Thumbs Down on the Fourth of July

Anti-Statism, History, Police Statism, Racism, War
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Anthony Gregory has a great  post up on TLS today, Should We Celebrate the American Revolution?, which exposes many myths about the “libertarian” nature of Independence Day and the Revolutionary War. (See also Jeff Tucker and Doug French’s column today, The Birth of Sedition.) I previously expressed skepticism of Constitution Day (Black Armbands for “Constitution Day”). Likewise, it’s problematic “Independence Day” is upheld as some sort of libertarian event.

Doing some random wikipedia searching about the Statue of “Liberty,” I came across a great quote, from 1886, by an African American newspaper, scoffing at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty (official name: Liberty Enlightening the World) and at the idea that America was a some free country and beacon of liberty. These thoughts express basically how I feel about the 4th of July, celebrations of the Constitution, American “independence,” and America’s “birthday” (note: by calling July 4–the date the US government may be said to have emerged–the country’s birthday, a subtle equation is made between country and state; which is why today yahoos say you are “unpatriotic” or “you hate your country” if you don’t “respect the flag” or don’t send your kids off to the military meat grinder to fight in its savage wars, etc.):

Shortly after the dedication, the Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper, suggested that the statue’s torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation “in reality”:

“Liberty enlightening the world,” indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It can not or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the “liberty” of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the “liberty” of this country “enlightening the world,” or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.

They had a good point. I’m so sick of libertarians upholding America or its Founding slaveholding “Fathers” or the Declaration or the abominable Constitution (the word is rightly used as a swear word in L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach or Gallatin Divergence, as I recall, as in “Constitution! I just hit my thumb with a hammer!”). Today will see countless American yahoos, the products of government schools, cheering on our “freedom” by singing Lee Greenwood songs and crying when they put their hands over their hearts to worship Old Glory, in violation of the First Commandment.

All these state-sanctioned state-worshiping “patriotic” holidays only serve to equate country with state and to glorify the state and its statism1 and wars. I’ll watch fireworks with my kid tonight, but tell him to enjoy the lights and chemical reactions, not what the state wants it to signify.

Related posts:

 

  1. See Re: War and Civil Liberties Under Obama. ↩

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Book Review: Liberty of Contract

Legal System, Non-Fiction Reviews
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Last year saw the release of two books on the U.S. courts’ history of (not) protecting the liberty of contract: David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner and David N. Mayer’s Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right.

My review of Bernstein’s book appeared in the Winter 2012 Independent Review; my review of Mayer’s book has just been published in The Freeman.

Which book is better? I couldn’t say. Both cover a lot of the same ground, and both are well-done. (Oddly, both were published at about the same time, and both appear to have been sponsored by the Cato Institute, though Bernstein’s book was published by the University of Chicago Press.) I recommend either or — if you really want to be an expert on all facets of New York v. Lochner and the courts’ inconsistent protection of economic liberty — both.

Here’s an excerpt from my Liberty of Contract review:

The U.S. Supreme Court has no coherent ideas about—or real respect for—individual rights. It generally allows governments to do whatever they want, with limited exceptions for a handful of rights it has deemed “fundamental,” such as the right to free speech (in some areas) and the right to sexual privacy (in some respects). Other rights, such as the right to economic liberty, receive almost no protection at all.

Why so much protection for some rights and so little for others? Because the Court has arbitrarily said so.

Libertarians, of course, think differently about rights. Libertarians think that our rights exist independently of government, and that if government has any legitimate purpose at all, it is to protect those preexisting rights.

Libertarians also think that all our rights are really property rights. We each own ourselves, and from that follows a right to own private property that we acquire through voluntary exchanges with others. Other rights, such as the right to free speech, derive from our right to use our own property as we see fit. And the right to economic liberty—that is, to trade your property and your labor freely with others—is just as “fundamental” as any other right.

In Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right, law professor and historian David N. Mayer shows how Americans went from embracing the libertarian conception of rights reflected (imperfectly) in the Declaration of Independence to the statist conception of rights reflected in modern Supreme Court decisions.

Read the rest.

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Why is it okay to pay an intern $0? or, liberal hypocrisy on the minimum wage

Business, Employment Law, Podcasts, Victimless Crimes
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A recent Slashdot post mentions some NYTimes-style whining about how employers like Apple are “exploiting” their employees by paying them low wages:

Apple Store Employees Soak Up the Atmosphere, But Not Much Cash
raque writes

“The NYTimes is reporting on just how badly Apple Retail employees are being paid. Apple is exploiting its fan base for cheap labor. This is one reason I don’t go to Apple Stores if I can avoid it. Stores like NY’s Tekserve offer a great shopping experience without so exploiting their workers.”

Would you rather start at an Apple store for $11.91 an hour (average starting base pay, according to the linked article) and an employee discount, or at Tiffany for $15.60?

The idea that it’s wrong to offer to pay someone a low wage is rampant. For a recent example, one sage argues, in a Techdirt comment thread, that “Competing by paying your workforce less is not competing, it is cheating.” Marxian “exploitation” ideas like this are at work behind the horrible minimum wage. As Henry Hazlitt explains in Economics in One Lesson (ch. 18), a minimum wage law simply causes unemployment—and it causes it primarily among those who have the lowest valued skills, namely the poor, minorities, handicapped people, and the young. It cuts out the lower rungs of the ladder that people could use to climb to higher levels. One benefit of a job at any price is the skills and learning experience—learning to engage with customers and co-workers, to show up on time, manners, dress code, and so on.

This is, in fact, one reason some people are willing to serve as “interns” for no pay: for the work experience, contacts, resume padding. And this an absurdity in the very idea of the minimum wage: it’s legal to offer to pay someone, say, $10 per hour for a certain job, or more, and it’s legal to offer to pay them $0 per hour (internship), but it’s illegal to offer them something in-between. This is just as absurd as the idea that it’s legal to give away sex but not to charge a monetary price for it (prostitution).

I thought about this when listening to a recent Slate Political Gabfest podcast, which is one of my favorites although the three hosts are liberals. In this episode, around 50:30, host David Plotz mentions that they are looking for a new intern—and that, while it is an “unpaid” position (6-10 hours per week), it leads to “great opportunities” for the interns, who use the experience to find a (real) job elsewhere. Exactly. Even working for nothing makes employment worthwhile for people starting out. It’s a stepping stone to other things. Of course, only middle class or richer kids can afford to work for nothing. Imagine if Slate were permitted to pay, say, $3 or $5 per hour to an intern—far below the curent federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour—more lower class or poorer kids could perhaps afford to take advantage of intern-type positions. But who cares about them, right? After all, they can always join the military, get on welfare, or sell drugs and then get a free jail cell with three hots and a cot.

As my friend and fellow TLS co-blogger Rob Wicks said to me:

Minimum wage can be a sort of welfare program for the middle class. For those at the upper end of the middle class, working for nothing but experience is a fine investment. But if you are doing it for money, it has to be enough to make it worthwhile for someone already middle class. Their support for minimum wage is not really for the poor. Middle class people with kids just want to make sure their spoiled, largely unmotivated children make enough money at the local coffee shop/burger joint to show up consistently.

 

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Problems with the SOPA opponents’ “Digital Bill of Rights”: A Libertarian counter-proposal

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Technology
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From ars technica, a report about a proposal from a couple of Congresscritters who opposed SOPA for a “Digital Bill of Rights,” to help maintain a free and open Internet. The proposal calls for these “rights”:

  1. The right to a free and uncensored Internet.
  2. The right to an open, unobstructed Internet.
  3. The right to equality on the Internet.
  4. The right to gather and participate in online activities.
  5. The right to create and collaborate on the Internet.
  6. The right to freely share their ideas.
  7. The right to access the Internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are.
  8. The right to freely associate on the Internet.
  9. The right to privacy on the Internet.
  10. The right to benefit from what they create.

This has some promise, but it’s both under- and over-inclusive. Under-inclusive in that it doesn’t call for the abolition of copyright, or for a radical reduction in term and penalties. In fact it suggests copyright is some kind of “right” in its call for “The right to benefit from what they create.” But so long as copyright exists, it is impossible to avoid its free-speech and free-press suppressing effects. There will continue to be a “balance” struck between copyright and First Amendment type rights; i.e., free speech will continue to be chilled and suppressed (see my post “Copyright is Unconstitutional”). It is impossible to have “a free and uncensored Internet,” which the new Digital Bill of Rights calls for, so long as there is copyright. You cannot have both free speech, and copyright.

And it is over-inclusive in that it calls for things like “the right to equality on the Internet” and “the right to access the Internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are.” These and some other proposals are troubling in that they are not clearly limits on government behavior, but potential authorizations to the government to limit private actors. For example these provisions could be used by the state to regulate private companies in the name of “net neutrality” or to provide some kind internet access as a positive welfare right or privilege. (See my posts Net Neutrality Developments and  Internet Access as a Human Right.)

Congress should not be declaring “rights,” since it can then serve as a source of power to the feds to regulate private activity, much as the federalizing of the Bill of Rights by way of the Fourteenth Amendment has served not to limit federal power but to extend it to regulating state laws. Congress should do nothing but limit its own power, since it is the federal government that is itself the biggest threat to Internet and digital freedoms.

A better, simpler, more effective, and less dangerous proposal would read something as follows:

  1. Copyright law is hereby abolished [or its term reduce to 5 years and statutory damages eliminated].
  2. Congress shall have no power to regulate or tax activity on the Internet, including gambling or commerce.

Here’s the ars technica piece:

 

SOPA opponents unveil “Digital Bill of Rights”

Sen. Wyden and Rep. Issa want to protect digital citizens.

by  – June 12 2012, 3:07pm CDT

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Leftist Taxonomy Under Obama

Anti-Statism, Statism, The Left
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There seems to be some debate about whether the left has “sold out” under Obama, or whether leftists have remained principled and critical in light of the president’s continuation of his predecessor’s policies. To explain it the way I see it, I’d like first to outline my views of leftist taxonomy.

What passes for the American left today is a wide spectrum. It reaches from principled radicals to those barely on the left side of the fascist establishment center. I see at least several categories, each of which has a diverse membership but sharp distinctions from other groups, and they all respond to partisan concerns differently. Some individuals and organizations have a foot in more than one camp. Nevertheless, here is my simplified sketch of the breakdown of modern leftism.

Communists and Pinkos: This is a rather diverse but small bunch. For better or worse, they are principled in their opposition to American capitalism as they define it. They are usually reliable on questions of U.S. empire, but not always so, and even though they will never have power in this country, it is probably good that they won’t. Their critiques of American power, corporatism, the war machine, and the prison-industrial complex are sometimes invaluable, but as we know, state socialists are horrible in power, not infrequently the worst. Their isolation from the U.S. power elite is a saving grace, and the Marxist intellectuals among them write good history. Because they follow the money and see politics as a class struggle, much of what people in this group say is more on target than anything heard among the moderates.

Anti-Authoritarian Radicals: I’m thinking of folks like those at Counterpunch. These AAR have an anarchist streak and are more numerous (and in ways more reliable) than the smaller clique of self-proclaimed “anarchists” we typically see on the left. These are some of my favorite leftists. They are very reliable on war if not perfect pacifists. They are great on police state issues and corporatism and recognize that the regulatory state is not our best friend. They have a soft spot for some welfare programs. They are often lefty culture warriors but are much more nuanced than those fellow leftists to their right, knowing cultural bias against cultural rightists can be a weapon of state power. I’m thinking of Alex Cockburn’s excellent take on the Waco massacre. These people are not perfect, but I will take them over 99% of conservatives and probably a third of libertarians.

Civil Libertarian Liberals: Glenn Greenwald is the paradigm case, although he is unusually magnificent. These folks consider themselves liberals on the left, although their radical allies would never use the word “liberal” for themselves. The CLL are principled on civil liberties and often on many questions of foreign policy, transparency, and fairness. They are rarely partisan and have decent priorities. For better or worse, they are less anti-capitalist than the AAR and certainly less so than the pinkos. They are therefore less enraged about questions like intellectual property and less inclined to see public schools as a product of mercantilism—which is bad—but they are more likely to see the modern market, however skewed, as not an enemy in and of itself. Unlike some to their left, they understand you cannot abolish money or private property and expect to feed the population. None of them suffer the illusion that the USSR was preferable to America or that Mao’s Workers’ State was anything short of a totalitarian hellhole. Whereas the commies and even some of the AAR sometimes have a soft spot for foreign regimes but are reliably critical of the US, the CCL are sometimes too tame on the US but are more grounded on the problems of “far-left” statism.

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