First, this controversy provides a delightful contrast to the Obama administration’s decision to force all Americans to purchase contraceptives and subsidize abortions.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation chose to stop providing grants to Planned Parenthood. Lots of people didn’t like (and/or don’t believe) Komen’s reasons. Some declared they would stop giving to Komen. Others approved of Komen’s decision and started giving to Komen. Many declared they would start donating to Planned Parenthood to show their disapproval of Komen’s decision.

Notice what didn’t happen. Nobody forced anybody to do anything that violated their conscience. People who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission can now support Komen without any misgivings. People who like Planned Parenthood’s mission can still support it, and can support other organizations that fight breast cancer. The whole episode may end up being a boon for both sides, if total contributions to the two organizations are any measure. Such are the blessings of liberty.

Contrast that to Obamacare, which forces people who don’t like Planned Parenthood’s mission to support it.

Second, there seems to be a bottomless well of delusion from which supporters of Planned Parenthood draw the idea that this decision shows Komen has injected politics into its grant-making.

Assume for the sake of argument that the Susan G. Komen Foundation has been hijacked by radical abortion opponents who forced the decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. Even if that is true, that decision did not inject politics into a process previously devoid of politics.

Millions of Americans believe that Planned Parenthood routinely kills small, helpless human beings. Believe it or not, they have a problem with that. When Komen gives money to Planned Parenthood, it no doubt angers those Americans (and makes them less likely to contribute). When Komen decided that the good it would accomplish by funding Planned Parenthood’s provision of breast exams outweighed the concerns (and reaction) of those millions of Americans, Komen was making a political judgment.

Perhaps Planned Parenthood’s supporters didn’t notice the politics that was always there, since Komen had been making the same political judgment they themselves make. But if Planned Parenthood’s supporters are angry now, it’s not because Komen injected politics into its grant-making. It’s because Komen made a different political judgment and Planned Parenthood lost, for now anyway. (Then again, if donations to Planned Parenthood are the measure, the group may be winning by losing.)

I must confess to a little bit of Schadenfreude here, as those who are complaining about Komen’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood are largely the same folks who applaud President Obama’s decision to force everyone to fund it (and, without a trace of irony, describe themselves as “pro-choice”). I predict that when a future president reverses Obama’s decision, supporters of Obama’s policy will likewise delude themselves that the future president has “injected” politics into the dispute.

UPDATE: The Susan G. Komen Foundation has again adjusted its grant-making policies, and Planned Parenthood will once again be eligible for funding. A reporter asks me: “So what does it mean now that Komen’s reversed itself?” My reply:

It does not mean that politics has been banished from Komen’s decisions. It just means that Komen has again made a political decision that more closely reflects the values of Planned Parenthood’s supporters than its detractors. But that is how we should settle the question of who funds Planned Parenthood: with vigorous debate and by allowing individuals to follow their conscience. When Obamacare ‘settles’ the question by forcing taxpayers to fund Planned Parenthood, it violates everyone’s freedom and dignity.

That was a hell of a lot more thoughtful than the reactions of all my liberal friends and acquaintances, which all boiled down to “Stop supporting Komen for the Cure because they caved in to right-wing political pressure!”

This occurred at a relatively unlikely place, the language-focused blag Lingua Franca. Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics and prolific language blagger, wrote:

The 1897 session of the Indiana General Assembly passed “A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth.” It asserted that (i) the ratio of the chord and arc of a 90-degree segment of a circle was 7/8; (ii) the ratio of said chord to the circle’s diameter (hence to the diagonal of a square inscribed in the circle) was 7/10; and (iii) the ratio of the diameter to the circumference was (5/4)/4. Pi must be equal to 3.2 for these things to be true. Yet the bill nearly made it through committee in the Senate, until one senator pointed out that it was ultra vires for the Assembly to define mathematical truth.

…when you assemble a few hundred ambitious people who managed to win elections and let them vote on proposed laws, you occasionally get silliness. Possibly about mathematical truth, or even linguistic truth.

The latter came up this past week when the French Senate passed a bill (already passed by the National Assembly in December) criminalizing a specific linguistic act: asserting that the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey during 1915 does not satisfy the definition of the word genocide.

This law (which President Sarkozy is widely expected to sign into law) makes it a crime to deny or “outrageously minimize” the number and motivation of the mass killings of Armenians. To assert the view “What happened in 1915 was not genocide” would be a prosecutable offense. The bill legislatively insists that a certain set of contingent historical events meet the criteria for use of the term genocide, and forbids asserting the opposite. If a document were found proving that all the killings of Armenians in 1915 were unintended side effects of a hyperspace bypass construction operation by extra-terrestrials, it would apparently be illegal for historians to discuss the document at a conference in France. This is legislative idiocy.
[...]
I have not expressed any opinion about the history. Since Armenian-Turkish journalist and editor Hrant Dink was murdered in broad daylight for treating the topic, I’m not exactly eager to. And my ignorance of early 20th-century Anatolian history is profound, so perhaps it’s just as well. But Mark Liberman noted on Language Log that The New York Times, after decades of demurral, reportedly decided in 2004 that “genocide” was and is an appropriate word for the events in question. (And you don’t turn the Gray Lady around easily—The New York Times still requires clause-initial whom, for heaven’s sake).

Mass killings of Armenians in Turkey as the Ottoman Empire collapsed appear to be copiously documented. My reasons for calling the French legislation crazy do not lie in any disagreement about the documentation. And I don’t care for wacky historical contrarians—nobody despises Holocaust deniers more than I do. I just think that it would be a monumental blunder to enact a law stipulating a point of lexical denotation. Insisting that you have to count the events as meeting the definition of genocide is as silly as trying to legislate the area of a square inscribed in a circle of diameter n.

The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.

Sarkozy isn’t Satan, and the fanatical Turkish denialism about 1915 is not virtuous or even sensible; but passing a law stipulating anything about how the word genocide is to be applied would be a stupid legislative mistake.

A commenter going by beedhamm wrote the following comment:

The main piece of support for your argument (something to the effect of it’s “legislative idiocy”) is stated here:

“The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.”
Now ask, what proof is there for this statement in the rest of your article? You’ve taken a serious, complex, nuanced situation and attempted to treat it in a lighthearted fashion, primarily by repeating something to the effect of it’s “a stupid legislative mistake.”

Perhaps a cognitive linguist, like Lakoff, would be better suited to comment on this issue?

I didn’t reply to this comment because I didn’t even know where to begin, perhaps largely because beedhamm failed to even make a point or state a single opinion, other than insinuating that Dr. Pullum’s conclusion is wrong and that a more detailed, in-depth, scholarly treatment of the proposed French law would lead to a different conclusion. Such a weak stance and absurdly heinous implication (that such laws aren’t mistakes and punishing speech can be desirable) were about par for the course for this morally questionable and intellectually bankrupt individual, as I discovered later.

Below that, an Armenian fellow whose name I will not paste because it was written in Armenian script, wrote:

Sound like you (the author) are one of the extremely uneducated (although have the opportunity to study whatever desired), wrongly self-confident Midwesterns that I’ve seen for years while studying there, that are no different from the uneducated (mainly cause they don’t have the choice to study), extremely ignorant immigrants whom I see every day now at the East Coast.

Please note that the language barrier has nothing to do with this Armenian’s misunderstanding of the principle of freedom of speech, as seen by the ensuing exchange. I responded:

Geoffrey Pullum: “Governments have no business legislating word definitions, any more than they have legislating mathematical relationships. We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.”

You: “You must be an uneducated, ignorant, privileged, out-of-touch moron.”

Nice job. You made your case really well, except I thought your Concluding Statement could have used a few more baseless insults.

This Armenian responded,

For your knowledge (since you need some): A word is the most powerful weapon existing on this planet (that is the same as religion, propaganda, etc.). So you agreeing with the thought “We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.” (by the way, see how it’s done? I mean the quotation) is another indicator of your low level education.

I ended my interaction with him with:

Just to clarify, you’re basically saying that it is ignorant (uneducated, stupid, wrong, unenlightened) to object to the idea that a government should define certain speech as harmful and punish users of such speech in proportion to the harm their words cause? Maybe you don’t realize how ridiculous that sounds to the English-speaking world. I didn’t think there was anyone outside of totalitarian governments who thought that way anymore. It is clear that nothing can be gained from interacting with such a sorry excuse for a human. Have a good life, and I hope you find your authoritarian police state someday.

(There was another brief exchange between us that was definitely hampered by the language barrier, but that’s not vital here.) Language barrier or no, this person’s intent is perfectly clear: The State should define certain speech or (mis)uses of words as harmful, should outlaw them, and should punish transgressors with the full force of the law.

I don’t care where you’re from, who you’re descended from, what your family or country has gone through, what your native language is, how fluent you are in the language you’re writing in, or what type of government you have lived under, there is NO EXCUSE for advocating the use of the police power of the State to punish people’s words or ideas. Boycotts, fine. Retaliatory slander, fine. Peaceful protests, fine. But this Armenian would lock you and your family in a cage for years for saying the wrong words in the wrong context. Those are monstrous thoughts written by a monstrous person, plain and simple. We (well, especially I) use all kinds of colorful language to describe people whose ideas and actions are abhorrent, so perhaps some of their meanings or effects get watered down on the internet. Well, here we have as clear-cut an example of a fascist, authoritarian, hateful, uncivilized, Statolatrist barbarian as I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Over the last couple years, spurred mainly by my own regret at how I responded to some people in internet discussions and the unpleasantness I felt when people were assholes to me, I have committed myself to responding politely and respectfully to others at all times, much to my and their mutual benefit, I’m happy to say. (You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?) However, I have no sympathy for anyone who would ever even consider taking such an anti–free speech position, and such a pathetic excuse for a human being deserves no respect, politeness, benefit of the doubt, or moderation in our condemnation of his opinions or exposure of his depraved, wretched character. As Professor Farnsworth would say, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

beedhamm responded to my first comment as well:

When did we agree that the deniers of genocide use “words … that harm no one”?

I suspect that we have to be a bit more careful to make sure that when we write “no one” we don’t just mean “me and the people like me.”

Again, he fails to really even make a point, other than to imply that words do, in fact, harm people, and by failing to qualify his statements with at least an admission that censorship laws can be a bad idea, he implies that they are good ideas, specifically the French genocide law. Therefore, I decided to take him behind the woodshed:

Of course words themselves harm no one, except emotionally and psychologically to the extent that the victim lets them. I guess you should be arrested and charged with a crime for harming my emotional state? Should I be arrested and charged with a crime for insulting you and the Armenian person above? How about if I said these things in the wrong locations:

The Holocaust never happened. Hitler was a great guy. No events in or around 1915 could be considered genocide, especially as concerns Armenians.

Those are all false statements and terribly offensive and ignorant, but no one was harmed by them. Yet according to German law and soon-to-be French law, I could be punished by law for typing them within their borders. That is absurd. If you disagree, I doubt either one of us will gain much by continuing this discussion.

Do you think it’s morally unjust right now, i.e., an attack that should be punishable or defensible by force, to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide? Or is it only wrong after a government outlaws it? If it has always been harmful since 1915, then what action or recourse should victims of such denial have been taking all these years? Surely they are right to strike out in self-defense in response to such offenses. What compensation are they due? If it has always been morally wrong, then surely it is wrong everywhere, not just France or Turkey or Armenia. Plenty of Armenians live in the U.S. What punishment should the New York Times be subject to for refusing to acknowledge it as a genocide? Surely if it’s wrong, period, regardless of law or geography, then I should be put in jail or fined heavily (or retaliated against in self-defense by all my victims) for typing it to prove a point.

Furthermore, surely there is not just one word in all of the French language that the government should determine the definition of. What other words fit the criterion of requiring definition by the government? What words in the English language fit the bill?

Is denying that Armenians were the victims of genocide a punishable offense if any human sees or hears it? Or just Armenians? Should the severity of the punishment be proportional to the number of humans or specifically Armenians who are exposed to it? What about someone who copies and spreads a speech or writing with such denials? Should this person be commended for alerting the Armenians (or all humans) to such offenses, or should they be punished similarly to the original perpetrator for spreading such lies? The words themselves do harm, remember, so it can’t matter why that person was motivated to spread the offending speech or what context it was done in or what commentary the spreader appended to the genocide denial. (You can’t rob someone and say “Theft is wrong” to avoid punishment. If the words do harm, the offender must be punished, right?) If someone wrote it in a private, personal journal and it was discovered happenstance by a visitor, should that offense also become punishable? After all, the words themselves are harmful. What if no Armenians actually saw it? What if only a single half-Armenian saw it? Should the fine be reduced by half?

How about implicit denial? Is that an aggression against person or property that should be punishable by force of law? For instance, someone talks about Armenians or Turks in or around 1915 but simply fails to mention the word “genocide”. What if they use all kinds of other words, like massacre or slaughter or travesty or injustice, but implicitly deny that it was genocide by avoiding this specific word? Surely that must also be wrong, not just after Sarkozy signs the bill but every day since the genocide ended (or even during it). What if future books about genocide are published that do not mention anything about Armenians? How about any current books about ethnic cleansing or genocide that might not mention the Armenian genocide and thereby implicitly deny it? By your logic, such books must necessarily be banned in France, and unless you’d say that right and wrong depend only on the law, such books should be banned everywhere, forever, in self-defense to prevent further harm being done by the words on their pages. If anyone’s definition of right and wrong depends on what laws politicians write and pass, then they can’t carry on an intelligent conversation with me.

The reason Dr. Pullum did not offer a detailed or academic defense of his contention that this French law is the wrong way to deal with offensive speech is probably partly because none is needed. It is self-evident. One’s innate right to free speech is not bound by anyone’s sensibilities or any laws, and certainly not math or history. If you agree with such censorship and dismissal of free speech, then, well, I would certainly want nothing to do with authoritarians of your ilk. Denying someone of a part of their property and liberty for typing or saying something offensive or insulting would be a far worse crime than any the offender supposedly committed. The words themselves are not harmful, not in any way that falls under the purview of law. And to re-state Dr. Pullum’s point, it is simply self-evidently absurd to suggest that any government can or should define words and punish people for their misuse.

I could have gone much farther than this reductio ad absurdum, but I doubt he got very far into my rant or understood how the absurdities that would result from censorship laws expose the inconsistency and untenability of his position. It is not possible to retain any semblance of a principled moral or political philosophy or even to put on a show of being a civilized, respectable, intelligent human being while asserting—even failing to deny—that words and ideas inflict harm upon others in ways that should be punishable by the State.

I am saddened to learn that many European and Asian countries already have laws against genocide denial, not just Germany. You might say, “Oh, now that you see how widespread genocide denial laws are and how acceptable they are to hundreds of millions of people, do you want to tone down your attack of the supporters of such laws?” Quite the contrary. They are all objectively, verifiably, undeniably wrong, just as all murder, rape, taxation, conscription, and all other free speech–abridging laws are wrong. It is quite possible that Holocaust deniers deserve for bad things to happen to them, but I’m thinking more in a karma-driven way, not through the police power of government.

If I had to guess, based on spelling and (lack of) opinions on the merits of free speech, I would guess beedhamm is from somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, perhaps Germany (“hamm”?) or somewhere farther east, where the innate right of free speech is less universally acknowledged than it is in North America. Therefore, it might be far past noon where beedhamm sits and longs for the kidnapping, beating, and imprisonment of people who misuse the word “genocide”, so I will take his current silence as an admission of defeat and acknowledgment of the beatdown I handed him (or her).

Most people would agree that the sign of an individual’s maturity and rationality, not to mention social skills, is her understanding that the cooperation of others must be obtained exclusively through persuasion. If you want something from someone you make an offer or an argument. You don’t demand, bully, or terrorize. And yet we tolerate an institution that demands, bullies, and terrorizes as a matter of course across a large and growing range of matters. It doesn’t demand merely that we not harm others or take their belongings. It bullies us into turning over our money for all kinds of purposes. It demands that we comply with its (ever-changing) rules about what we consume, how we manage our medical care, and in what manner we trade with others — and whom those others may be. And it increasingly terrorizes us in its brutal crusade against self-medication.

Notwithstanding the reminders from the likes of Noam Chomsky that the FBI (and, I presume, the CIA?) has no proof that Osama bin Laden orchestrated or ordered the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Eric Margolis’s matter-of-fact assertion that “Bin Laden long claimed he had no role in 9/11,” to me it seems extremely, vanishingly unlikely that bin Laden was not a murderer. Many Muslims whose judgment isn’t clouded by all-consuming hatred of the Great Satan recognize that bin Laden killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. In this case, as with presidents and dictators who are accurately called murderers for the deaths they ordered, I call bin Laden a murderer if he never pulled the trigger or pushed the detonator that killed any innocent. Without having analyzed any of the FBI’s, CIA’s, or anyone else’s raw intelligence data or other evidence, from my blagging chair I would put bin Laden’s likelihood of guilt as high as O.J.’s. Besides, he has loudly and proudly claimed responsibility for many non-9/11 murders.

If he is a murderer, then isn’t death a suitable punishment for his crimes? Doesn’t one forfeit his right to life when he maliciously (i.e., not in self-defense) kills innocent people? I think libertarian justice theory is even divided on this issue: some say no one should kill another except in self-defense, some say taking the life of a proven murderer is justified, some say the alleged killer must be convicted in some type of trial according to the legal (or anarchic protection and insurance) system of the victims or their representatives. I’m probably biased by emotion and circumstances, but I tend to think that every relative or friend of anyone killed by bin Laden’s terrorist attacks, which includes people of many nationalities and includes more than the 9/11 attacks, would be justified in seeking retribution in the form of retaliative killing, given that his guilt is proven. Some, including myself, say that his guilt is already proven, so the formality of a trial might not be strictly necessary. A trial would be preferable, though, for several reasons, as follows.

You could say that our Imperial Federal Government was acting as the representative of bin Laden’s thousands of American and non-American victims and exacting their revenge (justice?) for them, given its superior resources. However, I don’t think the State has any more justification to take someone’s life than it has to do anything else, no matter how justified that State’s subjects would be individually and no matter how heinous the crime. (I vehemently oppose the death penalty because the State should definitely not have permission to kill anyone, less so than any of its other activities.) If Chomsky and Margolis are right, then the Imperial Federal Government would not be justified in punishing or seeking justice against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. If most other people are right about 9/11 or at least about the thousands of other people bin Laden has murdered, then those people and their governments would be right in seeking justice or revenge (not the same thing). Therefore, I cannot conclude that it was necessarily right for the State to take bin Laden’s life, but killing a mass murderer per se certainly isn’t the worst thing the Obama regime could have done.

What should it have done, then? All of bin Laden’s victims and their military representatives, if you want to call them that (they don’t represent me, that’s for damn sure), had four options as I see it: do nothing about him, assassinate him, issue drone bombings and missile launches in the hopes that you kill him (and inevitably kill innocents in the process), or capture and try him for his murders. First, what were the legal and practical options the President had?

Professor Jon Silverman discusses and weighs all the legal avenues Obama (and Bush) could have taken regarding bin Laden. I liked that column both because and in spite of the fact that he doesn’t draw any solid conclusions.

This article by Emma Mustich of Salon.com, “Was killing bin Laden legal?”, is a thorough but brief must-read, even to those who recognize that legality rarely has anything to do with right and wrong. But if you’re going to talk about bringing someone to trial, then the realities of law and legality are unavoidable. Mustich writes:

Der Spiegel spoke Tuesday to University of Cologne professor Claus Kress, who questioned the legality of the terrorist leader’s assassination, insisting that justice is “not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial.” According to the Spiegel:

Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person.

[...]
Elsewehere in the media, James Downie quoted an explanation offered by one of his New Republic colleagues, who does believe the killing of bin Laden was legally justified:

“There are targeted killing issues where the legal background is complicated,” says Brookings fellow (and New Republic contributor) Benjamin Wittes. But, as it turns out, “[t]his isn’t one of them.” One week after the September 11 attacks, Wittes explains, President George W. Bush signed Public Law 107-40, in which Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” No one fit this description more closely than Osama bin Laden. (By contrast, the NATO missile strike in Tripoli that allegedly killed Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al Arab and three of his young grandchildren this past weekend has elicited greater controversy, because the U.N. resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, among many other differences from 107-40, did not include an authorization of force against Qaddafi or his family.)

For their parts, co-founders of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law John Norton Moore and Robert F. Turner have argued that bin Laden’s killing was legal according to the U.N. charter as well as Security Council Resolution 1373, passed within a month of Sept. 11, 2001, which emphasises “the need to combat by all means … threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.” Turner adds: “The targeting of Osama bin Laden is no more an assassination than was the intentional downing in 1943 of a transport aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Killing the enemy during armed conflict is not murder.”

Finally, professor Scott Silliman, who is executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke, told the Christian Science Monitor he has no doubt that bin Laden was “a lawful target”; the CSM also spoke to American University’s Stephen Vladeck, who expressed satisfaction that the U.S. government had “d[one] everything by the book.”

Glenn Greenwald (surprise) exposes the lie that bin Laden was armed or fighting back when he was captured or shot, making the SEALs’ shooting of him definitively non-defensive.

Thus do some scholars consider the targeted killing legally justified because, (a) he’s a murderer and, (b) it’s war, while some reject that conclusion because killing would only be justified in immediate self-defense, even in war.

It is important to remember that, like it or not and agree with it or not, the Imperial Federal Government is at war with Al Qaeda and the jihadists. Many people recognize that as horrible and murderous as the jihadists are, they are waging their war in response to American foreign policy specifically, not wealth or freedom. Even so, it is possible and, I think, useful to consider this war on terrorism and the hunt for bin Laden from the perspective of those fighting the war and those who support it (including the Statist and militarist legalities discussed above). Osama bin Laden did declare war on the “Great Satan” and all that entailed for him (innocents, military, and politicians). Therefore, it is at least possible to understand why military leaders would use any and all means necessary to cripple the threat (short of killing innocents; that is never understandable except as an honest mistake).

Is it a given that in a war, the leaders must not be targeted for death? Churchill and the American leaders did not regret the decision to hold Nazi war criminals on trial (more on that below), but was von Stauffenberg unjustified in attempting to assassinate Hitler? What if some French or British or American or Russian or Polish people helped him do it? (Maybe they did, I don’t know; I can’t stand Tom Cruise.) Would that go against the doctrines of war? Would some Allied soldiers have been wrong in shooting at or bombing Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels or Göring? Why in the world would that have been a bad thing? Was the aforementioned downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s airplane wrong? Why is it acceptable in a time of war to kill other soldiers but not target their leaders for assassination? Should French and Polish civilians and soldiers have tried to arrest every Nazi who marched into their countries instead of killing them? No, okay, then why not try to kill military leaders instead of arresting them (and instead of inflicting civilian casualties)? What if, instead of fire-bombing Dresden, the Allied leaders put together a team of Navy SEALs to assassinate only top Nazi military brass? How could that possibly have been a bad thing? Perhaps only the initiator of the murders, an unprovoked, non-defensive murderer, can rightly be retaliated against with killing? Can’t these questions be extended to any war and any war leaders? And make no mistake about it: Osama bin Laden was a war leader, according to himself and just about every government on Earth.

Therefore, attempting to put myself in the shoes of those engaged in this war, I can at least understand the decision to kill instead of arrest. Perhaps, as in any situation, if you are not shooting in immediate self-defense, then shooting is not permissible? Perhaps it is not considered acceptable for leaders to try to assassinate each other, whereas it would be justifiable for individual victims, their families and friends, or conscientious objectors on either side to assassinate a leader believed to be a past and future murderer? If so, then it would be acceptable to assassinate a murderous American president, which it decidedly is not.

I am left to conclude that within the realm of this war and considered from the perspective and interests of those fighting it, targeted assassination is understandable, but from a consistent, objective, self-defensive and not offensive, justice-seeking standpoint, capturing and trying bin Laden would have been preferable. If some stupid American jury or biased international jury found him not guilty, which would be a plainly incorrect decision, only then would I consider it justifiable to go all Dexter on him and bring him to justice where the “law” couldn’t. (Keep in mind that any jury could only find bin Laden not guilty for the purpose of sending the message, “Well, American presidents and generals are more guilty, so I won’t convict him until they have been,” which is irrelevant and immaterial to a murder trial.)

Which brings us to what Glenn Greenwald calls “the Osama bin Laden exception” and the legal and moral implications it entails. As John Cole says,

I’m the hypocrite here. I’m stridently against extrajudicial killings, the death penalty, targeted assassination, etc. I’d wager most of you are, too.

But when I heard that Osama had been killed, I’ll be damned if I didn’t think “Thank God that monster is gone.” Sure, in my ideal world he’d be brought back to the US, tried, and then imprisoned for the rest of his life. But you know what? I can not honestly say I give a damned that he took a double tap to the skull. Sorry. And I’d be also willing to bet that is where most of you all are- this may or may not have been legal, but you don’t give a shit, because that scumbag is at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and got what he deserved.

At an initial, emotional level, it’s hard to disagree. I do feel hypocritical and inconsistent. I feel glad and relieved that he’s dead. I almost wish I didn’t. It’s hard to see anything morally wrong with the retributive killing of a proven murderer per se. But I’m still forced to conclude that any killing not in self-defense should be avoided. Most especially, the State should not be permitted to get away with extralegal, extrajudicial actions of any kind. In this I do see many things morally and practically wrong with the State even having the powers or capabilities to carry out targeted assassinations, not to mention all the other things that any State with such powers will do (is already doing!). This is why I made the disclaimer above that the Obama regime killing bin Laden per se isn’t entirely bad, but many things implied and entailed by that decision and action are very bad.

What does the bin Laden capture-and-kill imply about the Imperial Federal Government’s boundaries (legal and moral) and the leeway it takes with handling justice, whether legal or not and whether towards American citizens or not? Could you imagine needing to quote anyone other than Glenn Greenwald on this issue?

My principal objection to it [the "bin Laden exception"] — aside from the fact that I think those principles shouldn’t be violated because they’re inherently right (which is what makes them principles) — is that there’s no principled way to confine it to bin Laden. If this makes sense for bin Laden, why not for other top accused Al Qaeda leaders? Why shouldn’t the same thing be done to Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen who has been allegedly linked by the Government to far more attacks over the last several years than bin Laden? At Guantanamo sits Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational mastermind of 9/11 — who was, if one believes the allegations, at least as responsible for the attack as bin Laden and about whom there is as little perceived dobut; why shouldn’t we just take him out back today and shoot him in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean rather than trying him?

Once you embrace the bin Laden Exception, how does it stay confined to him? Isn’t it necessarily the case that you’re endorsing the right of the U.S. Government to treat any top-level Terrorists in similar fashion? Again, this isn’t an argument that the bin Laden killing was illegal; it very well may have been legal, depending on the facts. But if we just cheer for this without caring about those facts, isn’t it clear that we’re endorsing a dangerous unfettered power — one that runs afoul of multiple principles which opponents of the Bush/Cheney template have long defended?

For me, the better principles are those established by the Nuremberg Trials, and numerous other war crimes trials accorded some of history’s most gruesome monsters. It should go without saying for all but the most intellectually and morally stunted that none of this has anything to do with sympathy for bin Laden. Just as was true for objections to the torture regime or Guantanamo or CIA black sites, this is about the standards to which we and our Government adhere, who we are as a nation and a people.

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out. Here was the very first paragraph uttered by lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stood up to deliver his Opening Statement:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

And here was the last thing he said:

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
[all emphasis Greenwald's]

I actually believe in those precepts. And if those principles were good enough for those responsible for Nazi atrocities, they are good enough for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It’s possible they weren’t applicable here; if he couldn’t be safely captured because of his attempted resistence, then capturing him wasn’t a reasonable possibility. But it seems increasingly clear that the objective here was to kill, not capture him, no matter what his conduct was. That, at the very least, raises a whole host of important questions about what we endorse and who we are that deserves serious examination — much more than has been prompted by this celebrated killing.

It’s not a good precedent, and it doesn’t speak highly of the moral character of the leaders who issued the order.

Before concluding with what bin Laden’s death implies for the future, I wanted to revisit the natural emotional responses of John Cole and myself that I touched on above and those of others around the world.

Perhaps my relatively sheltered, comfortable life and my lack of exposure to non-fictional death and violence bias this feeling of mine, but I can’t completely relate to those who say they find nothing (or very little) positive in any human’s death. For example, some commenters at Bob Murphy’s blag, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, Robert Higgs, and surely thousands of others around the interwebs and millions of others around the world find no joy or happiness in the death of even a mass murderer, and that isn’t just people who adored bin Laden and supported his ends and his means. As I said above, I couldn’t describe my reaction as joy or happiness when I first saw the news on TV, but I was definitely glad and relieved. Still positive emotions, but I just didn’t feel strongly about it. Maybe that’s only because our own murderer-in-chief ordered the mission and would receive much praise and credit for it.

One thing I was positively disgusted by and not conflicted at all about was the celebration from Americans that Sunday night. In Washington, D.C., in New York City, at the Mets–Phillies game, which is the main thing I was watching that night. It was pure collectivist, militarist, nationalist jingoism. The first thing that the footage of the impromptu celebrations and chants on Pennsylvania Avenue reminded me of was the audiences at the hangings and beheadings on the TV show The Tudors. They were (depicted as) bloodthirsty, barbaric animals who savored the sight of the king’s justice being done, believing like sheep that anyone the king ordered to death must be an awful sinner who deserved to burn in hell for all eternity. That is exactly what those celebrators and chanters are: bloodthirsty cavemen with iPhones and American flags instead of clubs and loincloths. Seeing that spectacle on TV actually gave me a little satisfaction at the moral high ground I (like to think I) have over the liberal Democrats who claim to be so much more understanding, fair, sympathetic, and certainly not militant or jingoistic. But they are just like the neoconservatives they so despise. Liberal Democratic Obama voters (past and future) probably constituted the majority of the celebrators on Pennsylvania Avenue that night, and my opinion of them is even lower because of it. I hadn’t known it could go any lower.

However, it should be noted that not only in degree but also in kind, there is a difference between Americans celebrating the death of a mass-murderer and Arabs celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At first glance, the libertarian or other-anarchist or general anti-militarist might say, “Americans cheering bin Laden’s death are cheering from the same perspective and for the same reasons as Arab America-haters cheering the deaths of Americans, because those Arabs see Americans as responsible for the deaths of many of their compatriots just like Americans see Al Qaeda as responsible for the deaths of many Americans.” This viewpoint fails to distinguish between collective responsibility (which in this case does not exist for the American victims) and individual responsibility (which in this case does exist for bin Laden).

Rather, Noam Chomsky’s analogy is p-… p-… perrr-… (I can do it)… perfect (wow, that was hard):

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Considered from this perspective, it definitely doesn’t make bin Laden’s murder something we should rejoice about or something we should have aimed for specifically; I don’t want George W. Bush or Barack Obama assassinated, especially not by some Iraqi or Afghani paramilitary unit, possibly because I am an American like them and naturally exhibit some nationalistic, tribal solidarity with them, and possibly because that’s an awful, hypocritical, counterproductive goal for the freedom movement. Therefore, if I don’t want one mass-murderer assassinated, I shouldn’t want the other one assassinated. This solidifies my position above that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, the Navy SEALs should have captured bin Laden for trial and execution rather than summarily executing him.

And isn’t it odd how Obama and so many Americans cite this as a testament to national greatness? I thought it was so arrogant for Obama to say that this operation proves that “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” He wasn’t the least bit humble, apologetic for all of that other death and destruction he and Bush have caused in the meantime, or thankful to any other nation except Pakistan (which was probably a token thank-you to mitigate the inevitable cries of “Pakistan obviously isn’t our ally!”). Robert Higgs was as disgusted by this claim of “greatness” as I was:

First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”

The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.

But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart.

Finally, as for the ramifications and the bin Laden–less future we have ahead of us, Laurence Vance, Anthony Gregory, Robert Higgs, Eric Margolis, and Justin Raimondo (and hundreds if not thousands of others whom I haven’t read) have said the cost of 5,000 American lives, a million Iraqi lives, trillions of dollars, and perhaps unrecoverable (in our lifetimes) civil liberties was not worth it to kill one man, however hated and dangerous. As those and others have also noted, bin Laden’s death doesn’t portend the end of anything, really. As Anthony Gregory writes elsewhere,

The smarter liberal media are playing this up as a repudiation of the Bush approach to the war on terror. Yet this only makes sense if Obama himself had actually repudiated that approach. He has instead tripled down in Afghanistan, continued the war in Iraq, multiplied the drone attacks many times over, and continued to treat international law as well as the U.S. Constitution as flexible rules in the waging of war and enforcement of national security. Insofar as Obama is implicitly admitting none of this was necessary to catch Osama, he should be criticized for persisting in it, not hailed as a hero of foreign policy restraint.

Indeed, Obama promises more war: Osama’s “death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad. . . . The cause of securing our country is not complete.”

Glenn Greenwald writes,

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

I fear that the combination of this celebration of “greatness” at a military accomplishment and the fact that we will now be living in a permanent national security state without a Public Enemy No. 1 (or much concrete success to show for our ongoing efforts) will only embolden the Imperial Federal Government’s efforts at home and abroad, weaken Americans’ opposition to the national security state, and encourage more encroachments of our civil liberties, because without bin Laden to serve as a cause célèbre, people will just become accustomed to the national security state as a way of life. Maybe no matter what, with or without a cause célèbre, the national security state was doomed to persist and expand.

This essay is such a tour de force that quoting passages would only do justice to the essay as a whole if done at great length, so I’m just going to excerpt from its second section, on equality. In that section, he links to Roderick Long’s Equality: The Unknown Ideal, which expresses a lot of similar points and is based on the same thesis: our individual liberty comes directly and solely from our equality as people.

Charles writes,

Attaching my controversial understanding of liberty to the standard of equality might seem less than prudent, if my interlocutor is a minarchist libertarian. Modern libertarians make demands for individual liberty with passion and urgency; their reaction to demands for social equality is more often tepid if not openly hostile. Criticism of social inequality is much more likely to be heard from the mouths of unreconstructed statists, and “egalitarianism” is hardly a term of praise in most libertarian intellectual circles. But I shall argue that equality, rightly understood, is the best grounds for principled libertarianism. When the conception of individual liberty is uprooted from the demand for social equality, the radicalism of libertarianism withers; it also leaves the libertarian open to a family of conceptual confusions which prop up many of the common minarchist arguments against anarchism.

Roderick Long also sympathizes with the temerity with which many minarchists face the idea of equality:

Yet we who regard ourselves as the inheritors of the principles of ’76 do not speak as often, or as warmly, about equality. We talk, instead, about liberty; we call ourselves libertarians, not egalitarians. We don’t give our books titles like The Constitution of Equality, or For a New Equality, or How I Found Equality in an Unequal World. By contrast, those who do most often invoke the language of equality in contemporary political discourse tend be the enemies of the principles of ’76, as we understand those principles. How could equality be our ideal, if it is also theirs?

The answer, of course, lies in the type of equality. Roderick Long writes more about what types of equality he doesn’t mean, explaining why libertarians reject socioeconomic equality, the mere equality of liberty, and the mere equality under the law. Check out his essay for a full account of why. Long and Johnson do give similar answers to what type of equality they do mean, so it’s better to quote from Johnson:

My task, then, is to explain what I mean by “equality, rightly understood.” I certainly do not intend to suggest that liberty is conceptually dependent on economic equality (of either opportunity or outcome), or on equality of socio-cultural status. But the equality I have in mind is also much more substantive than the formal “equality before the law” or “equality of rights” suggested by some libertarians and classical liberals, and rightly criticized by Leftists as an awfully thin glove over a very heavy fist. Formal equality within a statist political system, pervaded with pillage and petty tyranny, is hardly worth fighting for; the point is to challenge the system, not to be equally shoved around by it. The conception of equality that I have in mind has a history on the Left older and no less revolutionary than the redistributionist conception of socioeconomic equality. It is the equality that the French revolutionaries had in mind when they demanded egalité, and which the American revolutionaries had in mind when they stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Jefferson 1776a ¶ 2)

Jefferson is making revolutionary use of concepts drawn from the English liberal tradition. Equality, for Jefferson, is the basis for independence, and the grounds from which individual rights derive. Locke elucidates the concept when he characterizes a “state of Perfect freedom”—the state to which everyone is naturally entitled—as

A State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection …. (1690, II. 4. ¶ 2)

The Lockean conception of equality that underwrites Jefferson’s revolutionary doctrine of individual liberty is, as Roderick Long has argued, equality of political authority. Jefferson and Locke denied, as arbitrary, the Old Regime’s claim of a natural entitlement to lordship over their fellow creatures. Ranks of superior and inferior political authority were not established by natural differences in station or ordained by the will of God Almighty. Political coercion is the material expression of a claim of unequal authority: one person is entitled to dictate terms over another’s person and property, and the other can be forced to obey. Declaring universal equality thus means denying all such claims of lordship, and, thus, asserting that everyone has authority over herself, and over herself alone. Equality is the context within which the principle of self-ownership, and thus the demand for individual freedom, takes root.

This equality of authority can be expressed as not exactly equality under the law but equality with (those who would be) legislators, judges, and police. As mentioned above, I didn’t excerpt Roderick Long’s explanations of why socioeconomic and legal equality are inconsistent and illegitimate, but his conclusion on these matters is brief enough:

We can now see how socioeconomic equality and legal equality both fall short of the radicalism of Lockean equality. For neither of those forms of equality calls into question the authority of those who administer the legal system; such administrators are merely required to ensure equality, of the relevant sort, among those administered. Thus socioeconomic equality, despite the bold claims of its adherents, does no more to challenge the existing power structure than does legal equality. Both forms of equality call upon that power structure to do certain things; but in so doing, they both assume, and indeed require, an inequality in authority between those who administer the legal framework and everybody else.

The libertarian version of equality is not circumscribed in this way. As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system’s administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:

[T]he execution of the law of nature is in that state put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.

Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.

By this standard Murray Rothbard, in his advocacy of anarcho-capitalism, turns out to have been one of the most consistent and thoroughgoing egalitarian theorists of all time. As the author of Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, Rothbard might very well turn over in his grave to hear himself so described; but, as we shall see, what Ayn Rand used to say of capitalism applies a fortiori to equality: equality, properly understood, is in many ways an unknown ideal—unknown both to its defenders and to its detractors.
[...]
[I]n my view, Locke’s arguments for the incompatibility of Lockean equality with a functioning legal order [i.e., Locke's arguments for minarchism in which liberty is not quite total —JP] all commit either the fallacy of composition or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. (For example, from the claim everybody should submit his disputes to a third-party judge, Locke fallaciously infers there should be a third-party judge to whom everyone submits his disputes, which is like moving from everyone likes at least one TV show to there’s at least one TV show that everyone likes.)

… Hence libertarians have traditionally directed their ire against the inequalities in authority that exist between…the average person and…the legal system’s administrators (as well as their cronies, the private beneficiaries of government privilege). As Antony Flew writes:

[W]hat the various ruling élites determine to be fitting … may or may not turn out to be equality between all those who are so dependent. But as between those who give and those who receive the commands … there can of course be no equality at all.

[...]
From a libertarian standpoint, socioeconomic egalitarians turn out, embarrassingly enough, to be apologists for the ruling class.

That libertarian resistance to socioeconomically egalitarian proposals is itself based on an egalitarian ideal is seldom recognized. It is nonetheless true.
[...]
The case against socioeconomically egalitarian legislation is, as I said, an egalitarian one; for such legislation invariably involves the coercive subordination or subjection of dissenting individuals to the taxes and regulations imposed by government decision makers, and thus presupposes an inequality in authority between the former and the latter. As Ludwig von Mises writes:

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Nor would an anarchistic version of socialism fare any better; as long as some people are imposing redistributive policies by force or threat of force on unconsenting others, we have inequality in authority between the coercers and the coerced, regardless of whether those doing the coercing are public citizens or private individuals, and regardless of whether they represent a majority or a minority. Nor would a Hobbesian jungle, where anyone is free to impose her will on anyone else, embody equality in authority; for as soon as one person does succeed in subordinating another, an inequality in authority emerges.

The Hobbesian jungle might represent equal opportunity for authority, but in this context the libertarian favors equality of outcome. (That, incidentally, is why the right to liberty is inalienable.) Only defensive uses of force are justified, since these restore equality in authority rather than violating it. By the same token, an idealized democracy in which every citizen had an equal chance to get into a position of political power would also represent only equal opportunity for authority, not equality of outcome, and so would likewise offend against Lockean equality. To a libertarian, the saying “anyone can grow up to become president,” if it were true, would have the same cheery ring as “anyone might be the next person to assault you.”

Inequality in authority is far more offensive, from a moral point of view, than mere socioeconomic inequality; hence, whenever the demands of socioeconomic equality conflict with the demands of libertarian equality, which they generally do, preference must be given to the latter.

Johnson concludes his discussion on equality:

Equality of authority dulls the mystical glamor of State authority. The law is a human institution, and the legitimate authority of individual rights-claims does not need to be grounded in the dominance of a sovereign, or proclaimed from a standpoint beyond the fragile social relationships among fallible, mortal human beings. A good thing, too, since there is no Olympian standpoint for the State to occupy; governments are made of people with no more special authority than you or I—even when they are speaking ex cathedra in the name of the State. Rights are grounded in the claims that each of us, as ordinary human beings, are entitled to hold each other to, and are implemented not by paper laws but by the concrete social and cultural relationships we participate in. … The choice is not between a system where disputes are never meaningfully settled and one where they are, but between one in which they are settled through a decentralized network of institutions holding each other in check, or through a centralized hierarchy forcing others to defer to it. And, as Long argues, anarchy actually provides a better hope for disputes to be settled justly than minarchy—especially when an arbitrator is herself a party to the dispute—because under anarchy the watchers are themselves watched, and are less able to force through unjust rulings simply in virtue of their dominant position.

The context of a concept is often conceived as a constraint on the concept, and context-dropping as a matter of applying the concept more widely than it should be applied. But dropping the context of a concept could make you go wrong in either of two ways: improper abstraction might inflate the application of the concept beyond its domain of significance; or it might conceal the concept’s significance in cases where it should be applied. Understood in the context of Equality, the principle of Liberty becomes more radical, not less, challenging all forms of State mysticism with the standard of individual sovereignty.

There’s a little bit of redundancy among the passages I quoted from those two essays, and if you really want to appreciate their scope and force, then it would be better to just read them all (especially Long’s, which was presented as a speech and is much shorter). But I wanted to quote from them at length because I was very pleased to learn that my expression of my philosophy of equality-begets-liberty completely agreed with theirs, and also to learn how many subtle points and new arguments I have gained from these masterful philosophers.

In no particular order:

Economics

1. Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

2. Almost anyone can understand supply-and-demand if they calmly listen. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true.

3. Poverty is terrible, and economic growth, not redistribution, is the cure.

4. The proximate causes of unemployment are labor market regulation and workers’ misguided beliefs about fairness. But the fundamental cause of unemployment is excessive wages.

5. Free competition is far superior to “perfect” competition.

6. Governments with fiat money have near-absolute power over nominal GDP, but much less over real GDP or employment.

7. Moral hazard and adverse selection are largely the product of – not a rationale for – regulation of insurance.

8. Immigration restrictions are a fruitless crime – and do more harm than all other government regulations combined.

9. Communism was a disaster because of bad incentives, not lack of incentives.

10. The last two centuries of rising population and prosperity should fill us with awe – and the best is yet to come.

Philosophy

1. The greatest philosophical mistake is to demand proof for the obvious. See Hume.

2. The second greatest philosophical mistake is to try to prove the obvious. See Descartes.

3. If you can’t explain your position clearly in simple language, you probably don’t understand it yourself.

4. When possible, resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

5. Ignoring the facts of dualism and radical free will is anti-empirical and unscientific.

6. Talking about morality if there are no moral facts is like talking about unicorns if there aren’t any unicorns.

7. There are moral facts.

8. Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

9. Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

10. The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

Politics

1. Voters are irrational. So is believing otherwise.

2. Government isn’t a solution to externalities problems; it’s the best example of the problem.

3. The main output of government isn’t “public goods,” but private goods that people pretend to want much more than they really do. See Social Security and Medicare.

4. People rarely make the the most internally consistent argument for government action: paternalism.

5. The realistic path to freer markets isn’t “free-market reform,” but austerity.

6. Democrats and Republicans are about as different as Catholics and Protestants – and 80% of the union of their mutual recriminations is true.

7. Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.

8. Big reasons why democracy isn’t worse: Unequal participation, political slack, and status quo bias.

9. Libertarians are the dhimmis of democracy.

10. Despite everything, life in First World democracies is amazingly good by world and historic standards and will keep getting better. So cheer up.

Life

1. Life is a gift, and the more the better.

2. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Yep.

3. Be friendly as a matter of policy. Turn the other cheek in the face of ad hominem attacks. It might seem crazy, but it works.

4. Obsessiveness is an powerful solution for physical and social problems. Unfortunately it’s also a major cause of emotional problems.

5. Once you’re an adult, religious people will leave you alone if you leave them alone.

6. People vary more widely than you think. Tell yourself it’s nobody’s fault.

7. Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don’t see any around, quest for them.

8. Raise your children with kindness and respect. “I’m your parent, not you’re friend” is a reason to treat your kids better than their peers do, not worse.

9. Your mind ages at a slower rate than you expect when you’re young, your body at a faster rate.

10. Evolutionary psychology is by far the best universal theory of human motivation. Ignore it at your own peril.

This use of “hierarchy” and “command” to cover both coercive (the state) and voluntary, non-coercive institutions (church, family, corporation) is equivocation. We libertarians do not oppose hierarchy or command or authority in general, but only in the context of aggression. That is why we are libertarians, that is what it means to be a libertarian: to consistently and systematically oppose aggression of all types, both private (crime) and institutionalized (the state), on principled grounds.
[...]
…what is wrong with the state is not that it wields authority or even that it is hierarchical (though its hierarchical nature combined with its aggression makes it worse than a private criminal—it makes it systematic and institutionalized, so a bigger criminal threat).

The reason “hierarchy” in private institutions is “justified” is simply that it does not need to be justified. Only the use of interpersonal violence needs to be justified.
[...]
”Hierarchy is hierarchy my friend.”

yes, and libertarians are not against hiearchy.

His commenter Neverfox responded:

yes, and libertarians are not against hiearchy.

Maybe libertarians aren’t (if we accept your historically recent definition) but AN-archists are not against HIER-archy? In the immortal words of Violent J and Shaggy 2, how does that work? As William Gillis wrote:

“Anarchy” –in one of the most brilliant, clear and crystalline etymologies available in political ideology/idealism– is defined by its opposition to rulership. All forms of rulership.

The main commenter that made me think this blag post was so worth reading was Ryan Wills, of crossofcrimson.blogspot.com, who wrote,

Instead, what I’d like to suggest, is that any power that we have is tangential to our own property rights – that, if we do indeed grant that property is a valid concept, we simply have control over who may or may not use that property and no other enforcible powers beyond that. Therefore, any expression of power or authority as such exists only to the extent to which we may withdraw our explicit or implicit consent for others using that property.

So, to get back to the analogy: If I tell you to remove your shoes before entering my house, I’m not claiming some authority over you in that I have some right to tell you what you can and can’t do. On the contrary, my request only has power to the extent that it is an implicit condition upon which you may use my property.

If we were to take such conditional interaction and, as other anarchists often do, conflate it with authority, then it would make a good deal of fairly ambiguous daily interaction immoral. Families, churches, and many other voluntary organizations would seem malicious and predatory under such a notion. In fact it would seem hard to justify trade as being anything other than malign under such a notion. For, if one was asked to shovel snow out of a driveway in exchange for money we could then say that person was being temporarily subjugated to the will of another. [NB: Some anarchists, who neither I nor, I dare say, they themselves would call libertarian, do consider all families, churches, and many other voluntary organizations malicious and predatory, and not just the violent, oppressive ones. —John] We may say, “Clearly this is absurd – the person in question is not being forced to do such a thing. He’s doing it of free will and association.” And such a point couldn’t ring any clearer. In fact, it would ring just as clear and for the same reasons in regards to the removing of your shoes before you enter my house, or in regards to labor being exchanged for wages on the floor of an assembly line.

This is why anarcho-capitalists will forever clash with anarchists of other stripes. Few self-described anarchists seem to be willing to differentiate conditional association with what ANCAPs would describe as “authority” (forced hierarchy), even if those anarchists (according to their own view) willingly subject themselves to many conditional associations in their everyday lives without recognizing them as such. It presents an inherent problem to their ideology, and I believe it’s largely (maybe even subconsciously) why many dismiss private property altogether, or subscribe to the labor theory of value – it’s the result of cognitive dissonance.

Ultimately the distinction is clear. Private property as such is not simply a throwback to a feudal system (as other anarchists often claim) where owners of large tracts of land claim ownership over the lives of serfs. Instead we claim that any such command or power, as it may be perceived, can exist only, and unequivocally, as an expression of property rights -and nothing else. We submit then that all voluntary association, trade, or hierarchy is derived from the ownership of ourselves and willful consent therein – and that, as such, by nature their exhibition cannot be coercive. Even more clearly, the idea of restraining men from such voluntary association would be, by definition, explicitly coercive. In this way the anarcho-capitalist position is clear; free men of free association born out of an inherent ownership of self, labor, and the product thereof, reasoned simply and deductively. In this way, I don’t believe the onus is on Rothbardians to further justify self-ownership and free association. The onus is instead on detractors to explain why men should not own themselves or should be restricted in their associations with other free men.

Chris Thomas responded to Kinsella:

“The reason “hierarchy” in private institutions is “justified” is simply that it does not need to be justified. Only the use of interpersonal violence needs to be justified.”

This is true only if justice is the only aspect of morality that you’re concerned with. If you’re a thick libertarian (which is another way of saying you’re a libertarian who links justice with other aspects of morality) then you need to justify many types of action, including non-aggressive action. For example, being mean because you like to see others unhappy is improper behavior. If you can show that many types of hierarchical relationships are sufficiently related to aggression, then you may be able to show that they are condemnable, even if they are not a violation of justice.

And Ryan Wills responded to that:

“This is true only if justice is the only aspect of morality that you’re concerned with.”

I think thin libertarians would argue that justice (as a virtue) is the only purview of government or law in the way that we understand it. There are obviously other virtues which people believe ought to be endorsed (virtues that many libertarians may agree with). However they feel it has no place in the sphere of what constitutes just aggression. That isn’t to say that more thickly bound conceptualizations of libertarianism are wrong. The fundamental disagreement is regarding the scope of political justice.

Finally, neverfox responded,

I think thin libertarians would argue that justice (as a virtue) is the only purview of government or law in the way that we understand it.

But I don’t know any thick libertarian who argues differently. Such a statement, therefore, goes nowhere towards answering the question “thick or thin”? In other words, the difference between thick and thin libertarians is not over the purview of law but over the scope of things that one is committed to (though not necessarily logically committed to) because they are a committed to non-aggression.

That’s about enough for now. I think this last comment by neverfox demonstrates how much “left-libertarianism” is simply libertarianism and how much they therefore have in common with those of us who don’t use the “left” moniker (not that they don’t add on more concerns that they are committed to, as neverfox noted). My position as a Rothbardian thin-libertarian voluntarist is that libertarian theory and other theories of justice should only concern what people must and must not do: what is right and wrong, just and unjust. In this sphere of discourse is formed the theory of the justification of force: force is only justifiable in response to and/or to defend against injustice. Beyond the realm of justice theory lies what Chris Thomas called “improper” and “condemnable” actions and situations. According to my definitions, we can only endorse or oppose things beyond the realm of justice not as libertarians qua libertarians but rather as concerned, sympathetic human beings. If it isn’t universal, if it isn’t necessary and essential to the theory, then it isn’t a principle, and therefore I say it isn’t strictly libertarian.

Non-libertarian “anarchists” and libertarians who, in my opinion, exhibit too much thickness in some cases, are led by their non-justice/non-theoretical concerns to support striking government workers instead of opposing both the strikers and the states they work for, or to oppose all hierarchies as a matter of principle instead of just the actually condemnable ones.

For example, since I like using sports analogies, consider two hierarchies that must, according to some leftists’ own words and own definitions, be oppressive, predatory, violent, unjust, exploitative, and forbidden in their ideal society: football teams and the Dan Patrick radio show. In a football team, completely aside from the corporate ownership of each team (well, except the Packers) and the relationship of the league/owners with the players and their union, there is a necessary hierarchy of decision making. The head coach is the boss of the offensive and defensive coordinators, and these coordinators design the plays and call the plays during the game. The head coach, the coordinators, the strength and conditioning coaches, and other coaches determine every detail of the players’ training and practice. If they don’t get in shape or do the drills right, they get fired. If they don’t run the plays called by the coordinators during the game, or, in fact, if their intentions are perfectly obedient but they lack the necessary skill level, they get benched or fired. There is inter-player hierarchy between the starters and the others. On the field, only one player can alter the play called by the offensive coordinator, the quarterback, so there is even an inter-player hierarchy within the first string.

According to the confused millions who base their entire philosophy on opposition to hierarchy as a matter of principle, no football team or football league could ever exist. I am not creating a straw man or using hyperbole to make a point. If anti-hierarchists want to base their philosophy on any principles, then those principles must be true at all times and in all situations; that’s what makes them principles. If hierarchy is wrong in principle, then it is wrong for coaches to organize practices, design plays, call plays, or judge performance, and it is therefore morally unjust for any semi-organized sports team to exist.

The Dan Patrick radio show features former ESPN anchor Dan Patrick and his four “Danettes”, who perform various pre-show, post-show, and technical functions, in addition to chiming in on most topics. There exists a clear hierarchy in this radio show, not the least of which is naming it after a single person. Dan gets to begin and end each telephone interview. Unlike most multi-person radio shows, I think the Danettes have to push some button or click on something on their computer to let Dan know that they want to chime in when he’s done with his current point; then Dan calls on them like a teacher in a classroom. Hierarchy abounds in this outfit, and yet the Danettes don’t seem to feel too oppressed or exploited.

According to those who oppose hierarchy on principle (what are they called? “anarchist” isn’t correct because hierarhcy obviously doesn’t imply rulership, and “anti-hierarchists” is way too awkward to type and speak; I think “childish morans” is good), the Danettes have the right to use force to change the way the show is run, because its hierarchical nature is a violation of their rights. Also, they have obviously been brainwashed into thinking such a situation is acceptable or desirable. In the non-hierarchical world, the show couldn’t be called the Dan Patrick Show, they would all have equal speaking rights and equal duties both on and off the air, and they would all make the same amount of money. In that case, Dan would no longer want to do the show, the Danettes would be left to do their own show, no one would care about it anymore, and they’d all be out of a job.

I simply cannot understand how an anti-hierarchy philosophy leads to any conclusions other than the seemingly hyperbolic but all too literal conclusions I have drawn, and I cannot see how they don’t see how absurd it is. Maybe in the non-hierarchical world, the football players would vote on their plays and come to a majority decision within the 40 seconds allotted between plays. Maybe they would vote for people to be their coaches, in which case they would have voluntarily created a hierarchy similar to the one that exists in our world. Maybe the members of the Dan Patrick Show would vote to call it the Dan Patrick Show and would voluntarily accept the lower pay and more grunt work in place of a crappier job. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened in real life, minus the voting. Any answer I can think of seems to be, “Well, if they voluntarily accepted the hierarchy and voted on stuff, then it’d be okay, but voluntarily participating in a hierarchy in the world we live in is different.” Yeah, it’s a little different; it still isn’t wrong, unjust, oppressive, exploitative, or in any way inconsistent with any coherent property rights theory.

Any opponent of hierarchy on principle who would object to these as straw-man arguments (which they are not) must admit that these types of hierarchies aren’t really the object of his ire and that they are okay precisely because they are voluntary. If you think their hierarchical situation sucks, who cares? How does your opinion of their life choices matter in any way? You aren’t the one whose oppression or exploitation is under consideration; theirs is. In most cases, exploitation is in the eye of the exploited and also depends upon the alternatives. If they don’t think they’re being exploited and they do think this is their best option after considering all the alternative jobs, then it isn’t exploitation! Their voluntary participation in these hierarchies defines them as morally just and non-exploitative, revealing once again how voluntarism is the beginning, middle, and end of morality.

However, aside from those philosophical or economic arguments, you can take the easy road and can cite the fact that everything the government touches turns to crap and that government involvement always, necessarily, invariably leads to government control and government restriction. Your politics and philosophy aside, governments only exist to regulate and control everything, and their control only spreads and strengthens over time, not recedes when it becomes unpopular or impractical. As Mises wrote, one government intervention always seems to lead to another intervention to fix the problems that the first intervention caused, et cetera ad socialism. The fact that a net neutrality debate is even necessary is solely due to prior government intervention in creating telecom monopolies and regulating them through the Federal Communications Commission, and the net neutrality legislation that we will inevitably suffer will only beget more legislation. Here’s a helpful hint for your daily life: when you hear “legislation”, think “restrictions of free choices backed by threats of violent punishment for disobedience”.

In the case of the government controls that will follow net neutrality legislation, it might not be exactly the problems caused by such legislation that lead Congress and the FCC to instate new measures to fix those problems, but rather the opportunity to control and the lust for power will simply be too great to pass up. As a rare intelligent and informed redditor put it (hat tip Mises Blag),

So let me get this straight….the government, the same government that punishes success through the tax code, prevents innovation through burdensome regulation, can’t spend within its means, bails out billionaires with working people’s money, and has created a ponzi scheme in the form of social security to threatens to bankrupt the nation, and generally screwed up everything it has ever touched, getting involved in regulating the internet, is going to help increase speech, entrepreneurship, and innovation? Pardon me for being a little skeptical.

I’ll tell you what will really happen. The first 6 months will be fine. Then, first you will see federal taxes on internet purchases, then you will see ‘fairness’ controls that will restrict the content of what you can say, then you will see political speech regulated in the name of ‘campaign finance reform’, then you will see federal business licenses required for selling goods on the internet, required encryption backdoors, required technologies, national ‘internet IDs’, mandatory content filtering, a ban on anonymizing technologies, and 1,000 other terrors that I can’t even imagine right now. Regardless of the pure intents of the people wanting to push government enforced net neutrality, this will make the internet subject to politics and big money interests.

Here is what you will really get… Boy MP3′s sure are disruptive technology, not anymore! The president just appointed the head of BMG as the ‘internet czar’ (czar=no senate approval required!), after a $5 million campaign contribution, and he just decided that MP3s only exist to facilitate copyright infringement, and therefore must be filtered by all ISPs. And you just thought it would make your netflix download faster.

Government enforced Net neutrality is a dangerous idea that only serves to open the door to the destruction of the internet at the hands of government regulators. A better way would be an industry consortium that self-regulated net-neutrality and ostracized companies that didn’t play ball. Plus, people need to vote with their dollars. Your ISP is throttling Netflix? Don’t do business with them.

Contrary to that dolt Al Franken saying that net neutrality is the most important free-speech issue of our time, net neutrality and everything else internet- and telecom-related are solely a government-control issue. We are all born with the absolute right to completely free speech, and the State can only infringe upon that right, not protect or augment it.

The above objection to a Stateless libertarian society implies that society as a whole should use means it considers reasonable to enforce rules and restrictions it considers reasonable on each individual member of the society. Note that libertarian philosophies posit exactly the same thing, to a certain extent: our freedom of association, with which we can shun or ostracize unacceptable members of a group, and our economic freedom, with which we can contribute to the profit and loss of individuals and businesses, would result in a population tending to create for itself the world that it wants, with individual regions or groups deviating from the norm in whatever ways are practical and desirable. However, the crucial difference is in the granting of a monopoly on violence to a privileged group: the State. Because the State, by definition, is not subject to the same set of rules that everyone else in society must abide by, it exists outside of society, enforcing rules on society as it sees fit. And because the State, by definition, enjoys a legal monopoly on the initiation of force, it cannot be expected to be constrained by the society it rules over. The extent to which and the ways in which the State is influenced by its subjects are only according to the desires of the majority and other large, politically organized, powerful lobbies, and not according to the desires of individuals or minority groups outside of those politically influential blocs. In contrast to a free society in which everyone would be free to march to his own drummer, weak/minority groups become marginalized and constrained by powerful/larger lobbies in a Statist society. Even the majority of voters in a given region at a given time often don’t get what they want (e.g., Obama’s foreign-policy and civil-liberties record). Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State is purported to contain the best exposition of this power struggle.

Importantly, a government at any level of geographic jurisdiction (local, state, national, etc.) must enact and enforce laws that are one-size-fits-all, and as most people in Western society have seen from the crony-corporatism and the bailouts of the last few years, most exceptions to the universal laws are made in favor of the (large) companies that help out the politicians the most. Very few people anywhere approve of this, but obviously our only recourse, voting, does no good or else it would be outlawed. As Étienne de La Boétie would remind us, a state continues to exist in the form in which it exists because society at large generally approves of it, but the most important unit of any group, the individual, is persecuted and disenfranchised by the Statist system to the extent that he wants to live his life in peaceful abstinence from the State apparatus and in peaceful disregard of its restraints.

Therefore, however close a state comes to enforcing the mores or demands of the entire populace (in effect, the majority), the libertarian is repulsed by it because no one is permitted the freedom to peacefully abstain from any demand made by that state.

What are some of those demands, made by the State (the majority) on individual subjects, for the purpose of serving the greater good? Paying taxes of all kinds to fund government agencies of all kinds; helping out the less fortunate and otherwise indigent; bailing out business that are “too big to fail”; educating children only in ways that are approved of by local, state, and national school boards; paying for every child’s schooling to promote an educated citizenry; being conscripted into jury service to protect your fellow citizens from unfair prosecution; abstaining from ingesting substances that the State declares taboo and harmful to society; using only State-approved notes as currency; paying for the military’s defense of the citizens and their land; possibly being conscripted into the military; protecting the environment and natural resources; paying for other people’s medical care; protecting the intellectual property of innovators so as to promote more innovation; not harming others in their person or property; and not peacefully (or otherwise) seceding from the State’s geographic jurisdiction over all legal affairs.

As good and noble as many of those causes are, there is no cause so noble as to justify violating anyone’s rights in order to accomplish it. The rights of the one outweigh the needs of the many, and anything else, for that matter. If that is not true, who are you to say which rights of mine shall be ignored and which I shall have the privilege of maintaining? Why must libertarians always defend our person and property against you and not the other way around? Why am I not permitted to demand that you pay for my food, housing, health care, or bank bailout, that you operate your business according to the (lack of) regulations that I want, and that you be subject to the court system that I desire? Because the State says so? The majority voted on it? There’s a social contract? No. That is not acceptable or defensible under any system of logic or morality. Might does not make right, the majority should not rule, and there is no such thing as a social contract.

It is a general truism that ends that are achieved by means of violating anyone’s individual liberty cannot result in a net good. And it is a socio-psychological certainty that the type of people who desire the power to manage the affairs of others will violate individual rights in proportion to the greatness they aspire to. I do not support the means that the State uses to accomplish any ends, irrespective of the desirability of the ends themselves, and therefore I do not want to be a party to any of its activities. I am under no moral obligation to obey any of its demands or respect any of its methods, goals, or agents; I only do so out of concern for my own safety and well-being and because I think we can all accomplish more outside of prison than inside of it.

No person, or group of people, or society, or government has the right to demand anything of me other than that I not demand anything of them. No one has the right to demand that I pay anyone anything that I have not previously, willingly, implicitly or explicitly agreed to pay in return for a specific good or service. No one has the right to tell me how to educate my children, run my business, use my land, or redistribute “intellectual property”, as long as those actions don’t affect anyone else’s equal liberty to do the same. No one has the right to tell me what can and can’t be used as currency, what I can and can’t ingest, or what actions I can partake in with other consenting adults. No one has the right to conscript me into jury duty or military service any more than they have the right to force me into slave labor. The only right we have is for nobody to violate our person, liberty, or property—in other words, to remain in equal moral standing with every other human, such that no one is in a position of power to commit any involuntary action upon another person. From this moral egalitarianism are derived our rights to be free of aggression, fraud, and breach of contract.

These rights are not subject to any terms whatsoever—no modification, no specification, no exception, no infringement, no abrogation, no higher considerations, and certainly not a vote. They are absolute and infinite. I do not demand anything of anyone else, and no one may demand anything of me without my permission and a prior agreement of some kind. Why not? Because I say so. Why don’t I have any moral obligation to pay taxes, serve in the military, serve on a jury, ingest only authorized substances, donate money to a certain cause or group, or obey any of the other myriad restrictions the State places on my person, property, and liberty? Because I don’t want to. They are my body, property, liberty, and rights to manage as I please, within the identical boundaries that simultaneously constrain and protect every other human being; what other reason could I need for claiming my rights?; who are you to say which of my rights is to be violated and to what extent?; who are you to say that what you want for me supersedes what I want for myself?

No one is fit to govern me but myself. What I freely do with my body and property is not subject to debate or vote. What you want for society is irrelevant, and how you want me to behave is irrelevant. The only reasons the mob’s vote has any bearing on our practical world are that the State has the guns and the mob currently chooses not to start with first principles and examine what is right before deciding what is desirable. But it won’t be so forever. Because might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. The majority should not rule any more than one person should. The entirety of the human race save one is no more justified in violating the rights of the one than the one would be in oppressing all of humanity.

When Statists say they agree with our assertion of individual rights to some extent, or that this or that limitation should be imposed by the State, or that not even individual liberty should be absolute, what they are really saying is that they have the right to use the violent, deadly police power of the State to restrict what we do with our minds, bodies, and property, and that not only do we not have a reciprocal right to treat them the same way, we don’t even have the right to make those decisions for our own minds, bodies, and property. It is simply incoherent to assert such dominion over the liberty, property, and even the body of another. The falseness and invalidity of such a claim is self-evident. This is as certain as Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum. Our right to completely control our own bodies is virtually axiomatic (though extensive proofs exist), and all other rights against encroachment follow from it. No claim to a higher good has any bearing on them, and no moral system denying these absolute truths can ever be fair or just.