Living a Life of Excellence and Liberty

Anti-Statism, Education, The Basics
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My fellow TLS blogger Norman Horn’s recent speech, What you can do to promote liberty, called to mind some things I’ve blogged about before. In Nock and Leonard Read on “One Improved Unit” and the Power of Attraction, blogged previously here, I discussed the idea advocated by Albert Jay Nock and Leonard Read, that your primary task is to improve yourself–to strive for excellence in yourself. Then you become a bright light that attracts people; they see you are good, and successful, and worth emlating or listening to–so you win people over by the power of attraction. They come to you, and then you have more success spreading the ideas of liberty than if you go around being a boor. More detail, including excerpts from Nock and Read, are in that post.

[The Golden Age of America is Now]

The other post, previousyl blogged elsewhere, is reproduced in full here:

 Career Advice by North

Gary North delivered a wonderful lecture last month during Mises University 2009 (the same day I gave my own speech), “Calling and Career as an Austrian School Scholar” (a shorter version of this was in the LRC podcast 127. Gary North: Making a Difference, Making a Living, which is also excellent).  North talks calling and occupation. Calling is “the most important thing you can do with your life in which you are most difficult to replace.” Occupation is “how you put food on the table.” Occasionally they are the same, but often not; but there is no reason not to arrange your life so as to have both. He talks about how to combine them or at least have both in your life, and centers his talk around some examples, notably Burt Blumert and William Volker.

Also see Paul Graham’s “What You’ll Wish You’d Known (“I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.”)

Update: See also Bastiat, from The Law:

“Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don’t you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”

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Sean Gabb on Libertarianism: Left or Right?

Anti-Statism, Libertarian Theory, The Basics, The Left, The Right
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English libertarian Sean Gabb recently gave an excellent speech, “Libertarianism: Left or Right?”, to the Manchester Liberty League; his blogpost is reproduced below. The the audio file is here, and also streaming below.

Libertarianism: Left or Right? 2nd December 2011, Sean Gabb

Sean Gabb, speaking to the Manchester Liberty League on the 2nd December 2011.

Points made:

In early 19th century England, radical liberals – who may be regarded as libertarians on account of their views – were often in sharp opposition to conservatives. As such, always allowing for the overall lack of meaning to the term, these people were on the “left.”

By the end of the 19th century, people holding the same views had often closely associated themselves with the conservatives.

The reason was that the growth of municipal socialism and the increasing volume of collectivist legislation – usually brought in by Liberals. The Liberty and Propery Defence League was set up by conservatives and classical liberals to resist this growth of statism; and our libertarian ancestors became identified, and identified themselves, as on the “right.”

This identification was completed by the state socialist revolution in Russia. Between 1920 and 1990, politics became a tug of war. You could choose your ideological views. Once this was chosen, however, you gave up all control over which end of the rope you would be pulling. You also gave up any choice of allies.

This has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tug of war is over. We are free at last to have a good look at our allies; and big business is not particularly libertarian. Actually existing capitalism is largely the economic wing of an exploitative ruling class. It benefits from limited liability laws, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that favour large scale business.

Now that we no longer risk becoming useful idiots for the Communist Party, we should be reaching out to ordinary working people and explaining how big business and big government stand in their way.

So far as left and right have any real meaning, libertarians should align themselves on the left as well as on the right.

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Hoppe’s Phoenix and the Coming One-World Currency

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Statism
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I noted previously, in The Prophetic Dr. Hoppe on the Rise of the Phoenix, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s prediction years ago of the inexorable move to a single, worldwide fiat currency. It’s coming. As reported here back in 2009, “The dollar dropped after China’s central bank reiterated a call for a worldwide currency.”

In this connection, see Hoppe’s fascinating discussion of money starting about 1:05:17 of Lecture 3 of his riveting 10-part Economy, Society, and History lectures delivered in 2004, where he talks about the tendency on a free market of multiple “monies” to converge to one–by the nature of money, it’s more valuable the more widespread it is, etc. Hoppe notes that there is a similar tendency now, with fiat currencies, only this time, it’s bad, not good. He points out that the world had alreayd achieved free market unified money (gold); this was destroyed with the outgrowth of dozens of country-based paper monies, leading to a world in a state of quasi-barter; and now when the major currencies like the dollar, yen, euro, talk about monetary unification, they are moving back towards what we already had with gold, except without the relatively fixed supply and other salutary aspects of a commodity-based money.

Part of this process is cementing the position of the Euro as one of the world’s major currencies. And this is happening too. As reported in the NYTimes, Germany and France are now pushing for changes to the European treaties to extend and prop up the euro–with “automatic penalties for countries that exceed European deficit limits as well as the creation of a monetary fund for Europe. … European leaders will begin to change the fundamental structure of the union, creating a form of centralized oversight of national budgets.”

As I noted earlier, in Greece, the Euro, and Secession, in a 2004 LRC post, How Stupid are Europeans?, I observed that unless an explicit right to secede or exit from the then-proposed European Constitution were added, any countries joining would likely be prevented by force from leaving later. Happily, the EU Constitution was never finally ratified, due to the heroic stubbornness of French and Dutch citizens.

But as noted in Greece Considers Exit from Euro Zone,

It remains unclear whether it would even be legally possible for Greece to depart from the euro zone. Legal experts believe it would also be necessary for the country to split from the European Union entirely in order to abandon the common currency. At the same time, it is questionable whether other members of the currency union would actually refuse to accept a unilateral exit from the euro zone by the government in Athens.

Never join a political union. Never centralize. It could be a one-way ratchet, as the CSA was forced to realize. Decentralization—and the Catholic idea of subsidiarity—down to the individual level, is the anarcho-libertarian goal.

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Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Libertarian Theory, Taxation
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Land registry
Land Registry: Land Certificate, from A Short History of Land Registration in England and Wales

Opponents of intellectual property often point out that modern patent and copyright are purely legislated, artificial schemes. For anarcho-libertarians and libertarians opposed to legislation as a means of forming law, this is yet another stake in the heart of IP. (See my post The Mountain of IP Legislation, and my article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society.”)

So it’s not surprising that one retort of the IPers is to argue that patent- and copyright-like rights “could” evolve in common law courts. Even though they didn’t; even though the idea of statutorily enacted schemes arising from judicial decisions is more than implausible: it’s ridiculous. Some of them simply posit that there could be private “title” offices in a free society akin to real property title records in use today: you just go down and “register” your “idea”; later, when you sue an “infringer” of “your” idea in court, you can prove you “own” it by introducing evidence from the IP title records office. For example, in a recent Mises blog threat, someone suggested there might be some private invention title office (my reply). And the anarcho-libertarian Tannehills, in their classic The Market for Liberty, argue (pp. 58-59):

Ideas in the form of inventions could also be claimed by registering all details of the invention in a privately owned “data bank.” Of course, the more specific an inventor was about the details of his invention, the thought processes he followed while working on it, and the ideas on which he built, the more firmly established his claim would be and the less would be the likelihood of someone else squeezing him out with a fake claim based on stolen data. The inventor, having registered his invention to establish his ownership of the idea(s), could then buy insurance (from either the data bank firm or an independent insurance company) against the theft and unauthorized commercial use of his invention by any other person. The insurance company would guarantee to stop the unauthorized commercial use of the invention and to fully compensate the inventor for any losses so incurred. Such insurance policies could be bought to cover varying periods of time, with the longer-term policies more expensive than the shorter-term ones. Policies covering an indefinitely long time-period (“from now on”) probably wouldn’t be economically feasible, but there might well be clauses allowing the inventor to re-insure his idea at the end of the life of his policy.

One problem with the Tannehills’ reasoning was the question-begging assumption that it’s “theft” to use an idea if it’s “unauthorized”; this presupposes there is property in information. …

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Spooner the Entrepreneur

Anti-Statism, History
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(I’m reposting this from Whiskey&Gunpowder because it is of particular libertarian interest)

How much more ridiculous can the US Postal Service get? This you will not believe. It has embarked on a public relations campaign to get people to stop sending so much email and start licking more stamps. This is how it is dealing with its $10 billion loss last year. Meanwhile, rather than offering better service, it is cutting back ever more, which can only guarantee that the mails will get worse than they already are.

It’s true that mail still has a place in the digital world, as the post office says. But the government shouldn’t be the institution to run it. It already has competitors in package delivery but the government stands firmly against letting any private company deliver something like first class mail. And so it has been since the beginning. The state and only the state is permitted to charge people for non-urgent paper mail in a letter envelop.

It’s a control thing. The government is into that. And it is far from new.

Do you know the amazing story of Lysander Spooner? He lived from 1808 to 1887. His first great battle was taking on the post office monopoly. In the 1840s, he was like most people at the time: fed up with the high prices and bad service. But as an intellectual and entrepreneur, he decided to do something about it. He started the American Letter Mail Company, and his letter business gave the government some serious competition.

It opened offices in major cities, organized a network of steamships and railroads, and hired people to get the mail to where it needed to be. His service was both faster and cheaper than the government’s own. Then he published a pamphlet to fight the power: “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.” It was brilliant. It rallied people to his side. And he made a profit.

The government hated him and his company and began to litigate against him. It dramatically lowered the price for its services, and used public money to cover its losses. The goal was to bankrupt Spooner, and it eventually succeeded. Spooner’s private postal system had to be shut down. It’s the same way the government today shuts down private schools, private currencies, private security, private roads, private companies that ignore the central plan, and anyone else who stands up for freedom.

From this one anecdote alone, you can see that the post office is hardly a “natural monopoly” — something the government has to provide because free enterprise can’t do so. It is a forced monopoly, one kept alive solely through laws and subsidies. If the post office closed its doors today, there would be 1000 companies rushing in to fill the gap. Just as in the 1840s, the results would be cheaper, better services. The government runs the post office because it wants to control the command posts of society, including communication. The Internet as a global communication device snuck up on the state before the state could kill it.

Let’s return to the 19th century. Spooner didn’t go away. He was more than an entrepreneur. He was a brilliant and pioneering intellectual, as the collection The Lysander Spooner Reader makes clear. He was a champion of individual liberty and a passionate opponent of all forms of tyranny. He was an abolitionist before it became fashionable but he also defended the South’s right to secede.

Most incredibly, he was probably the first 19th century American to return to the old anti-Federalist tradition of post-Revolutionary America. He did this by asking the unaskable question: why should the US Constitution — however it is interpreted — be binding on every individual living in this geographic region?

This document was passed generations ago. Maybe you could say that the signers were bound by it, but what about those who opposed it at the time, and what about future generations? Why are the living being forced to live by parchment arrangement made by people long dead? Why are the living bound by a privileged group’s interpretations of its meaning?

In his view, people have rights or they do not have rights. If they have rights, no ancient scroll restricting those rights should have any power to take those rights away. Nor does it matter what a bunch of old guys in black robes say: rights are real things, not legal constructs to be added or reduced based on the results of courtroom deliberations. Plenty of Americans before his time would have agreed with him! It’s still the case.

Now, keep in mind that Spooner lived in a time where the living memory of these debates had not entirely disappeared. He knew what many people today do not know, namely that the Articles of Confederation made for a freer confederation of states than the Constitution. The Constitution amounted to an increase in government power, despite all its language about restricting government power. Remember too that it was only a few years after the Constitution was rammed through that the feds were suddenly jailing people for the speech crime of criticizing the US president!

Spooner spoke plainly: what you call the Constitution has no authority to take away my rights. Hence his famous essay: “Constitution of No Authority.” In “No Treason” he argues that the state has no rights over your freedom of speech. In “Vices Not Crimes,” he shows that people in any society are capable of doing terrible things but the law should only concern itself with aggression against person and property. Reading them all together, as they are in this book, is a radicalizing experience — a liberating experience. It makes you see the world in a completely different way.

It’s true that they aren’t teaching about Spooner in public school. But he was a giant by any standard, the 19th century’s own Thomas Jefferson (but even better than Jefferson on most issues). There is still so much to learn here. It’s no wonder that his legacy has been suppressed.

This edition of his best work is published by Fox & Wilkes, an imprint of Laissez-Faire Books. Incredibly, you are still permitted to buy this and read it without getting arrested — for now.

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