Pence and the Skater

A homosexual male figure skater on the American Olympic team made news this week by announcing he wanted nothing to do with Vice President Pence because he thought Pence supported so-called gay conversion therapy, i.e. therapy to change one’s sexual interests from homosexual to heterosexual.   It turned out that Pence said he didn’t, but why should it matter much if he had?  (It is  interesting that many on the left are in the unusual position of claiming that while wanting or pretending to alter one’s demonstrably genetically determined sex is a fine, admirable, and completely doable thing, any attempt to change one’s conjecturally genetically influenced sexual interests is both impossible and a black sin.) While no one should be coerced into entering any therapy, any adult wishing to change something about himself is free to get any sort of therapy he likes from anyone willing to provide it – quacks, charlatans, or otherwise. It is no one’s business including no other homosexual’s business if a homosexual decides to try such therapy. One may think doing so is pointless, futile, or wrong, but in a free country people get to do things others think are pointless, futile, or wrong.  

For centuries in Europe and for many decades after the founding of this country proponents of traditional Christian moral opinions made homosexuality illegal and homosexuals subject to persecution by officials.  The laws were often ignored or enforced only spottily, but the threat always was present.  Some homosexuals  were punished, and many or most had to be careful in public and lost some of  their freedom of association.  American libertarians and many liberals opposed these laws and supported the right of homosexuals for the same reasons  they supported the right of everyone to live peaceably as he chooses without the interference of officials, and eventually the laws were repealed or overturned. There has also been a change in the culture with many and probably most people now believing that condemning homosexuals as sinners or perverts is wrongheaded or even immoral.

While that cultural change is good, there is now a new problem as illustrated by such things as  attempts to outlaw voluntary conversion therapy or force unwilling florists and bakers to participate in same sex weddings.  Many people, homosexual and otherwise, now believe that  their superior moral  understanding  on such things gives them the right to suppress and punish a new class of sinners – those who either favor the traditional Christian belief that homosexuality is sinful or for reasons of  their own find it undesirable or risible.  This is wrong  for the same reasons punishing homosexuals was  wrong. It is also dangerous.  Homosexuals are a very small minority in this country, and there are many millions of traditional people. Political winds and fashions change. Worms turn. It is both right and safer to defend the right of  all people to think and behave peaceably as they like, whether one approves not, than to attempt to force people to conform.  To paraphrase a great man, those who deny tolerance to others, run the risk of not getting it for themselves.  Diversity of every sort is safer when there is not even the possibility of the power of the government being used to enforce conformity. Libertarians know this, and others should learn it. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Really Awful

America is a very diverse country, not in the fatuous, superficial, racial sense of present day political correctness but in terms of the habits, lifestyles, opinions, and weltanschauungen  of its people.  Millions of Americans hold beliefs that millions of other Americans find questionable, false, detestable, or idiotic. Millions of Americans conduct their lives in ways and engage in activities that millions of other Americans see as wrong, counterproductive, immoral, despicable, or even evil. Some differences are ephemeral and reconcilable,  but many are deep, lasting, and intractable. This is nothing new. Nostalgic  references to a time  - whether the turn of the 20^th Century, the Eisenhower years,  or some other good old days  – when things were completely  harmonious and homogeneous  do not  hold up in light of history.  However there are times when the differences lead to more contention, rancor, and conflict than others. We are in one of those times now. 

Libertarians offer a good solution for this. Leave each other alone and allow every person to lead his life as he wishes so long as he commits no crimes against the life or property of anyone else.  In a free society  many people  still would have no use for the beliefs or actions of some of their fellow citizens, but they would not be able to get officials to harm or punish them on account of it. Approval would be optional, but tolerance would be unavoidable.   

This was the principle  the Founding Fathers followed  in separating religion and government.   Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.” Likewise it does me no injury  if my neighbors have sex with one woman, two men, or no one at all, eat kale or Big Macs,  dress  as men, as women, or alternate according to mood,  read porn or devotionals,  save money or spend foolishly,   drink, smoke, consume drugs, or abstain,  like John Wayne, Meryl Streep, both, or neither, own a dozen guns or none, stay in shape or get fat, are hunters  or vegans, drive  F250s or  Priuses,  or like me or decline  to associate or do business with  me with so long as they do  not attempt to have their ways forced others.  If enough people realized that and acted accordingly, our differences and  mutual dislikes would not be the problem and danger they are. (There would still be hard cases, gray areas, and controversies – many about public areas and property.  But we would have a better basis for a civil and liberal society.)

However there is not much evidence these days that a libertarian solution is a likely one, at least in the short term. So it is worth looking at other less desirable ways in which the situation could play out. Perhaps  the worst likely outcome would be for the present condition  to continue or worsen with disparate groups and coalitions struggling to gain control of the federal government to impose their wishes on the entire population,  and either one faction gaining long term control or the abusive power rotating and  the people being yo-yoed  by changes of administration and political fashion.   It is easy to see how continuing on the present trend in either way could produce worse sectionalism, bitterness, and hostility than we have today. In the extreme case of a group in power grossly overstepping,  it could lead to dissolution of the union  or even guerrilla civil war.

Several people have proposed a renewal of federalism as a palliative to ease tensions and  reduce  present day conflicts. In their proposals  the power to decide many contentious political issues would move from the federal government to state or local governments.   If officials in California, New York, Portland, or  Philadelphia wanted to ban guns that look scary to them, dictate what information job seekers could put in resumes, mandate seminars on transitioning  gender for third graders in the public schools, prohibit showering with hot water, or punish people for throwing the residue of an unappetizing dinner in the trash, they could with impunity but  without any possible effect on those outside their jurisdiction.  If officials in Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma City, or Pensacola wanted to require drilling for oil in city parks, prohibit cross dressing men from using women’s restrooms,  mandate pro-abstinence indoctrination in the public schools, or impose fines on any  able bodied citizens not having adequate  means of self-defense in their homes, they could with impunity but without any possible effect on those outside their jurisdiction. 

This idea has some merit. However it is important to remember that it is still a bad outcome.  Being pushed around by state and local politicians  and bureaucrats  is not intrinsically better  than being pushed around by federal ones. But at least a person could move away.  And it might lower the pressure and help keep the lid from blowing off, at least for a while.

Two Weeks Later

At the start of the movie The Crimson Pirate, Burt Lancaster as the  pirate Captain  Vallo warns the audience to believe nothing it hears and only half of what it sees. That would be good advice as well for someone considering  the comments about and reactions to the recent election.  

Some of Trump’s supporters have claimed a mandate from the people for him and his policies, ignoring both the fact that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for him and polls consistently showing majorities disapproving of both candidates.  Even allowing for problems of accuracy in polling, it seems clear that a large number of people who voted for Trump chose him as the lesser of two evils, not as someone they would have wanted apart from who his opponent was.  This election was very close and far from any sort of landslide.  (There has not been a landslide in a presidential election in this country since 1984. Large  margins in the electoral college for George H. W. Bush and Barack Obama in 1988 and 2008 might give the impression of a landslide, but  neither received as much as 53.5% of the votes. No candidate for president since 1984  besides these two men has gotten even a simple majority of votes cast.)

For months before the election large numbers of  so-called establishment Republicans  assumed Trump would lose and claimed to be adamantly opposed to him both on principle and because of his flawed character and bad behavior.  Some supported Hillary Clinton, overtly or otherwise,  while others simply sat out the presidential election. Now that Trump has won, a some of them seem to have put those principles and reservations aside and decided he is not so bad after all -  maybe even someone they would like to work for in the new administration.  Yet Trump is the same person with the same ideas as he was last summer.

I have not seen much about it in the news, but the Libertarian party had its best results ever, with Gary Johnson receiving over four million votes. This was remarkable, particularly  considering that Johnson was far from a dynamic campaigner  and that the election was very close – which probably led many people who might have preferred to  support Johnson to vote for one of the major candidates.  There were times in the campaign when polls had him favored by around ten percent of the voters.  Johnson was helped by the weakness and unpopularity of Clinton and Trump, but his showing was still impressive and could help hasten the time when one or both  of the major parties take libertarian voters and ideas seriously. It surely made a good start.  

Some of the  worst, but  also most amusing,  reactions have come from the leftists and their publicists in the traditional media. We have had rioting, looting, vandalism,  demands for safe spaces and counseling, calls for  defiance or even revolution, expressions of crushing fear and anxiety, warning shouts that the Nazis are coming,  and immense amounts of self-righteous pouting – along with some curiously reasoned analysis of what went wrong.  Some have blamed Clinton’s defeat on racism, despite the rather obvious facts that she and her running mate were white and that the country had chosen a black man to be president in each of the prior elections. Some said the problem was  with poorly educated white people (or trash) who voted for Trump because they were poorly educated (trash), despite the fact that Trump won among  both non-college educated and college-educated white people and did better than Romney had among non-white voters.  Few seem to have considered the possibility that if the left could not win with a far more experienced,  far better funded candidate with almost all of the traditional media strongly behind her against a clumsy and very flawed newcomer who was not even supported by much of his own party, there could be things about their policies and ideology many people reject.  It seems fairly clear that  many who voted for Trump  were voting against the left rather than out of any enthusiasm for him.   (The fact that in exit polls  an unusually high percentage of voters were said to have listed filling vacancies on the supreme court as influencing how  they voted is an interesting datum supporting this notion.)  Yet that seems not to be being considered much in the losers’  post mortems.

The main  lesson I hope people can learn from this election is that we would be better off giving all  politicians and governments far less power. A political process that in a country of three hundred million people left us with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should help lead people to consider that idea.

A Simple Solution

In several cases in recent news, Christian business people such as florists and bakers have gotten in trouble with local authorities for refusing to sell goods and services to weddings between homosexuals. A pizza joint in Indiana was threatened and pressured to close after its owner said she would not want to cater the wedding of a homosexual couple.  In an attempt to turn the tables, a Christian asked various bakeries to produce cakes featuring quotes from the Bible condemning homosexuality and filed complaints with authorities when he was turned down. Presumed mainly Christian sympathizers with the owners of the pizza place raised almost a million dollars for them with an online appeal. Things seem to be both getting hot and being heated up by both conservatives and leftists in the media.

To libertarians the means of dealing with such disputes are  obvious. Simply leave people alone and let them make their own decisions about what they want to do. If a Christian or Muslim baker does not want to bake a cake for the wedding of a homosexual couple,  let him lose the business, and let the people getting married go find a willing vendor and make their purchase from him.  If people find the actions of the baker objectionable and bigoted, let them decide not to patronize his  store and go buy  their cookies and pastries elsewhere.   

That is how such a dispute would be handled in a free and civil society.   In our present environment which is not fully free and far from civil, we often get instead antagonistic groups fighting to use the coercive power of government to make other people obey their dictates.  Such a condition, besides being wrong and violating the rights of the losers, is dangerous for the winners. Political winds change, and a government that can force a Christian to act against his principles today can force someone else to act against his next month or next year.  It is not only more ethical but more prudent to respect and demand respect for the rights of all, including the rights of those who do things one disapproves of. 

Eric Garner and the Cops

People in New York are protesting in the streets after  the decision not to prosecute the cops who killed Eric Garner. They are right to do so.  This case does not have the ambiguity of the more publicized killing in Ferguson, Missouri. The event  was recorded  on video. Garner was not doing anything  actually wrong or harmful to anyone.  His so-called crime was selling untaxed cigarettes, and a group of cops jumped him, choked him as he shouted he could not breathe, and killed him. As a writer at Reason magazine said, harshly but accurately, he was in  a sense killed for city of New York revenue enhancement.

 

One can agree with conservative apologists for the police that Garner made a pragmatic mistake when he resisted (though it is easy to see how a person fed up with continued bullying and harassment might put pragmatism aside and imprudently but bravely stand up for himself) without thinking that absolves the cops who started the trouble by hassling Garner for no good reason and then brutalized and killed him.  It is usually imprudent  to resist the demands of armed and dangerous cops just as in a police state it is usually a bad idea to try to run when the Gestapo officers surround you and say “papiere, bitte”, but such practical considerations miss the point.   In a free society there are  no Gestapos, and the cops do not have the authority  to accost or abuse  or kill citizens who are not doing anyone harm.  America is far from  a police state, but neither is it a fully free society. It is somewhere in between, and since 2001 it has moved in the wrong direction.

As a start toward correcting  things,  Americans need to oppose and reverse the militarization of the police, the expansion of police powers  at all levels of government, and  the tendency to give enforcers of laws and rules  too much authority and leeway and to fail to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. It will not be easy. Too  many leftists tend to ignore or excuse abuses and  thuggery when the enforcers are employed by the federal government or the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as a Randy Weaver),  while too many conservatives tend to ignore or excuse abuses and thuggery when the enforcers are employed by local governments or  the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as an Eric Garner).   Both need to realize that dangerous police power is dangerous, and their friends will not always be the ones wielding it. 

Un-ominous Parallels?

We are now in the fourth year of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Unlike the centennial in the early 1960’s, the sesquicentennial has gone largely unmentioned in the traditional media. I think there are several reasons for this. The most obvious is simple ignorance. There are many in the media who do not know or understand much history.  Beyond that, attitudes and prejudices common among people in  the media preclude a sense or appreciation of the idea of an epic struggle.  Then too the fact of a war where hundreds of thousands white Americans fought and died to free black slaves runs counter to the official  political myth of unrelenting and exceptionless evil behavior  of whites toward blacks at all times before 1964. Also, for some on the left,  reflecting on the outcome of  Civil War would produce mixed feeling  because besides freeing the slaves, it preserved the nation they hate most in the world.   

Of course many of us think about the war, and Lincoln, and Grant and Sherman and Lee and the rest. I have lately thought and written about the divisions in the country in the years leading up to the Civil War and some similarities between that time and ours.

Recently I noticed something  I had not thought of before. In the years before  the Civil War, many Southern slave holders underestimated the abolitionists, dismissing them as a fringe group funded by a few wealthy troublemakers  and excited by a passionate novel written by an opinionated woman.  They misjudged the strength, growth, and appeal of the movement and ideas opposing them until the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans made it obvious.  Replace some New England merchants with people like the Koch brothers and Harriet Beecher Stowe with Ayn Rand, and you would be pretty close  to the attitude of the American statist establishment toward the libertarian and anti-establishment agitation of the present time. We can hope that they too are missing something, that the parallelism holds,  the leftists continue to underestimate us, and  our ideas have a similar influence, though of course without a civil war. Seemingly stranger things have happened. In the early 1980’s few would have expected the Soviet Empire to collapse within ten years.  Perhaps we can see a new birth of freedom in this country. We surely need to try to get one.  

True, But Irrelevant

The defining libertarian political principle is the idea that every person owns his own life, and others should not use coercion against him unless he has committed crimes against them.  Anarchists have argued that by the mere acts of funding their activities through extortion and asserting  authority over people who have not consented to it explicitly, all governments violate this principle.  Many libertarian thinkers have worked vigorously to try to refute  this claim – unsuccessfully and, I think, unnecessarily. The fact is the anarchists are right in their observation, but it does not matter that they are right, because the conclusions they draw from it are wrong. For it does not follow at all from the fact that all governments, even strictly limited ones, violate people’s rights to some degree that a society without a government would  produce the maximum attainable levels of liberty and respect for people’s rights.  Nor can anarchists produce examples  in history where such societies thrived or plausibly could have thrived. Rather, if anything,  the evidence of history indicates an anarchist  society would not survive long  as a free one before being subjugated by external enemies or torn apart by internal conflicts with those within it who did not accept its principles, leaving its inhabitants with less liberty than they might have enjoyed otherwise.  (Of course small anarchic communities have existed and thrived from time to time, but, as far as I can tell, only under the umbrella  of some state or in very remote and effectively unvisited places.)

In any particular context  the goal of libertarian political action should be to work for the freest society possible within that context while seeking  to alter  the context in directions making more liberty possible.  The context and understanding it are crucial for making specific decisions. For example during most of  the 19^th Century the United States faced no significant threat from foreign enemies and had no need for a large army. Friends of liberty would have been right to oppose creating one. But during the awful summer of 1940, creating huge and powerful American armed forces as quickly as possible was the least bad alternative the situation allowed, and friends of liberty would have been right and serving the cause of liberty to support doing so.

Recognizing the importance of context does not mean descending to cynicism or utilitarianism or abandoning ideals. It means only getting the facts and taking them into account before deciding what to do, something which is usually a good idea in just about any area if a person cares about the outcome of what he is setting out to do.

As to the anarchists, if they can find a large group of people reasonable, peaceful, and just enough to live freely and harmoniously with disputes between individuals or organizations solved by referring them to mutually acceptable, voluntarily chosen arbiters and a place for them never needing protection from outside enemies and free of violent, disruptive internal discord, they should go for it and  send the rest of us gloating postcards  from their new utopia.  It would nice to believe that someday and somewhere such a society might be possible, but I know of no such people or place ever having existed. So we need governments. Thomas Paine, as usual, said it very well. Government at its best is a necessary evil. The trick is to prevent its being an intolerable one.

Knowing What Does Not Matter

Many people are very pessimistic about the country because of the government. While there are real problems and dangers, some people are overreacting.  Of course many of the things the government does do matter. When the government starts a war or infringes on people’s rights or seizes a large part of a their wealth or income at gunpoint or  invades their homes and tosses them in jail, it matters a good deal. However many other things do not matter, and the belief that they do is an impediment to deciding what does and does not need to be taken seriously. At any particular time a government is just a group of people. In a free society those people provide the valuable functions of protecting the citizens’ lives, rights, and property, settling disputes through just laws, and defending the nation against foreign enemies. In a tyranny they function as a particularly powerful and dangerous criminal syndicate. In the present day United States they fall somewhere in between. The belief that a government is something above and beyond that must be respected, obeyed, and taken seriously  is a superstitious hold over from the days when rulers were believed to hold power by divine right. 

A good example of one aspect of taking the government too seriously comes from the controversy over homosexual marriage. A few years ago such marriages were illegal all over the country. Now they are legal in many locations. Before the laws changed homosexuals could marry with any ceremony they liked, performed by anyone willing to perform it, and attach any personal meaning to the event and the union they liked. At the same time others who saw marriage in different terms could see such unions as invalid, meaningless, or immoral and, if they liked,  refuse to recognize them as marriages at all.  Now  in places where the law has changed, homosexuals can marry with any ceremony they like, performed by anyone willing to perform it, and attach any personal meaning to the event and the union they like. At the same time others who see marriage in different terms can see such unions as invalid, meaningless, or immoral and, if they like,  refuse to recognize them as marriages at all.  The only difference (apart from those few  pragmatic issues that were never central to the controversy or the passions it aroused) is that now the unions have been declared valid by a majority of a legislature.   Yet people on both sides of the controversy act as though something tremendous has happened, and, joyfully or sadly, believe some important sanction has been granted and some moral value gained or lost. This is particularly strange since many of those same people share the opinion of legislative bodies as being comprised mainly of shysters, demagogues, grafters, con artists, thieves, and pompous ignoramuses.  Few sensible people would see anything culturally meaningful in a collection similarly questionable individuals, or even the same individuals acting apart from their official capacity, getting together and voting to favor or oppose homosexual marriage.  They should ask themselves why they take it so seriously when it happens in a capitol building.  People need to learn what to dismiss and laugh off.

They also need to learn when they do and do not have an obligation to obey a government’s edicts.  Some laws are proper and reasonable and should command obedience. Even some laws  such as an age requirement for voting that are arbitrary and unreasonable in some individual cases can be justified  if no better alternative is available.  However, under many governments there are laws and rules that  are unjustified and deserve no respect.  As an illustration we can consider a hypothetical example with some historical relevance.  At present it is  legal in the United States for citizens to own gold and silver coins. Many people own these commodities as investments or insurance against inflation and debasement of the currency.  Suppose that next month, in the Restoration of Consumer Confidence Act of 2013, the government bans private ownership of gold and silver coins and orders everyone to exchange his coins for thirty year treasury bonds.  Owning the coins would not have switched from being morally okay in February to morally wrong in March because a group of officials decided they did not like the practice, and a person would be under no ethical compulsion to obey the decree. The law itself, as opposed to the possible risks of disobeying it, should not be taken seriously at all, any more than any other claim from someone that “it’s right (or wrong) because I say so”.  Rather a person should decide whether or not to comply on purely pragmatic considerations – such as the amount of compensation the government offers for the coins, the inconvenience of having to hide the coins and trade them on a black market, the risk of getting caught, the penalties for getting caught, and so on. If  the risks and penalties were small enough, it might be perfectly reasonable to ignore the ban altogether. Risky or not, it would be within a person’s rights to do so.  Someone doing so should not feel like a criminal. He should just be careful. 

Gödel and the School Board

In the early decades of the Twentieth Century there was an interest in creating  a purely formal system  for mathematics consisting of symbolic objects and propositional entities  created by concatenations of symbols according to the rules of the system without much reference to what the objects or entities  actually were or meant and which was complete in the sense that  every such  entity allowed by the rules of the system  would be decidable as valid or not according to the rules of the system. (Why people worried about doing this is interesting in itself, but that is a story for another day.) In 1930 Kurt Gödel  proved that such a complete formal system was impossible, basically by showing that any such system tripped over an elaborate version of the liar paradox.

Bureaucrats, school administrators, and officials typically have a somewhat analogous set of interests and desires. Many of them yearn in a heartfelt way for a set of rules complete and comprehensive enough to dictate their actions and rulings in every case without any need for applying intelligence, common sense, general principles, or considerations of context. Indeed this reverence for and reliance upon rules and the accompanying reluctance to consider context and actual meaning are often seen as the hallmarks of the bureaucratic mentality.

These is also a relevant  analogue of Gödel’s theorem, not a proof,  but an observation: it is impossible to construct a set of formal rules governing human behavior which will answer every question under their purview in a just and appropriate way without applying thought and considerations of context to individual situations.

A general understanding and acceptance of this limitation and its implications probably would spoil the lunches of public servants everywhere and induce devastating clinical depression in human resources directors and school superintendents from coast to coast - neither a particularly bad thing.  However it should also be a warning to those libertarians who yearn for a somewhat similarly comprehensive set of rules for a free society. It reminds them that there will always be unusual cases and special situations.

As a simple example consider a free  society with laws and rules respecting property rights. Suppose that person A buys rural land completely surrounding the land owned and occupied by person B. It is fairly easy to come up with laws based on principles of individual rights saying that in such a situation A must grant B some sort of easement to come and go to and from his property, and B while using the easement must  respect A’s general right to control his own property.  Such rules, however, may not get things anywhere near to an actual solution, particularly if there are unusual conditions about the properties or if A  and/or B is a jackass.  It then would be necessary to arrive at an ad hoc solution based on general principles of fairness and reasonableness and the details of the particular situation.  A reasonably written law would anticipate such situations and allow for their resolution in this manner rather than striving for prescriptive completeness. A reasonably thought out legal and political theory would do the same. This incompleteness is not a problem for libertarian theory. It is really only a reminder that most of the time you can’t get away without thinking and paying attention to the facts and details.