Topic: Political Philosophy

Student Essay Contest

By
David Boaz

Attention high-school and college students: The Moorfield Storey Institute has announced the Vision of Ayn Rand essay contest. Students are invited to submit essays related to issues discussed in the book The Vision of Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden.

The book has a fascinating history. For ten years, from 1958 to 1968, Branden delivered lectures on “Basic Principles of Objectivism” at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City and, via tape transcription, to groups in more than 80 cities throughout the United States and abroad. More than 35,000 students attended those lectures. Along with Rand’s books, the lectures helped to create one of the first modern organized libertarian movements. But until 2009, the lectures were never available in printed form. Now they are. Buy the book here.

Back in 2009 I said this in a jacket blurb:

This is the most important work on Objectivism not written by Ayn Rand, available at last in book form. These lectures were delivered by the person closest to Ayn Rand, designated by her as her intellectual heir, often with her sitting in the audience and answering questions about them, and endorsed by her. Rand’s subsequent falling out with Nathaniel Branden over personal matters doesn’t change that. This is the organized, comprehensive treatise on Objectivism that Ayn Rand never wrote. Philosophers, historians, and economists may – and should – debate the claims of Objectivism. In this book they have a systematic work with which to engage. These lectures were also a milestone in libertarian history, as the lecture sessions brought together for the first time large numbers of young people who shared an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and the individualist philosophy. The lectures were given as taped courses in more than 80 cities, and people drove for miles to listen to them on tape. Wasn’t that a time! 

Topics: 
Political Philosophy

Stossel Tonight

By
David Boaz

Tonight at 9 pm on the Fox Business Network, John Stossel interviews a vast array of characters – Gov. Gary Johnson, Rep. Justin Amash, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko, John Bolton, Ann Coulter, and even me – in front of a cast of thousands. Literally. Some 1400 attendees at the Students for Liberty conference joined in asking the questions. As Stossel’s website says,

This week, Stossel does a special show at the 6th annual “Students for Liberty” conference in Washington….

Fireworks fly when Stossel and the mostly libertarian crowd spar with Ann Coulter about gay marriage and drug laws. Coulter is in rare form, passionately denouncing libertarians, and at one point calling Stossel and the crowd out for focusing on drug laws and gay marriage.

It may not make it into the final version, but Coulter said libertarians should stop spending time on, you know, issues of personal freedom and equality under the law and focus on more important issues. Like privatizing the New York City subways. I kid you not.

9 pm ET tonight. Be there.

 

Topics: 
General, Political Philosophy

This Week at Libertarianism.org

By
Aaron Ross Powell

It’s been a busy week over at Libertarianism.org, Cato’s website exploring the theory and history of liberty. George H. Smith published a new essay in his Excursions series. In this third part of an ongoing look at the history of political philosophy, Smith examines early thinking on political obligation, and how the problem of allegiance was the major concern of John Locke.

When philosophers discuss political obligation they sometimes ignore the crucial distinction between political obligation and political allegiance, despite the fact that many early political debates focused on the latter issue. Political obligation in some form was taken for granted, but this did not answer the crucial question: What makes a government legitimate in the first place?

Read it here.

We also released two new videos. In the first, Walter Williams, speaking at a 1984 Libertarian International conference, explains how the state’s occupational licensing restrictions and other discriminatory laws often prevent minorities from finding gainful employment.

Walter E. Williams on Minorities and Unemployment

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Political Philosophy

Ronald Dworkin, R.I.P.

By
Walter Olson

The influential legal philosopher has died in London at age 81 (Lawrence Solum, Godfrey Hodgson/Guardian). Adam Liptak’s sharp obituary for the NYT sums up some of the virtues that quickly carried Prof. Dworkin to the academic peaks where he remained through his life: passionately held views, close engagement with the arguments of figures like Hart and Rawls, a flair for exploring complications in a relatively accessible way. Yet Liptak does not stint the view of exasperated critics like judge/scholar Richard Posner: “Dworkin’s dominant bent as a public intellectual,” Posner wrote, “is to polemicize in favor of a standard menu of left-liberal policies.”

I’ve taken a less-than-reverent view of Dworkin’s work myself on occasion, but obituaries make a suitable time to emphasize the positive, and the fact is that over decades of intra-Left legal debates, Dworkin repeatedly took the better side, arguing for the importance of individual rights, free speech and the integrity of law as a discipline in itself. His forceful arguments on First Amendment values were important in preventing the anti-speech feminism of Catherine MacKinnon from becoming the dominant view in American progressive circles. He warned appropriately against the temptation on both left and right to abdicate questions of jurisprudence to simple majoritarianism in one form or another, and argued eloquently on behalf of both formalism and constitutionalism (legal reasoning yields correct answers for adjudicating particular cases, and law is not merely an extension of politics by other means). True, he tended to fill these honorable vessels with very different contents than I or my Cato colleagues might. But better that than to smash the vessels and leave us with no inheritance of law or constitution or legal principle or rights at all, as not a few others on the Left were attempting to do over Dworkin’s long heyday. 

For those who would like to learn more, let me recommend this fine short essay by the late Norman Barry at FEE’s The Freeman sketching out areas where classical liberals might and might not find common ground with the late Prof. Dworkin. 

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

Matt Yglesias Cools Out the Marks

By
Michael F. Cannon

Ben Smith has a mostly excellent piece titled, “Obama Prepares to Screw His Base”:

[T]he health care overhaul known as ObamaCare [is] calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

The passionate supporters are the youth, who voted for him by a margin of 60% to 36%, according to exit poll samples of people 29 and under. His enemies are the elderly: Mitt Romney won 56% of the votes from people 65 and over…[W]hat follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president’s supporters. The provisions required to make any sort of health insurance plan work — not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort — require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly…consume far more than they pay in…[T]his year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young…

And so this vast transfer or resources from young to old — just the latest in a long line of these transfers — hasn’t been discussed much because it is totally uncontroversial.

The piece falls shy of totally excellent because Smith incorrectly asserts, contrary to the economics literature, that young people have to subsidize old people for health insurance markets to work. Smith correctly notes that ObamaCare screws young people, but thinks that’s unavoidable, if unfortunate. Since there’s no reason to screw young people at all, ObamaCare is even worse than Smith portrays it.

But Matt Yglesias takes the cake. ObamaCare does not screw the young, he writes. Sure, millions of young adults will pay more for health insurance, even after accounting for ObamaCare’s subsidies. But young adults shouldn’t sweat the triple-digit premium hikes ObamaCare forces them to pay solely for the benefit of subsidizing older people who have more resources than they do. Why? Because today’s young adults will benefit later when ObamaCare does the same for them at the expense of subsequent generations. You know, if they don’t die first. What could go wrong?  

Social scientists have a term to describe the role that people like Yglesias play in a confidence game. It’s called “cooling out the mark.” In his classic 1952 article, sociologist Erving Goffman explains. See if you can find any similarities:

The confidence game – the con, as its practitioners call it – is a way of obtaining money under false pretenses by the exercise of fraud and deceit…

The typical play has typical phases. The potential sucker is first spotted and one member of the working team (called the outside man, steerer, or roper) arranges to make social contact with him. The confidence of the mark is won, and he is given an opportunity to invest his money in a gambling venture which he understands to have been fixed in his favor. The venture, of course, is fixed, but not in his favor. The mark is permitted to win some money and then persuaded to invest more. There is an “accident” or “mistake,” and the mark loses his total investment. The operators then depart in a ceremony that is called the blowoff or sting. They leave the mark but take his money. The mark is expected to go on his way, a little wiser and a lot poorer.

Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators’ point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out. After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.

So remember, young voters. ObamaCare doesn’t screw you. ObamaCare is good for you.

See you next time.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Political Philosophy, Social Security, Tax and Budget Policy

Cato Scholars Speaking at Students for Liberty Conference — Join Us

By
David Boaz

The 2013 International Students For Liberty Conference, now in its sixth year, will bring over a thousand students and young liberty activists to Washington, D.C. to talk about ideas, hear from leading policy experts, and network with organizations and each other. I’m proud to have been the first speaker at the first ISFLC conference, in New York in 2008.  This year, the conference will be hosted at the Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel, just three blocks from the Cato Institute.

I will be presenting two lectures that weekend, a session with Young Americans for Liberty on “The Ten Ways to Talk about Freedom” and a luncheon keynote in Cato’s Yeager Conference Center on Reclaiming Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Ideas in Mainstream Politics. Plus I’ll be on a special taping of the “Stossel” show.

Other Cato scholars will be speaking on policy issues throughout the conference.  All of the below sessions will be taking place in the Hyatt’s Constitution room B.

Saturday, February 16
10:00-10:45am Restoring Constitutional Liberty Roger Pilon
11:15-12:00pm Privacy Under Attack Jim Harper
12:10–1:20pm Reclaiming Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Ideas in Mainstream Politics *Luncheon @ the Cato Institute* David Boaz
1:30-2:15pm The Clone Wars: Fighting to Educate Free Individuals Neal McCluskey
2:45-3:30pm A Foreign Policy for Advancing Liberty Abroad (without Undermining It at Home) Christopher A. Preble
4:00-4:45pm Economic Growth and the Future of Liberty Brink Lindsey
5:15-6:00pm How the Government Uses “Science” to Take Away Your Stuff Patrick J. Michaels
     
Sunday, February 17
10:00-10:45am How to Win Every Libertarian Argument Jason Kuznicki
11:15-12:00pm Why Libertarians Should Care Much More about Immigration Alex Nowrasteh

To attend the student luncheon event, please register online or sign up for your ticket at the Cato booth at the conference exhibit hall.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Energy and Environment, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy, Tax and Budget Policy, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy, Trade and Immigration

Is Government a Threat to Our Freedom?

By
David Boaz

My book Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997, begins with this paragraph:

In 1995 Gallup pollsters found that 39 percent of Americans said that “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”  Pollsters couldn’t believe it, so they tried again, taking out the word “immediate.”  This time 52 percent of Americans agreed.

Well, the Pew Research Center has been polling on a similar question, and they’ve just found the highest number ever. They ask a slightly different question – “Do you think the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms, or not?” – and of course pollsters’ methods and samples may vary. Pew’s numbers seem to have been somewhat lower than Gallup’s over the past two decades. But today they report:

Pew Poll on Threat to Rights

As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high. And for the first time, a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Jan. 9-13 among 1,502 adults, finds that 53% think that the federal government threatens their own personal rights and freedoms while 43% disagree.

Gallup’s polling found that the level of fear had fallen dramatically in the early 2000s, as did Pew, but that by late 2011 it had risen back to 49 percent. Gallup also, alas, reports a partisan divide in answers to the question:

Americans’ sense that the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms is also at a new high, 49%, since Gallup began asking the question using this wording in 2003. This view is much more pronounced among Republicans (61%) and independents (57%) than among Democrats (28%), although when George W. Bush was president, Democrats and independents were more likely than Republicans to view government as a threat.

Dan Mitchell noted that divide back in 2010 and suggested that, with a Republican administration spending us into bankruptcy and a Democratic administration continuing the wars and the Patriot Act, partisans ought to start recognizing the threats from their own respective parties. Indeed.

The bottom line, though, is that when a government is viewed as a threat to “your own personal rights and freedoms” by a majority of its citizens, it should probably take a critical look at its policies.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

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