I was introduced to John Medaille's blog, The Distributist Review, by Kevin Carson, and I'm enjoying it very much. In particular, Medaille's essay, Why I Am Not a Libertarian, has lingered in the back of my mind for some time. I've always been a little amazed by the idea of such a radical Catholic approach to political economy, but Medaille has an interesting take on the role that sin plays in his (however moderate) rejection of libertarianism. While he claims that his conception of sin in this context is not theological, I think the rejection of humanism in Catholic theology has an interesting grain of truth to it, at least for libertarians to consider.
The second critique is the absence of distributive justice. Mutualism, as Kevin presents it (and I may be wrong here) relies (as does neoclassical economics) on corrective justice only, on free contract. But contracts arbitrate power, not productivity, not a contribution to the productive process. That is the whole reason that the formulas of marginal productivity do not work: they marginalize not productivity but power. Any glance at the difference in pay scales between the CEO and the line worker, between the sweatshop seamstress and the owner confirm that power is the key, not productivity. earns 500 times more than the line worker not because he is 500 times more productive but because he is 500 times more powerful; the seamstress in a sweatshop will be given a pittance not because she lacks productivity but because she lacks power. A glance at the statistics on the increase in productivity compared to the flatness of the typical wage shows the same thing. A contractual system, apart from a prior notion of distributive justice, will end in power being arbitrated, for that is what contracts do. Now, you can reasonably reply that a notion of distributive justice is satisfied by usufruct of land, and that will be true to a large extent, but not completely, because land is not the only factor of production. There will be many opportunities to cheat, which brings me to the next critique: you have not accounted for sin.
I am not so dogmatic as to insist on a notion of sin in a theological sense, but I think we can all agree that people have a tendency to try and profit at the expense of others, a desire to earn a surplus profit. Oddly enough, this is not really a desire for gain in terms of money, but in terms of power. For it is easy to show that everyone would be better off in an economic sense in a mutualist system. However, economic betterment is not the issue; power is. The pure joy of being able to lord it over your neighbor holds an irresistible attraction for at least some people, and maybe more than we think.
All of these things are problematic, are they not, for anarchism. Men have always had govmints not because of flawed thinking, but because of practical problems. The community has a role in all these affairs for all of these reasons, but a freely contracting society would have difficulty in handling them, would it not, because they cannot be subsumed under contract. Therefore, corrective justice alone is insufficient, and economics must also be political economy.
The Ron Paul campaign has supposedly stirred up controversy between the paleoconservative wing (such as those at LewRockwell.com) and the so-called cosmopolitan wing of the libertarian movement. While I have my share of differences with the paleoconservatives, sometimes it seems like those "establishment libertarians" who move with the professional political scene are a big part of the problem. Paleoconservatives like Paul aren't afraid to challenge the key institutons of the state such as the income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the Pentagon. Too often, these Washington libertarians defend the coercive systems and exploitative institutions that libertarians should be attacking without hesitation.
This Drew Carey video for Reason.tv is a great example of this "vulgar libertarianism". While these beltway libertarians are by no means the exclusive purveyors of such opinions, they certainly play a major role in erroneously equating libertarianism with current involuntary power structures:
So as somebody who has experienced their share of headaches deploying Rails apps (and ended up learning how to provision a VPS from scratch as a result) I'm interested in the questions Peter Cooper of Ruby Inside asks:
Is there / why isn't there a version of mod_ruby that doesn't have the "class sharing" issue? What is the technical impediment?
Is there any immutable reason that Ruby apps couldn't, in the future, be deployed in a PHP-esque fashion?
The ensuing discussion in the comments is very instructive, and I've even been giving Cooper's Switchpipe project a bit of attention lately. But Ezra Zygmuntowicz chimed in with quite welcome news:
I'm just going to say that Rubinius has support (as of today!) for running multiple instances of it's VM within one process, each VM on it's own *native* thread, each VM running many ruby green threads. Each VM has it's own heap and so each VM could load different apps that wouldn't interfere with each other. We have plans for a mod_rubinius for apache that takes full advantage of this feature. Stay tuned ;)
I've had an interest in police culture and practices for a long time. I haven't run into a huge amount of officers in my life, but I have seen some really good ones and some really bad ones. I'm just interested in what motivates them, I guess - it seems like most cops are bored most of the time.
And as I learn more, a trend towards belligerent behavior seems to emerge. It angers me for the obvious reasons, but the truly helpful and respectful cops stick out in my head and lead me to ask, "Why is this happening?" Many people have been collecting the evidence for this trend and asking the same question (Radley Balko's blog is excellent in this area). I've heard a lot of answers: some blame the drug war, others blame the influx of military into law enforcement ranks, and still others blame it all on standard-issue government evilness. But I found another, more direct and provable answer in an article at PoliceLink.com entitled Street Survival Insights: Behavior Traits that get Cops Killed; Long Known, Still Ignored.
The long and short of it is that a study was done fifteen years ago and, while the conclusions were speculative and hard to prove, five traits of behavior likely to get cops killed were dreamed up arrived at. Of these five behavior traits, the very first three have directly to do with friendliness, openness, and generally acting like a human being among equals:
Yesterday, Tasha and I went out with some friends (Matt from CVREG and his wife) to southside Richmond for duckpin bowling. It's a game we first played a few weeks ago visiting Baltimore, where it supposedly originated (or Boston, there's a dispute). While I'm not terribly fond of regular bowling, duckpin bowling is much more enjoyable for Tasha and me: the pins are about half the size, and you use a ball that's probably twice the size of a softball. You also get three bowls instead of two per turn.
It was very fun both times we went, but our trip to Plaza Bowl (521 E. Southside Plaza) last night was especially cool. It's in kind of a ghetto strip mall, and inside you can tell the place is old. This is not due to mere neglect, though: duckpin bowling systems are no longer manufactured, so they all use machinery from the 50s and 60s. We actually talked to the owner who accquired the venue in September, and among the other renovations he's been doing to the place he explained the difficulty of maintaining the duckpin bowling system. Essentially, he has to diagnose and repair the machinery whenever it breaks, and duckpin bowling alleys are always scrambling for spare parts and ways to patch things together on the fly.
That is all to say that we thoroughly enjoyed our night there. It's nice for once using a bowling system that doesn't try to basically play the game for you. We kept our own score, cleared and reset the pins using the manual controls, and generally revelled in the retro coolness of it all. The atmosphere is laid back, with a league bowling on one end and VCU hipster kids on the other. There's fried food and pitchers of PBR. Everything is priced pretty reasonably - I think for four people for two hours and a pitcher of beer we dropped maybe $40. I highly recommend it if you're looking for something to do in the R to the V to the A.
Kevin Carson was the first to really enlighten me about the difference between capitalism and the free market. It's a difference I heartily embrace as a leftlibertarian. While Wendy McElroy is obviously not as hostile to capitalism, she definitely has her priorities straight, unlike the vulgar libertarian corporate apologists:
At the risk of being misunderstood, I am not a capitalist. Instead, I advocate the free market. Capitalism is a specific economic arrangement with reference to the ownership of property and capital. It happens to be the arrangement I prefer because I believe it is more just, a far better reflection of reality and produces more prosperity than the alternatives. But I wouldn't crusade for capitalism the way I would crusade for freedom of speech. What I would crusade for is a free market in which individuals exchange or co-operate with each other according to their own choices.
What's the difference? Consider: I live near an old-fashioned Mennonite community that organizes its economic life along socialist ideals rather than capitalist ones. The community is absolutely voluntary -- that is, it results from the free choices of individuals. In a free market, my neighbors can peacefully disagree with my assessment of capitalism and set up whatever voluntary alternative appeals to them…for whatever reason it appeals to them (e.g. religion). My approval of their non-capitalist lifestyle is not necessary until or unless they attempt to make me adopt their preference. That's the free market: everyone peacefully pursues whichever economic goals they wish by whatever means is voluntary. If your chosen means is not capitalism and you don't want my advice…then I wish you well… even though I doubt you will succeed in the way I define ‘success.' Nevertheless I feel no urge to knock on your door as an evangelist for capitalism who is determined to demonstrate the error of your ways.
All of the noise about Ron Paul being a racist untouchable has gotten me thinking deeply about racism as it maps to individualist and collectivist approaches to the human condition. I maintain that libertarians have talked far too little about racism. I say this not only because we take positions that are often (mistakenly) assumed to be cryptoracist, but also because we can make a far more principled and consistent argument against it. As individualists, we necessarily find the categorization of people distasteful, especially when the State is the one doing it.
Now, that's not to say that we don't have racists among us, as clearly we do (just as every political group has their particular varieties). Nor is it to say that we don't make generalizations or categorize people, although I'd like to think that we feel the need to back up our assertions in so doing, rather than leaving them dangerously implicit and unspoken. Especially as a left libertarian, I see a common thread of resistance against all sorts of collectivist trends since the 19th century, framed in terms of opposition to the State's collectivist, organizing interventions into the otherwise peaceful society - but that's my opinion, and certainly not a universal libertarian position.
I suppose that in making all of these arguments about how libertarians eschew collectivism, I'm being notably collectivist myself! But there is utility in looking at people in groups; it just depends on what your purposes are. If I want to understand the political philosophies of people, I may generalize over a large group in order to effect a model about how to categorize the schools of thought. These categories are arbitrary, and the membership in the groups are based on assumptions I've made and the distinctions I happen to have drawn. If one remembers that the discrimination occurs to effect an abstraction on the infinitely nuanced reality, then one can adopt and discard collective judgments according to an evenhanded view of the evidence.
Yesterday, Tasha and I went out with some friends (Matt from 
That is all to say that we thoroughly enjoyed our night there. It's nice for once using a bowling system that doesn't try to basically play the game for you. We kept our own score, cleared and reset the pins using the manual controls, and generally revelled in the retro coolness of it all. The atmosphere is laid back, with a league bowling on one end and VCU hipster kids on the other. There's fried food and pitchers of PBR. Everything is priced pretty reasonably - I think for four people for two hours and a pitcher of beer we dropped maybe $40. I highly recommend it if you're looking for something to do in the R to the V to the A.
