Article: Voluntary Governance

Anti-Statism, Articles, Education, Libertarian Theory
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The standard nomenclature of libertarianism and anarchy suffer the double disadvantage of counter-productive cultural baggage and the factual stigma of being at best unclear and at worst inaccurate. Adopting, instead, the language of ‘voluntary governance’ has a triple advantage. It is a convivial language which doesn’t scare people and turn them off of our arguments before we’ve even made them. It is simply a more accurate description of our desired objective. And, given the actual state of affairs, it not only describes our ends, but also points toward the most promising means of getting to the desired outcome. In other words, ‘voluntary governance’ is not only rhetorically more convivial and substantively accurate, but also transitionally facilitating.

Michael McConkey lives in the socialist hotbed of Vancouver, Canada, where the mountains continually remind him of how puny are the grand designs of the state’s social engineers. He has a Ph.D. in communication from McGill University in Montreal and free lances in teaching organizational theory. He’s just finishing a book that aspires to reinvent communications theory through the application of Austrian and libertarian ideas to a discipline that has been painfully positivist and anti-market.

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Road Socialism Leads to Broadband Socialism

Nanny Statism, Technology, The Basics, The Left, The Right
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In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies now will set a precedent that will lead to unreasonable policies down the road. Our worries are discounted as merely hypothetical possibilities. They are quite content to put off discussion of crossing that bridge when we come to it…if we come to it, as they see things. And, in any case, something needs to be done about the current problem now, dammit! The trouble is, by the time we reach that bridge of unreasonableness (wherever it happens to be for our interlocutor), we have already gathered so much momentum from sliding down the slope that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt, much less reverse, the slide. Along the way, with each new government intervention, people grow increasingly used to turning to government solutions for every little problem — they lose the ability to even imagine the possibility of private, market solutions — and what was once thought unreasonable no longer seems so.

We libertarians have more than merely consequentialist, slippery slope arguments against government policies, of course, but I still think it is useful to point out dangerous precedents, particularly when our worries are not just theoretical as we are already well on our way down the slide. The acceptance of professional licensing of “crucial” professions has over time been expanded into ever more areas, even to the licensing of florists in my home state of Louisiana and now to calls for the licensing of parents.

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Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property

IP Law
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Law professor Tom W. Bell of Chapman University is an emerging pro-property rights anti-IP star (and one of the handful of patent lawyers who publicly opposes patent law) — his draft book Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good looks very promising. For a concise statement of his views, see his wonderful performance in The Great Debate on Intellectual Property, Cato Policy Report (January/February 2002). Note how solid and refreshingly lucid and libertarian his approach is, as contrasted, say, with that of James DeLong in the same publication (I debated DeLong in an Insight magazine symposium in 2001, where he gave similarly weak arguments for IP).

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Grading the Pledge to America

Corporatism, Democracy, Health Care, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War
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So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

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