RedStateEclectic

On Adam Kokesh, Revolution, and Lolita

OK, I have to admit that I'm an Adam Kokesh fan for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we can't have a revolution without revolutionaries.  

I realize that sometimes he does outrageous things that drive people away from the liberty movement, like this moment, right before he was forcefully removed from the 2008 Republican Convention:

And sometimes he organizes events that seem silly, like the Dance-In at the Jefferson Memorial:

But sometimes, his methods give us a glimpse of what we're up against and reveal what the government really thinks of us. This weekend is one of those times.  

Adam was speaking at a marijauna legalization rally.  While I think that drug laws should belong to the states, to be honest this isn't one of my issues and that's partly because it isn't a freedom that the traditional GOP voter is ready to embrace (yet). 

But Adam wasn't smoking pot, he wasn't carrying pot, and he didn't organize the event. However,the police moved in on him when he was speaking, and he was arrested.

The Kokesh wing of the movement has been aflutter all weekend about it, and if you want to know more specifics, I suggest you visit his Facebook page or click ont of the links at the bottom of this entry because I want to focus on one small event that will likely go unnoticed, and it's in this video.

This officer is answering phones that are apparently ringing quite a bit as people call to check on the status of a quasi-celebrity. You won't need to listen long, I promise:

  

Who is the provacatuer again?

This is why I like and admire Adam.  He never loses his cool, and his ability to do so exposes small bits of the arrogant power structures we're facing.

And in case you doubt the authenticity of the video, this is Part II, where the kid who recorded the call shows evidence in his favor:

  

 

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Related articles

Report: Adam Kokesh to be Charged With "Assaulting a Federal Officer"

Adam Kokesh Arrested At 'Philly Smoke Down,' Charged With 'Resisting'

10. Adam Kokesh arrested at a marijuana legalization assembly in Philadelphia

Liberty's Dawn

Savings and Consumption

Following up on Angela's Stimulating the Economy With Food Stamps, here's a neat little video on what really matters:

 

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3)

Image credit.

The idea that all human concerns can be dealt with in a market context, by voluntary transactions, which is usually implied by AC, is patently inapplicable in reality. Markets only work to the extent that agreement (of a certain sort) is possible. But life is full of issues where agreement is not possible. So, there is a competition amongst intransigent concerns (“political scarcity”), and we must often yield to positions we do not like, and there must be sufficient authority to police controversy in the face of unforgiving opposition.

Large communities work differently than small groups. Coordination and cooperation in very large groups requires adequate forms of authority, powerful enforcement agencies. We cannot do without them. We must try to keep them sufficiently constrained. But there is no guarantee that we will be able to keep them under control. I am not aware of a social technology that can preclude the enormous toxic potential of the state. I sincerely regret this state of affairs; but the matter is not altered by insisting on the impossible – a world without the constraints that I have tried to outline in this note, as well as here and here. We must enter the political process and try to shape the political mood and the state so as to enhance liberty and ensure respect for her. It is an open-ended battle. We have no better means.

There is another conundrum associated with AC. Take my part of Germany as it was 1 000 years ago, and compare it to today. The difference is a huge increase in liberty. At the same time, we register a huge increase in the extent and impact of the state. Would AC deny that liberty has increased? If not, I cannot take that position seriously. If yes, how is a substantial increase of liberty compatible with substantial state growth? Ah, all the additional liberty is due to non-state agents! Well, that, however, is hardly credible. It is not my neighbour or my girl friend who enforce my rights, it is the state. And if I can prove that my neighbour has stolen X from my premises, I can be pretty sure, the state will rectify the matter.

I am not defending the state – like I do not defend the elephant. I look at both, and acknowledge their features and reality.

If one wishes to promote more liberty, one has to acknowledge the substratum within which she will have to be fought for and established.

I shall not deal with the poor philosophical underpinnings of Rothbard-type of AC; I think Feser has done an excellent job at it - for more see Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement.

 It is worth noting, however, that Rothbard clearly believes that the nature of the state can be deduced without reference to the empirical world – a preposterous position that must lead to conclusions severely at odds with reality. It only goes to show the solipsistic, the hedonistic dogmatism underlying his approach to the issue.

Not only is the AC approach in its dominant Rothbardian variant methodologically fatally flawed (in its unsustainable, anti-empirical apriorism), it is also attitudinally repugnant: people who fail to discover the purportedly self-evident features of AC’s actually contradictory system of non sequiturs and arbitrary and uncompelling premises are treated as idiots or collaborators of evil powers. Naturally, an incoherent and empirically false theory can be maintained only by dogmatic arrogance.

Thus, the Rothbardian AC sits in his rocking chair savouring the joys of self-righteousness to be had from (the travesty of) an axiomatic theory of politics and morality. He refrains from politics, and specialises one-sidedly in complaining about the state. He diverts talent and impetus away from the freedom movement, binding it in self righteous, morbid inaction ( - Bob Higgs strikes me as a prime example of AC as a form of personal depression).

The adherent of AC does not understand the conditions of liberty, he damages the reputation of liberty, distorts its meaning and weakens its forces. He is either enraged, depressed, or both, and full of acerbic contempt for anyone with a divergent view.

Personally, I find it a lot harder to be a liberal, now that I have given up my implicit AC-illusions. By the latter term I mean this: since most of the valuable material that I used in recent years in order to educate myself about issues concerning liberty were provided by AC-sources, I developed the AC-habit of restricting my perceptions of the state to its lamentable aspects. This habit makes life easier, things always fit into a neat pattern. And there is a huge industry (blogs etc.) that caters to this view. I can no longer convince myself of the simplicity of that stance.

Liberty, to me, is not an end in itself. I give precedence to the unending quest by which I seek to approximate truth.

I see a certain analogy between the struggle for liberty and the Christian notion of original sin. Man is apt to act sinfully and must constantly struggle not to yield to this propensity. Liberty is a battle not to yield to conditions of the human life that tend toward arbitrariness and inordinate domination. It is an endless endeavour, never to be replaced by a final state of uncontested and perfect liberty.

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3).

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3)

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There are two more important aspects concerning the inevitability of the state – and in as much as state structures are inevitable we have simply got to work with them to achieve freedom as best as possible – anyone who runs away from this inconvenient constraint, as do statists and anarchist, is not capable of serving freedom.

Aspect One: Human capabilities are often prismatic and ambiguous, capable of creating both good and evil, the useful and the useless etc from the same essential resource base. But this ambivalence is a vital tool in the business of adapting to a changing environment – it is part of the conditio humana. Take aggression: human beings would be incapable of surviving if they did not have the ability to become aggressive. It’s a matter of dosage and context whether aggression is good or bad.  We cannot preclude that we will – often with the best of intentions use our human talents to drift from the realm of the good over into the realm of the bad.  We may disagree on what is good and what is bad. We may differ in our assessments as to whether a certain type of action is going to elicit good or bad consequences. There is any number of occasions to move from good to bad, and to not concur as to the moral nature of the state achieved. All we can do is learn from experience, try to avoid the most egregious excesses, and - at least as a last resort - wait for cultural evolution to weed out those practices most detrimental to our species. In this sense, the state will develop within a corridor defined by the natural limits to its destructiveness and the limits to its functional strengths. Within this corridor the state develops as a highly complex evolutionary product, indeed a composite product, for which it is often difficult or impossible to determine whether or how problematic aspects are related to welcome aspects and vice versa.

This brings me to Aspect Two: I have developed 3 theorems to explain the persistence of the state, the reason why no civilisation (since the Neolithic, which saw the emergence of enough productivity to sustain specialists of violence, power-wielding, administration and other state functionaries) has ever existed that does not elicit state structures.

Theorem 1: Whenever there is a chance to influence people and outcomes by power and force, people will develop Structures of Maximal Power (SMP) – and be it for purely defensive reasons. This launches a persistent competition for SMP, the most powerful and sophisticated variant of which being the modern territorial central state.

Theorem 2: In order to overthrow a SMP you need another SMP that is even more powerful.

Theorem 3: The individual has two options in the face of SMP. (3a) Either he complies, in which case he supports the SMP. (3b) Or he resists and revolts, in which case Theorem 2 applies.

As for Theorem 3a: Never underestimate the motives for an individual to wish to comply with and support the state; the most powerful of all being the state’s ability to overcome anarchy, or if you like anomie (both of which words have the same meaning to me, as the absence of SMP means violent chaos, a gory rush to develop stable SMP where none exist).

Well captured in Mancur Olson’s theory of the transition from regimes of roving bandits and stationary bandits (the state), both rulers and the people benefit from state structures as compared with anarchy. As the success of the Taliban attests, people support those – even though disliked in many other respects by them – who can bring an end to anarchy. The difference between anarchy and non-anarchy is huge. Which is – regrettably - hard to understand by people thoroughly used to (state guaranteed) peace.  

http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.pdf

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3).

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3)

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I have come to believe that anarcho-capitalism (AC) is a second – rather successful – attempt at usurping the meaning of liberalism; the first usurpation having been accomplished by America’s socialists and social democrats, i.e. the Democratic party, its doctrine and followers.

I see classical liberalism standing between and clearly separated from two extremes: statism - an attitude that uncritically ascribes more benignity and problem solving capability to the state than is warranted; and anarchism, which is statism in reverse, ascribing counterfactually total malignity and dysfunctionality to the state. Both extremes represent a form of escapism, a running away from an uncomfortable area of ambiguity.

The classical liberal, by contrast, bears up against the tension that emanates from the ambivalent mix of good and bad which has evolved along with the state. He faces this messy part of reality, recognising that the state is an evolutionary product that will not go away (in any reasonably foreseeable time) and, in fact, represents a condition of liberty, a requirement for liberty to exist.

The crux of the AC error lies in a tacit assumption on which the entire philosophy is based: liberty must be self-generating. The opposite is true, of course, as is nicely captured in the motto of our RSE blog. While it is certainly desirable for liberty to be self-generating, the desired condition can never come about.

Liberty is always being won from a hodge-podge of things outside of or even antithetical to liberty. The factors outside of or antithetical to liberty are persistent or are renewing themselves so that they need to be incessantly repelled and rolled back. In fact, liberty is conducive to producing anti-liberty material, for instance by allowing people to develop and propagate doctrines that compete against liberalism.

I have recently come across a quote (I can’t remember where) to the effect that philosophical schools often take perfectly reasonable continua and get into trouble by turning them into dichotomies.

That’s the problem with AC, too.  

The state is a multi-dimensional continuum which includes grown goods and bads, which are often inextricably intertwined. The state cannot be arbitrarily bad, it must be good as well, to survive.

Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on voit pas: followers of AC suffer from a bit of a Bastiat-deficit in this respect – they only see what is bad about the state, they do not see what is good about it.

However, much of what is good about the state is naturally hard to see – like peace, freedom or justice which come about when certain things DO NOT OCCUR.

I am being protected and helped in countless ways by the state. To the extent that the state depends on popular acceptance and a sound, preferably even a growing material base, it is rational for government to enforce individual rights etc. For instance, the gradual rise to power of the French central state/royal dynasty of the Carpet and the rise of its partner, the bourgeois commercial classes in France against the emperor, the clergy and the feudal power holders is a well documented example of how the state has rationally sided with individual and property rights and many other conditions conducive to free(er) markets and personal liberty.

Other forms of SMP (Structures of Maximal Power – see more in Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3)) such as state leagues and city states failed to prevail in the competition with the central territorial state. In the case of these alternative, ultimately defeated SMP, the structure of coercive capability was simply not stringent enough.  Put more bluntly, they were not powerful enough to be effective supporters of budding capitalism and the freedom that comes with it.

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3).

“But They Got The Suspect.” …That’s Not the Point!!! (Guest Post)

By Doug Newman.  

”The welfare of humanity is the alibi of tyrants.” – Albert Camus

Here are 30 thoughts about the martial law which was imposed on Boston in the name of apprehending one bombing suspect.

1. The Marathon bombings constituted a horrible crime. Likewise for the killing of the MIT police officer. Thoughts, prayers and condolences need to be offered to all affected.

2. The suspects could be totally guilty.

3.  The suspects could be totally innocent.

4. The suspects were at large for over 3 days, but Boston was not on lockdown. Then, all of a sudden, it was deemed necessary to put Boston and several surrounding towns on lockdown.

5.  Is this the way it is going to be now in the aftermath of high profile crimes?

6.  Will the American people continue to tolerate it?

7.  If the answer to #6 is “yes”, this is ought to frighten you more than any terrorist. The cops are the business end of the government. And when they can put whole cities on lockdown, what can’t they – or any government entity – do?

Just what kind of America awaits this young girl?

8.  I am all good with cops pursuing violent criminals. This does not justify martial law.

9.  Why am I concerned about rights at a time when suspected terrorists are on the loose? Because it is in times like this when governments want to take away liberty and people are more than willing to give up their liberty – in the name of “security”.

10.  There wasn’t a lot of street crime in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. The cops could do as they pleased. Would you want to live in either place? How “safe” would you feel?

11.  The most dangerous criminals have always been in governments. They have always sent police to do their dirty work. They always dress things up in the name of some higher good.

12. 238 years ago today, near Boston, “the shot heard ’round the world” was fired. King George III did a lot of bad things. Did he ever put an entire city on lockdown?

Lexington Green. 13 miles from Boston. 238 years ago today.

13. The lockdown of Boston in pursuit of one accused terrorist came on the 20^thanniversary of the torching by the feds of 80 innocent citizens near Waco. This was a trial balloon that was floated before a brainwashed nation to see just how much Uncle Sam could get away with. As it turns out, he can get away with just about anything.

14. The lockdown of Boston came on the 18th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Several witnesses claim to have seen a suspect known only as John Doe #2. A fugitive suspect in a bombing that killed 168 people did not cause the area around OKC to be put on lockdown. Why, then, was it necessary to put Boston and several suburbs under martial law after the killing of four people?

15. “But these were local police”, you say. Police have become more and more militarized and federalized in recent years, especially since 9/11.

Can anyone here say “occupying army”?

16. The media parrot everything the authorities say.

17. Millions of Americans believe everything the mainstream media says.

18. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc. etc. are part of this mainstream media.

19. The 5th Amendment demands due process regardless of the severity of the charges or the weight of public opinion against the defendant.

20. The 6th Amendment spells out the details of due process.

21. If these protections don’t apply to the suspects here, they don’t apply to you or me either.

22. If you will cheer on the authorities in this instance, you had just better hope and pray that you are never falsely accused of anything.

23. Most criminals are not Muslim.

24. 99-plus percent of Muslims are not violent criminals.

25. The most violent demographic in America is unmarried men. Let’s go after THEM! Oh, wait. Let’s not. I am an unmarried man.

26. It is always easy to say that your government should “do something” as long as they do it to somebody else.

From the Boston Globe – April 19, 2013

27. NEVER GIVE UP YOUR GUNS! They are your last line of defense against any kind of crazies – be they terrorists or rogue police.

28. How many military veterans who “fought for our freedom” were on the receiving end of Friday’s lockdown?

29. You will note that I have not said anything about conspiracies, “false flags”, etc. Even if everything the authorities are saying  is entirely true, their reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings is totally grotesque and tyrannical.

30. Dear God, why did You task me with being a “watchman on the wall”? (Ezekiel 33:6) Why do I have to be the bearer of this kind of news? Why couldn’t You give me a “nicer” ministry?
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If you would like to post this elsewhere, please email me and include a link to this URL. Thanks!

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

Liberty's Dawn

Writes Emma Griffin, the author of Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution:

Writers and academics often show an interesting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, they regard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to lift people out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the opposite conclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the end of more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitative employment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. It robbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, we find that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment. Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britain began to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greater numbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factories and mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, penned their stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of their life devoted to labor. In the process, they produced a remarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one that looks very different from the standard historical narrative.

Make sure to read the rest.

See also this excellent lecture by Ralph Raico:

 

Egoism, Altruism, and the Welfare State

Jaana Woiceshyn offers an interesting take on the dichotomy of egoism and altruism. In the below article, she makes an observation whose implications I find highly disturbing. If people stop learning (in term of moral discernment) in their "best" years, and if by then the majority are steeped in politically correct altruism, liberty has a naturally restricted target groups, in fact, a tiny one, indeed.

Research shows that most people do not think about ethics explicitly after their late teens or early twenties, implicitly choosing instead to follow cultural norms and the values they were taught at home, if any. The closest they come to choosing an “obvious” moral code is to follow cultural norms—which means subscribing to the moral code dominant around the world: altruism.

The entire article.

David Kelly gives an excellent presentation on the "moral" underpinnings of our radically altruistic welfare state.

 

The Life and Death of Democracy...

...is the title of a book by John Keane that I am reading in substantial extracts, at the moment. It is an exceedingly well written, thoughtful and inspiring book.

I have never been an anarcho-capitalist, but as a user of the vast resources - articles and ebooks - available from the LvMI, I have been tempted into ignoring alternatives to the often simplistic and enclosed views of the Rothbardians, especially concerning the state, democracy, and a number of topics in the field of economics. 

Presently, I am looking into the issue of democracy, and have made this diary entry to encourage me to pursue the below intuition - and it turns out, Keane's book provides material that confirms the hunch:

Freedom and democracy form a tense relationship. Isonomia, equality before the law – that precursor and beginning of the rule of law – gives rise to a desire to further strengthen this firewall against tyrannical domination: democracy is added to it, as a means of controlling rulers and permitting a bloodless change of government.

Why is it that there seems to be a continuing affinity that ties together the rule of law, a comparatively high degree of personal and economic freedom, and democracy?

A vague suspicion: practises characteristic of the rule of law, personal and economic freedom are protected by a subset and intersecting set of rights equally requisite to maintain democracy. In order to keep democracy alive one mustn’t undermine these common rights. Though democracy may be popular because it opens up options to act in ways that can be directed against freedom, still continued effectiveness of democracy is wedded to the need to respect rights that lend a certain robustness to freedom, too.