How do you preserve and conserve many laws and traditions and institutions likely worth preserving and conserving, and the authority necessary to maintain them with perhaps many people less connected in their lives and minds to those laws, traditions and institutions nowadays?
Are we becoming more individualistic?
Without that presumed moral fabric, and with more choice and opportunity available, will more Americans seek security and purpose in the secular ideologies so often leading to a rather Euro-statist secular authority?
Do you trust the institutional authority claimed by many standard secular liberal humanists on the way toward secular ideals?
How do the more often individualist and atheist libertarians find common ground with social and religious conservatives?
‘One of the problems of modern society is the difficulty many people now have with accepting and obeying rules that they neither made themselves nor can they deduce from any of their own, self-chosen first principles, chief amongst which is the democratic one that a cat may look at a king. That is why, if you take the risk of asking a person who is behaving in a mildly antisocial way to desist, he will suddenly turn moral philosopher and demand an incontrovertible proof that he should not behave in that way.’
Speaking of authority, at least one Russian lawmaker thought it was time to take post-Soviet authoritarianism, self-serving ethno-nationalism, and Russia’s low birth-rate to the next level.
First, there was talk of encouraging hook-ups in tents at love camps, mixing sweet, young romance with coolly calculated demographic and political survival:
‘Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia.’
-Naturally, Putin still offers photo-ops of himself bare-chested: embodying the virility, strength, and charisma that the Russian people will need going forward to conquer nature and vanquish all enemies.
A meeting of one of Vlad’s country jaunts was caught, miraculously, on tape and in English:
——————
You can’t enjoy the highs if you haven’t endured the lows, am I right?
To put it crudely as possible: This guy knows more about love than a fate-tossed Ukranian mail-order bride. You can’t entirely blame him either, as some of its working.
As an economist, Friedman has explored the idea of what transferring functions of the State to private agencies might look like. In the video he presents an outline of his thinking about what would happen if the legislature, the courts, and the police (drafting, legislating, passing and enforcing laws) would all be handled by private agencies instead of government. You would become a customer of a private enforcement agency amongst other agencies competing for your patronage in areas now covered by the criminal and civil law. There would be no more State, or perhaps just a Nozickian “night-watchman” State overseeing the National Defense.
1. As a consumer and customer of an agency, you would have more say than when you vote now, because you have the freedom to vote with your feet and choose a different agency. Your agency would be more responsive to you than the government is now (if you’ve paid your dues, I presume).
2. You would have more access to information about the performance of an agency, because more agencies would be able to compete and offer alternatives, and presumably have more incentive to provide information about their performance for consumer choice.
3. Criminals aiming to make their own agency (having the freedom to do so if not incarcerated by an agency) would find themselves unable to stay in business because of the overwhelming market forces that victims’ agencies would create. The harm done the victims and the right to be free from violence would still be central, but handled by the market. Friedman also makes the argument that there may be less crime overall because certain moral reasoning that has led to, say, the War on Drugs (drug use he considers a victimless crime) actually creates more crime, much as Milton Friedman argued that State welfare programs creates poverty by restricting access to the market (e.g. via minimum wage laws).
4. The National Defense is a public good for which Friedman’s thinking doesn’t fully have answers, but he does go into charities, the U.S. militia system (as back when we organized to fight the British) and because of the our wealth, the possibility of not maintaing a standing army. He rather naively (in my opinion) suggests letting people play and practice war games as they saw fit, but overall having a more martial, Spartan approach to play (a little totalitarian, and he points to Kipling). He suggests that because of our numbers and GDP, when the threat to our Sovereignty appeared, we would then organize and respond to it.
———————————————————————
I do wonder how far the free-market will go and how legitimate moral authority is possible on this view. Justice, and the feelings of fear, anger, mistrust revenge etc. that grip victims of the wake of many crimes (especially violent crimes) would be handled by those working for a paycheck, a promotion, or the incentives offered at a private firm without a Federal structure (though these are all are incentives for cops, lawyers and judges now). How fierce would the competition get between agencies? Would it be up to consumers themselves to form agencies to oversee the agencies and maintain private property rights? What other social institutions would unite Arizonans under agency B with New Yorkers under agency A? Would a form of soft despotism with a ring of price-fixing, oligopolic agencies develop?
A Hobbesian reponse might highlight that the rational interests of man in Nature given the State of Nature that would compel individuals to eventually declare their loyalty to one entity, compelling the creation of one large, authoritarian structure anyways, especially for security from within and without. There are many concerns in abandonding some of the rich heritage of British empiricism found within the common law for another set of principles that are assumed to be universal. Life liberty, and property might be harder to secure.
—————————————————————————-
Also mentioned:
Friedman asserts that people who once identified as classical liberals are now closer to ‘classical libertarianism.’ Most libertarians I know, as well as many conservatives, believe they are observing something similar: Modern American liberalism seems much more comfortable with many forms of collectivist political philosophy and principles of political organization (partially on the backs of postmodernism and moral relativism) that can lead to Statism and great intrusion into the lives of individuals. It has meant more freedom for some (especially against the injustices of slavery), and morally there are deep reasons and much good done as a result of these ideas, but it is not clear at what cost these changes have had on our educational, social and political institutions as well as our political stability and the dynamism of our economy. It’s up for debate.
Of course, all people aim to draft law according to their own principles while claiming their preferred laws and policies will serve the common good. On this view, though, modern collectivist liberals are pursuing their own self and group interest and overlooking what classical liberals once maintained, and what libertarians are maintaining (and being attacked for maintaining, often by liberals), namely the autonomy of the individual, the importance of open markets and an open society and a small government in maintaining liberty.
I’ve often wondered if the libertarian attempt to resuscitate classical liberalism isn’t chimerical from the conservative point of view, as some conservatives I know see libertarianism as a continuation of the Straussian slide into hedonism and relativism under the pursuit of post-enlightenment Reason alone (away from Natural Right), others see a slide away from from Natural Law, and others still simply an excessive pursuit of freedom that libertarians share with liberals, away from the doctrines of the Church and the clubs, associations, families, and institutions which maintain civil society.
“At some point soon I will take up directly Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s new book, The Executive Unbound, but in the meantime let me flag Harvey Mansfield’s polite but skeptical review in the New York Times Book Review.”
