This week at Libertarianism.org, we posted new videos on self-esteem and libertarianism, the morality of drug use, and separating school and state. The week also saw an essay from George H. Smith and blog posts on Charles Murray and Michael Sandel.
Nathaniel Branden on Self-Esteem and Libertarianism
Nathaniel Branden is a psychotherapist and writer known for being both the founder of the self-esteem movement in psychology and a former associate of Ayn Rand. In this lecture given at a Libertarian Party of California event in 2000, Branden talks about the connection between the workings of free-market capitalism, the self-esteem movement, and the Information Age. In his words, “entitlement robs people of the sense of self-reliance” and the self-esteem that comes with that sense of independence.
Jacob Sullum: In Defense of Drug Use
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and Reason.com and is a nationally syndicated columnist. In this lecture from a Libertarian Party of California event in 2000, Sullum goes beyond utilitarian arguments for repealing drug prohibition, saying that the nature of the act itself—using chemicals to alter one’s mental state—does not justify prohibition.
Sheldon Richman on Separating School and State
Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman (a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education), a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation, and a research fellow at the Independent Institute. In this lecture from one of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s conferences in 1995, Richman describes the state of public education in modern America. He makes note of state education’s Spartan origins, and refers to Israel Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship. Opening up public schools to competition, Richman says, would put the power to decide what and how their children learn back into parents’ hands.
Critics of State Education Part 2: The British Voluntaryists
With his new essay in his Excursions series, George H. Smith turns to the philosophy of Voluntaryism, discussing how its proponents fought against state control of education in the nineteenth century.
One important Voluntaryist was Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a leading libertarian philosopher of his day. Although Spencer became an agnostic, he was home-schooled in Dissenting causes by his father and uncle. “Our family was essentially a dissenting family,” Spencer wrote in his Autobiography, “and dissent is an expression of antagonism to arbitrary control.” Much of Spencer’s first political article, written in his early twenties and published in The Nonconformist in 1842, was devoted to a critique of state education, and it possibly influenced the birth of the Voluntaryist movement in the following year.
Gary Gutting on Charles Murray’s Coming Apart
Jason Kuznicki, who reviewed Murray’s new book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010 for Libertarianism.org back in February, looks at a critique of the book by Gary Gutting at the New York Times. Kuznicki writes,
It is, in short, a misreading to say that the message of the book is that poor people need to shape up. Instead it’s a lot more nuanced: rich and poor people alike might do better, but right now the government works very hard to make sure that they can’t.
But he does think Gutting raises an interesting question about how much support the rich get from government.
Michael Sandel Thinks Markets Make Us Worse—But He Can Make Us Better
I take aim at an article the philosopher Michael Sandel wrote in The Atlantic on the moral limits of markets.
And here’s his first—of many—missteps. Because of course we did arrive at this condition through deliberate choice. Every item bought and every item sold in his preamble was bought and sold through deliberate choice on the part of those doing the buying and the selling. Sandel’s argument thus is not that there wasn’t any deliberate choice involved but that the deliberative chooser wasn’t who Sandel thinks it should’ve been—and the choices made weren’t what Sandel himself would’ve chosen.
