Skeptical Man's blog

It is a real challenge for someone who has grown up in servitude, and received an education tailored to keeping them in that condition, to think like a free person. This is often apparent in the writings of libertarians, who think freedom consists of having a longer leash, or a master with velvet gloves. Even among people who style themselves "anarchists" it can often be observed, frequently in a form that I call the "master-behind-the-curtain". The author will obviously feel the need for some control over those "other people" which they believe can only come about through the application of an external coercive force, but since they don't believe in the legitimacy of government they will attempt some slight-of-hand to sweep that force behind the curtain where they can ignore it.

The article on children's rights that Sunni pointed to recently is a good example of this. The author of that piece feels the need to ensure that "other people" care for their children the way the author would like to see them cared for. They imagine a utopia where parents are forced to treat their children like self-owners, with some additional coercion in the form of one-sided "contracts" to keep them from utilizing neglect as a control mechanism. All force involved to be provided courtesy of the master-behind-the-curtain.

This argument is kicked off by the author defining self-ownership as a basic right that all humans possess, starting at birth. Now anytime you see a professed anarchist talking about "rights" you have a good chance of detecting the master-behind-the-curtain. "Rights" is usually used by libertarians in the negative "Bill of Rights" or "Rights of an Englishman" sense: a list of prerogatives that the serfs insist their masters not exercise upon them, upon penalty of revolt. For example: "master shall not piss in our water bowl and make us drink from it". Self-ownership never appears on these lists: if the revolting slaves wanted to be free they would just kill their masters, or have nothing further to do with them, rather than demanding concessions. Since the article in question was supposedly an anarchist's view of child-rearing, this sense wouldn't seem to apply.

I suspect that the author means "right" in the newfangled positive sense: a privilege that a master grants over their slaves. Monopolies of all sorts fall into this category, where the "right" consists of the owner ordering their chattel to buy only from, or refrain from competing with, a certain party. "Entitlements" are another form, where a master transfers some percentage of their slave's output to the privileged party. It has become common for owners to grant such privileges over their chattel to their chattel's children, regularly insisting that their youngest slaves have a "right" to various things at the expense of their parents. "Self-ownership" for the child in this context consists of the parent being ordered to treat their offspring as their master's property, rather than as their own.

Realistically, in a free country a parent would have no externally-imposed obligation to treat their children in a particular fashion. Free-market law-providers would recognize dependent children in exactly the capacity that they would be paid to recognize them in. I suspect that few parents would be willing to pay for a policy that treated their offspring as independent agents. If they signed up for such a policy by accident, the first time they got hauled before a court and fined for placing their kid in "time-out" would be the last time they would pay that premium. Most parents would pay to have their children protected as their most precious possessions: not as "self-owners". Children would achieve recognition as self-owners when they were ready and able to pay for such recognition.

Strong feelings about desired outcomes make many "anarchists" reluctant to discard their masters. Leftist "anarchists", with their concern with social outcomes label the curtain their master hides behind the "collective will". On the right you can see authors struggling with social control mechanisms that will make those darned "other people" behave properly without the strings being so obvious that their audience can follow them to the not-so-invisible hand of the puppeteer. A feeling of personal dependence on a master's beneficence makes it even harder to shake off. Many authors, for instance, can't imagine a world without (their) monopoly privileges. To really think like free people we need to check behind all of our curtains to make sure master isn't still hiding somewhere.

Every once in a while, an idea comes along that is so revolutionary, yet so obvious in hindsight, that you have to kick yourself three times around the block for missing it. If you are at all interested in astrophysics, and aren't familiar with the GTR theory (Gravitational Transverse Redshift) then you might want to check it out: http://www.stanford.edu/~afmayer/

You might want to sit down first. And bolt the chair to the floor.

Since I've been tagged, here are my thoughts on books (sorry, I'm not much for following rules...):

Books suck. Oh, they were a big improvement over, for instance, clay tablets. The improvement was both in the density of information stored and the cost of reproducing it. Few people could afford to devote a wing of their house to holding a single work in clay tablet form, or to pay someone to make such a copy for them.


At a very rough estimate, books are about 1200 times more space-efficient than clay tablets. They are probably at least several hundred times less expensive to reproduce. If you knew of someone who devoted a large portion of their living quarters and income to a collection of clay tablets, you would probably think them rather odd. They would also be comparatively poor, since you could best their huge, expensive collection with a couple of cheap paperbacks stuck in your pocket.

Another rough estimate suggests that a modern, inexpensive hard-drive is perhaps 250,000 times more space-efficient than a book (300,000,000 times better than clay tablets). The cost of reproducing a work in digital form has fallen so far that it's become negligible. If you thought that the clay-tablet collector was rather odd, and relatively poor -- well, the book collector is far odder and poorer when compared to the man with a hard-drive.

Of course, as with any great reduction in human poverty, this huge advance has spawned its share of Luddites. The reactionary legislation created when the printing press put the scribes out of business has continued to mutate over the years. The publishing industry, armed with its government-backed monopoly, insists that everyone be forced to purchase information in dead-tree format. Imagine if, 30 years ago, they had tried to force everyone to purchase everything in clay tablet form. Sound absurd? Demanding that we purchase books today is 200 times more absurd.

Someday I would like to have, preserved under glass in my 'library', a clay-tablet and a book: as reminders of two great milestones in the advancement of human wealth. But I'm not interested in devoting a wing of my house to either of them.

I'm used to hearing rather tepid defenses of liberty from many of those involved with the LP. My term for these people is "Longer Leash Libertarians": they aren't unhappy being slaves, they just think that their masters should give them a bit more rein. Following the link that Sunni posted earlier to the ongoing argument at the Statrix, I soon found myself on another site reading the article that started it, entitled "The Quick Way To Lose Your Rights".

It seems that the quick way to lose our rights would be to actually attempt to use them...

I now find myself in need of a new term to describe those who call themselves Libertarians, yet think that their leash is plenty long enough already, and who urge their fellows not to tug too hard on their leashes, lest our masters get peeved and reel-in some of the slack they so generously allow us. Any ideas?