In this article by Rothbard, we find the following: “while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.”
Nearly everyone in the philosophical profession thinks Nozick came up with the idea of “capitalist acts between consenting adults” in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But here we find the same analogy used by Rothbard a year before (1973) Nozick’s book came out (1974).
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Wrong link : “article” leads to “A Future of Peace and Capitalism” ???
What do you mean by “wrong link”? That is the right link.
Rothbard is wrong. Most liberals I know, including myself, would have no problem with making prostitution legal. It is the conservative elements that would clamor at such a notion. Liberals, as a principle, don’t believe in curtailing social or s*xual liberties, and that’s across the board.
Ummm… Rothbard said that liberals (in the modern sense) support those liberties… He said that they have problems when people want to exchange other things. For example: guns.
“He said that they have problems when people want to exchange other things. For example: guns.”
Yes, but this is not out of some innate ideological disposition, it’s rather out of safety and social necessity. If guns where harmless, than we wouldn’t be having this discussion. There is a reason why one can not yell “Fire” in a theater full of people. I believe the same line of reasoning applies to guns.
Gary misunderstands Rothbard’s quote; it’s not primarily about things like prostitution (nor primarily about guns for that matter — though I would point out in passing that guns are in the long run no more dangerous than books); it’s about economic regulation. “Capitalist acts between consenting adults” is not just about buying/selling s e x, it’s about buying/selling in general.
(I had to space out “s e x” because otherwise the server listed it as “questionable content”!!!)
“Yes, but this is not out of some innate ideological disposition, it’s rather out of safety and social necessity. If guns where harmless, than we wouldn’t be having this discussion. There is a reason why one can not yell “Fire” in a theater full of people. I believe the same line of reasoning applies to guns.”
If such is your reasoning, then why is that the goverment does not institute a prohibition on owning MOUTHS in order to keep people from yelling “Fire” in a theater full of people?
If keeping people from hurting themselves was the ONLY reason behind anti-gun laws, then to be logically consistent, a liberal goverment should also prohibit the use of knives, forks, hammers, propane gas torches, cars, planes, boats, swimming pools, power tools, dogs, horses, bicycles, household cleaners, matches, scissors, lights, packing cord and anything else that might endanger a person stupid enough not to know how to use them properly. Again, if you are being logically consistent.
Actually, Gary helped to demonstrate my point. Liberals aren’t for freedom. They’re for a paternalistic government that engages in ad hoc intervention based on estimates of “costs and benefits”. No need for logical consistency. Just do a study. “Prove” that heavy metal causes kids to shoot each other in schools, so we can outlaw it. (A pretty good argument if you totally ignore the number of students listening to heavy metal that AREN’T shooting each other.) “Prove” that guns are a great danger that need to be restricted or banned. (After all, deer overpopulation isn’t THAT bad.)
The fallacy, though, doesn’t lie in the poorly done studies. It lies in the fact that costs and benefits are subjective. There is no meaningful way to measure “pain of deaths times number of deaths” against “pleasure of enjoyment times number of enjoyers”. In fact, NO estimate of subjective costs and benefits can even be sensible. As Mises shows, for subjective costs and benefits to be comparable, market prices are needed. But, market prices can only exist if things are exchanged.
The problem is that these ad hoc policies are prohibitions or restrictions of exchange. They’re messing with the only means possible of determining whether the good’s production is actually “worth it” according to subjective costs and benefits. When you buy a gun (or any potentially dangerous object), you make an estimate as to the likelihood and subjective cost of an accident, and discount the price you’re willing to pay based on that. If the likelihood and subjective cost of an accident are sufficiently high, the price you’re willing to pay may be discounted to (or below) zero. Then you do something interesting. You don’t buy it because it’s not worth it.
The fallacies of the different pieces of modern liberalism run deep (not to mention that they contradict each other much of the time), and I find it amazing that thinking people could still be held captive by its doctrines.
“a liberal goverment should also prohibit the use of knives, forks, hammers, propane gas torches, cars, planes, boats, swimming pools, power tools, dogs, horses, bicycles, household cleaners, matches, scissors, lights, packing cord and anything else that might endanger a person stupid enough not to know how to use them properly. Again, if you are being logically consistent.
”
That’s just foolish and absurd. If you can’t differentiate between the two than someone must of dropped you when you were a toddler.
“Again, if you are being logically consistent.”
Being logically consistent does not represent some greater “good”, but potentially preventing the death of hundreds and thousands of people does. I guess you would rather have people killed for the sake of being logically consistent. Sure, sometime my pride gets the better of me too.
“There is no meaningful way to measure “pain of deaths times number of deaths” against “pleasure of enjoyment times number of enjoyers”.”
That’s your opinion and you are entitled to it. In the spirit of subjectivism, I think there is meaning and therefore I can go around meaning things as I wish. There is always trial and error. It might not be consistent, but if it works, what difference does it make.
Bastiat once pointed out that govt. regulation usually rests on a focus on the “seen” and an ignoring on the “unseen.” Gun control is a perfec example. Advocates of gun control focus on the deaths guns cause (which are seen) and not on the deaths guns prevent (which are unseen). What if they applied this same logic to the mdeical profession? Doctors’ mistakes cause thousands of deaths too.
Thank you, Gary, for once again demonstrating my point.
“if it works, what difference does it make.”
If it works AT WHAT? The question is always one of what is the policy trying to achieve? Are you trying to save lives? Are you trying to prevent injuries? What costs are acceptable? Who decides this? If you are going to give a cost-benefit analysis you have to have a way to measure them. You’ve not given us any idea of how this is possible, while I have demonstrated that it’s not without a market price.
“There is always trial and error.”
How can you tell if you made an error? There aren’t any money profits telling you that you’ve wasted resources. And you can’t see the unseen (as Dr. Long points out). How can you tell how many people would have died if there were guns, or if there were no FDA preventing medicines from making it to market, or if there were no EPA “protecting” the groundwater from pollution? The answer is simple, two words long, in fact. You can’t.
I’m willing to put the “logical consistency” issue on the back burner for now. The real problem you have at this point is that you can’t even do what you claim. And, if you can, you’ve not given us any reason to believe that you can.
Liberals are perfectly consistent.
They want to take powerful things out of their proper context where they will do damage and evil.
With reproduction (the comment system censors the three letter common term), they want it out of the bonds of matrimony and without the end of procreation and even commit murder on any inconvienient procreation.
With violence, they want it used, not in the limited scope to keep the peace or maintain order (Aquinas, and guns for self-defense), Instead they want to micromanage interpersonal trade.
Money must be debased, gold turned into paper, credit expanded, contracts that try to maintain value nullified (legal tender laws), Wages and prices micromanaged.
If the 10 commandments said smoking should only be done in the bedroom and reproduction could be done anywhere, a liberal would want to ban reproduction in public and require restaraunts to have no non-smoking areas since that would be discrimininatory.
The more powerful and dangerous the thing, the more the liberal wants to remove it from its proper context and place. When an Angel has lost its place in heaven, it is called a Devil. And they aren’t always confined to the details. So the thing which is most glorious in creation becomes the most effective in destruction.
Just in case you didn’t get the punch line, you no lnoger have to wonder why the more liberalism and socialism is practiced in a country, the more it becomes a “Hell on Earth” despite the best intentions.
Wow, tz,
That makes way too much sense. I guess I just prefer thinking that liberals are stupid rather than evil… Though it is often hard to tell the difference as each tends to lead to the other…
Re s3x (my route around the censor program): what this really means is that liberals favour subordinating the biological meaning of s3x to its spiritual meaning, while conservatives favour subordinating the spiritual meaning to the biological meaning. (See discussion here: http://praxeology.net/unblog08-03.htm#04 (Link).) I think liberals come off better on that comparison than conservatives do.
Re violence: Aquinas hardly counts as someone who favoured limited scope for governmental violence. Read his political writings, which argue inter alia for putting religious dissenters to death. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty of embracing initiatory violence; only libertarians have a defensible position here.
Actually, I’m not sure about the s3x issue, there, Dr. Long. At least, the religious conservatives that I know would claim to hold to the spiritual significance of the act. And, because that is so significant to them (I should probably say “us”, as I am religiously, though not politically, conservative), when it is performed in a way that is against God’s moral law, it is seen as particularly significantly immoral. If conservatives were primarily concerned with the procreational aspect, they would just condemn the homos3xual community as failing to use s3x successfully. (Like eating soup with a fork.) Also, we would expect that they would not condemn s3x outside of marriage. Instead, they say that they use it in a morally perverse way. At least in my experience, the procreational aspect is mainly seen as physical evidence of God’s moral law regarding the intensely spiritual act (two becoming one flesh and such).
I would then turn to say that liberals replace the spiritual significance with the emotional significance. In doing so, they liberate s3x from the realm of moral law. (Of course, here we can get into fun questions of whether a nonagressive act can be immoral, which gets down to that slippery moral “ought”, and where it comes from.)
Also, I think you sell Aquinas a little bit short. Sure, he was wrong. But, just because he believed in burning heretics doesn’t mean he believed in unlimited use of government violence. It just means the limits were nowhere near where any libertarian would put them.
Argh! I just wrote a long reply and it vanished. Let’s try again.
Maybe a different way of putting my point is that religious conservatives often take the sacred aspect of s3x as attaching primarily to its biological function of procreation; their views on marriage, abortion, homos3xuality, etc., seem to bear this out.
You have a point when you say that many liberals confuse emotional significance with spiritual significance. Still, I would say that this is a less serious confusion — a confusion of things less disparate — then confusing biological significance with spiritual significance. I’ve often noted what strikes me as a rather incongruous “biology-worship” among religious conservatives.
Also, most liberals don’t “liberate s3x from the moral law” in the sense of thinking that no moral principles govern it. Their moral principles may not derive from the Bible, but they certainly do have them.
Re Aquinas: no, he didn’t believe in unlimited governmental violence. But he does argue that government has the right to compel some acts of every virtue (though not every act of every virtue), not just acts of justice. I certainly don’t think he is more libertarian than the average liberal (though he does tend to want to control different aspects of human existence from those the liberal seeks to control).
Re whether nonaggressive acts can be immoral: as an Aristotelean I certainly think so!
Don’t you love when long replies vanish?
With that clarification, I’d say you’re probably right about religious conservatives. I can imagine an argument (though not a good one) that they could put forward about the tie between the natural/biological and the spiritual. But, after I typed it out, I realized that even I found it to be very unacceptable. And your observation of “biology-worship” is very accurate in many cases. I’m even a part of the Christian community, and I see all kinds of worship going on toward proxies for the spiritual, rather than for the spiritual itself. Frustrating.
And I’m with you on the nonaggressive immoral acts. Well, at least their existence. After all, as a Christian, I too would certainly hold to that. But, you never know what crazy libertine libertarians are out there, though we do get relatively few of them here at Mises.org.
Argh! I just wrote a long reply and it vanished. Let’s try again.
Hmmm…let me posit a guess here. You were writing your reply, and then all of the sudden, Internet Explorer crashed, and all of what you typed up was lost? I know the feeling…it’s happened to me at library computers after writing very long replies. Really gets you riles (which is why I now write up all of my replies, if I’m stuck with Windows, on Notepad and then copy them over). Another really fun one is some of these new idiot-keyboards, where there is a button to the left and one to the right of the up key, so that when you try to scroll up, you accidentally go to the previous web-page. This is really frustrating on Internet Explorer, which doesn’t save form-data.
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