Category Archives: Libertarianism

I do not recall, when I was growing up or as a young adult, ever thinking that the issue of vaccinations was a political issue. Now, thanks to the infusion of libertarian sensibilities into the body politic, and a culture in which choice is always the ace of trumps, vaccinations are a political football. It is to weep.

First, there was Gov. Chris Christie on a trip to the United Kingdom. He was trying to demonstrate his foreign policy bona fides I suppose, and certainly the issue of vaccines was not on the top of his list of things to be prepared to discuss while taking questions in the streets of London. But, the sudden outburst of measles stateside, which unlike Ebola is highly contagious, led to the question and, in his answer, Christie gave an unnecessary nod to parental choice. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of his intellect, there was a default switch that clicked on: When discussing family issues, do not forget to mention parental choice. And so he did. And so he looked very foolish.

Gov. Christie is not a libertarian in any meaningful sense of the word. But, Sen. Rand Paul swims in those waters, indeed we could say he was baptized politically in those waters. As if on cue, and ignoring the fact that for vaccines to achieve their medical benefit, we all have to take them, Sen. Paul turned to his binary view of the world in which the state is Leviathan, eager to devour first your rights and then, apparently, your children. The state doesnt own your children, he said eagerly. Parents own the children. And it is an issue of freedom and public health. The choice of the verb own to describe the relationship between children and parents is a little frightening. And, he does not square freedom and public health, which may make separate conclusions, on this issue, just leaves them out there like exclamation marks in search of a sentence.

The episode shows everything that is deplorable about libertarianism. First, and I invite my conservative Catholic friends to take special note of this, in Sen. Pauls binary vision of the state versus individual freedom there is as little room for civil society, and the Church, as there is in your worst collectivist nightmare. If it is all one or the other, there is no role for mediating institutions or, at least, they will quickly be relegated to the sidelines of political and intellectual discourse. Before the god freedom, all libertarians bow and grovel.

Second, as was pointed out by E.J. Dionne on one of the talk shows last night, the episode highlights another problem with libertarianism. While it can provide a certain cast of mind with a neat, tidy intellectual framework for explaining the world, once libertarianism gets applied to reality, it tends not to bear up very well. The real world exhibits nuance and conflicting values that must be weighed, it has exceptions to be sure, but more than exceptions it has an uncanny knack for requiring similar ideals to be applied differently in different situations. As an ideological construct, I am not much of a fan of libertarianism, but even if you are, you need to recognize, as Sen. Paul never really does, that in the application of those ideas, libertarianism tends to become either too rigid or too brittle to work.

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When Pope Francis says that reality is superior to ideas, he is telling us Catholics something very important about the very heart of our faith. Our incarnational faith certainly recognizes the importance and value of reason, but it tethers reason to both faith on the one hand and real-lived experience on the other. Pope Benedict XVI emphasized this as well, stating in the opening sentences of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est: We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John's Gospel describes that event in these words: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should ... have eternal life (3:16). The historic vocation of the Catholic Church in civil society is to provide a bulwark against any ideology that denies the human persons transcendence. And, in our day, the principle method of denying such transcendence is choice and freedom understood as ideological constructs and political tools.

Let us be clear: This cuts against both the left and the right. It always makes me laugh when I watch MSNBC and they are discussing abortion and they warn against the dangers of having the government in the examining room and then you flip to Fox, and they are discussing the Affordable Care Act and they, too, frighten everyone with the prospect of the government in the examining room. Neither side seems to even recognize the irony because their fear of government intrusion is not principled in the least.

Libertarians, at least, get high marks for consistency. But, in a culture in which choice is the preeminent value, there are many, many things that culture cannot accomplish because they require everyone to buy in, if I may be permitted a commercial metaphor. Vaccines are ones such issue. They dont work if only half the population gets them. To work, the compliance rate has to be above 97%. Of course, in Europe, where medical care actually is socialized, very few countries require vaccinations but they have an almost 100% compliance rate nonetheless. Sen. Paul can put that sociological datum into his libertarian pipe and smoke it.

Which leads to one other aspect of libertarianism today: I do not know what they have been smoking, but they have a penchant for embracing some really bizarre ideas. In an interview yesterday, Sen. Paul did his best imitation of former Cong. Michelle Bachmann. She once said that she knew a woman whose child was vaccinated and the vaccine caused mental retardation. Yesterday, Sen. Paul noted there were many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. Really? This is the medical equivalent of the Gold Standard, which many libertarians also embrace, or the idea that mammoth new trees can be genetically created to deal with climate change. Libertarianism seems almost uniquely to be the part of American politics where conspiracy theories and other idiocies find fertile soil.

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A lawyer friend of mine passed along this idea,

New cause of action: Tortious Non-Vaccination.

This is when a person who could be vaccinated but chooses not to (or his parents choose not to) becomes infected and then infects someone else who could not be vaccinated such as a someone with leukemia or some other immune deficiency or sensitivity to vaccinations. What victims of Tortious Non-Vaccination should do is file a complaint seeking to certify a defendant class action and bring a claim against all Tortious Non-Vaccinators [who had gotten the disease].

I think the kind of burden of proof shifting along the lines of Summers v. Tice would be appropriate. Thus, here, a member of the defendant class would have the opportunity to, say, prove that he could not have infected anyone.

[A]nd since its a negligence claim, you target the homeowners insurance policy. Anti-vaxers insurance rates will rise to internalize the cost of non-vaccination.

Summers v. Tice is a famous tort case in which plaintiff was allowed to recover from his two fellow hunters, when he was injured by one of them but it wasnt clear which one. Usually, a plaintiff has to show that theres a greater than 50% chance that the particular defendant he is suing caused his injury; but in this instance the court relaxed the requirement. (I include an edited version of Summers below.)

Im skeptical about my friends theory. Summers, I think, is a limited exception to the general tort law rule that the plaintiff must show that his injury was likely caused by the defendant. And I doubt that Summers would be extended to a situation such as communicable disease, given how unrelated and variegated the potential tortfeasors are, how many there are, and how unlikely each one is to have injured this particular plaintiff.

I agree that if you know that D has infected P, and D failed to take reasonable precautions to prevent this (e.g., getting vaccinated), this would be tortious under normal negligence principles. (This is often litigated in sexually transmitted disease cases, but historically that came out of other communicable disease cases, where the source of the infection was known; the principle dates back to the late 1800s and early 1900s.) But if a plaintiff is suing everyone who hasnt been vaccinated and has contracted the disease some of whom had more serious forms of the disease and some of whom had less serious forms, some of whom spent a lot of time during their illness around other people and some of whom spent less, and nearly of all whom are likely not to have caused plaintiffs illness, directly or indirectly I dont think the Summers theory would or should apply to defendants.

Indeed, this pretty closely tracks the way the law deals with pollution. In some situations, particular polluters can indeed be sued under general tort law principles for harm to particular plaintiffs. But in large part because of the difficulty proving causation, the tort route is often unavailable. The law has (generally) dealt with this not by relaxing the causation requirement, but by setting up a regulatory scheme requiring polluters to take various steps to diminish pollution.

And I think pollution in general is a good metaphor for non-vaccination. Factories sometimes emit chemical pollutants. Factory owners have a legal duty to take various reasonable steps to reduce the risk and magnitude of such emissions.

Read more from the original source:
Volokh Conspiracy: Not vaccinating = failure to reasonably avoid polluting

Interest in the bestselling novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand continues to grow, 33 years after her death and 70 years after she first hit the bestseller lists withThe Fountainhead. Rand was born February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had writtenLittle House on the Prairieand other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay calledThe Discovery of Freedom.Isabel Paterson, a novelist and literary critic, producedThe God of the Machine,which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world.

The other great book of 1943 wasThe Fountainhead,a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The books individualist theme did not fit the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But it found its intended readers. Its sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on theNew York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, some of them because of the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and many of them were inspired enough to seek more information about Ayn Rands ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel,Atlas Shrugged,in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. Although her political philosophy was libertarian, not all libertarians shared her views on metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Others were put off by the starkness of her presentation and by her cult following.

College students, professors, businessmen, Paul Ryan, the rock group Rush, and Hollywood stars have all proclaimed themselves fans of Ayn Rand.

Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?, she replied with her usual fire, Ichoseto be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?

George Gilder calledAtlas Shruggedthe most important novel of ideas sinceWar and Peace. Writing in theWashington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchevs assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.

Rands books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalisms greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just arent good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.

Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, cant-put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didnt just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.

Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of do your own thing and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the Me Decade but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.

Throughout those decades her books continued to sell 30 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gaveAtlas Shruggeda huge push. A Facebook group titled Read the news today? Its like Atlas Shrugged is happening in real life was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high more than a million copies of Rands books were sold in 2012.

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Ayn Rand at 110

Indy #39;s Insight #3 Libertarianism
the initiation of force is taught to our kids as wrong but as adults.... sorry for shit quality something went wrong hopefully can fix.

By: Iamindy33

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Indy's Insight #3 Libertarianism - Video

Libertarianism and Anti-Feminism with That Guy T and 6oodfella
Sargon of Akkad and DamagedBot couldn #39;t make it, but we #39;re not going to let that stop us.

By: Josh O #39;Brien

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Libertarianism and Anti-Feminism with That Guy T and 6oodfella - Video

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the top choice for Iowa GOP voters ahead of the 2016 caucuses in the state according to a new poll. But Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) is right behind.

Walker leads the field with 15 percent of voters, according to the poll from the Des Moines Register. His stock has been rising in conservative circles, especially in the Hawkeye State, after a strong showing at the Iowa Freedom Summit last week.

Paul is nipping at Walkers heels with 14 percent support. Iowa Republicans received the Paul family brand of libertarianism well in 2012, when Rand Pauls father, former Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), ran for president. The elder Paul initially came in third, and his campaign went on to secure the majority of the states delegates unbound by those results.

After that, support falls off. Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) come next at five and four percent respectively. And a mass of Republican contenders, including Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Texas), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and real estate magnate Donald Trump round out the group, with the lowest amount of support measured.

The Iowa caucuses are vital because they are the first contest in the presidential nominating process. But theres still a year left to go, and anything can happen.

Just months before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, former Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) won among Republicans in the Ames straw poll, a popular pre-caucus poll. She won five percent of the popular vote and zero delegates in the actual caucuses, prompting her to drop out of the race.

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Iowa poll: Scott Walker leads GOP field

Following the cancellation of Fox Business Networks The Independents, its libertarian host Kennedy re-emerged Monday with an eponymous nightly show on the same network. The show promises a quirky blend of politics, sports, music (Kennedys a former MTV VJ), and allusions to hilarious nights of binge-drinking with other political pundits.

Kennedy sat down with Mediaite for a quick Q&A on what she learned from her first political show experience, what she hopes Kennedy will accomplish, and why libertarianism is growing considerably, especially on cable news.

Enjoy below:

Since Mediaites readership is full of people who religiously watch cable news, explain to them why your new show is awesome and they should watch it.

Its awesome because its got a lot of lively interesting conversation, and its liberty-minded. Its whatever your favorite things were about the 90s we concentrate them all in one place.

So basically its a big melting pot of Gen-X sentiment and libertarianism is awesome? So its not just a bunch of people who are gold hoarders [a popular libertarian stereotype]?

Uh, I love gold hoarders. I love survivalists. But you dont have to hoard gold to love the show. Thats the nice thing about it. If you hoard gold, youll be delighted. And if youre a fan of other precious metals or paper currency, youll be equally happy. If your moms best friends love shiny things, theyll be right at home.

The new show has a similar vibe to E!s The Soup, mostly because you riff on all these things happening in the news, with a deadpan sort of mockery. Is that intentional?

Well, there was no Soup discussion when we were putting the show together, but I do love Joel McHale. Ive been a fan of his for a long time. I love his delivery, I adore his acting. I think hes really good. But what weve been trying to do is be true to ourselves and let the rest follow.

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Yelling at People Is Kinda Boring: Kennedy on Her New Show and the State of Cable News

Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics.[1] In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position,[2][3] argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe and that agents have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false.[4] Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are, in fact compatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers,[5] metaphysical libertarianism is discussed, though not necessarily endorsed, by several philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Robert Nozick,[6]Carl Ginet, Hugh McCann, Harry Frankfurt, E.J. Lowe, Alfred Mele, Roderick Chisholm, Daniel Dennett,[7]Timothy O'Connor, Derk Pereboom, and Galen Strawson.[8]

The term "libertarianism" in a metaphysical or philosophical sense was first used by late Enlightenment free-thinkers to refer to those who believed in free will, as opposed to determinism.[9] The first recorded use was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to "necessitarian" (or determinist) views.[10][11] Metaphysical and philosophical contrasts between philosophies of necessity and libertarianism continued in the early 19th century.[12]

Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, and consequently the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality.

Explanations of libertarianism that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior a theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians.

Free volition is regarded as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of indeterminism. An example of this kind of approach has been developed by Robert Kane,[13] where he hypothesises that,

In each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposesa hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which has to be overcome by effort.

At the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles,[14]quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, but still Lewis stated the logical possibility that, if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic, this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality. He states, however, that none of the arguments in his book will rely on this.

Nozick puts forward an indeterministic theory of free will in Philosophical Explanations.[6]

When human beings become agents through reflexive self-awareness, they express their agency by having reasons for acting, to which they assign weights. Choosing the dimensions of one's identity is a special case, in which the assigning of weight to a dimension is partly self-constitutive. But all acting for reasons is constitutive of the self in a broader sense, namely, by its shaping one's character and personality in a manner analogous to the shaping that law undergoes through the precedent set by earlier court decisions. Just as a judge does not merely apply the law but to some degree makes it through judicial discretion, so too a person does not merely discover weights but assigns them; one not only weighs reasons but also weights them. Set in train is a process of building a framework for future decisions that we are tentatively committed to.

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Libertarianism (metaphysics) - Wikipedia, the free ...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) The transcript of a recent speech Salon.com founder David Talbot made at Stanford University has spurred some lengthy and heated comment threads.

In it, Talbots paints a grim picture of the future of the City of Love. He chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley, from its birth as the incubator for the technology that helped fight the Cold War, to its present day form a breeding ground for the selfish libertarianism of todays baby tech moguls.

Talbot decries the triumph of techno-capitalism, the machine mentality that all social problems can be engineered away.

He describes his own neighborhood Bernal Heights once home to filmmakers, cartoonists, counterculture artists and community organizers who lived side-by-side with blue-collar workers and Latina grandmothers. Now, he says it is overrun by Teslas and Beamers transformed into what one real estate website crowned the hottest zip code in town.

Talbots rant is not new. Complaints about the changing face of San Francisco and the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods are almost mundane, so common is the practice of urban reclamation and redevelopment. The difference, perhaps, is to hear it from the mouth of someone who admits to having benefited enormously from the wonders of the digital revolution. Sadly, Talbot feels that revolution has grown old and corrupt.

In the end, Talbot challenges his Stanford audience, Are you interested in going public, or in serving the public youre either part of the problem or part of the solution which one are you, a Stanford dick? Or are you different.

Judging from the comments, articles, and reactions to Talbots speech, no one is indifferent. They run the gamut. One commenter wrote, Grow a pair and move on already. The person who wrote that, said it right after another who claims he was reading Talbot as, my wife and I are being evicted from our home of twenty years by a young tech couple. Theres finger pointing at the finger pointers, and they all point back.

Perhaps the ensuing conversations about Talbots speech are the best part of his rant. Check it out:

READ: Talbots Speech Don't Be a Stanford Asshole.

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Salon.com Founders Speech Blasts His New Bernal Heights Techie Neighbors For Ruining The Vibe

[This article is adapted from a talk presented at the Houston Mises Circle, January 24, 2015.]

Presumably everyone in this room, or virtually everyone, is here today because you have some interest in the topic of secession. You may be interested in it as an abstract concept or as a viable possibility for escaping a federal government that Americans now fear and distrust in unprecedented numbers.

As Mises wrote in 1927:

The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.

Im sure this sentiment is shared by many of you. Mises understood that mass democracy was no substitute for liberal society, but rather the enemy of it. Of course he was right: nearly 100 years later, we have been conquered and occupied by the state and its phony veneer of democratic elections. The federal government is now the putative ruler of nearly every aspect of life in America.

Thats why were here today entertaining the audacious idea of secession an idea Mises elevated to a defining principle of classical liberalism.

Its tempting, and entirely human, to close our eyes tight and resist radical change to live in Americas past.

But to borrow a line from the novelist L.P. Hartley, The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The America we thought we knew is a mirage; a memory, a foreign country.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely why we should take secession seriously, both conceptually as consistent with libertarianism and as a real alternative for the future.

Does anyone really believe that a physically vast, multicultural, social democratic welfare state of 330 million people, with hugely diverse economic, social, and cultural interests, can be commanded from DC indefinitely without intense conflict and economic strife?

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Secession Begins at Home