Liberty, Freedom, and Power

The following are reflections upon Murray N. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, which I am reading for the third time (and the second time in two weeks!).

On Liberty

What is Liberty? I very much like Rothbard’s definition: The absence of molestation or invasion of one’s person or just property. The word just is there to distinguish between property acquired through means in accordance with Natural Law, that is, through production, trade, or gift and that property acquired by violence or the threat thereof. That is, if I stole your watch, I’ve unjustly made it my property and it would be your right to invade my property and person to repossess your property.

On Power

One thing I do not care for in Rothbard’s argumentation is his use of the word power. He claims that in the free society, we would not have the “power” to invade another’s person or property, either because we would all refrain from doing so, or because other would prevent us from doing so.

“I don’t have the power to do something” seems to be equivalent to “I am prevented by (threat of) force from doing something.”

So…

1. Liberty is the ability to do anything within my power.
2. That which is  outside my power (see above) to bring about does not limit my freedom/liberty.
3. So if a law prevents me from, say, painting my house pink, then my freedom is not at all restricted because the act of painting my house pink is no longer within the range of my abilities/ power

It would seem that according to Rothbard, ability is power. That is, leaping the ocean in a single bound is impossible because it is

1. not within my power, nor
2. within the scope of my abilities, nor
3. in my human nature to do so.

I don’t know why he lets Power into the discussion. His definition of liberty seems to do well enough on its own. Now, I still need to go back and read the thing again to really be sure I’m understanding him right. As much as I like Rothbard’s style, argumentation, and depth of knowledge, he is still an imperfect human being and not beyond criticism. So I intend to delve further in an attempt to either reconcile the above comments on power, or reject it.

Open questions:

1. Is there a difference between liberty and freedom? This might be a silly semantic argument or it may have real teeth. Either way, it must be recognized that other languages may either have only one word (German springs to mind, as that language has only the word Freiheit) or even more than our two to describe these concepts.
2. Where do these words come from and what were their original meanings?W
3. What changes in connotation has it undergone? After all, it seems that one can use Freedom to describe virtually anything, including socialism, redistributism, and worse.

Musing #1: Word Debasement

The following is not finished. I haven't even proofread it yet, but I'm tired of getting halfway finished with an essay, and then putting it "temporarily" on the shelf to be perfected at a later date. So you'll have to deal with the mistakes and inaccuracies. Sorry!! I am of course always open to criticisms and suggestions.

This semester (Winter 2011/12), I have a course called Freedom is not for Free. Despite the name, it is actually conducted in German. One of the questions dealt with is the meaning of freedom. There are a plethora of possible meanings, including:

• the absence of power
• the ability to make one's own decisions
• wealth
• equality

and many more that are not coming to me right now. Basically, the debate seems to center around morality of holding a gun to someone's head to extort money, services, or anything else from him. That is of course what the State does in effect. There are naturally people on both sides of this issue and everywhere in between. But regardless of whether you believe this kind of action is moral or not, you cannot just wish it away. If your definition of freedom is the absence of such behavior you might be called a libertarian. If your definition of freedom is the use of such behavior to establish equality, then you might be called a liberal.

Here's the rub, how useless is a term such as Freedom if it can be applied to both viewpoints? Here's the power of language. 

1. There exists a Worthy Ideal (in this case: the absence of the state of affairs of being bossed around, plundered, killed, etc)
2. This Worthy Ideal is assigned a name (in this case: Freedom)
3. This word comes to represent a Good Thing in the minds of most people (although perhaps not in the minds of those doing the plundering)
4. Along comes a second concept, diametrically opposed to the first worthy ideal (say, the Welfare State). Whatever its other benefits, this second concept is in direct contradiction with the first. But its proponents cannot admit that this new proposal would eliminate or reduce the availability of the first. So they undertake to convince people that they can have their cake and eat it too. Thus they apply to their concept that very same word that rings so true in the people's ears. Once they have convinced enough people of the new meaning of the word to have sufficiently muddied the debate, they are well on their way. For now, every time they describe their program, it is very difficult for the opposition to argue against it, for who, after all, can be against this Good Thing? Why, you must be heartless! And forever thereafter, people will argue over the meaning of Freedom.
5. Sometimes it becomes necessary for the original Worthy Ideal to take on a new name in order to re-establish the distinction between two polar opposites. (This happened in the case of modern terms "libertarian" or "classical liberal." People who today carry these titles would have simply been called a "liberal" right up until about a hundred years ago.)
6. Sometimes no new name is discovered and the blind debate rages on, each side laying claim to a word that denotes a Good Thing. This allows allows politicians to claim that we are fighting wars "for freedom." Well who could be against that? It allows demagogues to promise freedom from fear, hunger, want, and on and on. 

This would be essentially impossible, but what if we could just assign new names to these two concepts? From now on, we have to use the following two ridiculous words instead of the wrecked term Freedom:

• Clipwobble =  the absence of the state of affairs of being bossed around, plundered, killed, etc. In other words, it is immoral to hold a gun to someone's head in order to extort money, services, or anything else from him. It it moral to defend oneself against such behavior.
• Stribswop = the state of affairs of where one group of people is legally and morally allowed to boss around, plunder, etc in order to get what they want. In this state of affairs, it may of course be possible to all to plunder all, with no one having a good idea of who's actually coming out on top after it all.

It would be obvious from now on that one either supports Clipwobble or Stribswop. You can't support both. See how much clearer that is? This is a silly example, but it should illustrate an important point. 

Give it time though. Eventually, Stribswoppers will claim to be Clipwobblers, and the whole cycle will start again.

Fetish

Is a political fetish one that is not in some way deduced from first principles?

A fetish might be, for example, worship of the military. Do they really keep us safe? Are they to thank for our freedoms?

Maybe one could think of a fetish as a statement that isn't back up by anything and that is used by people to determine "who is on their side." See the above example.

Another one that comes to mind is Teachers. We have to worship teachers because they are the ones we rely on to achieve future greatness. Well, is that true? Does this view of the noble teacher really stand up in light of their organized union activities?

I don't really know the answers here. I just want to record the fact that I find this an interesting topic to delve into some day with more depth...

111026 Articles

We are an empire.
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/24/why_cant_we_say_empire/
He claims that Empire is a neutral term. I disagree.

Reponse to Occupy Wall Street supporter

The below is my response to a friend posting this video on facebook: http://front.moveon.org/this-powerful-clip-is-exactly-why-we-support-occupywallstreet/#.TqbvKhuY9mc.facebook

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Glass Steagal was only partially repealed. The two repealed provisions wouldn't not have stopped the banks from doing what they did had the provisions stayed on the books (See Woods, Rollback, p57).

Not only that, the video makes NO mention of Nixon's closing the gold window in the 70s. After that and now free of almost all restraint, the government printed money to its heart's content, precipitating such stated crises as Savings and Loan. People really ought to read some Austrian Business Cycle theory (http://mises.org/daily/606) if they want to stop being taken advantage of by bankers and politicians peddling their snake oil.

Yes, Audit the Fed. There should not be a government monopoly that powerful.

And what's with that anti-business stuff at the end? There's only two ways for a firm to be successful. The first is to secure monopoly privilege for themselves under the guise of regulation and plunder the citizenry.(case in point: Glass-Steagal was a move by the Rockefeller ambit to hobble Morgan interests [p.315:http://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf. Or better yet, look to the New Left historians like Gabriel Kolko if you'd rather trust them) This is to be condemned and corrected by removing their monopoly privilege (ie. the Fed) but NOT by imposing more so-called regulation (after all, it's the financial industry who's going to write that regulation).

That's the one way to make money. The other way is to engage in voluntary, peaceful exchanges with people, in which both parties are made better off. How do we know they're better off? Because they wouldn't have made the exchange if they had believed ex-ante that the trade would make them worse off.

Synopsis: yes, hating the bankers is good. They've been ripping us off for a century. But banking and business are good, as long as they don't use government to rip us, the 99%, off.

Peace

Memory of the Day

Today I listened to a podcast of a Tom Woods lecture from 1998 on Teddy Roosevelt. A crazy man, that one. (Teddy, I mean)

Anyway, it just reminded me of being at the dentist when I was little (maybe 10-ish?). The dentist said I had nice big teeth like Teddy Roosevelt. I was horrified, because that man had HUGE teeth!! My parents said it was no big deal, and I don't find my teeth so big these days, but I was a little out of sorts for a couple days back then!

current song: Jillian (by Within Temptation)

Penmanship

Developing good penmanship is really not that easy. Ever since going back to school a year ago and having to take a ton of notes as a result, I've been going through a lot of ink. Contrast this to four years of working in industry where one barely ever picks up a pen.

Anyway, a year ago this time I was watching a bunch of how-to's on youtube, trying to figure out how to improve. I don't remember any of them being incredibly helpful, but it did get me thinking on the basics: posture, grip, rhythm, etc.

To this day I have bouts of great penmanship, and days where I just can't seem to get it past high school quality. On those on-days, I really feel the rhythm in my writing. You can see it too.

Learning has been similar to my learning process on the bass guitar: long periods of wood shedding on the current paradigm, broken up by quantum leaps forward.

Anywho. My lessons learned:

• Posture: support the elbow, but don't lean on it. Corollary: The wrist also lightly rests on the table.
• keep the hand straight in line with the arm. None of this pained, contorted wrist action I see all over the place. To move the pen to the right during writing, the whole arm moves. The wrist stays straight the whole time. 
• Hold the pen with index, thumb, and middle finger just like Momma always said, but DON'T hold it in some death grip as she insisted (or as I remember her insisting. Maybe the years have tainted my memory)
• Finally, my biggest Eureka momemt: guide the pen with the index finger, which should also be applying pressure to the pen onto the paper.

I'm still no expert, but hey. Practice, practice, practice. I know someone who still practices writing the first letter of her first name after some 40 years!