It’s time to evaluate a five year bet.

Back in 2001 Bob Murphy, posting as Bobbi-O on anti-state.com, was optimistic about persuading people of the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. I argued that not even 1% of the population would ever be persuaded to endorse anarcho-capitalism, and asked when he thought such a feat might be accomplished.

Murphy responded confidently:

If by “endorse” you mean people who say, “Yes, I agree that would the best system, I just don’t think it’s going to happen,” then I say it will happen in five years, easy.

We’re not trying to convince people to like our favorite musicians, we’re trying to convince them that systematic theft and murder are counterproductive. Call me naive, but I don’t think it will be that hard to convince 1% to admit this. I recall my own conversion process; I had to first hear the ideas (and think they were too radical), then get disillusioned for some inconsequential reason, and at that point remember all of Rothbard et al.’s arguments that I had earlier rejected.

If I can convince my mom to vote for Harry Browne, and my good Rush Limbaugh-devotee friend to favor drug legalization after an hour conversation, I think 1% isn’t too farfetched.

Again, I’m talking about people agreeing that it would be the best system if implemented, not that these people are going to lift a finger to make it so.

I immediately offered to bet $1000 that this would not happen. Bob accepted the bet in principle, and he was backed by Gene Callahan but we never came up with a metric for deciding the outcome so no money was wagered.

The five years ended last November. Based on a population of roughly 300,000,000 Americans, Murphy and Callahan needed to come up with about 3 million ancaps.

I submit that nothing remotely like Murphy’s prediction has happened. I’m confident that there are not even 30,000 Americans who satisfy the criteria, not even close - and that’s just 1% of 1% of the population.

Two questions occur to me:

How could smart cookies like Murphy and Callahan be so far off base?

My guess is that were caught up in excitement of the (then) recent explosive growth of ancap web sites and forums. Someone in the thread said anti-state.com had been growing at a rate of 50% per month. That may have been true but it was ending as he typed, ASC’s growth has been quite modest from that moment on. What had really happened was that the relatively few people sympathetic with anarcho-capitalism suddenly all found each other through the internet in a brief space of time. And then it was over. There was no second wave.

Has this result changed their opinions about the prospects of rational evangelism?

I’d be interested to hear from Murphy and Callahan on this.

Unfortunately there is a final irony here. Not only have 3,000,000 ancaps failed to materialize but one seems to have vanished, at least from the web. It appears that Murphy’s ancap writing on the web has largely been withdrawn recently, including well over 100 articles at lewrockwell.com, anti-state.com and strike-the-root.com.

From Beck:

[Howard Dean] — and all like him — have been playing a game of studied ignorance ever since about three days after 9/11, in order to not grasp the facts and implications of a stridently anti-American Saddam’s Iraq in the wake of everything that made up 9/11. The fact that George Bush made a bloody hash out of the problem in his pre-war arguments as well as in having anything to do with post-Saddam Iraq politics does not relieve Howard Dean — or anybody else — of the responsibility to grasp the facts that added up to nothing but the imperative to destroy Saddam.

(emphasis his)

Let’s see those facts that made it an imperative for me to be compelled to assist in attacking Iraq.

Or that government is abusive, you know: whichever.

The latest mini power-grab by the Federal government is a yawnfest. In effect, this government has written itself a note that says that they’ll snoop your mail if they really, really want to. They’re also saying that this note supecedes some other notes that they’ve written that stated they wouldn’t snoop your mail without a permission note. No word yet on what efforts libertarian activists will put forth to get this government to write a note that says that the government won’t really read your mail without a permission note.

Do you see what I mean? The fact that this government wrote a note in the first place giving themselves permission to do a number of things implies that they’ll write themselves a note to allow them to do whatever they want whenever they want to. Any note they write to the contrary can be replaced by yet another note.

And libertarian activists are outraged by all of this? It’s frankly amusing.

Let me tell you how I fought and won my most recent parking ticket. The ticket was for parking across two seperate spaces, of which I was guilty as charged. This was one of those weird parking lots that was obviously laid out at 4:00 on the Friday afternoon before the big ball game. The particular spaces I was occupying were situated in an odd corner of the lot, where if you park properly, other cars will block you in when they park properly. So you don’t park inside the lines, you park at a 45-degree angle. Everyone does this, but I got the ticket.

Well, I took that little slip of paper out from under the wipers and I wrote them a nastygram on the back. It went something like: “What’s this nonsense? I parked across two spaces because you have to. This parking lot is laid out such that…”, followed by a detailed explanation. I carefully refrained from profanity, but otherwise I let them have it for giving me the ticket. I then delivered said ticket with said nastygram to the office of the cognizant authority and washed my hands of the matter.

Next day, at work, I get a call from said authority. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “This is John.”
Authority: “Hi John, this is Susan. We’re very sorry for the parking ticket, it won’t happen again. There’s a new officer on patrol and he’s trying to make a good impression.”
Me: “I understand. Thanks.”

That’s right: the agency that issued me that ticket got it stuffed right back into their collective face and then apologized to me. Matter of fact, some months later the lot was re-painted with diagonal spaces, as it should have been all along. Now that’s how you fight a parking ticket.

Does this story seem a little implausible to you? Hopefully it does, because I held back one key detail: The authority mentioned above wasn’t the local government, it was the management of my apartment building.

You can contrast this with a city parking ticket. Can you imagine what would have happened should I return one of those with a nasty note written on it? I’d be lucky not to have an additonal fine tacked on for smart-mouthing the meter maids and/or not be charged with some sort of crime.

And so that’s how you fight a parking ticket: you make sure that the agency that issues it answers to you. In the case of the apartment building, they very much answer to me: they’re the vendor and I’m the customer and they have a financial motivation to keep me happy. Pissing off your customers with bullshit parking tickets is not a sound business decision. As for fighting a government ticket, well, since they can bring overwhelming force to bear on me should I choose to resist them, it’s a pretty good bet that I’ll be meekly paying for any ticket that’s sent my way.

Beck is puppy-sitting his sister’s boxer. I laughed right out loud reading his first morning:

Let me only say that I am far from accustomed to waking up to a three year-old eighty-pound Boxer jumping-ass up in my bed and whining in my face. The horrible beast.

Hilarious.

Look; I really have nothing against this animal. She’s really not bad at heart, at all. I just don’t understand why she has to be so… enthusiastic about everydamned thing. She hasn’t been taught how to be cool yet.

(emphasis his)

I have bad news for Uncle Billy. Boxers aren’t cool. They love life with unbridled passion. When you walk out to get the mail and come back, you will be greeted as if you were a long-lost brother. Every moment for them is TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME!

I try to live that way, to make every moment TFA. Fortunately, for the sake of productivity, I’m still not flexible enough to lick my own balls.

After pointing out (fairly) that many people are dishonestly accused of homophobia and racism, David Friedman goes on to argue that libertarians use certain words dishonestly:

The pattern is not limited to people whose politics I disagree with. Libertarians do the same thing. In our context, the question is how to label people who disagree with libertarian views, on particular subjects or more generally. The two popular choices are “statist” and “collectivist.”

Both are wrong. There are lots of reasons why someone might favor the draft, or minimum wage laws, or price controls, or the war on drugs. Worship of the state is no doubt one possible reason, but certainly not the only one. Belief that what really matters is the collective and not the individual is one possible reason but not the only one. Each of those views could readily be held by someone who agreed on the whole with libertarians about values, outcomes they wanted, but disagreed about the consequences of particular policies. Most obviously, someone might favor the draft because he believed it was necessary in order to defend the U.S., and want to defend the U.S. precisely because he was in favor of freedom and thought the U.S. was much freer now than it would be if someone else conquered it.

In each of these cases, the pattern is the same. We have a conclusion that might be reached for any of a variety of reasons. Someone who wants to attack the conclusion does it by picking one reason he considers particularly unattractive and indefensible, using that reason to label the conclusion, and thus (dishonestly) implying that anyone holding the conclusion does it for that reason.

This is of particular interest to me since, since Pete Bessman gets one thing right - I do identify a lot of people as collectivist and statist.

In a comment to Friedman I point out that he has called taxation robbery and robbery is widely considered unattractive and indefensible. Does this mean that in using the word “robbery” Friedman dishonestly mischaracterized the motivations of all who support taxation? No, he correctly characterized the act of slavery.

In another comment I ask Friedman about his example of someone favoring a draft:

What’s dishonest about calling someone collectivist because they favor sacrificing individuals for collective liberty?

He responds:

In the case we are discussing, someone favors sacrificing individual liberty in order to get more individual liberty. The supporter of the draft, given his factual beliefs, could reasonably enough accuse the opponent of wanting to sacrifice individual liberty–the liberty of all the people who will be enslaved when the country is conquered.

There’s a lot wrong with that answer.

But it’s obvious that “the liberty of all the people who will be enslaved when the country is conquered” is a collective standard. And this is precisely how I identify collectivists, by the standards they use to justify force. A libertarian individualist such as myself holds that force is only justified in the defense of peaceful individuals. Collectivists hold that force against individuals can be justified when it benefits the larger group. The hypothetical argument Friedman gave for conscription is collectivist because it applies a collective standard, the liberty of the group. Conscription is collectivist just as taxation is robbery, and the motivations of the supporters of conscription and taxation are irrelevant.

As to motivation - I do not say that all collectivists desire to do wrong; I say that what all collectivists desire to do is wrong. Specifically I don’t say that all supporters of conscription and taxation desire to do wrong. I say that what all supporters of conscription and taxation want to do is wrong.

I’m curious as to why David Friedman would think any of this is dishonest.

That’s what one Justin Cook, credentialed photographer for the Durham Police Department’s SWAT team, had to say about this heartwarming photo. Radley Balko directly quotes the photographer like so:

There is not much for me to say other than that during a chaotic day, this one moment was an ironic sliver of compassion and humanity.

Of course there isn’t so much compassion and humanity present that it deserves to actually stay in public view, or anything. At this time, it appears that the links to the photo and to the original post aren’t working. “Caption witheld at request of photographer.” says yet another reference. In addition, Cook apparently accused Balko of libel(!) merely for publicizing the photo at all. It seems clear that the photographer is attempting to bury his own photograph.

Who attempts to bury a prize-winning photo that they judge captures a moment of compassion and humanity?

The photo captured a tender moment of compassion, it doesn’t exist anyway, and you’re libelous if you mention it besides. How much more clear do we need to be that there is absolutely nothing to see here, Citizen?

Lewrockwell.com’s Stephan Kinsella recommends John Derbyshire on immigration. Derbyshire lectures libertarians thusly:

As to why I think libertarians are nuts to favor mass uncontrolled immigration from the third world: I think they are nuts because their enthusiasm on this matter is suicidal to their cause. Their ideological passion is blinding them to a rather obvious fact: that libertarianism is a peculiarly American doctrine, with very little appeal to the huddled masses of the third world.

Kinsella echoes Derbyshire at the LRC blog that

… libertarians are nuts to want a more open immigration policy, since it’s self-defeating.

What Derbyshire and Kinsella both miss is that libertarianism has very little appeal to Americans in the first place. Forget about immigrants for a second: how well has the American public been swayed by this “peculiarly American doctrine”?

Answer is not at all, collectivism has won on all fronts and continues to be a landslide winner every election. Even counting every Libertarian Party candidate, even the ones clamoring for more taxes, as a “libertarian”, it’s clear that libertarian ideas have been handed decades of resounding defeats. The open borders issue isn’t self-defeating for libertarians because libertarians have already lost.

For clues as to why, we don’t need to look further than the fact that Kinsella and Derbyshire themselves are arguing for nothing more than a particular collectivist public policy on the grounds that this policy will advance the libertarian cause. Our self-appointed libertarian strategists are proceeding on the assumption that more collectivism now will manufacture more libertarianism later, and they can still talk about “self-defeat” with a straight face.

I work in a small town, where the municipal building and the post office are connected. I ran to the post office today for the second time, and, just like the first time, it felt really strange.

This time, though, I figured it out: the number of signs. I quickly counted the number of signs in the parking lot, which was 17. Then I counted the number of parking spaces, which was 49. That’s right, there was a sign for every three parking spaces: yield signs, stop signs, no parking signs, handicapped parking signs, and street signs (in a fucking parking lot). Worse yet, I was there on the lunch hour, and there were maybe a dozen cars in the lot, three signs for every two cars.

They don’t trust that you can figure your way around a parking lot the size of a small backyard. Do you think they’re going to trust you with your life, citizen?

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok writes:

Tyler asks, following philosopher Alastair Norcross, whether it could ever satisfy a cost-benefit test for one person to die a terrible and tortured death in order to alleviate the headaches of billions of others by one second. Tyler begs off with “a mushy mish-mash of philosophic pluralism, quasi-lexical values” and moral conceit. I will have none of this. The answer, is yes.

Frédéric Bastiat presciently commented:

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

Ditto for “libertarian” planners.

At the Lewrockwell.com blog, Daniel McAdams notes some disconnects in regards to Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent firing:

Said Rumsfeld, “The first war of the 21st century is not well-known, it was not well-understood, it is complex for people to comprehend.”

OK, I’ll bite. One: US participation in this new kind of war has in duration nearly surpassed US participation in World War II. Is that not enough time to adequately explain to the American people the nature of this new kind of war? And if after all that time they still cannot comprehend it, one can only wonder if the flaw is in the terminally stupid student, or an incompetent teacher.

Two, and most important. If Bush and Rumsfeld were so determined to redirect our understanding of this war away from the old, WWII model and to a new kind of thinking, exactly why is it that both Bush and Rumsfeld continuously cite World War II when explaining the the war on Iraq and Afghanistan?

Let’s see what kinds of answers we can find to those questions. The “student” in this case (the electorate) isn’t necessarily terminally stupid, but definitely has no incentive at all to pay serious attention to the Iraq war. Think for a second: do you get a better Iraq war if you pay attention to it? No, you get whatever Iraq war that this government serves up. You can devote all the time and effort you care to into studying military history and tactics, Arab culture, or what have you, and at the end of the day you get the same Iraq war as everyone else.

The “teachers” in McAdams’ analogy (the various elected government officials) not only have to “teach” such students, but at the same time have to deal with the fact that their students can fire them every couple of years. Faced with an overwhelmingly uneducable “student body” that has veto power over their jobs, is it any wonder that the “teachers” devote far more time to placating the students than trying to teach them? What kind of school lets the students continue to attend if they openly refuse to learn, anyway?

It’s no wonder that Rumsfeld and Bush tried to sell the Iraq war as another World War 2: that war holds an enormous amount of emotional sway with the voters. Unlike conficts since then, in the eyes of the voters, WW2 had a Good Side and a Bad Side and the Good Side won decisively. There isn’t any of the moral ambiguity that’s present in later conflicts, and that’s what Bush & Co. are trying to harness with regards to the Iraq war.

McAdams seems content to leave this as it stands, simply pointing out the surface deceptions of the current administration. That’s fine, they’re liars and theives and as such deserve to be exposed. However, it’s well worth thinking about the root causes behind these lies: why does Bush lie so consitently and transparently? Why compare the Iraq war to WW2 when it’s clear that there is little to no substatial basis for comparison? The answer is, as usual, that that’s how the incentives are arranged. The lies that surround the Iraq war are a natural consequence of a representative democracy.

Sabotta sent me two comic strips he did about Meaghan Walker-Williams (who continues in her religious persecution of No Treason) using the Red Meat Construction Set. Click on each comic strip to enlarge and read it in it’s full glory.