions on transhumanist projects, and so both are, in theory, quite compatible with transhumanism. Minarchism has the added advantage that it more readily embraces incremental political reforms that could help make an existing society more free, even if any given reform will not completely achieve the libertarian ideal. Minarchist activism could therefore be one effective way to increase the rate of technological progress in the near-to-intermediate term, paving the way for massive prosperity in the long term, which would increasingly consign the “social service” role of many welfare states to irrelevance.

The Sliceman writes, “Libertarian Tranhumanism and Minarchism is an extremely rare match. The creed of Transhumanism is to use historical patterns and trends to predict the future. I’m sure this study greatly contributed to your [belief] and support for indefinite life extension. The creed of Libertarianism is to increase liberty, freedom, and the protection of private property by decreasing the institutionalized initiation of the use of force that is the state.”

I disagree with the proposition that libertarian transhumanism and minarchism are a rare match. It is important to keep in mind that, among libertarians today, anarcho-capitalism is still a significant minority position. Transhumanism attracts significant interest from both libertarians and non-libertarians alike, but its affinity with libertarianism is stronger, so a larger proportion of libertarians are transhumanists as compared to non-libertarians. I have seen no evidence to suggest that anarchist libertarians are more inclined toward transhumanism than minarchist libertarians. While I have done no polling on this question (and some empirical research would certainly be extremely interesting here), a more plausible hypothesis is that transhumanism attracts libertarians independently of their views on the question of minarchy versus anarchy. So if X% of libertarians are anarchists, and (100-X)% are minarchists, and Y% of libertarians are attracted to transhumanism, then it would appear that, as long as X% < 50%, then X%*Y% would be less than (100-X)%*Y%, so there would be more minarchist transhumanists than anarcho-capitalist transhumanists. Again, this is only a hypothesis at present, and conducting a scientific poll of libertarian transhumanists would enable a more in-depth exploration of this question.

The Sliceman continues by describing an “exponential curve of liberty” that has unfolded throughout history, as greater technological advancement, especially in communication technology, has increased individual sovereignty. I agree with this general characterization. In fact, it fits with Steven Pinker’s immensely well-researched look in The Better Angels of Our Nature into the decline in rates of human violence over time, as technology, culture, and political liberty have tended to progress. However, Pinker is certainly no anarchist. He points out that hunter-gatherer “stateless” societies experienced per capita rates of violence and murder greatly exceeding those of the most despotic governments or those that were manifested during the two World Wars of the 20^th century. Pinker’s view is that even despotic government is preferable to tribalism or lawlessness, while constitutional or limited government is greatly preferable to despotic government in reducing the rates of violence (which are at their lowest point now as compared to any prior era) and maximizing the scope of individual liberty. I have read the entirety of The Better Angels of Our Nature, and it appears that the evidence Pinker presents suggests that technology, commerce, and culture – rather than political structures – offer the greatest contributions to the reduction of violence, perhaps because political structures are very much conditioned by the technological, economic, and cultural environments in which they arise.

The Sliceman writes, “The question here is what kind of liberty this technology will lead us to. Your answer seems to be that the exponential change in liberty will come to a stop at minarchy and we will just stay there, where my answer is that the exponential change will continue and the only logical conclusion is that we will approach 100% liberty with only [a] few tiny fractions of a percent of violence being accounted for by the fact that we are still, in fact, animals, and animals are violent.”

Supposing that exponential increases in liberty through technological progress can be achieved, this is not per se a sufficient argument that all government would disappear. For instance, exponential advances have been made to store data in ever-smaller volumes of physical space. This does not, however, suggest that we will ever arrive at a point where no physical space at all will be required for the storage of data. At most, we could perhaps keep reducing the space required without any lower limit, but we would only asymptotically approach zero space without ever getting there. The same reasoning could apply to government. Indeed, I see in accelerating technological progress our best prospect for minarchism. As advancing technology raises the prevailing levels of prosperity, fewer people will find themselves in need of government services to rectify any perceived deficiencies in their lives. The more the role of the redistributive welfare state dwindles away, the more governments would be relegated to their theoretically justified roles under minarchism – the resolution of disputes and protection against the initiation of force. It is quite feasible that additional private mechanisms for dispute resolution would emerge, and people would become generally more comfortable and less likely to want to engage in violence in the first place – both of which phenomena would reduce the frequency with which the government would resolve disputes in practice or interject its retaliatory force. If many humans receive augmentations to their minds, increasing both their intelligence and their moral sense, then the result will be an even further-reduced inclination to initiate force. But would this trend ever result in the elimination of government altogether? I doubt it – for the simple reason that the ability to have an ultimate arbiter of disputes or an entity that can interject itself to prevent violence would be too valuable for a future society to do away with altogether. 99.9999% of future transhumans may be entirely peaceful and capable of dealing with one another solely through market arrangements. But suppose there is even one person who rejects all transhumanist paths for humankind and who seeks, in some way, to use violence to wage war on the transhumanist society. Maintaining some very minimal government to deter this person would be wise. Furthermore, if the situation improves to the point where no such person exists, then the mechanisms of a minimal government might well lie dormant for a time – but there would be no reason to abolish them. It would be better to keep them available, just in case a future threat of violence arises, and all market-based methods for preventing it fail. After all, what would happen if some barbarous militaristic alien species discovers the transhumanist Earth and simply launches an invasion, with no questions asked?

The Sliceman writes, “You don’t need an ultimate arbiter when you are running your contracts through the Bitcoin Blockchain or its future replacement. You don’t need an ultimate arbiter when everything on Earth is constantly being recorded and a murderer (whose act can be proven 10 ways from Sunday through constant voluntary surveillance i.e.: Google glass, dashcams, and their future equivalents) can be given a voluntary unanimous Yelp review of ‘exile’.” In some cases, technologies such as the blockchain or universal sousveillance might actually generate more of a need for an ultimate arbiter. It is true that those technologies can facilitate more transparency and discovery of facts, but, in some cases, they are just as open to exploitation for nefarious motives. For technologies based on the blockchain, this is evidenced by the many thefts that have occurred from third-party Bitcoin services or the dishonesty and consequent failure of Mt. Gox. For sousveillance, there is an extremely fine but important line between monitoring that can help deter or prevent crime and monitoring that can infringe on individual privacy and deter innocent behaviors that could only occur in private. When such conflict areas arise (as is inevitable with transformative new technologies), it would be nice to have an impartial arbiter that could resolve conflicting legitimate interests and help overcome the “growing pains” of technological change. Of course, today’s archaic and cumbersome legal system is not the answer to this challenge, but a highly streamlined, extremely knowledgeable, and technologically sophisticated minarchist court might be.

The Sliceman writes that “Technology does not stop at minarchy.” I respond that, ultimately, no single form of government can be seen as the final form, upon which there cannot be any improvement. I do not rule out the existence of true anarcho-capitalism at some future time, somewhere. In “Why I Do Not Adhere to Anarcho-Capitalism”, I wrote that “Perhaps the anarcho-capitalist ideal will be realizable in some distant future time, once human beings have progressed morally and technologically to such an extent that the initiation of force is no longer lucrative to anybody.” I would have no quarrel with transhumanists who attempt to implement anarcho-capitalism through emerging technologies – but, at the same time, minarchism appears to be a far more proximate prospect, and, in the next several decades at least, the very same concrete methods that any anarcho-capitalist would effectively pursue, could also be used to pursue minarchism (since societies would be moved in the direction of both ideals by the application of such methods). Perhaps one implication of my argument is that, for the time being, it does not really matter whether one is a minarchist or an anarcho-capitalist, as long as one supports pro-liberty incremental changes. Another implication, however, is that minarchism and transhumanism are fully compatible, at least for the foreseeable future.

Charity, Compulsion, and Conditionality – Video by G. Stolyarov II

February 19, 2014 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

Libertarians’ opposition to coercive redistribution of wealth does not mean that they are opposed to charitable giving that improves people’s lives.

In this video, Mr. Stolyarov analyzes why private charities are more effective in benefiting their intended recipients than programs which involve coercive redistribution of wealth. Paradoxically, it is the extreme conditionality of many coercive welfare programs that leads them to be less effective than the voluntary decisions of diverse individuals and organizations.

References

– “The Costs of Public Income Redistribution and Private Charity” – James Rolph Edwards – Journal of Libertarian Studies – Summer 2007
– In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State (2006) – Book by Charles Murray

“Exploring Capitalist Fiction” – Allen Mendenhall Interviews Edward W. Younkins

February 16, 2014 Allen Mendenhall and Edward W. Younkins Comments 0 Comment

Allen Mendenhall and Edward W. Younkins

February 16, 2014

Recommend this page.

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This interview is reprinted with permission from Allen Mendenhall’s blog.

Read Mr. Stolyarov’s review of Dr. Younkins’s book, Exploring Capitalist Fiction.

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AM: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I’d like to start by asking why you chose to write Exploring Capitalist Fiction. Was there a void you were seeking to fill?

EY: The origins of this book go back to the Spring of 1992 when I began teaching a course called Business Through Literature in Wheeling Jesuit University’s MBA program. Exploring Capitalist Fiction is heavily based on my lectures and notes on the novels, plays, and films used in this popular course over the years and on what I have learned from my students in class discussions and in their papers.

The idea to write this book originated a few years ago when one of Wheeling Jesuit University’s MBA graduates, who had taken and enjoyed the Business Through Literature course, proposed that I write a book based on the novels, plays, and films covered in that course. I agreed as I concluded that the subject matter was important and bookworthy and that the book would be fun for me to write and for others to read. I went on to select twenty-five works to include in the book out of the more than eighty different ones that had been used in my course over the years. I have endeavored to select the ones that have been the most influential, are the most relevant, and are the most interesting. In a few instances, I have chosen works that I believe to be undervalued treasures.

I was not intentionally trying to fill a void as there are a number of similar books by fine authors such as Joseph A. Badaracco, Robert A. Brawer, Robert Coles, Emily Stipes Watts, and Oliver F. Williams, among others. Of course, I did see my evenhanded study of business and capitalism in literature as a nice complement and supplement to these works.

AM: I assume that you’ll use this book to teach your own courses, and I suspect other teachers will also use the book in their courses. Anyone who reads the book will quickly understand the reason you believe that imaginative literature and film have pedagogical value in business courses, but would you mind stating some of those reasons for the benefit of those who haven’t read the book yet?

EY: The underpinning premise of this book and of my course is that fiction, including novels, plays, and films, can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. Works of fiction can address a range of issues and topics, provide detailed real-life descriptions of the organizational contexts in which workers find themselves, and tell interesting, engaging, and memorable stories that are richer and more likely to stay with the reader or viewer longer than lectures and other teaching approaches. Imaginative literature can enrich business teaching materials and provide an excellent supplement to the theories, concepts, and issues that students experience in their business courses. Reading novels and plays and watching films are excellent ways to develop critical thinking, to learn about character, and to instill moral values. It is likely that people who read business novels and plays and watch movies about business will continue to search for more of them as sources of entertainment, inspiration, and education.

AM: Who are the intended audiences for your new book?

EY: My target audiences include college students, business teachers, general readers, and people employed in the business world. My summaries and analyses of twenty-five works are intended to create the feel of what it is like to work in business. The premise of the book is that fiction can provide a powerful teaching tool to sensitize business students without business experiences and to educate and train managers in real businesses. Studying fictions of business can provide insights to often inexperienced business students and new employees with respect to real-life situations.

In each of my 25 chapters I provide a sequential summary of the fictional work, interspersed with some commentary that highlights the managerial, economic, and philosophical implications of the ideas found in the work. My emphasis is on the business applications of the lessons of particular novels, plays, and films. This book highlights the lessons that an individual can take from each work and apply to his or her own life. It is not literary analysis for its own sake.

I do not delve deeply into these novels, plays, and films in order to identify previously-covered and previously-uncovered themes in existing scholarship. My book is essentially a study guide for people interested in becoming familiar with the major relevant themes in significant works of literature and film. The book can also serve as a guide for professors who desire to expand their teaching approaches beyond the traditional ones employed in schools of business.

Of course, literary scholars can use my book as a starting point, catalyst, or reference work for their own in-depth scholarly studies of these and other works. For example, I can envision a number of scholars, from a variety of viewpoints, contributing essays to book collections devoted to different literary works. One possible collection that readily comes to mind would be devoted to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Other candidates for potential collections might include Howell’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Norris’s The Octopus, Dreiser’s The Financer, Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, Lewis’s Babbitt, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Hawley’s Executive Suite, Lodge’s Nice Work, Sterner’s Other People’s Money, among others. It would be great if some of the contributing literary scholars to these volumes would come from pro-business, pro-capitalist thinkers such as Paul Cantor, Stephen Cox, Ryan McMaken, Sarah Skwire, Amy Willis, Michelle Vachris, and yourself. As you know most literary critics are from the left. Those mentioned above celebrate individualism and freedom in place of collectivism and determinism.

AM: What can be learned from business fiction?

EY: Fiction can be used to teach, explicate, and illustrate a wide range of business issues and concepts. Many fictional works address human problems in business such as managing interpersonal conflict and office politics; using different styles of management; the potential loss of one’s individuality as a person tends to become an “organization man”; the stultifying effect of routine in business; the difficulty in balancing work life and home life; hiring and keeping virtuous employees; maintaining one’s personal integrity while satisfying the company’s demands for loyalty, conformity and adaptation to the firm’s culture; communication problems a business may experience; fundamental moral dilemmas; depersonalization and mechanization of human relationships; and so on. Fictional works tend to describe human behavior and motivations more eloquently, powerfully, and engagingly than texts, articles, or cases typically do. Literary authors and filmmakers are likely to develop and present ideas through individual characters. They depict human insights and interests from the perspective of individuals within an organizational setting. Reading imaginative literature and watching films are excellent ways to develop critical thinking and to learn about values and character.

Many novels, plays, and films are concerned with the actual operation of the business system. Some deal directly with business problems such as government regulation, cost control, new product development, labor relations, environmental pollution, health and safety, plant openings and closings, tactics used and selection of takeover targets, structuring financial transactions, succession planning, strategic planning, the creation of mission statements, the company’s role in the community, social responsibility, etc. Assessing fictional situations makes a person more thoughtful, better prepared for situations, and better able to predict the consequences of alternative actions. Fiction can address both matters of morality and practical issues. There are many fine selections in literature and film which prompt readers to wrestle with business situations.

Older novels, plays, and films can supply information on the history of a subject or topic. They can act as historical references for actual past instances and can help students to understand the reasons for successes and failures of the past. Older literature can provide a good history lesson and can help people to understand the development of our various businesses and industries. These stories can be inspiring and motivational and can demonstrate how various organizations and managers were able to overcome obstacles, adapt, and survive. Fictional works are cultural artifacts from different time periods that can be valuable when discussing the history of business. Many fictional works present history in a form that is more interesting than when one just reads history books.

Imaginative literature reflects a variety of cultural, social, ethical, political, economic, and philosophical perspectives that have been found in American society. Various images of businessmen have appeared in fictional works. These include the businessman as Scrooge-like miser, confidence man, robber baron, hero, superman, technocrat, organization man, small businessman, buffoon, rugged individualist, corporate capitalist, financial capitalist, man of integrity, etc.

AM: How will your teaching approach change in your Business Through Literature course now that you have published your own book on the subject?

EY: In the past students in this course have read, analyzed, and discussed novels, plays, and films. Each student prepared a minimum of 6 short papers (2000 words each) on the assigned works. Grades were based on these papers and class discussions.

I am experimenting this semester using my book in the class for the first time. I am requiring each student to take notes on each chapter of the book to help them in bringing up topics for class discussion and in participating in class discussions. Each student is also required to prepare and turn in three essay questions on each chapter. These are turned in before each relevant class. Grades for the class are based on class participation and two essay tests.

AM: Isn’t the reverse also true that literature students ought to study economics or at least gain an understanding of business from something besides imaginative literature and film, which tend not to portray capitalists in a favorable light?

EY: It would definitely be beneficial for literature students to study classes in business areas such as management, marketing, accounting, and finance. It would help them somewhat if they took a course or two in economics. Unfortunately, almost all college-level economics courses are based on Keynesian economics. I would encourage anyone who takes such courses to read and study Austrian economics in order to gain a more realistic perspective.

AM: You’ve written a great deal about Ayn Rand, and the chapter on Atlas Shrugged is the longest one in your book. Rand can be a divisive figure, even, perhaps especially, among what you might call “libertarians” or “free marketers” or “capitalists” and the like. But even the people in those categories who reject Objectivism tend to praise Rand’s novels. What do you make of that, and do you think there’s a lesson there about the novel as a medium for transmitting philosophy?

EY: I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who value “novels of ideas.” There have been many good philosophical novels but none have been as brilliantly integrated and unified as Atlas Shrugged. Rand characterizes grand themes and presents an entire and integrated view of how a man should live his life. Rand’s great power comes from her ability to unify everything in the novel to form an integrated whole. The theme and the plot are inextricably integrated. Rand is a superb practitioner of synthesis and unity whose literary style and subject are organically linked and fused to the content of her philosophy. She unifies the many aspects of Atlas Shrugged according to the principles of reality. People from the various schools of “free-market” thought are in accord in promoting an appropriate reality-based social system in which each person is free to strive for his personal flourishing and happiness.

AM: I want to ask about Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back, the subject of chapter twelve of your book. Why do you think this book has not received much attention? It has been, I’d venture to say, all but forgotten or overlooked by even the most ardent fans of Hazlitt. Is the book lacking something, or are there other factors at play here?

EY: Hazlitt’s novel may not be “literary” enough for many people. However, in my opinion, the author does skillfully use fiction to illustrate his teachings on economics. I think that the book also has a good story line. Economics professors tend to shy away from using it in their classes. Some may be so quantitatively oriented that they cannot envision using a novel to teach economics. Others may perceive the Austrian economics principles found in Time Will Run Back to not fit in with the Keynesian economics principles found in most textbooks (and of course they are right).

AM: Thank you again for doing this interview. All the best in 2014.

Edward W. Younkins. Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business Through Literature and Film. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.

***

Dr. Edward W. Younkins is Professor of Accountancy at Wheeling Jesuit University. He is the author of Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise [Lexington Books, 2002], Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond [Lexington Books, 2005] (See Mr. Stolyarov’s review of this book.), and Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society: Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism [Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated, 2011] (See Mr. Stolyarov’s review of this book.). Many of Dr. Younkins’s essays can be found online at his web page at www.quebecoislibre.org. You can contact Dr. Younkins at younkins@wju.edu.

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Allen Mendenhall is a writer, attorney, editor, speaker, and literary critic. As of January 2013, he is a staff attorney for Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Supreme Court of Alabama. He holds a B.A. in English from Furman University, M.A. in English from West Virginia University, J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law, and LL.M. in transnational law from Temple University Beasley School of Law. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Auburn University, where he received a Graduate Dean Fellowship. He is managing editor of the Southern Literary Review and has been an adjunct legal associate at the Cato Institute as well as a Humane Studies Fellow with the Institute for Humane Studies in Arlington, Virginia. He is a member of The Philadelphia Society and an associate of The Abbeville Institute and soon will serve as an ambassador for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

He has studied at the University of London (Birkbeck College), the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, Centro Universitario Vila Velha, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (Direito Rio), and the Tokyo campus of Temple University Beasley School of Law.

He is the author of over 100 publications in such outlets as law reviews, peer-reviewed journals, magazines, newspapers, literary journals and periodicals, and encyclopedias. He lives in Auburn, Alabama, with his wife, Giuliana, and son, Noah, and blogs at The Literary Lawyer, The Literary Table, Austrian Economics and Literature, and TheMendenhall.

Liberally Classical – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

January 13, 2014 Jeffrey A. Tucker Comments 0 Comment

Jeffrey A. Tucker

January 12, 2014

Recommend this page.

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I was recently in an ornate orchestral hall built in the late Gilded Age, a setting designed to present an opera or symphonic music to a generation before World War I that craved such performance art. The concert I attended was sold out, with tickets running between $40 and $75.

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The place was vibrating with anticipation as the full orchestra with winds, strings, brass, and percussion came on stage, and a 25-voice choir—live acoustic music without conspicuous electronics—filed in behind. The cheers, even before it all began, were glorious.

***

As I looked around the vast room full of wide smiles, I noted that that average age of the concert goers was late twenty-something. It was a slightly startling sight after having been to so many symphony concerts filled with septuagenarians. Not that there’s anything wrong with old people, but it always seemed to symbolize a dying art to me. Not this time though. This art and this room were alive and youthful and looking to the future.

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What followed was two hours of dramatic, emotionally gripping symphonic music. The audience couldn’t wait to cheer and stand at every opportunity. At the intermission not a soul failed to return to his or her assigned seat.

***

I’ve been around the art-music sector of the music industry for many years, and, for me, this experience was all dreamy, even surreal. My whole life, I’ve heard the same old complaints from classical musicians. We are underfunded. Governments are stingy. The people are not coming to our concerts. The young are only interested in junk music. High art is being crowded out by pop: it’s Schubert vs. Spears, Beethoven vs. Bieber, Mahler vs. Madonna. Our concert halls and symphonies are being massacred by market forces. We need subsidies in order to uphold real music against the pathetic tastes of the middle class.

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And so on it goes.

***

The conventional tactics for dealing with this obvious and old problem are well known. There are labor strikes—you know, those oppressed oboists and violists who are clamoring for their surplus value to be given back by the unnamed exploiter. Donors are being squeezed to make up for what can’t be gained in ticket sales. There are hectoring public campaigns to “support the arts” or feel really guilty. There are marketing gimmicks. There are foundations that provide temporary relief. All the while, musicians grow ever more bitter, resentful, and despairing.

***

So what made this event different? Many things. The bar was open with wine, beer, and spirits, and people were welcome to bring them to their seats, just like in a movie theater when people watch with soda and popcorn. Yes! Why doesn’t the Kennedy Center allow this? I don’t know. It should.

***

Also, the fantastic and rightly showy conductor was a young woman—defying the eternal stereotype and addressing another complaint about sexism in the history of orchestral conductors. Another thing: Many members of the audience were dressed in character, sporting funny ears, wigs, and costumes. Character? More on that follows.

***

Finally, the main event was something completely unexpected. The music was a performance of the soundtrack to the video game Legend of Zelda. The full name: “The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses.” Yes, a video game, a cult classic, one that began in 1989 and now has a beloved heritage and rich tradition.

***

The game itself is accompanied by a full suite of serious music composed over the course of 25 years by a dozen or so specialists (all well-trained musicians) from Japan. That means there is not a single god-like composer—we like to pretend they were all sui generis—but rather a crowdsourced, thematically arranged series of pieces, each of which is connected to some iteration of this long-running game.

***

The musicians seemed to love it, and the audience surely did. The exchange relationship between the musical producers and consumers was unlike anything I had experienced. This was not an audience obediently frozen in a stuffy pose waiting for the next assigned time to clap (never, never between movements, dammit!). They were serious, engaged people who were happy to gasp, laugh, cheer, ooh and ahh, and even cry. They did it all, and not on cue.

***

Above the orchestra floated a large screen that played scenes that matched the music, from its earliest and crudest computer animations to the latest and most dazzling visual art. We even saw the characters grow up in the course of their adventures, which are wonderful, faux-medieval tales of danger, courage, chivalry, and devotion.

***

My goodness, the whole scene just moved me so much. Here were the gamers all gathered, those “nerds” everyone made fun of during high school and college, and their love of their computer world was being validated and affirmed. But I suspect that even they didn’t understand the implications of all of this. I wanted to stand up and explain: Do you see what you have done here? Your consumers’ interests have brought back large-scale, live performance art—full choir and orchestra—through the most circuitous route one can possibly imagine.

***

And how different, really, is this from a Rossini opera about a love affair involving barbers, secret letters, singing lessons, stodgy aristocrats made to look silly, and narrow escapes down second-story ladders? Or a Mozart opera involving magic bells and flutes, evil queens, floating boys in an air balloon, and scary dwarfs and dragons? It’s all the same stuff. It’s that beautiful combination of audio and visual art—the sense that something is happening right there in front of you. They didn’t have video games but we do, and good for us!

***

All of this music could have easily been played on a loudspeaker, but that would have taken away the whole sense that something was being created on the spot. You want to see the violinists moving their bows, the percussionists crashing cymbals together, the bassoonist playing that most implausible of instruments. Adding to the irony is that the music on the Zelda game itself is mostly electronic, especially the choirs and their ethereal voices. Not here. It was human. It was life. We all experienced it in real time—fantasy became reality before our eyes and ears.

***

I thought back to my days hanging around the school of music, all those students and professors with long faces and grim demeanors, people down on markets, down on society, down on consumers. No one would have believed that he or she had a future in live performance music, filling up the old orchestral halls, by way of fun and wonderful video games. No, it took entrepreneurs and commerce to blaze this trail. It took markets to make this surprise happen.

***

The world of classical music, in fact, has been pathetically lacking in creative vision for many decades, if not an entire century. In large part, it keeps trying to recreate the past while cursing the present and despairing of the future. Why? Perhaps it is because this sector of life has been ever more removed from the commercial world through centrally planned education, subsidies, union control, copyrighted and monopolized musical scores, a culture of the entitled guild. None of it has worked and, needing to pay the rent, there has been a steady stream of young musicians leaving years of conservatory training to enter some other profession like making lattes.

***

But get outside those establishment circles and you see entirely different things happening. It was in Turkey when I first saw a performance of an all-woman string quartet. During the first part of the evening, they presented a solid program of Schubert, Mozart, and Haydn. Then came the change to leather and boots and an all-electronic/pop program followed by the same players. One can sneer at it as tacky (actually, I don’t think so) but people love it and pay the big bucks for it. Since I saw this performance two years ago, the approach has reemerged at several venues in the United States as well.

***

My point is not to isolate these two types of art-music presentations and say: This is the future for classically trained musicians. Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe there are dozens of other approaches yet to be explored. What is needed is some serious entrepreneurship to find the new approaches and test them in the marketplace.

***

The main feature in success here is an intimate connection between the players and the audience—the same as you see in the pop music world. It’s not about the style. It’s about the economic and artistic relationship between the producers and consumers. It must be a value enhancing proposition for both sides for a true profit to emerge.

***

Meanwhile, I will never be able to read the quarterly harangue in The New York Times about the death of symphonies without thinking of this wonderful evening. Classical music is not dead. It is just now coming back to life.

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Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), CEO of the startup Liberty.me, and publisher at Laissez Faire Books. He will be speaking at the FEE summer seminar “Making Innovation Possible: The Role of Economics in Scientific Progress“.

***

This article originally appeared in The Freeman, the magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Meaningful and Vacuous “Privilege” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

December 4, 2013 Gennady Stolyarov II Comments 0 Comment

G. Stolyarov II

December 3, 2013

Recommend this page.

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Sanford Ikeda’s concise and insightful lists of 14 common fallacies about the free market (available in two installments from The Freeman here and here) motivate careful thought about the commonly used and misused term “privilege” and the conflations in which it can result. In discussing the second fallacy regarding the free market, that it is identical to a system where the government grants special privileges to businesses, Dr. Ikeda writes that “People sometimes define ‘privilege’ as any advantage a person or group may have over others. Certainly such advantages exist today and would exist in a free market—you may be born into a wealthy family or have superior drive and resourcefulness—but these advantages are consistent with the absence of privilege in the libertarian sense, as long as you acquired such advantages without fraud or the initiation of physical violence against the person or property of others.”

Indeed, the increasingly common usage of the term “privilege” to mean any advantage whatsoever eviscerates it of any genuine meaning it once had. This problem in today’s discourse spreads far beyond discussions of connections between businesses and governments.

Certainly, the very fact that one individual is different from another – with a different set of experiences, different physique, different knowledge, and even different standing room at any particular time – provides that individual with opportunities that the other lacks, while rendering him or her limited in ways that the other is not. Unfortunately, this trivial fact is increasingly being misconstrued in some circles to suggest vile inequities arising out of innocuous human differences. People who have not aggressed against, or even demeaned or ridiculed, anyone are increasingly being identified as “privileged” simply for belonging to broadly and crudely defined groups – be it all people of European descent, all males, or even all non-overweight people (witness the pseudo-concept of “thin privilege”) or people who are not disabled. (“Ableism” is apparently an emerging sin in the vocabulary of the increasingly militant and vitriolic collectivistic “social justice” movement – which is about neither true individual-oriented justice nor the preservation of a civilized and tolerant society.) Such a vacuously expansive view of privilege is a tremendous insult to the true victims of coercive privilege throughout history – from slaves in all eras, to women who in prior eras were denied suffrage and property rights, to the freethinkers and forbears of liberty and reason, whose voices were too often snuffed out by the arbitrary power of absolute monarchs and theocrats in the pre-Enlightenment world.

Thomas Jefferson, an opponent of privilege in its meaningful sense, put it best when he expressed in his 1826 letter to Roger C. Weightman “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of god.” Jefferson was a staunch opponent of the coercive privilege that enabled some to gain artificial advantages by restricting others from pursuing life-improving courses of action. Accidents of birth, or special lobbying skills, should not, in a just system, enable a person to acquire prerogatives which could not be earned through the free, peaceful exercise of that person’s abilities. Jefferson saw the future and strength of the American republic in the hoped-for emergence of a “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue” – people who, when allowed the liberty to flourish through honest work and competition, would become role models for others solely through their examples. This natural aristocracy would not need force to maintain its prominence, because the traits of the most knowledgeable, most industrious, and most virtuous people will be emulated by any who earnestly seek to improve their own lives and who have the freedom to acquire knowledge and make their own decisions.

Yet Jefferson’s natural aristocracy would be denounced as an example of horrid “privilege” by the “social justice” types – simply due to the necessarily unequal distribution of outcomes on a free market of open and honest production, competition, and cooperation. After all, not everyone can originate the same ideas at the same time. Not everyone can take advantage of the same opportunity for entrepreneurial profit, whose attainment, as economist Israel Kirzner demonstrated in Competition and Entrepreneurship, arises out of alertness to opportunities that others have missed. Kirzner writes that “Because the participants in [a] market are less than omniscient, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken advantage of. Sellers may have sold for prices lower than the prices which were in fact obtainable… Buyers may have bought for prices higher than the lowest prices needed to secure what they are buying…” (43). Would it be an example of unacceptable “privilege” for an alert entrepreneur to remedy such an arbitrage opportunity and thereby bring otherwise-unrealized value to consumers?

Yes, the free exercise of human abilities will produce outcomes where some people will have some advantages over some others (while, of course, leaving fully open the possibility that those very others will have their own distinct advantages, obtained through hard work, knowledge, or sheer luck). But, as long as coercion is not involved in securing and maintaining those advantages, the people endowed with them are not “booted and spurred” to ride the rest of us. As Dr. Ikeda points out, the differences among people are a source of strength harnessed by the free market: “The free market gives you an incentive to profit from associating with and learning from others who might be very different from you, who operate outside your normal social networks.” By incentivizing and facilitating these interactions, the free market encourages greater tolerance, understanding, and visible societal heterogeneity of the sort that constitutes the best safeguard against truly heinous oppressions based on collectivistic stereotypes. Instead of condemning others as being too “privileged” simply on account of innocuous differences, it is far more productive to think about how those differences can help one achieve one’s own values through honest, peaceful, and productive interaction, cooperation, and exchange.

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man – Championing Reason, Rights, and Progress Since 2002

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