The president of the United States tweeted a video of an alleged rioter (who, in all likelihood, is an American citizen, not a “Mexican rapist”) with the threatening comment:
“Anarchists, we see you!”
Is it for the president to identify suspects? So much for the ideal of the rule of law, it seems.
But my point is different and relates to the benefits of personal knowledge. I have always hoped that a journalist would, during a press conference, ask the president something like “Mr. President, what do you mean exactly by ‘socialism’?” Or, “Mr. President, what do you mean by ‘the extreme left’ and how does it differ from the left?”
Since Mr. Trump’s tweet of yesterday and his other recent references to “anarchists” as another type of scapegoat, my dream has changed. I would now propose questions like the following:
Mr. President, what is an anarchist? What does an anarchist believe?
Mr. President, do you think that Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, and Murray Rothbard were anarchists?
What about David Friedman?
Do you think that Anthony de Jasay was a conservative anarchist?
Of course, looters have to be stopped and arrested but different sorts of anarchists exist, just as there are different sorts of defenders of the state. Another idea for a question along those lines:
Mr. President, don’t you think that the so-called “anarchist” rioters and looters actually want more state power, just like the “extreme left” you attack?
The following question may be problematic for both Mr. Trump and the libertarians involved:
Mr. President, what do you think of the anarcho-capitalists who, during your 2016 election campaign, created a group called “Libertarians for Trump”?
More seriously, I suggest the Trump presidency has taught something important to those of us who define themselves as libertarians or fellow travelers: knowledge is important, both in the sense of a minimal culture about what has been happening in the world until yesterday and in the sense of an intellectual capacity to learn. To advance liberty, an ignorant disrupter is not sufficient. He is more likely to advance tyranny. If he appears to defend one libertarian cause—say, the Second Amendment—he will more probably bring it into disrepute.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 2 2020 at 7:43am
Sympathetic agreement.
1. Journalists generally do not ask enough (any?) Why questions? Rather then just report the fact, X said Y, they could ask why X thinks Y is the case.
2. Policy critics should present an alternative policy, not just point out the policy X is bad.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 2 2020 at 10:16am
@Thomas: You might want to elaborate on your second point. The alternative of no policy is an alternative. If one wishes instead to consider “no policy” as a “policy”, then an alternative policy is individual liberty or the presumption of liberty. Isn’t it obvious that the state must not have a specific policy on everything? And suppose the proposed policy is to cut every man’s right hand, perhaps under the theory that it would dramatically reduce (private) crime rates. Should an opponent of such policy feel obliged to propose an alternative policy such as “only of those men whose social security number ends with an odd number” or “only those who have been born on an even day”?
Craig
Jun 2 2020 at 9:49am
“If he appears to defend one libertarian cause—say, the Second Amendment—he will more probably bring it into disrepute.”
That’s what the left will do though. The political trench warfare will never cease, the right and left will be throwing their political grenades at each other.
He did get Gorsuch and Kavanaugh though otherwise we would already be well on the road back to a Miller collective rights interpretation of the 2d Amendment.
“To advance liberty, an ignorant disrupter is not sufficient.”
The sauve Romney lost. The pre-Trump Republicans talked a good talk and consistently marched into Iraq. The trend was clear, the lobster was on slow boil, the demographic handwriting is/was and will remain on the wall. Government will be making a decent majority of economic decisions VERY soon. They were already there in higher tax blue states like NJ where all in, local, state, federal = 56% of income. Oh, and they want more…..and not only do they want more they don’t even want to set that as a limit. Its just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 2 2020 at 10:27am
@Craig: I agree that prima facie Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were accomplishments of Trump. But note three things. First, in that case, he apparently consulted more knowledgeable than himself (which is not difficult to find), that is, the Federalist Society. Second, the jury is still out on how this will play out for the Second Amendment. If I am not mistaken, one of the two new justices recently voted against reviewing the New York Second Amendment case. Or was it only on the basis of a technical issue? Third, if these achievements come at the cost of politicians more statist than Trump nominating judges for the next quarter of a century, they will turn out to be no achievement at all.
Craig
Jun 2 2020 at 10:58am
“First, in that case, he apparently consulted more knowledgeable than himself (which is not difficult to find), that is, the Federalist Society.”
Nobody knows more about judging than Trump. (joke of course in case you didn’t catch my sarcasm). I agree, he wouldn’t necessarily know who to appoint specifically.
“Second, the jury is still out on how this will play out for the Second Amendment.
True, the future has uncertainties. All I can say there is you have to play the odds, I suppose!
“If I am not mistaken, one of the two new justices recently voted against reviewing the New York Second Amendment case. Or was it only on the basis of a technical issue?”
NY repealed the law, so I believe the case became moot. New York State Rifle and Pistol Assoc v NYC, right? <– the liberals are actually VERY good at lawfare. Avoid bad precedents and live to fight another day.
“Third, if these achievements come at the cost of politicians more statist than Trump nominating judges for the next quarter of a century, they will turn out to be no achievement at all.”
Essentially what I am seeing here is that in Trump you see a future backlash. Oh, sure, there will be a backlash, but Trump won by ‘slipping one past the goalie’ and he still lost the popular vote. There is, in 2016, now and in the future a permanent Democratic majority. I don’t see the Democrats ascendant BECAUSE of Trump, the Democrats are ascendant and Trump ‘stole’ one from them.
Jon Murphy
Jun 2 2020 at 11:13am
You’ll forgive my skepticism, but people have been making that claim since the 30s. Since then, there have been 44 congresses, and the Democrats only held a majority in 28 of them, with most of those coming before the 1990s (22 of the 28 occurred prior to 1990. Of the remaining 6, 4 were the last 4 years of Bush I and the first term of Clinton. The last time they held a majority was the first two years of Obama).
We’re always on the cusp of a supposed Blue Wave, and yet it never comes. Even in 2016, with the unpopularity of Trump, the Dems just barely took the House and failed to capture the Senate.
I suspect we’ll see the same ebbs and flows of political fortunes just like always.
Craig
Jun 2 2020 at 12:05pm
“We’re always on the cusp of a supposed Blue Wave”
We’re not on the cusp of one, we’re in one right now. Trump is just an electoral aberration and make no qualms about it, he got crushed in the popular vote. Behind that at the state level, Bevin, Christie, Kasich, NONE can actually take on the public sector unions. Trump essentially won in some states the Republicans really got lucky in. There’s no Reaganesque 49 state blowout coming, and even then they still don’t actually make the government smaller anyway. TX is close to flipping, but FL is gone. In 2016 they passed an amendment to the state constitution allowing ex-felons to vote. There’s apparently 1.4mn of them. In the newspaper here they did a poll on those individuals registering and not a single one registered Republican. NOT ONE. FL which was close, its not even going to be close anymore. Its over….
Jon Murphy
Jun 2 2020 at 12:28pm
The Democrats have been losing ground in Congress for a decade now. Trump is President and, prior to the past few days, I’d give him even odds to get re-elected. The Democrats took exactly 1 seat in the Senate (remaining a minority) and barely got a majority in the House. Things are no better at the State or local levels for Dems.
If this is the supposed Blue Wave, then the Democrats are in worse trouble than I feared.
Idriss Z
Jun 2 2020 at 5:12pm
I agree with Craig, just curious Jon are you factoring in gerrymandering and voter suppression because the lack of the Blue Wave heretofore might have been postponed because of aggressive redistricting and anti-minority voting laws due to increased and more open racism in state legislatures? (sorry for the run-on). It seems voting rights groups are on the way to restoring those rights to people and so the nominal representation of democrats and republicans (and hopefully independents) better reflects real Americans preferences which is currently much more Blue.
On a more theoretical level, I also subscribe to the notion (hope?) that Locke’s wager will true and with free expression, good information will defeat bad information as we get accustomed to the information age and people believe youtube conspiracies less. It seemed people were apathetic towards expertise and qualifications and outright to public service experience which caused the slip-by, not any genuine love for conservative/republican ideas. Then again this is just an idea that’s no better than thousands of others bandied around so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.
Craig
Jun 2 2020 at 7:07pm
Red is ‘demographically’ challenged, Blue is ‘geographically’ challenged.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 2 2020 at 8:44pm
@Idryss: Any theory of democracy must pass the test of reality, which means be compatible with the actual incentives of the individual voter. The fact is that he is “rationally ignorant.” He remains ignorant of the issues (and the intricate consequences of complex policy packages) because information is costly (in only in time) and will be useless to him. It will be useless because if he uses his information to cast a good vote, this vote has, for all practical purposes, a zero chance to change the result of the election, just like a blind vote. This is why more than a third of electors cannot even name their representative, have no idea of the proportion of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid (and wouldn’t even know where to look for the information in government sources), don’t read the 66,000 pages of regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations every year (assuming they only know the CFR exists), and so forth. (See my old introduction to public choice theory in Regulation.)
Jon Murphy
Jun 2 2020 at 10:22pm
Gerrymandering works both ways, so I doubt it has that significant an effect.
Furthermore, gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, so it only explains the House (which has tended more Democrat anyway).
Jon Murphy
Jun 3 2020 at 11:35am
Just one final thought real quick:
The recurring point about “popular vote” supports my suspicion of no forthcoming Blue Wave and permanent Democrat majority.
Very little is decided by popular vote at the Federal level. The Presidency is not. Each state only has 2 senators, and so while the senators are chosen by popular vote within the state, nationally they are equally represented. Same with the House. each rep only represents his district, not the state as a whole. If, say, all the Democrats lived in just 2 states and the other 48 were populated by Republicans (a silly example, but let’s go with it), then they would never win a Presidency nor Senate majority, even if they have a perpetual majority in the House and a higher population.
The point here is simple: Democrats tend to win in every way except that which matters. Claiming the popular vote in the 2016 election is like saying “yeah, we had the most yards in the football game.” Yeah, you did, but so what? What matters is the final score, which is determined by touchdowns, field goals, and safeties. You gotta score points to win the game. The Democrats don’t seem to have realized this.
Until the Democrats actually learn to win elections, they will never have a permanent majority.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 5:44pm
Another crucial point is that the popular vote in current elections – where the electoral college exists – tells us little about what the popular vote would be if it actually mattered. The assumption that Democrats would still have won the pop. vote by the same margin if we didn’t have the electoral college ignores the fact that people know the electoral college exists and affects the relevance of their vote, e.g. many people don’t bother voting in California or Texas because they know they’re states are too solidly blue/red, while people in swing states have more of an incentive to vote.
If we switched to a popular-vote based system, voting incentives would change drastically, and it can’t really be inferred from current popular votes who would benefit or how much. It’d be like if in football, the team that got the most field goals won the game, even though points were still counted: one can’t assert, “if it were points that mattered, we would’be won,” because if points mattered, the other side would’ve actually been trying to score the most points, rather than trying to score the most field goals.
Craig
Jun 3 2020 at 7:39pm
Trump won a bizarre electoral victory in 2016 that is simply not going to happen again.
Jon Murphy
Jun 3 2020 at 8:47pm
Want to bet on that? Winning the Electoral College without the popular vote is rare, but hardly unprecedented. It’s happened twice in my short 30 years alive. It happened also in 1888 and 1876. It’ll happen again.
Jon Murphy
Jun 3 2020 at 8:48pm
Absolutely correct. Great point
Craig
Jun 3 2020 at 9:20pm
The day after Bevin lost, I liquidated every single US brokerage account and I went to the Bahamas. No, it wasn’t because I thought KY had been turned blue (Bevin was singularly unpopular), but yeah, I am actually betting on it.
The Republican Party isn’t just a minority party its a minority party with an aging demographic. VA is blue, NC is blue. FL is gone (the exfelons are Democrats and it won’t even be close) and the PA, OH, MI, WI — the odds of running that table again is 0. Trump in 2016 is a David Tyree helmet catch on 4th and 90 — a straight up hail mary and
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 4 2020 at 10:35am
@Mark: Your write: “people know the electoral college exists and affects the relevance of their vote.” You are not the only one to think this, but it is not correct. An individual’s vote has no relevance and he knows it (there might be some deluded exceptions). That’s why he votes blind: any mistake he makes does not matter for the result. There is no individual whose vote ever changed the result of the election in Wyoming or Vermont. (And if the number of voters made a difference, individuals would vote in higher proportion in local elections; the contrary happens.) If you are not familiar with this public choice idea, I have a short and imperfect introduction at http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2004/10/v27n3-2.pdf.
Jon Murphy
Jun 4 2020 at 12:49pm
With much respect, I disagree. I think that properly explains why he may be ignorant on specific policy, but not why he does or does not vote, which is the thrust of Mark’s point. I realize I am in conflict with people far smarter than I on the point I bring up (ignorance on policy versus choice to vote), but I think the argument relies too much on a specific definition of rationality.
A Republican in Massachusetts may not vote because his vote will not “count” since Massachusetts is highly unlikely to turn red. But if it were a nation-wide popular vote, his calculus to vote changes. Now, instead of there being zero likelihood to affect the election, there is a vanishingly small but non-zero chance. He may decide to vote now because his vote will “count.”
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 6 2020 at 4:05pm
@Jon: “Vanishlingly small” is very close to zero—vanishlingly close to zero. Nobody will buy one fewer tomato to reduce the price of tomatoes for the poor. Will this change if he learns something new about the market structure? Or perhaps you mean that information about the market structure would change his moral calculus, although it is not clear how.
Daniel Hill
Jun 2 2020 at 6:43pm
“Mr. President, why didn’t you encourage the MI governor to call out the National Guard and ‘dominate’ the men with guns who invaded the MI State House? Was it because they had the right color skin?”
For anyone wants to argue that it was a peaceful protest, turning up with guns is not a peaceful act. The guns serve only one purpose – to threaten violence. Armed robbery is still armed robbery even if no shots are fired.
“Mr. President, isn’t calling on your supporters to liberate their states from their lawfully elected governments an act of anarchy? Are you an anarchist, Mr. President? Or is it only anarchy when black people do it?”
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 2 2020 at 8:26pm
@Daniel: You ask interesting questions. Trump would not be able to answer, but here would be my own answers. First, anarchy and democracy are indeed opposites, except if you think that (some form of) democracy is a way to approximate anarchy. Except if you think, like Émile Faguet, that “an anarchist is an uncompromising liberal”; or, like Raymond Ruyer, that “real anarchism, feasible and realized … is simply the [classical] liberal economy.” (See sources in my Econlog post “The Basics: Anarchy and Public Goods“.) Second, it is not true that “guns serve only one purpose—to threaten violence,” except if in “threaten violence” you include “threatening violence to stop an aggressor’s violence.” Guns also serve to respond to and minimize threats of violence.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 4:33am
The alleged anarchist in question looks pretty white to me.
Mark Bahner
Jun 3 2020 at 11:30pm
It would be very interesting to know, but my guess is that, other than possibly Henry David Thoreau, Donald Trump would probably not recognize any of those names. (Sorry, David Friedman! ;-))
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 4 2020 at 10:26am
You’re right. That’s part of my point. (I am not sure he would understand what “think” means either.)
Niko Davor
Jun 7 2020 at 10:56am
This line of thinking is unreasonable. Note how malleable it is. You can blame almost anyone for anything with this reasoning.
In January 2020, Iran shot down a passenger plane; leading Democrats blame that on Trump, on the grounds that he provoked them. That’s exactly this kind of thinking and it’s not reasonable. The leaders of Iran bear responsibility for that, not Trump.
The Trump Administration bears responsibility for what they do or do not do. Others bear a similar responsibility. If Democratic politicians expand state power, if they seize guns and undermine the second amendment, or do other terrible things, they bear responsibility for their actions. Lemieux may twist that and blame all the bad behaviors of Democrats and the world on Trump; but that’s not reasonable.
I self-identify as a libertarian and I’m excited by the potential of anarcho-capitalism. I’ve read Huemer’s book “The Problem of Political Authority”. That’s not what anarchy means in more common usage. Lemieux knows that.
If someone says, “It’s pure anarchy”, they aren’t referring to opt-in market centric systems of governance. When guys are smashing windows, setting fires, throwing bombs with the anarchy symbol, they aren’t advocating the works of Rothbard and Spooner.
As for Trump not being versed in Thoreau, Spooner, and Rothbard: Pharma CEOs don’t have bioscience backgrounds. Tech CEOs usually don’t have software backgrounds. University Presidents usually don’t have strong research backgrounds. Different skills are valued in leaders. Trump has top economists and policy people and smart academics on his staff and as advisers. Trump himself doesn’t come from a policy background or academia. He’s the quarterback. That’s fine.
Personally, I experience and fear a totalitarian left. I view Trump as a valuable, but short lived bulwark against that. Trump will be gone from office soon, probably in January. It seems like the Republican party as we knew it is headed for extinction and in the near term, what replaces it will be much worse.
I’d also stress, that I consider Trump a very libertarian president. He genuinely fought for deregulation initiatives. He’s obeyed constitutional limits on his authority much more so than Obama or Bush. I understand he drives pundits who claim to be libertarian like Lemieux crazy, much more so than a Bush or Obama or Biden. I don’t find his arguments at all persuasive.
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