Who says good things don't come in threes? To finish threeposts on environmentalism, here is, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, an op-ed from an Austrialian academic and environmentalist arguing that environmental concerns are so important that they should trump both democracy and freedom. Note the last paragraph in particular:

Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. The subject is almost sacrosanct and those who indulge in criticism are labeled as Marxists, socialists, fundamentalists and worse. These labels are used because alternatives to democracy cannot be perceived! Support for Western democracy is messianic as proselytised by a President leading a flawed democracy

There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. It is not that liberal democracy cannot react once it sees a threat, for example, the speedy response to a recent international financial emergency. If governments can recognise a financial emergency and in an instant move heaven and earth (and billions of dollars, pounds sterling and euros) to contain it, why are they unable to do the same in response to a global environmental emergency? Quite simply our system is seen to live and breathe by the present economic system; the problem is that living and breathing within the confines of the world ecological systems is contrary to the activity of progress and development as defined within liberal democracy.

The Chinese decision on shopping bags is authoritarian and contrasts with the voluntary non-effective solutions put forward in most Western democracies. We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.

That we must choose between "liberty" and "life" puts a whole different spin on the whole "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" thing now doesn't it? Evidently, when you have the Truth, it must be imposed upon the non-believers whether they want it or not.

Goldberg adds a line from the guy's co-authored book page: "[T]he authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power." Has inter-war era scientism ever been more plain in our own time than this?

For Goldberg, by the way, this is a nice bit of evidence for his new book Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern American liberalism, deriving from Progressivism, shares some important features with the political economy of 20th century fascism. Modern liberalism, he argues, is fascism with a smiling face. Their underlying philosophy and many of their institutions are similar to those of the fascists, but their intentions are much more noble. The op-ed above certainly fits that description. Having started reading the book last night, and having seen a draft of the chapter on economics, I can tell you that it's a serious piece of intellectual history that should be taken seriously by precisely the folks who are going to dismiss his argument without reading the book.

Lest you believe that the notion of heretical behavior and other elements of the worst of organized religion within the environmentalist movement are hyperbole, check out what the Canadian scientist David Suzuki had to say about politicians who question the science of global warming (HT: Ron Bailey):

Toward the end of his speech, Dr. Suzuki said that "we can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton" and then encouraged attendees to hold politicians to a greater green standard.

"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

"It's an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years."

Deny the faith, go to jail. All the more ironic that he was a former board member of a civil liberties organization. Whatever one's views on climate change, suggesting jailing those who dissent should be beyond the bounds of reasoned discussion and smacks of the mentality of witch hunts, pogroms, and forced conversions.

On the Dem side, Hillary did better than I would have liked. DO NOT WANT. Even though Mass. Gov. Patrick and both Senators endorsed Obama, Hillary's strength with liberal boomer women worked well here, and, evidently, many other places. Fortunately, her lead is slim, where"fortunately" refers only to my sense that Obama is less scary, and marginally more liberty-friendly, than Hillary.

UPDATE: Hmm, I guess it's actually not clear who is ahead in delegates. See here, e.g.

One other thing. If I keep hearing these sloppy, lazy, MSM journalists describe Hillary's victory in New York as"winning her home state," I'm going to have start taking hostages. Even the NYT does this! One correspondent on NPR got it right this morning, referring to her winning her adopted home state. The reality is, she lost her home state, Illinois, to Obama.

Both are highly moralistic and use the language and strategies of "sinfulness." This also involves an implied and often explicit claim to have monopolized the moral high ground.

Both involve the idea that one must sacrifice now for some undetermined future reward. This makes the Lent connection very logical.

Both have historically been very quick to label and condemn as "heretics" those who disagree with them.

Both have a tendency toward irrationalism and mysticism, e.g. the Gaia strand of environmentalism.

I really do believe that for many young people and for older folks on the left, environmentalism is a way of creating meaning in their very secular lives that in an earlier era would have been fulfilled by religious practice. It brings the notion of living for something larger than oneself, of sacrificing in the name of a better future, and of having a set of certain moral categories by which one can orient one's own behavior and criticize that of others. In these ways it is also a response to the relativism with which many are inculcated growing up and being educated. It also explains, I think, the increasing attractiveness to young people of neo-paganism and other forms of spirituality that are linked to nature. Seeing Lent as a time to reduce carbon usage could be seen as a very clever way of speaking to young lapsed or non-practicing Catholics in the same sort of language.

And to head off a certain line of criticism, my point is not to condemn every form of concern about the environment, nor to suggest that such concerns are incompatible with reason or libertarianism. I think there are interesting and important parallels and interactions between the spontaneous order of nature and that of society that need to be taken seriously by libertarians. However, that perspective is not the one taken in the general public's environmentalism.

It is a challenge for those of us who are skeptical of both organized religion's and environmentalism's claims to being universal moralities that should inform public policy (as opposed to something one practices as a private morality) to find a way to offer people a set of meaningful and universalizable values that are more consistently congenial to classical liberalism. If we cannot offer our own way of filling that gap, it will continue to be filled for us by movements that are not so friendly to liberty and progress.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Case in point: critics of the Mises Institute often imply that it, or various people associated with it, are “pro-Confederate” in the sense of regarding the Confederacy as a legitimate government or regarding slavery as a defensible institution. As Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods point out on LRC today, this charge is completely false, and the critics should stop insinuating otherwise.

On the other hand, though, it’s a bit silly to act as though that’s all the “pro-Confederate” charge comes to. Surely it’s true that the overall tone of much that has come out of the Mises Institute on the Civil War has been not just critical of Lincoln and the Union (both well-deserving of criticism) but sympathetic toward and soft-pedaling of the Confederacy. This seems, well, blindingly obvious. To exaggerate this tendency into unproblematic “support” for the Confederacy, as the critics tend to do, is unfair. To downplay it into nothing at all also seems unfair. (And so on, mutatis mutandis, for most of the other issues dividing the “Beltway libertarians” and the “fever swamp.”)

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

A nice birthday present came in the mail today: my anthology with Tibor, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, hot off the presses. It looks very nice. (Well, at 40¢ a page, it’d better!)

The book features contributions from a variety of philosophical perspectives within libertarianism, including consequentialist, deontological, contractarian, Randian, and Hayekian approaches.

The contents:

PART 1: MINARCHISM

1. Why the State Needs a Justification – Lester H. Hunt

2. Libertarianism, Limited Government and Anarchy – John Roger Lee

3. Rationality, History, and Inductive Politics – Adam Reed

4. Objectivism against Anarchy – William R Thomas

5. Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism – Tibor R. Machan

PART 2: ANARCHISM

6. Radical Freedom and Social Living – Aeon James Skoble

7. The State: From Minarchy to Anarchy – Jan Narveson

8. The Obviousness of Anarchy – John Hasnas

9. Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism – Roderick T. Long

10. Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism – Charles Johnson

It strikes me that four of the ten contributors have some connection to the Auburn Philosophy Department. Tibor and I are Professor Emeritus and Associate Professor, respectively; Aeon was an Instructor here in 1993-1994; and Charles was an undergrad philosophy major here, graduating in 2003.