Book Idea: ‘Streets and roads, community, and liberty’

Yes, that’s a terrible title.

I was listening to the audio book of Murray Rothbard’s great work For a New Liberty this morning, and I worked through most of his chapter entitled ‘The Public Sector: Streets and Roads.‘ In it, Rothbard advocates allowing liberty to see its full manifestation even in the streets and roads, which would make all building, maintaining, and use under the jurisdiction of the free market. It is Rothbard’s contention that only voluntary associations and exchanges can make the roads a moral and efficient system, and that the time to privatize is always (and forever) “as soon as possible.”

I am of the opinion that one of the prevailing difficulties in being a libertarian is that few people understand both libertarian critiques of State-run society and the alternative that is proposed. Most assume that the libertarian’s most sophisticated answer to the question: “Well, how would that work?” is: “The market will take care of it!”

Of course, the short answer to any objection to liberty is, in fact, that the market will take care of it (which is simply short hand for saying ‘yes, it ought to be taken care of, and to do so without using violence is paramount’). However, this answer quickly grows stale to the ears of those seeking real solutions to our society’s problems. Politicians thrive on making promises when they can say that the have detailed, practical, and realistic plans for tackling ‘the issues.’ Such promises are rarely kept, but by observing the public’s general reaction to candidates willing to make such promises we can see how hungry people are for solutions that would work.

The libertarian, while cautious of providing a market blue-print for any given issue, should not shudder or buckle under any demand to produce some account for how a free market might handle a given problem.  A book along these lines could tackle many of the issues involved with public and private streets and roads; community development; economic efficiency; and of course freedom, liberty, and peace.  There is a wealth of research out there that could aid the libertarian in showing that, yes, such social organization is possible without absolute, overriding force.

books

For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard. I gave this book another read-through about a month ago. Both “readings” have been an audiobook (acquired for free!) that I listened to while driving the daily commute. I think this might be the perfect book to recommend to friends who are mostly convinced of many libertarian ideas, but for whatever reason feel uncomfortable saying things like “the free market would provide a far more effective and moral legal system,” or “the national road system suffers greatly in the hands of our government; making the roads private would benefit the common good like no other highway reform.” Rothbard, as usual, is relentless in his logic, clarity, and persuasiveness in this classic text.

Some Desperate Glory by Edwin Campion Vaughan. This gem of a diary, written by a young (not yet 20 years old) British officer during his front-line experience in the Great War, was discovered in a family cupboard only three decades ago. Though not as polished as other WWI literature in this genre, Vaughan’s account details both the monotonous boredom and the sheer horror of war. Vaughan witnesses and survives one of the worst battles in the war at Ypres: he sees a cat eating the face of a German corpse, he bears the sound of his own wounded men screaming and moaning in pain while they drown in the mucky shell-holes of no-man’s-land, he watches in horror as a soldier cowering on the ground is motivated by Vaughan’s screaming and gathers the courage to run into battle — only to be shot dead 3 paces later, and he recoils in shock when a solider being prodded by Vaughan replies “I’m blind, sir” and turns to reveal half of a face ripped off by shrapnel. These moments are weighty but come interspersed between long periods of boredom, frustration, and the discomfort that Vaughan experiences when he lives in the French mud for 7 straight months.

St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox by G. K. Chesterton. I picked up this book based on its reputation, and I wasn’t disappointed. Chesterton, who also wrote a much-acclaimed volume on St. Francis, tackles here one of the most monstrously-large figures in all of philosophy, and does so while keeping his project at about a couple hundred pages. Chesterton’s touch is poetic and delicate as he urges the reader to understand the fundamental love Aquinas had for reality, liberty, practical life, and everything that the scholastics are accused of dismissing. Chesterton, a firm Catholic, also makes a (persuasive) argument that, in many ways, Aquinas and Francis — an odd pair indeed — were very much the reformation before the Reformation. Compared to these thinkers, he writes, Calvin and Luther were reacitonaries. Not the typical line of reasoning about the relationship between the church and the reformers.

C.S. Lewis on punishment

Via Murray Rothbard in his book, The Ethics of Liberty (which I’m reading right now).  Don’t mind the overkill of “quoted” words, a bad habit that I’m coincidentally trying to purge from myself at the moment:

     Never has the tyranny and gross injustice of the “humanitarian” theory of punishment-as-reform been revealed in more scintillating fashion than by C.S. Lewis. Noting that the “reformers” call their proposed actions “healing” or “therapy” rather than “punishment,” Lewis adds:

But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver . . . to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust-is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

     Lewis goes on to demonstrate the particularly harsh tyranny that is likely to be levied by “humanitarians” out to inflict their “reforms” and “cures” on the populace:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better,” is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

     Furthermore, Lewis points out, the rulers can use the concept of “disease” as a means for terming any actions that they dislike as “crimes” and then to inflict a totalitarian rule in the name of Therapy.

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. . . . It will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. Even in ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are “treatment,” not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.[18]

     Thus, we see that the fashionable reform approach to punishment can be at least as grotesque and far more uncertain and arbitrary than the deterrence principle. Retribution remains as our only just and viable theory of punishment and equal treatment for equal crime is fundamental to such retributive punishment. The barbaric turns out to be the just while the “modern” and the “humanitarian” turn out to be grotesque parodies of justice.

Rothbard on Man

I found a curious section, almost a side-note, in Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty today:

“And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason. Reason is man’s instrument of knowledge and of his very survival; the use and of his mind, the acquisition of knowledge about what is best for him and how he can achieve it, is the uniquely human method of existence and of achievement. And this is uniquely man’s nature; man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or to be more precise, the rational being. Through his reason, the individual man observes both the facts and ways of the external world, and the facts of his own consciousness, including his emotions: in short, he employs both extraspection and introspection.”

I wonder what Rothbard is getting at when he says that “rational being” is a more precise way to encapsulate human nature than “rational animal.” Aristotle’s definition involves, as always, what he perceives to be the proper genus and species of the thing: Man is an animal with a rational soul. Inherent in this are all of the workings of the body and mind. Strip man of ‘animal’ and we lose eating and sleeping, sense perception, pooping, communication with others, and everything else that seems to (a) keep us alive, (b) allow us to perceive and utilize the world around us, and (c) provide the foundation for abstraction and reason.

If we allow Rothbard the qualifier and consider humans as rational beings — that is, rational being qua rational being — we lose the very foundation that Rothbard upholds in the beginning of the paragraph: “And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason.”

Perhaps it is the case that a human functioning in a rational manner is “in short” utilizing reason, but even Rothbard would agree that you can’t get to reason, abstraction, thought, etc. without first acquiring raw sense data — without first observing things in some sense.

Perhaps Rothbard meant “the rational being” to be read as “the rational being,” or in other words, “the [only] rational being,” so as to distinguish us from all of the other animals, plants, etc. But this would work only insofar as there are no other beings that have, or could potentially have, reasoning faculties. (Christians, of course, will submit at least a few more candidates for us to consider as ‘rational beings’). Aristotle restricts humanity’s genus to animals — i.e. enlivened organic bodies — because it is metaphysically possible for non-animal entities to exist exercising reason, such as the late Socrates’ rational soul. (Aquinas takes this concept and runs with it).

Or perhaps Rothbard had none of this in mind, and I’m reading into it. Still, it piqued my interest, as any author can do simply by quoting Aristotle and following it with “or, to be more precise. . .” (Aquinas, who is receiving only parenthetical treatment in this post, effectively does this in his commentaries on Aristotle, but usually does so under the guise of ‘what the Philosopher is really saying here is. . .’ rather than ‘this is almost true, but better still is. . .’)

The life of a libertarian

Rothbard is rather brilliant here in “For A New Liberty“, chapter 10. Any libertarian who has been so for more than 5 minutes will know this scenario all too intimately:

“PEOPLE TEND TO FALL into habits and into unquestioned ruts, especially in the field of government. On the market, in society in general, we expect and accommodate rapidly to change, to the unending marvels and improvements of our civilization. New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly. But in the area of government we follow blindly in the path of centuries, content to believe that what­ever has been must be right. In particular, government, in the United States and elsewhere, for centuries and seemingly from time immemorial has been supplying us with certain essential and necessary services, services which nearly everyone concedes are important: defense (includ­ing army, police, judicial, and legal), firefighting, streets and roads, water, sewage and garbage disposal, postal service, etc. So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself. Thus if one maintains that the State should not supply court services, and that private enterprise on the market could supply such service more efficiently as well as more morally, people tend to think of this as denying the importance of courts themselves[!].

“The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enter­prises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?[!!]“

“These questions, ridiculous as they seem to be and are with regard to the shoe business, are just as absurd when applied to the libertarian who advocates a free market in fire, police, postal service, or any other government operation. The point is that the advocate of a free market in anything cannot provide a “constructive” blueprint of such a market in advance. The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible. The libertarian economist can try to offer a few guidelines on how markets might develop where they are now prevented or re­stricted from developing; but he can do little more than point the way toward freedom, to call for government to get out of the way of the productive and ever-inventive energies of the public as expressed in voluntary market activity.

“How will the poor pay for defense, fire protection, postal service, etc., can basically be answered by the counter-question: how do the poor pay for anything they now obtain on the market? The difference is that we know that the free private market will supply these goods and services far more cheaply, in greater abundance, and of far higher quality than monopoly government does today. Everyone in society would benefit, and especially the poor[!]. And we also know that the mam­moth tax burden to finance these and other activities would be lifted from the shoulders of everyone in society, including the poor.”

(All emphasis and [!] are mine)

.. .and won’t someone please think of the children?!!?

books

I, Claudius by Robert Graves. A marvelous work of historical fiction woven together from the early days of the Roman emperors. Graves uses Claudius as a pair of sane eyes in an increasingly mad Roman world, and all of Rome’s great achievements and flaws are on display. At the beginning of the story, Claudius reflects on a prophecy given to him from the Oracle at Delphi, and its themes are carefully developed by Graves as the stuttering Cl – Cl – Claudius goes from family idiot and obscure historian to Roman Emperor (and eventually god). (I hope to read its sequel, Claudius the God, soon). A wholly satsifying and beautiful work.

On Memory and Recollection by Aristotle. A short tract (~8 pages) in which Aristotle further develops the faculties of the human soul (picking up where De Anima left off). It contains a key passage on abstraction and several helpful perspectives in understanding how it is that one recalls and remembers. As usual, his biology is a bit wanting; nevertheless the work has its moments of fascinating insight (e.g. Why is it that all animals have some kind of memory, yet only humans seem to be able to recollect?)

What Has the Government Done to Our Money? / The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar by Murray N Rothbard. Rothbard’s essays on money, collected in this volume, have been hailed as the greatest introduction to the subject of money ever written (this assessment is made by Austrians, of course!). The work embodies everything that is great about Rotbhard’s style: clear, concise, uncompromising, and well informed. I am now confident that I did not really know what money was until I read this work — shame on our educational system! For a short primer on money, banking, inflation, and (let’s not forget) government intervention in our money, there is probably no better work.