Batman vs James Bond

History, Pop Culture, Private Security & Law

By BK Marcus / January 28, 2014 / 5 minutes of reading

In recent months, my wife and I have been catching up on the Daniel Craig trilogy of 007 movies, and I’ve been watching Batman cartoons with my seven-year-old son. So my thoughts have been full of action heroes — particularly the Dark Knight and Her Majesty’s secret servant.

I remember my father complaining about both characters and contrasting them to the lone-hero tradition of hardboiled detectives and their fictional forebears, the cowboys.

G.I. vs Private Eye

In fact, my father’s point to my preteen self was a continuation of a point he made to me when I was about my son’s age. I’d just gotten a set of “Undercover Agent” accessories for my GI Joe doll (we didn’t call them action figures back then). Gone were the camouflage fatigues and assault rifle; now Joe sported a dark trench coat and a walkie-talkie.

I said, “Look dad: It’s GI Private Eye!”

My father explained to me that my rhyming name for my new hero was self-contradictory. A GI was an American soldier, an official agent of the US government, whereas a “private eye” was a private individual, a lone hero in the fictional tradition. If dad had been more of a libertarian, he would have said that the military agent is paid by coercively extracted taxes and operates by state privilege, whereas the private detective is an agent of the market, authorized only by private contracts, and liable to the same restrictions as any individual citizen. My father doesn’t talk that way, even now, but he would acknowledge that description as making the same point.

So after GI Private Eye, I grew up with an awareness of the distinction between heroes like James Bond, who was funded and sanctioned by the government, and heroes like Philip Marlowe, who was funded by private clients and sanctioned only by his personal code of conduct.

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On Libertarian Factionalism, Our Critics, Conservative Associations and State Power

Featured Posts, History, Libertarian Theory

By Anthony Gregory / January 27, 2014 / 9 Comments / 6 minutes of reading

The generation of libertarians seen in such outfits as SFL excites and encourages me. I especially approve its efforts to cleanse the movement of the type of bigotry that emerged after years of the libertarian movement’s circumstantial alliance with conservatives to battle against New Deal liberalism. Finally, young libertarians seem poised to differentiate themselves entirely from rightwing mythology and error.

I worry, however, that many of the young libertarians, particularly centered around the DC institutions, might lose sight of the importance of radical anti-statism. This all relates to something I can best explain by way of a little autobiography.

I was always a cosmopolitan libertarian. Although I had my origins on the right, I have favored gay marriage and open borders since I was in junior high in the mid-1990s. I have always disliked the notion that white upper middle class men were somehow the most persecuted minority. I have always seen law enforcement’s treatment of people of color as one of the greatest problems in American culture. I have, with varying degrees of intensity, long been sympathetic to such leftish concerns as feminism and the need for the poorest to be liberated from the state infrastructure that keeps them down.

There are many like me who in the 1990s tended to see our values most represented in institutions like CATO and Reason, and who were suspicious of the seemingly conservative tendencies of other libertarians, such as those associated with Ron Paul.

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Habeas Corpus in America

History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Reviews

By Norman Horn / January 16, 2014 / 5 minutes of reading

Review of The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror by Anthony Gregory. Cambridge University Press and the Independent Institute, 2013.

Anthony Gregory is a great friend of mine, and I am honored to have the opportunity to review briefly his splendid new book, Habeas Corpus in America.

A few comments about the book itself are in order before sojourning through the content. First, it is a beautiful volume. I suppose we can thank Cambridge University Press for that. The cover itself contains the text of Abraham Lincoln’s order to suspend habeas during the Civil War – a very nice visual touch. The forward is written by the erudite constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman. The book is written in three parts: history of habeas corpus, application of habeas corpus after 9/11, and a section titled “Custody and Liberty” exploring the future of habeas. Multiple appendices then analyze various habeas cases, and the customary selected bibliography and historical term explanations follow. It is long, thorough, sweeping, and powerful – but also pretty expensive. I suppose we can thank Cambridge University Press for that as well.

Habeas corpus is generally understood as the legal right not to be detained arbitrarily by the government. It is considered a foundational principle of Western legal systems, even of natural law itself. Still, habeas corpus is widely misunderstood, especially on a historical level. Anthony Gregory’s work on the history of habeas corpus and its application in America levels a damning charge against the American federal government and challenges the reader to reconsider the common assumption that the federal government protects liberty by showing how and why they abridge this fundamental right.

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The Pestilential State

History, Statism

By BK Marcus / November 25, 2013 / 3 minutes of reading

The Mongols surrounded the city walls. Genoese merchants hoped to wait them out inside the Black Sea trading city of Caffa. Technically these European merchants were guests of Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. But the Genoese had become unwelcome. They repeatedly disrespected the authority of Islam and the khan himself. They dared to trade in Turkic slaves and had even summoned Italian troops to repel the previous khan’s soldiers. Now, when one of their own had killed a Muslim in the port city of Tana, these foreign "guests" defied the law by giving the murderer sanctuary here in Caffa, then refusing entrance to their hosts and rightful rulers at the edge of the Mongol Empire.

This time, there would be no reinforcements from Italy. Instead, the Mongols would fall to the invisible arrows of a plague that had followed the Silk Road from the arid plains of central Asia. While the Genoese were safe within the city of Caffa, the Mongol bodies piled up outside its walls.

In many respects, this scene was an echo of earlier history. The Greeks had fallen to plague outside the high walls of Troy, if Homer’s telling is right. The Bible says that Sennacherib ended his siege of Jerusalem because "the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians … and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead.…" According to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, the Lord’s weapon was plague.

But the Mongols of the Golden Horde did something unprecedented both in the history of warfare and the history of disease. They piled their dead into catapults and hurled them over the city walls, raining diseased corpses on the besieged Genoese.

Unlike the Trojans and the Jews, the merchants were not on their home turf. And because Caffa was a port city, they could board their ships and flee the Crimea. It seems they brought the plague home with them.

"If this account is correct," writes bacteriologist Mark Wheelis in a paper for the Center for Disease Control, "Caffa should be recognized as the site of the most spectacular incident of biological warfare ever, with the Black Death as its disastrous consequence."

A century later, the population of Europe was only half the size it had been before the plague came west.

But even if the disease reached the West by way of the late Mongol Empire, causing what Wheelis calls "the greatest public health disaster in recorded history," ultimate blame for the cataclysm may not fall to the Mongol khan or his soldiers. Instead we should look to the conduct of European monarchs — and one in particular.

I tell the rest of the story in today’s featured article at FEE:

Black Death and Taxes

They had more to do with each other than you might think

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

The plague and the Little Ice Age didn’t do Europe any favors. But the excesses of the State amplified the damage.

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Watching Illegal TV in Turkey

History, Nanny Statism, Pop Culture, Technology

By BK Marcus / October 14, 2013 / 2 minutes of reading

Last month, I wrote in the Libertarian Standard about Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and the end of the Golden Age of Television — and about Serling’s preference for government interference over that of the advertisers.

Last week the Freeman published my article "TV’s Third Golden Age," about our present era in which quality dramas are moving from cable TV to the Internet, where they finally enjoy less interference from both advertisers and government regulation. The Internet is freer than television ever was.

In that article, I also give a little more background on JFK’s assault against the TV industry and how the deregulation trend of the 1970s and ’80s produced TV’s second "golden age." (Can you guess what brought it to an end?)

Because I mention the University of Virginia’s Paul Cantor in the Freeman article (as I did in "The Golden Age at Twilight" and "Price Theory a la Rupert Murdoch" here at TLS, as well as in "Did Capitalism Give Us the Laugh Track?" in the Freeman), I emailed Professor Cantor a link to the article.

Having just returned from the annual meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey, Cantor wrote this wonderful reply (which I quote with his permission):

This is a terrific article and thanks for sending it to me (and mentioning me in it). I’m glad to see that Thompson seems to be on board with us on these issues. I own his book but haven’t read it yet. It’s nearing the top of my "to read" pile, and you’ve pushed it up a few places. It’s good that we’re not alone on these issues.

As I recall what you wrote about radio, all this could have happened back in the 1920s if a subscriber model had been adopted for radio instead of the broadcasting model. Essentially, we’re finally getting where we should have been in the first place — real consumers for TV. I notice that young people now have no interest in seeing TV as broadcasted. They want direct access and know how to get it. When I was at Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s recent conference in Turkey, I was amazed at how current the young people from central and eastern Europe were with American TV — maybe one episode behind on BREAKING BAD. When I asked: "Is BREAKING BAD broadcast in your country?" they stared at me as if I were saying: "Do dinosaurs still roam the plains of Poland?" They were getting the show — well, frankly, I don’t know how they were getting the show, but it was definitely online and quite possibly illegal.

Paul

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