Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

Please Take My Wallet: I Do Not Want to Kill You

This post is in honor of my sister and her husband at Masada Tactical in Baltimore.

I prefer markets to government action not just on the practical grounds that markets usually produce better results but on the moral principle that there is something inherently violent about government, even liberal-democratic ones, in ways that markets are not. Arguing from principle is important here because, for most things, I really have no idea what would happen if markets took over from the government. If the FDA were abolished tomorrow, all drugs were legalized and all people in jail for drug-related offenses were released with their records expunged, what would happen? It very well might fail. If that is the case I would still want to try as a noble, if Quixotic experiment, because not threatening to kill people over what substances they put in their bodies is the right thing to do. We will learn from our mistakes in order to do better next time.

This idea that markets are non-violent while governments are inherently violent goes against the hard left which sees the actions of democratic governments as inherently peacefully as they represent the will of the "people" in contrast to markets which offer people the "liberty" of sleeping under a bridge and starving. From this perspective, the Soviet Union, despite murdering millions of people, was a noble experiment whose mistakes should be learned from in order to try socialism again. 

A further argument can be made that markets certainly can make use of literal violence. Shylock demanding his pound of flesh for Antonio's failure to return a loan, made under free-market conditions, is threatening violence. So what makes government actions inherently tainted by violence to the extent that even a politician wanting to raise taxes to fund education for children is the moral equivalent of a gangster because he risks having to use violence when businessmen can also find themselves having to use violence to enforce market agreements.

It occurred to me that my sister and her husband provide an answer. They teach martial arts to both police officers and civilians. You might think that the purpose of their training is that you should go around trashing bozos. Certainly, you should beat up a mugger who demands your wallet as it is your moral duty to defend your property, right? On the contrary, students are explicitly told to hand over their wallets. If someone tries to abduct you that is something else but for a wallet, it is not worth you getting killed or you killing the guy. Keep in mind that the legal right to self-defense is not any kind of blank check. As a private individual, you are obligated to not be a vigilante looking for trouble and when trouble finds you, you are supposed to try to back away.

Being in the market allows you to step back and not demand your full "pound of flesh" rights. You have the option and even the imperative to let the mugger have your wallet even though he is a thief. Similarly, if someone cheats you, the solution is not to do business with them in the future. Now, this is important; you are not trapped into needing to make higher moral points. We are not concerned that if thieves are allowed to get away their crimes people will lose their respect for property. It is alright to be "selfish" and only be concerned with the fact that blood feuds are bad for your bottom line.

This is different from government action where police officers are obligated to risk violence even to stop petty crimes. A private citizen can and should walk away from a situation before it degenerates into violence even at a financial loss. A police officer has no such choice. He must be willing to stop unruly motorists even knowing that such a confrontation may lead to killing that person. This concern is particularly true when dealing with secession. A government that is not willing to gun down unarmed children in order to stop a secessionist movement is not really a government. Government officials do not have the option of saying we disagree with secession and we wish you stayed with us, and we are really in the right, but keeping the country united is not worth killing for.

This distinction was made particularly clear to me with the recent attack on the American embassy in Iraq. If it were a private corporation like McDonald's under attack, no one would question the reasonableness of McDonald's simply shutting its doors in Iraq as the country is simply too dangerous to do business in. Why can't we close the embassy and pull out all American personnel from Iraq? Whether we should or not, staying clearly means killing and not just people attacking the embassy but bombing the Iranian backed militias and possibly even Iran itself. Yes, the United States can pull out instead of pursuing mass retaliation, much as Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, but the political price is real. This is not the case with McDonald's which can operate in Iraq, despite the danger, without any assumption of failure if it pulls out its staff instead of going to war.

My point is not to bash the police and the military. They do a necessary job by putting themselves in harm's way and, for that, they deserve the respect of society. But it is the fact that their job is defined by them placing themselves in situations where they may have to kill that needs to always be kept in focus. We must always be willing to ask the question of "why" to those members of the political class who put our servicemen into danger.

I am not a pacifist. I am willing to defend myself when backed against a wall. That being said, I can interact with other people without the subtext of threatening to kill them because if you choose to not cooperate I will back away and let you win even when I am right. The government does not have that moral luxury. It can never back down. It must always assert its right even at the cost of human life.

Where Do We Go From Here? Let Us Make Government Equal Violence Again

Libertarians are a small minority in this country, without much particular influence. For all the complaints about the Koch brothers, we do not control academia. Our influence over Hollywood is so non-existent that we cannot even get a decent Atlas Shrugged filmed made. Assuming that this status quo is unlikely to change in our lifetime, our only chance of having some limited say over public policy is through an alliance with either liberals or conservatives (At this point, I am uncertain which is a better option so all can I do is urge libertarians to be charitable to whatever path other libertarians pursue, recognizing that there really are no good options.) Regardless of whether libertarians should be on the left or the right, I would hope that what unites us and what we should never lose track of is the desire to make it clear that government is a literal act of violence.

As we approach the one-hundredth anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, it is useful to note that the end of World War I marked a critical turning point in a moral revolution almost as important as the Enlightenment's turn to equality as a moral principle. World War I was made possible because people, as it was the norm throughout history, looked to war as something noble. Millions of men marched to war in 1914 on the logic that the worst that could happen was that they would die and be remembered as heroes. Most likely, the war would be over by Christmas and they would be able to go home to show off a minor injury that would mark them forever as "real men." It is important to keep in mind that women were fully culpable in pushing this logic on men by shaming them into fighting. Such a state of affairs was not something unique to 1914. It goes all the way back to at least the Iliad.

Perhaps, the finest summation of such war apologetics can be found in Shakespeare's Henry V.




Critical for understanding the play is the fact that Shakespeare does not ask us to care about medieval dynastic politics. It is irrelevant whether Henry V has a legitimate claim to the throne of France. There is no pretense that fighting for Henry will make the world safe for hereditary monarchy through the female line (the official issue at stake in the Hundred Years War). What Henry offers his men is the opportunity to be part of his "band of brothers," to be remembered as such heroes that someone would write a play about them nearly two centuries later. (This is a good example of the "post-modern" side to Shakespeare where he regularly gives his characters a certain awareness that they are actors in a play.)

This view of war as an opportunity to win personal glory died in the mud of the Western Trenches. World War II could still be fought for the ideologies of Fascism, Communism, and Democracy, but no more could intellectually series people think of war as a principled good in itself. What is critical to understand here is not that 20th-century man abandoned war nor is it likely that peace will come to the world in the 21st century (even as we continue to enjoy the long peace of no war between major powers since World War II). What can no longer be seriously contemplated, even as superhero action movies remain popular, is any discussion of war that omits the obvious fact that war involves murder and the fact that it might be carried out by men in uniform following orders from their superiors does nothing to change that. Wars may continue to be fought as inescapable tragedies, but there is no escaping their morally problematic nature.

In practice, this means that in debating war, opponents of war start with the moral high ground. For example, with the Iraq War, the Bush administration could not even simply argue that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and that the United States was legally justified in removing him, let alone that they were offering young Americans the opportunity to take part in a "glorious" adventure. They needed to argue that Saddam presented a clear and present danger to the world through his possession of weapons of mass destruction. The fact that these accusations turned out to be false fatally compromised the moral position of the United States in occupying Iraq.

The success of anti-war movements in making war morally problematic offers us a model for what libertarians might achieve in the 21st century. Even if we cannot stop the expansion of government let alone eliminate it, we can still make government morally problematic.

My model for this is the Road to Serfdom, in which Friedrich Hayek directly connected the romanticization of war as the county coming together for a single cause to the argument for continuing that same military logic in peacetime with a government-run economy. It stands to the credit of Hayek that conservatives developed a guilty conscious regarding government (distinct from actually cutting government spending). This was a valid justification for allying with conservatives in the past and it may continue to be so in the future. Clearly, this is not the case with the wider society. On the contrary, when people, particularly on the left, talk about government, there is a tendency to see it in terms of "everyone coming together for the common good." By contrast, markets are seen as manifestations of greed. This gives government action the moral high ground.

We can criticize government policies and we will win some major victories. Hardcore Marxism went down with the Cold War. Even the Chinese Communist Party accepts market control over much of the economy. Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders are not revolutionaries trying to nationalize everything. On the contrary, they largely accept the current status quo. That being said, such victories often seem hallow as we cannot escape the sense that our opponents are simply rearming, waiting for their chance to make their next big push. The reason for this is that the horrors of Communism did not discredit government in the same sense that the horrors of Nazism discredited racism. (Try claiming to be a "Democratic Nazi.") From this perspective, Communism stands as a "noble" experiment, its failures a lesson for future attempts to bring about the brotherhood of man. By contrast, those who oppose Communism on principle, stand convicted of being so selfish as to oppose human brotherhood.

My modest goal for libertarianism is to simply make it impossible, within mainstream society, to talk about government programs without acknowledging that violence is being advocated. Today, we can take it for granted that defenders of the military are not going to be able to ignore the fact that war inevitably leads to atrocities while denouncing their opponents as cowards who hate their country. Similarly, we can push the debate to a point in which defenders of government programs are not able to simply portray themselves as humanitarians and their opponents as greedy corporate shills. On the contrary, it is we who oppose government who are the true humanitarians. We are the ones who do not wish to use violence.

You wish to have public education and universal health care? Fine, just as long as you are willing to admit that you believe that it is right and laudable to murder children if that is the only way to get people to pay for these programs. We libertarians may still lose the debate if we cannot offer a better alternative, but if we lose we will still be able to hold our heads up high and claim the moral high ground as the humanitarians who dared to dream of a world without violence. If we can do that, who knows, maybe the next generation will be able to come up with a plan that really does make government services unnecessary. 

Not Worshipping Markets: Hating Government and Loving Liberty

There is a common misunderstanding about libertarians that we worship the market. We are supposed to believe that market solutions are perfect and if only the government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. Someone must have assumed that Adam Smith was not being ironic when he compared the market to an "invisible hand" and (foreshadowing Darwin) argued that it is possible to have an intelligent process without any kind of intelligent designer. The market is not providence. Libertarianism is a distinctly secular (in the classic sense of being neutral about religion) anti-utopian doctrine. We do not believe that anything resembling a perfect world is possible. Human beings are flawed, both intellectually and morally; any human creation, including markets, will inevitably inherit those same flaws to some degree. This anti-utopianism is balanced by an anti-nihilism. If a perfect world is not possible, a significantly better world can be fashioned through the use of reason.

It is because libertarians are such anti-utopians that, more than we have confidence in any Smithian hidden hand, we fear government. (Whether or not I can come up with a good alternative to government licenses, I do fear that the Trump administration will use them to round up opponents. Forgive me for taking liberal concerns over Trump seriously and not as mere political rhetoric.) It is government, particularly the kind that is willing to compromise on the checks and balances means for its own ideological ends, that possesses a utopian streak. Who but a utopian would be unable to imagine a day when the very institutions they created might be turned against them? If government means to use force, even murder, how can one justify committing such violence unless one is supremely confident that each specific government action would either lead to a significantly better world or at least to prevent a worse one from coming about? Furthermore, to agree to pay taxes means buying guns for anonymous people, who will then use them to kill people for reasons that you will never be told. The only way it can be morally justifiable to agree to such a deal is if you believe there is some moral guidance protecting government officials from ever making a mistake (something akin to nineteenth-century Catholic beliefs regarding papal ex-cathedra statements). Note that this is particularly true regarding democratic governments as monarchies and aristocracies deny that personal choice is even relevant to government decisions and claim no moral authority from them.

I would go so far as to say that those who claim that libertarians worship the market are revealing something about their own worship of government. They are so enraptured with government as the solution that they cannot imagine someone questioning the legitimacy of government as an instrument of violence and therefore considering an alternative. They, therefore, attribute their own utopian faith in government to libertarians and accuse libertarians of being market worshipers.

A useful test as to whether someone tolerates government simply on pragmatic grounds or worships it as the key to man's salvation is if someone is inclined to accuse libertarians of market worship. It should follow naturally for government pragmatists, who believe that government is an inherently flawed institution, that a better solution is hypothetically possible and that other people will wish to pursue it. Such people might be wrong in regard to their proposed alternatives, but there is no reason to assume that they are motivated by a blind faith in markets.

Alternatively, we can examine if a person is willing to accept Max Weber's (not a libertarian) definition of government as a "monopoly on violence." A person who feels the need to dance around the issue that government is an act of violence is presumably doing so because they are so wrapped up in government worship that they cannot think outside of it. If government is people coming together for the sake of civilization, peace, and love while everything else is darkness, then government cannot be violent. On the contrary, it is those who reject government who must be violent as they are opposing civilization, peace, and love.

For all of my talk about hating government and that taxation is theft, I do believe it is important to recognize the limitations of such a position. A libertarianism whose hatred of government is not matched by a love of liberty will fall to nihilism and eventually authoritarianism. The rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump should make this obvious. Part of the blame for the alt-right and Trump lies within the Rothbardian libertarian tradition as embodied by figures such as Ron Paul, Walter Block, and Tom Woods. (To any Rothbardians out there, much as part of the problem with government worshipers is that they cannot imagine how anyone in good faith could think of them as violent, your inability to imagine how someone in good faith might think that you are enabling the alt-right is a big part of the problem.) I supported Ron Paul for president and highly recommend Block's Defending the Undefendable as a gateway into accepting the more radical implications of libertarianism. The Rothbardians deserve a lot of credit for keeping the libertarian focus on the immorality of government. Without them, it would be too easy to fall into making pragmatic compromises that would endanger the soul of the movement. Rothbardians are an important part of libertarianism and need to be kept as part of the family. That being said, the Rothbardian habit of focusing on opposition to the government to the exclusion of almost anything else led to the development of a certain blind spot for angry white men, who hate the government and even the Federal Reserve, ignoring whether such views came from a genuine love of liberty.

Ideally, there should not be any laws against private discrimination. This does not mean that libertarians should not be extremely wary of those whose main objection to government is that it bans discrimination. It very well may be that Donald Trump was not worse than other Republican candidates and that the liberal media hated him the most. This does not mean that one should form a Libertarians for Trump group.

This also has implications for dealing with terrorism and authoritarianism. There are good reasons to oppose US policy in the Middle East. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud are not libertarians. I would even go so far as to say that a large part of the Israeli-Palestinian problem has been caused by thinking in terms of states as opposed to private property owners, whether Jews or Muslims, coming to personal agreements, likely leading to some kind of multi-political entity peace plan. That being said, this does not mean that one should not actively be more against Hamas, Assad, or Putin than Israel. As libertarians, we should not support intervention in Syria even if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. To go out on a limb to argue that he did not use such weapons and is merely the victim of a neo-conservative conspiracy (possibly true) is to signal that you are motivated by something other than liberty, likely a willingness to think well of anyone the CIA hates. That is an apology for authoritarianism and defending oneself by saying that libertarianism opposes tyranny, while true, simply means that one has completely betrayed libertarian ideals to the extent that libertarianism has become a dead letter ideology whose chief value now is to serve as moral cover for what libertarians should abhor.

You can justify supporting Trump on libertarian grounds (just as it would not be a contradiction for a libertarian to "feel the Bern.") There are also arguments to be made in favor of Hamas, Assad, and Putin. That being said, if, out of all the issues in the world you could have chosen, you go for one of these, I cannot take you seriously as being a libertarian in good faith. This issue is important precisely because libertarianism really can be used to justify anything in practice. Therefore, a libertarian movement requires that certain positions, a priori, render a person unacceptable for membership. Note that such a person might still be a righteous libertarian at heart even as I exclude him but not others who are ideologically less pure.

If one takes a step back to look at the Rothbardians, there is a deeper problem than Trump and other kinds of authoritarian apologetics. One is always going to have a lot of latitude in who to attack and who to defend when analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Inconsistencies are only going to appear when you compare who someone attacks with whom they defend. One of the curiosities of the Rothbardians is the paradox of both demanding strict ideological purity to the extent of attacking other libertarians with a willingness to tolerate figures from the alt-right. This apparent contradiction begins to make a frightening amount of sense if you take a party approach to ideology. If you assume that the point of libertarianism is to fight the government, you are going to have a problem in deciding between all the different ways of doing so. If you wish to maintain the pretense that your system is complete then you are going to need some kind of party to make decisions as to which of the many possibilities is the one true path. This means that party loyalty becomes the ideology. Under such circumstances, it becomes necessary to demonstrate party loyalty in an antinomian fashion by doing things that would otherwise appear to go against one's ideology. Rothbardians believe more in their party's strategy of courting angry white men, who hate the government than they believe in liberty. In the end, their libertarianism devolves into promoting non-libertarian ideas like "blood and soil" and claiming to be all the more libertarian for doing so.

A libertarian hatred of government needs to be matched with a love of liberty as an ongoing dialectic. For me, loving liberty means that each person has value as a narrative that they control through personal choices. People's choices matter all the more when we think that they are making a mistake. If it is not a mistake, then the choice has no positive value as a choice. Considering the limitations of human beings with their finite knowledge and lifespans, if people only remained individuals, their lives could have little meaning. Thus, the central choice of any human narrative is which society (if any and when) should a person submit themselves to. (Note that even Ayn Rand's heroes in Atlas Shrugged join a society.) To initiate aggression is to negate a person's choice, their very meaning in life. As government is the monopoly on violence, government stands as the de facto primary threat to choice. To equate government with society is to deny humans that most critical choice of all, what society to join and under what terms.

In loving liberty and not just hating government there is a challenge. If that love is expressed just in market terms, then it is going to look awfully like market worship. What is needed is an embracement of the full range of human choices, including ones that we do not approve of. It should be noted that just as this model celebrates the rights of individuals to defy society, it takes it as a given that there can be such a thing as something society disapproves of. Hence the celebration of choice has the paradoxical requirement of opposing the action. There can be no such thing as celebrating a choice you approve of. For example, I can celebrate the liberty of gay marriage precisely to the extent that I mourn the loss of traditional values. Similarly, I can celebrate the liberty of bakers refusing to bake gay wedding cakes as manifestations of intolerance. In both cases, I have paid the necessary "blood price" to allow liberty to have meaning. Note that this is not some utopian faith in liberty as leading to an ideal world. On the contrary, such liberty is founded on its tragic implications, one that ought to be avoided, human life having meaning be damned, if it were not for the fact that the government alternative is simply too horrific to accept.

Libertarianism is not some dangerous cult that encourages people to worship the market and be paranoid about the government. On the contrary, it accepts the sobering reality that government is an act of violence. The libertarian walks out from the ruins of his utopian dreams that he has abandoned with his rejection of government and seeks to learn to love the hard road of liberty. Hating the government is easy. Loving liberty, with all of its imperfections, is a challenge worth embracing.

If Taxes are Not Extortion, You Cannot Pay Them

A major foundation of my personal libertarianism is that I see it as a self-evident truth that government is, by definition, an act of violence and even murder. While this does not discredit all government action, it does mean that it is immoral for the government to do anything that I would not personally be willing to kill someone in order to accomplish, a pretty narrow list. It occurred to me that there are some very interesting implications as to the morality of paying taxes if you reject this premise.

I assume all my readers can agree that it would be immoral to sell me a gun knowing that I planned on killing my wife with it. It would not matter if I were otherwise a very decent fellow and used the gun to guard a battered women's shelter. (As it has been demonstrated with the recent revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood, there is no contradiction between supporting women's rights in general while violating the particular women in your life.) If you were to give me the gun, you would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. Now imagine that I was connected to the government and threatened you that if you refused to pass guns to mafia hitmen with which they could take out their opponents you would be put in jail. I assume that you would be morally obligated to go to jail rather than participate in a murder.

Now I do not question that the United States government has done a lot of legitimate good around the world. That being said, there have certainly been cases in which the government, particularly the CIA, has literally helped arm gangsters in order to commit murder. This means that, as taxpayers, there can be no illusions; by agreeing to pay taxes, we are literally complicit in murder.

While I believe that it is immoral to pay taxes to the American government in much the same way that one is not allowed to be a gun runner for the mob, I still pay taxes. There is a simple reason for this. I fully believe that there is a gun to my head and that I would be killed for refusing to pay. Keep in mind that I would not be refusing out of venal greed, but because I reject, on principle, the moral authority of the government to do certain things. This is treason and the penalty for treason is death. Furthermore, consider that the people involved in those actions I most object to are likely acting out of idealism. Like the Operator villain, in Serenity, they kill because they believe they are making a better world. If these men are already committing murder to further their aims, surely they would be willing to kill ideological tax evaders bent on stopping their better world from ever happening.

If you believe that taxes are not extorted at gunpoint, but are willingly given then you have no such excuse. Either you endorse every action of the government and as not wrongfully murdering anyone or you believe that the government is guilty of murder. If you believe that the government is guilty of murder, why do you pay taxes? Just as none of you would ever willingly buy guns for the mob even if it paid well, you should not feel any need to buy guns for the government. Keep in mind that our government spends far more on the military than on social services. So, when you pay taxes, you are supporting the military industrial complex with some welfare programs thrown in on the side as cover.

This argument is of little use against conservatives, who are likely to take a strong moral stance in favor of the American government. What intrigues me here is the reasoning of liberals, most of whom seem to view the American government even less charitably than I do. At least I acknowledge that radical political Islam is a threat and that it theoretically might be justifiable for the government to take action against it. I am even open to fire-bombing cities. The more you believe that the American government is a blood-soaked racist entity the more you need to feel directly threatened in order to justify paying taxes. From this perspective, it is not just libertarians who need to assume that taxation is theft at gunpoint, but liberals perhaps even more so. 

How to Teach the Story of Balak and Bilam to Kalman

In addition to anything involving kitty, my three-year old son, Kalman, has become fascinated with the story of Balak and Bilam and regularly asks either my wife or me to tell it. This story presents a number of challenges to someone of my particular political theology. That being said, challenges also offer opportunities to make it clear to Kalman that his Abba is a libertarian monotheist. Government is a form of idolatry that believes it is a moral/legal authority that can demand absolute loyalty and obedience. A monotheist knows that Hashem is the only true power and the only one you should listen to no matter how hard the government tries to trick or threaten you to believe otherwise. (Mommy gets hung up on fewer political theological issues and is, therefore, a more interesting story teller.)

Balak was the king of Moab. As their government, he was an evil mass murderer and also very foolish. He wanted to destroy Bnai Yisroel but, because he did not believe in Hashem, he was very superstitious and believed in magic. He believed that a sorcerer named Bilam actually had the power to "curse" people and cause bad things to happen to them just with words. So Balak sent messengers to Bilam with money, hoping that he would curse Bnai Yisroel for him.

Bilam was a wicked man who liked to convince people not to trust in Hashem so he could trick them into paying him money to do his fake magic. Hashem told Bilam not to go but, when Bilam insisted on going, Hashem gave him permission but warned him that he would only be allowed to do as Hashem commanded. Bilam was so excited to do an avairah that he got up first thing in the morning to saddle his donkey. Bilam's mind was so caught up in the money he was going to swindle out of Balak that he did not see a messenger of Hashem standing on the road with a sword. (As an alternative to the word angel, messenger is a legitimate translation of malach and, for now, I see no reason to confuse my child with talk of supernatural beings that are not God. Unfortunately, my wife disagrees and now Kalman is quite taken with the "A word.") The donkey tried to get off the road but Bilam got angry and began to hit the donkey. To demonstrate to Bilam what a fool he was to pursue gold and silver instead of listening to Hashem, Hashem did a miracle and caused the donkey to speak and ask Bilam why he was hitting him. Bilam refused to learn his lesson and continued with his scheme.

When Bilam arrived in Moab, he got on top of a mountain and tried to curse Bnai Yisroel. If Bilam had been able to say a curse, even though curses are useless people might think that curses have power. They would simply fall for the post hoc fallacy and assume that anything bad that happens afterward was due to the power of Bilam's curse. So Hashem only allowed Bilam to bless Bnai Yisroel. So now everyone could see that Bilam was a lying crook with no magic powers. Without Hashem, Bilam could not even say a curse, let alone cause it to come true.

King Balak was so angry that he wasted his money. Scared that Balak would kill him (as killing people is what governments do), Bilam told Balak a secret how to harm Bnai Yisroel. If they could convince the Bnai Yisroel to stop listening to Hashem, then they could be harmed. So Balak sent beautiful women carrying idols of puppy and making peepee on them. There was an Israelite government politician named Zimri. He took a poll and realized that women peeing on puppies were now more popular than serving Hashem so he decided to jump on the bandwagon. Pinchus saved Bnai Yisroel from puppy, pee and politicians. Rather than listen to any government law, Pinchus listened to Hashem and grabbed a spear and killed Zimri along with the woman who was helping him pee on puppy.

We learn from this story that you should only believe in Hashem and not in government nor in magic. Following Hashem means being kind to all creatures including animals, but it is ok to kill people who are trying to hurt you or otherwise in government.

Saving Water with Etta Israel's Public Service Video

Since I have moved to Los Angeles, I have been privileged to be occasionally involved with Etta Israel, a support organization for people with special needs in the Jewish community. I would particularly like to thank Josh Taff, who reached out to my wife and I. Etta offers a wide range of programs for both children and adults with the goal of integrating people with special needs into the Jewish community instead of simply shuffling them of to a corner where they can be ignored. One of Etta's projects is an initiative to design environmental education programs for people with special needs. Unfortunately, this is being paid for by a government grant. We can hope for the day when the Los Angeles water department will be privatized. Until that day, people should be looking to save money to make up for all the money that government wastes and to demonstrate that human beings are actually quite rational and can be relied upon to be environmentally conscious without a government gun pointed at their heads. In that spirit, my wife took part in the making of a public service video this past summer.  




Kalman wants everyone to know that he is really the star of the entire video and was directing everything from the side all while engaging in epic shloofy.

Not Advocating for Vaccination - And Will Still Not Love Rav Shmuel

My good friend Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein has written a piece "Why I Love Rav Shmuel - And Will Advocate Vaccination Nonetheless" in which he attempts to distinguish between his personal respect for Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky and his opposition to his recent comments opposing vaccinations. According to Rabbi Kamenetsky: “There is a doctor in Chicago who doesn’t vaccinate any of his patients and they have no problem at all. ... I see vaccinations as the problem. It’s a hoax. Even the Salk vaccine [against polio] is a hoax. It is just big business.” While I accept Rabbi Adlerstein's general premise of distinguishing between opposing specific ideas advocated by a person and rejecting the person as a whole, the serious problems raised by Rabbi Kamenetsky's position force the thoughtful person to take a harsher line and view his "sin" as not merely venial, but mortal.

An essential part of living in a society (particularly a liberal one that values diversity) is the ability to create two circles of opposition. One implies a narrow rejection of a particular belief or action while valuing the person's many other worthwhile attributes; the other places the person completely beyond the pale. For example, I recognize that many intelligent people of goodwill support the expansion of government health care. I may oppose such a position, but my opposition, in no way, takes anything away from the positive opinion I hold of them in other fields. Thus, I would defend them to my fellow libertarians by saying: "you should ignore what they believe in regard to health care and just focus on the worthwhile things they have to say." Similarly, members of Hamas engage in social support programs within their community in addition to being terrorists. That being said, a critical part of recognizing Hamas as a terrorist organization is precisely that willingness to not draw a line between Hamas the social welfare organization and Hamas the terrorist organization. This would even apply to members of Hamas, who are solely involved with the social side. All must be condemned as terrorists without any account for any positive aspects. Hamas' "good" work does not lessen its evil. On the contrary, its evil is such that it makes it as if the good never happened. It is even possible that, under such circumstances, the good itself is transformed into evil as it serves to render the entire enterprise all the more perverse.

I must confess that I have yet to come up with an intellectually rigorous method for deciding who belongs in which circle. A step in the right direction would be to ask whether the problematic position directly affects other areas. For example, support for government does not directly connect to a person's personal charity. By contrast, Hamas' social welfare programs are all part of an ideology that seeks to destroy Israel. Furthermore, one should take into account the possibility of the positive being used as cover for their more problematic agenda. I am not worried that supporters of health care will use their personal charity as moral cover for their government agenda. By contrast, I do worry about Hamas using their social programs as moral cover.

Even if we lack clear lines, it is important that we recognize the existence of both people who must be tolerated despite their errors and those who must be rejected for them. There is not another person in the world that I agree with about everything. As my opinions on many issues have changed over the years, I do not even agree with my past selves. Thus, if I am going to live with other people and even with myself, I must be willing to tolerate the existence of at least certain types of errors. That being said, we live in a world in which there are truly dangerous people who mean us very real harm. Others possess radically different values and seek to build a society in their own image on the ruin of our society. Clearly, tolerance as a blank check that does not insist on something in return will quickly turn into a suicide pact that benefits only the least tolerant in our midst.     

In what circle should we classify Rabbi Kamenetsky? Let me admit that I take his comments personally on two accounts. As an Asperger, I have no wish for autism to be used in any campaign against the medical establishment. Why did Rav Shmuel have to walk shomer negiah arm in arm with Jenny McCarthy? Also, a number of years ago, I challenged Rabbi Kamenetsky on his willingness to offer approbations for works on Jewish history considering that he has no professional training in the field. I asked him if he would be willing to write an approbation to a medical book. He responded that he would not as he had no expertise in medicine. I tried to press him on why he did not hold himself to a similar standard regarding history. He did not give me a clear answer; I assume that, unlike medicine, he did not see history as a field operating based on clear rules to be mastered before wading into any discussions on the topic. The fact that Rabbi Kamenetsky has now placed himself in the middle of a medical debate means that he lied to me regarding his belief as to his lack of qualification.

All that aside, there are good reasons to reject Rabbi Kamenetsky across the board simply for his comments as they directly relate to larger issues of scientific methodology and ultimately raise questions regarding his commitment to a halachic process. If you read Rabbi Kamenetsky carefully, you will see that he does not merely reject vaccinations, but the scientific method as well. I recognize that more knowledgeable people than me worry about the health risks of vaccines and that, in theory at least, one might be able to make a scientifically rigorous case against them. Like most people in the anti-vaccination movement, though, Rabbi Kamenetsky foregoes this debate in favor of claiming that the scientific establishment is not only wrong but that they are engaged in a hoax; in essence that they are conspiring against the public. To claim a conspiracy implies a rejection of the scientific method as anyone who accepts this method must also accept that it borders on the impossible for there ever to be a sustained conspiracy in science. Instead of science, Rabbi Kamenetsky turns to the anecdotal evidence of an unnamed doctor in Chicago. Anecdotal evidence is among the most worthless kinds of evidence in existence. Scientific medicine requires double-blind trials. Rabbi Kamenetsky clearly does not believe this and, if placed in charge of a scientific establishment, would operate it in a very different fashion.

For the sake of clarity, let me say that I take no scientific position regarding vaccines. I am not a scientist and, therefore, am not qualified to have an opinion. As a non-scientist, who accepts the scientific method, though, I am forced to operate with the current scientific consensus on the assumption that it is the product of the scientific method. This is the case even though, as a historian, I am aware that any scientific consensus is subject to change. Even if I thought that vaccines were a bad idea, I would still be willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of children for the sake of defending the scientific method by upholding scientific consensus even when it is wrong.

If we accept my argument so far then we should reject Rabbi Kamenetsky's authority on all scientific issues. This would mean, not only evolution but also anything regarding medicine. No religious believer in the scientific method can accept him as an impartial arbitrator as he operates under a clearly very different set of premises.

Let me take this a step further to argue that even those Jews with no particular allegiance to the scientific method should reject Rabbi Kamenetsky as a halachic authority as there is good reason to be suspicious of his allegiance to any consistent halachic methodology. We already know that Rabbi Kamenetsky has, at the very least, been passively tolerant of a trend within the Haredi world toward charismatic authority that certain specific individuals are subject to direct personal divine inspiration and should, therefore, be listened to. For one thing, this position makes a mockery of Rabbi Adlerstein's claim of the non-absolute nature of religious authority within the non-Hasidic Haredi world. Charismatic authority is as absolute as that of the Almighty. Furthermore, charismatic authority is ultimately contrary to halachic authority (even if believers in charismatic authority might be observant in their day-to-day lives). The moment you grant the merest hint of legitimacy to charismatic authority then you open a Pandora's Box in which any illiterate child can trump the most learned rabbis and every line in the Talmud merely by claiming to have received divine inspiration.

Rabbi Kamenetsky's comments regarding vaccines are relevant here because they strongly suggest that, at least when it comes to science, he does not believe in following any clear principled method, but relies on charismatic authority. Where else does he get the idea to take it upon his shoulders to contradict mainstream science relying simply upon his own authority? (This would be consistent with the common Haredi acceptance of charismatic authority when applied to medicine. For example, the Chazon Ish is widely claimed to have been a great expert in medicine without ever having studied medicine.) Normally, the further one goes from one's field of professional expertise, the more important it is to consciously rely on clear methodology. The reason for this is that, without professional training, the field's methods will not have sunk to an unconscious level to allow a person to operate on their instincts. If Rabbi Kamenetsky is so contemptuous of any methodology as a matter of principle that he would forego them when it came to a field outside of his professional expertise then we should assume that he has written himself a large blank check to do whatever he wants and ignores methodology when it comes to halacha.

Consistency demands that Rabbi Adlerstein make a choice between defending not only the scientific method but also the halachic process and sacrificing Rabbi Kamenetsky. Even though I believe that Rabbi Adlerstein is mistaken in not rejecting Rabbi Kamenetsky, I still respect him. For one thing, the food and conversation at his house are simply too good. He is a wise man and worth listening to. One can even gain some valuable insights from analyzing his apologetics on behalf of Haredi religious authority figures.

The Best Collection of Liberty Loving Short Stories about Government that Money Can Buy

Oren Litwin is a friend of mine from back in my days in the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society. I have since fallen out of touch with him. While I have been pursuing my doctorate in history from Ohio State, he has been pursuing one in political science at George Mason. I moved out to California and he moved out to California. While I have not finished my dissertation and have therefore put my musket and magic fantasy novel on hold, Oren has produced a delightful collection of short stories titled The Best Government Money Can Buy.

Each of these short stories is premised on a wild government reform and what it might mean if such policies ever were put into practice. Such reforms include direct elections for cabinet positions, private prisons that inmates pay to be sent to and lawsuits against corrupt politicians. Most of the stories seem to be of policies that Oren would like to see in practice. There is one story, though, about mandatory firearm ownership. Here the main point of the story is to imagine the commerce clause being turned against liberals. Instead of liberals being able to use the commerce clause to demand that citizens buy healthcare, conservatives get to demand that even liberal pacifists buy some sort of firearm, even a Taser. Liberals then wake up and discover the value of a limited government.

The stories, in general, have a libertarian bent, with running references to Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, without being explicitly so. There are stories about legalizing marijuana and privatizing social services, but if I were to put my finger on what precisely about these stories is libertarian I would say that the approach to reform that runs through these stories is not of specific laws, but of institutions and the incentives that motivate the people behind them. This is in keeping with one of the main contributions of thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek that the noblest best-intentioned plan in the world is worthless in the face of the flesh and blood humans, who will put that plan into practice and what their incentives might be. Also while these stories do not actually support anarchism as the government is left standing, there is something anarchistic in its spirit in that it approaches government as something that can be radically restructured at will. A government that can be refashioned at will is also a government that can be made to disappear. Even if government exists, it is placed on the dock as something that must justify itself in the face of the demand for personal liberty.

The story that intrigued me the most was the last one, which deals with a plan to crowdsource the paying of city taxes. If citizens in a town can raise a certain amount of money in a given year than they do not have to pay taxes. Instead, citizens would be able to decide which public works projects they would want their donations to go to. I am still mulling over whether such a plan would work. My concern would be special interests taking an expansive view of what counts as public works. For example, what if wealthy elites put together the necessary money to get out of taxes and then used their donations to fund the building of golf courses instead of schools. I will certainly have to reread the story to come to an opinion.