In a recent court decision, conservative commentator Andrew Bolt was found guilty of breaching the Racial Vilification Act (Eatock vs. Bolt, see http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2011/1103.html ).

From the classical liberal perspective, the good intentions behind the Racial Vilification Act do not justify the existence of the Act; Free Speech is an absolute right which is only bounded by fraud (for example, in the case of actual defamation) and coercion (i.e. making threats of violence or similar forms of extortion).

I am not a viewer of Andrew Bolt, although in full disclosure I did once send him an email which corrected a philosophical mistake of his; he accused Postmodernism of being Metaphysically Subjectivist (i.e. people’s minds literally remake reality). I believe that to be mistaken since Postmodernism is Epistemologically Subjectivist, typically on philosophical grounds derived from German Idealist thought. This has been my only interaction with his work in the past, and I know little about him. Although I was pleasantly surprised when reading his Wikipedia page that he’s an Agnostic rather than a religionist.

But the reason for this post is that I found a specific comment about the Bolt case interesting from the perspective of political philosophy.

Commentator Brian F. McCoy argued that the ultimate issue in the Bolt case wasn’t freedom of speech. He identified the core issue as “freedom of identity” (see http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=28512).

What a fascinating concept.

“Identity” in the context of the case was referring to social identity or the groups with which one identifies.

The following article is not so much a deliberate argumentative essay per se. Rather, it is a set of commentary on a series of interconnected issues raised by the Bolt affair. In it, I will cover epistemological and philosophical considerations relating to the concept of “social identity” and I will also discuss the various analytical frameworks and assumptions that are used when dealing with the concept. Ultimately I will launch into a discussion of Brian McCoy’s “freedom of identity.”

First, let’s review the basic facts. Bolt published several articles which dealt with the subject of various individuals with mixed ethnic heritage (which in all cases included Indigenous Australian heritage) choosing to socially identify as Aboriginal.

As a hypothetical example, let’s assume someone has one English grandparent, one Japanese grandparent, one Indigenous American grandparent and one Saudi Arabian grandparent. This would make their ethnic heritage 1/4 each way. Let’s assume this person, in spite of this genealogical fact, identifies most closely as an Arab and participates in the cultures and traditions of this group (for instance, this person is most likely to be a Muslim).

Now, many readers of this blog may ask: “Why that specific portion of your ethnic background? Why not this portion? Why not these other two portions? Or why not identify partially with each?” But the purpose of this article isn’t to assess these claims but rather analyze how they are being discussed.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to ethnic identification. It exists quite heavily in other areas, such as sexual identity. Let’s take a real life example; horror and dark fantasy author Clive Barker (who, incidentally, wrote and directed one of my favorite films of all time, the original Hellraiser). Barker socially identifies as a gay man and is married to another man, however he has freely stated that he has had girlfriends before and cannot rule out ever having another one.

If by “gay” one means “sexually attracted exclusively to members of the same sex and not attracted to any members of the opposite sex” then Barker is technically not gay; on the Kinsey Scale he’d be rated either a 4 or 5 and hence be a predominantly-but-not-exclusively-same-sex-oriented bisexual.

Speaking of Alfred Kinsey, he argued that the actual sexual conduct of most people was not exclusively heterosexual but rather predominantly-heterosexual bisexual (this category included Kinsey himself), these days referred to as “heteroflexible.” Even if we are to bring a healthy skepticism towards Kinsey’s statistics, there seems to be an inevitable conclusion that a substantial number of people that socially identify as heterosexual aren’t exclusively heterosexual.

In other words, there are many areas in people’s lives where a “gap” exists between their social identity and the actual facts of their nature.

This isn’t necessarily a bad or malevolent thing; as I’ll explain further along, social identities are concepts or abstractions which tend to gather lots of varying connotations and notions which all get filed under the same label. Additionally, even “harder” concepts like ethnic heritage are simplified during the process of abstraction, causing a loss of information. Finally, the process of abstraction is one of compare-and-contrast, which means how something is defined within a specific context will be influenced by the other things around it within that same context.

Epistemology 101 – In An Article Written By Me, You Knew This Was Coming
And so we commence a detour into the delicious happyland of the Problem of Universals (yes, I know, another Randian trope, the dead horse has been flogged again and again, groan).

Yes, this is actually relevant! Social identities are universal nouns/adjectives; basically they are words denoting categories which we put multiple concrete things into. “Dog” and “Cat” are universal nouns. For that matter, so are ethnic descriptors.

Let’s take, for example, a series of tribes in some area of land. In coming up with their concept of ethnicity, they simply compare and contrast their own tribes against other tribes.

Then in come some foreigners that look so vastly different to the members of ALL the tribes (different facial structures, skin tones, etcetera).

Let’s assume these foreigners are from a seafaring people that love exploring different places. To them, all the tribes of this new land look the same without careful study, and so said foreigners subsume all the tribal ethnic categories under one descriptor.

At the same time, the tribesfolk are likely to notice that, when contrasted against such very different people, all the different tribes which used to look remarkably different now have more in common with each other than previously thought.

What we have here is people performing the process of abstraction from different contexts. The seafaring people have a wider context than the tribespeople because they’ve seen a wider variety of types of peoples, however as a result they use much more coarsely-grained classification systems. In other words, their categories are more abstract; they omit more ‘inessential’ information and thus embrace wider groups, but at the same time the categories are more general and less nuanced and brush over factors like inter-tribal conflict which would necessitate less abstract and more finely-grained classification.

In other words, whilst entities are naturally differentiated from each other, they are only experienced as entities of a specific type when an observer performs a process of abstraction where the observer compares and contrasts entites with each other and is thus able to comparatively measure “clusters” of relative similarity vs. relative difference. From this, the observer actively categorizes entities. This means that “essence” is not a metaphysical matter as both Plato and Aristotle believed (although their own arguments for essentialism do differ from each other) but is rather an epistemological and contextual matter.

For more info, see Ray, C (1998), Identity and Universals: a Conceptualist Approach, Electronically published by Enlightenment, http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/carolynray/diss/

This approach to the Problem of Universals is called “Empirical Conceptualism” and essentially argues that Universals are mind-dependent abstractions formed by sensory measurement of empirical data (this approach contrasts with Platonic Essentialism (or Platonic Realism or Transcendental Realism), Aristotelian Essentialism (or Aristotelian Realism or Moderate Realism), Rationalist Conceptualism, and Nominalism).

Race And Universals, or “Make The Damn Philosophy Stop Already!”
Let’s put these philosophical abstractions into the real world. How does the manner in which one deals with concepts of ethnicity change how one approaches these issues (yes, I promise, this actually sheds light on the Bolt case!)?

The approach I outlined in the preceeding section is the Empirical Conceptualist way to approach ethnicity as a concept. But how do each of the other approaches work?

Let’s start by trashing Plato (where else?). Platonic realism treats ethnicity as a form above and beyond this world and above and beyond all the people that are said to have this ethnicity. Objects in this world try to “participate in the form of” their relevant form, and the closer they come to it the “better” they are at being that kind of object (i.e. a good sword is a sword that is very competent at participating in the form of the sword).

So let’s apply this theory to ethnicity. As stated above, in order to be X, one must be good at doing X-ness… to act in manner X-way is to “participate in the form of X-ness” and thus shore up one’s identity. Now, to most people (including me) this theory sounds completely ridiculous; “Plato must’ve been contemplating the form of acid when coming up with this idea!” But people actually handle many abstractions as if they were Platonic.

Let’s take the concept “real man.” In order to not just be male but rather a “real man” one must perform certain actions, have X physical characteristics and express them in Y manner, and any failure to reach these goals and continuously prove one’s capability of reaching them is punished with social emasculation and some level of moral condemnation. This is textbook Platonism (ironic how by “real man” what people really mean is “ideal man” (by a specific definition of ‘ideal’)). Plato might have been high as a kite but a relatively common concept is handled in a Platonic manner.

In the issue of race, let’s look at a phenomenon within parts of the African-American community. In parts of this community, there is a concept called “acting white” or “oreo” (named after the popular cookie; the symbolism should be obvious (“black on the outside, white on the inside”)). To quote George Mason University Economist and commentator on African-American issues Walter E. Williams, “A black student who speaks well, carries books and studies can be accused of “acting white” and find himself shunned and assaulted by other students” (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/walter-williams/2912-black-opportunity-destruction ).

Williams is of course accused of being an “oreo” himself, but that’s besides the point. According to the concept of “acting white,” any attempt to improve one’s position that doesn’t involve the culturally-accepted career choices of what is considered to be “proper black culture” is treason, race-betrayal, and repudiation of what one is.

Thus, one’s identity is a function of acting in a specific manner; failure to do so is to place one’s identity outside the category and to in essence commit an immoral act (or to “go against nature”). This is again textbook Platonism; it depends on an eternal form of “proper” black culture to which everyone’s adherence must be evaluated and policed.

Next, we move onto trashing Aristotelian Realism. Aristotelian Realism believes that within every member of the category X, there is a real substance called the “essence of X-ness” which is responsible for each member of X belonging to the category.

In some respects, Aristotelian Realism is more benevolent than Platonic Realism because it lacks the built-in normativity of Plato’s approach. But it would be a mistake to think Aristotelian Realism as right, and this idea has indeed been disastrous when linked to issues of race and ethnicity.

Specifically, much of the discrimination towards ethnic minorities that has happened in the 20th century West is in part a product of this attitude.

Aristotelian Realism makes ethnic grouping innate and thus inflexible and rigid. It is something substantial inside you.

In and of itself, this is the kind of attitude which would collapse into “keep to your own kind” policies (such as ethnic separatism, xenophobia and the like). But when the biological-determinist racial supremacists came around, the results were catastrophic.

Recasting an Aristotelian “essence” into a biological one, and reducing all human actions down to products of genes, biological essentialism cemented racial categories in stone (and policy) and denied free will. If it is accepted that we are just products of our genes and have no individual agency, then we end up back in the land of methodological collectivism.

The third ingredient to this caustic intellectual mixture was a distortion of the theory of Evolution. The theory is meant to be applied to individual organisms (after all, they are the engines of variation and replication, and they’re the beings that get selected out!), but the biological essentialism and determinism resulted in a methodologically collectivist focus on races as a whole, especially when the selection mechanism came about.

We all know where this led. Eugenics and the 1920′s American Progressives, the Holocaust (to an extent since the Nazi view of race contained Platonic/Mystical elements), mandatory sterilization programs, and to debated extents the Stolen Generation. There are plenty of others.

Contemporary Western commentary about race and ethnicity issues is ultimately an attempt to exorcize the above Biological Determinist/Racial Essentialist/False-Darwinist framework. Hence why suggestions about biological differences (even at the level of very broad, statistical generalities) between ethnic groups are often considered “politically incorrect” (since these hypotheses may be construed as racially essentialist and biologically determinist). Given the bloody history that these ideas have been behind, it isn’t surprising that people want to keep these ideas buried at any cost (even if that cost happens to be the rights to free speech or freedom of conscience).

But what did the Essentialist frameworks get replaced with?

Social Constructivism, Baby!
Modern discourse about race has typically been the province of those that describe themselves as leftists. Whilst this term is slippery to define, I believe it is fair to say that leftists in general are strong proponents of methodological collectivism in the social sciences.

This is a rejection of the Enlightenment position of methodological individualism (upon which the Classical Liberal/Libertarian tradition is based).

With biological determinism, and all forms of epistemic essentialism, generally out of fasion, the left began to embrace a social constructivist view on race and ethnicity.

This is not surprising; various forms of social constructivism have always been prominent in leftist thought. Marxism for one advocated for a form of social constructivism centered around economic factors. Marxism also lacks any explicit endorsement of epistemic essentialism (although I’d argue the strict dichotomy between capital goods and non-capital goods requires some sort of essentialism to back it up, but I digress), arguing that even ideas are just products of relationships to the means of production.

Some important caveats: 1) I am not alleging that all racial discourse is Marxist; merely that there are some similarities between Marxist methodology and the methodology with which a lot of analysis of racial issues is carried out (more about that later), and 2) social constructivism is not an exclusively or inherently leftist idea, it is merely an idea that shows up in a lot of leftist thought.

Going back to Universals, the new discourse on race and ethnicity rejected essentialism of both kinds. Instead, it embraced a Nominalist position on ethnicity, which basically said that ethnic labels were just words with no necessary connection to empirical reality.

At first thought, it is ironic that the side of the debate that reduces ethnicity labels to “just words” would want to ban the words of Andrew Bolt.

But as stated before, the left have a strong attachment to methodological collectivism. This meant that there HAD to be some meanings in these “meaningless” ethnicity labels; their suite of analytical tools could only cope with collectives but they had to reject essentialism. How could they have their methodological collectivism whilst rejecting essentialism?

This is what social constructivism allowed. Now, it should be again restated that social constructivism is not inherently leftist or collectivist. Social constructivism can in fact be individualist (Ayn Rand, who was anything but a collectivist, accepted the proposition that some things were indeed socially constructed; she used the term “the man-made” and distinguished it from “the metaphysically given” to illustrate this point).

But the specific kind of social constructivism which was embraced managed to remain methodologically collectivist by treating individuals themselves, and the contents of their minds, as social constructs (just like Marxism but through a different means). It denies or severely limits the abilities of individuals to think for themselves, critically analyze ideas, or even shape their own identities. The meanings of the “meaningless” ethnicity labels became whatever subjective meanings were invested in those labels, and it is those subjective meanings which construct the identities of individuals.

Go Fouc Yourself
Probably the most influential thinker in this like of thought is French postmodernist Michel Foucault. Foucault himself was anti-Marxist and has inspired libertarians as well as leftists (see Dr. Thomas Szasz for an example), but his inspiration has mostly been towards the left.

Foucault was philosophically influenced by the German Idealist tradition (Kant/Hegel/Fichte/etc.) but took most strongly after Friederich Nietzsche. Where Nietzsche made a case for moral skepticism, Foucault broadened Nietzsche’s skepticism beyond the field of ethics.

Nietzsche’s argument in On The Genealogy of Morality was that morality is a product of a “Pathos of Distance.” In essence, people’s concept of “the good” is no more than a flattering self-portrait. “The good” is that which is “like us” and that which is not like us (i.e. “the other”) becomes the bad.

In light of this, Nietzsche confronts a fact; the moral philosophies of some people tend towards praising certain kinds of virtues, and the moral philosophies of other people tend towards having very different codes of virtue. Some moral codes tend to celebrate strength, joy, conquest, achievement, wisdom, adventure and creation, whilst other moral codes tend to celebrate weakness, patience, faith, humility, turning the other cheek, obedience and believe that pain and suffering bring redemption. He calls the first code of values “Master Morality” because it was (according to him) practiced by successful civilizations that conquered other people. He calls the second code of values “Slave Morality” because it was practiced by those whom were conquered.

Nietzsche argues that, basically, when Civilization A conquers and dominates Civilization B, it makes sense that Civilization A will come to celebrate their conquest and revere themelves as strong and powerful and worthy of their triumphs. Civilization B, on the other hand, will have wounded pride and thus craft a morality which says THEY are the true nobles, that their overlords are drooling monsters on the side of evil, and that one day they will have their revenge on their oppressors when justice is restored.

Nietzsche and Focault both shared this idea that socially-accepted moral concepts are essentially products of oppression, but they saw things differently. To Nietzsche, remaking morality is a way that the powerless get revenge on the powerful, by inflicting guilt onto them, by making them feel guilty for (what Nietzsche believes to be) their nature, and by robbing their lives of spiritual joy and moral confidence.

Foucault, on the other hand, reverses this. For Foucault, socially-accepted morality is yet another way that the powerful keep the powerless down (this is a similar argument to that made by the Frankfurt School of Marxist Critical Theory, but without the economic reductionism). So what controls socially-accepted morality? What convinces people about what is good and what is bad?

In accordance with methodological collectivism, Foucault doesn’t let individual will or thought have a role. So what does? Foucault’s answer may surprise, but it is a similar answer to that given by the Frankfurt School. Foucault answers that the “texts of society” perform the process of moral indoctrination.

Music. Art. Fiction. Nonfiction. Language. Video Games. You name it; if its a form of communication, it counts as a text of society, and according to Foucault it is these texts which determine the prevailing beliefs about everything.

To quote individualist-anarchist-feminist Wendy McElroy, describing Foucault’s position: “The most important factor in defining the human body and sexuality are the texts that are written and spoken about them. As a way understanding this point, consider the Victorian epoch of repressed sexuality in the late nineteenth century. A common approach is to look at its plays and literature, the songs and newspapers — in other words the texts of Victorian society — and to conclude that the texts reflect a repressed, sexually – horrified culture. Foucault sees exactly the opposite. He believes that the society reflects the texts” (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/plugins/content/content.php?content.73 ).

In brief, life imitates art and thus, if you control the texts of society you can re-engineer the society. Caveat: it is actually debated how strong the claims made by Foucault himself were (some would argue he’s merely saying the texts are an influence), but Foucault’s followers clearly ramped up the severity of his claims to the levels McElroy identifies.

Political Correctness. Censorship. Speech Codes. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The Misandrist-Feminist War On Pornography. All of it stems ultimately from a belief that by controlling the texts of society (including language) you can perform social engineering by altering the content of individual minds. It is no surprise that it was a member of the Progressive Left, a child psychologist named Leland Yee, who was behind California’s failed legislative ban on selling violent video games to minors. Many of the left’s intellectual traditions, such as Foucauldianism, can justify censorship just as easily as the Christian tradition.

Ethnicity, Identity and Speech
This, ultimately, is why Andrew Bolt’s work was targeted; Bolt’s work generated social text which in turn would construct people’s concepts of Aboriginal social identity, including the concepts of Aboriginal social identity that are embraced by people of Aboriginal ethnic heritage (in whole or part). Bolt’s work had the potential to define/re-define “Aboriginal-ness.” In the Foucauldian view of things, this is power; the ability to remake what society accepts as truth. And being defined by your oppressors is the Foucauldian view of powerlessness. This is what Foucauldians mean by “power-knowledge,” by manipulating what is accepted as truth one can hold monumental influence. One need not be a member of a Nietzschean conqueror-race in order to hold power, one merely needs to be a convincing myth-maker.

In the interests of charity, this isn’t necessarily as weird a conclusion as one might think on first sight (and for the record, I do think the concept of “power-knowledge” has some value when the idea is employed in a methodologically individualist fashion). Take for instance the left-right political spectrum, which defines ideologies on a one-dimensional continuum where one side (allegedly) believes in social freedom but economic controls, and the other side (allegedly) believes in social controls but free markets. The ideology of Classical Liberalism is thus defined either as on the same side of the spectrum as Hitler (if it is grouped under the category of “right wing”) or it is defined out of existence. And the totalitarian variants of leftism are portrayed as the “opposite” of Hitler, even when this was anything but the case. And the mere structure of the spectrum suggests that there’s an inherent trade off between social freedoms and economic freedoms. As many libertarians ever since David Nolan have asked, Cui Bono?

And this kind of postmodernist argumentation doesn’t always result in attacks on free speech. Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine is a Postmodernist, albiet significantly less extreme than the followers of Foucault. Thomas Szasz, NYU Professor Emertius of Psychiatry, is a prominent libertarian thinker and was heavily influenced by Foucault’s analysis of psychiatry. Szasz’s book “The Myth of Mental Illness” argues that “Mental Illness” is merely Power-Knowledge; a semantically nonsensical category that exists purely to further the pretense that what really amount to personality quirks and/or problems with living are exactly the same as physical pathologies.

Irrespective of this, the Foucaldian methodology I am discussing (which is not used by either Gillespie or Szasz; both are consistent methodological individualists) clearly forms the theoretical framework under which laws like the Racial Vilification Act become favorable. Allowing people to engage in “hate speech” against various groups allows the hate-speakers to socially construct the concept (and hence the social identity) of the hated groups. This means that members of the Oppressor Class end up defining the very identity of the Oppressed Class, which in turn further oppresses the Oppressed Class even more.

The Bolt case is a clear example of this (according to the Foucauldian paradigm) – an Australian of European descent (i.e. member of the Oppressor Class) attempted to spark a discussion on what the proper criteria were for an “authentic” Aboriginal identity.

This brings us to an apparent paradox. The mainstream Foucauldian analytical framework is Nominalist and skeptical about knowledge as a whole and believes that concepts of social identity are basically subjective (and intersubjective) and need not have any relationship to reality. However, in a previous example I discussed the historically recent phenomenon by which some African-Americans employ a Platonic treatment of an “authentic” African-American identity (those African-Americans that don’t embrace the same ideals are called “oreos” and accused of race treachery). Why wouldn’t the Nominalist-Subjectivist-Foucauldian wing criticize the Platonists? I’d argue this again is a product of the taboo upon doing anything which might be perceived as a a member of the Oppressor Class trying to define the proper identity of members of the Oppressed Class. For a European Foucauldian to refrain from criticizing an African-American Platonist is seen as allowing the Oppressed Class to define their own social identity.

The Foucauldian paradigm may indeed reduce words to Roscelin’s “blowing of the voice,” but because subjective meaning is invested in these words they become (subjectively) meaningful. As such, according to this paradigm, those that control the construction of meanings behind the words will exert mind control over the people that use these words and label themselves with these words. Individuals and their beliefs will thus be socially constructed by the texts of society and thus individuals cease to have meaningful agency. Wordsmiths become mind-smiths.

Under this paradigm, acts of speech do become harmful; since people’s opinions of group X will be socially constructed by the definitions, connotations and other ideas linked to group X, any group of people that advance a proposition that “group X is bad” therefore encourages other people to dislike and eventually attack group X.

This is the reasoning behind “hate speech” laws, speech codes and “political correctness.” The reasoning is, quite literally, hate speech causes hate crimes.

Freedom Of Identity, Freedom Of Speech and Isiah Berlin
This long round trip brings us back to the interesting notion I found in Brian McCoy’s previously-mentioned blog post; “Freedom of Identity.”

Again, a very interesting and curious notion.

We already know that “Identity” here is being used to mean “Social Identity” or “how one labels oneself.” There are multiple kinds of social identity, from the ethnic/racial to the sexual to the subcultural and various other categories too. As stated back in the introduction, social identity isn’t necessarily a perfectly correct descriptor of the individual in question (for instance, Barack Obama socially identifies as black, but he has mixed ethnic heritage including both African and Caucasian ancestry). The reasons any specific individual embraces a specific social identity are likely to be numerous, complex and contextual; in short, if you want to know why X calls themselves Y, ask them.

So what does “Freedom of Social Identity” actually entail? What does it mean? What assumptions are behind it? And how can the speech of Andrew Bolt threaten it?

Let’s begin with the meaning of “freedom” or “liberty” in politics. Isiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty remains to this day the most informative work about the common meanings that “liberty” carries. Berlin argued that the Classical Liberal tradition defined “liberty” as what he called negative liberty. If one has the negative liberty to do X, this means that no individual, group thereof or institution (including the State) is allowed to start the use of violence, fraud or threats thereof against you in order to stop you from doing X. Taking this to its full conclusion would grant every individual the negative liberty to anything they wish as long as it does not involve starting the use of violence, fraud or threats thereof.

As such, a Freedom of Social Identity from a Classical Liberal/Libertarian perspective (i.e. when conceived of as a negative liberty) would imply that all individuals have the right to embrace any social identity they wish to, and no individual, institution or group can use violence, fraud or coercion to stop this. Others may still, however, attempt to use persuasion to convince people to adopt or reject any specific social identity and they may make whatever moral evaluations they wish (pro or con) about any other specific person’s social identity.

What Andrew Bolt said in his articles may have been tasteless and offensive race-baiting (according to some), or it may have been fair comment about whether or not some people have carefully calibrated their social identities to make it easier for them to rent-seek (according to others). Certainly it is fair to say (and Bolt has conceded that it is indeed the case) that there were some factual errors in the reporting he made. But did Bolt’s words deny anyone the negative liberty to social identity?

For an act of speech (which is by definition not an act of violence in and of itself) to violate the negative liberty of others, said act must constitute either coercion (i.e. threats/”fighting words”) or fraud (commercial deception, defamation). It is fair to say it didn’t constitute the former, but what about fraud?

I am no expert on defamation law, and many libertarian legal theorists are divided over the proper way to define and deal with defamation. I think that a clear-cut example of defamation that should be illegal would be a gossip magazine making knowingly false accusations about person X which can be reasonably expected to make most of the magazine’s readers instantly think person X is a horrible/evil/vile/depraved person (for example: “Celebrity X snorted meth from between the breasts of a crippled teenage prostitute, and didn’t even leave a tip”). But in real life, defamation cases are rarely this clear-cut and I absolutely concede I don’t have sufficient experience with the topic to propose a libertarian approach to defamation. That said, I will say that I think at least some kind of defamation law is a consequence of the prohibition of fraud and thus is consistent with the Classical Liberal tradition (I’d say the same about privacy laws; private property and rights to consensual sex upon said property as well as the notion that the matter of abortion is between a woman and her obstetrician are all logically dependent on the existence of a sphere of privacy).

Irrespective of the position on defamation laws, the Bolt case wasn’t handled under defamation laws. Rather, it was handled under the Racial Discrimination Act. I’m tempted to suggest that perhaps the standard of proof for defamation was much harder to reach than the standard of proof under the RDA. According to the summary of the case (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2011/1103.html ), the claimant needed to establish that “it was reasonably likely that fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the conduct” as well as “that the conduct was done by Mr Bolt and the Herald & Weekly Times, including because of the race, colour or ethnic origin of fair-skinned Aboriginal people.” As I am not sufficiently familiar with defamation laws, I am not sure how the Australian standard for defamation compares to the standard of the RDA, but since a legal representative would attempt to make the best case possible for their client, it makes intuitive sense to assume the representative believed that the client’s best chances were served by appealling to the RDA rather than defamation law. And even then, would the best possible defamation case against Bolt pass an hypothetical Classical Liberal defamation law? This is yet another question entirely.

I lack the required legal expertise to make a definitive judgment here. Suffice it to say, whilst I do not believe it to be a priori impossible that a reasonable case could potentially be mounted that Bolt’s articles may have infringed the negative liberty of certain people to a specific social identity (although in order to do this, they’d have to pass a hypothetical standard of defamation that’s compatible with Classical Liberalism), I am extremely skeptical that such a case could be convincing.

But there is a second concept of liberty; one which poses a far lower burden of proof upon those that believe Bolt violated people’s Freedom of Identity.

Isiah Berlin referred to this second concept of liberty as “positive liberty.” If one has the positive liberty to do X, this means that you have an entitlement to the ability to perform X; if circumstances of any kind render you unable to perform X, then this imposes an obligation upon other individuals (or groups thereof, or institutions) to enable you to perform X. For instance, if you have a positive liberty to medical care, this implies that if you cannot get medical care (can’t afford it, or don’t have nearby doctors, etc) then other people will become obliged to enable you to get it.

For practical purposes, positive liberty generally requires the State; whilst voluntary charity can quite clearly enable many people, voluntary charity lacks an enforcement mechanism to make people respect their obligation to enable those that lack the positive liberties they are entitled to. This is a massive departure from the Classical Liberal tradition, which sees the State (and the power of violence that it wields) as the primary threat to freedom; the idea of positive liberty recasts the State as a liberator. Positive liberty also forces some people to perform some specific actions (in order to enable others), whereas negative liberty merely prohibits some specific actions against others.

So if we are to talk about “Freedom of (Social) Identity,” what would this imply if we were to characterize this specific liberty as a positive liberty?

An example may be instructive. Let’s take the following hypothetical; a young woman growing up in a small religious country town discovers over time that her sexual desires are exclusively for other women and she never experiences sexual desire for any men. Her family are fundamentalist evangelical Christians that believe to engage in any homosexual act is an abomination in the eyes of God and if committed even once then the people involved are inevitably damned to hell for eternal spit-roasting, eye-gouging and fingernails-being-ripped-out-with-red-hot-pliers.

Let’s also assume (for the purposes of the argument) that the most sacred tenet in this faith group is a belief in absolute nonviolence, either directly or through the political process, even against the most heinous of sinners. Let’s also assume that the people in this country town are actually consistent with their own beliefs (especially on this matter).

This would mean that our young woman would indeed have the negative liberty to embrace a Lesbian sexual identity. No individual or institution in this town would stop her from coming out, labelling herself “Lesbian” and acting accordingly. Her family would probably abandon her and she’d be considered a moral monstrosity, but by a strictly negative definition of liberty she does still have Freedom of Identity.

Caveat: My hypothetical “NIOF Fundies” example depends on two things, 1) that threats of eternal torture in hell, to a religious person brainwashed with these beliefs all their lives, would not constitute coercion (personally, I’m inclined to think this MIGHT have a status approaching a credible threat to the people that are threatened, but if I were to accept this I’d essentially be arguing a large number of Christian churches are initiating coercion on their own followers and this belief has some scary consequences for issues like freedom of conscience and freedom of religion… I’d really like to hear from anyone here that has been raised in the Fundy tradition what they’d think about this topic), and 2) that disinheriting children is not fraud (and I basically agree that disinheriting children is not fraud, but anyone that wishes to bring an argument against this is welcome to do so).

But whilst this hypothetical young woman clearly has the negative liberty version of Freedom of Identity, she clearly lacks the positive liberty version. Her environment around her isn’t going to enable her to embrace a Lesbian identity (or, for that matter, any other kind of nontraditional sexual identity label should she prefer). Indeed her social environment and the institutions within it strongly discourage her from doing such a thing. People at school talk about “evil people that go to hell for being queer” and describe San Francisco as “New Sodom.” The local school board has banned any discussion in sex ed classes of any sexuality besides lights-out-missionary-position-heterosexual-reproduction-within-monogamous-marriage. And every Sunday she goes along to Church (she doesn’t want to raise suspicions) and gets told over and over again that if she even thinks about having sex with a woman, she’ll go to hell and be sewn into a Human Centipede. Probably between two men too, since Hell apparently likes ironic punishments.

Hence, negative Freedom of Identity without positive Freedom of Identity.

Dispensing with hyperbolic hypotheticals; a positive liberty to social identity is to have an environment which enables you to openly embrace a social identity. This goes beyond stopping anyone from beating you up/killing you/stealing your lunch money/etc. for your social identity, because there are more factors than violence which prevent you from openly embracing said identity.

For instance, if nasty comments about the group you identified with are made on a regular basis, that would make it less easy to openly embrace that identity.

Multiculturalism (actual ideological multiculturalism, not the casual use of the term) strongly emphasizes this idea of a positive liberty to embrace one’s own culture. According to Multiculturalism’s theoretical foundations (which I strongly disagree with), people are socially constructed by their culture (to the point where they don’t have a self independently of their culture; their culture is constitutive of their selves) and are thus happiest when with their own authentic culture. As a result, human happiness requires the positive liberty to live according to one’s own authentic culture. This, naturally, is much easier to do in the presence of multicultural festivals and the absence of hate speech.

It should be noted that there ARE ways to provide positive liberties through non-statist and voluntary means, so we libertarians shouldn’t immediately assume that ANY desire to increase positive liberties is automatically a Statist plot to destroy free market classical liberalism. But I believe, after all of the above has been taken into account, it is clear that Brian McCoy’s concept of “Freedom of Identity” is that of a positive liberty.

Except in cases of legitimate defamation (which constitutes fraud), words cannot restrict the negative liberty of people to embrace a specific social identity. Even mean, hateful abuse can only impact the positive liberty an individual experiences.

But into this worldview, let’s introduce the Foucauldian Social-Constructivist paradigm. In this paradigm, social identity is malleable and up-for-grabs but generally the ideas are controlled by socially dominant classes and used to oppress and further secure dominion over everyone that falls outside the dominant group. The only way to end this is to prevent the Oppressor class from being able to criticize or discuss any elements of the social identities of groups other than their own; the Oppressed group must be the only permitted participants in the discourse surrounding their social identity. Since all individuals are just social constructs determined by prevailing trends in discourse, words become weapons and tools of social control.

This results in a stunning conclusion; that if you accept the Foucauldian, methodologically collectivist, Social-Constructivist “discourse of domination” model, then Freedom of Speech in the Classical Liberal meaning of the term (as a negative liberty) becomes the greatest possible threat to the positive liberty version of Freedom of Identity. By letting all people, including those of the Oppressor Classes, speak freely about concepts of social identities including those of Oppressed Classes, you drown out the voices of the Oppressed and allow the Oppressors to redefine and reconstruct them. According to this worldview, to promote free speech as the solution to intolerant bigotry (e.g. the belief that “the solution to bad speech is more speech”) is to allow the fox to guard the hen-house.

Positive Freedom of Identity: For Whom?
One of the many appealling things about negative liberties is that they are founded on human equality. They always apply to all human beings at all times, and always impose the same level of obligations independent of situation. The outer limits of negative liberty are established by the Equal Freedom Principle; another indication of the fact that Classical Liberalism is truly egalitarian in the proper sense, irrespective of what the haters of freedom allege. Classical Liberalism enshrines equal treatment under law for all people and hence rejects the patronage systems of the past.

Positive liberties, by definition, cannot be spread so equally. They always have to be targeted towards specific groups, even if the group is “those that need to be enabled.” Part of the reason for this is that positive liberties are about providing means to allow people to reach specific ends; as basic economics says, our total means are limited and need to be prioritized. This also sheds light on another unpleasant fact about positive liberties; by definition they must infringe upon negative liberties because they legitimize forcing other people to act in a certain way (in order to enable others).

A significant problem with the idea of a positive liberty to social identity is that it won’t be spread equally. There are so many potential social identities of many different kinds. Not only that but people can easily adopt mixtures and hybrids of various social identities. For instance, the “Metrosexual” was an heterosexual male that adopted various elements of (what was labelled at the time) “gay culture.” And then we have the fact people can adopt multiple social identities in their lives depending on context. As Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain The Declaration of Independents (see Chapter 7), we are always producing and hybridizing and renovating and replacing social identities. Old “quaint little categories” of self-identification become redundant overnight. This pesky little fact, that it is individuals that construct their own social identities, is precisely what Foucauldian analysis denies.

In short, there will probably be more social groups in this world by the time you reach the end of this essay than there were when you started reading.

So, with all these new social identity groups springing up out of the ground, and only a limited amount of means to allocate towards the goals of allowing people to embrace their social identities, we are left with a question: to which social identities do we give positive liberty?

After all, every dollar spent on a Gay-Straight Alliance is a dollar that could have been spent on an Anti-Racism lecture. Or it could have subsidized a concert of a specific ethnic group’s traditional music. Or we could give it to the Emos, maybe it will cheer them up.

The answer is, like far too many answers, determined by the political process.

When politicians divide up the pie, they’re naturally thinking about doing something which will make their constituents happy, preferably happy enough to re-elect them so they can keep enjoying long liquid lunches at taxpayer expense.

Is it really a surprise that the more politically influential a particular social identity lobby group is, the more funding for positive liberty goes toward that particular social identity?

“Freedom of Identity” in a positive sense really only refers to additional positive liberty to embrace certain identities, typically identities with well-connected lobbyists. It is certainly becoming easier to embrace Aboriginal Australian heritage, as well as a Gay or Lesbian sexual identity, and in the United States it is getting progressively easier for African-Americans to embrace a notion of “authentic” black culture (note that none of this disproves or discredits the basic political causes here).

But in today’s world there are a hell of a lot more varying social identities to pick from.

In some respects, it may be an ironic unintended consequence of postmodernism; fear of having another person define your own individual identity (and thus control and limit you) has made people more eager to explore and create new identities. People have been self-deconstructing and self-reconstructing their own social identities for decades, in some respects outdoing the postmodernists at their own game. The followers of Foucault may insist on methodological collectivism, but actual people on the ground aren’t buying it. They’re customizing their own social identity every day, breaking down traditional norms, cliches and categories.

So again, why are some social identities deserving of positive liberty and some not?

It would be fair to say that it is harder to openly embrace some social identities than others, because some identities do receive discrimination of various kinds. It is easier to embrace being heterosexual than it is to embrace being homosexual. It is easier to reclaim and identify with one’s French ancestry than one’s Arab ancestry. But on the other hand, it isn’t necessarily fair to say that the positive liberty granted towards any specific identity is in all cases proportional to how much that identity gets discriminated against by the ignorant in society. Walter Williams again talks about how some Asian-Americans have experienced racism at the hands of some African-Americans (http://www.lewrockwell.com/williams-w/w-williams44.html ).

But in general, Asian-American groups don’t have the same level of organized lobbying, the same level of intellectual backing by the identity-politics-obsessed Academy, the same number of famous entertainers that can donate to political candidates, or the same (general) level of general willingness to engage heavily in politics.

Whether you like it or not, the level of positive liberty given to enable people to embrace any specific social identity is determined by the politicial system and thus is dependent on social identity groups willing to lobby and thus participate in the politicial system.

This creates an ironic result. The political system is by its nature built around creating broad-based coalitions that can dependably muster voting blocs in order to win elections. This means that certain favored social identities and their lobby groups have an incentive to maintain the stability of that identity, to strictly define that identity and to strongly insociate people into that identity. After all, if their ability to get State largesse is a product of how well they can turn out voters, then they’d better get a well-defined voting bloc under their control as quickly as possible.

In other words, the political distribution of positive Freedom Of Identity will inevitably create a situation where specific social identity groups will play the “us vs. them” game, seeking to ensure the loyalty of their voting bloc. It is in their interests to make individuals define themselves by the “officially sanctioned” version of the group’s preferred social identity and to prevent individuals from constructing their own social identities. This in turn will (over the long run) detract from individual’s positive liberty to construct their own social identity.

This is one reason why so many social identity groups will police the behavior of their members to make sure they’re embracing that social identity in the “proper” way; the example of educated black people being called “oreos” is one example. Another example is when exclusively same-sex-attracted men who prefer to embrace a relatively traditionally masculine appearance and demeanour are accused of being insufficiently gay, or guilty of “internalized homophobia.” And in both of these identity groups, it is a major social transgression to not support mainstream center-left and/or Progressive politicians.

And whilst it is fair to say that some social identities are being progressively more accepted over time, this certainly doesn’t happen with all social identities. Some social identities remain pathologized and stigmatized, if not by the State than by many people in society. But at times, hysteria over a specific social identity can easily spill over into State discrimination and we get the phenomenon known as the “moral panic.”

The moral panic over certain social identities tends to be confined to those identities embraced by youth; this is because many young people can’t vote and also because it caters to the protective urges of adults in the polity (to the political mind, this means “no potential loss, all potential gain”). Let’s take the example of the moral panic that happened in the wake of the Columbine massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were members of a goth-esque clique; the “trench-coat mafia.” Apparently, Columbine high school was an identity politics breeding ground; there was a very strictly defined clique structure which included very specific dress codes (the “Jock” clique all wore white baseball caps) and, inevitably, cliques setting up heirarchies within their own clique and amongst all other cliques.

After the actual shooting, politicians moved in to capitalize. Conservatives blamed the lack of prayer in schools. So-called “Liberals” blamed lack of gun control. Both sides, however, happily blamed “goth culture,” with Tipper Gore’s campaign for music censorship getting a massive boon in the process. Evangelical ministries began to target goths, too, as high priority targets for salvation.

An interesting point to note is that the mainstream media, the “texts of society” at the time, all began spelling out critiques of (what they believed to be) “goth” culture. Don’t expect any analysis of the historical-artistic roots of goth music or anything, because it was far easier for the media and politicians to just Blame Marilyn Manson (whom the actual Columbine shooters didn’t even listen to in the first place; they were fans of KMFDM!).

If Foucauldian-esque identity politics had any actual resemblance to reality, you’d expect that having the MSM relentlessly define “goth” and hand the label out to anyone that wore a trenchcoat would in fact substantially alter the goth subculture. It didn’t, and Marilyn Manson didn’t suddenly become a goth act due to being labelled one.

But irrespective of this, the result of Columbine wasn’t an increase in tolerance or anyone being concerned about whether systemic inter-class oppression was responsible for diminishing the positive liberty of high school students to embrace a gothic social identity (which at least on its face sounds like a properly Foucauldian-type concern). Rather, the result was a crackdown on the liberties (both positive and negative) of pretty much everyone (even adults in a few cases) to embrace a gothic social identity. Colors like black even got banned, because obstensibly they were “gang paraphernalia” and showing up in a trenchcoat was basically an invitation to be cavity searched. An increase in the social stigma of such an identity was the natural result.

Thankfully, the moral panic over Columbine has completely run its course. But the overall point here is that any concept of a “positive Freedom of Social Identity” will inevitably create a situation of lobbying pressure groups and thus favor more politically expedient social identities, will unavoidably create incentives towards social identity groups favoring group loyalty and conformity and thus impede the positive liberty of individuals to construct their own social identity, and will only be used in a discriminatory fashion to promote some specific social identities.

Summary And Conclusion (Yes, Finally!)
The Bolt case caused a lot of commentator’s ink to be spilled. Social identity is anything but a simple matter, and is analyzed in many different ways. The proper methodology to unpack such inherently fuzzy and partly intersubjective concepts will always be a subject of intense academic debate.

Concepts of Race and Ethnicity are especially difficult to deal with since they’re heavily emotionally charged, delicate issues, and many in the West are justifiably afraid of falling into the Biological Determinism/Essentialism (derived from Aristotelian Essentialism) approach that characterized racial-ethnic discourse during the past and was used to justify horrors like State-backed Eugenics, biological social engineering, the Holocaust and plenty of other horrors.

But this Biological Determinism/Essentialism paradigm was replaced not with the Methodological Individualism of Martin Luther King Jr, but with a Social Constructivist/Determinist/Foucauldian paradigm which treats individuals as social constructs that manipulate social discourse to entrench power of their groups over other groups. This paradigm may be nominalist and subjectivist, but is no less methodologically collectivist than the Biological Determinist/Essentialist paradigm that has been rejected.

Because this Social Constructivist/Determinist/Foucauldian paradigm treats language as a tool of social control/engineering, it is inherently hostile to Freedom of Speech; to allow a member of the dominant group the right to make commentary on the social identities of oppressed groups is to allow the foundation of oppression to remain in place. Thus, laws like the specific section of the Racial Discrimination Act which Bolt was found guilty of breaching, are justified under this framework and “Freedom of Identity” becomes more important than “Freedom of Speech.”

“Freedom of Identity” as used in Brian McCoy’s article is almost certain to be meant as a positive liberty. Under the prevailing Social Constructivist/Determinist/Foucauldian framework, Bolt’s articles clearly infringe on the positive liberty of Australians of partly-Aboriginal mixed heritage to embrace an Aboriginal social identity.

But a positive liberty to social identity brings along many problems; for one, it will inevitably be a positive liberty to some specific social identities, typically ones that have skilled lobbyists and pressure groups speaking on their behalf and aren’t the subject of moral panic. As such, favored social identities will be those that provide good voting blocs. This creates a political-economic incentive for these social identities to police in-group behavior and to make sure people stick with the group (especially in political matters) which in turn circumvents the positive liberty of individuals to craft their own individualized social identity.

This article has not been a comprehensive analysis of the Bolt case itself. Rather, it is a series of interconnected reflections; “food for thought” on a group of interconnected issues raised by the case. Naturally, I do not accept the idea that people should have a state-provided positive right of Freedom of Identity. But the notion does make an interesting subject of discussion.

That agonized screaming you hear inside your head after reading the linked paragraph is a trillion neurons shrieking in pain.

Okay, let’s look at the entire lynchpin of the case made in the linked article:

“The idea of promoting oneself at the expense of others, advocated by Rand, is consistent with taking advantage of whatever support one is able to get from the government in this process.”

The error in the quote is “advocated by Rand.”

Anyone that has actually read Rand knows that Rand emphatically rejected self-advancement at the expense of others. She believed that one should neither sacrifice themselves to others nor others to themselves.

This isn’t some subtle point squirreled away in a footnote. She states it repeatedly in “The Virtue of Selfishness” and reiterates it repeatedly in her fiction.

“The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value” (The Objectivist Ethics, p31 in VOS).

“Altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice” (Introduction, p ix in VOS).

“The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin” (Introduction, p ix in VOS, emphasis mine).

“The egoist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men” (from Roark’s Speech, The Fountainhead, emphasis mine).

So how on earth can someone actually make accusations as utterly, monstrously boneheadedly false as alleging that Rand advocated “promoting oneself at the expense of others?”

Rand’s repeated explicit rejection of doing this makes an honest misreading simply impossible. There are only two alternatives:
1) He didn’t do any research at all, and/or just recycled what he has heard other people say about Rand. This makes him an idiot and a second-hander that won’t even bother to read what she actually said.
or
2) He knows that what he’s saying is false, but he’s more than happy to lie. Which makes him intellectually dishonest, an evader, and a lying liar that lies.

Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine posts a fantastic response here: (http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/14/ayn-rand-defender-of-corporate-welfare) and (quite correctly) describes the linked comment as being “head-smackingly clueless.”

I’m tempted to suggest that Sullum, by calling the comment “clueless” rather than “offensive, misleading, and a clear attempt to defame Objectivism,” is being excessively charitable.

I wish to make my own proposal. At risk of Yet Another Objectivist Cliche, I’m going to indulge in some trichotomic analysis and suggest that libertarians can be divided into three basic kinds.

I am dividing libertarians on the basis of three different broad lines in libertarian argumentation. All three kinds of argument have overlap with each other, so by no means is this system perfect, but I believe it has some use.

In essence, my scheme divides libertarians on the basis of which argument for liberty they most strongly emphasize. Whilst libertarian thought is very diverse and rife with internal disagreements, I think it would be fair to describe it as having three underlying “currents” that dominate the discourse.

1) The Argument from Natural Rights (“Radical Libertarianism”)
This argument proposes that because of human nature, people can be said to possess a natural right of self-sovereignty (also known as self-ownership). As such, it is wrong for any individual to intrude on the self-sovereignty of any other individual.

This is the oldest argument for libertarianism and is generally credited to John Locke. Other thinkers associated with it are Ayn Rand as well as Murray Rothbard and the Rothbardian free-market anarchists. Religious libertarians will often be of this kind and argue for rights granted by God. The most famous statement of the Radical Libertarian argument is from the Declaration Of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

2) The Argument from Consequentialism (“Utilitarian Libertarianism”)
This argument proposes that liberty is good because it creates the most positive consequences for the widest number of people. As such, any curtailment to liberty will produce negative outcomes.

This is the second oldest argument for libertarianism and emerged most fully during the British Enlightenment. This argument tends to be associated primarily with Adam Smith and most pro-market economic analysis. Milton Friedman is probably the most famous modern proponent of this argument. Free market anarchists are typically Radicals, but David D. Friedman is an example of a Utilitarian free market anarchist.

3) The Argument from Anti-Utopianism (“Skeptical Libertarianism”)
This argument is the newest of the arguments for libertarianism and, whilst having historical roots in the British Enlightenment, emerged most fully as a counter to the dominance of Marxism during the early 20th Century. This historical context is crucial for understanding the argument, for this argument is principally a negative argument disputing any alternatives to libertarianism rather than a positive argument for liberty per se.

This argument proposes that totalitarianism is doomed to fail because it is invariably based on a rationalistic impulse to construct utopia out of a grand sociological theory; whilst this may look good on paper, it always fails in real life because human beings cannot be perfectly understood by theory.

Probably the first clue to this argument lies in the work of J.S. Mill. Whilst Mill was an Utilitarian, his case for liberty was dependent on the proposition that only each individual knows what will generate the most subjective utility for themselves. Therefore, the best results will be generated by letting individuals live their own lives and solve their own problems and pursue their own happiness.

This argument emerged fully during the Economic Calculation Debate, where Mises and Hayek argued that the price system collected subjective preferences of market participants and eventually produced prices which guided the efficient allocation of capital; in the absence of these prices (which, as Hayek stressed, were impossible to replicate because they were grounded in individual preferences (a kind of information which was tacit and essentially impossible to gauge without the use of a price system)) there could be no efficient allocation of capital.

Hayek consistently expanded this argument into an indictment of rationalistic, deterministic social theories like Marxism; he ultimately accused these theories of abusing human reason, divorcing it from reality, and underestimating its fallibility.

This line of thought has been expanded by many thinkers including the philosopher Karl Popper.

It needs to be emphasized that none of these arguments are mutually exclusive. The vast majority of libertarian thinkers have employed all three arguments at various occasions depending on context. It should also be stated that in many respects, these arguments tend to be logically compatible. For instance, Radicals can argue that evidence from the Utilitarian case substantiates their argument that human nature demands liberty; after all, the conditions under which any organism thrives are determined by the nature of the organism. J.S. Mill was an Utilitarian, but his emphasis on only individuals understanding what can bring their own happiness was a clear precursor to Hayek’s Skeptical critiques of attempts to design Utopia. And, whilst Radicals have often shown hostility to Skeptical libertarians (Rand and Rothbard’s attacks on Hayek, for instance), but the Skeptical libertarian indictment of rationalism shows the epistemological origins of totalitarianism and vindicates the empiricist roots of Radical Libertarianism. Additionally, by emphasizing how human reason is not suited to totalitarian societies, Skeptical Libertarianism only backs up the Radical Libertarian appeal to human nature as the basis of rights.

But typically, one of these arguments will be the focal point. One will be predominant and the others will be used as support (or in some cases, attacked as sham ‘pseudo-libertarianism’). One argument will be cited as the fundamental justification for liberty.

And it is on this basis that I divide libertarians up. They differ in amount of overlap with other categories (how frequently they employ non-primary arguments), and matters of degree with respect to political program, but a division on the basis of intellectual subspecies makes the most sense.

As for classifying myself, I am a Radical, but I acknowledge and respect both the Utilitarian and Skeptical cases. Unlike most Objectivists I actually think the Skeptical case is perfectly in accordance with the Objectivist argument since the Skeptical case targets Rationalism, which Objectivism considers intrinsicism.

So, where do you guys fit? And do you think this classification system has any use or is it just another useless set of quaint little categories?

I didn’t post the full review here because it is both rather lengthy and analyzes/discusses a lot of philosophical issues raised by the plot. Since most readers here are not Objectivists, my philosophical commentary is probably less interesting in aggregate to this blog’s general readership than the political-economic commentary I made.

Full review can be found at Objectivist Living, here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11126

All comments welcomed!

Ever since the announcement that Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant was planning to hold a children’s beauty pageant in Melbourne, plenty of Australian parents flocked to the latest and greatest Moral Panic. The pageant is now over, but the Moral Panic makes for interesting analysis.

As is depressingly typical in Australian politics, said parents (mostly affiliated with the group Pull The Pin) were not happy with merely privately boycotting the event or protesting it; they aim to make children’s beauty pageants illegal in Australia (see: http://www.pullthepin.com.au/). In other words, “I don’t like it, so There Outta Be A Law against it!”

The Pageant was going to feature Eden Wood; child Beauty Queen who was extensively featured, gyrating around in a pink sequinned Stripper Cowgirl outfit, on several Current Affairs shows. Eden cancelled; conflicts between Today Tonight and A Current Affair prevented her from attending.

As per usual, the Moral Panic over Universal Royalty’s event included every libertarian’s most loathed four-word logical fallacy; “think of the children!”

According to both Pull The Pin and Australians Against Child Beauty Pageants, these events harm the stars of the show. They harm the children they claim to be celebrating.

Pull The Pin’s petition for laws against child pageants (http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/pull-the-pin-on-beauty-pageants-for-children.html) reads as follows;

“We believe that child beauty pageants instil harmful messages in children (girls in particular as they make up the majority of participants), including that their looks are their currency.

We would like to see age restrictions applied (16+) so that the decision to compete against their peers in a beauty contest is made with full consent, and when their emotional maturity better enables them to fully comprehend and handle any negative self esteem impacts. We oppose the narrow gender messages child beauty pageants help perpetuate, doing nothing to improve the status of women in general, and encouraging ever younger games of ‘compare and despair’.”

In this article, I will make four basic arguments;
1) Fears of ‘child sexualization’ are clearly overblown,
2) Some anti-Pageant forces may be acting out of wounded pride rather than the interests of the children,
3) The Pageant critics make some very legitimate identifications of problems with child beauty pageants, but these problems are also found in children’s sports and no one is trying to ban them,
4) Finally, there seems to be a troubling undertone of xenophobia amongst anti-Pageant forces.

1. Sexualization, The Pedophile’s Veto, and Monkey-See-Monkey-Do-Kids
Both Pull The Pin and Australians Against Child Beauty Pageants also raise the specter of “sexualization.” PTP says “children should be allowed to be children without being adultified and/or sexualized” (http://www.facebook.com/pullthepinonpageants?sk=info) and AACBP brings up “research on the sexualisation of children” (http://www.facebook.com/AustraliansAgainstChildBeautyPageants#!/AustraliansAgainstChildBeautyPageants?sk=info).

Bringing up “sexualization” and “children” is a sure-fire way to provoke a Moral Panic. After all, you’re basically accusing the Pageant of either pedophilia or enabling pedophilia.

A desire to protect children from pedophilia is noble, but these campaigns produce not a shred of evidence for any link between child beauty pageants and actual pedophilia! Do these pageants create more kiddy-fiddlers? If not, why should we worry?

Video Games are the subject of a similar Moral Panic, with the argument against them being that they encourage psychotics. But it has been realized that restricting the freedom of completely sane people to engage in a fictional activity that harms nothing but pixels just to prevent the nutcases from going on rampages (and this assumes video games actually can influence people to do such a thing, which is a highly contestable proposition) generates a “maniac’s veto” on free speech.

Pull The Pin is essentially asking for a Pedophile’s Veto on child beauty pageants. They are arguing that because some twisted oily sexual deviant may be, somewhere, reaching for a tub of vaseline and a box of tissues upon viewing pictures of Eden Wood, we should make child beauty pageants illegal.

Should The Passion of the Christ have been banned just because some twisted sexual deviants may have, erm, ‘gone to war in the South Pacific’ over the scene where burly and butch Roman soldiers were whipping, flogging and caning Jesus (who himself was clad only in a loin-cloth)? I doubt Christopher Hitchens was the only person that believed the film to have a certain level of homoerotic subtext; he described the film as “a movie that relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism” and compared it to “the culture of blackshirt and brownshirt pseudomasculinity” for having “massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, an obsession with flogging and a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews” (http://www.slate.com/id/2096323/).

Some may counter the above example with the fact that homosexual sadomasochism, if consensual, is not a crime. They’d be correct (although the scene depicted in The Passion is clearly not consensual, and Universal Royalty’s beauty pageant did not depict any criminal acts whatsoever). Sex with a child is a crime (although it should be pointed out that the previous example of someone pleasuring themselves over a picture of Eden Wood, whilst stomach-churning, is not a criminal act; masturbation in a private place does not constitute a crime irrespective of the object of the masturbatory fantasy) because children cannot render informed consent.

Rape, however, is a crime. Lets take, for example, Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Should this film be banned just because, in some dingy basement somewhere, someone is enjoying a graphic sexual fantasy of forcing copulation upon Ariel at gunpoint? What about Little Red Riding Hood; Red’s underage and I’m sure someone out there has fantasized about being the Wolf and saying “all the better to screw you with, my dear!” Should we ban any real life event with any person involved just because someone out there might be sexually fantasizing about raping one of the involved people? I’m sure most of the Australian Olympic team have been the objects of rape fantasies before; lets withdraw from the Olympics! Its the only way to stop rape!

The anti-Pageant forces have argued a position far stronger than “depicting pedophilia will generate pedophilia.” They’ve argued that “presenting a young girl in stereotypically ‘adult’ kinds of appearances will generate pedophilia.” This is a far flimsier hypothesis than, say, “depicting murder in a video game will make more people want to commit murder” or “depicting a fictional rape in pornography will make more people want to commit rape.” The latter hypotheses are variants on “monkey see, monkey do,” the anti-Pageant hypothesis is that merely a potential suggestion of a pre-turn girl as ‘a young woman’ will turn monkey into a raging rabid pedophile.

But even the “monkey see, monkey do” hypotheses are empirically false. Crime (including violent crimes and sex crimes such as rape) in the US peaked in the early 90′s and began to fall as internet market penetration (i.e. porn avaliability) and violent videogame avaliability began to rise (http://reason.com/blog/2011/04/13/do-video-games-hone-players-ki)(http://reason.com/archives/2005/06/29/video-violence-real-violence). This is the exact opposite situation to that which would be predicted by the “monkey see, monkey do” theory. Indeed, what it indicates is that porn and violent video games function as substitute goods for the real thing by creating a Catharsis; instead of shooting your teacher in the head and/or raping them, you play a Half-Life 2 mod where you shoot a naked image of your teacher and then ‘teabag’ the corpse.

But what about pedophilia? Well, there aren’t many proxies we can use for pedophilia given that kiddy-porn is illegal (and it should be; actual pornography of real children is the recording of a crime and the material by definition was produced via a violation of an individual’s rights). However, fictional depictions of pedophilia are a different matter.

In Australia, even fictional depictions of child sex (cartoon drawings, etc) are illegal. But this is not the case in Japan. In Japan, sexualized fictional images of young, often pre-teen, children (called “Lolicon” for the female variety and “Shotacon” for the male variety) are a well-known subgenre of Manga (and even some Anime). If the “monkey see, monkey do” theory is correct, than Japan should have a very high rate of pedophilia.

With respect to rape, Japan has one of the lowest rape rates; indeed, it has the lowest rape rate in the OECD (see http://www.independent.org/pdf/working_papers/50_prostitution.pdf)(http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita). Note also, nationmaster’s statistics show Australia has the third highest rape rate per capita and Canada has the fifth highest. Both of them have more rape than the United States and both Australia and Canada have more legal restrictions on pornography than the US (Canada, in particular, has adopted Catherine MacKinnon’s (a radical post-Marxist collectivist-feminist) definition of obscenity into law (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/plugins/content/content.php?content.73)). This correlation of “more porn, less rape” has also been observed by Northwestern University Law Professor Anthony d’Amato (http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pdf).

Does this general correlation apply to pedophilia?

According to the paper “Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic” ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21116701), it does. Denmark, the Czech Republic and Japan all have experienced a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and during such time, the incidence of child sex abuse “showed a significant decrease.”

Since real life child pornography is a recording of a crime created via the violation of an individual’s rights, it is proper to ban it even if if functions as a substitute good for actual pedophilia. But illustrated fictional material such as the Lolicon and Shotacon of Japan cannot be criticized on this basis. Whilst further study is required to ascertain whether Lolicon/Shotacon can be a substitute for pedophilic acts (because it clearly isn’t ‘real porn’ and thus it would be a more imperfect substitute), this fact clearly puts a hole in the “monkey see, monkey do” case.

But in spite of all of the above, one point hasn’t been adressed; even if one were to argue that the Universal Royalty pageant presented children in a sexualized fashion (which, again, is contestable), the pageant is not pornographic. Short skirts, heavy makeup and suggestive dancing do not make something pornography (most music videos would count under that definition). Outrageously over the top costumes, glitter eye-shadow and musical numbers do not make pornography (plus, most drag shows would probably count as porn if we accepted that definition). A standard beauty pageant is no more risque than what you’d find in a fashion magazine, and a children’s pageant is typically tamer.

In short, accusations of “sexualization” are, at best, hyperbole. At worst, they’re an attempt to exploit fear of pedophilia and use it to stoke a moral panic and restrict freedom.

2. Resentment and Envy
The “Pull The Pin” rally held in Melbourne had many interesting banners (pictures here: http://melbourneprotests.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/pull-the-pin-no-child-beauty-pageants-in-australia-rally-at-parliament-house-melbourne-24-may-2011/). However, one sign in particular was interesting. Specifically, a sign reading “all kids are beautiful.”

Now, lets accept the premise; “all kids are beautiful.” Why does that imply that there can’t be any ranking of beauty? We can grab several different objects that we might class as “yellow” but they could all be various different shades of yellow, and naturally some yellows will be closer to ‘pure’ yellow than others.

The answer, of course, is feelings. “You’ll hurt the feelings of the losers,” goes the common reply.

But this rebuttal applies to more than beauty pageants.

It applies to any and all competitions between kids. Do we ban scholastic competitions because the feelings of less intelligent children? No. Do we ban athletic competitions of any sort because of the feelings of slower, less physically strong, less physically co-ordinated children? Of course not. Indeed, given the immense amount of reverence Australian popular culture has for sporting prowess (see http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/mia-culpa-cadel-evans-and-my-week-from-hell-20110730-1i5lx.html), it is at least arguable that sporting failure hurts the self-esteem of more kids to a higher degree individually than a beauty pageant. Do we ban artistic contests? Untalented, unmusical, uncreative people might have their feelings hurt! But no, we have art contests very frequently (and art, like beauty, is a highly subjective field primarily ruled by faddish critics).

Clearly, the “feelings” argument is deployed inconsistently.

Why?

I’m going to suggest an hypothesis; the reaction against the pageant is not an attack on “games of ‘compare and despair’” (if it were, they’d be more consistent). Rather, it is a reaction against the idea of competing on beauty.

It is no secret that many people are superficial and thus will judge others on appearance. This is unfortunate but common. Regardless, I think that the anti-Pageant forces are themselves very fed up with that state of affairs, and I don’t blame them.

They don’t object to ranking kids on the basis of intelligence, artistic creativity, or physical skills/prowess. But they do object to a ranking on the basis of beauty. Why?

Perhaps they object to what they perceive as an over-valuation of beauty. People are often superficial, and this superficiality can indeed hurt feelings. If I were to be Nietzschean about it, I’d suggest that some (certainly not all and possibly even not most) people with strong anti-Pageant sentiment have themselves experienced hurt feelings at the hands of superficiality; they may have been bullied for an insufficient level of beauty, they may feel especially envious of people more beautiful than them, etcetera.

Note that this isn’t necessarily the twisted nihilism that manifests itself in a desire to ‘destroy all beauty.’ I doubt that many of them are going around and fantasizing about mutilating Eden Wood. Beauty is desirable by definition, but I doubt that many people are thinking “if I can’t be beautiful, no one can!”

The attitude is more of a subtle and inconsistent ressentiment (resentment that motivates the resenter to generate moral beliefs which back up the resentment). Now, first it must be said that ressentiment is not necessarily bad, and not necessarily irrational (although it can be both).

In this situation, we begin with something which the resenter accepts as desirable, and lacks. Lacking something one wants is not a pleasant experience. It gets worse when people at large commonly have the same basic desires and these desires get manifested in various institutions, such as beauty pageants. To the resenter, this feels like rubbing their nose in their defeat; it amplifies their feelings of inadequacy.

In order to deal with these feelings of inadequacy, they have to confront the premise which society at large (and they, at least subconsciously) have ultimately accepted; that the object they lack is truly desirable.

Take, for example, a person of limited economic resources. Said person, assuming they actually desire more money, would naturally be frustrated at people flaunting wealth, or goods of high quality (and the typically-accompanying high price tag). In order to convince themselves that they really weren’t losing out and mitigate their feelings of deprivation, they’d be more likely to generate some sort of moral belief that makes them feel better.

Hence religious doctrines about a god that favors the poor over the rich, and sayings like “money doesn’t buy happiness” (a saying which, in my experience, is never sincerely believed in, unless one takes it literally (since happiness is not a physical good or service, hence it can’t be bought with money per se)).

This isn’t classical Nietzschean ressentiment. It differs in that the self-justifying moral belief (or set thereof) is not sincerely accepted. The resenter is trying to soothe their feelings of jealousy.

Again, it should be noted that this isn’t necessarily bad or irrational (although it can be both). But in the case of the Universal Royalty beauty pageant controversy, we’ve reached the stage where this ressentiment may to some degree be motivating a push for yet more curtailments to liberty. As such, it needs to be analyzed.

If the anti-Pageant people didn’t truly desire more beauty for themselves (i.e. they sincerely believed that the Pageant’s ideals of beauty were silly), they wouldn’t feel a sense of lacking. They’d probably just roll their eyes at the Pageant for overvaluing something that really didn’t mean much, scoff, and let it be. But they are calling for a law, calling for the banning of an institution that lives by the premise that people (including children) can be ranked according to beauty and that beauty is a desirable thing.

Since they tacitly accept this premise, but their failure to measure up to their own standards causes pain, they try to convince themselves the premise is wrong. Hence, the argument that “all kids are beautiful” (with, of course, the tacit position that they’re all equally beautiful), the lashing out against an institution which contradicts this proposition, and the consistent attempts to delegitimize the Pageant’s idea of what constitutes beautiful.

Now, to be fair, there are many reasonable criticisms of the Pageant’s idea of beauty; the anti-Pageant people make quite a few. The Pageant’s idea of beauty arguably is narrow (then again, so is the cliche Bottle-Blond-Bondi-Beach-Bikini-Babe, and it should also be stated that many pageants have more criterion than physical apperance (such as talent and intelligence)). Additionally, I am not arguing that all opposition to Universal Royalty is a product of this inconsistent ressentiment. But the point remains that there is a clear likelihood that a certain amount of opposition to the Pageant is powered not by disagreement with a specific ideal of beauty, but rather frustration at failing to measure up to it.

3. The Sporting Life, or Tu Quoque
Anti-Pageant activists have often made very valid points about beauty pageants; the primary problem with their activism is not their criticisms per se but their desire to use the State to ban beauty pageants for children.

But I do agree with quite a few of the anti-Pageant’s activists claims. The events clearly attract some pushy parents that are living vicariously through their children as a way of compensating for their own failed dreams of glory (and of accumulating glory for themselves for being “such good parents for producing such a successful child”). The events also arguably promote very restrictive concepts of “acceptable” femaleness (specifically, women are meant to want to be physically beautiful in order to impress men, and that’s all a woman should aim at doing). Pageants also do arguably encourage people to overvalue the physical aspects of a person, rather than to evaluate people’s personality traits, intellect or any other aspects. Finally, pageants do indeed have the potential to encourage games of “compare and despair,” or (to rephrase) encourage children to evaluate themselves comparatively rather than objectively (i.e. to be more interested in “I am better than X” rather than “I am good”).

These are all reasonable criticisms and I won’t contest them. But why are pageants criticized for these flaws when they exist in far more widely-spread activities for children?

Specifically, every single one of these flaws applies to children’s sports; a hobby which is beyond “commonplace” in its participation level.

The prevalence of pushy parents in the children’s sporting arena cannot be denied. Certainly, many children participate in sport because they wish to, but in my experiences the presence of pushy parents ‘encouraging’ their children into sport is definite. And naturally, said pushy parents greatly enjoy basking in the reflected glow from said child’s trophy and awards collection.

Beauty pageants tend to be contested primarily (but not exclusively) by females. Children’s sports, whilst less skewed towards one specific gender, are still principally male in their appeal. And just as Beauty pageants arguably market a rigid kind of feminity, children’s sports do the same thing with respect to masculinity. They define one’s maleness principally in terms of physical exertion, endurance of physical pain, and ability to supress individual identity and work in a pack with a well-defined dominance hierarchy (this last point doesn’t apply so much to non-team sports, but team sports are emphasized far more than individual sports in the Australian children’s sporting world).

These traits were useful in a hunter-gatherer society of tribes and still have use (unfortunately) in matters relating to the military. But they have progressively less and less use in a world where capital replaces and augments labour productivity, where wealth is primarily generated by mental effort and competence in creating and distributing novel ideas, and where individuals (rather than collectives) are considered the building blocks of society.

Of course, you’d never guess this if you looked at how most schoolyards operate.

My time in high school was a period of utter torment, endured at the Anglican Church Grammar School (colloquially known as Churchie). Churchie was a strong supporter of its extracurricular sports programs, and as such had a culture which heavily valued sporting success (all to glorify the School Community, of course… that place was the spiritual equivalent of North Korea and only varied in matters of degree rather than principle). It should come as no surprise that the social understanding of “proper” masculinity was indeed very narrow. Basically, one was a “proper” male in proportion to one’s level of success at sports and fitting in with the group (to an extent these two standards were interrelated; team sports especially being social-cohesion mechanisms, and one’s acceptance into the pack presupposing someone accepts the pack’s standards in the first place). War-cries which more or less were about encouraging people to identify with the group and devolve into a primal tribe of grunting and yelling Vikings (an image which I’m sure would strike some people as even more homoerotic than The Passion of the Christ) were a regular feature, analagous to the “Two Minutes Hate” from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If one were to be so unlucky as to have competencies principally in non-sporting areas, such as music and art, or even worse, academics (because academic achievement didn’t glorify the School Community sufficiently; its selfish and hence bad (naturally, during the QCS test (which takes schoolwide average into account in grading individual students), this was reversed and suddenly intelligence became a good thing, only because it would help the School Community (indeed, there was a pre-QCS meeting where two of the, erm, less intellectually capable students basically pleaded for the smart people to try harder so as to lift up their scores (please John Galt! Save us! Save us!))), then one was socially emasculated on a regular basis. Using words of more than two syllables instantly brought up the suspicion of homosexuality. Are you a musician, artist or actor? You can’t possibly have a girlfriend!

There was but one metric of proper maleness; sporting participation and proficiency. In this, children’s sports were no different to beauty pageants; both promoted rigid gender norms and hence supressed individuality.

And lets not forget some of the parents. Whilst there were plenty of exceptions, I was personally acquainted with many parents that were psychotically pushy and redefined the concept of ‘sociopathic social climber’ on a regular basis. All of them loved to bask in reflected glory from their sons, who’s achievements on the playing field were of course barometers of their own fitness to be parents. There were frequent Churchie-parent get-togethers, the content of which was little more than said parents more or less competing with each other as to who’s child is the most amazing. And of course, several parents were more than happy to lend ‘assistance’ to the school in order to ensure preferential treatment for their kids.

Mothers like Joan Crawford are clearly not confined to beauty pageantry.

So, pushy parents exploiting their children’s glory, and the cultivation of rigid gender norms, are present in children’s sporting. By definition, sporting success is a predominantly physical endeavour, and thus the valuation of sporting success over success in other fields translates into propagating the belief that physical perfection is the only valuable attribute someone can have.

This leaves one final attribute of beauty pageants which is shared by sports; games of “compare and despair.” Indeed, “games of ‘compare and despair’” could pretty much be a synonym of “sport.” Sports, by definition, are competitive activities which rank the participants from “winner” to “loser,” glorify the winner and humiliate (and in the case of men, symbolically emasculate) the loser. In many situations, trophies are distributed, allowing said games of “compare and despair” to be continued when children (or their parents) compare trophies.

Why does it matter whether the trophies come from sporting achievements or beauty pageants?

Maybe my own experience is atypical; maybe my high school’s culture was a product of Adverse Selection and all the Stage Mothers of Sporting sent their sons to Churchie because it was basically Jock Central and thus I was subjected to a higher concentration of Sport-Love than the average Australian young male (of course, I’d actually be more inclined to believe this hypothesis if, like Mia Freedman makes clear here (http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/mia-culpa-cadel-evans-and-my-week-from-hell-20110730-1i5lx.html), general Australian culture weren’t so completely, pathologically obsessed with sporting success!).

But in my experience, every single reasonable criticism that Pull The Pin and other anti-Pageant campaigners make about Universal Royalty’s pageant applies just as much to children’s sports; games of ‘compare and despair’ which implicitly endorse restrictive ideals of ‘correct’ gendered-ness and the overvaluation of the physical (and undervaluation of all else) and are often powered by pushy pathological parents wishing to live vicariously through their Little Winners.

4. “I’m Afraid of Americans”
As stated above, the vast majority of the flaws of beauty pageants for children exist in children’s sports.

So why do children’s sports emerge relatively unscathed? I don’t see anyone arguing that sports for the under 16′s should be banned. Even me, who is bitter and twisted over the idolization of sport above all else, wouldn’t ban it (then again, I’m a libertarian so I don’t fall prey to “There Outta Be A Law”).

I think the best clue is given by another sign held up at the aforementioned Pull The Pin rally reading: “Keep Their Tiaras Off Our Toddlers” (http://melbourneprotests.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/line-up1.jpg).

Note the invocation of “our” and “their,” or an “us” and a “them.” So, who is the “us” and who is the “them?” Who are we, and who is the sinister Other out to destroy our society?

In answering that question, I can’t help but point out that I have not seen a single piece of news coverage of the Universal Royalty pageant that didn’t explicitly remind us that Universal Royalty is an American organization. NineMSN’s headline reads “US child pageant hits Melbourne” (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/glanceview/180443/us-child-pageant-hits-melbourne.glance). Pull The Pin themselves characterize the pageant as “Universal Royalty announcing their Australian invasion” (http://www.facebook.com/pullthepinonpageants?sk=info). Pull The Pin’s leader, Catherine Manning, even said in the video at this news report (http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toddlers-tears-and-tv-tussles-at-usstyle-beauty-pageant-20110730-1i5qh.html?from=age_sb) “we’re Australian, we’re not American.”

This helps explain the double standard between sports and pageants. Sports are a national pasttime, a tradition, a foundational element of the Australian identity (in popular culture). As Mia Freedman recently discovered (http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/mia-culpa-cadel-evans-and-my-week-from-hell-20110730-1i5lx.html), to question the worth of sport and specifically sporting achievement in international competition will result in a firestorm of abuse being directed towards you and for your Australian-ness to be questioned.

Beauty pageants, on the other hand, are a strongly American pasttime (although, naturally, when an Australian woman wins Miss Universe, not too many Australians go on complaining about pageants then).

Both children’s sports and pageants can be fairly accused of being inegalitarian, promoting unattainable ideals of personal adequacy, being full of pushy parents eager to live vicariously through their children, setting up the vast majority of kids for disappointment, encouraging negative body image, self-esteem problems and eating disorders, encouraging kids to judge themselves merely on physical levels etc. but one of these is part of being truly Australian (apparently), and the other is imported from Texas (Mickie Wood’s rather thick Texan accent was not good PR, unfortunately).

In short, I find a troubling subtext of anti-American xenophobia and Australian nationalism running through some of the backlash against Universal Royalty. With protestors wanting Mickie Wood to keep her American, Texan Tiaras away from our wholesome, innocent Australian children, it seems hard to avoid the impression that at least some of the disdain towards Universal Royalty stems from some sort of anti-Americanism.

5. A Libertarian’s Perspective
I loathe beauty pageants. I have an endless reservoir of hate for pushy parents. Superficiality, one-upmanship and proverbial ‘pissing contests’ all can have negative effects on children. And yes, somewhere, some sick pedophile might proverbially get wood from the publicity shots of Eden Wood.

But I don’t think There Outta Be A Law.

Whether you like them or not, beauty pageants have not been demonstrated to be psychologically more potentially damaging than school sports. The question should not even be whether or not a beauty pageant is a good thing, but whether or not it is proper for the State to ban it.

And clearly, it is improper for the State to ban beauty pageants. The role of the State is not to protect people’s feelings, but rather their lives, liberty and property.

To all those that wish to ban beauty pageants (or, more broadly, enforce moral preferences against nonviolent behavior at gunpoint), I think you should realize this; a government powerful enough to ban beauty pageants is a government powerful enough to mandate them. A government with the power to enforce moral preferences becomes nothing more than a weapon which various pressure groups will fight over, and the simple fact is that your moral preferences may not be shared by the ruling class.

Voluntary, peaceful boycotts and protests, even on the basis of irrational or semi-rational positions, are always permitted. But to advocate the use of the power of the State to ban a non-violent activity you don’t like ends up enabling Australia to take one more step down the Road To Serfdom.

Freedom requires tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t mean you have to like it, you just have to refrain from starting or advocating the use of violence, fraud or threats thereof against it. Clearly, many people find pageants can stir feelings of unease, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking them. But merely disliking something is no reason to make it illegal.

And yes, tolerance even extends to little girls that resemble Shirley Temple in a pink-sequined cowgirl outfit, as well as their Texan mothers.

This analysis is quite long, and I wrote it in my typical “snark-slathered disdain” style. But I’m slightly concerned that some of the content of my article may be considered potentially offensive for some readers. As such, I’d like to ask if anyone here would be happy to read over my draft and pre-approve the content, just to make sure nothing would be too unpleasant for this blog’s readership.

Any volunteers? If so, could you provide an email address I can send the work to?

Thanks in advance.

By Andrew Russell

Today’s installment of my long-running series can owe itself to a caustically-written, snark-slathered piece of character assassination entitled “Beware The Geeks Defending WikiLeaks.” This attempt at journalism was written by Tom Whipple of the London Times (and published in The Weekend Australian, December 11-12 2010, Page 21 in the “World” section) and is indicative of little more than an Establishment journalist having a temper tantrum that his precious position as “official tribune of the people” has been usurped by people that are more anti-social than him!

I am not making this up.

The article itself deals with Anonymous; a hacker organization fermented in the depraved bowels of 4Chan. For those unaware, 4Chan is a place where people look at pictures of… well… I won’t be going into detail about that. Needless to say, “Rule 34 Of The Internet” is absolute gospel at said site.

Irrespectively, Whipple basically argues that members of Anonymous are, his words, “the odd, slightly greasy outcast at school – the misfit with the Games Workshop fetish, the Dungeons & Dragons fan.”

This, according to Whipple, suddenly renders the concerns of Anonymous worthless. Why? Because (his words) “this is a middle-class youth rebellion” and (again, his words) “the cool kids are marching against student fees.”

In other words, Whipple’s excuse for an argument is that “Anonymous members are not the cool kids.”

This is the kind of journalism supported by the Times.

Whipple then engages in psychologizing Anonymous members, specifically by arguing that members of Anonymous don’t care about free speech or freedom of the press. Rather, they only want friends and to be loved and accepted by others, and this is why they are defending Assange.

Does Tom Whipple even have the slightest clue about how demeaning, patronizing, offensive, ridiculous and patently childish this argument is? It is also an example of the logical fallacy of Poisoning The Well, and a situation where Whipple is basically saying that Anonymous members are insincere about their concerns.

Because honestly, we all know that the mainstream press like the Times of London is doing a perfect and completely objective job of reporting the facts, and thus anyone claiming to defend freedom of the media who isn’t a member of the established mainstream media institutions cannot truly be serious [/sarcasm].

There are two possible interpretations of why Whipple wrote this so-called article. One is more charitable than the other. I will start with the chartiable one.

Case one is that Whipple is a member of the establishment media; the same media which has been running stories about how new media forms are destroying our children and how said media will never be able to replicate the high quality journalism of the Times [/sarcasm]. Whipple, like the rest of the media establishment, knows that the internet’s decentralization of media poses the greatest threat to the establishment MSM (which is precisely why said MSM in the United States has been arguing for government subsidies to stop it from going out of business). And the WikiLeaks saga shows that major investigative journalism that uncovers conspiracies no longer requires the monumental media conglomerates of today. In other words, WikiLeaks has proven that the establishment MSM is quickly becoming obsolete and is proving this to the average person. In other words, the WikiLeaks saga is demonstrating, to the consumer base of the MSM, that they don’t need the MSM any more.

Thus, read charitably, Whipple’s argument boils down to Julian Assange is likely to TAKE OUR JOBS! It is ultimately the reflexive response of a dying institution attempting to become a rent-seeker and salvage its own quickly-diminishing popular legitimacy. The long-overdue death of the mythical “intrepid reporter desperate to expose only the truth” is naturally causing anxiety to Whipple.

But charitable readings aren’t fun, so lets go to the uncharitable reading!

Uncharitably, Whipple seems to be the antipode to the high school nerd that he accuses members of Anonymous of being. Specifically, he seems to relish the position of being the high school bully. Indeed, the string of assertions made in his article each seem to be anchored down by one of the primary premises of the bully mentality.

First, the long list of hobbies that members of Anonymous have; “Games Workshop, Dungeons and Dragons.” Because apparently, having these hobbies automatically makes you a lesser person who’s concerns about free speech and centralization of power can be disregarded. Whipple relishes pointing out that these people have hobbies and these hobbies are different… they don’t do normal things like listen to Top 40 pop hits, they don’t restrict their played video games to “Call Of Duty” or “Halo,” they don’t like the same TV shows you like (even worse; they might like TV shows from non-English-speaking countries!). Whipple seems to mention this over and over again; they are different!

Unspoken premise; being different is bad, and if you are unlike other people in terms of your cultural likes and dislikes, you are a threat!

This unspoken premise is, unfortunately, the primary regulator of social life in most high school playgrounds. But I had hoped this premise would remain in the high school playground, rather than being transported onto the pages of the Times.

Second; members of Anonymous are “slightly awkward,” “tubby,” “odd, slightly greasy” and “in their bedrooms – laughing at pictures of cats that look like Hitler.” In other words, insufficiently social. This criticism of Anonymous should be of interest to Libertarians/Classical Liberals, since it is one of the biggest accusations thrown at us. We aren’t social enough, we don’t care for others enough, our symbols are loners like Howard Roark, and as we all know [/sarcasm], loners are freaks!!!

Unspoken premise; the greatest value in life is friends, people’s worth can be measured by the number of friends they have, and if you don’t have many friends then any concerns you raise over abstract philosophical issues are utterly meaningless, because YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS, NYAH-NYAH-NYAH!!!!

Again, this is an attitde commonly expressed by high school bullies. It is now to be found on the pages of the Times!

Third; members of Anonymous are “uncool.” Because, as Whipple says, their rebellion is “middle-class” (perhaps Whipple believes a rebellion must be Proletarian to be genuine?), and that the really “cool kids” are “marching against student fees.”

Unspoken premise; what matters is being cool and doing what the cool kids are doing. Uncool is bad.

Again, the attitude of the high school bully. A particularly virulent appeal to popularity, even! “Don’t back Assange; he and his supporters are unpopular geeks! Protest against the tripling of student fees, like all the cool kids are doing!!!” So, according to this logic, if all the cool kids were to jump off a bridge, we should all jump off a bridge! I wonder what Whipple would think if all the cool kids started voting Tory.

Fourth; that there is something wrong with people that don’t want to habitually use violence. Whipple goes on about members of Anonymous hosting their earlier protests against the Church of Scientology; their protest “distributing free cake” and being armed with “Guy Fawkes masks and pirate hats.” He even brought up the fact that one of the police officers said about the protest “these are the nicest protestors I have ever had the privelige of policing.” Additionally, “a few mintes later, someone handed him a card, signed by everyone, congratulating the police on their work.”

Tom Whipple apparently thinks that this is a bad thing. Why? Is a real protest, like a real man, meant to be willing to solve all political issues with their fists, beat up riot police, tear apart barricades, smash glass, and make loud yells of “GAAAAAR” in order to be considered a legitimate one?

Yet again, Whipple’s attitude is that of the school bully; a belief that might makes right and one lacks a Y-Chromosome until one has sufficiently intimidated others with displays of physical violence. This attitude used to be seen as definitive of tribal societies that lacked the rule of law (including but not limited to high school playgrounds). Now, this attitude draws a salary from the Times.

When the Mainstream Media is constantly claiming that video games and internet porn will create the next Super-Predator, one would think they’d welcome evidence showing that the ‘social misfits’ aren’t planning on killing everyone. But no, apparently they are too violent to be trusted with video games, and not violent enough to be making a legitimate protest.

In conclusion, Tom Whipple’s “Beware The Geeks Defending WikiLeaks” is a monumental temper tantrum; a lashing out against geeks and “the antisocial” and the internet, a reification of the insecurity that Stasisists feel about the Creative Destruction of the marketplace, and evidence of a person who’s attitudes still remain stuck in the high school playground.

In the battle between the Geeks and the Bullies, between the Misfits and the Enforcers of Conformity, between the Loners and the Pack Animals, it is clear where Tom Whipple stands. In Whipple’s world, WikiLeaks is bad because it is nerdy.

Where should libertarians stand on this battle? I think it is obvious where I do. I, too, am ‘socially maladjusted’ and listen to ‘socially unacceptable’ music and don’t have ‘enough’ friends (by Whipple’s irrational standards, at least). I am Gothic and hence several years ago (when Goth was the object of Moral Panic) I was Public Enemy Number 1 and (according to the media) on the verge of committing school shootings.

I call on all libertarians to reject the implicit worldview of Whipple’s article; a conformist pack-mentality that constitutes what Ayn Rand quite correctly described as “collectivism of the soul.”

If it isn’t merely the vestigal remnants of the high school bully mentality, then it is merely a naked fear of competition manifested in a hatred of those “geeks” like those that invented the technology enabling such competition in the first place.

And so (to borrow a phrase) I must intone in a shrill voice, calling from painful necessity, “to a High School playground, Tom Whipple; Go!”

Now, as someone that once was more than happy to enjoy a game of laser tag, I found it interesting. Especially when their really, really cool video showing their arena happened to have a nicely EBM-Industrial-ish backing track (watch the video here).

This looked, to me, like a fun thing to do next time I was in Sydney.

And then I read their hideous excuse for a “plot.” Apparently their storyline centers upon “the battle for Sydney” being fought between “the resistance” and “the corporation” (anyone want to guess who the bad guys are?).

Many years ago, the people of this planet lived in peace and prosperity. But as is always the case with mankind, we wanted more. Desire created consumerism, consumerism created industry – and industry poisoned our world.
The signs were there, but they were ignored until it became too late. By the year 2030, global warming had accelerated out of control, and droughts had ravaged the land. Water began to disappear, and people became scared. Despite Government assurances, they feared for their survival – and the Great Water Riots began.

Oh dear… now isn’t this an insightful and intelligent piece of literature! [/sarcasm]

Even Cyberpunk literature of the 80′s could come up with some demented butchery of Frankfurt School critical theory to support its dystopian vision of the future. But ever since the constant plummetting of prices for computer equipment began making everyone a Capitalist (using the Marxist definition of the term), Cyberpunk’s technophobic corporate-statist nightmare has fallen greatly out of fashion amongst the advocates of Cultural Marxism. Even a libertarian like myself likes Cyberpunk, assuming it doesn’t gloss over the buddyness between State and Corporation.

But lets look at the quote and dissect it, shall we?

“Many years ago, the people of this planet lived in peace and prosperity…”
And then, it was ruined when “Desire created consumerism, consumerism created industry – and industry poisoned our world.”

So apparently, we managed to reach peace and prosperity without BEFORE industry came about! I wonder how that happened. Any ideas?

Note the title of this piece; “pseudo-Marxist” ideology. The “pseudo” is important, because this kind of narrative would make a Frankfurt School Marxist blush with embarrasment. The Frankfurt School argued that it was industry which created consumerism rather than the other way around! And Marx, for one, never scorned industry itself; he saw production as a natural (even automatic) process which humans engage in.

So, industry poisoned our world. What about the clean technology industries? Subsidy-sucking whores they may be, but they are still industries. There are plenty of clean industries which do not poison our world and scientists are coming up with a myriad of ways to clean up even dirty industries.

Even according to the ‘establishment’ scientific consensus the whole “global warming creates drought” fear is irrational. For all water that evaporates from some area, it will eventually rain down in another. And also, in the usual ‘ice-cap melting doomsday scenario’ preached by the more demented environmentalists, Australia will not have problem getting more water. Why? We’ll mostly be under water if the ice caps melt. The tropical areas will probably get more rainfall too.

Now, one can hardly expect a laser tag center’s backstory to be the height of good literature, but if I were to play a game of laser tag I would like to play a game without having a terrible, childish, badly-researched shallow-parody-taking-itself-seriously of Neuromancer shoved into several of my orifices. Actually, comparing it to Neuromancer even in a most unflattering light is an implicit insult to William Gibson.

And of course, one final point must be mentioned. A Laser Tag center uses multiple products, all of which are developed by industry and sold for profit. Indeed, the products required for this kind of entertainment are the same kinds of devices the old Cyberpunk literature feared would cause a corporatist dystopia. The game consumes electricity and thus contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. And Strike Bowling Bars are probably owned by a large firm as well.

Just like James Cameron using a massive amount of corporate finance and technology to make an anti-corporate, anti-technological film and selling it to customers in the hope of making a profit (Avatar); we have in this laser tag center a prime example of The Man Is Sticking It To The Man (in order to make a profit!).

Is that kerosene fog or hypocrisy that I am smelling?

Of course, the State’s four main casinos will be exempt.

And naturally, the drive behind this new proposal is the old mainstay of moral panic.

Aidan McLindon is the man behind this push; a former LNP member with a grudge against pokies, McLindon is arguing for a “Vegas style” pokies hub. The purpose: to reduce gambling.

“To reduce gambling” is, unfortunately, the axiom at the base of all mainstream political discourse that deals with gambling policy. Under this attitude, gambling is itself an evil and the goal of gambling policy should be to reduce the amount of gambling that takes place.

But I’ll get back to that in a second. Lets look at the problems with this proposal, from a strictly economic perspective.

First; this proposal strengthens the monopoly enjoyed by Tabcorp and endorsed by the state government. Competition for pokies is abolished; the only places legally allowed to offer pokies under this proposal would be Cairns, Jupiters Townsville, Jupiters Gold Coast, and the Treasury casino. Thus, if it is not Cairns, it is Tabcorp (and of course, Tabcorp runs The Reef casino in Cairns).

This means that the house edges on pokies will go up. Tabcorp have a monopoly on table games as well and the house edges for Australian blackjack are shockingly high. Slot machine house edges are usually very high even in places with competition (i.e. Las Vegas); Australian slots are even worse and they will be made worse still without any competition.

Who will suffer the most from this? The “little guy” that these laws set out to protect. High Rollers typically play low-house-edge games like Blackjack and Baccarat. They can afford to go to Macau or Las Vegas and gamble at casinos there (all of which have lower house edges than Australian casinos!). It is the proverbial “battler” that suffers the hike in pokies house edges.

In other words, the costs of this policy will be imposed precisely on those that the policy aims to protect.

However, this is totally acceptable to someone that aims to reduce gambling. To this attitude, a bad gamble will put gamblers off, and/or suck their money away more quickly (thus getting them away from the pokies in less time). They probably see a huge loss in a casino as some sort of moral lesson, a deserved punishment for sin. To draw an analogy, this attitude would argue against Harm Reduction approaches when dealing with drug policy, because the possibility of a fatal overdose is a deterrent for drug use.

Of course, McLindon may not understand how his proposal will hurt the “little guy” the most. This means he doesn’t understand economics and thus shouldn’t be in Parliament.

Economically speaking, this approach may also have one further effect; enrich the State Government (and Tabcorp). Although it is reasonable to speculate that there will be an overall drop in amount of money gambled, Tabcorp are still likely to hike pokie house edges owing to their monopoly (thus increasing the overall share of money won). This isn’t certain, but it is clear that the possibility exists for the government to make more money from this. As for Tabcorp, their benefit is certain; they get even more monopoly priveliges.

McLindon claims his policy is “Vegas-style,” but Vegas offers table games as well (and usually with much better rules than Australia). It is good table games that attract big bettors and high rollers, international tourists with money to spend. McLindon claims his proposal will be good for Cairns tourism, but turning the place into a huge slot parlor simply is not effective. If you want people to buy plane tickets to go somewhere to gamble, then you should offer them a good gamble!

But, as is obvious, McLindon doesn’t care about gamblers. According to his worldview, any gambler is a degenerate that is pouring children’s cereal money into the pokies.

Looking at the facts, Queensland is bankrupt. The state government needs more money. A possible solution would be to legalize and tax gambling in the two largest tourist markets in the State; the Gold Coast and Cairns. In order to ensure both political feasability and actual competition, lets limit things to five casinos per market and have one casino per owner (i.e. Tabcorp gets one, Crown Limited gets one, etc.). This would provide jobs, ensure competition and at least have some level of political feasibility (Yes, like everyone here I would prefer a more laissez-faire approach, but that has no hope of even being considered). It also has the advantage of actually not infringing on individual rights (unlike Captain Bligh’s latest “swearing fines” laws, which violate free speech (and yes, free speech doesn’t protect yelling out “fire” in a crowded theatre, but it does protect usages of the word “fuck” from being legally penalized (in and of themselves))).

This solution has proven itself effective several times. Multiple US states, for instance Pennsylvania, have legalized gambling. Empirically there is no question that legalized gambling is a good way to raise tax revenue; this is one of the primary justifications for the current situation of state-sanctioned monopoly casinos. Demonopolization of gambling will increase the amount of revenue raised.

But, unfortunately, even this modest and moderate proposal for a demonopolized gambling industry faces a significant hurdle; the belief that gambling discourse must be based around stopping gambling. Not around minimizing the potential negative externalities associated with it, but stopping it from occurring. Anyone that dares propose a solution that makes good gambling more accessible is automatically accused of wanting to pour children’s cereal money into the pokies.

The differences between various forms of gambling are dealt with in a very inconsistent fashion. Horse racing is seen as “okay” (and indeed, on the first Tuesday in November, it is considered a national tradition), pokies as “a scourge (that funds our government)” and table games as “utter evil.”

Table games actually offer some of the best chances for the player. This is conveniently ignored by the debate. Regardless, table games offer…
1) a social environment
2) a job per table (i.e. a dealer)
3) low house edges relative to slots

These three factors alone should make table games more politically appealling than pokies.

But no. Sanity and rationality simply do not exist in the debate. What exists is a deontological demand “to stop gambling.” All other approaches are seen as an attempt to pour the children’s cereal money into the pokies.

A sensible economic analysis of proposals shows that McLindon’s suggestion is pure idiocy. It punishes the people he claims to be protecting, it fails at turning Cairns into a destination for gambling, and it doesn’t fix the underlying problem with Australian gambling; the state-priveliged monopoly system. Of course, McLindon’s grasp of basic economics is probably worse than his grasp of basic accounting (for one, he hasn’t exactly published accounts explaining how he spent his $30 000 electoral allowance).

And of course, the primary issue (from a classical liberal perspective) about gambling policy simply doesn’t get mentioned. This issue is “why should my individual right to engage in consensual gambling be curtailed, just because some idiots pour their kiddies cereal money into the slot machines?”

The Nolan Chart classifies actual economic systems according to their real world level of state control. But, take for instance Proudhon-style Free-Market Anarchism (i.e. Mutualism). This ideology would, like classical liberalism, have a low “Statism” rank. Yet there are many differences between Mutualism and Classical Liberalism (for one, the former accepts the Labor Theory of Value).

I am suggesting a way to classify various economic ideologies that can at least come close to accepting these differences. Note that, unlike the Nolan Chart, this form of classification applies only to economic ideologies (and takes no position on social matters).

Yes, this too is an imprecise taxonomy, but I think it helps demystify some things.

On the Y-Axis, we have a measure of Institutionalism vs. Anti-Institutionalism, or what Virginia Postrel would call Stasisism vs. Dynamism. This axis refers to the character of the entities formed in the society to conduct economic affairs.

An Institutionalist (or Stasisist) believes that economic entities should be institutions. They should have a defined structure and heirarchy that is not defied. They conduct economic matters in established ways. Structural change is much more gradual in this kind of economy. Examples of this kind of economy include;

1) State Socialism (where all economic decisions were made by the State (an institution))
2) The managed corporate behemoths of 50′s America like IBM and General Motors
3) The Zaibatsu economies of Japan
4) The domestic (but not the international) economies of Singapore and Hong Kong
5) Mercantilism

An Anti-Institutionalist (or Dynamist) believes that economic entities should not be institutions. They should be flexible entities, flatter heirarchies are seen as desirable, and experimentation and novelty should be encouraged. This kind of economy has very significant levels of structural change. Examples of this are;

1) Joseph Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”
2) Silicon Valley during its early years
3) Most free-market proponents are dynamists, including Rand and Hayek
4) Most forms of Anarchism, especially Free Market Anarchism
5) Much opposition to “big corporations,” on the occasion when it is actually backed by intellectual substance, exhibits this attitude.

On the X-Axis, we have a measure of an ideology’s appraisal of whom the primary benefactor of an economy is; the State or private enterprises. Note that this is not a measure of how laissez-faire the ideology is; rather it is a measure of whether or not, according to the ideology, the State is the hero of the economy or whether private businesses are. This axis is about the ideology’s narrative of the State or private entities.

It should be clarified that this does not measure who “creates the most wealth” and nor does it necessitate that one side is benign and the other side is Hitler. It is quite possible to see this axis as the “least worst” out of the private sector or the State.

On the “pro-State” or “anti-Private” side you have people that argue that the ultimate protagonist (or at least, least monstrous entity) of the economy is the State. For instance, State Socialism sees the State as the defender of the working class against the exploitation of big business.

On the “pro-Private” or “anti-State” side you have people who argue that the ultimate protagonist of the economy (or at least, least monstrous entity) of the economy is the private sector. Classical Liberalism is an example of this.

Combining these two axes gives four quadrants:

1) Stasisist/Pro-State or Anti-Private
2) Stasisist/Pro-Private or Anti-State
3) Dynamist/Pro-State or Anti-Private
4) Dynamist/Pro-Private or Anti-State

Quadrant 1 is where both State Socialism, Fascism and Nazism fit. Whilst Fascism and Nazism tolerated private ownership, the State had de facto control.

Quadrant 2 is where “Free market” Conservatism fits. This ideology likes large corporate institutions and corporate bureaucracy. Economic stability is prized. Most modern “business-friendly regulation”-type ideologies fit here as well, and arguably so does Keynesianism and Social Democracy (even if both have less benign views of the private sector; they’d be closer to the middle on the X axis). Taken to its logical extreme, this ideology becomes Corporate Statism, or “what is good for General Motors is good for America.”

Schumpeter railed against this ideology. It is anti-entrepreneurial and anti-innovative. Arguably, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan are examples of this in terms of their domestic economies.

Quadrant 3 is a tough one because the State, by definition, is an institution. Thus, a dynamist cannot be a statist. This quadrant might possibly include dynamists that are anti-private (if not necessarily pro-State), which means that modern American “liberalism” and anti-free-market forms of Anarchism might possibly fit here. It is arguable that Quadrant 3 is a selective form of Anti-Institutionalism, only disliking private profit-making institutions.

Quadrant 4 is where Classical Liberalism/Libertarianism and Free Market Anarchism fit. This quadrant is open to the Schumpeterian/Randian types of Entrepreneur, does not consider tradition sacred (although it might in many cases consider it instrumentally useful), and is essentially where the regular readers of this blog should hopefully feel comfortable.

I am by no means proposing this ideology taxonomy is perfect. But I hope it helps stimulate some thinking on the subject.