Anybody remember Echelon? I remember when it was the outrage-of-the-hour. Lots of juicy accusations of shady domestic spying in the above-referenced interview, vintage 2000.
Bill Clinton was no friend of civil liberties – he even supported warrantless wiretapping. John Kerry had a rotten record on civil liberties too.
Hear me out. I’m not just playing moral relativity games, saying “well they did it too, so that makes it OK”. My point goes much deeper than partisan politics.
Bush probably has the worst civil liberties record of any president in recent memory. This is true. He was also president during a period of unprecedented public outcry for greater security. Given the records of two of the more prominent and popular recent Democrats, I’m not convinced that they or any other major politician would have reacted substantially differently post 9/11. After all, the majority of Americans have accepted the restrictions and invasions of privacy without a whimper.
My point is that this kind of thing has been going on for a long time (which doesn’t reduce it’s wrongness one iota). It’s nothing new, and it has little if anything to do with party affiliation. The corruption is systemic.
I guess I feel compelled to comment because it seems like there’s this wishful thinking going around, as if the problems are localized to the Bush administration. Sure, the Bushies are egregiously bad and provide a good scapegoat. But I wish that people would, for once, take a step back and realize that just because jerk A is currently a problem, that jerk B will not necessarily be their saviour. The American people need to demand more than just “I promise I won’t do exactly what the last guy did, or if I do I promise not to get caught, or at least to use different words for it”.
I challenge everyone who is outraged by the domestic spying, and all the other crimes against liberties that the Bush administration has committed to commit to voting for genuine change next time around. That means actually looking at candidates history ten, twenty years into the past instead of taking their current statements at face-value. That means reading their critics as well as their advocates. That means listening to us crazy libertarians – you may not agree with everything we stand for, but we have a better record than most for consistently pointing out individual liberty abuses long before they become the issue-of-the-hour, and without bias towards a particular party. That means potentially voting for an unlikely candidate rather than voting for someone who is one terrorist attack away from getting the facsist-of-the-year award.
You seem like an interesting person. Mind if I friend you?
Go fer it 🙂
He is. You should.
May we write you in?
Oh wait! You’re still too young for that office. (This is not a strike against your age, rather this is about the absurdity of the age restriction set on certain government offices.)
well said.
I might be more inclined to buy into your argument if Bush was more transparent in his administration. Instead, his is one of the most secretive administrations in the modern era. Screening of people along parade routes to include only loyalist, planted questions in press conferences, few press conferences, shady connections to private corporations, a refusal to share vital information with regards to investigations, the branding of htose not on-message as unpatriotic, etc, etc, etc. These, culminated by this, fuel my anger, my outrage. Perhaps all politicians are corrupt or become corrupted, and maybe I have developed a tolerance. However, this exceeds the bounds of that tolerance and now I’m just plain pissed off at Bush and at the people that put him into power. Maybe I’m not as mad about the domestic spying as I am about the general level of skeeziness that this administration and this ideology has affected. I honestly don’t know.
By your position, wouldn’t voting for anyone, libertarian or not, ring the death knoll of their integrety? If power corrupts then any form of government is destined to fail and thus useless. And yet, government has accomplished things and been good. Not all good, but better then the alternative of man-eat-man society.
Again, I admit the possibility of being naive or idealistic. It is very hard for me to fathom that all in power will corrupt and thus infringe on my rights and my happiness.
Jamie does need to revive utiopiaquest. I’d love to mash once again together with people and create some form of society that avoids the pitfalls of modern government.
I don’t buy that dichotomy, but that’s an argument for another time. Most people who trot out the “at least it’s not anarchy” line fail to reflect on the fact that they’ve never witnessed anarchy, and neither have the vast majority of people in human history. For something as scarce as it is, people sure know a whole lot about anarchy.
Which is not to say that anarchy=utopia. Just that I see no reason to assume that the absence of government is worse than the presence, considering the lack of data.
But yes, I do believe that giving someone coercive power almost invariably corrupts over time, which is why term limits are a good idea. (And by corrupts I don’t necessarily mean “makes evil”. Most of the worst offenders against liberty did their deeds with the best of intentions.)
I wish that the founding fathers had seen fit to make the presidency, and any elected position, less comfortable. If all politicians had to sign a document formally giving up all of their rights to privacy for the duration of their term I think we would have far better government.
Anarchy is not so uncommon..
a lack of government–or the lack of any substantive govenment that can exert authority over a country–is closer to the rule rather than the exception in most nations in the world…
It is from instances where one approaches total anarcy–like Somalia–that you can start evaluating what you think anarchy will be like… and the situation there isn’t pretty.. (we’ve had a direct talk about Somalia a year ago or so, I know..)
When you have no government, then you get the situation of warlords–or at least, that is what all of the empirical data from current world and past history tells us…
Re: Anarchy is not so uncommon..
Most nations in the world? That seems a bit excessive…
I think it’s safe to say that no nation in recent history (or perhaps ever) has “tried” anarchy, they way they try communism or democracy. Anarchy, the kind you’re talking about, develops in the midst of war, famine, and utter poverty, in nations that have seen nothing but bloodshed and lawlessness for decades. It’s a temporary power vaccuum caused by no leader havign sufficient resources to crush the opposition. It’s hardly fair to judge anarchy solely under those conditions.
America has experienced at least one period of limited “anarchy” in it’s history, but nobody noticed because, as a far less dysfunctional nation than the ones described above, it just kept chugging right along. That’s too small a sample to draw any sweeping conclusions from either. My point is that if you throw a bunch of starving wretches who are used to having to kill and steal to stay alive into a leaky lifeboat and then judge “anarchy” based on the results, you’re hardly giving it a fair trial.
it also…
has to do with our long-noted, but vastly different views on human nature…
If I’m not going to far to state.. you often seem to believe that people are good at heart–or at least fairly consistently ethical so that if you took away the leviathan, that they would still be nice to each other…
I, on the other hand, tend to believe that people are inherently fairly selfish to the point that, given the chance, they would do anything to get ahead of others and amass as much power/resources/whatnot even if the cost of this endeavor was a vastly worse off situation…
Thus, where you see anarchy as something distinct from savagery.. I see anarchy as one of the normal states where savagery exists… and that it is only moving away from anarchy that we get things like civl rights, liberty, equality, justice, etc etc…
Thus.. I don’t think we will ever agree on this.. it has to do with how you view humanity fundamentally.. i.e. if I did believe that humans were inherently good.. I would agree with you to try to give anarchy a shot.. but I don’t.. so I think that attempts to “try anarchy” are very much like attempts to “try civil war”…generally not very pleasent endeavors for all involved..
ps.. I’d be interested in knowing what period you think was “anarchy” in the U.S…. Articles of Confederation? Gilded Age? I’m betting Articles of Confederation–and for as much as I know about that period.. while we didn’t achieve wholesale savagery then.. the lack of any common governing structure was annoying enough–with states beginning to contemplate armed conflict with each other–that it induced almost everyone to want more of a central government… also.. the continuing threat of having the UK reconquer the country had something to do with it…
pps–as for my “most nations of the world”.. that is probably a bit misleading.. In terms of population–no.. it doesn’t hold up.. but if you want to count individual states where the central government really has a meagre grasp or control on what goes on in most of the territory of the state–then I think you can count most of latin America, almost all of Africa, and a few asian states as well…
Basically, if you to a quick empirical correlation–having a larger central government structure correlates pretty closely with a higher standard of living–at least up to a point–that point being approximately where government spending is between 20-25% of GNP.. After that point.. it falls off a bit..
Re: it also…
I don’t think whether anarchy has been tried the same way democracy and communism have been tried is a matter of difference of opinion between us – it’s a matter of empirical fact. Either it has or it hasn’t. It has nothing to do with what I believe about human nature. You stated it had been tried, I countered with my reasons for believing it hasn’t been tried. I wasn’t asking for your agreement that it should be tried, either. Are you conceding that it hasn’t been tried, or are you defending the position that it has? I can’t tell from your answer, it seems more like a diversion than anything else.
I want to clarify something that I think I’ve tried to get across before, but apparently failed at. I don’t believe that people are inherently “good-hearted”, in some fluffy peace-on-earth-goodwill-toward-men way. I believe people have the potential for goodness, and I also believe that the majority of mankind’s desires are mutually complementery, and that under the right circumstances goodness towards others is both self-propagating and self-sustaining. There’s a difference.
not trying to create a diversion..still fundamentally disagree
1. I’m defending the position that it has been tried and is a failure–or perhaps rather that while I don’t disagree that there hasn’t been a volitional attempt to abolish all central government and see what happens–well, perhaps besides the early stages of the Russian Revolution–that the experience of Anarchy has existed numerous times throughout history and that these experiences were overwhelmingly negative for the people who lived through them…
2. Perhaps I do not understand your concept of anarchy… Anarchy, to me, implies the lack of a central government authority… and although the specific etymological definition of “anarchy” merely means “no ruler”–in which case many different forms of government–including plebiscite democracy fit under the definition of anarchy..
So, perhaps, I had better ask, what do you mean by anarchy?
If it fits under the idea of a society in which there is no central governmental authority, then I believe that anarchy has been tried numerous times throughout history, and that it is not a particularly stable, nor successful situation for society. Original hunter-gatherer groups lived in a form of anarchy–and although it may have functioned for them in an adequate way–it wasn’t a particularly robust form of governance. The basic solution to major disagreements in such groups was for part of the group just to leave and form its own new group… Furthermore.. once this form of governance–or lack there of–started to come into contact with more authoritarian/larger/rigid/permanent forms in agricultural societies–the anarchists basically got pushed aside, assimilated, or killed..
So.. I’m wondering what you mean by “trying anarchy”–this will obviously have to do with how your definition of it goes–but for my understanding of it, it would mean abolishing a central governmental authority and perhaps even more local instances of authority… And when I look at that situation.. I think it is a horrible thing.. I think that this kind of situation has occurred a number of times in the history of china–and the collapse of central governance in all of these situations led to massive destruction and death.. and this was not in some flea-ridden poor ass civilization–but in probably the most advanced civilization in the world for most of recorded history.. So, that would be my biggest example of why anarchy has been experienced–perhaps not tried in the volitional sense—but definitely has existed and the results were not particularly good..
3. As for your view that people have the potential for goodness–and that under the right circumstances that this goodness is self-propagating and sustaining… That’s fine.. I agree with those two statements.. but I must state that I still believe the potential for goodness doesn’t and hasn’t affected the world’s history nearly as much as the potential for selfishness has–and in any case–I think that Anarchy as a societal form would be exactly the wrong circumstances for this potential–that in anarchy, the potential for evil has far more encouragement than the potential for good and that anarchy creates self-sustaining selfishness rather than goodness..
Basically, I agree with Hobbes… that only under the threat of some recognized greater authority to enforce laws/contracts/societal forms that are beneficial to all, will you see the “potential for goodness” come to the fore in people.. and I don’t just believe this on ideological grounds, but from my readings from history, and my experiences of everyday life, when you get a bunch of people together…
Re: not trying to create a diversion..still fundamentally disagree
And, of course, from my reading of history and experience of everyday life, authority brings out the very worst in people and encourages them to abdicate the very goodness that they might have a potential for, in favor of grudging obedience to the letter, but never the spirit, of the law…
I stand by the position that no community has consciously set itself to the task of living in harmony without government, in the same way that the founders of the US sat down and said “hey, we’re starting a brand new country, let’s try that democracy thing that european intellectuals have been writing about”. Anarchy, where it has occurred, has always occurred as an unintentional absence of power, without any conscious consensus that the absence was something to be deliberately maintained indefinitely.
I actually agree with most of what you’ve said here. I think it’s pretty naive to think that the government never does anything shady, and I definitely know that when I was tearing my hair out and throwing it at the TV or internet or newspaper post-9/11, it was largely aimed at the stupid sheeple who were trampling each other in their eagerness to offer up our civil liberties on the altar of domestic security.
What burns my ass at the moment, though, is that Bush can stand up there and act all indignant and petulant, like he really can’t believe we think this is something to complain about– and to stand there and tell us that he has every right to do what he’s doing, like, oh gee, well when you put it THAT way
Mad KingPreznit Georgie…And ok, if he stood up there and acted outraged to learn that there was gambling in this establishment, I’d totally be pissed that he was lying to us AGAIN. My own naive wishful thinking is that when something like this comes to light, the president might be *genuinely* outraged and try to put an end to what must have been a rogue action…*sigh* I know, dream on…If…
the libertarian candidates that I had a choice to vote for didn’t come off so much as purely rabid capitalists, whose attention wasn’t so entirely focussed on property rights over civil liberties, then there might be a better chance that I would vote for them…
Unfortunately, when I look at their policies–how they stand on the environment, how they stand on education, how they stand on health care, how they stand on oversight of corporate behavior–these give me no reason to believe–at least up until this point–that they would be any better if they were given power…
In fact, the biggest problem that I see about Bush is that I don’t really see him as a conservative or a Republican… but rather as just a corporate criminal with a bunch of corporate cronies who have managed to take over command of one of the world’s largest organizations… and they are raping it for as much as they can for their limited time as CEO’s.. whether the organization functions well after they leave really doesn’t seem to be much of a concern of theirs.. as one can also see by the sad state of affairs that Bush left Texas in when he left…
This is not to say that libertarians are this way–I know a few libertarians here that I find very reasonable–who are not just corporate propagandists.. but rather acknowledge that civil liberties are threatened not just from governments but also from private organizations… (just as I, as a moderate liberal, also know that good things can come from both the public and private sector…) so I don’t automatically assume that all libertarians are bad.. but then again.. in leadership positions, I haven’t seen many good ones..
one last point.. and then I have to run.. i would have more faith that Libertarians if I got to see some of them in real positions of authority and got to see how they hold up under the exercise of power.. In Wisconsin, this isn’t very likely.. but maybe if you do move up to New Hampshire eventually, you can work towards getting them in power there and then we will have some real data on how they are, rather than just what they say they are like…
of course, if we wait a bit, perhaps, the growing conflict in the Republican party between capitalism and christianity (two systems that really are quite different and somewhat in conflict if you take their basic premises seriously) will split that party into a more libertarian branch, and a more socially conservative religious group..
okay.. I must go do actual work now…