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From the New York Times op-ed pages, of all places, confirmation of a number of libertarian ideas, including the axiom that an armed society is a polite society.
These revisionists’ history, unlike the one now fashionable in academia, is not a grim saga of settlers exploiting one another, annihilating natives and despoiling nature. Nor is it like the previously fashionable history depicting the settlers as heroic individualists who tamed the frontier by developing the great American virtue of self-reliance.
The Westerners in this history survived by learning to get along, as Terry Anderson and Peter Hill document in their new book, “The Not So Wild, Wild West.” These economists, both at the PERC think tank in Montana, argue that their Western ancestors were usually neither heroic enough to make it on their own nor strong enough to take it away from others.
Always gratifying to see the NYT take a slap at the PC bilge being ladled out in institutions of higher learning, of course, but what is perhaps more interesting is the nod given to the voluntary ordering of civil society on the frontier.
Roger McGrath, a historian who studied dozens of Western mining camps and towns, found a high rate of homicide in them mainly because it was socially acceptable for young, drunk single men to resolve points of honor by fighting to the death. But other violence wasn’t tolerated, he said.
“It was a rather polite and civil society enforced by armed men,” Dr. McGrath said. “The rate of burglary and robbery was lower than in American cities today. Claim-jumping was rare. Rape was extraordinarily rare – you can argue it wasn’t being reported, but I’ve never seen evidence hinting at that.”
One suspects that the presence of substantial numbers of prominently displayed large caliber handguns would have a certain pacifying effect. I submit that this would appear paradoxical only to animists or people infected with an irrational fear of inanimate objects.
It is just plain wrong to think things were just peachy in the United States until last week when all the Supreme Court did was make de jure what had been de facto for quite some time regarding the state’s ability to sieze private property for no other reason than to get more tax. But perhaps this is for the best as there is no longer any doubt that things are badly broken and that this should not be a left vs. right issue. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent:
If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms to victimize the weak.
Those incentives have made the legacy of this court’s public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were non-white, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; in cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
I trust that decent Democrats who are not in the pockets of public sector employee associations and who actually have at the core of their convictions the desire to help the ‘have nots’ against whom the system can at time be so slanted, will set aside partisan politics and join with Republicans who are not in the pockets of well funded business interests to rebel against this savage wound to the US Constitution which in effects rips out the Fifth Amendment. Let this case be the litmus test of decency against which political figures of both left and right will judged and judged harshly.
Still buzzing with pleasure after a terrific day with pals at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday, it struck me as I walked around the ground and past the huge car park as to how fantastic is the level of motoring engineering, aesthetics and of course safety these days. But we are hemmed in as never before by rules and regulations, speed cameras and road humps, the combined effect of which is to make driving in most of Britain a frustrating experience. The joys of flooring the accelerator on the open road, with the roar of wind in the hair, are over.
Such a shame. As my dad said, it is a bit like being surrounded by the world’s most beautiful women and then to be told by the State that you are not allowed to ask any of them for a date.
Bob ‘give-us-yer-fokken-money’ Geldof must be losing his touch:
Berlin’s planned Live8 concert next week threatens to turn into a fiasco because it has failed to attract the support of politicians or business sponsors, the event’s German organiser has admitted.
Marek Lieberberg, a friend of Bob Geldof contracted to run the Live8 concert in Berlin, said the lack of support meant the rock bands appearing at the event risked having to pay for the €1m (£663,000) show themselves.
A risk? Surely not a ‘risk’ but a heaven-sent opportunity for the socially-conscious cream of the rockeratti to put their own money where their big ‘fokken’ mouths are.
Read this…
…then read this.
Oh how sweet and utterly deserved. As they would say in the on-line gaming world: owned!
There is an industry in the USA in which people make a career based on using the power of the state to seize the private property from churches, home owners and small businesses and turn it over to large corporations in order to let them benefit by setting up large businesses and thereby provide more tax money for more public sector employees to share in.
It has been pointed out by many that this is a deeply corrupting process in which wealthy developers simply pay local government officials to use force in their narrow economic interests. Yet ‘corrupting’ seems a rather weak term for what is simply naked theft which at the same time negates the often stated pretence that the state is there to ensure individual rights are not trampled upon by the rich and powerful. In fact the Supreme Court ruling overtly institutionalises the fact that the police and courts are vehicles for the rich and powerful (business and governmental interests) to do whatever they wish if there is money to be made.
To understand how this could happen it helps if you realise that many Democrats these days take what is technically a fascist view of private property (that you are free to own property provided you further state objectives with it) rather than a socialist one (that all means of production should belong to the state). So next time a some hysterical Democrat from the Daily Kos tells you how important it is to prevent George Bush from adding some conservatives to the Supreme Court because of the need to safeguard civil liberties from The Wingnuts, understand that these same people actually have no problem from a civil liberties point of view with enriching already wealthy property developers at the expense of community churches and poor people. Exactly how this squares with their purported support for ‘the little guy’ (have you ever heard of a wealthy district full of stockbrokers and lawyers being bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart?) is an interesting question answered only via some impressive pretzel logic. In reality the Justices who stood up to corporate interests were ‘conservatives’. The fight to prevent eminent domain abuse now has to be conducted at State level now that the Federal battle has been lost to the corporatists.
But also many advocates of the Second Amendment talk about how private firearms are the ultimate bulwark against tyranny and injustice. Well maybe now it is time for them to walk the walk. Maybe if some of the people who make their living as ’eminent domain professionals’ were unable to scout out their targets in the most egregious of these cases without considerable personal risk, much like any criminal casing a property they intend to rob, then perhaps the true nature of what they are doing becomes harder to hide behind legal verbiage.
The only upside to this whole situation is the likely radicalising effect this ruling will have on people to whom civil liberties matter and to whom private property is the very corner stone of those liberties.
Listening to Tony Blair addressing the EU parliament is a rather strange experience. He calls for reform of spending and recognising economic reality whilst at the same time declaring that he is a ‘passionate European’ and saying that he supports the idea of an intrusive welfare state.
That Blair’s views on the need to ‘liberalise’ makes him a Thatcherite radical in the eyes of many Continental politicians shows how truly doomed to long term stagnation and irrelevance the EU really is. It also shows Blair’s wish to be all things to all people and why in the long run NuLabour cannot help but choke on its own contradictions just as the Tories have.
“It seems to be the general opinion, fortified by a strong current of judicial opinion, that since the American revolution no state government can be presumed to possess the transcendental sovereignty to take away vested rights of property; to take the property of A. and transfer it to B. by a mere legislative act. A government can scarcely be deemed to be free, where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon a legislative body, without any restraint. The fundamental maxims of a free government seem to require, that the rights of personal liberty, and private property should be held sacred. At least, no court of justice, in this country, would be warranted in assuming, that any state legislature possessed a power to violate and disregard them; or that such a power, so repugnant to the common principles of justice and civil liberty, lurked under any general grant of legislative authority, or ought to be implied from any general expression of the will of the people, in the usual forms of the constitutional delegation of power. The people ought not to be presumed to part with rights, so vital to their security and well-being, without very strong, and positive declarations to that effect.”
-Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. (With thanks to Professor Reynolds.)
Well, it was a nice idea. But today I have to say oh dear, and Michael Jennings can say heh. Australia smashed England at one-day cricket today, and the man who made the biggest impact was the still great Glenn McGrath, who took two of the three wickets that fell at the very start of the England innings. England tried hard after that but never recovered.
In other sporting news, the rule in England is that if you are Scottish and you lose you are Scottish, but if you win you are British. I did not know that Tim Henman had Scottish ancestors, but it would seem that he does. On the other hand, someone called Andrew Murray is, for the duration of his Wimbledon run, British.
In other cricket news, the Zimbabwean cricket team is not welcome. That is history, of the horrible sort, and a rather ineffectual attempt to make it less horrible. Plus, the cricketers of the USA are at each others’ throats. That is more like farce, although having been caught up in one of these irreversible faction fight things myself, I sympathise more deeply than most would.
Due to some ‘under the hood’ difficulties, we will be doing some code work on Samizdata.net for a while and this may cause problems with comments and site avilability on and off for the next day or so.
Hopefully we will get this out of the way as quickly as possible.
Peter Hitchens is someone I only intermittently agree with (and this time is no different, after all he writes for that bastion of the right-statism, The Mail on Sunday) but his lengthy article in The Spectator called Conservatives do not have a party had me nodding most of the time.
There is no point in pretending that the Tory party is going to recover. This pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.
[…]
So David Davis, who is opposed to European integration if he means anything at all, is compelled to seek the support of federalists. This, the modified Molotov–Ribbentrop pact approach, has been tried before — but only by people who forget how that pact ended. Similarly, Kenneth Clarke is seriously put forward as the saviour of a party he plainly hates.
[…]
You cannot properly defend, say, constitutional monarchy if you have no idea why you believe in it and do not understand why your opponents hate it. You cannot effectively oppose the introduction of identity cards unless your every instinct revolts at the imposition of these oppressive breathing licences on a free people.
Hitchens and I disagree over foreign policy issues (amongst other things) but it is hard not to recognise that the Tories are finished for exactly the reasons Hitchens points out and that it is not in the interests of anyone who cares what happens in Britain to have the current power elite unopposed for any longer.
And before some of our commentariat start muttering that it is unrealistic for someone like me to expect the Tory party to transform itself into a model of libertarian small state rectitude; I am not suggesting that at all. I just think that as the Conservative party is not meaningfully conservative any more and that the party’s leadership clearly do not give a hoot about conserving civil society, it needs to be replaced with something that fills that rather large political niche if the current trend towards politically correct populist authoritarianism is to be effectively opposed.
Richard B. North has a terrific set of articles about the current focus on Africa, debt-relief and poverty brought about partly by the efforts of Sir Bob “keep it off eBay” Geldof. It is fair to summarise that North is not totally blown away with admiration by the scruffy former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, or indeed with the grandstanding of our own wonderful PM, Tony Blair.
Definitely not the sort of articles one would expect to get on a college degree reading list. How I wish the weblog existed when studying for my degree back in the 80s.
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