"Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else."~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'Conservatism: An Obituary,' collected in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. [See also 'Cue Card Libertarianism: Freedom']
"The concept of 'force' ... is widely misused today....
"Physical force is coercion exercised by physical agency, such as, among many other examples, by punching a man in the face, incarcerating him, shooting him, or seizing his property [it is is physical contact with the person or property of another without his consent and/or the threat of such contact]....
"There is only one way to attempt to force a man s mind: by directing the force to his body (or property).... A volitional being, left unmolested, is free to initiate a cognitive process. He can struggle to untangle his confusions and replace them ultimately with truth. The only kind of 'social pressure' that cannot be resisted bv intellectual means is the kind that does not rely on intellectual means. If some group, governmental or private, tells a man: 'Either you agree with us or we will clean out your bank account, break your legs, kill you,' then a cognitive process on his part is ineffective; no such process avails in counteracting the threat. This, this category of threat or harm—physical force and nothing else—is what constitutes coercion. This is what sweeps into the discard the victim’s mind...."Coercion is not coextensive with frustration caused by others. It pertains only to those frustrations that men cause by invoking the methods of brutality...."~ Leonard Peikoff, from his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
"A border is a geographic limit on the power of government. A border is not a limit on the rights of people.
"This confusion as to whether it is government or people who have unlimited rights is at the heart of the liberty movement, from its inceptions at least back to the Magna Carta and certainly 18th century England."
~ Keith Weiner, commenting on a misconception of the nature of borders, rights and government
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Examples in use:
‘For British Labour party leaders, Europeanism is just a virtue-signalling gesture -- like wearing a charity ribbon.’
‘A lot of what happens on Facebook, as with Twitter, is “virtue signalling” — showing off how right on you are.’
'Led by global luminaries such as Michelle Obama, Malala and Piers Morgan, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls has been used 4.8 million times by 2.3 million users on Twitter. Some of the girls escaped but, tragically, 218 remain missing, and virtue signalling celebs quickly moved on to the next fashionable hashtag.'
'Expect a year of virtue signalling from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, particularly on plastic trash in our oceans. And as with nearly all virtue signalling, expect Trudeau’s blather to be more about shining his environmental apple than about doing anything meaningful.'
'Jacinda Ardern's Government is putting 'virtue signalling' above energy reliability.'See also:
His Royal Majesty was forced to swallow antimony a toxic metal. He vomited and was given a series of enemas. His hair was shave f, and he had blistering agents applied to the scalp, to drive any bad humours downward.If you guessed that the next sentence reads something like, "not surprisingly, the king died soon after," then you wouldn't be too surprised.
....Plasters of chemical irritants, including pigeon droppings, were applied to the soles of the royal feet, to attract the falling humours. Another ten ounces of blood was drawn.
....The king was given white sugar candy, to cheer him up, then prodded with a red-hot poker. He was then given forty drops of ooze from "the skull of a man that was never buried" who, it was promised, had died a. most violent death. Finally, crushed stones from the intestines of a goat from East India were forced down the royal throat
The king died on February 6. But notice all the conspicuous effort in this story. If Charles's physicians had simply prescribed soup and bed rest, everyone might have questioned whether "enough" had been done. Instead, the king's treatments were elaborate and esoteric, By sparing no expense or effort -- by procuring fluids form a torture victim and stones from goat bellies -- the physicians were safe from accusations of malpractice.The physicians were safe. The patient was not.
Geoffrey Palmer has resurrected his life-long desire for a written constitution that would undoubtedly entrench the fashionable-but-wrong interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and cement in so-called welfare rights.
In any case, it will with complete certainly be one that Thomas Jefferson and his friends would only barely recognise (even as we should recognise the repairs to the sacred document they draw up that are necessary for it to continue the job they hoped for it).
An appropriate time then to re-post (with new links!) my Cue Card on what a constitution is for.
Cue Card Libertarianism -- Constitution
Why do we need a government at all? James Madison puts the argument in a nutshell:
“If men were angels no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men,
neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”Here in capsule form is the essential argument both against anarchy, and for a constitutional republic: Because men are not automatically angels, and because government does need to be controlled.
But how? That’s the 64-million-laws question.
Let’s start by examining the purpose of government. Government in essence is like a guard dog: to protect us from being done over by others. However, if that dog is badly trained and it gets off the chain, we can be badly savaged -- more than we would have been without the dog.
So we get to our first major point:
A constitution is our means of chaining up the government and training it to act only in our protection.
As I’ve said already in these Cue Cards, the purpose of government is to protect properly-formulated individual rights. The means by which it carries out this life-giving task is to protect us against physical coercion and its derivative, fraud. Good government is the means by which retaliatory force is brought under objective control. A good constitution, properly written, brings the government itself under objective control.
Such a constitution was the intent of America’s Founding Fathers, a clear and understandable document delineating a government that protects individuals’ rights, but after nearly two-hundred years the success has been only partial. Building on the success of the US Constitution and seeking to close the loopholes exploited since its introduction, New Zealand libertarians have written what we call A Constitution for New Freeland summing up what a good constitution should look like, and why:
The job of government is to protect our rights—a ‘Bill of Rights’ clearly outlines the rights to be protected.
The job of government is not to infringe the liberties of its own citizens without due process of law—a ‘Bill of Due Process’ clearly outlines under what circumstances and in what manner those liberties may be breached, and for what purpose.
The US Constitution has suffered from interpretations that have often been at odds with the declared intentions of the Constitution’s authors—the Constitution for New Freeland puts the intentions of its authors on the record in the ‘Notes on the Bills of Rights and Due Process.’
To prevent monopolisation of political power, a good government should have its powers separated—a formal statement is included as to how the rigorous separation is to be ensured, and each of government’s three branches – legislature, judiciary and executive – is given some specified veto power over all the others. The imperfect separation of powers in our present NZ constitutional arrangements shows the dangers of being without these essential checks and balances on political power.
Every good constitution relies on one further, crucial, restraint on the growth of Omnipotent Government: significant public understanding and support for the constitution and its protections, without which politicians and advocates of a ‘living constitution’ can pervert the constitutional protections as easily as the simple agreements given in the Treaty of Waitangi have been perverted. (On this much at least, Burke was right.)
Further, the task of constitutional law is to delineate the legal structure of a country’s law; it must therefore be superior to all other laws, and law stepping outside the bounds of what is declared unconstitutional must be able to be struck down – an accessible Constitutional Court makes this possible.
The superiority of a constitution to all other law is both a good thing and a bad thing. What’s good is that once a watertight constitution properly protecting individual rights is in place, it acts to chain up the guard dog and to keep it on its leash for good. What’s bad is that once in place, a poor or anti-freedom constitution is very difficult to get rid of.
As history demonstrates -- and the constitutional conference of 2000, a previous Select Committee review of NZ’s constitutional arrangements, and now Palmer’s wet rag foreshadows – a bad constitution poorly written can give the erstwhile guard-dog control of the back yard and the house, and before you know it it’s chewing off your leg and attacking the baby. Rather than protecting us, it has no impediment at all to doing us over.
Liberty, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, requires eternal vigilance.
This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
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Other people—wherever they are—give us benefits even if we never meet them. Even if we don’t even know they exist. Even if they’re from the other side of the planet—or from centuries before we were born.
It’s all part of the social cooperation of the market, in which we can all enjoy the many benefits of genius wherever we are.
One of the many blessings of the division-of-labour society that the market makes possible is how it allows us all to benefit from the existence of these geniuses (genii?). “It makes it possible” explains economist George Reisman, “for geniuses to specialise in science, invention, and the organisation and direction of the productive activity of others, thereby further and progressively increasing the knowledge used in production.” From which we all get the benefits, even centuries later.
I was thinking of this when I saw this clickbait list of the Top 20+ Smartest People Who Ever Lived – the sort of thing you and I like to click on during breakfast. Based on the web writers’ own spurious estimates of a spurious measurement (IQ) and interspersed with chess heroes and a failed stateswoman (Cleopatra) we see a number of people without whom our own lives would be a much lesser existence. List the ways in which each of them moved the world, and you’re well on your way to writing a 100 Greatest Reasons to Be Alive listicle for the next piece of clickbait.
And the funny thing is, as one commenter pointed out, there is no way if knowing that these are even the greatest genii who ever lived (geniuses?), because it’s perfectly possible, and even highly likely, that many other would-be geniuses simply withered on the vine without any opportunity to exercise their genius or benefit the world.
But when we realise the powerful impact just one genuine genius can have – that of an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, a Newton – we should understand the crucial life-giving importance of the specialisation that the division-of-labour society makes possible:
In the absence of a division-of-labour society, geniuses alonng with everyone else, must pass their lives in producing their own food, clothing and shelter—assuming they are fortunate enough to have survived in the first place. Perhaps their high intelligence enables them to produce somewhat more efficiently than do other people. But their real potential is obviously lost—both to themselves and to the rest of society.
In contrast, in a division-of-labour society … instead of being lost in obscurity, they [are able to] become the Newtons, the Edisons, the Fords of the world, thereby incalculably raising the productivity of every member of the division-of-labour society.
The effect is not just expanded wealth and productivity – it’s virtually an exponential multiplication of brain power.
The effect of a division-of-labour society is thus not only to increase the total of the knowledge that the same amount of brain power can store and use, but also to bring that knowedge up to a standard set by the most intelligent members of the society. The average and below-average member of society is enabled to produce on the strength of the intelligence of the most intelligent…
So even if we have never heard of Philip Emeagwali, Srinivasa Ramanujan or Aryabhata, the fact they existed and their genius was able to flourish and be shared has made our own lives incalculably better and more productive.
… And in each succeeding generation, geniuses are able to begin with the knowledge acquired by all the preceding generations, and then make their own fresh contributions to knowledge. In this way, the knowledge and productive power of a division-of-labour society are able progressively to increase, reaching greater and greater heights as time goes on.
It’s a great story.
Exactly the sort of story I like to think about over breakfast.
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WHERE DO PROPERTY RIGHTS come from? And what did John Locke get right?
It’s important to remember that the concept even of individual rights “is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.” Indeed, only two centuries before Europeans arrived in New Zealand, to most Europeans as well they remained a complete mystery.
In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.
“The Declaration of Independence stated that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.
“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.”
Flawed beginnings
But where do rights come from, what is their source? Some men assert that rights are either a gift of God or a gift of society -- that men are either “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” or are endowed by legislators with certain contingent rights that they may alienate at any time of their choosing.
Neither is particularly compelling on its own.
Neither is it enough to say that because we own our bodies, then we must therefore also own all the products of our bodies—it should be obvious this is a species of begging the question. Not to mention tremendously confusing for our bodily wastes.
And it’s not correct to say that the source of property is that the concept makes goods “non-rivalrous” –since this confuses a consequence for a cause: everyone knows whose goods are whose because folk do have various rights in those goods. But that doesn’t explain why they do.
John Locke famously argued that we acquire rights in the property with which we mix our own labour:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he re-moves out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the un-questionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.
You see immediately that, right from the off, Locke virtually assumes his own conclusion: that every Man has a Property in his own Person means the concept of Property is already assumed. But he does take it some way further.
But what exactly does it mean to say that we have mixed our labour with something? Locke gives a 3-stage process for this:
Thus and so, the thing I first espied in nature and then worked with is now mine. But that still leaves many questions.
If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?
Fortunately, Locke himself gives some guidance. He gives examples of “mixing labour”: gathering nuts, growing vegetables and fruits, mining ore, drawing water, killing a deer, catching fish, hunting a hare, cultivating land for farming, sewing clothes, baking bread, felling timber, fermenting wine. (Never forget fermenting wine.) So labour is in this sense a goal-directed productive activity – “a rational (or purposeful), value-creating activity,” argues modern-day Lockean Stephen Buckle. “Tis Labour then which puts the greatest part of Value upon Land,” says Locke, “without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: ‘tis to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful Products.” In other words (the words of Adam Mossoff, from whom this short summary comes),
Labour creates valuable products—and turns worthless land into valuable real estate—because “labour” in this context means production.
And production in Locke’s context is a moral virtue.
If it is a moral obligation for people to pre-serve themselves, then it follows as a corollary that the means of this preservation is a moral virtue. For mankind, the means of survival are produced goods, such as shelter, clothing and food. Production therefore is the moral action by which a man fulfils his fundamental moral duty: preservation of his life.
Labour in this context means production. And production means a rational (or purposeful), value-creating activity. The result being the fulfilment of a moral duty: the preservation of the labourer’s life.
But these are the words of two modern-day interpreters trying to understand Locke’s infelicitous metaphor, not those of Locke’s himself—which are nowhere near as clear. And they still don’t get us fully down to the root of our cause for which we’re searching.
What really is the root of property rights?
The real root of rights
THE ROOT OF ALL RIGHTS is the human need to take action to survive, and the means by which human beings each elect to achieve it.
Individual rights are ultimately based on the needs of man’s life—they recognise man as a causal agent in his life, and frame the “moral space” within which he may take the actions as of right that are necessary to sustain it. Unlike other animals we cannot survive as we come into the world; in order to stay alive and to flourish we each need to choose our own means of survival and flourishing (this needing to be first identified before it can be acted upon), and then to produce and to keep the fruits of our production (this needing to be kept so as to make our survival plan worthwhile). If our minds are our means of survival – as Julian Simon used to say, our Ultimate Resource – then property is the result of applying the creative potential of our minds to reality in order to enhance and promote our lives and those we love and interact with.
Other animals survive by acting automatically, instinctively; man survives by using his mind. Animals survive by repeating their actions of the past, by doing what worked yesterday; man survives by by looking towards the future, by using reason.
The protection of individual rights makes the world safe for reason.
The influence of reason shows up in the development of the individual’s conceptual ability to give a sense of present reality to his life in decades to come, and in his identification of himself as a self-responsible causal agent with the power to improve his life. This combination of ideas is what produced in people such attitudes as the realization that hard work pays and that they must accept responsibility for their future by means of saving. The same combination of ideas helped to provide the intellectual foundation for the establishment and extension of private property rights as incentives to production and saving. Private property rights rest on the recognition of the principle of causality in the form that those who are to implement the causes must be motivated by being able to benefit from the effects they create. They also rest on a foundation of secularism—of the recognition of the rightness of being concerned with material improvement.
(George Reisman, ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Capitalism and Economic Activity,’ in Capitalism)
So how exactly does reason “mix” with reality? Consider that first question in the section above: why did I choose those particular things to remove from their “State of Nature”? What was it about those particular things made them so special? Carl Menger explains that what we are doing fundamentally in taking things from “the state of nature” is transforming things into goods on the basis of our human reason:
Things that can be placed in a causal connection with the satisfaction of human needs we term useful things [“Nützlichkeiten”]. If, however, we both recognize this causal connection, and have the power actually to direct the useful things to the satisfaction of our needs, we call them goods.
“If a thing is to become a good, or in other words, if it is to acquire goods-character, all four of the following prerequisites must be simultaneously present:
1. A human need.
2. Such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction
of this need.
3. Human knowledge of this causal connection.
4. Command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.
Only when all four of these prerequisites are present simultaneously can a thing become a good.
(Carl Menger, ‘The General Theory of The Good,’ Principles of Economics)
This is the process by which resources are continually created where before there might have been none – how oil turned from bane to boon and desert turned to pasture. All four of Menger’s “prerequisites” require human reason—Menger saying bluntly that it is not primarily a property of the goods themselves that gives them good-character, “but merely a relationship between certain things and men, the things obviously ceasing to be goods with the disappearance of this relationship.”
At the very first stage of productive labour then, we see that the “labour” that is most important here is not physical, but intellectual—intellectual effort directed outward to make nature more humane.
Labour is the means by which man’s mind transmits his designs and purposes to matter. It is man’s application of his bodily and mental faculties for the purpose of altering matter in form or location and thereby making the matter thus altered serve a further purpose. . .
The physical matter of which natural resources a composed is, of course, not made by man—it is nature-given. Nevertheless, the wealth-character of natural resources is man-made: it is the result of human labour. It is the result of the labour that discovers the uses to which the natural resources can be put, and of the labour that enable them to become accessible in ways that they can be used gainfully. Thus, it is labour [mainly of an intellectual character] that establishes the character of natural resources as goods, and thus as wealth.”
(George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Labour,’ Capitalism)
Hence:
The source of the goods-character of things is ultimately within us. Goods derive their character as goods by virtue of their ability to benefit human beings.
(George Reisman, ‘Wealth & Goods,’ in Capitalism)
We’re having a right-old relationship with our goods
And as Menger identifies above, it is the relationship that results between certain things and men that is the primary product of this intellectual labour. Because it’s important to recognise that property cannot simply be equated with objects. More accurately, property refers to a relationship—something tangible (or intangible) in which we have property. “As long as this is understood, we may use the term ‘property’ to refer either to the object owned or to the relationship of ownership.” [Tara Smith.] It’s more accurate, strictly speaking, to say we have “property in” this or that than it is to say that this or that is property.
We frequently speak as if property denotes goods that a person owns. (‘Leave that alone, it’s my property.’) Yet property does not refer to objects per se. For an object is just that. . . An object qualifies as property only insofar as it stands in a certain relationship to some person.
(Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)
A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
(James Madison)Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.
(Ayn Rand, ‘Man’s Rights’)
And this relationship clearly does not accrue to every man. Because specific individuals have identified these specific things with which they have formed a goods-relationship –those goods being perhaps part of some multi-period production plan requiring the certainty that can only be given by right.
Because, you see, the stuff that sustains human life all has to be created—goods have to be created--wealth has to be created. All the wealth in the world that now exists in the world had to be created. The very act of creating new wealth brings it into a property relationship with the creator.
Because when we create new wealth, we create new values. Those new values have an owner.
Individuals do not possess property rights simply because material goods are part of what life requires. The other essential leg of the case stems from the origin of goods’ value.
(Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)
So the reason new values have an owner, is because without that owner those new values wouldn’t exist.
Mixing labour? Or rewarding good judgement.
So to return to our start and then reach a conclusion. John Locke’s brilliant analysis of how property rights are applied is undercut by his flawed argument for their justification—and particularly by his flawed metaphor of labour-mixing. Tibor Machan amends the flaw and concludes as I have here that the fundamental justification for property rights is an entrepreneurial one--not based on a “labour theory of value,” where labour is identified only on its purely physical component, but on the crucially important identification of the role of the mind in production.
It’s in this sense that we can understand Ayn Rand’s saying that at root “all property is intellectual property.”
John Locke advanced the theory that when one mixes one’s labour with nature, one gains ownership of that part of nature with which the labour is mixed. Thus, for example, if I gather wood from the forest for a fire, or for materials to build a shelter, I have a ‘natural right’ to what I have gathered, inasmuch as I have ‘mixed my labour’ with it and to that extent put some of myself into it. Since I have a self-evident right to my own body, including my labour, that part of nature that includes myself (i.e., my labour) is also mine. Though Locke held that nature is initially a gift from God to us all, he argued that once we individually mix our labour with some portion of it, it becomes ours alone.
This idea, though perhaps commonsensically compelling when limited to simple examples of physical labour such as gathering wood, has not carried wide conviction, mainly because the idea of ‘mixing labour with nature’ is too vague. Does discovering an island count as an act of labour—never mind ‘mixing’ one’s labour? Does exploring the island? Fencing it in? Does identifying (discovering) a scientific truth count as mixing labour with nature? What about inventing a new device based on scientific information available to all? Or trade—should the act of coming to an agreement count as mixing one’s labour with something of value? Challenging examples to Locke’s principle abound.
A revised Lockean notion has been advanced in current libertarian thought by way of a theory of entrepreneurship, an idea advanced at about the same time by philosopher James Sadowsky of Fordham University and by economist Israel Kirzner of New York University. The novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, perhaps the modern era’s most fervent advocate of capitalism based on a theory of the inalienable individual right to life, liberty, and property, also emphasised the moral role of individual judgment and initiative or entrepreneurship.
“According to the entrepreneurial model, it is the judgment—no small matter in human affairs where instincts play hardly any role—that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others); and therefore the making of this judgment and acting on it—the alertness and attentiveness of it all—is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational process of forming a judgment is neither automatic nor passive; neither does the process involve more than a minimum overt physical effort, but it is an act of labour nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals. One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a “first come, first served” basis.
For example, assume that George identifies some portion of unowned land as being of potential value. Having made this judgment, George now has rightful jurisdiction over the property, so that others may not (rightfully) prevent him from exploring it for oil or minerals, or simply using it to build a museum or a private home. His judgment may have been in error: the land may turn out to be infertile or otherwise unsuitable for his purposes. Even so, given that people require for their lives a sphere of jurisdiction, by having first made and acted upon the decision to select the land, he has appropriated it in a way that cannot be objectionable—indeed, is a prudent effort, at least.
(Tibor Machan, ‘The Right to Private Property’)
Property creates new value
So ultimately, what we’re creating with our good judgement is new values. By identifying and rearranging what nature has given use, we raise materials from a lower value (in relation to us) to a higher value (in relation to us); they move from being things to goods, from being materials to being resources. It is their creation as new goods that is the economic component. It is their creation as new values that is the moral component.
Consider those things that people hold as property. What makes the possession of these things desirable is that they serve human purposes. . . All the things that individuals own … are valuable insofar as they contribute to the fulfilment of some purpose. . .
The point is, the goods that individuals own are valuable because of individuals’ efforts. [Individuals had to figure out, for example, that coal could be burnt to produce energy, how it might do so, what ends this might accomplish, and then proceed to locate, extract, transport, and burn coal under suitable conditions to serve those ends. Individuals had to figure out that rubber could be converted into tires, how to do so, why that might be useful, and proceed to harvest and treat the rubber in order to make it serve that function.] These goods are not intrinsically valuable. Their value is not buried within them, like gifts in boxes, simply awaiting our discovery. Things’ desirability does not precede individuals’ moulding resources to accomplish various purposes. It is individuals’ deliberate employment of materials to serve certain needs that supplies things’ value. Before that human contribution, naturally available resources hold merely the potential to be of value to people, if they are tapped in appropriate ways.
The relevance of all this to the defence of property rights is straightforward. If objects’ value is the result of individual efforts, them objects are valuable only because particular individuals have worked in constructive ways to make things serve some ends. When this realization is teamed with the egoistic premise that a person is entitled to live for her own benefit, it becomes clear that the value a person creates should be hers to keep and control.
Since human effort creates the value that any object possesses—since individuals are responsible for all of a thing’s value—it is appropriate to recognise property rights belonging to the individuals who generate the relevant value. If a person is entitled to act to promote her own eudaimonia and through her actions creates something that is valuable to her, we have no grounds for denying her right to that product.
(Tara Smith, Moral Rights & Political Freedom)
Let’s spell out that last again:
As we see, this entrepreneurial argument for property is very far removed from the simple notion of “mixing one’s labour.”
And as we saw yesterday, and as explained especially by Ayn Rand and the Austrian economists, it is not just the individual who benefits from that right – though it is not the primary justification of any theory of rights, there is a general benefit from the private ownership of the means of production that can be achieved no other way. Because in the same way that Thomas Edison’s cleaning lady benefits in her wage packet from the enormous productivity of her employer, so every individual in a division-of-labour society benefits from the creation, production and trade of these new values.
And that is good. And right.
In the wake of imbecilic feminist indignation trumping astonishing astronomy and now Nobel-Prize winning cell biology research, this below seemed an appropriate re-post from 2006 … [STEM, by the way, “is an acronym referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]
Like most intellectual movements, feminism is a movement of many strands, some valid, some toxic.
The rebellion against the notion of women as reproductive animals devoid of intellect, incapable of logical thought, destined by their biology passively to serve the needs of men – a notion brilliantly catalogued and analysed by Betty Friedan in her ground-breaking 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique – was long overdue. Unfortunately, it also became misdirected through such vehicles as Wimmin’s Lib and Wimmin's Studies, and the idea that all wimmin are 'sisters,' that all men are rapists, and that all woolly Feminazis are good looking.
The essential wrong of the barnyard animal view of women was that it was collectivist. It said, in effect, that woman qua woman had an inescapable, predetermined role in life from which no individual deviation was possible, let alone permissible. This is clearly nonsense.
The Feminazis, however, went on to preach their own version of collectivism with a vengeance - instead of equality they simply wished to reverse whatever 'gender thinking' then existed, and to replace the perceived positions on the totem pole. By their view, women were not only not inferior to men, they were superior; they not only had the right to pursue a career, they had a right to take jobs from men through such political means as affirmative action programmes, quota systems and sisterly solidarity; not only were they not sex objects, but all men were rapists; not only were they not breeding machines, but motherhood itself was immoral; not only had there been oppression of women, but all of Western civilisation, particularly capitalism, was an edifice of patriarchal hegemony; not only were men and women not completely different, there were no differences between them at all; etc, etc.
Fortunately, enlightened feminists such as Camille Paglia and Ayaan Hirsi Ali emerged to counter such lunacies and encourage women to think of themselves as individuals, first and foremost. Libertarianism intersects with this strand of feminism.
Strictly speaking, the term feminism, as a legitimate assertion of individuality and rebellion against collectivism, is a redundancy; individualism is sufficient. See ‘Cue Card Libertarianism: Individualism’!
This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published by Lindsay Perigo in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
[Cartoon by Anti Feminist Comics]
Each 'Cue Card Libertarianism' entry forms part of a series intended to introduce newbies to the terms used (or as used) by local libertarians. The series so far can be found archived here, and here, and the Introduction here.
This entry seems particularly relevant today. 
Cartoon by Nick Kim
“A tax-supported, compulsory educational system
is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”
– Isabel Paterson, 'The God of the Machine.'
EDUCATION: The system of compulsory, taxpayer-funded education is another prime example of the state performing the opposite role to its proper one, i.e. initiating force against its citizens, rather than protecting them from it.
It forces children from their parents; it forces a curriculum on children with or without the parents’ approval; it treats the child’s mind as the property of the state; it forces people to pay for the education of other people’s children.
New Zealand’s public education has followed in the path of the United States: beginning with educating children to submit to the collective feelings of the group, rather than to develop their own minds ands use their own independent judgement – i.e. it teaches them to value 'consensus' before truth, and 'fitting in' above facts.
Peer pressure and politics are now important than good pedagogy. “Humanities” subjects have been hi-jacked by the purveyors of fashionable political viewpoints, and even the sciences have been infected with irrational nature-worship and notions like "Maori Science," ie., myth.
A recent Minister of Education even claimed that science is not even concerned with the discovery of truth.
The travesty of education being perpetrated by the state currently is nothing short of criminal. Taxpayers paying more and more to get less and less -- more money spent, to fill the heads of more and more young New Zealanders with mush.
Despite governments doling out increasing election bribes on the state's factory schools, the 2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey figures estimated “close to 1 million working age adults in New Zealand lack the literacy and numeracy skills needed to function in a modern workplace.” That makes nearly 1 in 4 New Zealanders who are functionally illiterate.
It's clear what we have is neither free, nor a system of education.
We're left to deduce (as we must with all government spending binges) that education isn't a function of the money that's thrown at it; what matters more is what that money is spent on.
What it's been spent on in recent years is bullshit, mush and toxic swill -- and the seven-lesson inculcation of servitude.
“Education in the government's factory schools is pumping out an
ever-increasing number of functionally illiterate and unemployable
youths - good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box."
- Peter Osborne
The 'liberal' view is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education, results have shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure.
The view of conservatives on the other hand is generally that public education needs to be made more “efficient.” More testing, more efficiencies, and better 'delivery' of education is the answer they say.
Neither of their answers are working.
Libertarians however maintain that public education is already all too efficient at the very thing it was designed to do: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the government’s chosen values.
While the numbers of students able to read and write diminishes with each new generation, after many generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe, 'politically correct and totally unable to think-- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good, forty-two percent of whom are unable to read a bus timetable or operate a simple appliance.
That delivering the government’s chosen values is the goal of the government’s education system can be seen not just by the facts from history, but by their dismissive reaction to ongoing failure in what many parents consider is the actual purpose of education—reading and writing.
In previous decades, the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools now however is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture.
Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctrination doesn't.
The government's most recently chosen values include “sustainability,” "fairness,” “opportunity” and security." We know that because Helen Clark said so when the current curriculum was being developed. Orwell would have recognised all these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training.
"What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," Ms Clark acknowledged in her speech, admitting perhaps that this is the way governments make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula.
Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.
Rather than delivering new generations of New Zealand's children to be indoctrinated into servitude and their heads filled with mush, we say instead it's time for a radical rethink and a wholesale rejection of NZ's educational establishment – a rejection of those who've sucked up taxpayers’ money, and (in the only measures parents care about) produced only failure .
It's time for a permanent and constitutional separation of school and state, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state.
Even the critics of state education, however, cannot imagine life without it, simply because they’ve never known anything else. They would have the same difficulty grasping the possibility of removing the state from the production of clothing if, all their lives, the state had exercised a coercive monopoly in that field.
Libertarianism holds that the removal of the state from education is a reform needed more urgently than most; and that all education should be private, non-compulsory, and paid for by the parents whose children are receiving it.
This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by New Zealand libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993.
The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
entrenching the Treaty of Waitangi in a constitution a “constitutional review.” The committee, comprising a number of government and tangata whanua toadies, has been examining “the role of the Treaty of Waitangi within constitutional arrangements,” “how New Zealand's legal and political systems could better incorporate Maori,” and “whether New Zealand needs a written constitution.”
I doubt, if one emerges, it will be one that Thomas Jefferson would recognise.
An appropriate time then to re-post (with new links!)my Cue Card on what a constitution is for.
Why do we need a government at all? James Madison puts the argument in a nutshell:
If men were angels no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Here’s the essential argument against anarchy, and for a constitutional republic: Because men are not angels, and government does need to be controlled.
But how? That’s the question.
A constitution is our means of chaining up the government and training it to act only in our protection.
As I’ve said already in these Cue Cards, the task of government is to protect us against physical coercion and its derivative, fraud. Good government is the means by which retaliatory force is brought under objective control. A good constitution, properly written, brings the government itself under objective control.
Such a constitution was the intent of America’s Founding Fathers, a clear and understandable document delineating a government that protects individuals’ rights, but after nearly two-hundred years the success has been only partial. Building on the success of the US Constitution and seeking to close the loopholes exploited since its introduction, New Zealand libertarians have written what we call A Constitution for New Freeland summing up what a good constitution should look like, and why:
Every good constitution relies on one further, crucial, restraint on the growth of Omnipotent Government: significant public understanding and support for the constitution and its protections, without which politicians and advocates of a ‘living constitution’ can pervert the constitutional protections as easily as the simple agreements given in the Treaty of Waitangi have been perverted.
Further, the task of constitutional law is to delineate the legal structure of a country’s law; it must therefore be superior to all other laws, and law stepping outside the bounds of what is declared unconstitutional must be able to be struck down – an accessible Constitutional Court makes this possible.
The superiority of a constitution to all other law is both a good thing and a bad thing. What’s good is that once a watertight constitution properly protecting individual rights is in place, it acts to chain up the guard dog and to keep it on its leash for good. What’s bad is that once in place, a poor or anti-freedom constitution is very difficult to get rid of.
Liberty, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, requires eternal vigilance.
This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.
* Yes, you really do have to watch your spelling!
Those laws and customs [of the common law], so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together.Unfortunately the “boasted regulations” of today have turned Smith’s insight on its head, and removed many of the rights that common law once protected. Not least among those rights are property rights.
