In Which I Disagree with John Holbo: In Atheistic Libertarian La-La Land Slavery IS Freedom
John Locke says that the only thing that keeps absolute slavery inconsistent with perfect libertarian freedom is that we cannot sell ourselves to others because we do not own ourselves--we only rent ourselves from God:
[A] man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself.... No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot [justly] take away his own life, cannot give another power over it. Indeed, having by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service, and he does him no injury by it: for, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on himself the death he desires. This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive: for, if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery ceases, as long as the compact endures: for, as has been said, no man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a power over his own life...
This has bearing on John Holbo, who this morning carries out a full "1984":
John Holbo: Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership — Crooked Timber: [T]he thick/thin libertarian distinction... marks out two fundamentally distinct kinds of political philosophy, based on totally different principles... disguised because there is considerable overlapping consensus at higher levels; and the thin side... tends to be systematically confused about where it is coming from.... Once we see this, a few things that are a bit strange about libertarianism, as a sociological phenomenon, look less strange.... [And] libertarianism is a Bigger Tent than liberalism, philosophically, even though it is sometimes classed as a mere fringe of the liberal tent. Liberalism really is one kind of thing... libertarianism – which is really two fundamentally different kinds of thing.... [L]ibertarianism can run the gamut from feudalism to J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. That’s really pretty weird.
Now: why would libertarianism be a form of feudalism, of all things?... Libertarians – propertarians, anyway – rather notoriously maintain that you really ought to be able to sell yourself into slavery, if you want to. After all, you’re your property. You should be able to dispose of yourself as you see fit. (Some libertarians don’t go so far but many do. Nozick, for example. I think it’s pretty hard to resist this conclusion, in princpled fashion, once you’ve bought the strong self-ownership principle.) Now: suppose we drop, experimentally, just the libertarian ‘self-ownership’ assumption, while keeping the ownership model. Imagine a society in which everyone belongs to their parents, at birth. (Or, if their parents belong to someone, to their parents’ owners.) The libertarian logic of this is clear enough, I trust. (I don’t say all libertarians should be bound by logic to embrace this vision of utopia on the spot, but they ought to recognize libertarianism, minus assumed self-ownership, as a form of the philosophy they advocate, albeit an extreme form.) You didn’t make yourself. You are not the sweat of your brow. Someone else made you. And people are the sort of things that can be owned. So you are a made-by-someone-else thing. And made to be owned. Why shouldn’t you be born owned by whoever went to the trouble (two someones?)
It would be kind of fun to sketch a hyper-propertarian society, organized along these lines.... It wouldn’t be terribly surprising if it turned out radically … feudal. Libertarianism, in this extreme form... [is] the road to serfdom... political power is privately held... "elements of political authority are powers that are held personally by individuals, not by enduring political institutions. These powers are held as a matter of private contractual right. Individuals gradually acquire the power to make, apply, and enforce rules by forging a series of private contracts with particular individuals or families. Oaths of fealty or service are sworn in exchange for similar or compensating benefits. Those who exercise political power wield it on behalf of others pursuant to their private contractual relation and only so long as their contract is in force. Since different services are provided to people, there is no notion of a uniform public law....
Now, to repeat: this Freeman sense [of libertarianism] has nothing to do with serfs...
And here I disagree with John Holbo: this Freeman sense of libertarianism has everything to do with serfs. That's how serfdom got started. The Roman Empire collapses. The legions go away. You have a bunch of small farmers with their land who used to pay taxes to the legions. You have a bunch of local notables with land. You have some barbarian soldiers (or ex-Roman soldiers) with military equipment. The local notables marry their daughters and sons into the barbarian military lineages and become lords and the farmers contract with the lords, "hiring" them to provide local protection and arbitration services. That's the origin of feudalism: in a series of libertarian contracts made by autonomous property-owning individuals who found themselves in a libertarian state-of-nature vis-a-vis each other.
John Holbo goes on:
Suppose an inhabitant of this feudal libertarian utopia objected to not being able to own his own children. Because creeping socialism, that’s why! (What will they take away from me next?) The government is stepping in and taking property, without compensation, and redistributing it to – well, to the property. And a very undeserving sort of moocher it looks, there in its crib. This welfare scheme – taking things from owners and giving them to themselves – is sure to lead rampant child abuse, typical liberal self-defeating perverse consequences idiocy. (Anyway, why should there even be an agency with the authority to take and redistribute property in this extremely expansive and unwarranted fashion?)... I think libertarians should admit that it is a libertarian scheme. It’s roughly half of what libertarians believe, plus an argument that the other half is really inconsistent with the half we are keeping.... So what do libertarians believe?... That we should treat liberty as property, and everyone as their own property.... 4 can be regarded as a kind of feudalism + minimum welfare state: everyone is given one lump-sum gubmint handout at birth – herself. Feudalism + welfarism is a cheeky formula for thin libertarianism, to be sure. But it brings out its genuine kinship with other views like: your parents owns you at birth. The king owns you at birth. God owns you at birth. The local lord owns you at birth. These ‘propertarian’ variants are but one step from propertarian libertarianism....
[I]f libertarians stick to their ‘thin’ guns they are sticking with feudalism + minimum welfare state and letting go of any ideal of liberty in any ordinary sense... you are elaborately apologizing for the status quo.... [I]f libertarians stick with the ideal of maximizing (optimizing) the stock of freedom – making sure there is as much of the stuff as is consistent with everyone having that amount of it – then you are like Will Wilkinson or Jacob Levy... an instrumental, policy dispute over the best means of achieving what is basically a liberal end.... You think liberals are perversely obstinate about resisting market solutions; but you are philosophically at odds with ‘thin’ libertarianism because you are in favor of liberty....
Caplan is, I am pretty sure, a ‘thin’ libertarian. Self-ownership and the market and non-aggression and no fraud. The minimum libertarian package. He has this idea that men, in the 19th Century, in the US, were closer to his libertarian ideal than men today. Because less government and lower taxes, pretty much.... Liberty is not being interfered with, if the exercise of your legitimate property rights is not interfered with. But by that standard, not only might married women in the 19th Century qualify (if we accept the ‘put your foot down’ and force your husband to do it form of argument); but, actually, African-Americans under Jim Crow would quality. And indeed, African-Americans in slavery might qualify, if it had only been the case that their sales had been on the up-and-up, libertarian-wise (which they clearly weren’t). That is, you can’t tell that there is any lack of freedom, just by looking at the pre-Civil War South, and noticing there are lots of slaves. You have to ask: how did they get this way? Since Kaplan is not looking at how women in the 19th Century got into the general social state they were in, he is hardly going to conclude that there is anything necessarily ‘unfree’ about that state. Unless there are high taxes in it. In short, everyone is looking at the screamingly feudal results and saying: how the hell does this look like liberty? And the answer is: Caplan is a libertarian, so of course it can look strangely feudal. That’s because it can be completely feudal...
And Holbo is right. If not for the fact that we do not own ourselves but only rent ourselves from God. From a "think" libertarian standpoint slavery is libertarian freedom. And war is peace, too! And ignorance is strength!!
