On Walden Two

January 21, 2013

Mr. Skinner,

Accept my deepest appreciation for sending me a copy of your account of Walden Two.  It has been a while since I have read a truly fascinating book, but that fast has thankfully been broken.  Please take no offense at this, but I opened this work dead set on finding flaws, and while I certainly found some, I both thoroughly enjoyed your work and found it instructive on a variety of issues.  As much as I wished it otherwise at first, your community is certainly plausible, even if not compellingly so. 

Education today is a sad sham.  Whatever driving force it may have possessed is long vanished and its current movement is more a matter of inertia than intent.  We do it because that is what is done; the act has become its own justification.  Our curriculum is not designed to provide useful skills for life, or to create independent learners, but rather is imposed from a far away capitol uniformly across all youth to discover who is following the curriculum best.  But that is not a justification of what we teach, merely a sad bureaucratic tool used to measure "success."  But again, higher numbers are pointless until the curriculum is justified.  Teaching them more useless trivia is no better than less useless trivia.

As you have heard, I am currently outside of the professional education industry right now and working in a meat cutting shop.  The folks I work with are not only proud of their job and financially secure, they achieved it without a college degree and in some cases without finishing high school.  Within the school walls, such a career is not only not presented as a useful trade, but is often deployed as a specter to those not involved enough in the book learning.  I yield to nobody in my love of academics, but such a snobbish attitude is not only detrimental to less academic youths (being treated as second class) but is detrimental to society at large.  Jobs are sent overseas for a reason; often the skills are over there but not here. 

If this tide of centralization could be rolled back, it would be nice to see local education flex to the interests and talents of students rather than make futile attempts to bend students to a set way of teaching.  Provide the basics of math and reading, but there is no justification for demanding every youth learn Shakespeare.  None.  If a student is interested in mechanics or butchering, don't deride them; encourage them, and hook them up with those possessing the skills and willingness to teach them!  Let them learn not only the trade but the habits of reliability!  We may not be able to recreate your utopia here, but that alone would greatly improve our culture and society.  So many youths spend 12 years in school hearing they are inferior to the book worm and having their own talents trampled down and despised.  How can anyone be surprised that this recipe brews social disorder?

While being praised, the academically superior are equally done a disservice.  As you rightly notice, not everyone can learn any particular skill, but our quantified system requires teachers to do just that.  Their emphasis naturally falls on the struggling to get them to pass the state tests, which increasingly is the measure of the teacher's worth.  The gifted students are ignored and their potential atrophies.  I envy both your youths and teachers in Walden Two. 

I have but a minor quibble on education.  History does serve a purpose.  We cannot perform experiments in history, as you note, but we can apply inductive reasoning to past events to notice repeating patterns.  I do not know how Frazier could tackle societal problems until he first identified them.  That said, we short change philosophy in our current system, which may in fact be its worst flaw. 

As with Mr. More, I cannot tell how serious you are about implementing your own utopia.  I have not received any word of your actually attempting such a community or even having serious designs in motion.  It seems I owe you an answer as to whether or not I believe Walden Two would work and, if it is really a separate question at all, whether it ought to.  The first response is a clear no.  Though it feels convincing enough as read (especially with Frazier's constant insistence), I cannot help but believe this society is over engineered.  This is not a normative criticism, but rather a practical one.  Society is composed of too many moving parts to remain perfectly tuned.  Your society reminds me of tanks in WWII.  Allied vehicles were not as impressive individually as those of Nazi Germany, but they were mechanically reliable, whereas the Axis vehicles were amazing if and only if they were not waiting for some rare and expensive part to move.  Society as it stands is not necessarily pretty, but it has survived for 10,000 years.  One shock from the outside world would severely test the strength of such behavioral engineering, especially as so much relies on a herd mentality. 

You wisely begin your book a decade after the founding of Walden Two.  The ball is already rolling and the inertia of current human behavior has already been overcome, but how that can be done is exactly the hard question essential to the benevolent use of behavioral science.  Frazier rightly describes people as sheep wanting to be lead, but you were equally right in pointing to the string barrier the sheep would not cross.  Only the Fraziers of the world will be there at first, and a functioning society of such people is unthinkable, much less a utopia!

Some method would be required to fairly assign credit values to community work.  This has been the bane of socialist societies and cannot be dismissed. 

Regarding the pitiful state of democracy, I could hardly agree more.  Mr. Madison has summed up the problem of politics better than anyone: we need a government with sufficient power to impose rules that benefit all, but that same government thereby becomes a threat to us.  While I heartily agree with Mr. Thoreau that the government that governs least governs best, it is "best" in a general sense, and a government that rules absolutely is best for the rulers.  Frankly, I have no idea how to keep the Leviathan at bay, and all thought into a better life in liberty comes to nought as we are chased by this increasingly inscrutable dragon.  The men who respect the rights of others will arrive at about the same time as Plato's Noble King and Marx's New Man.  Economics may be the dismal science, but politics is truly the depressing one. 

I thank you again for your outstanding book.  Walden Two falls short of utopia, but I can hardly think of a lighter criticism.  Any student hungry for tough questions and decent social commentary will find a satisfactory meal here. 

With greatest appreciation, I am humbly yours,

A Good Book Can Be Dangerous

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one of those rare books that can captivate any reader with a gripping story that compels one to the author's philosophy, which is always whispered just audibly into the mind's ear so subtly that we believe the thoughts to be our own. There is no need to scream, like Ayn Rand, about the hardships and injustices faced by the Joads and the millions of real farmers they represent; the reader's conscience is already aflame long before the book ends or a single mention is made of economic systems, businesses, or the government. Steinbeck's ability to move his reader's passion is created by his undeniable talent as a novelist, the truly difficult position technological advancement can put people into, and mankind's innate desire to side with the underdog, in particular when that underdog has no serious moral failings. What he does not do, however, is tell the whole story. Justice does not always reside with the popular champion, and hard as it may be to challenge the unthinking sensibilities of the masses, we must defend those who are our just benefactors. The Joads may be unjustly treated by Chance or God, but they have not been mistreated by men in the form of corporations and employers.

While set in the same time period as the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath is not actually a book about that phenomena. Rather, this book and the story it tells is brought about by the sheer economic fact that those who cannot keep up with the times are left behind. Mechanization, not tumbling stock prices, is the prime mover behind the Joad's discomfiture. The 1920's and 30's witnessed the introduction of petroleum based machines overtaking hand and horse drawn equipment. As with every new technology, supply always begins off low for these revolutionary machines, and with their ability to create higher profits, demand is high, creating high prices the average person cannot afford. This situation is hardly the result of some conspiracy. It is impossible to create high supply of a new technology overnight; this is just a basic fact. Demand must be high in order to give the producer an incentive to create more. These high prices at first may seem unfair to the layman, but in fact is the catalyst that improves all of our lives.

This, of course, does not alleviate the situation of the Joads. Change, no matter how beneficial it is to many people, is still hard on the old guard that benefited from the old order. Those who produced sails were ruined by the advent of the steam engine; producers of the steam engine were likewise taken over by the internal combustion engine. it is easy to hate the companies that buy up the land the Joads can no longer profitably operate, until we ask what it is the company did that is so evil. Producing cheap and abundant food can only be seen as an evil to one who has never had to deal with an acute shortage of food. Rather than hate the man on the tractor, we should applaud his productivity, of which we benefit. The Joads may have put their blood and sweat into that patch of land for generations, but that does not absolve them from the laws of economic reality. No amount of sentimentality ever can.

Von Mises' book, Human Action, is far less entertaining but far more accurate in describing reality and justice. There is no "right" to never go backwards or to maintain one's place in the world; it must always be earned anew. Steinbeck makes this family particularly sympathetic by showing they have no serious moral flaws and are nice folks. What is not mentioned is that they do not offer much to society, to their fellow men and women, in terms of usefulness. Their farming techniques could not feed as many children as the company's tractors could. Picking fruit is not a rare skill that is in high demand. While it may seem unjust to the Joads and to the reader that these folks should endure such hard times, the simple truth is that the Joads failed to keep up with society's needs and effectively made themselves useless in a most literal sense.

Ironically, John Mellencamp's "Rain on the Scarecrow" unintentionally drives this point home. The protagonist in the song laments the loss of his land that "once fed this nation." Problem is, 300,000,000 Americans cannot be fed on nostalgia. Who fed us is not important; who feeds us today and in the future is. Mellencamp errs in being blunt with his message and accidentally reveals a truth so craftily hidden by Steinbeck.

Steinbeck's book is a must read for multiple reasons. His account is entertaining and masterful, and therein lies the danger we must all guard against. The heart wrenching story is not always the best carrier of the truth and justice. We must beware lest we forget to think for ourselves and abandon our moral judgment to the best poet to woo our hearts.

Notes on Notes From Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky has never disappointed me in his ability to write an entertaining and thought provoking story. Notes From Underground, one of his shorter stories, is certainly no exception. I picked this book up largely because I have enjoyed reading his previous works (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov, The Idiot) and because Russian literature (at least that prior to the Revolution) tends to be amazing. These people knew a thing or two about human suffering, both from poverty and from an identity crisis. To continue being Russia, to Westernize, or some sort of mix was a problem that vexed the Russian intelligentsia during the 19th Century.

It was with a bit of surprise to learn that this particular book was largely a critical response towards another Russian book I have read and enjoyed, Nikolia Chernishevsky's What Is to Be Done?, a book I had the pleasure of reading for a Russian history college class oh so long ago. Having read Dostoevsky's book, I cannot be surprised that the Soviets who would later rule Russia would be naming their books after Chernishevsky's title rather than Dostoevsky, as the latter annihilates the basic assumptions of all Utopian philosophies.

The Underground Man is a disgusting creature. He is vain, confused, prone to hating people for their success or for his failures. Nobody should read Notes From Underground and believe the narrator is in any way of creature to be emulated or maybe even really understood; the point is, he exists. This man exists all too often. His traits exist in all of us at some point.

Dostoevsky challenges those who seek to marshal men into a "better" society: this is your building material. Good luck creating your socialism, your rational egoism, your communism with such men.

"One's own free and voluntary wanting, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness - all this is that same most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.

"You shout at me (if you do still honor me with your shouts) that no one is taking my will from me here; that all they're doing here is busily arranging it somehow so that my will, of its own will, coincides with my normal interests, with the laws of nature, and with arithmetic.

Eh, gentlemen, what sort of will of one's own can there be if it comes to tables and arithmetic, and the only thing going is two times two is four? Two times two will be four even without my will. As if that were any will of one's own!"

This is the point people who desire to "fix" society miss. We live to be happy, to fulfill our own needs, however we may define them. Those needs and wants are different from person to person and even within the same person from time to time. The will of mankind will never fit into an equation. All attempts to force them into such neat equations will fail or lead to the mass deaths of those who do not fit. The result is never, ever, a paradise on Earth or even an improved society.

Ironically enough, this point has been made fairly recently in the worst of the Matrix Trilogy. The Architect, one of the most annoying characters ever written, gives a bombastic speech explaining why the Matrix exists. He had attempted to create a perfect society so as to preserve their own power source, but all attempts that denied mankind a measure of choice in determining their own futures failed miserably. The needs of mankind are, frankly, beyond the ability of mankind to truly understand.

The Conundrum

I'm about halfway through reading Ludwig von Mises' Human Action. So far, I am highly impressed. He does an excellent job showing how physical reality combined with human desires is the only way to understand economics (Mises takes a very wide view of what constitutes economic action, which I believe is appropriate). His book has also done a magnificent job of destroying falsehoods concerning the nature of value (it is subjective and transient, not objective and measurable contra Marx) and the nature of the free market, in particular that state intervention on behalf of businesses is still a form of statism incompatible with the free market.

There is a problem, however, with the free market. Mises points this out but does not spend a great deal of time on it. Here's the situation:

The free market is predicated on the idea that the use of force, whether by individuals or the government, will not be used. People are free to buy from the best sellers to their individual needs and to sell likewise.

This means that some businesses will fail. Those that, for whatever reason, cannot compete to meet consumer demand best will not survive, which is a good thing seeing that resources are scarce and need to be employed to fit consumer's values. Those not doing so are wasting those goods. Even for those winning, they have to sell their goods at a lower price than they would if competition did not exist.

Here is the problem: those businessmen do not want to compete with others. It lowers their profits. If at all possible, they will wish to use force either to improve their own resources, increase their own clientele, or to damage competitors. The best means to achieve this power is via the government, which has a tendency to be seen as legitimate.

In democracies, the government is elected by the people. Like anyone else, they wish for more power, or at the very least to maintain their current level of power.

The anti competition businessman and the company see an opportunity for mutual cooperation. The government can claim powers to regulate businesses (introducing the use of force to compel people to act contrary to their own desires) in order to help either consumers or weaker businesses. These people, in turn, come out to support those politicians.

The more powerful the protected business, the more influence they can have in bribing politicians with votes and public support; the more power the politicians get, the more they can offer to protect those businesses, which in turn empowers those businesses further. It becomes a nasty cycle of increasing use of force and power for the government at the expense of competition and a free market.

Consumers are screwed in this deal, as more competitive businesses that could provide goods for lower prices are forced out via regulation (if not outlawed outright). However, most consumers do not understand what is going on in terms of economics and will not trace back the problem to government interference into the free market in the first place. Many will naively believe that more regulation will somehow be helpful, further limiting the ability of businesses to compete. If the best businesses at a particular time are protected, potentially better newcomers are kept out; if a bad business is protected, good businesses are damaged. In both situations, the consumer losses. Those who gain (the only ones who gain) are the protected business and the government which gains more power.

Very simply:

1. Competition is good for consumers, bad for businesses.
2. Businesses will seek protection from government officials in return for electoral support.
3. Competition is reduced; consumers pay more, protected businesses make more, government can grab more power to protect more privileged businesses or "protect the consumers."
4. Cycle continues.

This is not an optimal situation for anyone but the protected business and the government; the more it occurs, the more we get screwed. How do we stop it from occurring, though?

One proposed solution is to quit on the free market and establish a full blown socialist system. This idea is ridiculous on multiple fronts. For starters, resources are still limited and have to be distributed somehow. As von Mises points out, giving all power and resources to the government is to create the mother of all monopolies; the bureaucrats running the show will have no incentive to do anything efficiently save use those resources as a bribe for their own individual good. This isn't a solution to the above problem; it is that problem in its absolute worst form. The other problems need not even be stated, as this solution fails completely to mitigate to problem at hand.

The other proposed solution is...non existent.

I'm concerned that the drift towards more powerful governments and hence less efficient economies is a likely (if not inevitable) result of the very conditions that make the free market work. Politicians will always want more power; in a democracy, that usually means bribing people, in particular voters, to support those particular politicians. Those politicians, in order to pay off those bribes, have to take the resources from otherwise innocent people; productive taxpayers are screwed, productive businesses are "regulated" and made less productive.

But so long as voters think they gain, they will continue to allow such abuses of power. The situation will get worse (competition is ruined, goods are not sold at optimum prices for consumers), the government claims that yet more regulation will help, and the mess is repeated.

An educated, virtuous citizenry would be able to stop this madness by understanding how the free market works. But such a citizenry does not, and probably never will, exist. It is on par with hoping for socialist denizens that love shoveling horse manure for the collective good; such people do not exist.

It is like finding a solution to the prisoner's dilemma.

I do not believe in a sentient being willing us towards this conclusion (Marx, his historical materialism, and his entire critique of capitalism and crisis theory are hogwash). None the less, as technology makes more power available for people to use over one another, this centralization of power into the hands of a few and away from personal liberty seems likely. It is a horrifying thought for anyone dedicated towards human happiness.

Machiavelli may have been on to something with his idea of virtu. Rather than being a willingness to fight and increase the power of one's country, though, we should view it as the willingness to uphold the rights of others. How this particular trait is created is beyond my understanding. I do know that it is easier to destroy than to create; it is our nature to want more, even if at the expense of others, and reversing this trend is extremely difficult. Places like Russia did not make a nice transition to the protection of rights.

I wonder if stable democracies with free markets are like Plato's philosopher king, a fluke that just kind of happens by accident? If so, and if they are destroyed more easily than created, our future will not be nearly as bright as it could have been.

Review of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell
Harcourt, Inc., 1969
232 pages

I do not have to tell you that Orwell was an amazing writer; 1984 is such a powerful and entertaining work that millions of people who rarely read at all can discuss that work in detail. Sadly, few individuals take the opportunity to read his other works. This book is a must read for those who wonder where Orwell's inspiration came from for his magnum opus and for those who still seriously contend that the Marxist view of history is correct.

Because 1984 was written after the fall of Nazi Germany, it is too easy to assume the horrid conditions described are in fact references to the Third Reich and such totalitarian regimes. Orwell was able to write such captivating descriptions because he had lived through many of the miseries he described, but as far as I know Orwell never stepped foot inside Nazi Germany or Stalin's U.S.S.R. His experience came fighting for the Spanish Republican forces in the region of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). Originally planning to merely report on the war, Orwell decided to volunteer with the P.O.U.M (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), which recruited militias to fight against the Nationalist forces (composed of religious conservatives, Fascists, monarchists, and other Right leaning forces) lead by Francisco Franco.

Despite being a Leftist himself, no one in the world has given harder hitting reviews to socialism and communism in practice than Orwell. The Republican forces were a hodge-podge of socialist, communist, and anarchist groups with their constituent labor unions that were usually supported by different left leaning foreign organizations and nations. Because the Soviet Union was the main supplier of arms for the Republicans, the P.S.U.C (leading communist group tied to Stalin) became the major power for the Left in Spain and promptly removed more revolutionary elements that opposed Stalin, such as Orwell's P.O.U.M. Many of the elements of internecine fighting and suspension of civil liberties that are familiar elements of 1984 are recorded first as history in Homage to Catalonia:

Ministry of Propaganda: Check
Official stories being changed: Check
Official enemies/friends being changed: Check
Leftist government putting their own desires ahead of the people: Check
People arrested in the middle of the night with no trial or even indictment: Check
Stagnant wars with better armed troops in the rear to prevent insurrection among fictional enemies: Check
Blue overalls for the workers: Check
Ill defined counter revolutionary philosophy lead by some shadowy figure (Trotskyism, Goldstein): Check
Police raiding homes and stealing every conceivable item: Check
Food and supply shortages: Check

This is a remarkable work, greater than his more famous fictional pieces. The Spanish Civil War is a complicated historical topic due to the fragmented nature of the parties involved and the difficulty of sorting out propaganda from realistic accounts. Orwell pulls no punches. While he served in the P.O.U.M., he acknowledges that this tints his view of the war, but largely resorts to only covering events he witnessed himself rather than positing guesses based on hearsay (when hearsay is used, it is clearly marked as such). A wonderful first hand account of this conflict. The descriptions of the "fighting" on the front is similar to that of most static conflicts, though I was surprised by the egalitarian nature of the P.O.U.M. and how well it seemed to hold together. Whether such a system could work in a more dynamic situation is more debatable.

The last sentence of this book was particularly prophetic, not just of England but of the entire Western World not already ensnared in Fascism.

The exit question I have after reading this book is: how will a classless society ever emerge from a proletarian revolution? Orwell wisely does not touch on this subject at all as his work is not a treatise on political or economic theory, but as someone who does study those subjects it is the question that dominates my mind once I finally put this book down. Marx never goes into any detail on how that unprecedented shift in power would occur; history shows leftist groups fighting and purging one another (along with millions of innocents) and establishing perpetual dictatorships of the politburos rather than of the people. The defense of communism in light of the last 100 years of butchery and misery in Marxist nations has been that true Marxism has never been attempted yet; this book furthers my believe that "true" Marxism cannot happen and that every attempt to create it will only create a dictatorship of whichever leftist group wins out.

What Others Have Said

The Brothers Judd gave this book an A

SocialistWorld.net

Goodreads.com

Review of Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty

The Ethics of Liberty (full text online)
Murray N. Rothbard

This is a complex book and I am not honestly sure how I feel about it overall. There is a great deal of good in this book, in particular for one who has never seriously considered the origins and propriety of property rights. Rothbard's criticism of the state is penetrating to such an extent that even minimal state libertarians will have difficulty justifying their positions. However, I think the case for an anarchist system is not particularly well made and that a critical eye on par with Rothbard's would find as many, if not more, problems with his solution than he has come up with the concerning the state. I could spend the better part of a year going into each intellectual crevice opened up by this book, but rather than going into such detail I will point out a few of the more interesting topics that the reader would certainly benefit from chewing over.

Rothbard's theory is that all rights are derived from a human having an intrinsic right to his own body and the works thereof. As anyone who follows the courts knows, even widely accepted rights, such as the right to free speech, religion, press, etc., become fairly complex when argued before the court. Why is this? Rothbard sees the problem as the courts looking for a mystical right out of thin air rather than basing these rights in the person and his property. So long as I own the property I use to speak, write, or worship on, it is nobodies business how I do so and nobody, but nobody, may deny me the ability to do so as long as their property right is not violated. This clears up a great deal of confusion concerning gun rights, freedom of speech and press, among others. I think that such an analysis makes sense. Consider the FCC/Citizens United case that was decided earlier this year with a surprising amount of controversy. If a corporation, using its own money, decides to buy political advertisements, they should be allowed to so long as somebody is voluntarily willing to sell them a forum. It is the business of nobody else to deny them the use of their own property.

Punishment for crimes against a person or their property is to be dealt with "proportionally" in that the criminal will pay back what was damaged plus lose from their own personal property an equivalent amount. Rothbard comes up with some interesting ways of applying this to situations of assault, murder, kidnapping, and other situations where a literal tit for tat would make no sense. In his section concerning children, however, Rothbard fails to apply his own theory when it comes to abortion. Concerning proportionality, the only case justifying the death penalty is in a case of murder, according to Rothbard himself, but he then allows the "crime" of "invasion" committed by a fetus upon the mother to also be punished with death. With this exception, his theory concerning children does logically flow from his theory of property rights, harsh as it may sound. I believe children to be the bane of political philosophy. In children we have a human being incapable of taking care of themselves yet with the future ability to do so, who did not bring themselves into existence, who will depend greatly upon their parents for what sort of life they will end up living with. No ideology seems to really know what to do with them.

My problem with this book lies generally in that I have no idea how wrongs will be redressed. I fear such an anarchist society would devolve into gang warfare, as individuals will collect into groups for mutual protection and see that group as the source of authority. All groups follow the iron law of oligarchy in that they will always pick leaders, who will then have incentive to abuse their power, often at the expense of those outside of the group. The state apparatus, for all of its problems, does provide a means of executing justice without competition. This is important because competition in terms of executing justice will not come just in the form of a lower price; it may also come in the form of a different judgment. Rothbard seems to believe that be describing those groups enforcing justice incorrectly as criminals means something. Labelling them criminals means nothing if they are the most powerful group. Replacing the state with a very powerful gang or groups of gangs does not really solve the problem of reducing and eliminating illegitimate force. Such a society would also be at the mercy of other nations, in particular those that develop advanced military forces. Rothbard never deals with this problem; presumably he would look to volunteer militias or security forces. The former would have no chance against professional soldiers, the second creates a powerful force that could abuse the people.

Rothbard's attempt to create a political philosophy based on the nature of mankind has many successful points concerning property rights but fails to really take in the nature of mankind itself. We are a violent species and are willing to use violence to gain what we like. While social ties do tend to negate this, it is not a cure all, and violence between societies in the same geographic area may actually be increased by this organizing power. Anarchy fails to prevent groups from forming and abusing their own power; obliterating "the state" leads to a situation where many little "states" come into existence. Whoever has power will always be able to abuse that power, even (or perhaps especially) in anarchy. Libertarianism is the best of all possible outcomes, but it does contain an emotional letdown in that the 'promised' land type outcome isn't included. At best, we'll have a world where abuses of justice will be kept lower than in others but not entirely wiped out. It is a lamentable aspect of our species that the need for politics will always be with us and that the best solution we have is a vigilant, perpetual guard against abuses of our liberties. That all being said, I think Rothbard does an excellent job defining what those liberties are, even if his solution to protecting them is not top notch.

Companion Reading

Rothbard vs. Strauss: Libertarianism, Rights and Reason (free download)

Ten Most Influential Books In My Rather Limited World

Since everyone else is doing it...

In all honesty, I can't limit it to ten. Our "world" is so multi-faceted that I can't really rank these books, so I won't bother numbering them.

The Republic of Plato. There is no one in the Western World who has not, in some form or another, been influenced by the works of Plato, and a great deal of political philosophy can find a prototype expressed in the Republic. As with many of the truly Great Books, however, this one is extremely dangerous. Plato searched from the one true Good in the universe and according to the story told in this book a perfect city could be made if only the very wise possessed unfettered power. I highly doubt "good" is unitary and I know that no human is wise enough to be telling another how to live his or her life backed up by the threat of the state. Plato himself seems to have known that; if only modern day statists could figure it out.

Federalist by Publius: This work has had a rather amazing story behind it. For those who read it while thinking about the situation in which it was written, one has to wonder if the authors would have been surprised how we almost revere this collection of essays today, long after the issue of creating a federal government has been settled. The true value of this book lies in the philosophy of man and his imperfections; they never sought out to cure those imperfections but only to limit their abuses in government itself, namely by dividing power so much that no one person or faction could accomplish their goals without compromise. A true warning for modern times.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. A response to John Rawls argument that the state is needed to fix perceived injustices in the distribution of goods and talents by nature. Nozick does an excellent job showing the advantages of a minimal state, the necessity of the rule of law being applied equally to all, and the impossiblity of "social justice" (which always means different things to different people). A must read for anyone who actually desires to study the proper role of government rather than just its forms.

April, 1865 by Jay Winik. This should be read by more high school students. The Civil War did not just "end" in April with everyone saying "yup, it's over, might as well go grab a beer and head home." Even with the Confederacy on the verge of collapse, it was by no means certain the fighting and the killing would end with the destruction of the political state. Guerilla war, similar to what we saw in Iraq, was rampant in places like Missouri, and some of Lee's officers recommended continuing the fight by such means rather than surrender. Lee, Lincoln, and Grant were all amazing commanders in their own way, but each showed their highest quality at the end.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I love Russian literature and Dostoevsky is a favorite. The conscience of a human being can be a dreadful thing, something I know from first hand experience but preferred immensely more from reading this book.

The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin. My introduction into the world of political pluralism. Berlin's understanding of the imperfection of man, even (or perhaps, especially) those in power, is a lesson I wish I could magically implant in the mind of every person. He also dismantles the idea that "the good" is unitary.

Second Treatise of Government by John Locke. The intellectual founder of our Republic. A limited government based on the consent of the governed with the purpose of protecting our rights (in particular property rights)...how radical he would seem nowadays!

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. Though I am not a Christian any longer, C. S. Lewis will always be one of my favorite authors, and his explanation of personal choice in this book was nothing short of amazing. Mankind truly is petty.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I picked this book up in January of 2009, when America was taking a distinct turn towards statism. Rand predicted the failure of governments running economies before people like Barack Obama were even born, but apparently nobody every lent poor Obama a copy. More important than the technical aspects of the impossibilty of socialism, though, is the moral superiority of the free market; socialism treats men as cogs, capitalism treats men as men who are capable of determining their own lives for good or ill.

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Prophet of Nature and Man. His beautiful essays cover a vast realm of topics but always manage to focus on the pure and beautiful. While there are aspects I disagree with, in particular concerning the unitary nature of everything, I still always pick up this book when spring time comes around to help enhance the wonder of the season.

The Bible. Nobody knows exactly how long it took to write the Bible or how many people were involved, but it does seem safe to say it spans hundreds of years with dozens of authors. No book has influenced Western literature as much as this one and I highly doubt there is another which influences personal morality as much, either. The stories and themes are wonderful and far too many to list.

1984 by George Orwell. I end this list with the two most abused books in history. Orwell was a magnificent author, but more importantly he was an honest one. He looked straight into the heart of mankind and saw its desire for power, for money, for lust, the weaknesses people carry with them, but the true horror comes in the form of domination of life, and nothing is as capable of dominating life as an all powerful state. I seriously considered adding Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest here, which focused on the horrors of the 20th Centuries totalitarian states, but Orwell's fiction will always be more memorable than reality.


Anyway, that's my (incomplete) list of books that have significantly shaped my world view, whether on God, politics, society, ethics, economics, or any other such field.

Review of Posner's Not A Suicide Pact

Not a Suicide Pact
Richard A. Posner
Oxford University Press, 2006
171 pages

The first time I remember coming across Richard Posner's work was in grad school when I read Frontiers of Legal Theory. Posner, a sitting judge on Seventh Circuit, is a renowned academic famous for his economic analysis of law. I picked up this particular book because Posner's positions on various current issues are almost unpredictable and certainly beyond categorization in traditional political labels. This particular book, Not a Suicide Pact, deals with the balance between demands for security and the pressure to protect constitutional rights in the post 9/11 era. While I believe this book would be an interesting and thought provoking read for anyone concerned with this subject, Posner's reliance on a rational choice analysis for legal theory is not a convincing criteria for judicial decisions.

Posner does an excellent job summarizing the problem at hand: we are in a conflict with a non-state force that legally neither our criminal law nor our regulation of interstate war is capable of handling. Terrorists pose an existential threat to our nation, something even groups like the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, and national gangs do not. On the other hand, they are not focused in any area of the world, do not have an infrastructure, do not represent the people they live with, and are often in our midst, disguised as one of us. The Bush Administration had the unenviable duty of finding a legal pattern to work with in respect to terrorism while being under a perceived imminent threat of another attack.

Generally, Posner agrees with what the Bush Administration has tried to do, taking issue with a few legal niceties (the Unitary Executiy Theory in particular) but generally believing the Executive has not overstepped its appropriate bounds. Posner takes the view that we should maximize both liberty and safety via rational choice theory: the moment a decrease in liberty does not bring about an equal or greater increase in security is the balance we should aim for. This a dynamic, not a static, point: after 9/11, we clearly needed an increase in security even at the cost of some liberty. Civil libertarians, who argue no decrease in liberty can ever be justified, do not take the terrorist threat seriously and fail to recognize that the greatest threat to liberty in this nation would be another terrorist attack and the subsequent security measures taken.

While a number of hot button issues relating to security and liberty are discussed (the "rights" of people detained without trial is particularly interesting), I want to focus quickly on Posner's view concerning intelligence gathering. Many people took issue with the Bush Administration using wiretaps on Americans being contacted or contacting individuals outside of the United States, claiming this is a violation of the Fifth Amendment. This is only true if the information is used against a U.S. national in a conviction. The President, as Commander in Chief, needs to be able to collect information about our enemy, a power that has never been seriously questioned. Given the massive amount of communication that needs to be sifted and analyzed, obtaining a warrant in every situation is basically impossible. This is not gathering evidence for a criminal trial; it is gathering military intelligence, a power the President has sans warrant. If the government abuses this power for political or other non-military ends, so many people of so many political ideologies are involved that a leak to the current 24/7 media is almost inevitable, with devastating consequences to the administration abusing the power. Enough leaks of legitimate government programs existed under Bush to prove this point.

Richard Posner's book is certainly worth reading for these interesting and novel ideas concerning the balance of security and liberty and which aspects of our government should be handling them during and after an emergency. As I said at the beginning, though, I find Posner's rational choice approach too impermanent and vague to avoid an abuse of power. Posner treats the Constitution almost as a list of suggested ideas rather than as hard and fast boundaries between the government and the branches of government versus one another. This line is blurred enough as is. The Supreme Court's "interpretation" of the Constitution has lead to a great many restrictions that were not included by the Founders; agreeing with Posner, we are now having a hard time dealing with this straight jacket, but leaving the division of power to actors who have motivations outside of the good of the nation is not the answer. I had a hard time determining exactly what it is Posner proposes for us to do, what criteria he proposes for us to follow to know when the line has been crossed outside of a subjective opinion on when the function of liberty and security has reached its maximum (see the first two reviews in the "What Others Have Said" section to view two opponents of Bush disagree as to where the line should be drawn in a cost-benefit analysis). Given all, I would recommend reading this book because of the unique (at least to me) views he gives on free speech, interrogation techniques, and intelligence gathering, but it is not a must read.

What Others Have Said:

"Not Just Because Bush Says So", Washington Post, 2006

Judge Posner's "Not a Suicide Pact, Concurring Opinions, 2006

"Conservatives" cheer on Judge Posner's highly un-conservative defense of federal police powers , Glenn Greenwald, 2006

"Pragmatism Trumps Suicide", New York Sun, 2006

Review of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom
Friedrich August von Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1944 (original publication)
240 pages

One of the most important and influential books of the 20th Century, von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom makes two profound arguments relating to the differences between classical liberals (modern libertarians) and statists (cultural conservatives and modern American liberals). The first of these arguments is to show the bankruptcy of notion that the government can improve upon the free market by "rationally organizing" resources. The second, and more disturbing, thesis is that setting up a truly organized society, economic or otherwise, can only be accomplished via totalitarian methods. While I have a few quibbles about Hayek's willingness to redistribute wealth to set up a "minimum standard," the case made against the statist philosophy is amazingly strong.

Rather than outlining or summarizing the book, I will present a few of the ideas that I found surprising and worthy of deeper thought. That isn't to say the aspects I present were the only parts worth knowing; the book as a whole was presents a hell of a wallop that just doesn't exist in isolated chunks. Nevertheless, these ideas stood out to me. It's not often a book presents novel ideas to me; it is even rarer for a book to present as many questions to seriously ponder as this one did.

Hayek points out that the success of liberalism (again, classical, not modern American) may very well bring about its own demise. The freedom to innovate and profit from that innovation inspired untold entrepreneurs and inventors into action; we saw a correspondingly amazing growth in technology and wealth at all levels of society from the end of feudalism until the time this book was written. However, this amazing increase in wealth has made us unwilling to accept any imperfection, as we see it, in society. Our skyrocketing wealth, combined with the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and unbounded potential, leads us to conclude we could solve problems like poverty and inequality of wealth if we could only organize society more rationally. Rather than acknowledging the success of the system, critics will point out that not everyone has risen equally, though even that implicitly acknowledges that everyone has indeed risen. Imagine a group of starving peasants suddenly having enough meat to eat, but rather than being happy they become incensed over the fact that some get filet mignon and others only get a rib eye.

Democratic governments are particularly libel to this problem. No matter how much they may gain by a capitalist system, only a few will rise to the top (by definition, only a few can be at the top). The vast majority who have not gained as much, though in absolute terms they have indeed gained much, will be jealous. Certain politicians and other "enlightened" men proclaim to be able to fix this inequality if they could but "organize" society along more "rational" grounds that they supposedly can see. However, even if these reformers obtain a majority in government, the details of how best to organize society will lead to infighting. One may wish to expand railroads (his constituency has lots of them); another, farm work (her's is teaming with farmers); another, computers (Silicon Valley's man). The conservative and classical liberal representatives will vote against all of them, while the statists will only support the reorganization that helps their constituents. In this way, despite having a majority, the statists will not be able to use democratic institutions to impose a state run economy. The danger lies in that the people, still jealous and still demanding more, quickly become fed up with parliaments and democracy. They will turn to a few "experts" or a single man and will give them whatever authority they need to impose their will and organize society as they see fit. Society is now in the hands of a dictator or an oligarchy, individual rights (which would impede the "reorganization") are thrown out, and what more is needed for a totalitarian system?

The main argument of statists is that government can provide more for us because they are more efficient than multiple companies competing against each other. Well, nothing is more efficient than a dictatorship. Democracy is not efficient and the American Republic was built with the intended purpose of having a slow government that would need to compromise at every turn, hardly the tool for reorganizing society. Our armed forces are not a democracy; wars are much, much simpler than the economy; why, then, should we believe a government controlled society will be democratic?

The Rule of Law cannot coexist with statist philosophy. The Rule of Law is applying equally the rules (whatever they may be) to everyone. This exists to give everyone in the society a clear notion of what is acceptable and what actions will bring about costs. For statism, however, costs can be inflicted upon individuals irrespective of those individuals. An example: a pig farmer is forced to give up some of his money to give to the apple pickers. The pig farmer did nothing to warrant this act, save for having money. The pig farmer can do nothing to avoid this act, save for having money. The pig farmer, then, has no incentive to work hard or to produce, as the pig farmer has absolutely no reason to believe he'll enjoy the fruit of his labor. Rule of Law is based on a passive system of rules that does not make any distinction between people save whether they have transgressed a rule or not; statism is an active system controlled by people (with all of the faults of greed, corruption, etc.) who arbitrarily take from some.

Interestingly, Hayek shows that socialism and its offshoots have to be nationalistic. Think of it this way: if the government of the United States decided to become internationally socialist, that government would have to send the wealth of this nation over to Africa, Asia, and the tribes of the Amazon. The people here would not stand for it! Socialism is Nationalist and we should remember the threat of National Socialism well.

From page 228: "Exclusive control of an essential commodity or service (as, for example, air travel) is in effect one of the most far-reaching powers which can be conferred on any authority. And as there is scarcely anything which could not be justified by 'technical necessities' which no outsider could effectively question...there is little possibility of controlling that power....this would inevitably become the worst of all conceivable rackets..." Food for thought for those seeking to put the Federal Government in charge of our health care. The government could put the screws to any opposition in the future by denying them coverage. This does not have to apply to the current administration (though it could). Unless we are certain no administration in the future will use this power inappropriately, we should not grant such excessive powers to the government. The burden now rests on those supporting such an expansion of government powers to show no government will indeed abuse this massive power.

These are but a few of the amazing questions that are raised against the statist philosophy by Hayek's book. I am fairly well versed in both political theory and libertarian thought, but this book was still worth the time and effort to read. His analyses on statism's influence on Fascism and Communism is indispensable for anyone who wishes to know what those two ideologies really were, as is his warning to those who would collect too much power in the hands of any person for any goal. Despite being written over 60 years ago, The Road to Serfdom remains remarkably relevant today, a testament to Hayek's ability to move beyond the policy issues of his day to examine the philosophical underpinnings.

What Others Have Said

George Orwell, 1944, The Observer

Ludwig von Mises Institute

Matthew Lymburner, 2008, CulturalShifts.com