“libertarianism”

A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.

As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.

In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.

Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?

Hace ya casi un anho de la FIL y yo apenas subo este cuentito que tan simpatico se me hizo. Libertarianismo para ninhos.

The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.

Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?

That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.

134 sayings by John McCarthy^WP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.

Here 8 of the very best:

Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchism^WP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.

Timothy C. May’s^WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collection^AM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)

Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.

Ayn Rand’s^{WP, ELZR} Atlas Shrugged^AM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.

The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.

Milton Friedman ^{WP, E} died 9 days ago, November 16, and though I wanted to write about it that day, I dared not. I had mostly read only about him, his life, his reputation, and reverberations of his arguments; I had bought but not yet read two of his books^ELZR; treasured a sentence (“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”) found in the only thing I had read from him (the prologue to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom^AM ); and deeply admired his son, David Friedman^ELZR. In other words, I could only lay claim to love the idea of the idea of the man (2^nd degree platonic love, common personal affliction). I knew I’d fall in love with him, I only needed time, and so I didn’t dare write an obituary that Thursday—but I’m gonna.

I’ve downloaded Friedman’s Free to Choose series (also available as a free stream) to watch as I read the sametitled book^AM and the first episode has already confirmed Friedman as a most worthwhile man. Far as I can gather from a sample of 1, the series consists of a brief, excellent documentary narrated by Friedman, followed by lively debate with a group of economists, politicians, and businessmen. As much as I’m lately having serious misgivings about arguing in general, it’s a pleasure to watch him passionately refute and belie his often downright frightening partners in debate (“It’s demagoguery, if you’ll pardon me, Michael Harrington…”).

Seeing those suited men from the seventies I couldn’t help but think of what future debates on the subject will be like. One of the intriguing things about Milton Friedman is how his ideas have been carried on by his children. Himself the greatest XX^th century defender of capitalism, he still didn’t dare (?) take the leap to anarchism (he couldn’t have put it more bluntly at the debate from Free To Choose’s first episode: “I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government.”). His son, David Friedman ^ELZR, is on the other hand the most prominent anarchocapitalist alive, and David Friedman’s son, Googler Patri Friedman, wants to homestead the oceans in turn.

One can only wonder what little Tovar Miles Friedman will come up with.

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM:

OK, pardon the profanity. I had been following the Net “Neutrality” argument from a perplexed distance for some time (as I’ve chronicled about before) but this month’s Scientific American editorial on the subject and its disgusting rhetoric is just too damn much. Perverting George Orwell’s masterpiece on the dangers of imposing equality, Animal Farm^WP, so as to defend that very same imposition is off-limits, it’s too low, it’s too devious. It’s repulsive. Yuck.

There are several more gems sprinkled throughout. Here’s another one:

Of course, forget the silly “caprices” and blind moneylust of the pesky owners of the cable themselves. Who could know better about the cable business and its needs than casual passersby like ourselves?

To respond in kind, I propose a different appropriation of George Orwell, this one from his other anti-totalitarianism classic, 1984^WP:

One good thing came out of that editorial though, I found out about Hands Off The Internet, a sane organization against government intervention on the net. Pay them a visit.

The above is a map of world happiness—the redder, the happier—Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester, made in a meta-study that aggregated the results of over a 100 independent studies and surveys on subjective wellbeing from around the world. The study itself isn’t yet available, but there’s an intereresting (though hideous) press release were you can quote your country’s rank (the US is #23, Denmark #1, Switzerland #2, Austria #3 (cheers to Alexis!), and Mexico #51).

As I said, the source itself isn’t yet available, but Eurekalert—a science news service of sorts—provides some quotes on White’s meta-study.

My favorite one—because it confirms my individualistic prejudices of course:

It was also interesting to find out that health was the most closely correlated variable to happiness (I would have expected wealth to have that place):

But there are several quotes that hint at the study’s agenda—and it sends a chill through my spine:

If government has proved itself so egregiously lousy and so disturbingly meddling when it started working under the banner of improving our welfare through last century, I can only shudder when imagining what a brand new world awaits us when it pursues “our” happiness.