Four jobs I've had:
1. Easter Bunny (for store photo ops)
2. Bookkeeper
3. Technical Writer
4. Proofreader

Four movies I can watch over and over again:
1. The Lion in Winter (1968)
2. Serenity (2005)
3. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Four places I've lived:
1. Falls Church, VA
2. Tulsa, OK
3. Broken Arrow, OK
4. Nashville, TN

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Prisoner
2. 24
3. The X-Files
4. Serenity

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen (at all, ever):
1. The Sopranos
2. Scrubs
3. CSI
4. The Office

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Bath, England
2. Maggie Valley, NC
3. Paris, France
4. Toronto, Ontario

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Mushroom pizza
2. Chille rellenos
3. Eggplant parmigiana
4. Asparagus soup

Four sites I visit daily:
1. Ebay (at least I admit it)
2. Locus Online
3. Neil Gaiman's Blog
4. Liberty and Power Blog

Four places I’d rather be right now (of places I've been):
1. Providence, RI
2. Toronto, Ontario
3. Bath, England
4. in the Blue Ridge Mountains

Four albums I can't live without (only four?):
1. Contact from the Underworld of Red Boy by Robbie Robertson
2. Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos
3. Falling Farther In by October Project
4. Middle Earth by Bob Catley

Here are four of my favorite artists/bands:
1. Tori Amos
2. Robbie Robertson
3. Giuseppe Festa and Lingalad
4. Glass Hammer


Since I'm the new kid on the Liberty and Power block, I won't tag anyone.

The reform would introduce a "market mechanism" for compensation payments for farmland seized for commercial use, said Du Ying, a deputy minister of China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Mr Du gave few details of the reform plan and no timetable for its implementation, which could prove far from straightforward.

But market-based compensation would bring potentially dramatic benefits to rural residents whose land is taken over for use in China's fast-expanding cities, towns and industrial zones.

It could also help to prevent land disputes between rural residents and local governments, which have become a significant source of social tension and violent protest in recent years.

"If the land is being requisitioned for use for the public good, then there must be a raised standard for compensation. If it is to be used commercially, then the market mechanism must be introduced," he said, without elaborating.

Wu Chongqing, a expert on rural issues at the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, said it was the first time the government had offered the prospect of different handling of land for public and commercial use.

"This kind of differentiation is extremely significant for China," Mr Wu said. "The significance lies in raising the compensation for farmers' requisitioned land."

However, Mr Wu warned that if both public use and commercial requisition orders continued to be the preserve of local governments, it would remain very difficult for farmers to protect their land.

I. Virtù and Selfishness. Machiavelli called it virtù: Successful polities, he argued, possessed a sense of public-mindedness that brought their citizens to do what was right for the state even when it contravened their private interests. Sometimes translated as civic virtue, public spirit, or just plain virtue, virtù was Machiavelli's chief explanation for the success and failure of political enterprises from antiquity to the Renaissance. Societies possessing virtù would sacrifice their wealth, their comfort, and even their sons so that good government would continue. And paradoxically, through sacrifice they would usually prosper.

The trouble with virtù, however, was that it was almost intrinsically fleeting. Societies kept their virtù only so long as they resisted the temptation toward softness: While virtù brought strength, strength brought wealth. In turn, wealth brought luxury, vice, and effeminacy. In other words, virtù contained the seeds of its own destruction. For
Machiavelli, history could be explained as an ongoing battle between virtù and decadence. (Yes, there's a painfully obvious gender angle here. I may eventually discuss it in another post.)

Machiavelli shocked his contemporaries in part because his idea of virtù was audaciously pagan: It had little or nothing to do with Christian ideas of virtue, positing that perhaps the best interests of the Church did not always coincide with those of the state. Virtù may have had nothing to do with selfishness, but it had still less to do with Christian humility.

As Bernard Crick put it in his introduction to Machiavelli's Discourses (the relevant portion of which can be read here):

'Civic spirit' is probably the best simple translation—if by 'spirit' one means spirited action, like the arete of the early Greeks -- as in Homer's description of Achilles as being 'a doer of deeds and a speaker of words'; and in Machiavelli's relishing the significance of Achilles' tutor having been a centaur, 'half-beast and half-man'. Lastly, while he often uses the term in a hortatory way -- people should recover their virtù' while there is time, or should not have let it idle away into ozio (indolence or corruption) -- its force is as often empirical. Does a state have virtù among its inhabitants or not? Are there, in a word, citizens? If there are no or too few citizens, one is doomed to personal or princely rule; but if many, then a republic can flourish, and will prove — the by now familiar argument — the stronger form of state. Look around the modern world. It is a reasonably precise criterion. To give one dangerous example. Leave aside the rights and the wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Is it not obvious that the weakness, for all their numbers and arms, of the Arabs is related to the historical lack and the slow development of a class of citizens -- men who combine individual initiative with collective discipline? And that much of the strength of Israel is related to its citizen culture?

(Two complete asides: My own edition adds the words"as well as to foreign subvention" before the final question mark, which dilutes the argument considerably. I would have left them off. Elsewhere, Crick also makes a howling error about the French Revolution, claiming that universal manhood suffrage was never imagined by the men of 1793; in reality, the French Constitution of 1793 made France the first European polity ever to adopt the measure. But aside from this error, I found Crick's introduction to the Discourses to be one of the most stimulating pieces of writing I have encountered for many
weeks.)

In England, Machiavelli's ideas would later animate many of what are now termed the classical republican thinkers, men like Algernon Sidney and John Milton. Cato's Letters (excerpts here), from which the Cato Institute takes its name, are likewise typical of this strain of republican and proto-libertarian thought.

The classical republicans also exerted a strong influence on the founding of the American republic. When Benjamin Franklin famously declared that the Constitutional Convention had given America"a republic, if you can keep it," the second half of his epigram was a clear reference to the civic virtue that our founders hoped would sustain the American experiment. Many of the Federalist Papers are also informed by an appreciation of how difficult it is to maintain a republic. While present-day Americans may think that liberal democracy is one of the easiest and most natural things in the world, our founders thought it could only be won -- and maintained -- through tremendous sacrifice.

Yet even in the late eighteenth century, an intellectual revolution was already underway, and classical republicanism was on the wane. Inspired by thinkers like Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith, those who prized human liberty increasingly declared that neither freedom nor progress demanded very much in the way of civic virtue or self-sacrifice for the good of the polity: Prosperity, good government, and even virtuous individual character might instead arise through the pursuit of fundamentally selfish goals. In his poem"The Fable of the Bees," Mandeville wrote,

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.

This was the State's Craft, that maintain'd
The Whole, of which each Part complain'd:
This, as in Musick Harmony,
Made Jarrings in the Main agree;
Parties directly opposite
Assist each oth'r, as 'twere for Spight;
And Temp'rance with Sobriety
Serve Drunkenness and Gluttonny.

The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury.
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more.

Clearly we are far removed from Machiavelli's understanding of how a republic endures; the intellectual revolution of which Mandeville was part turned on its head one of the key tenets of classical republicanism. Most subsequent classical liberals have idealized commerce and selfishness to almost the same degree that classical republicans vilified them. And while Franklin quipped of having given America a republic, if it could keep it, many of his other writings reveal him have had inordinate difficulties on the question of pride -- which he knew from experience to be a great motivator. Here he discussed his famous list of practical virtues:

My list of virtues contain'd at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show'd itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc'd me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list giving an extensive meaning to the word.

I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it... When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

The influence of Mandeville -- a sometime friend of Franklin's -- is clear: The appearance of virtue may well be enough, and pride may well be the engine that drove all of Franklin's legendary hard work. Franklin seems to demand of himself not Christian virtue, nor even virtù, but a crafty self-interest and a pleasant demeanor.

Especially in the twentieth century, something like Mandeville's position won a decisive victory among libertarians: From Ayn Rand, who extolled the virtue of selfishness, to Friedrich Hayek, who argued that a wide array of helpful social systems arose through amoral and shortsighted transactions, to Robert Nozick, who even offered an invisible hand explanation for the state, civic virtue is nowhere to be found -- except for those rare occasions where it is argued against. (It is easy to see how Rand, who fled the communists, and Hayek, who fled the Nazis, might have come to reject the notion of self-sacrifice for the good of a government, purely for personal reasons. Yet both participated in a trend that had begun well before them and would continue to the present.)

II. The Limits of Government To ensure the properly selfish life, Rand, Hayek, and many others demanded sharp limits on the power of government. Across many different lines of modern libertarian thought, government is conceived as an obstacle to self-fulfillment, understood either as man's proper aim in life or as the creator of most of our other beneficial social attributes. More often than not, government gets in the way because it introduces inauthentic motives, distorts the proper relationships among individuals, and even tempts people toward a worship of the collective at the expense of the self. Broadly speaking, this is the libertarian account of fascism and communism, and it has always seemed to me one of the areas where libertarian political thought rang the truest.

We are to expand the realm of the individual, because -- in Rand's formulation -- the individual, and not society, is the prime mover of the world, or because -- in Hayek's -- we do not understand and cannot possibly understand the complex honeycomb that we all create through the pursuit of our own self-interests. In either case, the prescription is roughly the same.

How, though, are we to achieve our goal? A wide variety of tactics have been suggested, from Objectivism's stress on rationality and proper cultural values as the foundation for a free society -- all the way to the Rothbard Caucus's proposal to dismantle all improper government programs immediately and without regard for consequence.

Each in its own way, the various strains of libertarianism are grappling with the problems of public choice theory, and, in his own way, Machiavelli acknowledged . As Wikipedia explains (I think fairly),

One of the basic claims that obtain from public choice theory is that good government policies in a democracy are an underprovided public good, because of the rational ignorance of the voters. Each voter is faced with an infinitesimally small probability that his vote will change the result of the elections, while gathering the relevant information necessary for a well-informed voting decision requires substantial time and effort. Therefore, the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout.

While the good government tends to be a pure public good for the mass of voters, there exists a plethora of various interest groups that have strong incentives for lobbying the government to implement specific inefficient policies that would benefit them at the expense of the general public. For example, lobbying by the sugar manufacturers might result in an inefficient subsidy for the production of sugar, either direct or by protectionist measures. The costs of such inefficient policy are dispersed over all citizens, and therefore unnoticeable to each individual. On the other hand, the benefits are shared by a very small special interest group, who has very strong incentives to perpetuate the policy by further lobbying. The vast majority of voters will be completely unaware of the whole affair due to the phenomenon of rational ignorance. Therefore, theorists expect that numerous special interests will be able to successfully lobby for various inefficient policies.

Inspired by the inaugural essay at Cato Unbound, James Buchanan's"Three Amendments: Responsibility, Generality, and Natural Liberty," Sandefur has argued that there is no possible way to write a constitution whose text escapes the fundamental problem of public choice in politics. He writes,

At Cato Unbound, Prof. James Buchanan.. recommends amending the United States Constitution to say something like (in Hayek's words)"Congress shall make no law authorizing government to take any discriminatory measures of coercion." He's open to other phrases, but the idea is to enshrine the principle of"generality, which has long been accepted as the central element in the rule of law."

Buchanan believes that we can limit the public choice problem by establishing a constitutional limit on differential benefits, but, as Anthony de Jasay explains in his essay, On Treating Like Cases Alike, reprinted in Justice And Its Surroundings 170 (2002), there is a major problem with this: constitutional rules are subject to the same public choice pressures that influence statutes. As Jasay puts it, interest groups not only" choose legislation that maximizes their gains from politics," they also"learn to choose a constitution that maximizes the scope for such legislation."

...Requiring"generality" doesn't answer the question, therefore, of what sort of laws are general and what are special, because it doesn't explain what variables are to be considered relevant when determining whether one case is like another case. Those variables are potentially infinite, and many have a great deal of plausibility. But once we decide on some, then we have loaded the game and our"general" laws are no longer truly"general" in a meaningful sense.

...You see now why I once referred to this essay as"spooky." It suggests that there is no possible solution to the fundamental problem of politics — no matter how philosophically savvy the people are!

Call it the Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem of limited government: No matter how we set the limits, there will always be people with the proper personal incentives to wish to circumvent them; no matter how we write the rules, there will always be ways of rendering these same rules moot. And if there aren't any such ways, then people, in their infinite turpitude, will invent them. In a flash, we are back at Machiavelli, who demaned a certain public-spiritedness, a certain virtù, as a precondition for liberty. And I daresay that even in an anarcho-capitalist system, the same might well be required: Even granting for the sake of argument that all the rest of anarcho-capitalist theory is right, what, if not some quality or virtue of the people, would prevent an anarcho-capitalism from degenerating into a mere government?

[Crossposted at Positive Liberty.]

Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 08:38:12 -0600
From: Scott Laderman <laderman@d.umn.edu>

Given the nature of American exceptionalism, I am not surprised that
Mr. Gaffney does not recall anyone in government openly employing the
term "empire" or conceding its existence. The notion that the United
States maintains such a thing is antithetical to many Americans'
conception of their nation. I was thus struck by a 2004 article in
the _New York Times Magazine_ that quoted an adviser to George W.
Bush admitting, "We're an empire now." Mr. Gaffney (as well as those
who have recently written on H-Diplo about history and "reality") may
be interested in the following excerpt.

According to the writer Ron Suskind:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article for _Esquire_
that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications
director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to
Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told
me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which
I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The
aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based
community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded
and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really
works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.'" [1]

Scott Laderman
University of Minnesota, Duluth

NOTE:

[1] Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” _New York Times Magazine_
(October 17, 2004): 50-51.

The following speech, “The Ship and the Sea: ‘The Party of Lincoln’ and Civil Rights,” was presented to the Jackson County Republicans Lincoln Day Dinner (keynote address) (March 4, 2006). Professor Bean teaches History at Southern Illinois University; his web page is here

A member of that other political party, Harry S Truman, once said that"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.”

My book-in-progress, Right on Race: Conservative Voices for Racial Freedom offers the “history we don’t know” about conservatives, the Republican Party, and race. My goal is simple and radical: To turn our concept of the civil rights movement upside down, and place the Republican Party and conservatives at the center of a 150 year movement for racial freedom.

We need this book more than ever. Since the 1960s, young Americans have been taught to equate the Democratic Party with civil rights, while being taught that the Republican Party was on the “wrong side” of history. The media and our schools have drummed this myth into our heads so that Republican politicians fear to even deal with civil rights because, as they say, “you can’t fight the race card.” This is bad history, betrays our proud party tradition, and offers no vision for the future. By looking backward at the Republican Party record on race, my book offers ammunition for those willing to “fight the race card” and promote colorblind justice.

For 150 years, the Republican Party held high the banner of civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party defended slavery, segregation and allied itself with the Ku Klux Klan to take the vote away from black and white Republicans and terrorize them into submission. Little wonder the Democratic Party was known as the “party of the Klan” well into the 20th century. When Democrats finally embraced the cause of racial freedom in the 1960s, they were the “Johnny come latelys” of the civil rights movement, simply undoing the damage their Party had inflicted on racial minorities during the prior 100 years. We, the Party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Ward Connerly, have a far better claim to civil rights but we have forgotten our own history.

Here are a few of the forgotten voices I reclaim in my book:

Lewis Tappan took the lead in defending the slaves who mutinied on the Amistad – a court case made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film. Tappan was an evangelical Christian and conservative businessman. He used his network of antislavery men, including Abraham Lincoln, to create a credit reporting system–Dun & Bradstreet--that covered North America.

Another early Republican leader, Salmon P. Chase, earned the nickname “Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves” for defending runaway slaves.

The most famous runaway, Frederick Douglass, was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the 19th century. Douglass said "The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea."

Then there was Abraham Lincoln, who gave his name to “the Party of Lincoln.” He not only emancipated slaves, but spent his late political career calling slavery “a relic of barbarism” and advocating its “ultimate extinction.”

After the Civil War, a Republican Congress advanced a “Second American Revolution” by passing Civil Rights Acts and three constitutional amendments: abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection of the law and securing voting rights. This Congress also asserted the individual right to bear arms as needed for blacks (and others) to protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

Republicans were equally concerned with the rights of other racial minorities. For example, a conservative Republican Senator, Joseph Hawley, was the chief opponent of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred any Chinese from entering this country.

Republican civil rights advocates also used the courts to advance a colorblind vision of America. Thus, it was Republican Justice Harlan who dissented from the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring that “our Constitution is colorblind.” This became the rallying cry of the NAACP in its later battles to undo the segregation imposed on the South by the Democratic Party.

In fact, Republicans were also influential in the NAACP. The group’s first president, Moorefield Storey, denounced Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government and also won the first Supreme Court case ruling residential segregation unconstitutional – in 1917 (37 years before Brown v. Board).

During this same period, Republican businessmen used their philanthropy to improve the lives of African Americans in the South. Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears & Roebuck, was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire and a great philanthropist. One of the notable expressions of his “give while you live” charity was the creation of 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” in the South for poor black youth.

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan arose again as a national force. Republican presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge denounced KKK violence and supported a federal anti-lynch law, which passed the Republican House before repeatedly dying in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Continuing through the 1930s and 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt refused to have pictures taken with blacks, the Republican Party called for desegregation of the military, antilynching laws, and the right to vote. Furthermore, while FDR sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, a conservative newspaper chain denounced this violation of civil rights, as did the influential black conservative George Schuyler.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson passed the landmark Civil Rights Act only after Republicans introduced their own bill and overcame a Democratic filibuster. 89% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act–a far greater percentage than the Democrats, who mustered a bare majority.

Almost immediately, however, the Democratic Party returned to its tradition of racial discrimination by instituting racial preferences that judged people by the color of their skin. In this era, I include excerpts from George Schuyler, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Linda Chavez, Ward Connerly, and Jorge Mas Conosa.

To return to Truman: His supporters said “Give ‘em hell, Harry.” For all the Harrys of the Republican Party who are afraid to speak their mind on civil rights, afraid to fight the “race card” and the race hustlers of the Democratic Party, I say: Read my book and “Give ‘em hell.”

Deroy Murdock, “Grand Old Party” (National Review Online, 2005) – wonderful overview of Republican civil rights record, 1850s-present. Drawn from House Policy Committee document, “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar” http://policy.house.gov/2005_calendar/2005_calendar.pdf

Jon Stewart, for repeatedly poking a pin in the pretensions of the Hollywood crowd. As the night wore on, the audience seemed to warm to him -- and he, in return, seemed to exude more and more contempt. His two best moments came after two of Chuck Workman's haphazard collections of movie clips. After a ridiculously self-congratulatory batch of excerpts meant to illustrate Hollywood's history of taking brave stands for social justice -- I kept waiting to see the Klan riding to the rescue in Birth of a Nation, but for some reason they left that one out -- Stewart said sarcastically,"And none of those issues were ever a problem again." And after a montage of clips purportedly taken from"epics" (since when are E.T. and West Side Story epics?), he gave us a look of supreme boredom and said,"What's next: Oscar's tribute to montages?"

NTP was co-founded in 1992 by former patent examiner Don Stout and the late inventor Thomas Campana, who worked on ways to send emails wirelessly. In 2001, NTP sued RIM saying it held patents covering the"push" aspect of wireless email.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.