Baptists, bootleggers... and libertarians

By -
Many libertarians like to point out that it is an alliance of "Bootleggers and Baptists" that drives legislation like Prohibition.

But that is just a two-legged and stool, and it won't stand without its third leg: libertarians! By presenting complete license as the only alternative to full prohibition, the libertarians serve to drive people into the camp of the bootleggers and the Baptists: if the only alternative to having prostitution publicly marketed to one's children is a complete ban, then a lot of people will opt for the ban.

We used to have more sensible options on the table: prostitution was permitted, but in a defined red-light district, and certainly couldn't be widely marketed. But we live today in an age of extremes.

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell12:13 PM

    Those silly libertarians, thinking they understand people.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Samson Corwell12:21 AM

    "Many libertarians like to point out that it is an alliance of 'Bootleggers and Baptists' that drives legislation like Prohibition."

    And what I have to ask is "So?".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Prateek3:55 AM

    This assumes the opinions of libertarians actually matters in the public policy sphere.

    Outside of the internet (in this day and age) or PBS (in another), nobody ever really cares what libertarians think.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:28 PM

      No Prateek: I mean the libertarian impulse understood broadly. For example, there are many, many "free speech absolutists," and they are very influential.

      Delete
    2. Samson Corwell10:05 PM

      Are you against "free speech absolutism", Gene?

      Delete
    3. gcallah1:45 AM

      Absolutely! :-)

      Delete
    4. Sails7:02 PM

      Who do you consider to be free speech absolutists? I think even the most rabid defenders of free speech wouldn't seriously suggest that threats of violence are okay. Rothbard thought libel and slander shouldn't be illegal, and that seems to be as absolutist as it gets without advocating for the right to violently threaten.

      Delete
    5. Samson Corwell4:52 PM

      Sails, I think that free speech absolutism is problematic for threats.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
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.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more