A Personal Failure

My friend Mitch The Killer - check the Glossary of Characters - recently commented on a blog post that this blog has been busy sucking. In a way, I agree. Whereas I once swore regularly, and raged against the dying of the light, and charged foolishly into windmills, now I bore those few people who stop by with tattooing, rationality, and Libertarianism.

Somebody asked me about this obsession with Libertarians. “Why, what’s wrong with you? Why bother with them? They’re a few percent of the population, and they’re never going to win!” These are excellent points.

Once, I went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gay Meccas on the East Coast, and I remember thinking, “How on Earth can everybody here look so damned similar? These people are gay! They, if anybody, should be tolerant of difference! Where is the difference?!?” And then I walked down to the ocean, which was beautiful, and screamed at the high tide.

So why the newer focus on Libertarians? Because they claim to care about all of the same things that I do - specifically, individual liberty - and yet they propose solutions which will almost certainly reduce the aggregate amount of individual liberty. I cannot possibly square these two realities.

“Move on! Focus on something else! Jesus Christ already, the Libertarians see individual liberty differently than you do, and they’re not going to change that! Come on already.”

But I can’t. Just like I struggle to let go of most things: old breakups, the Mountaineers not stopping Tremaine Mack on the end in the loss to Miami, the lunacy of running John Kerry for president, four-putting the final green in a golf tournament that I won. “How can people be so fucking stupid,” I wonder about everyone, including myself.

Libertarians aren’t so fucking stupid, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just that they don’t seem to give a good god damn about anybody but themselves. That’s fine I guess. No law requires anybody to care about anybody else. But it seems like the right thing to do, and it certainly seems like there are some people who simply can’t take care of themselves. I know that Libertarians have no problem with innocent people being allowed to die - “Hey, nobody has a right to take my money to pay for that old woman’s selfish desire for medical attention!” - but I can’t take the same position myself.

Sometimes, I have this fantasy. There are people in my town who are crazy anti-abortion protestors. They carry around those signs with babies on them in an attempt to shock us into political submission, and they do it on major street corners, because God-for-fucking-bid that I be allowed to drive to work without being confronted with somebody else’s political crusade. I think it would be fun to make a sandwich board that says, “These people oppose contraception.” Nothing for me clarifies better the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement than the morons who believe that contraception is bad. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will lead to fewer abortions than the correct use of contraception. I imagine that my sign board would actually mean something, that people driving by would say, “God, these people are idiots.” I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to actually do such things. So it remains my little dream, a fun little fantasy.

And so it goes that I find myself standing outside of the Libertarian headquarters shaking my fist like an old man telling those damned kids to get off my lawn. It probably doesn’t make for radically interesting reading, but dammit, I’ve got to be me.

Good Times With Peter Leeson

To read Peter Leeson’s defense of anarchy, you’d come away from it thinking that anarchy was actually a good idea. And although I have numerous objections to his work, my friend Josh does a far better job of dissecting Leeson’s work. But I wanted to object to one particular argument that Leeson, and his other anarcho-capitalists, frequently make: that negative behaviors are no big deal in the long run.

 To illustrate this, Leeson makes the following argument -

Imagine you go to a restaurant and order a $30 filet mignon. When your food arrives you take a bite and realize the restaurant has served you a $10 flank steak instead. The restaurant has defrauded you. You could take the owner to court; but then you realize that the simple time cost this will entail is not worth what you will recover even if you win. Although in principle government exists to adjudicate this matter, in practice it does not.

Your dining experience is a little slice of anarchy. Knowing this, restaurant owners should perpetually serve $10 flank steaks to customers who order filet mignon. Of course restaurants don’t do this. And the reason they don’t is because they realize that if they do, you’ll stop eating there and tell everyone you know to boycott the restaurant as well. Even without government, Smith’s “invisible hand” leads the restaurant to do the right thing.

This is a common argument made by anarcho-capitalists like Leeson. In it, we see that the negative behavior - serving the incorrect food in an attempt to steal profit from the customer - will eventually end as the restaurant’s reputation is so badly damaged that it loses its customers. Sure, a few people have been defrauded out of their money, but over the long run, so what?

There are two very serious problems with this sort of argument. The first is that comparing steaks to the very serious suffering of Somalis is slightly offensive. “Oh, see how I got defrauded out of my $20 bucks for a steak? That’s like 300,000 Somalis dying in an anarchist state. Sure, it sucks in the immediate, but over the long term, so what?” Reading through Leeson’s work - and the work of some other anarcho-capitalists - you see very real human suffering compared to all sorts of pain-in-the-ass experiences, as if there is anything there worth comparing.

The second, and more objectionable, part of Leeson’s argument is that he affords himself and his beliefs an infinite amount of time to work themselves out. In other words, while he gives any form of government approximately no time whatsoever to work itself out, he maintains that places like Somalia will eventually be in tip-top shape. How convenient for his beliefs. It makes it remarkably easy to gloss over 300,000 dead Somalis if, in however long it takes for anarchy to actually work, things eventually get better.

But that’s just it; short term suffering, especially on the scale of the Somali experience, does matter. Glossing it over because, some day, things will be better? That seems cruel at best and downright ignorant at worst. And although Leeson, and other anarcho-capitalists can try, attrocities cannot be ignored simply because they undermine their own beliefs. What’s strange is that the Leesons of the world insist that those of us who believe in some sort of government owe everybody else the same honesty, that we must admit that governments have failed to lived up to expectations. I’ll be the first in line to do so. But ignoring the serious concerns that some of us have over human suffering in an anarchist state, or by simply comparing it to a flank staek, one wonders how seriously Leeson is actually taking things.

(For the record, I have met Peter Leeson, and he seems like a very decent man. He also looks an awful lot like the kid from Rushmore.)