Tabarrok Deported
Here.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Leftish immigration boosters occasionally advise me that no one is asking for completely open borders. I know this is incorrect from my misspent youth as an anarcho-capitalist (remember the good old days on the Anti-State.com forums?) In fact, at one point, I myself argued for completely open borders on moral grounds. Seeing the flaws in that conclusion, as it happened, was the beginning of a major change in my view of politics and society (perhaps still ongoing).
ReplyDeleteGreg, did you have a "handle" at ASC?
DeleteWhoa! I'm sure I did, but ... I was "Otto Kerner" a lot of the time back then. If it was anything other than that, then I'm drawing a complete blank.
DeleteGreg, if you feel like sharing more, I'd love to hear what made you change. I can see people becoming disillusioned and thinking, "This will never happen," but do you mean you no longer think an-cap is the ideal?
ReplyDelete'I can see people becoming disillusioned and thinking, "This will never happen,"'
DeleteWhoa! Do you think THAT is what I have been saying these last five or six years?!
He has not been an anarcho-capitalist for several years, no?
DeleteBy the way, Bob, I'd like to engage you on the "privatization prevents disputes" concept. Typically I hear that something like "the decisions would be made by property owners" and somehow this means "no conflict". Similarly, couldn't you just "prevent conflict" and "questions over makes decisions" by handing control of everything over to, say, me?
The real problem was the title of Bob Murphy's first book Chaos Theory. I thought to myself, whoa, chaos? I can barely stomach theory, but chaos just ain't what I signed up for!
DeleteJust kidding (I do still have my copy of Chaos Theory, though). As it happens, mostly by coincidence but partly by influence, the development of my political thought over the last ten years or so has been broadly similar to Gene Callahan's. For me, immigration was particularly important because I reached a point where it dawned on me that the policy I had been advocating, completely open national borders, would be a huge disaster for the country I live in; and that the arguments I had been making for the practical benefits of unrestricted immigration were based on tendentious motivated reasoning in order to support a conclusion I wanted for other reasons. The other reasons boiled down to a moral claim. This was the first time that I had to admit a conflict between what my political theory described as a moral imperative and what's at all of a good idea. As a result, I reconsidered how to apply morality to politics. One result is that, right now, I find it no longer fits in with the rest of what I understand about human social life to say that the state shouldn't exist. States are social institutions that are part of the culture we live in now. I certainly hope that our social institutions will become better and better in the future, and perhaps someday the state as we know it will no longer exist, and perhaps what replaces it will be much better for everybody, and that sounds great! But it doesn't sound like a political program to me.
P.S. Along the way, I basically reconsidered my ideas about what morality is, to boot. Of course, I changed few if any of my actual moral scruples in the process. I just developed a different way of describing what a scruple is.
No, did you think when I asked Greg what made him change, that I was really asking him what made Gene change?
ReplyDeleteYou said "I can see PEOPLE becoming disillusioned..."
DeleteAs though that is the only reason you can conceive of any person ceasing to be an ancap.