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Dale Amon is someone with whom I actually have an unusually high degree of agreement on many many issues. In his article Free love or fight! however, I find myself agreeing with his conclusions only partly and even that for rather different reasons.
Whilst he is quite correct that there are elements of the Republican Party in the USA which are supportive of profoundly repressive actions by the state regarding sexual freedoms, I am not sure the issue of abortion comes under the category of ‘sexual freedoms’ at all. It is a contentious issue pertaining to definitions of life and death rather than sex, which whilst the proximate cause, is a separate issue.
Similarly I know many Republicans who are very libertarian regarding matters of sexual liberty… profoundly so in fact, taking the view that provided possible results of sex such as disease and pregnancy are treated responsibly and of accepted consequence, then the fact a person might like to have wild monkey sex is none of any one else’s business. The ‘Ashcroft’ faction does not define the entire Republican Party’s views on sex.
Of course there is indeed a certain paleo-conservative constituency within Republicanism in the USA which is inimical to libertarian values on many issues… but then I would argue they are just as inimical to neo-conservative values. Similarly there is a large and just as toxic ‘anti-sex’ element within the US Democratic Party, largely drawn from their still large number of paleo-feminist supporters. In reality I suspect the Democratic Party’s infection with Political Correctness is probably the greater threat to sexual freedoms (abortion is another issue entirely) than the Republican Puritan elements will ever be.
I am convinced that libertarians can indeed find significant elements within both the Democratic and Republican Party with whom to work, based on the inherent contradictions of these philosophically fuzzy groups that make a subversivist approach both practical and productive.
My worry about whether libertarians can actually find any common ground in the short term with mainstream Republicanism is more due to the fact it is becoming clear that George Bush is just another economically incoherent crypto-Keynsian. For all his talk about free trade, he has added not just steel tariffs but also wood tariffs against Canada, honey tariffs against Argentina, textile tariffs against Pakistan and sugar tariffs against Mexico… never mind that Mexico and Canada are NAFTA members.
I shall blog another article soon about the economic and political harm being done by the US government not just in their own country but also elsewhere, as they undermine the very people they should be supporting.
The regular last Friday of the month get-together by London libertarians at Brian Micklethwait‘s place featured an interesting talk by Antoine Clarke about the reality of the introduction of the €uro, particularly how it occurred in France, and about the possible future of the EU from his well informed and rational libertarian perspective.
As usual after the formal talk was concluded, the assembled libertarian rabble had a forthright exchange of views in which hardly anyone actually got bitten…
Regular Samizdata.net contributor Brian Micklethwait will be appearing on BBC Radio 4’s “You and Yours” programme, defending the relaxation of the drink licensing and gambling laws, on Thursday March 28, at 12:30 pm. As will long-time Libertarian Alliance supporter Dr Robert Lefever, an expert on addiction, and Mary Kenny for the keep-it-illegal persuasion.
This is an issue that often brings out the divisions amongst libertarians. There are two broad camps on this matter:
Most libertarians take the view that it is just a matter of free association and thus the state has no business preventing people from seeking opportunities wherever they are found. Within this group, most also hold that the new arrivals should not be given access to welfare or other transfer payments, taking the view that such redistributions of wealth are just theft in any case and should not be made to anyone, let alone immigrants.
The other camp of people with more or less libertarian views, such as Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe take the view that unrestricted immigration is actually a facet of statism, not liberty. They argue that as all property should be private, mass immigration only occurs when the state takes a hand to prevent people from excluding the new arrivals from privately owned housing and jobs in the manner they assume existing property owners would naturally choose to pursue.
The two main reasons held up to justify this opposition to open immigration is firstly that of the risk of swamping their freedom loving culture that is evolving towards libertarian understandings… and secondly that new and economically unproductive arrivals often hugely increase demand on social security and welfare systems, thereby leading to an increase in unjustified appropriation by the state of tax monies.
The first argument, to which Hans-Hermann Hoppe addresses at great length has two main strands. Firstly the risk of crime and violence posed by a large underclass of non-assimilated immigrants and secondly the moral right of ‘citizen’ peoples to naturally form communities of cultural affinity and ‘dis-affinity’ (i.e. to accept and reject certain types of people without being coerced by the state).
The argument goes that it is the state which ‘imposes’ immigrants on communities and to make it worse there is little motivation to assimilate but rather to just line up for welfare handouts. Additionally, without the coercion of the state, societies in their natural form have deep genetic, racial and ethnic elements which will militate towards evolving to a series of economically interlinked but spatially separated communities, presumably rather like ancient Greek city-states. Whilst the corrosive effects of welfare are undeniably true, the foundation of both these ideas is, I believe, quite false.
It is only due to active state efforts to prevent assimilation (called ‘multiculturalism’) that the ghettoization of sections of society are more than a passing phase in the immigration process. Unless they are uprooted forcibly (as was the case with the arrival of Africans as slaves in North America), people do not emigrate great distances to a foreign land in this modern era because they are happy with their existing way of life and culture. For an Indian or Chinese family to move to Britain, it does not mean they are completely rejecting their original culture and family ties, but it does mean they are making a value judgement that life and culture is at least in some significant measure superior in their destination of choice. Thus to argue that it is intrinsically rational to reject immigrants from different cultures if natural social forces are allowed to work seems to misunderstand why people become immigrants in the first place.
Some like Hans-Hermann Hoppe have what I believe to be quite incorrect understandings of not just the inevitably fluid nature of society in a modern extended order but have also failed to grasp the dramatic effect of capitalist trade based economics on making societies more dynamic and adaptive when they interact increasingly globally. As a result, Hoppe takes an extremely non-Anglosphere, quintessentially Germanic view of the nature of civil society when viewed separately from the state: at its core he sees a blood and soil Volk, racially, genetically as well as culturally based and therefore leading to self reinforcing communities of ‘like cultures’.
Thus he takes the view that were it not for the imposed integration of the state, whilst people may wish to trade with anyone, they would inevitably not freely wish to live and work in close physical proximity with different cultures, races and lifestyles. Different races, homosexuals, libertines, people who take siestas in the afternoon etc. etc. (i.e. anyone who was not a member of the Volk either racially or culturally) would be either excluded from the community of free property owning citizens all together or at the very least banished to enforced ghettos like medieval Jews. I do not feel I am overstating Hoppe’s position (see ch.9 ‘On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State’ in ‘Democracy-The God that failed’ (2001, Transaction Publisher)).
Yet I look around at London and see a very different world to that of Hoppe. It is abundantly clear that when the state does not enforce distorting multiculturalism, social values will naturally evolve not to Hoppe’s hypothetical future libertarian neo-tribalism but rather to cosmopolitanism, right here and right now. The only Volk of the future is the Volkswagen. When people of different cultures and races actually interact economically, the inevitable consequence is familiarity, cultural confluence and ultimately miscegenation, not a regression to atavistic tribalism. One only has to walk down the streets of London to see the truth of that.
Sure, areas of minority racial and to a lesser extent cultural concentration can be found in Britain, yet one does not have to look far to see an expanding and entirely British black and Asian population already in the mainstream of cultural and economic life of the country… and not just flipping burgers and digging up roads. In racial flash points, such as Oldham, it is racially ghettoized low income supporters of socialist largess who exchange barrages of bricks and bottles over which community is getting the bigger handout from local government. In less radically separated and far less state dependent majority black communities like Clapham in London, for instance, economics un-mediated by the state lead to a very different and altogether better result.
Ilana Mercer makes several excellent points as to the harmful effects of the welfare state on creating an ‘acculturation’ to largess. In this as in so many things she is manifestly correct. Certainly people who see political favour rather than economic interaction as the means to support ones self are indeed the ‘wrong’ sort of immigrant (not to mention the wrong sort of domestic ‘citizen’) who are little more than muggers-by-proxy. However this is not then an argument against open immigration on economic grounds but rather a self-evident argument against the welfare state and all other forms of democratically sanctioned criminality that falls under the ‘redistribution of wealth’ category.
As far as I am concerned Hans-Hermann and Ilana are free to feel distaste at the idea of the close proximity of alien cultures, races and lifestyles (clearly the case for Hoppe) but for them to then deduce that their sentiments are in fact what would be the ‘natural’ sentiments of the majority if it were not for state enforced integration is not really born out by the evidence.
I share the view that socialist multiculturalism is in fact just an attempt to dismantle Anglosphere civil society with its dynamist adaptive nature and replace it with ‘social’ values more amenable to state centred stasis collectivism. However again this is not an argument against immigration but against state interference in the values of civil society. In reality I am probably much more of a cultural chauvinist than Ilana Mercer and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are. They fear the ‘other’ out of alarm for the fate of liberty based civil society in the face of more primitive collectivist based social values that they see as inevitably (and often incorrectly) defining Third World newcomers.
However I do not fear the cultural alien at all because it is the anti-culture of collectivism which should be afraid and not Anglosphere civil society. I am so convinced of the seductive, viral nature of the core value of our civil society (severalty, unenumerated rights, free contract, personal choice) that unless the dead hand of the state actively prevents it from spreading (i.e. by enforcing ‘multiculturalism’ legislation), the triumph of liberty’s cultural underpinnings is pretty much just a matter of time. The reason for this is that the modern dynamist technological networked extended order is so much more economically effective than every single one of the collectivist state centred stasis based alternatives… all we have to do to ‘win’ is continue to produce the things other societies want and yet are incapable of actually producing.
Just as Hoppe’s ‘Volk’ based understanding of what lies at the core of society was archaic and false even 100 years ago, it is reduced to complete nonsense by the subversive, dynamic, eclectic and market driven screech of the modem, the convenience of the mobile phone and TV screens filled with The History Channel, Australian Soap Operas, Star Trek, Monty Python and Baywatch (quite possibly dubbed in Urdu) and other irresistible bourgeois banalities. Do not fear the immigrant because freed from the baleful distortions of statism, they wish to be us, only more colourfully so. Let them get on with it and thereby enrich us all.
Is that the headline you saw all over the US media the other day when the US government imposed import tariffs on Canadian lumber? No? I wonder why that was?
A question to all those people who sent me e-mails following my claims after Bush’s imposition of the steel quotas that his economic views were ludicrous. Many of you said he was just playing an inconsequential domestic political card and said George Bush was still a committed free trader. Given that:
1. A large number of US manufactured products involving steel and wood are about to become more expensive both domestically in the USA and compared to similar overseas products.
2. Other US produced goods and services are about to be made more expensive overseas due to retaliatory tariffs by the USA’s major trading partners (i.e. the people who actually have the money to buy most of the huge quantity of goods America exports).
Are you still unconcerned about the economic and political damage being done to the US economy (not to mention the rest of the world’s economy)?
All round gentleman-about-town, raconteur, degenerate smoker of communist cigars and worthy blogger Brian Linse also moonlights as a film producer when he is not doing his proper job of blogging.
The production of his very interesting looking film called Den of Lions is well underway, shooting on location in Budapest, Hungary.
Progress reports and numerous pictures can be found at the film’s own blog site! Check it out. 
Joshua Marshall has been discussing why he does not approve of dual-citizenship in several interesting posts. Not surprisingly I see it in very different terms to him. It is not one of those things that I feel I must ‘take him to task’ over because I do understand his view and realise that the root of our disagreement lies much further up the causal chain than the issue of ‘citizenship’. I see our difference of opinion as springing not so much from error but rather from radically different views of the world itself. He wrote:
To my mind, this isn’t a conservative view. It’s a liberal one. One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That’s what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower.
He is quite right that the way he reasonably describes ‘citizenship’ is indeed ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of the word: i.e. what Europeans call ‘democratic socialist’). The ‘political community’ Josh describes is not civil society at all. Civil society is something to which people like me have no problem belonging and which does not require the permission (citizenship) of the state thus to do. No, what Josh is talking about is ‘The State’ because state and society are not the same thing. That is because civil society is not a ‘political’ community at all (i.e. a community in which politics, which is entirely about the use of force, governs the interactions), but rather a community which works by affinity and economic interaction rather than legislation.
In a sense I suppose it’s not a very big deal. But doesn’t this trivialize what it should mean to be a citizen of one of those countries? It’s sounds less like a civic, national identity than a sort of heritage knickknack or heirloom. Citizenship isn’t just about having a standing right of residency or something you have because you have some attachment or family connection to a particular country. I think it’s something more than that — particularly in the context of American citizenship.
Josh is also quite right that dual-citizenship trivialises what it does mean to be a citizen of one of those countries. His objections mirror those of Marxists with their disdain for ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. When a person sees political rather than social interaction as the core of society, then a person who stands outside, indeed above, the political structure in question is surely a threat to the authority of the political order. Yet globalization, technology and trade are indeed inexorably producing a larger and more culturally influential cosmopolitan class, not just a ‘Jet Set’ of people who work in banking and broking, but also a more broadly based group who have ’emigrated’ yet retain close and active ties across the oceans in ways that were previously either too expensive or technologically impossible to maintain. In past times, a family moving from India or Jamaica or China to a new life in Britain or North America or Australia, would have only the slow and remote link of written mail sent by ship to stay in contact. → Continue reading: Citizenship: the state’s way of saying it owns you
Although we have reduced the amount of blogs to which we link on the Samizdata main page, we have added a separate links and photographs page. We will occasionally add new photographs there every now and then if we can catch a member of the Samizdata Team in a compromising situation.
We added the links page as the sidebar was becoming unmanagable and the links list was in danger of melting down… a sort of blogger China Syndrome.
Update, July 2002: since our transmogification to Samizdata.net, this has all changed
The regular Samizdata e-mail address is back up and running after our domain host finally clubbed the misbehaving server into submission like a baby seal.
Feedback should go to: [address removed]
If you have them, the various other samizdata.net e-mail addresses are now functional again.
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
For much of today, we have been having e-mail problems (i.e. the domain hosting server is down), so if you e-mailed any of the usual addresses, we probably did not get it.
As a temporary measure, please send all e-mails to samizdata at cloister.dircon.co.uk until you get the all clear.
Oh happy happy joy joy, we love our domain server!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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