Levelling

                                                                                  

                                           Levelling

The Levellers, such as John Lilburne (1615-1657), Richard Overton (1631-1664), and William Walwyn (c. 1600-1681), were a group of radical libertarian activists and pamphleteers who were active during the English Revolution. They advocated individual liberty, property rights, constitutionally limited government, religious toleration, and free trade at a time when virtually none of these things existed in England. For their troubles, several of them were repeatedly imprisoned and their publications censored.

Richard Rumbold, a Leveller writing in 1685 before his execution in Edinburgh:


I am sure that there was no man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.

Liberty/Property/Trade

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)


Saw Donny and Carol Capone last night and we had a great time. They are doing well. Donny made a very good dinner. A nice night compromised slightly by a scary ride home in a lunatic Uber. 
Another great performance by an ex-Pirate in the playoffs. They will probably never give up on a pitcher again, regardless of how terrible he is.
We head for Bonita Springs today.

Sanders has had myocardial damage. The impact on his physiology is a bell curve of possibilities. He might be physically able to continue but his V-P will be as important as he is, like an old Roman election. If he drops, who gets his funds? Whoever does must assume some of the socialist mantle which I think will make Trump stronger.

The word "sin" in Hebrew means "to miss the mark."

                                         Liberty/Property/Trade

Liberty is often described as an internal process where the mind surmounts some horrible material restraint. Not poverty, not the Gulag can enslave the heart of man. Liberty has some external examples like "Free speech," and "Free press" but these can be as abstract as internalized freedom. So what is Liberty's touchstone?       

There are some realities: Liberty is a recent concept, recent for a reason. One could argue that Liberty requires some unfettered sphere of influence; it is impossible without the ability to have something of one's own. Until recently, that personal influence was impossible. The Powers That Be allowed no individual sphere of influence. The rise of production beyond subsistence created value. That is, Liberty is a corollary of personal property. Put another way, is freedom meaningful without having something of one's own?

Then things get sticky. According to Ayau, "A person can exercise property rights in one of two ways: through personal use, the enjoyment or consumption of what he owns; or by trading it for something else, either directly through barter or indirectly through the use of money and the intermediation of third parties. Thus, trade is a fundamental manifestation of your property rights."

So Freedom, Property and  Free Trade are Siamese triplets, one impossible without the other. Indeed all three are a function of each other, which explains their concurrent development. And, if you will allow a wonderful reach, the triplets create The Three Body Problem.

So, of course, it gets more complex. As Frenchie Rourk says, "Property is without meaning unless you are allowed to defend it."

The Dangers of Free Speech

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.--Sugata Mitr 

Mom spent yesterday in Ohio with oil and gas wild men.
Chris has been playing tennis again.
I went to a writing meeting and it was worthwhile. Panara has very small sandwiches, though. Arby's wins.

Michigan State University has announced a $2.4 million retirement deal for former MSU president Lou Anna Simon, who was forced out of office last year after MSU’s crippling sexual assault scandal. Simon stands charged with two felonies and is accused of lying to law enforcement officials about what she knew regarding the abuse of more than 150 women over nearly three decades. In addition to its three-year pay-out to Simon, the university will provide a generous benefits package, including medical and dental coverage, the title of “president emeritus,” continued access to football and basketball tickets and a commissioned portrait that will be displayed at the university (so long as she is not convicted).
Preemptive rehab? What's next? Jerry Sundusky gets tenure?


A new candidate has come out of nowhere to surge in the polls in the Democratic primary, and she’s only six years old. Susie Peters of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was on a local news segment where children gave their opinions on world problems, and she asked, “Why can’t we just give everyone everything they want for free?” The message quickly went viral and really resonated with Democratic voters, propelling Susie from unknown to third in most polls, ahead of Bernie Sanders and just behind Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.--Babylon Bee



One of the casualties of the Democrat debate was Obama. His center-left policies were pilloried as old world and incomplete by the far Left majority. A legacy slipping away so soon.

Germany’s economy shrank in the second quarter and China reported a raft of weak data, sharpening fears over how far the spillover from the global trade dispute is damaging the prospects for growth.(wsj)

• The statists at the OECD put together a ranking asserting that poverty is a bigger problem in the United States than in Greece, Portugal, or Turkey.

The U.S. is now exporting crude oil to a record number of 31 countries, according to newly released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. U.S. oil exports are going all over the world, ranging from oil-rich United Arab Emirates to Australia, reaching 2.9 million barrels a day from essentially 0 in 2015 before Congress lifted a 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil.

There is a fondness for the pre-technology days. We were so much human then, right? But one of the best things that ever happened to African-Americans was the mechanization of agriculture that destroyed many of their jobs. 

Is it possible to have unlimited access to limited products and services? 

As health care costs continue to rise, practitioners in India are working to lower prices -- and bring their innovations closer to American shores. Health City Cayman Islands is a new frontier for India’s largest for-profit hospital chain. Focused on efficient health care delivery, its services are now drawing Americans to the Cayman Islands.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed  the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935.

                   The Dangers of Free Speech

Most infringements of liberty have some good intention. People are not capable to make good decisions, people don't understand the science, the species is inherently malicious and we must be protected from each other. Even slavery has an upside; at least you weren't executed.

Free speech has recently become one of our dispensable freedoms. Faculty leaders of the University of California consider these statements racist microagressions: “America is a melting pot”; “America is the land of opportunity”; “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough”; and “There is only one race, the human race.” The latter statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. Then there’s “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” speech because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” or “Affirmative action is racist.” Perhaps worst of all is, “Where are you from, or where were you born?”

Princeton University professor Carolyn Rouse, who is chairperson of the department of Anthropology, called free speech a political illusion, a baseless ruse to enable people to “say whatever they want, in any context, with no social, economic, legal or political repercussions.” As an example, she says that a climate change skeptic has no right to make “claims about climate change, as if all the science discovered over the last X-number of centuries were irrelevant.”

There are simply too many opinions out there and a lot of them are either wrong or malicious. Why should we tolerate error and malice? Elites just know better. They know more and they see deeper. And they are better motivated. No less a revolutionary luminary than President John Adams wrote and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
We clearly must escape our liberty obsession.

Freedom is "Obsolete"

No genuine scientist would ever ridicule skepticism. It is one of the defining features of an inquisitive mind. No genuine scientist would use the word “denier” to describe another scientist. No genuine scientist would claim a computer model is able to predict future climates.--Moore 

Mom felt well all weekend.
This could be a long winter. The Steelers looked Pirate-like in their lack of high-level talent at the elite positions. Smith did not look like a first receiver--or perhaps their lack of a second receiver allowed the Patriots to take liberties. This did not look like a team that would be competitive on the upper level of the league.
The Patriot defense did look elite. And their left tackle, in his first pro game, stood up well against the feared Dupree.
And how is it that Brown ends up with exactly what he wanted, shafting both the Steelers and the Raiders?


The quote above raises the major--and unspoken--objection to the climate debate. Scientists do not ridicule or hound those who disagree. That is a particularly political and/or religious quality. Anyone with a scientific mind would recognize such intolerance as specifically unscientific.

For those of you who are low on your anxieties, by 2030, according to a recent report, half the population of India — 700 million people — will lack adequate drinking water. Currently, 25 percent of India’s population is suffering from drought. “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” warns Ismail Serageldin, a former executive for the World Bank.

"There are now over 50 gender clinics in the United States. These were unheard of seven or eight years ago. And they’re set up real, almost like — if I may use a crude analogy — a restaurant where a person comes in and orders a treatment. Doctors have always said — you give me the symptoms, and I’ll help you with what I think is going on for the diagnosis. But that basic process is being short-circuited by a “this is my diagnosis; this is what I have” approach. And literally they’re asking for hormones. And amazingly, doctors are going along with it in many cases. I think it’s a travesty of our profession."--Josephson

Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the phrase “race suicide,” wrote to a eugenicist that “the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” Woodrow Wilson warned against the “corruption of foreign blood” and “ever-deteriorating” genetic material.

The government has hit and raised the debt limit 78 times since 1960, some 49 under Republican administrations and 29 under Democrats. And this time will be the same. Anger and threats will fill the airways. Righteous indignation will reign. Why is that? Because it gives these people a stage and an opportunity to pontificate.

On this day in 1942, a Japanese floatplane dropped incendiary bombs on an Oregon state forest—the first and only air attack on the U.S. mainland in the war.

                            Freedom is "Obsolete"

Putin thinks that "liberalism" has faded as a solution to the problems of man. The liberal ideology that has underpinned Western democracy for decades is “obsolete,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times published Friday. Speaking to the FT on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, during which world leaders will discuss trade, security and other matters, Putin said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” and “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
The Russian political philosopher has serious questions about the limits of "Liberty." As well he should. Liberty is an individual right that is beneficial to the collective only indirectly. But the Russian oligarch is probably asking a deeper question, placing, as much as a powerful and wealthy warlord can, himself in the jackboots of the average guy. Because liberty is risky. Many of us manage it poorly and will eagerly trade it for security, security we are strangely willing to risk on the leader's behalf. The divine right of kings was more than an imposition upon a superstitious people, it was a bargain, a trade, liberty-for-security. The leaders would manage things, we would feed them. Sooner or later we would be forced to fight for them.
Putin thinks we have had our run of freedom. It is time for men to be taken care of again.

ADDICTION AND FREEDOM

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.--Chesterton



A car was broken into at the VA parking lot.

So several people tried to buy their children's' way into college and broke the law. Let's see if they buy their way out of the consequences.
Like Smollett.

There was a wrapped roast in front of the house yesterday.

In a March 2017 report, the US Food and Drug Administration found that women with breast implants had a "very low but increased risk" of developing anaplastic large-cell lymphoma compared with women who did not have them.

Congress wants the Mueller report redacted. That would include grand jury results and counter intel; that is illegal. They know that so....why would they do it?

Women make less than men driving Uber and a study on Uber shows that the difference is similar to the difference in medicine. The authors found that the gender gap is caused by three factors: How long they’ve been driving on the platform, preferences over where/when to work and driving speed. “This suggests that, as the gig economy grows and brings more flexibility in employment, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based preference differences can perpetuate a gender earnings gap even in the absence of discrimination,” the authors concluded.

Twin males have each been named as father in a paternity suit. The cost has been divided between them. Remember when Solomon said to divide the baby?


The deficit under the Republicans continues to rise, as it did under Reagan, Bush, and Bush. Strangely, only Clinton and Obama handed their successors a National Debt shrinking relative to the economy as a whole. All this is interesting but it is also true that rising economies disguise a deficit and the executive does not write the budget, it only proposes it.

Dictionary.com has added a new word/phrase, Death cleaning — which the company defines as “the process of cleaning and decluttering one’s home so as to spare others, especially family members, from the chore of it after one’s death.”

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

                                         Addiction and Freedom

“The free-market theory taught in our universities holds that consumers know what’s best for them, with businesses efficiently and appropriately catering to those desires,” someone named Sachs wrote. “The prevalence of addiction suggests a very different picture: that individuals may be lured into self-destructive behaviors, notably by businesses keen on boosting sales of their goods and services.”

So people make bad decisions? And those people invalidate the very concept of Liberty, the free market, and its astonishing creative progress over the last two centuries? And validate what? Constant monitoring? Scripted, safe and enforced behavior? Brownshirts and ecclesiastical courts?

Nonsense. But nonsense is the new coin of the realm.

Freedom of Choice

Basic to the current non-discussion of economics in this country is the apparent division over the idea of  "Choice."  What is clear is that socialists believe that free choice is inefficient and expensive. Choice allows money to move to unneeded areas in the culture and encourages inefficient and expensive competition through infrastructure and management that could be better used elsewhere. This is not a mistrust of the producer, who is simply following the consumer's preferences, it is a basic mistrust of the consumer himself, the citizen, and his ability to choose. This has serious and far-reaching, if rarely discussed, implications.

So the Left's mantra of "choice" seems quite limited to areas of abortion and sexual preference; in other, broader areas it is simply not to be trusted.

Free markets adherents, on the other hand, believe choice--and its handmaiden, competition--brings down prices and increases both availability and efficiency.

What is unspoken here is the one thing freedom does not do: It does not inherently help the inept and the disinterested. It might inadvertently raise their standard of living but it does not target them. Nor does it solve the question that is rising in most of the countries that the American socialists point to for guidance: Responsibility.

Adam Smith believed that the free culture had some responsibility to the unable, but he also thought that all had a responsibility to the free society. The Left does not think we are up to it.

Algernon Sidney

“This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.”-- Algernon Sidney

Involved in some of the same anti-monarchical causes as John Locke,
Algernon Sidney was caught up in the conspiracy to oust King Charles II. He was
beheaded on December 7, 1683, a martyr to the English Whig cause.
Fifteen years after his death, his Discourses Concerning Government
was published. A hero to John Adams and widely read in the American
colonies, some of his writings sound like Madison.
Sidney famously inscribed the following in the Visitor’s Book at
the University of Copenhagen: “This hand, enemy to tyrants, by the sword
seeks peace under liberty.” This inscription later inspired the state motto
of Massachusetts.

In Discourses Concerning Government he attacks the absurdity of the rights of kings and the inheritance of those rights:

"And we may justly conclude that God having never given the whole world to be governed
by one man, not prescribed any rule for the division of it; nor declared
where the right of dividing or subdividing that which every man has should
terminate; we may safely affirm that the whole is forever left to the will and
discretion of man: We may enter into, form, and continue in greater or lesser
societies, as best pleases ourselves: The right of paternity as to dominion is at
an end, and no more remains, but the love, veneration, and obedience, which
proceeding from a due sense of the benefits of birth and education, have their
root in gratitude, and are esteemed sacred and inviolable by all that are sober
and virtuous. And as ’tis impossible to transfer these benefits by inheritance,
so ’tis impossible to transfer the rights arising from them."

And the danger of applying qualities to leaders that are not common to men:

"And as ’tis folly to suppose that princes will always be wise, just and good,
when we know that few have been able alone to bear the weight of a government,
or to resist the temptations to ill, that accompany an unlimited power, it
would be madness to presume they will for the future be free from infirmities
and vices...."

The Cons of Spontaneous Order

 One of the elements of Libertarian thinking veers close to Naturalistic Fallacy.

Here is an excerpt of a  letter to Bordeaux from Caplan. Bordeaux had written earlier that the Left did not understand the notion of "spontaneous order;" Caplan disagrees:

"I don’t think it’s correct to argue that leftists do not “grasp the reality of spontaneous order.” It is precisely that spontaneous order and the freedom that yields it (sic) that the left hates, because it is the opposite of the centralized control that is the reason d’etre of the left. Here is a simple conceptual experiment: Suppose that the left did understand spontaneous order and its implications. Can anyone believe that they would applaud it? Of course not, because it is a specific set of evolving allocational outcomes that they demand, along with the coercion needed to effect them. That is why the left is fundamentally anti-human."

Are there examples of spontaneous order that Caplan would try to rise above?

Liberte Egalite and Fraternite

I recently quoted the assessment of Krauthammer which included his quote, repeated by Will: "America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It’s founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world;"

It sounds much like Margaret Thacher's  “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

It was countered that Liberte Egalite and Fraternite of the French Revolution were similar. I think not.

First, the architects of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment and the revolution was a planned and debated event. True, the leaders were pushed a bit by the public but nothing like the French Revolution which was not really led until the killing began to slow and the murders had to be more targeted. The Americans were guided by Locke and his belief in natural rights, rights people were born with. There was a merger that individuals made with those rights in what he called the social contract. This was an organizing structure. The Americans found that structure in the suggestions of Baron de Montesquieu who believed in a separation of powers into three branches (executive, legislative, and judicial). Montesquieu believed they should hold equal power, a crucial idea in the Americans' separation of powers and checks and balances. The French Revolution, unplanned and spontaneous, had the qualities of Voltaire, who was a free speech and anti-church writer, and Rousseau, who was really an anti-Enlightenment thinker who believed in an esprit that united a people, as opposed to a modern social or religious hierarchy. The French Revolution was less a structured event than the outburst of resentment and anger toward a suppressive political and religious system. Both the Americans and the French were angry at a hierarchy but the Americans wanted to build a country afterwards, the French mainly wanted revenge.

And, true to form, after a decade, they got Napoleon.

This points to a crucial difference between the Americans and most other political systems, a distinction that may harm them over time but is nonetheless real. The Americans really believe what they say. No one believed equality and liberty because they are contradictory notions; equality is possible only with restriction of liberty. There is no other option. But the Americans built an edifice that defended liberty, that worked and continues to. It is also very difficult to change. It is conceivable, for example, that technology will make gun ownership a difficult freedom to defend--but it will be debated and argued over in its proper venue, at least for Americans: Liberty. When that lynchpin goes away, when it surrenders to comfort or practicality or superficiality, that idea that made America will go too.

Bentham

Jeremy Bentham and Natural Rights

Jeremy Bentham did not originate the utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”; there are similar expressions in a number of eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Hutcheson, Helvetius and Beccaria. The most significant feature of Bentham’s utilitarianism was its unequivocal rejection of natural rights.
Natural rights, according to Bentham, are “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts” So-called moral and natural rights are mischievous fictions and anarchical fallacies that encourage civil unrest, disobedience and resistance to laws, and revolution against established governments. Only political rights, those positive rights established and enforced by government, have “any determinate and intelligible meaning.” Rights are “the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law.”

How can the legislator possibly know which measures will promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number? To this question classical liberals in the Lockean tradition had answered, in effect: By respecting the natural rights of individuals. Thus if social utility is the general goal of legislation, natural rights are the standard, or rule, which must be followed if this goal is to be achieved.
Bentham broke with this venerable tradition, in which utility and rights were seen as different aspects of the same process, by rejecting the entire scheme of natural rights and by proposing that social utility serve as both the goal and standard of political activity.

According to Bentham, the “happiness of individuals, of whom a community is composed…is the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view [and] the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought, as far as depends on the legislator, to be made to fashion his behavior.” Natural rights are not only a groundless fiction, one that is incompatible with an empiricist methodology, but they are a highly dangerous fiction to boot, because they have traditionally been used to undermine the authority of governments. In short, natural rights are “terrorist language.”

Bentham repeatedly refers to the quantity and measurement of pleasures and pains, but nowhere does he address the serious problems of dealing with pleasure and pain quantitatively (as if they can be added together in a single sum); nor does he explain how it is possible to quantify and compare the subjective feelings of different individuals.
(This latter problem is now called the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons.)
Bentham concedes that his hedonic calculus, like the theory of natural rights, is based on a fiction, or unreal abstraction. But he also claims that his fiction is “successful” because it can function as a practical guide for legislators.

So the crucial point was this: Who is to decide whether a given person assesses his interests correctly or not—the individual or the government? After all, Bentham conceded that people can make mistakes about what will promote their happiness, but who should determine when these mistakes are made and when they are not? Bentham’s theory suggests such decisions should ultimately be made by a legislative authority, not by individuals, for it is the job of legislators to calculate the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and they are empowered to enforce their decisions.
This was what so infuriated Bentham’s liberal critics, such as Thomas Hodgskin and Herbert Spencer, and this is the key to understanding the rift in nineteenth-century British liberalism that was precipitated by the immense influence of Jeremy Bentham.
The utilitarians, according to their critics, had undercut the moral foundation of a free society by their rejection of natural rights.

Bentham’s ideal legislator reminded his critics too much of Plato’s philosopher-king—that wise and benevolent social planner who has the best interests of his subjects at heart.
How often in human history, they asked, have political rulers actually governed with the best interests of their subjects at heart? Never, or almost never, they answered. And, given human nature, may we realistically expect that rulers will magically lose their self-seeking inclinations immediately upon gaining power, forgoing their own interests for the sake of the common good? Or may we expect rulers to behave like other mortals, and continue to pursue their own interests through the coercive instrumentality of government?

Bentham was aware of this problem, and he found an answer in his theory of democracy. If the franchise were extended, if the people at large were able to elect their rulers, then there would emerge an identity of interests between the rulers and the ruled, for people would surely never vote against their own interests.
Bentham’s natural-rights critics generally favored democratic reform, but they were not nearly so sanguine about its prospects. Democracy is desirable, but it is not a cure-all. Like many of their American counterparts, they believed that a majority could tyrannize over a minority as surely as any tyrant. Indeed, they regarded democratic despotism as more dangerous than monarchical despotism, since a despot can be resisted more easily than a majority. Only a theory of natural rights, which defines the proper limits of government, can morally empower minorities to demand that their rights be respected, whatever the form of a government may be.

(from somewhere)

On Righteous Minorities

All societies are organized around some principles. Tribal. Ethnic. Right of Kings. Religion. The unseen movement in history. All societies have some organizing principles
America was organized by people who took the idea of liberty and the inherent value of the individual that was swirling around in the Enlightenment and made those ideas concrete in law. They adopted "isonomy," the equality of political rights. In On Revolution, in 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote "Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος would make them equal." Every man, regardless of his background or qualities, was equal before the law. This equality was not granted by the state, it was protected by the state.
They were as a group fearful of administrative power and did not trust the government to do the right thing or to do the right thing well. And this concept of equality through isonomy, liberty and personal responsibility was held in common among their fellow citizens.

The murders in Orlando were committed by a guy with allegiance to a different, higher, law than ours. He was following the dictates of an ancient set of rules he believed are the laws of God. Those laws trumped our laws. Now that makes law-making sticky as the general situation in America has included an agreement among the citizenry on the basics. This guy--and guys like him--do not agree on our basics and our legal concepts simply do not apply to him.

The essence of this country is that a primary legal agreement has been set up as the foundation of law and behavior. Dissent should be tolerated but no one in the United State should be allowed to oppose its founding principles. Citizenship and immigration to this country should hinge upon that idea as well. Anti-democratic, anti-liberty minorities advocating their own violent solutions to the problems of some group have been rightfully suppressed in the past from the Klan to the homicidal Marxists. That was the essence of the Civil War. It should be our essence now.

There may come a point where the Second Amendment will be seen in the light of  "I do not trust the government to do the right thing or the right thing well but I trust my fellow citizens less."
That will be a sea change in America.

Michael Roth and a Liberal Education

Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, was in town last night speaking on liberal education, the topic of his new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters.. He is a very erudite guy with an academic background in philosophy and history. He gives several MOOC courses, an excellent one on the Enlightenment.
He started his talk defining a liberal education as being liberating, animating, cooperating and instigating. One could argue with these requirements but in the first fifteen minutes he spoke of the notion of "liberating" through the writings of Thomas Jefferson. It was electrifying.

Education had an impaired history in Europe. European traditions gave the church or the family the responsibility for education, and the nature of instruction much depended on the denomination with which one was affiliated. But in America, education was political, integral with our revolutionary system. For Thomas Jefferson, education was the guardian of freedom. Cultivation of the capacity for independent judgment was necessary to inspire and defend a fledgling democracy devoted to the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson admired knowledge for its own sake but insisted that it also be useful to human progress. John Adams and Jefferson agreed on the necessity of education as a foundation for maintaining freedom. "Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people," Adams wrote, "arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion."  Man, Jefferson, believed, is most free when he is most nearly or completely self-sufficient, hence his education must be concerned with developing such inner resourcefulness. All citizens should develop this capacity, and some of them would go beyond it to develop lives in which they pursued ideas for their own sake. Jefferson's On the More General Diffusion of Knowledge proposed that citizens should learn the basic skills for preserving their freedom, for conducting their affairs, and for continuing to learn. "If we think them [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." He was trying to create a system that would find gifted young men who might otherwise be overlooked because they didn't come from the right families. "The best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually." Imagine such a nation, growing with its citizens, each one growing in knowledge and liberty, intertwined.

It was inspiring. Roth was almost evangelical in his channeling Jefferson. I anxiously checked my watch; how could he keep this up? Everyone was on the edge of his seat when he said, "And now everyone is thinking the same two words...." I froze. What had I missed? Alexander Hamilton? What was Rousseau's first name? Roth answered his question. "Sally Hemmings!" Huh? The time honored and time-warped hypocrisy? Sally Hemmings?

I like this guy and I like his school. But in the midst of this inspiring discussion he must, must, throw in a anachronistic non sequitur. Like many of our educational elite, he likely brings this ghastly companion everywhere he goes.

This nation must get beyond this. I'm sure Mr. Jefferson was wrong about a lot of things. My solution is simple: We pardon both O.J and Jefferson and move on.

The Cost of Effeciency

This is an interesting take of the economic debate: While capitalism has a visible cost – profit – that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an invisible cost – inefficiency – that gets weeded out by losses and bankruptcy under capitalism. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in a capitalist economy implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency. Put differently, profit is a price paid for efficiency.--Sowell

There is a similar element in advertising. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn hated the commercial nature of the West. It seemed to be everywhere with ads and billboards and general commercial insincerity that seemed to him to compose the matrix of Western society. He hated the Russian state too but gave up the West partly because of its commercialism.
But advertising underwrites production from TV to hockey arenas to literary lectures. And, because it goes where the return is, it is exquisitely sensitive to demand, to what people want. It is NPR vs. the Kardashians. So, strangely, it is an agent of freedom, of choice.

Advertising, like profit, contains seeds of liberty. If you want to raise the bar for both profit and advertising, educate better.

Altruism in America‏

This Zuckenberg thing is telling. People are outraged over how the guy is going to give his own money away. Political correctness has become more than an shallow attitude, it is a movement. Teach for America is a common option for college graduates, nonprofits have gone from make-work projects for the wealthy to aspirations for all, comics avoid campuses for fear of drifting outside the tight circle of approval. People can get their college loans forgiven if they work for non-profits. (And government.)

And righteousness has birthed a militant arm, the  cultural vigilantes. Some might argue it is too selective to be either spontaneous or genuine: The Mozilla CEO is hounded out of office for mainstream and legal opinions, Romney vilified for completely fabricated bullying charges decades ago in high school, a young woman is offended by the lyrics of the nation's best selling song being played in a bar and initiates a petition that gets the DJ fired for playing it. But results matter.

De Tocqueville described America as a country that had coalesced around the notion of individual liberty. It, liberty, was the social bond that cut across and united all groups. But liberty has a serious downside: Inequity. De Tocqueville said that equality was achievable only through tyranny and that the American knowingly rejected it. Liberty solved a lot of problems in the democracy. It unified the most disparate groups, withheld judgment from all, respected failure and was self justifying; it could exist with religion but did not require it. But we may be changing. And liberty, as a unifying principle, might be very hard to replace with a satisfactory substitute because liberty is, it can not be granted or imposed.

Inequality might become a problem the young are unwilling to live with. And, as the country becomes more diverse, fewer things are held in common. If the concept of liberty is insufficient as a bond, we may need to seek something else. Historically those unifying elements have not been good as all cultures seek themselves and mark The Other. Perhaps we will fall back on some poorly defined good will. But that likely will eventually be shown as too weak and in need of some stronger and more aggressive administration. Some unifying principle will have to be imposed, as de Tocqueville predicted.

The Opportunity of Pot

There are frequent comparisons between liberty and science. This is more than an analogy; there is a thesis that the two are intertwined, arose at the same time in history from the same thinking. Basic to the idea is the need for independence for both; no idea is off the table and all ideas are legitimate at least to consider. Essential to the vision is that of uncertainty. No one has a monopoly on truth. No idea is beyond considering.

An interesting offshoot of this idea is the mixture of democracies, states rights and " the experiment." You have a lot of different regions, states of different make-up and size, all generating their own ideas and plans. The whole, then, can take advantage of the experiences of individual states' concepts. The only thing required is the recognition of the possible productivity of such a system and the patience of the whole to allow the individual results to evolve.

In this light, the legalization of marijuana is a great opportunity. Several states are legalizing it and there are strong arguments on both sides. The experiences of the participating states should be interesting and instructive. There are two threats, of course, the same old two threats that haunt us and, strangely, stem from the same life-source. Righteousness. On one hand is the restrictive moralists who would confine the activity and on the other is the camp of militant indifference. Both would legislate from the whole, from the central government. One would ban the individual states from legalizing it. One would mandate all states legalize it. 

And, of course, the advantage of individual and assessable experience would be lost. 

Liberty, Equality, Production

"I had become aware that, in our time, the new social state that had produced and is still producing very great benefits was, however, giving birth to a number of quite dangerous tendencies. . . . My aim in writing (the) book was to point out these dreadful downward paths opening under the feet of our contemporaries, not to prove that they must be thrown back into an aristocratic state of society ... but to make these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will which alone can combat them -- to teach democracy to know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain itself."--Tocqueville, responding in an argument between liberty and equality in democracy.


One of the interesting aspects of the current presidency is the idea that this debate between liberty and equality is new, with new concepts and knowledge, when it actually is as old as the country. This debate is separate from the central government debate between the federalist and the anti-federalist, where the concern was the power needed by the state to function appropriately and what liberties would have to be surrendered.

The question of equality and liberty is more complex. The moral and ethical questions include what the individual can demand for himself and what his neighbor can withhold. So each individual in the equation has an equal claim for specialness.They are both different sides of the same coin. An additional  problem concerns whether the inhibition of liberty inhibits the community production, so the net effect of the government's expropriations necessarily decreases their largess. So that in an effort to improve the lot of one, all decline--even the intended beneficiary.

So not only is there a conflict within the intent; there is a conflict between the intent and the outcome.

Leaders in Search of a Vacuum

A discussion has arisen on the nature of liberalism.

While there are countless sources, a good starting point is Locke"s Two Treatises of Government (1690) in which he states that government serves the people and their community, its power limited by the natural rights of individuals and natural law. (Burke did not believe this. It was too metaphysical and/or religious. He thought that people's rights evolved and were stored in the genetic structure of the society's institutions and traditions.) In Locke, the rights of life, liberty and property are inherent to man and not granted by society or its government.

The revolutions this inspired--or that evolved--were quite individually distinctive. The British slowly eroded and replaced the power of the King, the French killed everyone they could possibly blame for their social and political oppression, and the Americans, with their landlords and oppressors far away, had a revolt of limits and precision.

Ingrained in this idea of "inherent" rights, is the notion of the individual value of rational man. Jefferson, until he went to France, was a savage opponent of man as a governor; he felt that all of the defects in man were magnified when he became a leader. (He soften a bit in France, amazingly, and one wonders if it was not fortuitous that he was not present for the making of the formal constitution. He did, however, believe in the value of periodic revolution to cleanse the new generation of the past.) This respect for man's ability emerged in the 20th Century (somewhat as a result of the advance of scientific achievement) as confidence in man and, consequently, government; liberalism progressed from protecting people from government to protecting them through the use of government.

So government, the individual's former enemy, has now become the agent acting on behalf of the individual. And the Progressives are even more confident in the experts that the society can advance to lead it.

What Was Volunteered Is Now Demanded

The notion of the "right to health care" contains a number of implications. First is the "right" of the individual to make demands upon his neighbors; his neighbors must financially underwrite his neighbor's health costs. Second, this demand on his neighbor's income contains--at least for the present--no demands upon the recipient for this largess. He may drink excessively, smoke, take drugs, weigh 600 pounds without any consequence to his health care coverage. Third, this "right" for health care demands the physician to acquiesce. This "right" constricts the rights of the physician who is now legally required to respond to the patient's demand. The physician is bound, indentured without his approval.

People are worn out by taxes. Taxes are unjust, inefficient, misdirected, misspent, skewered by influence--all of these and more--but the small necessary taxes somehow justify the larger unnecessary ones. Taxation in the average citizen's mind is a huge slush fund that sometimes is of benefit to the payer, sometimes not. It is the physician in this relationship that is of interest here. To take a free man, a physician, and bind him in a relationship without his consent--that accepts an infringement on personal freedom and that is new. Some jobs are created as indentured--like policemen or firemen--, some are created as jobs for the common good--like utilities--, but to take independent individuals and absorb them into a system and require thenm to serve without their consent--like eminent domain or a military draft--that is new in this free country.

And the thoughtless attitude towards the physician's liberty should chill everyone, even the most devoted who have entered the subsidized life.