Tom DiLorenzo has made a pretty steady gig for himself in lodging criticisms — mostly just ones — against the federal government’s conduct in the Civil War and against Abraham Lincoln in particular. But the tenor of his comments and his comments about similar crimes by leading lights of the Confederacy has led to some accusations that he seems to be motivated by a dishonestly-supported fetish for Dixie at least as much by concerns about the historical Lincoln. Lately he decided to prove these charges wrong, once and for all, with the following modest proposal:

re: Greatest Americans

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire.

Virginia originally voted to stay in the union, after the lower south seceded, and re-voted (by popular vote as well as by its legislature) only after Lincoln began his invasion of the southern states. Lee turned down command of the Union Army, which was offered to him, to defend his home country against foreign invaders. He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, something Ulysses S. Grant did not get around to until he was forced to do so by the 13th Amendment in 1866.

(This should cause the politically-correct liberventinists to start cackling like a flock of hens).

Now, my opinions about Robert E. Lee may be different from Tom DiLorenzo’s. (If I were going to make a list of politically incorrect greatest Virginians, I would suggest Gabriel Prosser or Nat Turner long before the pro-slavery, anti-secession, statist warrior Lee.) But whatever our differences may be, what I want to remark on here is that DiLorenzo’s description of Lee contains a documented factual error. I know about it, and he knows about it; I know that he knows about it because I wrote him about it a week ago:

To: Thomas DiLorenzo
Subject: Like a flock of hens, indeed.
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005

In “re: Greatest Americans”, you recently claimed:

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire. … He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, …

But this is not true. Lee’s wife did not inherit any slaves and Lee did not “liberate” them. Lee did gain temporary control over 63 slaves after the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, but Custis freed the slaves in his will and Lee was legally obligated to process the manumission papers within five years of his death. (You can find a copy of the will at [1].) In fact, after hiring the slaves out to other plantations for the five years he finally released the slaves in the winter of 1862 and formally filed the manumission papers on December 29, 1862 [2], five years, two months, and nineteen days after his father-in-law’s death.

To suggest that Lee deserves any credit for the emancipation when the terms of the will legally mandated it, and when he held the slaves in bondage for his own profit as long as he was legally able to do so, is either misinformation or disinformation; in either case it should not have been printed and ought to be publicly corrected.

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

DiLorenzo didn’t mention this point in his later posts to the LRC Blog, exactly, but he did go on to prove his objectivity by explaining that Lee could not be blamed by anti-state, anti-war, pro-market libertarians for his role in the imperial war against Mexico because doing the right thing would have been personally costly and possibly dangerous, and to suggest Jefferson Davis as the candidate for the state of Mississippi.

Still, it is important that these facts see the light of day. I wrote yesterday in praise of direct action over lobbying, and since DiLorenzo’s public correction doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, I suppose that I will have to take matters into my own hands.

Lee did not free a single one of the slaves that he gained control of after his father-in-law’s death. Custis emancipated them in his will; Lee just enacted the terms of Custis’s will, as he was legally obligated to do as its sole executor. Lee also happened to keep control over those 63 slaves for as long as he could legally get away with it and sent them, for his own profit, to be forced to work on neighboring plantations and in eastern Virginia. To credit Lee with liberating enslaved people, when it was his father-in-law who freed them, and Lee who kept them in bondage as long as he felt that he could, is disingenuous, and the statement ought to be retracted.

Further reading:

• GT 2005/01/03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves
• No Treason 2004/10/19: DiLorenzo Responds
• No Treason 2004/10/18: Speaking of Slavery
• No Treason 2003/05/18: Making a Fetish of the Confederacy at LewRockwell.com

I’m usually not one to be too picky about labels — depending on the dialectical context and the aspect of my politics that I want to emphasize at the moment, they can accurately be described as Leftist, a libertarian, free marketeer, socialist, anarchist, democratic, republican, individualist, mutualist, populist, radical, feminist, et cetera. But there is one thing that I just refuse to call myself anymore. I am not a Progressive, God damn it, and no matter how much I may like some individual people who call themselves that, and no matter how much I may sympathize with a broad cluster of their personal concerns and subcultural values, I just will not call myself one for love or money.

Why not? Well, there are some specific historical reasons having to do with what the folks calling themselves Progressives in the early 20th century actually were like and what they actually did. But there are also some contemporary reasons, too. Look at the prominent political figures and organizations calling themselves Progressive, and the kind of politics that they endorse when they have their Progressive hats on. You are now looking at a bunch of losers. Sometimes they’re noble losers, and sometimes they are silly milksop losers, but losers they remain, and you may as well go around calling yourself pudd’nhead for all the grace and dignity that the mantle of Progressivism confers.

An example: here is the latest series of e-mails I’ve received from MoveOn. Quick! Everybody wring your hands!

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Tue., 14 Jun 2005

…

A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and other commercial-free children’s shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS:

…

If we can reach 250,000 signatures by the end of the week, we’ll put Congress on notice. After you sign the petition, please pass this message along to any friends, neighbors or co-workers who count on NPR and PBS.

And:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 15 Jun 2005

In less than a day, we’ve blown past our goal–more than 300,000 of us have signed the petition to save NPR and PBS from losing public funding. This is huge, but we need your help.

Tomorrow, the House Appropriations Committee will decide whether to approve these severe cuts to NPR and PBS. We can stop the cuts–and save public TV and radio–with a strong show of public outrage. We’ll report to the committee members on our petition before they vote.

Can you help us reach 400,000 signers by the end of the day?

And then, when the effort to stop the committee vote failed:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 17 Jun 2005

Yesterday, a House committee slashed half of the federal funding for NPR and PBS, specifically targeting popular children’s shows like Sesame Street and Postcards from Buster. These cuts will decimate local stations and undermine quality news reporting. This is nothing less than an effort to kill off NPR and PBS.

But people like you are fighting back, making the petition to save NPR and PBS one of the most popular we’ve ever seen–750,000 signers to date! Already, the public outcry has delayed the effort to eliminate funding entirely, but we must fight to restore full funding at once. The House will vote on these massive cuts to NPR and PBS as soon as Tuesday, and representatives are making up their minds right now.

Make sure Rep. Dingell doesn’t take away the programs you love. Call him today at:

Congressman John Dingell
Phone: 202-225-4071

And then:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org
To: Charles Johnson
Date: Wed., 20 Jun 2005

In the next few days, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to slash funding for NPR and PBS. And tomorrow, before Congress votes, we’ll present stacks and stacks of printed petitions and public comments to save public broadcasting. We’ll be joined by members of Congress and the public TV and radio staff fighting for survival.

Over 817,000 people have signed the petition so far–simply incredible. But we want to present 1 million signatures to the press tomorrow, and we can do it with your help. In all our years of online organizing, we’ve never heard of one million Americans signing a petition in a week, but we’re within striking distance now.

Help us reach 1 million signers by the end of the day. Sign the petition at: …

The stakes are high: some of the best programs on the air are at risk. After you sign, please send this message on to your friends and colleagues–it’ll take all of us pushing together to get to the 1 million mark.

…

If the House passes these massive cuts, we’ll fight to restore the funding when the Senate takes up public broadcasting. But even if we stop the House cuts, we’ll need to make sure Senate Republicans don’t try the same thing.

Together, we can stop the House from slashing NPR and PBS in the federal budget. Can you help us hit 1 million signers today?

MoveOn’s online petition campaign had exceeded their goal of one million petitioners. In fact, they’d reached 1,091,509 last I looked.

And, the last I heard, they managed to get the programming funding restored, but the House voted for another $105 million of government funding to be eliminated from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget anyway:

After a storm of protest from supporters of public television and radio, the House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to restore $100 million in programming money to next year’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget. The CPB is the private agency that disburses funds to the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio and their member stations.

At the same, however, $105 million in funding, including $23 million for children’s programming and educational outreach, was eliminated. The fight over that money will now move to the Senate, which has traditionally been a strong backer of PBS and NPR.

San Jose Mercury-News 2005-06-24: House restores public TV funding, but fight continues

If you want to know why Progressives keep losing all the time, then here it is:

If we can reach 250,000 signatures by the end of the week, we’ll put Congress on notice. …

We can stop the cuts–and save public TV and radio–with a strong show of public outrage. …

But people like you are fighting back, making the petition to save NPR and PBS one of the most popular we’ve ever seen …

Make sure Rep. Dingell doesn’t take away the programs you love. Call him today …

And tomorrow, before Congress votes, we’ll present stacks and stacks of printed petitions and public comments to save public broadcasting. …

What this has accomplished, so far, is that it’s sent 1,091,509 copies of the following e-mail to members of Congress:

TO: Your senators and representative
FROM: (Your Name and Email)
SUBJECT: Save NPR and PBS

Dear senators and representative,

(Your personal note)

Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.

Don’t get me wrong. I like PBS and NPR is just about all the radio I ever listen to. The issue here isn’t whether they should face a funding crisis or not; I hope that they don’t. Rather, it’s what you should do in the face of that funding crisis. MoveOn just invested an incredible amount of time, money, and energy into mobilizing a bunch of Progressives to whine about it in Congress and beg for the money back. Meanwhile, instead of signing an online petition, calling my Representative, and e-mailing my friends and colleagues to get them to shake the change cup with me, I shut up and put down a pledge of $10 / month to Detroit Public Television.

Now, if 1,091,509 people in MoveOn’s orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, then by my calculations PBS and NPR would have $130,981,080 more money for programming in the upcoming year. More importantly, they’d have that $131 million no matter what Congress and the Senate decided to do.

You might claim that not everyone who gets MoveOn e-mails will put down a pledge, but a lot more people will put down a zero-cost signature. You might think that MoveOn just can’t command that kind of money. Well, that strikes me as making excuses: we are talking about the group that just threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (depending on the as-yet unreleased budget data for their 501(c)(4) branch) down the tubes for electable John Kerry just last year. But fundraising is tricky, and maybe they wouldn’t make as much as they might hope. But think it about it this way: when you give money directly to people doing good work, the economics of failing to meet your goals are different. Lobbying is, more or less, an all-or-nothing game, with very few chances for gains on the margin. Names on a petition may or may not make a difference; but if they don’t make a difference (and, frankly, it doesn’t look like they made much of one here) then the names and pious hopes that NPR and PBS got out of the campaign aren’t worth the electrons that they’re printed on. But if you don’t hit your targets in direct support, the contributions you did get are money in the bank, no matter what. If only half as many people pledged as signed the petition, well, then PBS and NPR would have $65,490,540 that they didn’t have before. If the average contribution was $30 instead of a $10 / month pledge, they’d would have $32,745,270. Maybe that will save Big Bird and maybe it won’t; but even if it doesn’t it’s a darn sight better and more secure than the nothing that failed petitioning campaigns produce.

There’s a general principles here worth mentioning; it’s a principle the Left used to care about. It’s called direct action, and the longer the Progressive wing of the Left keeps ignoring it — the longer that they spend throwing time and organizing effort down the tubes to beg the government to support the institutions that they like — the longer we are all going to be losers.

We can do this ourselves, so quit begging. Shut up and put up.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been on something of a break from writing here for the past few weeks (due partly to travel, partly to lack of motivation, and partly to wanting to spend some quiet time away from it). I don’t know whether I’ll feel like picking up on the rate of posting in the near future; I do know that I’ll probably be taking more time off about a month from now when I head off for summer work in New York (same thing as last year: I’ll be working for the Center for Talented Youth, TA’ing two courses in Logic for extremely gifted 12-16 year olds).

I’m trying to wean myself off posting Sorry I’m not posting posts; but my purpose here is a bit different anyway. While I may not have the drive to post much right now, I do at least have the energy to copy out things that people smarter than I am once wrote. Thus, I’ve been making some substantial progress in transcribing the third chapter of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica for online reading and citation. It’s not complete yet (Chapter III is one of the longest chapters in the book), but I am mostly keeping up a pace of a section a day or more; which means that if I keep a steady pace the chapter should be complete in under three weeks. (Knock on wood.)

Chapter III contains Moore’s extended treatment of ethical hedonism — that is, the theory that pleasure is the only thing good in itself (this is how Moore defines it, anyway; he claims that some hedonists might not agree to the formulation explicitly but that they have to rest on it at least implicitly for their arguments to go through). The first part of the chapter is an addendum to his treatment of naturalistic ethics in Chapter II: he attacks arguments for hedonism based on the naturalistic fallacy, using John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism as an example. (The case is mostly pretty convincing, although I think he is unfair to Mill toward the end and doesn’t adequately discuss Mill’s notion of goods that are desired as parts of happiness.)

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my transcription of the chapter so far; but if you want a preview of what’s to come in the next few days, Moore goes on to consider whether hedonism can be defended on grounds of ethical intuitions, once defenses based on the naturalistic fallacy have been set aside. He argues no; this involves what I think are some of the best arguments in the book and a long consideration of Sidgwick (Moore’s ideas about the proper methods of ethical philosophy owe a lot to Sidgwick’s intuitionism; but Sidgwick thought that intuitionist methods supported hedonism, and Moore thinks they decisively refute it). Finally, he wraps up with some rather brief and unfair polemics against the two ethical schools that seem most commonly to be based on hedonist arguments–Egoism and Utilitarianism.

There’s a lot to complain about in the chapter, but also a lot to love; it’s certainly something that anyone engaging in ethics or moral psychology ought to read and engage with. Read, cite, and be merry!

Further reading

• GT 2004/12/19: One Moore for the free world: Chapter I of Principia Ethica is now online
• GT 2005/02/18: Philosophy Break

(Link thanks to Lew Rockwell [2005-03-02].)

I’ve commented on the obliteration of any notion of proportionality in modern police forces before (in GT 2005-04-26: Peace Officers and GT 2004-11-14: Civil defense). The plain, ugly fact is that what we have today is not civil policing, but rather paramilitary cadres occupying most of our urban centers. Cadres of paras who feel no particular qualms about using physical violence to maintain order and control in any and every situation, without any particular concern for whether the force matches the threat. In Aurora, Colorado, this took a turn for the straightforwardly absurd:

Police talked to the Chuck E. Cheese manager, who told them that a customer had refused to show proof that he had paid for food. The manager said the man was seen loading his plate at the salad bar.

The officers confronted Danon Gale, 29, who was at the restaurant with his children, aged 3 and 7. Patrons said the popular kids pizza parlor was packed with children and families at the time.

According to police, Gale was asked to step outside to discuss the incident.

According to witnesses (Gale) refused to cooperate with police and a struggle ensued, said Larry Martinez, a police spokesman. He said that Gale became argumentative and shoved one of the officers, a fact disputed by another patron.

One of the officers kept poking the gentleman in the chest, Felicia Mayo told the Rocky Mountain News.

She was there with her 7-year-old son. She told the newspaper that Gale told the officer You don’t have to do that. She said Gale never put his hands on the officer who was confronting him

The argument escalated until Gale was shoved into the lap of Mayo’s sister, who was sitting two booths away, holding a 10-month-old baby. That’s when police pulled out a Taser stun gun to subdue him.

They beat this man in front of all these kids then Tased him in my sister’s lap, Mayo told the newspaper. They had no regard for the effect this would have on the kids. This is Chuck E. Cheese, you know.

Gale’s two children were screaming and hollering and crying as Gale was hit two times with the stun gun.

Police arrested Gale as his children and other customers watched. They took him outside, leaving his children inside the restaurant.

Gale was arrested for investigation of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing.

— NewsNet5.com 2005-03-02: Dad Accused of Chuck E. Cheese Salad Theft Zapped by Police

Cops bully people, hurt them for no good reason, use tasers to end arguments, and then make up lies to cover it up. If you or I did that, we would be in jail. Cops did it here, so we are treated to this:

AURORA, Colo. — Aurora police have reviewed a weekend incident in which a man accused of stealing salad from a Chuck E. Cheese salad bar was hit with a stun gun twice by officers and said that proper procedures were followed.

… which, apparently, is supposed to make everything alright. As long as the police department determines that cops are following the procedures that the police department determined to be proper, blasting 20,000 volts through a man who is at most guilty of grand salad bar larceny is a perfectly appropriate response to the situation. Move along, citizen, nothing to see here.

Support your local CopWatch.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-04-26: Peace officers
• GT 2004-11-14: Civil defense

As a nice set piece to my May Day paean to wildcat unionism–that is, workers organizing themselves on the free market, without the suffocating patronage of the government, Ampersand passes along a nice reminder that modern corporate capitalists–the Behemoth from Bentonville chief among them–are not creatures of the free market; they are Frankenstein creations of government privilege for the bosses. Jonathan Tasini at TomPaine.com (2005-04-21) is mired in a host of confusions about free market economics, but he is precisely, and importantly, right to remind us that Truth is, Wal-Mart could not survive in a real free market. Remember that we are talking about a company that routinely robs the land that it needs for its gigantic stores by Mau-Mauing local governments into using eminent domain powers and handing out tax-funded subsidies. Remember that Wal-Mart’s business model for the past decade has been directly dependent on the repression of workers’ wages by the government of Communist China.

Putting aside the morality of forcing people to work in slave-like conditions, the so-called free market does not exist in China when it comes to wages. China artificially suppresses wages by anywhere from 47 to 85 percent below what they should be, according to the AFL-CIO’s complaint about China’s labor policies filed with the United States Trade Representative last year. With Wal-Mart as its willing customer, an authoritarian regime ruthlessly warps the market for wages by enforcing a system that controls where people can work and imprisons and tortures people who attempt to organize real unions or strike. Maybe the rock-bottom labor costs are really behind Wal-Mart’s slogan always low prices, but the company is certainly not an example of how to win in a free market economy.

It’s easy to see why Wal-Mart and its conservative defenders discard ideology: money. By ignoring free market principles, the left-wing Harvard Business School estimates that Wal-Mart reduces its procurement costs by 10-20 percent, primarily by taking advantage of the artificially suppressed labor market in China.

…

Back at home, Wal-Mart’s free market mantra stops at the water’s edge of the public till. By one estimate, Wal-Mart has pulled in $1.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies (see www.walmartwatch.com). And that’s at the low end, because subsidies are sometimes hard to track based on the lack of public reporting requirements. Wal-Mart is happy to cash in on government largess like property tax abatements, infrastructure support, free land and just straight-out cold cash–all of which are the antithesis of free market ideology.

Free software advocates sometimes like to point out that there are a couple of meanings of the word free; there’s free as in free speech and free as in free lunch. The thing about Right-wing blowhards is that they routinely support pro-business giveaways, whether in the form of subsidies to Wal-Mart, endless coercive monopolies for pharmaceutical companies, or government-enforced union busting (see: right-to-work laws; see also: Taft-Hartley). When they start pontificating on the virtues of the free market they never mean it–unless by free market means a market that’s free as in free lunch, i.e. a government-guaranteed market for big consolidated businesses that they don’t have to work for or earn.

That’s the real reason to oppose Wal-Mart: not because they supposedly represent the worst of the free market (it isn’t a creature of the free market at all), and certainly not because of some cracked anti-consumerist claptrap. The problem with Wal-Mart is that they steal your money and use it to keep their business running whether you want to shop there or not. But it’s for precisely this reason that I think the best way to take the fight to Wal-Mart is not to dismiss the free market or to try to block Wal-Mart through local zoning controls. Wal-Mart is what it is today because it’s better at manipulating the State than you are, and there is no reason to think that that’s likely to change substantially as long as they remain what they are. (Trying to turn Leviathan against Behemoth has always been a sucker’s bet.) If Wal-Mart couldn’t survive in a free market, then the best way to fix what’s wrong with them is to make them compete on a free market–a real free market, not the corporatist sham market of today–a market where workers organize in freely-constituted unions that aren’t subject to the constraints of government colonization, where competitors can enter the market without having to buy off town and county governments and homeowners aren’t forced to sacrifice their own homes on the altar of Commerce. The system of state patronage is the problem; freedom, as usual, is the solution.