THOMAS FLEMING: Abuse Your Illusions

This article is a hatchet job.

The author starts by claiming, as I pointed out, through an amazing series of rhetorical flourishes that because people are property this means that Adam Smith is fallacious. A total abuse of logic.

He finishes off by claiming that Hayek's The Fatal Conceit is somehow a repudiation of libertarianism provoked by his divorce. What nonsense.

In between, as AJ points out, he confuses Mises' theory of Subjective Value (worth) with the idea that values (ethics) are subjective. He then wonders why Mises' did not believe in Situational Ethics! There is no one more ethically consistent than libertarians, yet Fleming accuses them of being relativists. Is he really this stupid?

If you wish to defend this piece of crapola, you need to address the points that AJ and I brought up in our #3 and #4.

You may dispute Mises' and Hayek's contention that liberty and the marketplace support family and community while the state destroys them. Even if you are right, that has nothing to do with the points AJ and I brought up. And, BTW, it has been tried out. Throughout history.

Architect rather hilariously invokes Edmond Burke as his allie for drug legalization.

Where do you get the idea that Burke would have favored prison for drug abusers? He was a conservative. Drug use was not illegal in his day. I think he would have viewed prisons themselves as monstrous. The modern "penitance-iary" was not invented until the 1830s, you know.

My point was how much supposedly-conservative thought has moved in the last two hundred years. The traditions of our ancestors are largely dead, destroyed by the rise of the state. If "conservatives" think they are conserving anything, they are wrong.

Read over the subsequent posts and you'll see that enthusiasm for this article has waned. I was impressed by Fleming's article originally because I agreed with its general criticisms of libertarians. Judging by his posts Okiereddust felt the same way, but then came to feel that it was more rhetorical, emotional and disorganized. Rereading the piece it was clear to me that he was right about the emotional character of the article and Fleming's tendency to get carried away. Read Okie's post and you'll find that he's not defending Fleming any longer.

I am not an economist and am not qualified to judge as regards Menger, Mises or the subjective theory of value, but I do think that Fleming is on to something regarding contemporary libertarians and their attitudes towards morality, though he doesn't do all that much better than I could at expressing it. You and #3 may very well have a point that a subjective theory of value (worth) is not a subjective theory of values (ethics). But what then is Mises theory of ethics or his attitude towards it? There is no reason why Mises should have such a theory since he works in a different field. But if he is taken to be so very important and essential a thinker by many, would the absence of such ethical views and the glorification of Mises have a harmful effect on the ethical views of his votaries? There does seem to be a gap between the suspension of judgement over value and the assertion of values that can and should be addressed by those who know more about it. Fleming addresses his doubts in a polemical anti-libertarian fashion, but he does express concerns that can and should be handled in a less confrontational fashion.

While I can't judge post #3 or the beginning of your post #4, the end is pure emotional rhetoric of the sort that one accepts or rejects more on faith than on anything else. There's nothing wrong with that, and it was very well written, but it's worth pointing out to those who find it convincing, that it's assertion rather than anything definitively proven or even supported by your earlier argument. There's nothing wrong with being a convincing writer -- and you seem better at it than Fleming -- but your reply #4 contains enough "rhetorical flourishes" of its own, impressive to those who already agree, but not convincing to those who don't.

If liberty is really dependent on family, community and virtue, lose these things and we also lose all. To the extent libertarians define liberty as something independent of anything else (their conditioning from modern liberalism) , as they sometimes seem to do, their sense of liberty is false and their ideoogy is bogus.

I think Fleming starts wrong with his question, "Freedom to do what?" That's the wrong question because it treats freedom as a positive quality, a presence, when in fact freedom is the absence of something undesireable. So the right question is, freedom from what, and the answer, at least in the political sense, is oppression, or unjust coercion, or harm to one's person or property except as punishment for a crime (to a libertarian all three of these say the same thing).

So your identification of freedom with family, community, and virtue is also mistaken. Freedom is an absence, and those are some (but by no means all) of the things that go into the good life. Freedom is not the be all and end all of life. It's obviously better to have both positive goods and the absence of evils, than just the absence of evils. It is, however, the be all and end all of politics. Fleming makes a mistake here, too. In other essays he called the good life the end of politics (although he mentioned the good life here, I don't think he went quite that far this time). It's a mistake with a venerable history, but still a mistake. The government is necessarily an institution built on violence; the best we can hope from from it is that the violence will be directed only at those who deserve it.

Its odd though. Fleming and his libertarian opponents at times act like two political candidates debating, who try as they can to disparage the other's position really can find surprisingly little to substantatively disagree on in a policy or ideological sense. The differences seem more cultural/preferential, in a way that makes it difficult to discuss. Like many things in politics - the campaign of Gore vs. Bradley, of Buchanan vs. Dole, of Bush vs. McCain.

There's a lot to that. Maybe it's why he fails to really refute libertarianism. If he did, he'd undercut himself, too. Instead he muses on Walter Block, and then starts calling the general theory "false and evil", without anything to actually back that up.

You don't have to be an ecomonist to know the basics.

On Fleming's point about libertarians' attitude to morality, it depends which libertarians you're talking about. Maybe some of the people at Reason, but the writers for, say, RazorMouth.com would have a totally different set of attitudes.

Okie: If liberty is really dependent on family, community and virtue, lose these things and we also lose all.

x: a subjective theory of value (worth) is not a subjective theory of values (ethics).

Putting liberty in the same list with positive values such as family, community and virtue, is an ontological error. Liberty is an infrastructure that enables values, just like the Internet is an infrastructure that enables creation of WWW content.

Thus the interdependence between the two is not symmetrical. Values depend on liberty because a coerced behavior that conforms with values possesses no values. Coerced family is no family; coerced virtue is no virtue. Liberty depends on values not ontologically but practically: if men have no virtue, they will gradually lose their liberty. But we can imagine (all too well) a free man without virtue. The opposite is not true: the only way to ascertain a slave's virtue is to see what he does when free.

You and #3 may very well have a point that a subjective theory of value (worth) is not a subjective theory of values (ethics). But what then is Mises theory of ethics or his attitude towards it? There is no reason why Mises should have such a theory since he works in a different field. But if he is taken to be so very important and essential a thinker by many, would the absence of such ethical views and the glorification of Mises have a harmful effect on the ethical views of his votaries?

In libertarian theory, a clear line is made between private ethics and public ethics. Each man should govern himself by the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. A virtuous man should live by this maxim. He should be a good father and husband, as the right would want. He should help the poor and the less fortunate, as the left proclaims.

While this dictum is an excellent guide for your own life, you make a serious mistake if you attempt to force others to apply it to theirs. It is, in fact, a violation of the Golden Rule to attempt to force others to act virtuously. Would you like it if someone else forced his ethical priorities on you? Why should I be a family man, after all? Perhaps, like mother Theresa, I feel that a vow of chastity and dedication to the poor is more important. Or something I am better able to do. Similarly, the man who devotes himself to his family is honorable, even if he never contributes to charity.

Thus, you must be less ambitious when judging the morality of others. Instead of insisting that they do good, all you can ask is that they do not do evil. As the Buddha said “hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful”. This negative version of the Golden Rule is what the libertarian calls the Principle of the non-initiation of force.

This, in a nutshell is libertarian morality. Forcing others to do good is a mistake which ultimately leads to totalitarianism. Conservatives understand that forcing people to care for the poor creates poverty. Why is it so hard to understand that forcing people to care for their family destroys the family?

One of the principles of the Common Law, that magnificent achievement of a free market in law, was that a man could not be forced to care for his children unless it was under his own roof. When that principle was violated in the 1920s, the stage was set for the modern catastrophe called divorce. The state had invented a new form of the family in which a man could be forced to continue to act as husband and father against his will while his wife abandoned her duties. Unsurprisingly, many women do precisely that.

Mises and Hayek were intensely ethical men. Most libertarians are. Imposing your ethics on other people is, in itself, unethical. Show by example or by argument. But never use force.

That is a very well written summation. I don't find anything to disagree with in it. I do note that people do want to proclaim principles of this sort and give them some sort of authority above and beyond mere commercial transactions. They want some kind of official embodiment or institutionalization of ethical principles because of the fear that they will be lost amongst all the competing products and lifestyles available in the marketplace. Some critics miss this kind of enunciation or establishment of principles in the theories of libertarians they encounter. Other critics will want to institutionalize or establish more and more principles using government, though that doesn't usually work.

"Fleming starts off by dismissing Walter Block’s (admittedly-bizarre) theory of fetal ethics by claiming that mothers and fathers are property. “An animal coming out of nowhere is an uncommon experience, and children—whether the identity of mother and father is known—have two parents. In fact, the proper point of comparison is with calves that belong to the people who own the cow and the bull”. Of course he never answers the obvious questions. Who are people the property of? Does the owner have the right to do what he wants with the foetus? Whatever you might think of Block’s case, this is not a refutation, unless you accept the argument that all people are slaves."

I disagree. Thomas Fleming most assuredly does NOT claim that "mothers and fathers are property".

Parents are capable of being guardians of their children in the full legal sense. However, the cow and bull that are the "parents" of a calf are not. Therefore the guardians for the calf are the owners of the cow and bull.

All Fleming is saying is that a fetus is to its parental guardians as a calf is to its owner guardians, rather than as a wild calf is to its wild surroundings.

What I believe that Fleming is trying to do is to point up the importance of relationships between humans. Libertarians tend to emphasize the importance of the individual to the point of deempasizing the importance of relationships among individuals.

Parents that bring a fetus into this world, whether they want to admit it or not, have a relationship with that fetus. In a better world, that relationship would imply certain resposibilities, such as not killing it or allowing someone else to kill it.

However, if the fetus is viewed as a rugged individual in the wilderness, then noone has a positive responsibility with respect to it. If it dies out in the wild, then so be it. If someone wants to save it, then they are welcome to try.

The reality, is that even if someone wanted to come along and save the wild fetus, they would be prevented from doing so. No amount of money, technology, or government coercion will allow one woman to take the fetus from another woman to bring it to term. In this way Block's analogy sounds even more silly.

Don't blame Fleming for pointing out not only the reprehensibility of Block's position, but the logical inconsistency of it as well.

"Mises’ theory was actually quite simple, almost a tautology. People want what they want and they make choices based on their wants ... It is a self-evident truth, an axiom of the behaviour of the reasoning man. "

I strongly disagree, as I believe so does Fleming.

People smoke cigarettes even though they know they are increasing their chances of getting cancer. People don't take the time to put on their seatbelts even though they know they are slightly increasing their chances of worse bodily injury in a crash.

People basically do not reason well. People drink too much, smoke too much, watch too much TV, and spend too much time on FreeRepublic.

More to the point of Fleming's article, where do children fit into the scheme of rational decisions in the marketplace? Do we let kids buy all the candy their parents can afford, because thats what the kids "reasoned" this out?

Also, as transactions occur in the marketplace, relationships (sorry to have to bring up that nasty word again) develop among the rugged and rational individuals. People fall in love. People develop irrational hatreds based on feelings of having been had, e.g. buying a lemon from a used car dealer. And sometimes people decide to continue buying from a certain individual because they value the relationship they are developing more than the savings they could achieve through shopping around.

The problem with the special case of libertarian economic thought, which is a direct result of the problem with the general case of libertarian social thought, is the deemphasis on relationships and overemphasis on individuals.

We are not brought forth into this world as individuals, and none of us are capable of fully isolating ourselves from others once we achieve adulthood. We are not capable of making completely "reasonable" choices because we don't have all of the information, and we don't have the brain processing power to assimilate all of the information and process it to make that absolutely most effective decision. We just do the best we can.

And those that lean on their parents, siblings, friends, history, traditions, and community for help in making these decisions will tend to be a lot more successful and happy, than those who try to go it all alone.

Trying to create a world based on the fiction that people are independent agents is only going to lead to nonsensical results, i.e. the current state of things.

A calf has an owner, not a guardian, which is precisely what Fleming said. The calf's owner may do with it as he wants, and he does.

Don't blame Fleming for pointing out not only the reprehensibility of Block's position, but the logical inconsistency of it as well.

It is Block's position which is logical (if reprehensible). The Homestead principle says that things which are not owned belong to the first person who claims it. I may "homestead" a wild fish (e.g catch it) and eat it. I am not allowed to homestead my neighbor and eat him. That is called cannibalism, and polite people frown on it. What's the difference? The fish has no owner, but my neighbor owns himself.

Thus, the whole issue revolves around the question of whether a fetus is human or not. If a fetus is not human, then Block is perfectly right. Anyone may claim an abandoned fetus and do what he wants with it.

If, on the other hand, a fetus is human then it owns itself - and this is true even though it cannot care for itself. It has a guardian, not an owner, and you cannot homestead it. It is because you and I believe that the fetus is human that we disagree with Block, not because of Fleming's bizarre argument - which is both illogical and reprehensible.

Of course, they do. People have wants and they act in accordance with their wants. If someone smokes despite the danger, this obviously is because he has decided that whatever benefits he gets from smoking exceed the risk he takes. This decision may not fit what you call "rational", but the smoker has made this choice based on his own priorities. Similarly, the driver who refuses to belt up has made the decision to do so for his own reasons. This is why it's called the "Subjective Theory of Value".

We are creatures of free will. When a tiger kills its prey, it does so out of instinct. It has no more choice in this matter than does the victim. But when you decide to kill that calf because you like veal, that is a decision made by a being with free will - the capability to decide not to kill the calf.

This is Mises' point. Everything people do is freely chosen by the individual actor. If you decide to give into your instincts, that is a choice like any other. Personally I like veal. Which is why I eat it. I also happen to think that my likes supercede the rights of a dumb animal. Selfish, maybe. But that's my viewpoint.

I tried really hard not to use the word "rational" in my reply to you. I believe strongly in free will, but I also believe that us being imperfect human beings means that we are likely to make unreasonable decisions.

Lately I've been trying to help my father who is on dialysis. Despite explicit instructions from the doctors, he refuses to follow their advice and causes himself harm on a daily basis. At first we tried everything we could to get him to do the "right" thing. But he would rather do his thing than the "right" thing. So be it.

We are currently living in a welfare state mostly as a result of the accumulation of bad choices by large numbers of American citizens. Large numbers of American citizens vote for Democrats, put themselves into situations where they depend on government programs such as Social Security, ignore the daily assaults on the Constitution, worship the memory of politicians such as FDR & LBJ, etc.

I would like to be able to just be a rugged individual and deal with this wave of stupidity and dependency, but I cannot do it myself. I must depend on others, and it helps if we have a common set of principles. And it helps if there are positive elements such as support for traditional morality and ethics, rather than just the "negative" injunction of "Don't tread on me and I won't tread on you."

The mob is already treading all over me, while simultaneously proclaiming that they are in the process of saving me from myself!

My belief is that we don't see anarchies around because those who chose to break up into smaller groups in the past got beaten into submission by the larger groups. We need to fight fire with fire. We need to create a large group linked by a common set of principles and values willing to go toe-to-toe with the socialists and statists.

A bunch of rugged individuals a la Jeremiah Johnson building their own cabins and catching their own fish in the forest, is just not going to cut it.

We have to take the risk of becoming the new mob in order to fight against the current mob running this country into the ground. This doesn't mean that we have to use the federal government to ratify and execute our program. But we do need to use some institution such as an invigorated fraternal order or such to combine our efforts in an effective way.

If the fascists at MADD can create a tidal wave of anti-constitutional legislation from the ripple of anger at the death of a loved one from a drunk driver, then we can certainly try to do likewise.

Whatever form that institution takes, it would be well for those who form it to look at the Libertarian Party as a good counter example! ;-)

"Read over the subsequent posts and you'll see that enthusiasm for this article has waned"

I got in a little late, so now what you say is no longer true. I am quite enthusiastic about the article. Also, I believe that I have successfully countered Architect's argument. Read my earlier posts to see if you agree.

Whether we like it or not we are stuck in a web of complex relationships and all of the libertarian talk of atomic actors in a free marketplace is just not an accurate depiction of what is really going on. This is what I believe Fleming is getting at, and what Architect and Mises and other libertarians either can't or won't see.

"Liberty is an infrastructure that enables values, just like the Internet is an infrastructure that enables creation of WWW content."

The opposite could also be said to be true: if you are not surrounded by primarily moral and ethical people what you are free to do, besides shooting back until you run out of ammo, is pretty limited.

"Coerced family is no family"

All families are coerced in the sense that they are determined by who had sex with whom and who was born as a result. People who recognize that they are "stuck" with their father, mother and siblings and behave morally and ethically with regard to them are freely choosing to do the right thing despite being presented with a fait acompli.

"the only way to ascertain a slave's virtue is to see what he does when free."

None of us are completely free, nor is anyone completely enslaved. Even a slave can refuse to follow orders. He may soon be hanged, but he can choose to resist nevertheless. Coalminers who had to work long hours in dangerous conditions could walk off the job any time, but they had few other opportunities that would guarantee food on the table for them and their families.

The reality is that we have to try and make the best choices we can given that we have been genetically created to prefer certain actions and things (regardless of their merit), conditioned by early childhood to prefer certain other actions and things (again, regardless of their merit), and we are currently surrounded by a sea of voices trying to get us to do still other things of questionable merit.

We are born stuck in a very sticky life and the more we thrash around in life, the more we get stuck. We are not individual atoms engaging in pure transactions with other individual atoms.

We learn from tradition that if we behave certain ways and limit ourselves to certain choices, we will have more choices in the future, e.g. if I don't become a drug addict I will tend to have more money with which to buy more useful stuff. So does the freedom proceed from adherence to good values, or do good values proceed from a free environment? I may agree with you that the relationship is not symmetric, but I don't think it is one of precedence either where freedom is given the greater precedence.

Besides if you've ever visited one of the Calvinist predestination threads, you might start doubting freedom exists at all! ;-)

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