Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Posts

I Became a Libertarian By Learning Three Life-Lessons.

/in /by

I did not become a libertarian because I was persuaded by philosophical arguments — those of Ayn Rand or F. A. Hayek, for example. Rather, I became a libertarian because I was persuaded by my own experiences and observations of reality. There were three important lessons.

The first lesson was my personal experience of socialism. The second was what I learned about the consequences of government intervention from teaching a course on financial intermediaries and markets. And the third lesson was what I learned about the origin and evolution of government from my research into the sources of economic progress in preindustrial Europe and China.

Lesson 1. My Personal Experience of Socialism

In my youth, I was a socialist. I know that is not unusual. But I not only talked the talk, I walked the walk.

Growing up in England as a foreign‐​born Jew, I did not feel I belonged. So, as a teenager, I decided to emigrate to Israel. To further my plan, I joined a Zionist youth movement. The movement I joined was not only Zionist: it was also socialist. So, to fit in, I became a socialist. Hey, I was a teenager!

What do I mean by a socialist? I mean someone who believes that the principal source of human unhappiness is the struggle for money — “capitalism” — and that the solution is to organize society on a different principle — “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” The Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s was such a society. The youth movement I joined in England sent groups of young people to Israel to settle on a kibbutz. When I was 18, I joined such a group going to settle on Kibbutz Amiad.

A kibbutz is a commune of a few hundred adults, plus kids, engaged primarily in agriculture but also in light industry and tourism. Members work wherever they are assigned, although preferences are taken into account. Instead of receiving pay, members receive benefits in kind: they live in assigned housing, they eat in a communal dining hall, and their children are raised communally in children’s houses, and can visit with their parents for a few hours each day. Most property is communal except for personal items such as clothing and furniture, for which members receive a small budget. Because cigarettes were free, I soon began to smoke!

Kibbutz is bottom‐​up socialism on the scale of a small community. It thereby avoids the worst problems of state socialism: a planned economy and totalitarianism. The kibbutz, as a unit, is part of a market economy, and membership is voluntary: you can leave at any time. This is “socialism with a human face” — as good as it gets.

Being a member of a kibbutz taught me two important facts about socialism. The first is that material equality does not bring happiness. The differences in our material circumstances were indeed minimal. Apartments, for example, if not identical, were very similar. Nonetheless, a member assigned to an apartment that was a little smaller or a little older than someone else’s would be highly resentful. Partly, this was because a person’s ability to discern differences grows as the differences become smaller. But largely it was because what we received was assigned rather than earned. It turns out that how you get stuff matters no less than what you get.

The second thing I learned from my experience of socialism was that incentives matter. On a kibbutz, there is no material incentive for effort and not much incentive of any kind. There are two kinds of people who have no problem with this: deadbeats and saints. When a group joined a kibbutz, the deadbeats and saints tended to stay while the others eventually left. I left.

In retrospect, I should have known right away, from my first day, that something was wrong with utopia. On my arrival, I was struck by the fact that the pantry of the communal kitchen was locked.

Lesson 2. My Teaching — The Effects of Government Intervention

Although I was no longer a socialist, I was certainly not a libertarian. I believed in a market economy and the importance of incentives: I had begun to study economics. But economics also taught me that market outcomes, and society more generally, were often imperfect and that they could be improved by the judicious use of government power. I was a progressive.

Progressivism rests on two critical assumptions. The first is that we know how to improve society: “social science” provides us with a reliable basis for the necessary social engineering. The second critical assumption is that government is a suitable instrument for improving society. My second and third lessons taught me that these two critical assumptions were unfounded and unrealistic.

For many years, I have taught a course on the economics of the financial system; I have also written a textbook on the subject. Government regulation is an important topic in this course. The need for such regulation seems like a no‐​brainer. The financial system is obviously unstable: look at all those crises, including the stock market crash of the 1930s and the financial crisis of 2008. Surely we need government regulation to stabilize the financial system? But looking at the evidence, I came to believe otherwise. I saw that the history of the U.S. financial system could be understood as a series of cycles: the government intervenes in the financial system; the financial system adapts to the intervention; this adaptation makes the system more fragile and unstable, eventually resulting in a crisis; the government responds to the crisis with additional interventions intended to stabilize the system, and we have begun the next cycle.

The first of these cycles in the United States began almost two centuries ago, in 1832, when President Andrew Jackson vetoed renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, the sole national bank.

A consequence of this action was that, subsequently, banking in the United States was regulated solely by the states. The states prohibited interstate branching and often prohibited branching within a state. As a result, banking developed in the United States as a system of thousands of small banks. Since small banks are far more likely to fail than large ones, the history of American banking was one of frequent banking crises and panics, culminating in the great banking crisis of the 1930s.

At the time, many argued (rightly) that the solution to instability of the banking system was to remove the regulatory obstacles to consolidation. However, Congress, catering to special interests, came up with a different solution: deposit insurance. Even President Roosevelt, not exactly a libertarian, understood that this was a bad idea. He realized that it would allow banks to engage in risky behavior with no danger of losing depositors, an example of a problem of insurance known as “moral hazard.” So began the second cycle.

The moral hazard problem expressed itself in banks cutting their capital ratios. Before deposit insurance, a typical bank had funded about 25 percent of its assets with its own capital. This had the effect of protecting depositors against losses on the bank’s loans. Consequently, depositors had paid close attention to their bank’s capital ratio. If it fell too low, they withdrew their deposits. However, with the creation of deposit insurance, depositors no longer cared about their banks’ capital ratios. Banks responded by steadily reducing them, thereby increasing their leverage and thus their return on equity. The fall in capital ratios also had the effect of making the banking system far more fragile in the face of a shock.

For decades, however, there was no shock. For unrelated reasons, the environment remained unusually stable. By the 1970s, capital ratios had fallen as low as 5 percent. Then, in the late ‘70s, a steep rise in interest rates caused a rash of bank failures, culminating in the savings and loan crisis of the early 1980s.

Regulators, rather than admitting that deposit insurance had been a mistake, responded by doubling down. To address the moral hazard problem, they instituted capital requirements to force banks to increase their capital ratios. They also introduced a new form of government guarantee: the doctrine of “too big to fail.” So began the third cycle.

It was adaptation to the new capital requirements that set up the financial system for the financial crisis of 2008. Because nonbank financial institutions were not subject to capital requirements, profits could be increased significantly by shifting lending from banks to nonbank lenders. This happened on a massive scale — especially with mortgage lending — leaving the financial system as a whole with a very low effective capital ratio and consequently in a very fragile state.

Then, in the 1990s, the federal government began to promote subprime mortgages, lending to borrowers who would not have otherwise qualified for a mortgage loan. Since the government implicitly guaranteed most of these mortgages, lenders considered them safe. As a result, many financial institutions — banks, securities firms, and others — invested heavily in these instruments. In 2006, the housing market turned down and subprime defaults began to mount, leading to a major financial crisis in 2008.

What is the lesson from all of this? It certainly seems that government intervention, far from stabilizing the financial system, has been a major cause of its instability. For example, the crisis of 2008 was not caused by “greed on Wall Street” but rather by incentives distorted by two centuries of government intervention.

Does this mean that without government intervention the financial system would have been stable, or at least more stable? To answer this question, a study by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber compared government intervention and financial system stability across countries. They found that, indeed, more intervention is associated with greater instability. Their most interesting comparison is between the United States and Canada — two economies that are similar in most respects, except that the Canadian government has intervened very little in its financial system. The result? Since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the United States has experienced 12 major banking crises. In the same period, Canada has experienced not even one — not in the Great Depression, not in 2008.

The lesson for progressivism is clear: we don’t understand the economy and the effects of intervention well enough to be able to improve things. The economy is a complex system that adapts to intervention in ways that are inherently unpredictable. The consequences are rarely what we expect or desire. So, for me, the first pillar of progressivism crumbled. We don’t know how to make things better through government intervention.

Lesson 3. My Research — The Nature of Government

The second pillar of progressivism is the belief that government is a suitable instrument for doing good. This pillar crumbled for me as a result of my research.

For some time, I have been developing a theory of economic progress based on the evidence of preindustrial Europe and preindustrial China. My theory differs from textbook economics in several ways. In particular, it suggests a very different understanding of government.

For textbook economics, economic activity means production. However, looking at the historical evidence, there are two other ways that people make a living — two other economic activities. The first is commerce, buying and selling the goods that others produce. The second is predation, taking by force the goods that others produce or trade.

Economic progress can be understood in terms of the different effects of commerce and predation. Commerce makes it easier for people to trade with one another. The resulting expansion of trade leads to increased productivity, which creates opportunities for further expansion of trade. Economic progress, therefore, is a self‐​perpetuating process. Why, then, isn’t every nation wealthy? The answer is predation. Predation slows, stops, and even reverses economic progress. And the principal source of predation is governments.

Textbook economics has no explicit discussion of what government is or how it works. It simply assumes that government is a kind of benign spirit ready and willing to solve our problems — a kind of fairy godmother. The historical evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

Government is an organization created to deploy force, either to engage in predation (predatory government) or to protect a population against predation (associational government). In preindustrial Europe, the governments of kings and princes were predatory governments; think the Norman conquest of England. The governments of commercial cities were associational governments. In general, associational governments were hospitable to economic progress, while predatory governments were not.

Associational government, however, had a problem: it did not scale up very well. As the territory and population under an associational government grew, it became increasingly difficult for the population to exercise effective control over its government. This enabled the government to engage in predation: associational government turned into predatory government. Fortunately, a new form of associational government emerged, largely by chance, that solved this problem. When the provinces of the Netherlands won their war of independence from Spain, they created a national government that was an association of associational governments — a federal government. This was the model later adopted by the United States.

What did this different understanding of government mean for my progressivism? What government does is deploy force. In the good case, it deploys force to protect its territory against predation. In the bad case, to which things naturally tend, it deploys force to engage in predation. Government has existed for millennia; only a century or so ago did intellectuals — many of them economists — come up with the idea that government was a suitable instrument for solving society’s problems. It is a bizarre idea: why should the guys with the guns run the financial system or provide us with education or health care? The second pillar of my progressivism crumbled.

Conclusion

So, that is how I became a libertarian. The first step was my personal experience of kibbutz, where I came to realize that socialism, even on the scale of a small community, did not further human happiness. The second step was examining the history of government regulation of the U.S. financial system. From that, I learned that contrary to the assumption of progressivism, the government does not know — and cannot know — how to make things better. Indeed, its interventions generally make things worse. The third step was my research into the origins and nature of government. Progressivism assumes that government is a suitable instrument for improving society — a kind of fairy godmother. History teaches otherwise: government evolved primarily as an instrument of predation — more like a wicked witch.

Persuaded by this evidence, I became a libertarian — a libertarian with a small “l.” That is, I believe in limited government. Government is necessary to protect us against predation by other governments. But government is not a suitable instrument for other purposes, such as regulating economic activity, funding scientific research, or engaging in social engineering.

California’s Anti-Gig-Worker Law Is A Grave Moral Offense That’s Turning Democrats Into Libertarians.

/in /by

Are California Democrats—responsible for the state’s new anti-gig-worker law, AB5—so out of touch that they’re not aware of the growing anger of their constituents? It appears so.

Since AB5 took effect on January 1, hundreds of thousands of Californians are finding their businesses in tatters. Musicians can’t join bands for a one-night gig, chefs can’t join forces with caterers, nurses can’t work at various hospitals, and writers must cap their submissions per media outlet to 35 per year. Under the law, these freelancers can no longer conduct the same business-to-business transactions they have for years or even decades. Clients with whom they fostered valuable relationships are gone—as are their successful careers and incomes. An overwhelming majority of professionals in fields affected by AB5 identify as liberals and have generally voted along the blue line. Today, however, many are so disillusioned with their representatives that they’re changing political loyalties.

When Gloria Rivera, a San Diego-based, Peruvian-born translator and interpreter, achieved U.S. citizenship, the first thing she did was register as a Democrat. “Now I’m seeing a lot of people like me who are either going Independent or Republican,” she says, “myself included. The Democrats are not listening to us.”

Lorena Gonzalez, the San Diego assembly member who authored AB5, faces public condemnation wherever she goes. Online and in person, independent contractors are confronting Gonzalez and demanding a repeal of the law. Her condescending response: independent contractors need the protection of union-driven labor laws. In a damning KUSI news interview, Gonzalez denied that AB5 has resulted in widespread income loss. Her dismissive attitude has fueled outrage against Democrats. “Lorena Gonzalez is doing a great job turning everybody red,” says Rivera.

Gonzalez deserves much of the blame for the AB5 train wreck, but she had plenty of support from her party: nearly every assembly member who approved AB5 is a Democrat, including Governor Gavin Newsom. Those opposed: Republicans and Independents. Senator Patricia Bates, a Republican state senator representing parts of Orange and San Diego counties, has been hearing from constituents who had no idea that they were swept up in the AB5 net. “They’re asking, ‘Who did this to me?’” says Bates. “I don’t like to make it partisan, but I have to tell them the majority party that runs the show did it. There’s a new awareness about the anti-business environment and how it affects their right to work, to be free.”

Independent contractors are entering new territory. Suddenly, a more conservative approach seems more attractive. “My entire political mindset has changed drastically following the enactment of AB5,” says Cathy Hertz, a freelance copyeditor of STM (science-technology-medicine) books, from Loma Linda. Hertz campaigned for Barack Obama cross-country at her own expense in 2008; she campaigned for him locally, in Los Angeles, in 2012. “Now I feel that the rights of entrepreneurs are being stifled, trampled upon, violated,” she says. “Free enterprise is one of the main pillars of modern democracy.”

Apparently oblivious to the reaction in California, congressional Democrats have passed HR 2474, a national version of AB5, known as the “Protecting the Right to Organize” or “PRO Act.” The PRO Act, designed to boost union membership, will put 57 million independent contractors across the country out of work if it becomes law. These enterprising professionals will be forced into low-paying jobs—if they can find them—with none of the autonomy, flexibility, or opportunity that they currently enjoy. When the Trump administration denounced the bill, people who normally hiss at mention of the president’s name found themselves in a peculiar position: feeling grateful.

As for Gonzalez, she’s up for reelection this year and is aiming for secretary of state in 2022. Her campaigns will be tougher than she likely imagines. The movement against her is ramping up.

“I see a revolution on the horizon,” says David Mills, a musician from Lake Elsinore who created the Facebook group Freelancers against PRO Act. “This may be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. But I think it’s leading to something good. The American people on all sides are waking up. We’ve gotten too caught up in partisan support. Now we’re paying attention. There is a huge uprising. People had to lose their jobs to find out what it was.”

Kevin Kiley, a Republican assembly member representing a large swath of Sacramento and a vocal ally of independent contractors, agrees. In January, he led a rally on the steps of the state capitol against AB5 and introduced a bill to repeal it. “We have a capital that’s controlled by special interests, and the public good isn’t even considered,” says Kiley. “That disconnect is stark. I’m more motivated to change this law than anything I’ve ever worked on because it has such a direct and negative impact on peoples’ lives. I believe very deeply in economic freedom, the right to pursue your calling. AB5 is a grave moral offense. So if there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s giving a diverse range of people a window into the dysfunctional nature of politics in Sacramento. For those who are disenchanted with the political majority, there is now an opportunity for alternatives.”

Such alternatives are popping up around the state. Evan Wecksell, a comedian and tutor by trade, is running for state senate as a write-in candidate for District 25, which encompasses parts of Los Angeles and San Bernardino county. He was registered as a Democrat until recently. Today, he’s a Libertarian.

“I definitely sense a change,” says Wecksell. “People who swore they would never vote for a Republican are doing it. We were not up to speed with knowing what was going on in Sacramento, but AB5 was a lesson and we’re learning from it. They’re taking away our natural human rights.”

Independent contractors are a unique bunch. Deeply committed to individual liberty, they’re becoming a unified group of fighters in California. They come from all walks of life and political persuasions, and if voting differently means that they can continue to run their businesses as they see fit, then so be it. Unless Democrats change course, the AB5 revolt may be the Brexit that the U.S. never saw coming. California certainly didn’t.

Erica Sandberg is a widely published consumer-finance reporter based in San Francisco

Don’t Try To Change The World. A Better Strategy Is To Go Home And Hug Your Kids.

/in /by
It is a peculiar characteristic of modern man to think in terms of changing the world, either in triumph over our sinful past or in some grand return to better days.
In a world dominated by the political, when all things are related in one way or another to public institutions managed and upheld by the social-administrative nature of Western government—and especially its narratives—so many have a tendency to push toward improvement at a universal scale. As the political extends to the globe, so does the framing of our problems and search for solution.
Whether seeking to overcome the prejudices and cultural inclinations of yesterday, or seeking to re-instill them, our thinking is geared toward colossal shifts that must happen in order to achieve the improvements which we imagine. Our vision is cosmic and there is no hope except in contributing consciously and readily to the unfolding of progress in our time. Man is thrust into the grand and epochal battle for the future of the world, always needing to hone and craft his ideology for the sake of victory over the present conditions of insecurity and tension.
Indeed, man feels an obligation, a pull, to jump into the mix and “do something about it.”
Thus, as we sit on the precipice of the Western socio-political framework in decline, there is a constant and implicit demand that we offer an ideological replacement to fill the void created by the Neo-liberal social order (with not only its political structure, but its overall social milieu and interpretive framework). The question constantly asked is: “how do we achieve the successful implementation of our vision?”
We each believe that if the world could adapt, however slightly, our own suggestions, the future might indeed be saved. In a social environment of strife and upheaval, where the animosity and social hostility felt comes via media of entertainment, news, formal education, social media campaigns, and even the narratives that dominate corporate culture, it is becoming obvious that the state is not our only problem. While the managerial state in the West played—and plays— a core role in the transformation of society, the fact remains that it has, undeniably, transformed society itself.
The question therefore is increasingly not merely how do we roll back the influence of the progressive state, the question is what are the causes of a healthy and stable society? In this sense, the answer is not to be found in a loud chorus of ideas offered, understood, and accepted. Civilizations, I’ve said so many times of late, are not phenomena rising out of the application of mutually agreed upon ideological frameworks.  The individuals who make up society at large have rarely (perhaps examples can be found in certain religious sects) in history consented to live peacefully among themselves on the basis of a shared ideological vision.Moreover, the birth and development of sound civilizations are not projects that span the lifetime of a single reformer, whether or not he is fully dedicated to his cause.
Western civilization and all its institutions and cultural contributions was the result of over a thousand years of crisis, struggle, and maturation; it was not the result of the intended goal of constructing a brilliant vision for the future.  Even more profoundly, the roots of European civilization, which nestled in at the collapse of the Roman Empire, were not the product of revolutionaries seeking to set forth a plan of concerted action.
Throughout American (and European history), the majority of real, everyday, people did not operate their lives in terms of a some fight for liberty; they barely thought about it. The politicization of our thinking has coincided not with the buildup of a strong society, but as it has come at the expense of attention on more important, non-political things, the politicization of our passions and mental bandwidth has been a key element of the growth of the state and the fracturing of social continuity. Robert Nisbet describes this social breakdown as follows:

It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought.”

In a recent review of Patrick Deneen’s book on the failures of Liberalism, (a book which may not be agreeable in total), Sam Goldman concludes:

Deneen is probably right that the demand for an ideological replacement for liberalism is not only distinctively modern, but actually part of the problem. In seeking out a course beyond liberalism, we may find ourselves in a position that more closely resembles that of the ancients, who did not possess—and did not generally seek—a comprehensive political and moral doctrine.

Whether one finds fault with the difficult-to-define project of “liberalism,” the point still stands: constructing a socio-political framework for our human future is not the sole way out. This makes the mistake of presuming that the health of society is a result of a comprehensive and shared vision. In truth, naturally arising social context must come first, it is the soil in which the fruit trees can grow. In the words of Robert Nisbet (Quest for Community):

The family, religious association, and local community—these, the  conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man’s thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions.

Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.

What we learn from all this is that our strategy may be found in the opposite of our modern inclination. Consider the following suggestion: we may not need a mere mob of more voices on behalf of a better ideology at the expense of the actual development of the roots that are required for civilization to rest on solid ground.

The social mood of our late stage democratic progressivism puts a particular emphasis on the primacy of political involvement, politicized chatter, and the sham of making “your voice be heard.” There is a general atmosphere that encourages one to think in terms of creating a movement, of overcoming the power elite, of rallying the proverbial militia, of changing hearts and minds of the world around us.

But imagine, if you will, the sheer audacity of traveling back in time to the degenerative collapse of the Roman world and rallying a handful of people to tell their neighbors about the Good News of Lockean-style private property rights. What is being posited here is certainly not a plea to ignore ideas, but rather, to direct and preserve them in more meaningful, even self-fulfilling ways.

One must consider finding fulfillment and satisfaction in a completely different civilizational role than that of a visible hero. To echo Warren Harding’s campaign speech on a slightly different context, we need, at a personal level, to “return to normalcy:”

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise;

Such a return to normalcy must be motivated in a change of personal perspective. We must learn to love the everyday; to cherish the mundane; to appreciate the regular; to invest time and happiness in the ordinary. This is the long-lasting and measurable path forward. A people that find their sole identity in the fight against the zeitgeist will so often find that the fight came at the expense of the truly meaningful elements of our person. And the negative effects of non-meaningful political identities have negative effects on those that come after us, long after we draw our last breath.

Indeed, as Nisbet writes:

the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.”

Each of us tend to flatter ourselves that we will follow in the footsteps of Cato the Younger or Ron Paul, yet the odds are unfavorable that this is the role for our personal taking.  Thus, it is high time that we come to terms with the suggestion that we might take up a similar function of the Celts in those dark years in the vacuum of Rome’s former glory.

Rather than a pursuit of some vague agenda of saving the world, the Irish monks, as told in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, took the path of restoration and preservation on the home front— their scribes took it upon themselves to collect, copy, and preserve the literary contributions of a world that was quickly slipping away. In an age of barbarianism, anti-intellectualism, and revolt against civilization, the role of St. Patrick and the monks he inspired was to act as a silent medium through an era of cultural darkness.

For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.

Without this service of the scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly rebounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would not have come to be.

And Kenneth Clark, in his chapter “The Skin of Our Teeth,” in his own Civilisation writes:

Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

Their objective was far from hoisting a civilized society back on to the then-dead Roman society, it was rather to be faithful in the small things; to accomplish some obtainable and something accessible. In the scheme of things, the Irish saved civilization because they became the living preservation of the elements of goodness taken from Rome in decay.

From their activities of preservation came forth the eventual outward growth and spread of these memories via an impressive chain of monasteries from Ireland back through continental Europe and blossomed into the roots of the soil of what would one day be European civilization. Literature, art, religious writings, history, records, all the recordings of Roman life were transferred across time via the Irish monks.

This is all analogy, of course. We do not need to run for the caves, build fortresses in the mountains— but the analogy is obvious: in a world of politicization, the most prudent use of our time is not to be another voice in the crowd. Even Jesus said as much: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”

What, in our context, might it look like to hunker down and hold to a mentality of preservation, to “save the books,” rather than reshape the present world? One thing in particular would be to restore, in our personal lives, the social primacy of the family. This is immediate, it is measurable, it is meaningful, and it is long-lasting. It is quite remarkable that such suggestion might come off as a bland and out of fashion in our age of individual liberation.

And yet, the idea of family—the idea of a partnership between those who have passed on, those currently living, and those yet to be born—this is itself a proven model that can act as a via media, or a conduit, if our goal is the preservation and promulgation of the goodness of civilization. These goods, what TS Eliot and Russell Kirk called “permanent things,” must be passed on in a world dominated by the enemies of permanent things.

In our time, our strategy must be to turn back toward the home, a shelter from the broken and loney world around us. In a world of upheaval, there is solace and meaning in the activities of raising a family. The greatest legacy that many of us will pass on are those of our own flesh and blood.  The opportunity that we get to impart our own memories and passions, wisdom and insight, habits and prejudices, to the next generation is made manifest in the raising of a family. In a Progressivist world that downplays the importance of the family and sings the praises of alternative arrangements, few things are more important—but certainly not political activity— than just being a dedicated spouse and parent.

Far from defeatism, there rests a very real sense of hope in walking away from the primacy of the political and tending to the care and development of one’s children. To be a voice in the crowd will likely change no one; to be parent is to homestead a living being that can embody the very things worth passing forward to the world unknown. Our friend Nick Hankoff recently offered pushback against a particular phenomenon among libertarians, writing a piece in the Daily Caller titled As Long As Libertarians Reject Traditional Institutions, They’re As Doomed As America:

The only way to correct the inevitable failure of the libertarian movement is through a deeper appreciation and love for family, church, community, and nationality. For too long, these centers of civic life that strengthen the individual and diminish the state have been neglected.

To the detriment of their cause, some libertarians sneer at these social structures and retreat to more familiar ideological territory. The individual owns himself and has natural rights, yes. But he is also the product of his family, religion, and communities.

If you want to have a role on the future, something measurable and something identifiable to your own hand, stop trying to change the world. Go home and hug your kids. If you don’t have any, get married and make some. Homeschool them, if at all possible. Enjoy them. Teach them. Impart the memories and customs of your past—their past—onto their soul, that they might bring them forward to posterity. Make them read— most kids can’t; make them write—still fewer know how.

Raise boys to be men. Raise girls to be women. This is the new counter-cultural. But it is the foundation of culture.

Don’t envision yourself as a hero of world change and bringer of hope to the world. Be a father or mother. Be a hero to your family. Gramsci had his long march through the institutions. It’s time for our long march through Main Street.

To leave a legacy, first look homeward.

It must be remembered that we the living are the catalyst bringing the past to the future.

We must be vigilant to treat this duty with care, for we are our children’s present and tomorrow we will be their past.

 

C.Jay Engel is the founder and publisher of Bastion Magazine.

If You Call Yourself An Individualist, You Are Stating Clear Opposition To Collectivism Of Both The Right And Left.

/in /by

If like me you are someone who believes in the values and political principles of individual liberty, personal rights, and limited government, then you face many challenges in the contemporary cultural and political climate. Ideas directly opposed to those principles are gaining ground — on both political sides.

Faced with this situation it may seem frivolous to think about what to call yourself, what label to give your ideas. Surely that is a trivial matter and you should concentrate on the serious stuff such as developing your ideas and getting them out into the public realm?

Indeed you should be doing that, but the question of what name to give the body of beliefs you subscribe to is not trivial: the names of political ideals and movements have a power of their own, independent of the actual content of the philosophy, because of the associations they bring and the emotional response they provoke.

One aspect of this is the way that political labels often begin their life as pejoratives, terms of abuse, before being taken up as a badge of pride by the people they refer to. In that case the power of the label derives from the way it comes to embody a spirit of defiance and solidarity on the part of a group who are being attacked and abused by their opponents. The classic English terms Whig and Tory are examples of this — originally Whig meant a Scottish outlaw and Tory an Irish robber.

This is a case of turning a term of abuse against its originators and making it something descriptive and identity-defining in a positive way. Another case is that of a word being appropriated by people opposed to the ideas it originally referred to, because of its positive connotations. This is of course what has happened with the ideas of individual freedom and limited government.

Originally the word universally used to describe people who supported that position (and related ideas such as rationalism and progress or optimism about the future) was “liberal” with the ideas being labeled “liberalism.” The word had positive connotations partly because of the popularity of the values so labeled but also because of the favorable associations of the word “liberal” in its original sense (meaning open-hearted, generous, broad-minded, and tolerant).

In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the word “liberal” was taken over as a label by people who advocated a very different kind of politics and ideas. They had originally called themselves “progressives” but by 1900 had adopted the label of “liberal” and in so doing redefined the commonly understood referent or content of that term. It now meant large and active government combined with ethical collectivism of various kinds. Something similar happened in Britain with the appearance at the same time of so-called “New Liberalism,” but the shift in meaning was less clear-cut.

Elsewhere the word “liberal” retained its original meaning for most people. However because of the dominance of the American academy and popular culture in the 20th century it became difficult for advocates of individual liberty in the Anglophone world to continue to describe themselves as “liberals” because that term had come to refer to what everywhere else was called “social democracy.”

Increasingly they came to describe themselves (and be described) as “conservatives.” This was problematic for a number of reasons: in particular, self-identified conservatives had been the main opponents of liberals since the two philosophies had emerged in the 1820s, and there are still significant differences between the two positions and traditions of thought. In particular, liberals and conservatives, who may sometimes agree about economics, are typically sharply divided over issues of personal liberty, privacy, and the role of the state in upholding traditional mores and ways of life. This reflects a more profound disagreement over the moral status of rules and institutions that restrict personal liberty but do not derive from government.

Conservatives typically support them, while liberals oppose them.

However labels and names have real power and effects. If you use one label to describe yourself, then you will often be influenced by the associations the word brings, even if unconsciously, and your own views will tend to shift. (They will also shift because you now associate with and are allied to people fully committed to the original set of meanings associated with the word.) So the appropriated or adopted label will change its commonly understood meaning or referent, but at the same time that referent will be changed by its being associated with the label. (We can see this with the aforementioned progressives, who did indeed move away from their originally robust collectivism in some ways as they came to think of themselves as liberals while at the same time shifting the commonly understood meaning of the term.)

However the story for Anglophone supporters of individual liberty is a more complicated one than that. There was always another label available to them, and for a long time they made enthusiastic use of it. This was the term “individualism” and the associated “individualist.” Individualism was a word that had undergone the change from being a term of opprobrium to one of positive identity. It had originally had connotations of selfishness and egoism but by the 1870s had been adopted by a number of radical liberals as a label for their views, on both sides of the Atlantic (and, interestingly, particularly in France).

In the 1880s and 1890s there was a vigorous intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic between the self-defined individualists on one side and the self-defined “collectivists” (in the UK, Canada, and Europe) or “progressives” (in the U.S.) on the other. Subsequently the terms “individualist” and “individualism” remained the main labels used by advocates of the radical case for personal, individual liberty. This was true in the 1920s and even as late as the 1940s and early 1950s (Friedrich Hayek used the term for example and spoke of “those of us who adhere to the individualist position”).

Then quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1950s, all of this changed. People who had described themselves as individualists and identified with that label suddenly stopped using it (with a very few exceptions such as Frank Chodorow). Many adopted the label “conservative,” particularly in the U.S. Most however took to calling themselves classical liberals or libertarians (a word that had previously referred to communist anarchists of the Peter Kropotkin type). The term “individualist,” which had been used until then by both friends and critics, almost vanished.

Why this happened is a mystery. My own suspicion is that it was due to a combination of a generational rupture and the successful meta-political strategy of the CIA at that time, to unite disparate groups into an anti-Communist front — this involved ditching terms and concepts that were clear and therefore divisive.

Today however, people who support the ideals and practice of individual liberty should think very seriously about reverting to the older label and once again calling themselves individualists. The two terms they have used are both problematic, for different reasons. Classical liberal is essentially a historical term, referring to the ideas and personalities of a specific historical period (broadly the 1780s to the 1900s). The danger with using this as a label is that it implies you are advocating a kind of embalmed truth rather than a living intellectual tradition. It also has limited appeal or resonance to people from outside Europe or North America (there were in fact individualist liberals in other parts of the world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are not remembered in the same way as their counterparts in Europe and the Anglosphere).

Simply using the term “liberal” without qualification is attractive, but there is a definite tradition of collectivist liberalism now and this means a constant need to explain how your own position is different from that, or a qualification of the core individualist perspective.

The widely used term “libertarian” (which I have employed myself) is even more problematic and becoming critically so. Individualism as a label has always had a thick and extensive meaning or set of referents. It refers not just to economic liberalism (free markets and laissez-faire) or political individualism (strictly limited government) but also to lifestyle individualism (J. S. Mill’s experiments in living), cultural individualism and innovation (as in, e.g., Ibsen and Strindberg), and a particular vision of personal identity and the way to live and flourish as a human being. So the label comes with a particular kind of attached content and association, which is philosophical and cultural as well as economic and political.

By contrast the term “libertarianism,” once divorced from its associations with anarchist communism, comes to be understood as meaning only the first two of those things and increasingly only the first, so the economic content comes to dominate and crowd out the social and cultural elements and even the political. Simply saying that you are opposed to large government or support free markets says little or nothing about the kinds of culture, ways of living, character, and social relations that you admire and advocate. So you have a much more thin and ultimately impoverished understanding of what you are about and support.

Even more seriously, using a label that implies that support for free markets and opposition to state welfare is the whole of your position or at least the essential core of it allows very different and actually opposed political philosophies and identities to claim the same label. In particular it allows people who combine the two positions described earlier with collectivist ideals such as nationalism and ethnic identity, or who support the subordination of the individual’s pursuit of happiness to tradition and social (as opposed to governmental) authoritarianism, to claim the label “libertarian.”

In fact there is a deep cleavage between people of that kind and radical individualists. As long as their principal opponents were advocates of a planned and collectivist economy this division could be ignored. However we are now rapidly moving into a world where the division between these two kinds of self-defined libertarians is becoming the main issue in politics.

In that situation the label “libertarian” is the object of a tug-of-war between individualists and small-government conservatives over who has the right to use it. A serious risk is that the term will become associated with what we may call right-wing collectivism and this will discredit and obscure individualists who continue to use it.

Given this, why not revive the term that was used until the 1950s and call yourself an individualist and your philosophy individualism? If you do not want to surrender the term “liberal” to soft collectivism, then speak of individualist liberalism rather than classical liberalism.

There is no danger of this term and its associated identity being appropriated by self-aware collectivists of either the left or right varieties, and in fact it makes it clear that you are at a third point of that triangle, rejecting both kinds of collectivist politics. In other words using the term “individualism” will clarify both what you are for and what you are against, which is always a good thing to get straight.

Stephen Davies is a Senior Fellow at AIER.

Don’t Be A Conservative. Aim For Abolition, Rather Than Reform.

/in /by

One of the fundamental differences between conservatives and libertarians is with respect to reforming the welfare-warfare state way of life versus striving for a genuinely free society. Conservatives aim for reform. Libertarians strive for freedom.

The way that one can usually tell whether a particular book, article, or speech is conservative or libertarian is by examining its conclusion. If the conclusion says something like, “The system needs reform” or if it calls for a specific reform of the government program it’s complaining about, it is a virtual certainty that the author or speaker is a conservative. If instead the conclusion calls for a repeal, dismantling, or abolition of the program, there is a high likelihood that the author or speaker is a libertarian.

The difference between reform and abolition is night and day. By advocating reform, conservatives have made peace with the welfare-warfare state way of life. They have given up any hope of attaining a genuinely free society. Their only aim is to make the serfdom under which people live in a welfare-warfare state more palatable or more comfortable.

Imagine you lived in Alabama in 1855. Conservatives would likely be dedicating their lives to improving the plight of the slaves through such reforms as fewer lashings, shorter work hours, and better healthcare. Libertarians would be striving to abolish, end, or repeal slavery. Our goal would be freedom, not reform.

While libertarians have nothing against conservative (or liberal) reforms that might improve the lives of the serfs under a welfare-warfare state, that is not our goal. Our goal is a genuinely free society, which necessarily entails a lifting of infringements on freedom. We hold that if all we do is reform or improve infringements on liberty, we have failed to achieve our goal of a free society.

Let’s consider some real-world examples.

Education. Conservatives, like liberals, have come to accept the inevitability of state control over the education of children in American society. Thus, they have come to embrace educational reform, which consists of school vouchers. In fact, they even claim that their reforms will improve public schooling.

Not libertarians. We understand that a free society necessarily presupposes the separation of school and state, just as our ancestors understood that a free society presupposes the separation of church and state. Thus, we oppose vouchers as just another welfare-state program, one that in this case actually embeds the state more deeply into education. We libertarians say: Repeal compulsory school-attendance laws and school taxes and end all state involvement in education.

Monetary policy. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in the Federal Reserve System, which is nothing more than a socialist system of monetary central planning. Conservatives think that if they can just get conservatives appointed to the Fed, they will be better central planners than liberals. A good example is President Trump’s appointment of conservative Stephen Moore to the Fed. Moore is fighting hard against the personal attacks being leveled against him in his quest to become a member of the Fed and move it in a conservative direction, which, he says, entails maintaining low interest rates to boost the economy.

Not libertarians. We understand that monetary freedom and sound money necessarily presuppose an abolition or end of the Fed. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek put it, freedom entails the “denationalization of money” — a free-market monetary system in which the government plays no role whatsoever.

Borders. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in government-controlled borders, at least with respect to international borders. At best, they want the government to “let in” more immigrants, so long as they are “qualified” and “safe.” At worst, they want the government to build a Berlin Wall along the border and convert the borderlands into an even fiercer police state.

Not libertarians. We understand that an immigration system of border controls is one based on socialist central planning, which is why there has been a decades-long immigration crisis. We say: Open the borders to the free movements of goods, people, and services, just as we have open borders between the states. A genuinely free society necessarily presupposes open borders.

Social Security and Medicare. Conservatives, like liberals, believe in these two socialist programs, the crown jewels of the welfare state. And like liberals, they are committed to reform, so long as both programs are left intact.

Not libertarians. We understand that a system of coerced charity is incompatible with the principles of a free society. In a genuinely free society, people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it. No mandatory charity whatsoever.

Drug laws. Conservatives believe in putting people into jail and fining them for ingesting what some consider to be harmful or destructive substances. At best, they support minor reforms of drug laws, such as lowering sentences for possessing marijuana or reforming asset-forfeiture laws.

Not libertarians. We hold that a free society necessarily presupposes the right to ingest whatever a person chooses to ingest, no matter how harmful or destructive. If the state can punish a person for ingesting something in the privacy of his own home, that’s definitely not a free society.

Thus, once he discovers libertarianism, every American is faced with a choice: Go with conservatives and liberals and their reforms of the welfare-warfare state way of life, or join up with us libertarians in our quest to achieve the genuinely free society on our lifetime.

 

Jacob G. Hornberger via fff.org

Write for CFI