Hudson Valley LP Blog

At a recent family gathering, the host described how impressed he was by a book he had read recently on the Pilgrims: Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. I gathered that he was impressed how much more difficult everything was for the settlers than he had been previously been taught, and that he had been brought up short by the disparity between this account and his earlier school history lessons.

A brief history of Thanksgiving may be found here .

An experience such as that of my host may reach the level of a significant emotional experience. It was such an experience during the period of stagflation of the late 1970's that made me feel betrayed by my college economics courses of the 1950's. Samuelson's Economics, based on Keynes ideas, did not contain the word stagflation. Even more, the book had exuded confidence that every problem faced by the economy as a whole could be successfully addressed by some appropriate government action. During the 1970's, many more people than I were awakened to the reality that this was nonsense. This was the event that started my own journey to libertarianism.

A project management course I once attended included some psychological content thought to be useful to managers. I particularly remember the lesson that adults do not readily change their habits and beliefs; that in order for change to occur in an adult, the person must have a "significant emotional experience". It seems to me that many such experiences faced by adults take the form of a betrayal. A common reason for the feeling of betrayal is the realization that one has been deliberately deceived.

Every LP member must feel the weight of the uphill battle that we wage. Political change requires a change of heart by vast numbers of adult voters. Such change requires, then, a great many significant emotional experiences; at least one per voter. But the issue is clearly not hopeless, for there has in fact been a tremendous amount of deliberate deception in our education as well as in what we have heard and read since we left school.

Many of our libertarian writer-heroes have written books addressed to the ordinary reader, and other books designed to help us insiders appeal to outsiders. A few of these are Harry Browne, Mary Ruwart, David Boaz, Murray Rothbard, Morris and Linda Tannehill, Michael Cloud, and many others. I invite you to add your favorites in the comments. It would be presumptuous for me to try to add much to what they have said. Let me repeat a comment from one of my best teachers, however. He found value in the Socratic method of instruction. As he described it, it involves letting the student discover, "remember", or believe that he has discovered or remembered the truth. In other words, it is not simply instruction or argumentation, but a more subtle game. The main gambit is to ask questions of the student. A superior teacher can, in this way, lead the student towards discovery. A truth discovered by oneself makes a much deeper impression than one heard second hand.

One example: I recently asked someone "Why is monopoly considered to be a bad thing in the private sector but a good thing in the public sector?" I doubt that Socrates would have been impressed with me, but I can report that the question was more effective than most of the statements that I have made in similar circumstances.

A recent entry on LewRockwell.com may cause some people to reach the level of betrayal I am discussing.

Don't Talk to the Police
Don't Talk to the Police (2)

These two videos are well worth the time they require, even if you already know that they are right. Two experts will convince you that saying anything whatsoever to the police about your actions would be a mistake, and is frequently a BIG mistake.

Nowadays it is even worse. These videos do not mention that lying to a government agent, police or not, is now a federal crime. Some states may have similar laws. Using the arguments given in the videos, then, we may conclude that to talk to the police about the actions of anyone may equally be a mistake. My own rule of thumb is that I would not talk about anyone's actions to authorities without consulting an attorney first. I might even get a second opinion.

This is a long way from the childhood lesson that the policeman is your friend.

At some point, nearly every adult will be disillusioned about some aspect of government. If you happen to reach that person at the right time with an appropriate reference to the right material, that may be more effective than anything else you could have done.

Missouri was once known as the "show me" state. Its residents were supposed to be skeptics who needed reasons before they would accept the claims of others. They might be in trouble when conversing with simple folk who expect every statement that they make to be immediately accepted as gospel. When such people sense doubt in the listener they may ask "Are you calling me a liar?" and ask him to step outside to settle the issue with fists.

Public skepticism seems out of favor today. The cult of democracy has overtaken truth itself. When a majority believes something, it is now bad form to continue to express doubt in public. Ron Paul, for example, has been silenced both by the press and by his own party, and yet his message has that ring of truth that cuts through the din of propaganda.

As a minority, libertarians need to understand how truth is established and communicated. Persuasive arts are also helpful, but these do not take the place of philosophical underpinnings. I must take issue with a few of our own heroes in this respect: I find the a-priorism Mises, Ayn Rand and Hoppe wanting. As I have mentioned before, the modern tradition from Kant through A. J. Ayer and Karl Popper seems to me both more defensible and more useful to libertarians, as I will try to explain.

Suppose it is our task to comment on the merit of some claim. Truth is established in various ways depending on the intended meaning of the claim. When dealing with mathematics or with board games, the objects under discussion are symbolic. Truth is defined by formal proof, using premises and rules. These are accepted by all participants at the outset, or the game cannot proceed. I reserve the word "proof" for truth in this context. It is here that the greatest degree of agreement among participants is achieved. Mathematicians can nearly always agree as to whether a proof is valid, and chess players can similarly agree as to who won a game. The realm of the symbolic and the imaginary has been known since Kant as the a priori.

When a claim is made about physical reality, such as whether a crime has been committed, or whether fire requires oxygen, things are quite different. Logic and proof may play a role, but only a partial role. Evidence is also required. Truth beyond doubt is rare here. No matter how obvious it is that 9/11 involved highjacked planes crashing into buildings, there will always be doubters with other explanations. Physical reality is the realm of the a posteriori.

Our method attempts to benefit from the clarity of statements residing in the a priori. To isolate that part of a claim that lies in the a priori, imagine for a moment that you are writing a fictional account of a real occurrence. In order not to offend real people, you change all of the names of people and places. You may change many more details, both to improve the story and to avoid lawsuits. The logical progression must be retained, so that the point of the story is not lost. You will attempt to make as many points as possible by the use of logical deduction within the fictional account, since proof is more certain than evidence.

But now suppose that you are a trial attorney, and you want to use this fictional account as part of your courtroom argument. You must connect the characters of the story to the real world, give them real names, obtain testimony from or about them, obtain physical evidence to convince a jury that the story is not only non-fiction, but is "true beyond a reasonable doubt". If you are a defense attorney, you may create doubt by offering an alternative story that also seems consistent with the evidence. The jury decides, a verdict is rendered. Justice may or may not be done. Sometimes the guilty are acquitted or the innocent convicted. Welcome to life in the real world.

Scientists also deal in the a posteriori, but they have an advantage over lawyers. They usually deal not with isolated incidents like crimes, but with classes of phenomena. Scientists do not require that others believe what they have found in their laboratories; rather, they invite these others to duplicate their findings in their own laboratories, or to fail to do so. Even if the results can be duplicated, the claims are not proved. A better word is verified. As Popper famously pointed out, an a posteriori claim cannot be proved, it can only be falsified through counter-evidence.

A few examples: Newton's laws of motion were introduced both with a rich story that included the differential and integral calculus, and rich evidence both from astronomy and from experiment. Darwin delayed publishing until he had both a story and rich evidence compiled during his voyage on the Beagle. Neither of these two examples satisfied all critics. Newton was challenged to account for action-at-a-distance and Darwin for the variation within species on which his theory depends. Every explanation, however successful, seems to raise new questions that it is unable to address.

Accounts of abduction by aliens sometimes have elaborate stories, but offer little or no evidence. A massive double-blind experiment to test a new drug has in the end a very small story, consisting of a few numbers in a table, attached to the hugely expensive evidence.

Now for some more topical applications of these ideas.

Von Mises Approach to Economics

Von Mises clearly preferred an a priori approach to economics. He felt no obligation to perform endless real-world studies to justify his conclusions. To obtain his conclusions through a priori reasoning without data from the real world, he had only to formulate assumptions or axioms which, together with his theory, would produce the conclusions that he wanted. Then critics could criticise these assumptions, but there would be no philosophical dispute. His assumptions regarding human action might be of this sort: businessmen tend to make market choices, within the limits of their knowledge and time constraints, in such a way as to minimize their expenses and maximize their income. Most people probably would find this assumption reasonable, though critics of the free market have spent considerable effort to show that people often make irrational market choices. I doubt that Mises was much troubled by such studies. Reason is available to everyone who wishes to use it.

The Need for Liberty

Government uses law to govern the real world. Our commentary on the application of law to the real world has two parts: considering laws as referring to a make-believe world described by the laws themselves, and applying laws to real-world situations. Logic is used in the first endeavor, evidence in the second. We agree with Popper that certainty cannot be obtained in the second endeavor. If no one can know a posteriori truth with certainty, then in particular government cannot know it. Therefore, people must always be left free to advance current understanding. If they are bound by law to current fashion, progress will stop. Truth is a moving target. Skepticism and liberty are required in order for progress to occur.

Same Sex Marriage

Some proponents of same sex marriage insist that marriage is a civil right, and that no other term, such as civil union, will suffice to satisfy the need. Shakespeare asked "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Why then the insistence on the word marriage?

Andrew Sullivan has admitted that one motive is financial. Law is written in words. If a gay couple is legally married, then the social security and other laws governing married couples (presumably) must be applied. No other word will accomplish this.

Other proponents avoid making this connection. They insist that marriage (only with that designation) is a desirable state that is being denied to them. They seem to say that the real-world nature of a relationship can be affected by the (abstract) word used to name it. This appears to contradict our story vs. evidence approach to meaning.

Would society be disadvantaged if the word marriage were used? I think so. Just as the civil rights laws of the 1960's passed for the benefit of black Americans gave rise to demands by every conceivable minority group to be given equal status in victim-hood, I see a philosophical error being committed here that could have equally negative consequences.

Words are attached to things by common usage over time, not by legal fiat. When we have evidence of a distinction in the real-world, we invent distinct terms to distinguish those things in the world of language. For legislation or a court decision to compel the use of the same term for situations widely perceived to be distinct is novel. The unfortunate lesson would be this: use political power to reshape the world by changing the meaning of our words. If in the future a group were unable change the laws, it might try to get the same effect by changing the meaning of the words in the laws. A future President Clinton might actually be able to change what the meaning of is is.

Would this controversy occur in a more libertarian society? If there were no social security, or better yet, if marriage were simply a private contract with no affect outside the family involved, no dispute would arise. In that case, gay couples could probably use the word marriage without complaint from anyone. Dictionaries might begin to list an additional meaning after the traditional one. Over time, the meaning of the word would change.