Tough Questions, Strange Answers, or, why I am (almost) not a Libertarian.
Meredith L. Patterson (
Back in this post, I said that I like to call myself a suffragette. I think any woman who owns a firearm should have the right to vote and own property in her own name. I might even be willing to extend the franchise to unarmed women, if they owned land, knew a trade, or owned property.
"What of unarmed men who own no land or property and do not know a trade?"
Disenfranchise them! Who wants landless, tradeless panhandlers exercising the soveriegn power of the ballot over their neighbors? And if they are gunless, they form no credible threat when the State takes away their voting rights! Ho-Hah! Non-gun-owning men should of course be allowed an exception, and be allowed to vote if they own a sword or know kung-fu. I do not want to disenfranchise my friends who are blackbelts or SCA members. Also bowhunters. I ain’t taking no vote away from Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent.
But even for landowning gun-owner males, let us raise their voting age to 35. Women as young as 18 often have a practical head on their shoulders, but guys do not mature until later. What good has the Youth Vote done the republic?
"(For that matter, I’m also curious what constitutes "knowing a trade", in your view.)"
Knowing a trade means being a man of substance without necessarily being a landowner or a professional, such as a blacksmith, tinker, cooper, joiner, wheelwright or thatcher. I am very liberal in my political opinions: I would be happy to let an honest man of the lower orders vote, if he owned his own tools, and had an apprentice or two, and was not a wanderer or an itinerant or an Irishman. (Darwin has proved scientifically that Irishmen are descended from apes, and are drunkards and Papists, besides.) Property qualifications for a townsman or burgess make little sense — who could own a hundred acres in downtown New Amsterdam or Boston? — but a ship owner or a tavern keeper, or man who owned a printing press, has as much stake in the common good as a planter, does he not?
I am only half kidding. My libertarian friends assume universal suffrage is an unmitigated good. As a practical matter, I am willing to consider restricting the vote to those who have their self-interest tied into the common interest of the community, that is, not wandering strangers, and not beggars who sell their votes for goodies from Uncle Sam.
(One word of caution: I would be more willing to consider property qualifications if I came from a country which had not abused property qualifications to disenfranchise Blacks. One has to keep in mind not just the theory, but the history of the abuse, of such laws.)
I realize that my new scheme of restricting the vote to pistol-packing women and men who own property may seem unfair to women, some of whom lack the gun-nut gene. (Of course, if they taught firearm safety, handling, and use in gym class (target or skeet) in public school, as they ought, this might not be a problem.)
Let me propose instead a much more sensible voting scheme! one baby, one vote. Two babies, two votes. As many babies are you bear to term, you get an additional vote!
Any woman who has borne a child has done her duty to the race, and deserves a vote. Women with large families have a correspondingly larger investment in the future. Men, who cannot get pregnant, are just out of luck. Sorry, guys.
Now you might say, that my proposal is a scheme can be located on a map halfway between crazytown and stupidville. I agree. My only point is that a social scheme based on pregnancy would do one thing: I suspect women with children, because their self interest is tied into future generations, would be more careful than to vote for candidates who mortgage their children’s future by runing up the national debt.
(And I include both Republics and Democrats in that condemnation! G.W.Bush has a lot to answer for when he enters the Capitalist version of Heaven, Galt’s Gulch, and confronts a wrathful St. Adam Smith and St. Ludwig von Mises.)
Conservatives will support my scheme because the one-vote-per-one-child policy might help keep aborticide safe and rare. Democrats will support it because it will disenfranchise priests, nuns, and monks.
We could also gain support from Animal Rights activists if we have small human children legally redefined to be neotenous apes — whereupon human babies in the womb could be declared an endangered species, and enjoy more survivals rights than they do currently.
So one child-one vote policy may have drawbacks. But can you honestly say it would land this nation in a noticeably worse political situation than the one we currently occupy?
On to more importent topics:
"Tata Young doesn’t strike me as all that "unfeminine" ("feminine" here as contrasted with "masculine" or "asexual") per se; she is certainly making a very gendered display of her, um, assets. Certainly no one would mistake her for a man."
I suppose that depends on your definition of feminine. She (or should I say, her character she plays in the song?) is certainly not very romantic or ladylike or virginal or maidenly.I cannot imagine Sir Lancelot betraying his friend, soverign, and the Seventh Commandment for her.
(On the other hand, if Guinnivere looked like Julia Ormand in FIRST KNIGHT, I would understand, even as I condemned, the crime. (On the griping hand, if King Arthur looked like Sean Connery, whereas Lance only looked as medium-hawt as prettyboy Richard Gere, I cannot imagine it. What was she thinking? I mean, c’mon, Sean Connery! He is as handsome as James Bond and Ramirez and Michael McBride and Robin Hood and the Raisuli put together! Now, if he looked a goofy as somelike like, say Zed of Zardoz, I could understand a feminine disinterest in him.))
To me it looks as if the character in the song is trying to be as masculine as possible, by which I mean, crude: the song reflects the kind of male sexual gusto that bachelors in the locker room display when they are telling fish stories about their sexual conquests.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I just saw Blake’s THE GREAT RACE with my children. One character was a suffragette played by Natalie Wood, whom no one would mistake for a man. She demands of Tony Curtis’ character, the Great Leslie, why they cannot talk openly about sex. "Men talk about sex openly!" she challenges him. With a twinkle in his eye, he says gravely, "Gentlemen do not."
"That said, given the opportunity and a time machine I would much rather spend time with Mae West, who by all accounts was exceptionally quick-witted — not the impression I really get from Ms. Young."
There have always been women who were a bit nickel-plated. It is almost an Americana stereotype. But there is a self-righteous quality to the Tata Young lyrics ("Can’t change the way I am!") that is absent from the Mae West character. (Again, I mention a character, because we are dealing with a personae, an act, not a real person.)
Let me close this rambling and incoherent post with an anecdote, explaining why I am no longer a Libertarian, even though I still can be mistaken for one is a dim light. In discussing whether or not, for example, to limit the vote to women who own guns or men who know kung-fu, the Libertarian approach would be theoretical, starting, as philosophers ought from first principles: such as first asking what is the nature of justice, and then asking how a political commonwealth can best realize that nature. This had always been my approach in my youth.
Then one day someone asked me whether judges should be appointed or elected, and I realized that there was no right answer, not even in theory, to this question. Each option had particular strengths and drawbacks. The answer depended on which of the two impending flaws happened to be more dangerous to the commonwealth at your particular time and situation in history. If you live in a land and an era threatened by unchecked activist judges, so that you trust the common people more than you trust the judges, then support election. If you live in a land and an era threatened more by undue popular influence over the court system, so that you trust the judges over the common people, then support appointment for life. It is not a question that can be resolved by reference to first principles.
In a recent discussion over the definition of rape, one commenter expressed horror at the high level of evidence the common law required to prove rape, and — correctly — said that the courts seemed to be more interested in protecting innocent men from false accusations than protecting women from rape. If deciding this matter on first principles, the ideal justice would suggest that the standard of evidence for robbery not be higher than that for rape. The common law has never, for example, demanded that a robbery victim resist to his utmost power when a robber tries to steal his wallet, nor that he report the crime within 40 days. But keep in mind that England, ever since the days of Titus Oates had a particular tendency to indulge in perjury, and a particular aversion to it, as evidenced by the Hearsay rules, and other legal protections against it. Suppose there had been a rash of false accusations at about the time these laws were made — the crime is, after all, one that engages the passions of men not merely to protect their women, but to avenge themselves mortally on the wrongdoer. A woman disenfranchised by a political system not interested in granting her dignity or equality might be tempted to avail herself more frequently than her modern sister to this means of inflicting deadly harm on a foe. I don’t know myself if this were the case. But suppose it were so: as a practical matter, what else could the courts have done? I am suggesting this is also a case where reference to first principles does not yield an unambiguous answer. If you are more afraid of false accusations of rape, you are wise to raise the burden of evidence; if you are more afraid of the unnatural crime, you are wise to lower the burden of evidence.
I read a book on strategy once (in fact, I think the title was STRATEGY) whose main argument was that military strategy and tactics could not be solved by reference to first principles, simply because, unlike a mathematician or a physicist, whose objects of study are not planning to deceive him, the strategist studies and enemy who is trying to deceive him. If there are two roads into the enemy terrain, one good and clear road and one winding and narrow and rutted road, the wise strategist puts his troops on the bad road IF he thinks the enemy will defend the good road; but IF the enemy suspects that the strategist thinks the enemy will defend the good road, he will place his own forces on the bad road, in which case the good road is not the bad road but the good road. There is no right answer, only a choice based on practical wisdom between a bad option and a worse option.
As with strategists facing enemies, so also with courts facing criminals, and imperfect princes or parliaments facing the difficulties of ruling imperfect subjects and citizens. As the Libertarians say, utopia (the situation where all options are good options) is not an option.
The reason why I am not a Libertarian is that Libertarians are content to cleaveto deductions from first principles, even in situations where the particulars render their verdict unsound. A Libertarian would legalize cocaine under the same argument that he legalizes Coca-Cola: the government cannot be trusted to enforce an anti-drug law without undue impositions on liberty, and no man has the right to govern the private behavior of another man. He says this even in situations where the danger from the government is small and the erosion of civilization from drug-runners (or, as I call them, Zwilnicks) is high. (I would argue that, before the spread of confiscation laws, our danger was the state during the war on drugs was small. Now, the danger is high.) The Libertarian holds as a matter of principle that the state cannot govern the morals and manners of the people, and so the Libertarian is required by his principles to overlook the distinctions between harmless pleasures (Coca Cola) and life-destroying vices (cocaine) — or if he notes the distinction, his interest only extends to negative externalities of the vice, i.e. whether the cocaine addict harms or imposes upon his neighbors and family by his slow and degrading self-destruction. The Libertarian says (if he is true to his principles) that the life of a cocaine addict is not sacred, since it has no value apart from what the addict himself places upon it. His life is merely his property, like his house or pocketwatch or his half-empty bottle of soda, which he can burn or smash or throw into the nearest trash the moment the possession of it is no longer is pleasing or valuable to him.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
