Thanks for this piece, Msr. Johnson; I belive you hit all the nails right on the head. I’ll be posting this to my Salon.
thx, Jeanine
]]>As for Ward Churchhill, the man writes inflammatory things for the sake of being inflammatory, I’m sure the administration of his institution knows that by now, but I’d say kicking him off the panel is a fair call to make, although they propably made it for the wrong reasons.
A quick read through “Pacifism as Pathology” gives the reader the impression that Churchill is a jerk, but the reader will also grudgingly admit he has some good points. On the other hand, the essay is question doesn’t seem to have much of a point at all, ans ahows a very shallow analysis. It doesn’t seem like something that would be written by someone qualified to be on the panel.
Maybe I just have a different concept of what Academic freedom should be than you do. In my mind, bad or offensive theories are one thing, but people that can’t clearly articulate and organise whatever their points are shouldn’t be proffessional academics.
]]>Jeff Tucker points out an MP3 recording of what appears to be more or less a version Hoppe’s standard lecture on Time Preference, the lecture upon which the present controversy is based. Upon listening to the lecture I found that it contains Hoppe sp…
]]>the problem is that “we” do pay our taxes and these taxes are used to wage war.
I’d like to find some way not to pay my taxes this year. Besides not having the money to spare, I also think that a very substantial portion of the uses they’ll be put to are profoundly immoral. If you know of some way to avoid paying taxes, or even to pay them so that the money will only be used for purposes other than shooting people, I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, I’m not sure how the fact that the government takes my money and uses it for evil purposes imputes any blame to me.
further, the related process by which american citizens have been distanced from active citizenship.
I don’t know that the majority of people in America have ever been in a position of “active citizenship”; for the first half of our history the majority of adult Americans (i.e., women, Black slaves, and Indians not taxed) didn’t have the status of citizens in the first place. By the time most adults were accorded the status of citizens, the processes by which any meaningful citizen participation in government (the imperial presidency, the rise of the trusts, ballot restrictions, etc.) had begun to firmly take hold.
In any case, though, I take it that the answer to the question is “government”; there have been times when some classes had more power to check the prerogatives of the government than they do today, but the nature of government itself has always been to reduce the population to submission and do things in their name that they would never do themselves. That’s what governments were made for:
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. –P.-J. Proudhon
Denny, again:
perhaps my experiences are not the norm but outside of the relatively small activist community my perception (based on my limited experience) is that average americans are not that interested or concerned with the conduct of “their” government.
It’s true that many if not most Americans are either ignorant, apathetic, or both about how the American government conducts itself in the world. That’s regrettable, but it shouldn’t be surprising: people often tend not to invest a lot of time and effort into studying a process where they don’t have very much individual control and any individual attempt to go against it is much more likely to get you killed, imprisoned, or shunned, than to make any meaningful difference. I take it that’s why the real changes for the better that have been accomplished in American history have mostly been made when people got organized and saw a way that, individually, they could participate in something that was making real differences. I take it that’s also the reason why, where organized resistence and co-operative ventures have both fallen apart, there tends to be a lot of despair or simple tuning-out.
That’s certainly regrettable. Maybe it’s even blameworthy. But is it a hanging crime? I can’t see what would make it one. Remember we’re not talking about people who frame or enact these policies. At worst, some people (certainly not all and probably not most) support them; but having bad thoughts is not a hanging crime, either. The only legitimate targets, if you are using force to try to stop an ongoing crime, are the people who are actually involved in committing that crime. People who aren’t–even if some arrogant ass is presuming to commit the crime “in their name”–aren’t on the hook for it.
]]>So you form a pressure group for academic freedom and others form pressure groups for competing values. I think its terribly ineffective to try to manage climate by pressure group.
Isn’t that how ideological changes have always been effectively brought about in the past? People act on more incentives than just monetary ones.
]]>“I have to ask again: who is this mythical “public”? Everybody can’t be — which means that the inevitable result is warring pressure groups, which is precisely what we have today.” — Ayn Rand
Personally, I’d rather set fire to the amount of production that gets stolen from me than see one dime go to pay economics profs, electrical engineering staffs, or any other thing that I’m not going to be using. Jimmy needs a “free” education? Tough. Susie wants to be a nurse? Go indenture yourself to the local hospital and they can pay for it.
]]>I love you, and not only because I love articles that require thinking more than I love physics that doesn’t.
I find myself deeply frustrated by the need to punish people for stupidity of the sort mentioned in this post. Ergo, this post makes me happy, and I can read it and nod my head and feel like I have company.
Denny– taxes wage war, yes. But don’t taxes (and correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t pay them afterall) go for generally good things too– public schooling, social security? No American can say “oh but don’t use my taxes for anything war-related kthxbye.” I think Americans are most definitely innocent– this isn’t ancient Athens, we don’t toss stones into pots to say what we want; the most we can do is elect folks to make decisions for us and hope they’re good at it. We can protest til we’re blue in the face, but we can’t waltz into the halls of Congress and halt proceedings.
Nor do I think apathy negates innocence. Apathy itself is deplorable, but I don’t see the logic or fairness in making it a sin. No one should be blown up for apathy.
]]>So you form a pressure group for academic freedom and others form pressure groups for competing values. I think its terribly ineffective to try to manage climate by pressure group.
If a firm is acting on the basis of an irrational policy then the real harm is done to the firm and that’s their lookout. But sub-optimal performance by one firm creates opportunities in the rest of the market. Effective market action identifies and takes advantage of those opportunities.
]]>