Black Armbands for “Constitution Day”

Anti-Statism, Statism
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Today is the 223rd anniversary of the adoption of the modern American Constitution, on Sept. 17, 1787. Most Americans are too ignorant to even realize that this followed in the wake of the 1776 Declaration of Independence (on July 2, not July 4, 1776), and the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781. Or to understand that the Bill of Rights was not adopted until 1791, two years after the Constitution was ratified (in their hysterical devotion to the flaccid Bill of Rights (see The Bad Bill of Rights) and ignorance about the limited powers scheme of the federal government, they would have to believe there were no rights in the two-year period between 1789 and 1791).

Flag-waving yahoos grin like idiots.
Flag-waving yahoos grin like idiots.

Yet, adopting the Official History and hagiography of our constructivist, utopian Founders, they worship the Constitution anyway, even though it was a coup d’état, even though slavery was permitted, even though it was an illegal, unnecessary, centralizing power play by politicians (see Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power), even though it arguably led to the Civil War, WWI, the collapse of western monarchies and the regressive replacement of traditionalist limited monarchy with socialized democracy, WWII, Naziism, Communism, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (see my When Did the Trouble Start?).

Ironically, today is officially decreed to be “Constitution Day” by the Congress, in an act that is itself unconstitutional since the Constitution does not authorize the Congress to establish any such quasi-religious institutions or observances. The very act of official worship of the Constitution is unconstitutional. How fitting.

Down with the Constitution. What a socialist, centralizing, utopian mistake. It is time for libertarians to stop glorifying early America, the Founders, the Constitution, etc., as proto-libertarian. All states are illegitimate, including America’s. As Lew Rockwell observed in stirring words in his article The Enemy Is Always the State:

Let me state this as plainly as possible. The enemy is the state. There are other enemies too, but none so fearsome, destructive, dangerous, or culturally and economically debilitating. No matter what other proximate enemy you can name — big business, unions, victim lobbies, foreign lobbies, medical cartels, religious groups, classes, city dwellers, farmers, left-wing professors, right-wing blue-collar workers, or even bankers and arms merchants — none are as horrible as the hydra known as the leviathan state. If you understand this point — and only this point — you can understand the core of libertarian strategy.

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Triangulating Peace? Or, Three Foundations for Oppression?

Corporatism, Democracy, Non-Fiction Reviews, War
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[The following is a revised version of a reaction paper I wrote for a graduate seminar in international conflict back in 2005.]

In Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, Bruce Russet and John Oneal mount the most thorough defense of the democratic peace thesis I have yet seen. Indeed, they go beyond the democratic peace thesis to posit a Kantian peace consisting of the interrelated and reciprocal effects of democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations. I am not without criticism, however.

I have always been skeptical of the democratic peace thesis, which posits that democratic states do not go to war with one another, in part because it seemed to me to be incomplete. Russet and Oneal attempt to shore up that incompleteness by emphasizing the pacifying effects of both bilateral and global economic interdependence as well as (though not unproblematically) international law and organizations.

Despite the impossibility of discovering empirical laws via inductive and statistical methods, it may be true that (liberal) democracies rarely go to war with one another and, ceteris paribus, might be less war prone than other states. But I am not confident this trend will hold for all times and places.1 Moreover, democracies may still be more likely to go to war with non-democracies for ideological reasons. “We’ve” got to make the world safe for democracy, after all.

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  1. Joanne Gowa, in Ballots and Bullets, argued that the democratic peace was an artifact of the Cold War; it appeared to be true only because Western, capitalist, democratic nations had a shared security interest against the Soviet Union. My professor for the above-mentioned seminar, David Sobek, argued that Gowa’s book suffers from methodological deficiencies, but said that he had been working on an article (I don’t know if it was ever published) that improved on Gowa’s methods and he was surprised to find her results confirmed. ↩

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How State Lotteries Make Markets Less Efficient

Anti-Statism, Business, Finance, Statism
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Someone sent me a link to this paper yesterday.

Prof. Harris argues that skilled traders, who consistently profit, do so by taking money from people who trade for extrinsic reasons, to hedge risks, increase their savings, or simply to gamble for entertainment.  He then points out an interesting implication:

If gamblers do indeed contribute to market quality in the long run by subsidizing information acquisition, an intriguing argument can be made about public lotteries.  Lotteries would appear to compete with financial markets for gamblers willing to lose money. Lottery gamblers subsidize the state through their voluntary participation in a negative-sum game. Financial market gamblers subsidize productive information acquisition.  Perhaps prices, and ultimately economic production, would be more efficient if gamblers gambled exclusively in the financial markets.

So there you have it — state lotteries make us worse off by wasting gambling money that would otherwise be productively spent.

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Ecofascism in the Name of Fending Off Ecofascism

Corporatism, Democracy, Environment, Nanny Statism, The Left, Totalitarianism, Vulgar Politics
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Micah White at The Guardian writes of the growing danger of ecofascism or environmental authoritarianism. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock and Pentti Linkola, want to put democracy on hold and/or return humanity world-wide to a primitive state of existence in order to combat global warming. Ironically, his proposal to fend off this growing danger is itself an example of the very thing he fears, though perhaps his proposal is motivated not entirely by environmental concerns but also by an independent dislike of consumerism.

White’s solution is to end the culture of rampant consumerism in the West. How does he propose to do this? Ah, now there’s the rub.

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(Statist) Politics as Household Management

Anti-Statism, Democracy, Libertarian Theory, Vulgar Politics
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In a previous post, Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons, I discussed the moral hazards of voting and why democracy does not legitimize the state or protect our liberty. I also discussed how statist democracy, particularly representative democracy, is manipulative and conducive to top-down central planning of society. (Statist) politics tends to reduce all basic social issues to problems requiring administrative manipulation. In this post, I’m going to delve into this issue further and draw upon insights by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition1 to illustrate how (statist) politics is inherently an attempt to run society as one massive organization, organism, or machine.

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the differences between action (praxis)2 and work – and between politics, which involves action, and fabrication or making (poi?sis), which involves work – has negative implications for the central planning of society that is characteristic of modern representative-democratic states. In particular, I have in mind her criticism of Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, regarding their tendency to view society as a sort of organization and politics as the running of society as such an organization – or, in their words, politics as akin to household management. This fits with the tendency in many cultures to refer to one’s country as “the Fatherland” or “the Motherland” and with socialists and communitarians (on the left and the right) essentially modeling their ideal society after the family.

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  1. All page numbers, provided for your convenience, refer to the 1998 2nd Edition. ↩

  2. Arendt uses the term ‘action’ more narrowly than do the praxeologists of the Austrian School. ↩

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