Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

A British tar is a soaring soul,
As free as a mountain bird.
His energetic fist should be ready to resist
A dictatorial word.

His nose should pant,
and his lip should curl.
His cheeks should flame,
and his brow should furl.
His bosom should heave,
and his heart should glow,
And his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow.

His eyes should flash with an inborn fire,
His brow with scorn be wrung.
He never should bow down to a domineering frown
Or the tang of a tyrant tongue.

His foot should stamp,
and his throat should growl.
His hair should twirl,
and his face should scowl.
His eyes should flash,
and his breast protrude,
And this should be his customary attitude.

– from H.M.S. Pinafore

Should we Americans rediscover this “customary attitude”? Vote Ron Paul, folks. He is the our first hope since the failed “Republican Revolution” in 1994, and we may not have another such for a long time should he fail to win.

One may have noticed that we are never shown on television images of everyday life in the “evil” nations, nor read about them in mainstream publications. The reason is that doing so may convert floating abstractions into concrete living and breathing and useful people, exotic locations, and obvious civilizations, the sight of which may cause one to lose interest somewhat in cheering for abstract bombs falling on abstract cities. According to Yahoo, for example, Iraq “used to be one of the best places for shopping in the Middle East.” Information like this may impel the public, bewitched by crude ideologies like “democracy” and statism and various apocalyptic creeds, to focus on what really does go on in the real world. It may redirect irrational gung-ho murderous impulses into business relationships. It may even restore scientific cooperation.

From the point of view of the political class, unfortunately, all of these things would be bad. That is why we are unlikely ever to see anything except a few “liberated” beggars amidst the rubble when it is time, after the war, to shake down the taxpayers for foreign aid.

Which I’ll be presidentin’: here.

Here.

I have written a couple of posts and an article on race differences (which I actually first recorded in my little “political diary” I used to keep some time in 2001, long before there were such things as blogs):

• Whites and Civilization
• Blacks and Whites
• Reflections on Race

Back in those days I was young and idealistic and was astonished that obviously ludicrous nonsense about races was being accepted as Gospel. It’s as if people had been conditioned to feel guilty even contemplating the idea that there may be race differences. Truth literally hurt them. Why, we must not offend anyone. Don’t be politically incorrect.

So, do my opinions signify a character defect on my part, perhaps some sort of “racism”? What the heck is racism, anyway? Tshaka Barrows, a spokesperson for the Multicultural Students Coalition, defines “racism” as follows:

Racism is having the power to institutionalize your prejudice.

It just goes to show that this word lost all meaning a long time ago. Racism, as I understand it, refers to the belief that one race is inferior to another and because of that must be exterminated or enslaved. Ricardo’s law of association (aka comparative advantage) has always rendered this “principle” absurd. All other definitions, especially ones that involve power, are fanciful indulgences that clarify nothing.

m-w.com says, somewhat more usefully, that racism is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

I don’t know what a “primary” determinant of human traits and capacities is, but it is obvious to anyone but the most deluded of left-liberals that race does influence one’s intelligence and character. Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean, a hugely controversial work for which he was fired from a tenured position and had to sue the university to get his job back, is a spectacular and convincing book. (A review by David Gordon is here.) In other words, under none of the three definitions am I a racist.

The “superiority” of whites, of course, is not and must not be legal or political superiority (although Levin suggests, e.g., that greater punishments be inflicted on blacks than on whites for the same crimes, because blacks are less responsive to incentives designed to deter wrongdoing), but as Levin writes, “No sub-Saharan society has ever developed mathematics, a written language, formal educational institutions, or the wheel, while white and Asian societies have done so many times,” and to repeat what Mises has written, “It is vain to deny that up to now certain races have contributed nothing or very little to the development of civilization and can, in this sense, be called inferior.” Why such assertions are nowadays beyond the pale is beyond me.

At any rate, my interest in race differences was intimately connected with my interest in political philosophy and the theory of liberty. If there were no privileges and preferential treatment for blacks and other “oppressed” groups, I probably would not have bothered even to examine this issue (although it is surely interesting in its own right). But given the volatile climate and the fact that everyone’s afraid to speak up, I felt I had to do something. Hence my remarks on race.

by Étienne de La Boétie here or here if you prefer to read Rothbard’s introduction at the expense of having to open a PDF file.

When I first read it a long time ago, I was fearful that a medieval thinker would be obscure and hard to read; I was very pleasantly surprised by how lucid, sharp, and powerful this book is. You will not be disappointed, and you will learn much of political philosophy by reading it.

Here is his spectacular and brilliant The Anatomy of the State, e.g.,

Especially has the State been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of other State rulers. Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage. If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.

(Here it could be argued, contra Rothbard, that the foreign state would attack the people rather than the ruling elite, e.g., for booty, if these people were not already enslaved by “their own” state. If government is an attempt by the elites to prevent overexploitation of the producing public (such that would occur, e.g., as a result of constant raids on peaceful villages) through a well-designed system of taxation, inflation and debt, and political privilege, then if that government is already established, it makes no sense to attack the people but only the rulers with the goal of supplanting them. But if the political system is somehow anarchic, it might be in the interest of a foreign state to attack the people directly, in order to loot them or subjugate them.

This assumes that privately produced defense would be hard to obtain, which may not be true.)

Continue with Rothbard…

Hugh LaFollette, whose article on Plantinga I review here, is a peculiar fellow. Did you know that he wrote an article in 1980 which advocates licensing of parents by the state? Yes, our friend here has proposed a policy (which is both “theoretically desirable” and such that a “workable and just licensing program actually could be established”) that no totalitarian government has probably ever even considered, let alone implemented. Hey, LaFollette: no free man and woman would ever agree to have their family decisions be regimented by the state.

Still, I understand LaFollette’s point: if adoption agencies legitimately scrutinize the lifestyles and characters of prospective parents, why shouldn’t having children be treated as adopting the unconceived and be regulated by the state? The first reason why it should not be so regulated is that having and rearing children require from their parents significant sacrifices, and so very few people will actually abuse their children. It makes no sense to have kids and then be uncharitable towards them: it spoils the efforts that the parents invest into their kids. The vast majority of those who do not expect to love their children will simply not have them voluntarily, and so it is probable that child abusers will be few in number, certainly not enough to cause a social problem.

Second, there are numerous ways for individuals to improve their parenting skills though books, magazines, counseling, and so on. Why the need for government intervention? It is much better to leave finding good parenting techniques to the market instead of administering a (probably ineffective) one-size-fits-all government test. Besides, there is no guarantee that the “size” that is supposed to fit all will fit even the majority. People are very different, and the state will be powerless to deal with the legitimate diversity of parenting styles.

Third, being a good parent comes from experience. Before having children, many people (including, I am sure, myself) are unprepared for parenthood. Yet they learn by experience. Therefore, the government will reject many people who will eventually end up very well qualified to have kids.

Fourth, and relatedly, marriage and children civilize people. The government cannot take that into account.

Fifth, our author writes that

researchers at Nashville General Hospital have developed a brief interview questionnaire which seems to have significant predictive power. Based on their data, the researchers identified 20 percent of the interviewees as a “risk group” – those having great potential for serious problems. After one year they found “the incidence of major breakdown in parent-child interaction in the risk group was approximately four to five times as great as in the low risk group.” (191)

But what was the risk in the low risk group? If it was, say, 1%, then the risk of child abuse by the members of the high risk group is at most 5%. So, this test would have prevented the good 95% of parents from having children.

Sixth, people can lie on the test, and there surely will arise a whole industry dedicated to enabling people to pass the government’s tests.

Seventh, because the test will apply to absolutely everybody, the standards of acceptability will be set very low. LaFollette himself argues that the idea is to eliminate the really bad parents. But then even if his proposal is successful, these bad apples will be a tiny minority. Society will not be damaged even if they end up having children. Yet the cost of the intrusion into the private lives of everybody may well outweigh the benefits of weeding out some potential child abusers.

Eighth, in LaFollette’s scheme the unconceived are in a way punished for having bad parents by not being allowed to come into existence. I am not sure that that is not unjust.

Ninth, the reason why screening of prospective parents in adoption cases takes place is that there is no market in adoption. There is a price ceiling of $0 for guardianship rights over children; that is, no one can obtain custody for a price, and therefore there is a severe shortage of children. Permit the market to flourish, and you will see it clear, as well.

And then there is LaFollette’s article on gun control. After seeing the reasonable “we have to assess the empirical evidence” (even though to argue that people should surrender their right to self-defense to the state is prima facie crazy), we read on the next to last page that LaFollette “find[s] the idea of a world without handguns immensely appealing,” which kind of ruins his credibility right there. Well, I personally am starting to find the idea of a world without government immensely appealing; governments allow people like LaFollette to hope that their mushy propaganda will fall on willing ears.

References:

“Licensing Parents,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1980), pp. 182-197

“Gun Control,” Ethics, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Jan., 2000), pp. 263-281