6-yr-old Libertarian Challenges City Council

Six-year-old Zoe Holtz seems to have inherited the libertarian principles of her dad Brian (a Libertarian Party state leader) and the entrepreneurial instincts of her mom Melisse (a Stanford Business School grad). After beta-testing her commerce skills several times with pretend lemonade and cookie stands in her family living room, Zoe was shocked to hear that in her new hometown of Los Altos Hills, lemonade stands are forbidden. So she accompanied Brian to a City Council meeting in April, resolved to ask the city leaders why she can't sell lemonade. On the short minivan ride to City Hall she rehearsed her case, arguing "something shouldn't be against the rules just because it annoys some people, or else everything would be against the rules."

However, she lost her nerve at the podium looking up at the imposing rostrum of the town (pop. 8000), and her dad had to ask her question for her. The Council members didn't seem to know that lemonade stands weren't allowed, and the Mayor inadvertently hinted at the dangers of such regulations when he joked that her lemonade stand would be OK as long as he got free lemonade. When the town staff sheepishly pointed out that the town code prohibits vending, the Council members virtually tripped over each other in assuring Zoe that the authorities would look the other way if her stand were safely off the road and only during daylight hours. The Council minutes report the episode this way:

Zoe Holtz, resident, with the assistance of her father, asked the Council if it was "ok" for her to have a lemonade stand in her neighborhood. City Attorney Steve Mattas explained that with the exception of the sale of agricultural products produced on resident’s property; sale of merchandise/goods was prohibited by the Town’s Codes. Mattas offered that there were concerns about traffic and safety. He noted that historically, the Town did not enforce the code with respect to lemonade stands. Council consensus was to support her request with the stipulation that it be done in a safe manner.

However, the City Attorney is wrong about his town history. A 2004 article in the Los Altos Town Crier reported that a deputy sheriff shut down a child's lemonade stand in Los Altos Hills even though no complaints had been received.

The following Saturday, Zoe set about to exercise her newly-won freedom. She set up a lemonade stand on the quiet street in front of her house, and staffed it with the assistance of her sister Shannon and her best friend Cassie. (She's said before she wants "employees".) Most of their sales were to their parents and immediate neighbors, so it's clear that she has a bit to learn about location and pricing (as the photo shows).

But she has time -- and now, a little more freedom to use it.

CF's New Antiwar Obsession Still Won't Grow the LP

California Freedom editor Tom Sipos writing in the August issue critiques my article therein. The two main points of my article (original here) were 1) empirical data from the 2000 and 2004 elections suggests that antiwar won't grow the LP, and 2) libertarian antiwar dogmatism comes from denial of the public goods argument for the existence of the state. Sipos addresses neither point, and instead writes:

TS) in this issue Brian Holtz defends the war (TS

This is not quite accurate. In the article I defend "the U.S. overthrow of Saddam" and the attempt to achieve the objectives I described as "1) eliminating any WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing Saddam in favor of a democratic framework designed to protect fundamental human rights." However, I describe those objectives as "achieved", and nowhere in the article do I suggest that the war is worth continuing. I instead say "Iraqis (and war critics in America) failed to predict that sectarian strife was to develop into a Sunni-Shia civil war and negate much of the value of achieving objective #2." In the blog posting that my article links to, I explicitly say: "Iraq's thirst for civil war has effectively exhausted the reconstruction and stabilization efforts we owed the Iraqis for having liberated them. It is now time to accept our partial victory and let the Iraqi people take responsibility for their own future."

BH) The crucial question is whether the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists. (BH

TS) Holtz’s word choice is intriguing. He doesn’t say that borders are moral, albeit not moral absolutes. Rather, he characterizes borders as “lines drawn on maps by statists.” He surely knows that in libertarian circles to characterize anything as “statist” is to impugn its validity. Holtz thus appeals to libertarian purism to justify the Iraq War. (TS

No, I appeal to libertarian purism to show the self-contradiction involved in a libertarian "purist" letting statists decide for him where human liberty should be defended.

TS) But does he support, or even appreciate, his principle’s logical conclusion? If borders are illegitimate, then tens of millions more Mexicans have an absolute right of entry into the US. (TS

I of course appreciate that anti-statism implies open borders. But anti-statism is not my principle, and I do not support open borders.

TS) Most “pro-defense” libertarians support borders, so it’s curious to see Holtz base an argument on their invalidity. (TS

Libertarian "purists" assert that any moral duty of a liberty-loving polity/community/society to voluntarily defend human liberty vanishes completely at places in the world that correspond precisely to lines drawn on maps by people who are in fact statists. This framing of the issue indeed invokes the anti-statism of libertarian "purists" against them, but my own arguments do not assume that borders are meaningless for purposes of normative political theory.

TS) by imposing a collectivist “duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty,” Holtz simultaneously contradicts his purism. What is a polity, if not a statist creation? (See how the American Heritage Dictionary defines polity.) (TS

As noted above, I do not share the anti-statist view that borders are meaningless in political ethics. By "polity" here I mean a community or society that observes a common set of principles about political organization or lack thereof. The "Imposing a collectivist ..." phrasing above is clearly meant to invoke the specter of state coercion, but almost every anarcholibertarian would agree that individuals have some kind of moral duty to voluntarily cooperate to protect the liberty of their community against tyrants and invaders. The question then becomes: what are the boundaries of the community? If the anarcholibertarian replies that those boundaries are determined by lines drawn on maps by statists, that's a really embarrassing answer for an anarcholibertarian to give.

TS) he does broach some difficult philosophical areas, however unintentionally. (TS

Heh. There are more things in my philosophy, dear Thomas, than are dreamt of in your part of heaven and earth. :-)

TS) Nations are collectives, antithetical to a purist individualism. (TS

Yes, I'm excruciatingly aware of the anarcholibertarian deontological argument against the morality of the existence of that force-initiating institution known as the state. ("State" is preferred over "nation" in the relevant branch of political theory, as "nation" points more at the geographical region and the people who occupy it than it does at the institution that governs it.) For my counter-arguments, see e.g.

• The Anti-Aggression Principle: Better Than NAP/ZAP
• 17 Free Variables in Libertarian Theory
• Is Taxation Theft?

TS) Every nation’s border contains some people who feel oppressed within it. It’s unlibertarian to demand that people “love it or leave it.” (TS

I've never used those words in my life, and I don't understand why they're quoted in something purporting to criticize an essay of mine. I've never argued that the state is legitimized merely by the decisions of its inhabitants not to leave it.

TS) Yet by what right does one nation compel its citizens to “liberate” citizens of another nation (TS

Minarchists don't agree that every possible form of free-riding is a right, by which one may not be compelled by one's neighbors acting together under the auspices of a constitutional democratic republic. I explained this in my article: "The military defense of liberty is the canonical textbook example of what economists call a 'public good' — a good that markets will underproduce due to the Free Rider Problem and thus needs tax financing." The primary purpose of my article was to explain that libertarian antiwar dogmatism comes from denial of the public goods argument for the existence of the state, so for Sipos to ignore this point suggests that my article failed -- or that it succeeded all too well.

TS) —some of whom don’t want to be liberated, either because they like their collective, or because the price in lives and limbs is too high? (TS

Some Germans liked the Nazi regime too. This requirement of universal demand for liberation is nonsensical, since a society by definition doesn't need liberating if every member of it agrees it should be liberated. As for the price in Iraq, my article explicitly cited Iraqi polling data, but Sipos doesn't address that data.

TS) Yes, we have a volunteer force, but if someone enlisted to defend the nation, there was no contractual consent to be used for liberation. (TS

Sipos seems to think that the contract agreed to by members of our all-volunteer armed forces limits their service to defending American soil. He is mistaken, and needs to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_enlistment .

TS) And by what right does a nation exclude immigrants in order to preserve some of its citizens’ economic advantage, or racial or religious majority? (TS

This is off-topic, but my answer has nothing to do with race or religion. I have no problem with property owners in America allowing unlimited immigration of people who never set foot on the land of any non-consenting owner if those sponsors can guarantee that the immigrants will cause no extra burden on public goods, natural monopolies, and natural resources. Otherwise, I'm prepared to allow immigration only when it can be expected to have as little detrimental effect on public goods, natural monopolies, and natural resources as does the average child of legal residents. For more information, see http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=465 .

TS) It’s easy for us to disregard the “collateral damage” wreaked by our liberations when we’re in no risk of being similarly liberated by foreigners. (TS

The question is: what constitutes "similarly liberated"? This reminds me of Ron Paul's inane question about how would we like it if China did to us what we did to Iraq. Of the 14 arguments against libervention that I catalog here, this Patriotic argument is the third weakest. If China had America's track record of attempting to promote and defend liberty and democratic sovereignty, and came here to snap the neck of a genocidal tyrannical George Bush who had used chemical weapons to exterminate entire towns of American dissidents, then I would welcome the Chinese Army with open arms, and might even tear down a statue of Bush to smack it with the sole of my shoe.

---

When I first approached Sipos about answering the Samuels piece that was the object of my essay that I defend above, Sipos replied "the LPC has been silent on the war for the last several years. Bruce ran the paper without mentioning the war." This is simply false. During Bruce Cohen's tenure, CF ran five pieces featuring opposition to intervention, and zero pieces in defense of intervention in general or the Iraq invasion in particular:

• The August 2005 issue published an antiwar LTE by Jay Eckl. The associated brief editor's note merely reported the objective facts that 1) opinions on the war issue were split at the 2005 LPC convention, and 2) the LP is officially anti-intervention. (Thus the editor's note could count as a sixth anti-intervention piece, but I'll be generous to Sipos and not count it separately.)
• The same issue contained an article by Mark Selzer that opposed U.S. efforts to build democracy in Iraq.
• The Sep 2005 issue featured a commentary opposing restrictions on media coverage of the war.
• The same issue contained an article on the LPCA ExCom resolution against the war. (That issue also featured dueling paid advertisements by antiwar libertarians and their opponents, but these were ads and thus not editorial content.)
• The Nov 2005 issue promoted the antiwar "Gold, Freedom, and War" conference.

The Oct 2005 issue contained an LTE that criticized ideological litmus-testing by antiwar libertarians, but it did not mention Iraq and did not contain a single sentence defending intervention in general or the Iraq invasion in particular.

Contrast Bruce's record to that of Mr. Sipos in his first three issues. His first issue had three anti-war articles taking up nearly two entire pages, including the page-one headline. There were two anti-war articles in the July 2007 issue. The current issue contains my critique of antiwar dogmatism, but it is accompanied by the full-length editorial rebuttal that this posting answers. It also contains a brief LTE criticizing CF's sudden antiwar focus, but that is rebutted by a rambling personal editorial note that is twice as long as the LTE itself. Finally, it contains an antiwar book review ("Neo-Conned Into War") that is longer than any of these other pieces (and has no direct connection to the LPCA).

In summary, Cohen ran five pieces over two years featuring opposition to intervention, and zero unpaid content defending intervention. Sipos in three months has run six anti-intervention pieces, and the two opposing pieces he has run have been accompanied by two instant rebuttals -- totaling 8 antiwar pieces in 3 issues.

This isn't balance. It's obsession.

Immigration reform hostage to welfare reform?

Tom Knapp complains about libertarians like Ron Paul and George Phillies who recognize that policy changes aren't made in a vacuum:

TK) It's a neat scam, this holding of one positive reform hostage, while around the corner your political enemies hold its counterpart hostage as well. You won't let your hostage go until they let their hostage go. And they won't let their hostage go until you let yours go [...] you've both successfully avoided responsibility. They've avoided doing something they don't want to do anyway, you've avoided doing something you claim you want to do but are looking for an excuse not to advocate. (TK

Knapp is right to lampoon libertarians who are so economically illiterate as to worry that America's current level of legal and illegal immigration is causing either 1) net negative economic impact or 2) a burden on the welfare system that is anything more than noise next to middle-class entitlements. However, Knapp is wrong to lump me in with libertarians who worry that America's welfare state is the primary obstacle to open borders. He should know from our discussion last year that I consider the primary obstacle to opening immigration is not the policies inside the border, but rather the policies outside it.

While most anarchopuritarians' policy prescriptions are unrealistically utopian merely about America, their stance on open borders is unrealistically utopian about the whole world. That's utopianism squared. Open borders between America and the rest of the world will only be feasible when the differences between America and the world are as small as, say, the differences between America and Canada, or between Alabama and Florida.

Libertarians just aren't thinking clearly when they condition open borders on replacing the welfare state with private charity. If hordes of poor immigrants would cause an intolerable expense for public charity, then they would cause a similar expense for private charity. To the extent that private charity doesn't replace public, it will result in massive downward pressure on unskilled wages and levels of mass squalor unseen outside the Third World.

Another way to state the argument is in a set of propositions which cannot all be believed consistently. For example:

1. Technology will continue to drive the costs (in money as well as social disconnection) of emigration dramatically lower.
2. Polities with significantly more economic liberty will continue to grow dramatically more prosperous than other polities, increasing their attractiveness as immigration destinations.
3. People living in such prosperous polities are reasonable to expect something better than the subsistence labor markets and ubiquitous squalor typical of economically unfree nations.
4. Charity (whether public or private) can and should maintain America’s current effective minimum living standards (which are extravagant by global standards).
5. Immigration of peaceful honest people should be unrestricted.

Even if one doesn't believe that current or prospective technological and demographic conditions don't combine with global disparities in economic freedom to make opening America's borders infeasible, it surely is not tenable to claim as a matter of political philosophy that a liberty-loving human polity should under all conceivable circumstances always allow unrestricted economic immigration. The concept of a "border" in these discussions is a demarcation between regions with different policies. It's just not intellectually credible to maintain that conditions and policies on opposite sides of a border could never vary so widely as to make unrestricted immigration infeasible. If your political theory nevertheless insists that unrestricted economic immigration is always a fundamental human right, then your theory is just plain broken.

DownsizeDC helping the enemies of freedom

To comments@DownsizeDC.org:

I am a member of the California Libertarian Party Executive Committee and the 2006 LP Platform Committee. Since my Green opponent in my 2006 congressional race is a national leader of the 9/11 conspiracy movement, I had the misfortune of acquiring more expertise on 9/11 conspiracies than probably any other leader in the LP or the broader freedom movement.

I write to tell you that you're being duped by leftist enemies of freedom.

Yes, I know you say:

DDC) most of the conspiracy theories that have emerged are speculation, or worse, lunacy. [...] The American public has been turned off by these theories. [...] We believe Al Qaeda supplied the manpower and flew planes into buildings. We believe foreign policy blowback was the primary motive. We believe that it's about the questions: The Jersey Girls deserve an answer. (DDC

Nearly all the victims' families have already gotten an unprecedented per-victim average payoff of $2.3M of taxpayer money, in exchange for which they agreed not to pursue legal action. The 9/11 conspiracy movement will never be satisfied with the independence of any investigation official enough to have subpoena power. If you want well-indexed answers to the conspiracists' questions, see http://911myths.com/, http://debunking911.com/, and http://www.jod911.com/. That your "background" page gives no hint of such resources suggests that you're more interested in cynically pandering to anti-government paranoia than in answering questions about 9/11.

During my campaign I prepared my own set of Questions For The 9/11 "Truth" Movement. If you're serious in saying that "it's about the questions", then you'll ask ask such questions of the conspiracists, and link to such resources on your background page. If you're serious about the questions you ask, then you'll post links to the answers that are already available from public resources. If you don't know how to find them yourself, I'll do it for you. You ask:

DDC) Why had the US military defenses, particularly NORAD, failed to stop any of the four hijacked planes, particularly when the plane crashes were separated by nearly two hours? (DDC

http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

DDC) What about the lack of response, both by the President, who sat in a public school in Florida after the second plane had struck, and his Secret Service detail, whose standard procedure is to grab the President and move him to safety, the morning of 9-11? (DDC

http://www.911myths.com/html/bush_on_9_11.html

DDC) Why have the 9-11 emergency recordings and tapes, plus 500 interviews done of the Fire Department, right after 9-11, been withheld from the public? (DDC

They haven't. http://wcbstv.com/national/topstories_story_228010652.html

DDC) How is that when we have the largest structural collapse in US history and the largest loss of life since the Civil War, not one Congressional official wants to know how this happened? (DDC

NIST conducted an exhaustive investigation of the collapse, and their massive report explains how it happened in excruciating technical and scientific detail.

DDC) Why was a potential suicide-pilot/conspirator who turned himself in nearly a year before 9-11, plus intelligence about hijacking American planes from fourteen nations, plus the Bush-requested Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, ignored? (DDC

The conspirator was not a pilot. The FBI interrogated him for three weeks in 2000. The FBI criticized British authorities for not making him available for the 9/11 investigation. http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38448

Intelligence about hijacking threats wasn't simply "ignored", but intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 have already been exhaustively documented. See pp. 344-348 of the 9/11 Commission Report, and more details at http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq36.html.

http://www.911myths.com/html/august_6_memo.html

DDC) Why did the Justice Department, based on a FBI threat assessment, begin flying the Attorney General and other department officials by private charter jets, as reported by Dan Rather, CBS News, on July 26, 2001? (DDC

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=4701

DDC) Why was Osama bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their Taliban supporters, allowed to escape first to Jalalabad, then to Tora Bora, and ultimately into Pakistan? (DDC

There were disputes over how many troops to use in the battle of Tora Bora, but it's ludicrous to suggest there was a deliberate decision to allow OBL and al Qaeda to escape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

DDC) Why did the administration first block, then stall, then hamstring, and only then, stubbornly cooperate (if you can call it that) with an investigation? (DDC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass. Do you really think subpoenas are going to turn up any answer other than this?

DDC) Why did only about 30% of the questions provided by the Family Steering Committee get asked and answered by the 9-11 Commission? (DDC

Of the 51 original FSC questions, the overwhelming majority have answers that even casual web-searching can find, just as I did for your questions above. Pick any five, and I'll answer those as well. Better, yet submit them all to the tireless webmasters of the anti-conspiracy sites I listed above, and see how fast they all get answered.

Anti-War Doesn't Grow The LP

It's not easy for an alternative party like the LP to do large-scale empirical research on possible political strategies. Exit polls ignore us, and government officials don't like to re-run election-day procedures to answer empirical questions (unless they're Democrat appointees on the Florida Supreme Court). So if, for example, you wanted to to use election results to measure the anti-war issue as a way to grow the LP, you would need back-to-back elections in which 1) the first election established a relatively large baseline for the available third-party vote in a war-free context, and 2) the second election was a wartime election between two major-party candidates who both favored continuing the war and who faced the same alternative candidate who had established most of the previous baseline.

Amazingly, this is precisely the scenario that happened in 2000 and 2004. Ralph Nader received 2.9M votes in 2000 from voters who were presumably anti-war and clearly willing to vote third-party. Another 450K votes went to Pat Buchanan, the darling of anti-war ex-LP paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard and antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Colin Hunter (who all had been leaders with Rothbard of the LP's Radical Caucus in the early 1980s). Those 3.35M votes should have been available to the anti-war candidates in 2004, because both major-party candidates favored continuing the war that had started between the elections. Together Nader and Green rival Cobb reclaimed at most 580K of those 3.35M, but Badnarik improved on the 2000 LP presidential vote by only 13K! Even the tiny Constitution Party was able to add 46K to its total, a nearly 50% increase. Thus when about 2.6M anti-war third-party voters rejected Nader/Reform/Constitution to choose among 1) the pro-war major parties, 2) the anti-war LP, and 3) NOTA, the LP attracted only about 1% of them-- whereas 100% of them would still have been only 2% of all voters! It's hard to imagine better empirical evidence that emphasizing our anti-war position is not the best way grow the LP.

Understanding the origin and psychology of that position helps explain why the LP emphasizes it over others -- like privatizing education and healthcare -- that have no Green/Dem/GOP competition and that will still correspond to growing national crises long after lame-duck Bush and his entanglement in an Iraqi civil war are a distant memory. A large component of the explanation is the sincere belief that governments throughout the world, and even the American government throughout its history, have demonstrated insufficient ability to reliably choose military interventions that increase liberty instead of decrease it. Another significant component is that the Vietnam War and the Draft were monumental issues to the generation that founded the LP, and the institutional anti-war memory remained in the LP even as important radical anti-war leaders left it. (Some, like Rothbard lieutenants Bill Evers and Emil Franzi, later ended up supporting the Iraq war in their post-anti-war incarnations.)

But there is a fundamental ideological reason why opposition to war is considered by LP radicals to be the most important issue. The military defense of liberty is the textbook example of what in economics is called a "public good" -- a good that markets will underproduce due to the Free Rider Problem and that thus needs tax financing. Anarcholibertarian dogma denies this textbook market failure, and so zero-coercion absolutists have a deep need to deny that any net good could ever be done by a tax-financed military.

This could explain much of why anarcholibertarians are so peculiarly revisionist about e.g. the Civil War and World War II. It would undermine my hypothesis if we could find significant examples of 1) revisionists about these two wars who don't oppose all tax-financing of defense, or 2) opponents of all tax-financing of defense who admit that a tax-financed military could do or has done some net good in a war. The only possible example I know of is Ron Paul, whose borderline exception proves the rule. Paul defends the use of some coercive taxes (excise, not income) to finance the military -- although you might not know if from his recent appearance on the Daily Show, where even a TV comedian was able to instantly identify the national defense exception to Paul's blanket call for privatization, and force the former LP presidential candidate Paul into a muddled backpedal. Paul is indeed something of a war revisionist, but he voted to approve the use of the tax-financed military against those nations that aided or harbored the planners of the 9/11 attack -- and is criticized for doing so by zero-coercion anti-state absolutists.

As Lawrence Samuels wrote in CF: "To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war." On antiwar.com, Samuels opined that "technically, any taxpayer paying federal taxes can be considered an accessory to murder if they support involuntary taxation." Samuels resoundingly defeated the arguments of strawmen who claim "any resulting collateral damage is considered acceptable because the war is being waged for a good cause". In response to Samuels' quote of the Bourne aphorism that "war is the health of the state", Saddam Hussein's neck might reply that aversion to war is the health of the tyrant. Anti-war absolutists argue that wars have been a ratchet mechanism for the size of government, but a graph of the ratio of government spending to GDP shows otherwise. It shows only two short-term doublings: the peacetime doubling in the early Great Depression was sustained, but the WW II spike was not. Subsequent wars disappear in the noise of the growth of the nanny state.

Samuels said that "Iraq has never had a democratic government in its 7,000-year history, or possessed any grassroots movements advancing the concept of liberty." But America had in Kurdish Iraq a ten-year existence proof that the U.S. military could replace Saddam's tyranny with an commendable level of stability, prosperity, and self-determination. America achieved its objectives of 1) eliminating any WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing Saddam's regime in favor of a federal democratic constitutional framework designed to protect minorities and fundamental human rights. By early 2004, polls showed that a majority of Iraqis believed "things were better now than they were before the war" and that "Saddam Hussein's ouster made it worth any hardships." What these Iraqis (and Cassandras in America) failed to predict was that sectarian strife was to develop into a bloody Sunni-Shia civil war and negate much of the value of achieving objective #2.

Reasonable liberty-lovers can disagree over whether a conjunction of self-defense and humanitarian arguments could justify the U.S. overthrow of Saddam. The crucial question is whether the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists. Some very principled libertarians say it does, but it's hard to see how that position is liberty-maximizing.