Slavery and/or Liberty

Political ideologies aside, the ownership of another human is unconscionable, yet has been with our species for thousands of years, with the abolition of such practices only constituting a narrow range of recent years. I don't expect that history can be swept aside so quickly, but that slavers simply move to new methods of control. During the post-abolition years, free men were still excluded from opportunity and full realization of their natural rights, but government itself infringes upon natural rights significantly more than individuals ever have.

There is a good essay on the abolition of slavery by Lysander Spooner (A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery), in which Spooner promotes the ideas of self-ownership and property rights (in which a person can not be considered property of another). The history of slavery was undoubtedly a black mark on society, rightly so, but it's promotion through the state is a reminder that evil men will always use the force of the state to promote their will against that of the common man. Some believe that by enacting laws we can realize a just and fruitful society, but slavery existed in America despite it's conflict with the laws of this nation. The black Jamaican culture has historically been victimized through law by Anglos using the state to continue oppression against them post-abolition, but aspects of slavery persist.

A decade before his essay on abolition, Spooner went into great detail on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery. As a specialist in the field of contract law, he was able to refute many ideas and practices that were in direct conflict with the law, yet practices such as slavery persisted. In The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, the author describes the state's monopoly on the use of force as legal plunder, and applying it to slavery; "in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them."

There is a paradoxical belief that the state can promote peace and equality through force. Enabling violence to prevent violence is not a path to promote social equality and liberty. Slavery may have been abolished in it's traditional sense, but aspects of it continue today. As Spooner said, "A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years." Often, those we see garner support from minorities to promote minority causes tend to use the same system of plunder to either defend or aggress through the state, and many of the policies they support tend to have negative consequences for those minorities they are supposed to be defending.

Election Time, HOA Edition

I found a message in my inbox from a member of my local homeowners association board who is running for re-election:

Hello Neighbors,

Early voting starts today and your vote counts! I am asking for your support in putting me back on the Block House MUD Board. I am also asking that each of you tell 10 of your neighbors to vote for me. This is a crucial election and every vote counts.

After a 2 year break from my last term on the MUD Board, I am ready to get back to work representing YOU and your best interest. During my first 4 years on the Board, I fought to keep the taxes low while maintaining the services that were offered to our residents the previous year. My record will show that the tax rate did not increase one time while I was on Board. I plan to continue this record because I know that, in this economy, every dollar counts.

With 4 people running for 2 seats, I need and want your support. I am pleased to have this opportunity and I look forward to the challenges that it presents.

While I hold no ill will against anyone on the homeowners association board, but this is a good time to discuss an idea that has been circulating in my head for some time. Could engaging in the act of voting, whereby the result is a situation where those who have not voted to support those who were elected, are forced or coerced to comply with the will of those in elected positions? I believe there is a moral deficiency here. One that is not unfounded. The opposition to this system of representative democracy goes back to the Romans, but more recently was supported by the likes of Frédéric Bastiat and Lysander Spooner.

In The Law, Bastiat offers this which he calls legal plunder, by which voters either use their vote to plunder others, or to defend themselves preemptively against plunder:

But on the other hand, imagine that this fatal principle has been introduced: Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few — whether farmers, manufacturers, ship owners, artists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so.

The excluded classes will furiously demand their right to vote — and will overthrow society rather than not to obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will then prove to you that they also have an incontestable title to vote. They will say to you:

"We cannot buy wine, tobacco, or salt without paying the tax. And a part of the tax that we pay is given by law — in privileges and subsidies — to men who are richer than we are. Others use the law to raise the prices of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Thus, since everyone else uses the law for his own profit, we also would like to use the law for our own profit. We demand from the law the right to relief, which is the poor man's plunder. To obtain this right, we also should be voters and legislators in order that we may organize Beggary on a grand scale for our own class, as you have organized Protection on a grand scale for your class. Now don't tell us beggars that you will act for us, and then toss us, as Mr. Mimerel proposes, 600,000 francs to keep us quiet, like throwing us a bone to gnaw. We have other claims. And anyway, we wish to bargain for ourselves as other classes have bargained for themselves!"

Spooner goes a bit further in No Treason to present the idea that we are not bound by contracts that we have no entered into ourselves voluntarily:

If, then, those who established the Constitution, had no power to bind, and did not attempt to bind, their posterity, the question arises, whether their posterity have bound themselves. If they have done so, they can have done so in only one or both of these two ways, viz., by voting, and paying taxes.

In the very nature of things, the act of voting could bind nobody but the actual voters. But owing to the property qualifications required, it is probable that, during the first twenty or thirty years under the Constitution, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or perhaps twentieth of the whole population (black and white, men, women, and minors) were permitted to vote. Consequently, so far as voting was concerned, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth of those then existing, could have incurred any obligation to support the Constitution.

No one, by voting, can be said to pledge himself for any longer period than that for which he votes. If, for example, I vote for an officer who is to hold his office for only a year, I cannot be said to have thereby pledged myself to support the government beyond that term. Therefore, on the ground of actual voting, it probably cannot be said that more than one-ninth or one-eighth, of the whole population are usually under any pledge to support the Constitution. [In recent years, since 1940, the number of voters in elections has usually fluctuated between one-third and two-fifths of the populace.]

It cannot be said that, by voting, a man pledges himself to support the Constitution, unless the act of voting be a perfectly voluntary one on his part. Yet the act of voting cannot properly be called a voluntary one on the part of any very large number of those who do vote. It is rather a measure of necessity imposed upon them by others, than one of their own choice.

While this has little bearing on the institution of the homeowners association, Spooner's ideas on the unintended (intended) consequences of a representative government hold more weight in any argument defending the movement toward a voluntary society. It is time to Stop Voting, and I have cast my last vote; no confidence. What if they had an election and nobody came?

FDR2228 Taxes, Statism and Families

 

 

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the challenges of modern families. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

FDR2225 Ethics Unsucked! A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics

"You can get roses out of fertilizer but you can't get virtue out of the shit of the state." - Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, reviews Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, using audience participation at the Capitalism and Morality seminar in Vancouver, summer 2012. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

V for Voluntary, Motherfucker

I recently noticed that Lysander Spooner lived until just one year shy of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, not that he was as focused on issues outside of the United States as he was in his critical words and actions at home, doing his damnedest to promote liberty through education where it was considered utmost for a healthy, voluntary society. I'd like to think that his works (and those of his peers; Mises, Bastiat, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Hayek, Woods, Block, and many others) continue to be influential on the necessity for economic and civil liberty To maintain a free society. 

It's a conspiracy! Let's leave each other alone and promote respect in a voluntary society. We could do it in a few days, if we'd just let go of the false Left-Right dichotomy of separation and control (Divide et Impera, as the Romans called what we still see today), and just give in to morality and reason. Continuing to do the same thing while expecting differing results is how Einstein defined insanity. Rather acute, no?

People are born with natural rights, and many of America's own founding fathers recognized this (yet sadly abandoned those principles shortly thereafter) in their framing of a document which  intended to restrict state infringement upon those natural rights, yet none of signed nor are bound to who do not hold public office or civil position. If it were a contract, all those who signed it are long dead. Yet our collective pockets are plundered against our will to fund various immoral activities in our name. Yet we consent to this? I can not with a clear conscience. 

And to those who do? How is statism working out for us? Maybe it's finally time to try something different. I promise you'll like it, if you understand morality. 

Voting is nothing more than a tug of war, pushing on others to relieve our own burden, swinging back and forth on a pendulum, never really getting anywhere. Yet, over time, our collective burden increases gradually, and our liberties suffer. We harm ourselves in our attempt to harm others. Beware the double edged sword. Legal plunder is nothing to tolerate at any level. It is masturbation without pleasure. 

As Mises said, "economics is far too important to be left to the economists." In his worldview, government only decreases economic efficiency as its intervention and scope of government increase. And without economic liberty, civil liberties suffer greatly beside their counterpart. 

Imagine that...

How to Protect Against the Evil Eye

In large parts of the oldest civilized region of the world, you will find in nearly every room a pretty blue charm that looks like an eye. It's in the front entrance of homes, somewhere in every room, on boats, in airports, in restaurants, and built into the designs of everything from wallpaper to grocery bags. It's on jewelry, wind chimes, and serving plates.

It is common in the Aegean Sea region but encompasses all countries and religious traditions. Though it's never received endorsement from any clerical body — they consider it a silly superstition — it is found in the histories of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In Turkey, from where I just returned, it's called the nazar boncugu. That's Turkish, but in Arabic it isayn al-hasud. In Hebrew it is ayn ha-r a. In Greek, it is το µΆτι, and in Spanish, it is mal de ojo.

Its purpose is to ward off the evil eye. What is that? Americans imagine that it is some ancient myth that has no relevance to modernity. Actually, the evil eye is right now destroying prosperity in the United States. The more it is doing this, the less we hear about it. Far from being some primitive idea, the evil eye is summed up in a wicked vice we don't hear about anymore: envy.

The evil eye looks for success and wishes for its destruction. It is different from jealousy in that sense. It doesn't desire the wealth or happiness of another. It wants the other to suffer because of the other's wealth, fame, success, or happiness. People since the ancient world have feared this impulse more than any other. It is more dangerous to persons and society than any natural disaster. It is a greater threat day to day than floods, hurricanes, or wild beasts.

In other words, the concept of the evil eye grows out of a very real conviction that the greatest threat to human flourishing is the malice of human beings who resent success. And that is actually a very keen insight! No wonder it's had such traction in all religions for so long.

Further, the charm here looks like an eye too, though its purpose is to fight the evil eye. The best way to fight the evil eye, in this tradition, is to look straight back at it. That's what the nazar does. It's an eye for an eye.

[...]

More: http://lfb.org/today/how-to-protect-against-the-evil-eye/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-protect-against-the-evil-eye

Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 into a family steeped in academic life and scientific research. He worked as a statistician from 1927–31, became a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Vienna in 1929, then moved to the University of London in 1931, the University of Chicago in 1950, and the University of Freiburg in 1962, retiring in 1967. He continued writing into the late 1980s, dying in 1992.

Hayek worked in the areas of philosophy of science, political philosophy, the free will problem, and epistemology. For all that, Hayek was more hedgehog than fox. His life's work, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1974, illuminated the nature and significance of spontaneous order. The concept seems simple, yet Hayek spent six decades refining his idea, evidently finding elusive the goal of being as clear about it as he aspired to be.

This essay concentrates on this enduring theme of Hayek's work, and a question: why would the scholar who did more than anyone in the twentieth century to advance our understanding of price signals and the emergence of spontaneous orders also be driven to claim that social justice is a mirage?

More: Friedrich Hayek (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition

Nativism is experiencing a resurgence. Up until some sixty years ago, there were no active research programs that were looking for the innate factors in knowledge and cognition that had been hypothesized and argued for by Nativist thinkers since Plato. It was widely agreed that the centuries-old battles between Empiricists and Nativists were over, and that the Empiricists had decisively won. The Nativist situation was actually worse than that: innateness claims were seen as not only wrong, but as ultimately unscientific approaches to mind and perhaps incoherent as well. The prevailing research agenda for scientists and philosophers interested in how the mind works was to show how our knowledge and abilities could be fully accounted for on the basis of our sensory experiences and the general learning mechanisms that operate on them.

I expect that as humans advance or evolve, as their cognitive abilities expand and increase, the opportunity to see previous philosophical views in a more critical manner becomes easier for a wider scope of the population. I wonder if this expansion is fast enough...

A number of developments led to a change in this situation, but most significant was Chomsky's revolutionary work in linguistics in the 1950's and 1960's. Today the cognitive sciences are teeming with multi-disciplinary approaches to mind that are very much open to the idea that the character of our mental lives owes a great deal more to our innate endowments than Empiricists have supposed. It is also teeming with work that is more in line with Empiricist commitments, so it is hard to determine whether, all things considered, the tide has turned in favor of Nativism. But there is no question that the Nativist approach is once again a live and very lively option.

More: Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I've been following various schools of thought regarding liberty and economics for a while, most of which apply a heavy dose of philosophy to the science of various fields. I suppose I need an outlet to focus on the ideas rather than their application. I am not sure that mental capacity is entirely innate, only that I see an overall increase in the knowledge that can be acquired by individuals in a society.

Welcome to my mind.