Hi there. I seem to have botched the end of SuperNovember! Sorry about that! There are a multitude of issues on my end of the monitor including my nth cold in two months, weird awful eye strain, unpleasantly large TA duties, and a writing deadline. But if you could just see how adorably charming I am, you’d forgive me. I am, however, pleased to see that The Fly Bottle has remained a venue of vigorous discussion. FYI, I am largely in agreement about whatever you like with the indefatigable Micha Ghertner.

I’m sorry I was lame over Thanksgiving. I am, however, thankful for each and every one of you, and I hope you kicked back and took a day to really enjoy the fat of the land.

Eat up.

If you’ve ever heard Bruce Yandle’s delightful lecture on “Baptist’s and Bootleggers,” you’ll enjoy Todd Zywicki’s comments on Ralph Reed and the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America.

Here is the Economist column by Adrian Wooldridge (”Lexington”) I mentioned a few days ago. Demographic upshot:

Mr Bush’s optimistic message gave him a commanding advantage in pro-growth America. Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based writer who knows as much about the grassroots economy as anyone, points to the close relationship between growth, both demographic and economic, and a propensity to vote Republican. Most of Mr Kerry’s base was in stagnant America. Democratic strongholds such as Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Mr Kerry’s Boston have been losing people and jobs.

Mr Bush’s America, for the most part, is booming. This is not just because the red states that voted for Mr Bush are growing faster than the blue states that voted for Mr Kerry. It is also because Mr Bush did well in the fast-growing suburbs and “exurbs” in both red and blue states. Mr Bush’s triumph in greater Phoenix, greater Houston and greater Atlanta was perhaps predictable. But Mr Kotkin points out that he also triumphed in what he calls the “third California”: the vast inland region that is producing the bulk of the state’s growth at the moment.

Also interesting: Republicans reproduce.

Justin Logan takes Ryan Sager to the cleaners regarding the “seriousness” of libertarian foreign policy. Jim Henley has a funny follow-up.

OK, enough public reason. Why not look at a picture of a panda bear!?

I’ve been meaning to comment on Matt’s skeptical post about public reason. In a nutshell, Matt worries that folks are offering arguments in publicly acceptable terms in “bad faith.” That is, they are motivated by their comprehensive views, which they know not everyone shares, and so they give an argument that is more broadly acceptable, even if they don’t really believe it.

Sez Matt:

. . . I am totally unconvinced that the “public reason” arguments against gay marriage are being offered in good faith. I know perfectly well that people who oppose gay marriage do so overwhelmingly either out of religious conviction or simple prejudice. I also know that people understand that such arguments cannot be presented in elite media contexts and so forth and that, as Beinart writes, it’s considered (even by people who haven’t studied Political Liberalism) to be a kind of ‘debate foul’ to just pound the Bible. So they gone out into the world, searching around for a tolerable public reason argument that will reach their favored conclusion. But the motivating issue for (the vast majority of) these people isn’t demographic shifts in Scandinavia, it’s the religion stupid. As a result, I have little incentive to take the empirical arguments offered by the anti-gay folks, and as a result of that, they have little reason to bother to make their arguments convincing (since they know no one will be convinced no matter what) rather than simply providing a kind of “public reason” cover for their real agenda.

I think Matt’s largely right as a matter of fact, but the relevance of Matt’s observation isn’t clear. Rawls is doing a bit of what he calls “ideal theory,” and although I don’t think Rawls conceives of ideal theory in the right way, it remains that norms of public reason are offered by Rawls as part of an ideal normative conception of a well-ordered society, and not as a description of actual norms of public discourse. The observation that people, as a matter of descriptive fact, offer public reasons in “bad faith” has the same standing as the observation that people, as a matter of descriptive fact, only grudgingly pay their taxes under the threat of sanction. That, of course, does not mean that it is okay for people to pay their taxes only grudgingly. It may be that they ought to recognize and be motivated by a duty of justice.

Rawls at one point talks about the way a society might move from a mere modus vivendi (a kind of truce or detente) to an order that is stable “for the right reasons,” i.e., because enough people have come to affirm a public conception of justice. Relatedly, we don’t just begin with full-fledged norms of public reason. These must develop over time. The fact that many folks recognize that some “arguments cannot be presented in elite media contexts and so forth and that, as Beinart writes, it’s considered (even by people who haven’t studied Political Liberalism) to be a kind of ‘debate foul’ to just pound the Bible” is a very important step on the path toward more widespread and robust norms of public reason.

I think we should consider it important to reinforce these norms, to make sure that people know what is an is not a debate foul. This is not something worth doing just for its own sake. For one thing, we need to do it so that we can have a debate at all, and not just the assertion and counter-assertion of incommensurable considerations. But mainly, we need to do it to reinforce the ideal of a pluralistic liberal order. We have to remind people, and keep reminding them, and keep reminding them, that we do not all agree on certain fundamental matters, and that therefore we should agree to refrain from using politics to impose our vision on others.

Now, I agree with Matt that the ideal of public reason is “in a great deal of tension with human nature.” I therefore don’t think that we can realize an order that is stable for the “right” Rawlsian reasons. The best we can hope for is some kind of modus vivendi. But this kind of stability need not be fragile. It can be fairly robust and self-equilibrating, and is quite worth having. It is unlikely that even most people will ever internalize norms of public reason. But if enough of the right kind of people do so, that can have a deeply positive effect on the neutrality and stability of our social order. So keep the faith.

Kriston links to a funny sheet of textbook advisory stickers and discusses some matters of public reason.

Which puts me in the mind to say this: You know, I wish that some folks on the left (and I don’t mean Kriston or Matt, unless the shoe fits) would be more frank about the fact that they really do seek to use the manifold powers of the state to impose their secular liberal comprehensive conception on the unwilling. (The right seems to be pretty frank about its intentions.)

But, I suppose, if you’re really up front about this, then you simply CANNOT pretend to be shocked, shocked when you end up in a cultural-political battle with the right. And you can’t be properly surprised and appalled when the right wins, and ends up imposing some of their comprehensive conception on you, because this is exactly what you wanted to do to them, but you lost.

So, if you would just cop to your designs of imposition through the power of the state, then it wouldn’t be so grating to me if you went ahead and railed full bore against warning stickers on textbooks and those creationist oafs and whatnot. But please don’t ALSO bitch about the fact that public schools are a politicized battleground for competing conceptions of truth and goodness. I mean, I guess it’s a cagey bit of rhetoric to pretend that sex ed classes and environmental consciousness-raising units and good old Darwin aren’t all part of a scheme to impose your view of the world upon other people’s children, so that you can then turn around and scream bloody murder when some zealots wants to put a sticker on a textbook because the textbook doesn’t teach what they (as opposed to you) want their children to believe. But, please, be serious.

I think that if you’re a political liberal, and sincerely don’t want to impose your comprehensive view on people, then you’re obliged to support something like vouchers for religious schools, so that you don’t end up imposing a secular comprehensive conception by means of crowding out the institutions through which people are able to raise and educate their children as they see fit. If you’re not willing to go quite this far, then it seems to me extremely unreasonable to complain about a sticker on a textbook. In fact, I don’t think you can complain about the sticker, be against vouchers for religious schools, and claim to be a political liberal all at the same time. If you do, then you’re really just an “impositionist” liberal of the first sort who has at least tacitly assented to the principle that those with the political power get to impose their views.

Having endorsed this principle, you should be pretty worried to find yourself on the wrong end of the power, but you shouldn’t pretend to be shocked that the right is trying to use its power to at least insulate elements of their comprehensive conceptions from the influence of we atheist, Darwinian liberals. Right?

The University of Chicago Chronicle has a nice profile of Ronald Coase, still kicking at 94. I liked this bit of tempered wisdom at the end:

Coase said that “it’s very difficult to imagine a system that would work better than one with private property rights and a market: mechanisms that have proved themselves repeatedly against regimes where central authority is the dominant economic force. A private enterprise system with vigorous, competitive markets seems to function best because central authority cannot have all the diffused knowledge that is captured effectively by the workings of the market,” he said.

Coase’s persistent smile and bright, blue eyes easily belie his nine decades of life, so it is surprising to hear him say he is a pessimist about the world: not because he believes the human condition has worsened, but because “as the 20th century has shown, we have such a capacity to mess things up, and even when we can do the obviously right thing, we so often choose the wrong one.”

[Link via the invaluable Political Theory Daily Review.]

Yglesias suggests that Gillespie’s maligned piece about his history of home ownership and the excruciating boredom of Kansas may get his libertarian card yanked. I should say that, to my knowledge, there is no authority who issues libertarian cards, and thus there is no agency authorized to revoke them. Matt’s statism apparently goes so deep that he conceives even libertarianism in terms of licensure.

Oh, but I wanted to say something about Matt’s post! He writes:

if what matters freedomwise isn’t simply the absence of coercive state action, but the practical ability to do things (i.e., the sense in which you’re freer in New York City simply because there are more things you could do, even though you’d be less regulated in Kansas) then you start slipping toward all manner of statist leftwingery — the fair value of liberties, positive rights, etc. Marx, I think, referred to the equal freedom of rich and poor alike to spend the night sleeping under a bridge as a way of highlighting the putative bankruptcy of European classical liberalism.

If Matt is right I fear my card, too, may be in danger. I am happy to endorse a notion of positive freedom. I do think it is important not to confuse liberty with ability. I do not have the ability simply to flap my arms and fly, although I am perfectly at liberty to do so, in the sense that I am not threatened with violence or censure should I attempt to do so. But I agree that it is cold comfort to be assured that you are at liberty to buy a yacht, or a sandwich, when you lack the ability. We cannot eat, or sunbathe upon the decks of, our liberties. Ability really is what matters. And people no doubt often find that it’s worth it to sacrifice some liberty to gain the unique abilities a city like New York affords.

However, I think that among the best argument for robust negative or liberty rights, i.e., for institutionalized constraints on coercion, is that a reliable system of negative rights over time creates more abilities, opens more paths of feasible possibility for individual lives, than most alternative systems of rights. Like Friedman and Hayek, I’m in favor of a modest and well-designed social safety net. However, political systems built around positive rights tend toward sclerosis, thereby reducing rates of economic growth, and a high rate of economic growth, along with (negative) liberty and stability, is part of the trinity of primary political goods (says me). Furthermore, a system of positive rights, conceived as a system of guarantees, is often self-defeating, because it cannot overcome systemic moral hazard problems that, independently of growth problems, turn out foreclose many of the possibilities for life that the system of guarantees was meant to open.

A system of robust negative liberty, together with a modest well-designed safety net, is in my opinion the one in which people are least likely to avail themseleves of their freedom to sleep under bridges.

the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons?

Has anyone been reading The Believer? Is it worth it?

And has anyone read Rick Moody’s review there of Wieseltier’s review of Baker? What does it say?!

If the money were right, I would like to work for a circus or carnival.

Since I started working at Cato, I’ve become more sensitive to the fact that folks often write it “CATO.” Now, this may be because of the the logo, which is all caps, but lots of organizations have logos in all caps, and people don’t write it that way. So I think folks must think CATO is some kind of acronym, like the CIA or something. This suggests a comments box game! If Cato was really CATO and CATO was an acronym, what would it stand for?

I’ll get you started. Kelly in the Westminster rumpus room suggests “Center for Advanced Tautological Observation.” Now you!

The new Philosophical Gourmet Report is out. Maryland moved up to 25 in the overall. Good show Maryland!

So, directly below you’ll find the book review that was apparently a little too saucy for Brainwash, having appeared there from some time Sunday evening to some time Monday morning. Conservative donors and all that, I suppose. (Do take note, if you’ve ever considered writing for Brainwash.) Please note that the foul, foul language is all Baker’s, which I quote purely for critical purposes.

I do think the point I’m attributing to (or reading into) the book is an important one, and worth thinking about, and so I present the review, with minor modifications of the original (which, naturally enough, may be found in the Google cache) here for your pleasure and edification.

Checkpoint, by Nicholson Baker, New York: Knopf, 115 pages, $15.95

The resounding Republican victory left legions of Bush-haters in manic disbelief, with trembling fistfuls of perfectly good hair. The voters, naturally, have come under fire. There is talk of exodus to Canada. Under such conditions one can easily imagine some would-be Blue State Czolgosz thumbing through Nicholson Baker’s new novella, Checkpoint, nodding, dreaming filthy dreams of execucide.

Bush’s reëlection may drive Nicholson Baker to put his head through a wall, but it’s the best thing that could happen to his sales. Checkpoint has sold poorly so far because it’s a mediocre book. Nevertheless, Baker is one of the best writers of his generation, celebrated for his crystalline exaltations of the mundane and his pioneering exploration of neglected masturbatory possibilities. Although it is, by Baker’s usual standards, a middling production, Checkpoint did occasion something of a second-order news event as critics and commentators from across the notional left-right spectrum rose to condemn it for immorality, bad taste, or both. Checkpoint is centrally occupied with volcanic outrage over the Iraq war and the crazed desire to murder George W. Bush, and therefore makes up in controversy what it lacks in quality.

Checkpoint poses as the transcript of a taped conversation between an unhinged left-wing conspiracy theorist named Jay and his old friend, Ben, an amateur photographer and commonplace, pusillanimous, middle-aged subscriber to (one imagines) The Utne Reader. Jay has called Ben to his room in a hotel near the White House where they commiserate about the evil of Bush and his advisors (”these rusted hulks, these zombies”), the raw, outrageous injustice of the war in Iraq, and Jay’s plan to murder the president with wacky imaginary weapons (flying saw blades; uranium boulder; homing bullets “marinated” in a box with a picture of president; specially brainwashed scorpion for Cheney; a hammer).

Ben, it turns out, largely agrees with Jay on the facts, and he assents to the preliminary moral verdict: Bush is corrupt; his administration is criminal; he is tantamount to a murderer. But Ben dissents on the ultimate verdict: justice does not demand that Bush be translated from high office to a yet higher sphere. The difference between the two men, as trifling as they seem in ideological terms, is the subject of the book. How, Baker asks, may we remain sane in a world of intolerable cruelty, injustice, and corruption? Kill the president? No.

The answer, and it is a good answer: get a camera.

Baker’s critics perhaps felt free to flout the usual standards of criticism and indulge in daft moralizing because Checkpoint itself seems to be a daftly moralistic book. Tim Noah called it “a work of pornography.” In a huffy, matronly review, Leon Wieseltier called it a “scummy little book.” Rush Limbaugh said . . . well, he didn’t like it. But it is less daftly moralistic than it first appears, as it is in many ways an indictment of the deforming effects of the hyper-heightened moral sensibility it seems to exemplify.

Checkpoint makes plain that Jay, Baker’s Bush-loathing nutcase, is in fact a nutcase. One cannot be like Jay without fraying the delicate threads in the weave of a decent life. Jay himself recognizes that he has paid a dear price for his compulsive over-politicization. Speaking of his ex-wife, he says:

I just wore Lila out. You know? With me, everything’s political. I mean, she’s political too, but not as much . . . I’ve made a bollix of my life, that’s for sure.

Jay cannot find the safety on his hair-trigger sense of injustice, and so cannot fail to wreak collateral damage on his loved ones, leaving him perpetually outraged and alone. Not a ringing endorsement.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the raving Jay does often speak for Baker, who has admitted to obsession over the war. As David Gates wrote in Newsweek:

“Checkpoint” did, in fact, originate in Baker’s own fury, grief and helplessness over Iraq. “I was plodding
along, writing my little books,” he says, “and then suddenly this thing speared into my life and it just took me over.” He lost a month of 2003 to his obsession with the news, swore off Google News and blogs–he now has a Post-It on his screen saying ONLY E-MAIL and finally wrote the first draft of “Checkpoint” in April 2004, during the siege of Fallujah, because he could think about nothing else. As he typed, he found himself weeping.

If one is familiar with Baker’s autobiographical writings, one can detect a lot of Baker in Jay.(Compare to the above: “Jay: I’d been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google News twenty times a day.”) All the same, he is embarrassed by Jay, which should be no surprise. It is Baker’s peculiar form of generosity to share with us his awkward relation to himself, as he does in Vox and The Fermata, where he frankly shares, not wholly unashamed, his uncomfortably weird sexual imagination, or in U and I, where he explores in clinical detail his ridiculously vain obsession with John Updike.

Here, in Checkpoint, Baker lay bare his moral obsessiveness and political crankery for our discomfiting inspection. He does his best, through Ben, to talk himself down, to convince himself that justice–politics–does not exhaust goodness. Baker appears to be trying to convince himself (or some shade of himself) that the life of aesthetic engagement, the life of the novelist, is not an irresponsible, trivializing evasion of the supreme moral imperative. Or, rather less grandly, that irresponsible, trivializing evasion through art is less bad than killing the President.

Much of Checkpoint bounces back and forth between talk of murder and photography. Ben relates to Jay his new interest in expensive, large format camera equipment, and suggests it as an alternative to homicidal obsession.

Jay:     . . . I’m going to kill the fucker!
Ben:    No you’re not.
Jay:     Penisfucker!
Ben:    Jay, relax.
Jay:     Why should I relax? Jiminy Cricket. Anyway, so
you bought a camera, did you. How diverting. . . .

Later:

Ben:     But my suggestion is, get yourself
a camera. . . .

Jay:     I thought film was dead.
Ben:    It’s dying, but it’s not dead. The larger formats
still hold more
detail. Look, my friend, look. Okay, they used napalm. That’s very
bad. 
    I agree. Shooting the head of state is not a
solution.

Jay is not easily placated, having developed a moral sensitivity to general suffering that would make Peter Singer proud. It is indeed hard to resist Jay’s outrage when he describes the horrific episode from which Checkpoint takes its title. A family in a Land Rover comes to an Army checkpoint, attempting to flee the war zone. Somebody in the car waves, and the soldiers think the wave indicates something it does not and opens fire
on the family.

Jay:     . . . and so there was this huge blast of fire, and one of the women in the car, the mother, she said, “I saw the–” Sorry.
Ben:     It’s okay.
Jay:     She said, “I saw the heads–” Pull myself together.
Ben:     It’s all right.
Jay:     She said, “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off.” That’s what she fucking said. I’m not kidding you, man. “My two little girls.” That’s what she fucking said. Can you imagine it? You’re just trying to get your family out of a war zone? Your farm’s already been blasted by helicopters, and then a bunch of guys in Kevlar open fire on your kids, and you see that happen? Ho, God.
Ben:     That’s bad.
Jay:     Liberators. Such bullshit. It’s just one event. The grandfather was killed, too. You know what he had on? He was wearing a pin-striped suit so he would look more American. Ho, man. Ho, man. And that creep, that fucking Texas punk, who can’t even talk, with his drugged-out eyes, he brought us to this point, to this war, and for nothing, for not one red fucking thing.

Obviously Jay’s admirable sympathy is not idle fellow feeling. It works a path through Jay’s implicit theory of just war and just retribution. But he fails to recognize a difference in rational status between the fact of his feeling and the assertion of his judgment. He does not question that that one might not really follow from the other. Jay takes his conclusion to follow from a kind of inexorable machinery of moral-psychological inference.

Jay:     So then the desire for justice starts moving through me. It’s like a huge paddlewheel. It churns up all this foam and fury. VENGEANCE.

It is perhaps Ben’s failure to question the transition to “VENGEANCE” that led Tim Noah to complain, strangely, that the conversation between Jay and Ben “isn’t a debate at all,” as if it should be. Ben doesn’t disagree with Jay’s moral logic. Rather, he exhorts Jay to stop fixating on the sorts of thing that set in motion the paddlewheel of justice.

Ben suggests, unhelpfully, copying a book word for word. Mainly, he sticks to the remedy of aesthetic engagement. He notes, for instance, that the Dutch masters were surrounded by cockroaches.

Ben:     . . . The painters were doing the things they could do, never mind the pests–the pests were bracketed off. They didn’t impinge. The painters looked at the trees. That’s what you should do.

Looking at the trees in the right sort of way calls up a different kind of emotional logic. Ben walks Jay through the experience of looking at the world through a viewfinder:

Ben:     . . . You might see, oh, I don’t know, a nuthatch on a fence. You think, take the picture? No, no. There’s somebody’s cat sniffing a blade of grass. Take the picture? No, no. You move on. A twisted piece of wire on the ground. Yes? No, no. You see what’s happening?
Jay:     I’m not sure I do.
Ben:     What’s happening is that the weight of the camera in your hand–and remember, it’s a heavy camera–the holding of it is changing the way you look at everything. You look up at the buildings, the stonework up there–ah, and then you see the trees . . .

Ben goes on to describe the sublimity of photographing a catalpa tree and its “incredible explosion of black twigs reaching in every direction.”

Ben:     . . . I knew I had that catalpa in the bag. I knew its secrets. Yet there it was still out in the street for everyone to enjoy. So who cares about George W.? He’s irrelevant. He’s irrelevant. You see?

Jay finally relents, settling for an attack with a hammer on a photograph of Bush, an act of minor aggression that may have a similar tonic effect on millions of disaffected Kerry voters.

So Ben’s strategy is a success with Jay. Baker’s novella, however, leaves the reader with an aftertaste of failure. Checkpoint sputters to an end (they smash the picture, press “Stop” on the tape recorder, and, we imagine, just leave) because one senses that Baker has not really satisfied himself that it’s okay to become one with catalpa trees, or to rhapsodize about the geometry of milk cartons, as he does to wonderful effect in The Mezzanine, while our government blows innocent kids to bloody pieces in an unjust war. We can, like the Dutch Masters ignoring the cockroaches, just “bracket” it all off. But once one has tasted sublime moral outrage, this has to seem like woeful retreat.

Baker is, as always, embarrassed about his obsessiveness. He realizes that it is insane to ask that we go forward deranged by our moral horror until the last knot of injustice is undone. And so he saves Jay from his insanity. Yet he is embarrassed, too, by the aesthetic remedy, by the fact that it’s the best he can manage.

But it is the best he can manage, especially given the corner he has painted himself into with the completeness of Jay and Ben’s agreement. However, Baker may be showing us something worth seeing. It is, perhaps, our minimal moral obligation to be at least slightly abashed by our evasion of total moral engagement, although we really must avoid it. Morals, and politics especially, do not reign supreme over life. We may, if we choose, cultivate the beautiful, or devote ourselves to the pleasures of discovery. But we may not do so blithely. Life is a web of awful tradeoffs; there is no escape from regret, or shame.

The lesson, then, for those millions with a visceral antipathy to Bush, and a horror of another four Bush years, is just to set politics aside, to look away, to look to the trees–every once in a while at least, for balance–and accept that even if this is a shameful way to live, it is the best way to live.

Checkpoint is not a great book, but it’s not bad advice.

Tim Lee micturates upon Nick Gillespie’s semi-autobiographical work of armchair demography.

What do you think about Reason’s “cultural turn.” Personally, I enjoy reading Nick’s Reason better than Virginia’s, although Virginia’s did seem more like a serious magazine for serious people with serious thoughts, and thus I guess I found her version more intellectually edifying. But what I think may be most interesting is the fact that, oh I don’t know, I guess maybe 70% of the writers are the same. So the actual substantive differences aren’t that great. It’s basically the same magazine with a few fewer pieces on privatizing x, a few more pieces on drugs, rock, and burning things in the desert, a reliably unfunny but fun-to-look-at cartoon, and lots more willfully obscure pop culture references. Overall, I like it. I think the formula’s got maybe two years left before its played.

OK. So the baseball team name is a drag. It sounds like the damn airport. But where were the Reagan legacy people? The DC Reagan Nationals would at least inspire passion. How long before the “The Nationals: America’s Team” crap starts?

This interesting (as always [that is, I want to have millions of Malcolm Gladwell's babies]) Malcolm Gladwell essay on personality tests comes down hard on the Myers-Briggs. Now, I think he’s right about everything he’s saying about personality. Yet it remains that the Myers-Briggs does tend to track some fairly deep and important regularities. For instance, almost everyone I know is an NT. (Indeed, almost all libertarians are NTs, which is helpful for understanding why we do such a terrible job communicating to non-NTs.) So Gladwell’s right, but I sort of believe Myers-Briggs anyway. What’s going on?

Similarly, I think the mind is pretty modular, if not massively so. Thus, I don’t think there is anything like a general reasoning capacity. There are various cognitive subroutines that are elicited by different environmental cues, and it is possible to reason effectively in one domain while it is possible to make systematic errors in other domains. So, in terms of foundational theory, I shouldn’t believe in G, general intelligence. Yet I’m rather impressed by the data on G, and how it predicts quite a number of things. So what is G tracking if there is no general reasoning capacity? And what is Myers-Briggs capturing if personality is more continuous and labile that the test seems to assume?

(Bonus conjecture: If you have taken the M-B test, put your personality type in the comments. I bet that over 70% of The Fly Bottle readers are NTs of some sort. I am, FYI, an xNTP.)

Tyler Cowen’s favorite philosophy blog! Wow! Thanks Tyler! That makes my day.

This means something to me, not only because Tyler was sort of my boss at Mercatus, and because I admire his work immensely, but because Tyler is one of those extremely rare economists who is also an outstanding philosopher (putting him in the company of people like Buchanan and Sen). Tyler has published papers in Ethics, in Philosophy and Public Affairs, in Economics and Philosophy, and has co-authored papers with Derek Parfit, an enviable record for just about any philosopher. But that’s just in his spare time.

You will weep in . . . well, you will weep from something or other when you read this collection of Modern Political Thought Poetry by Beth Cohen.

I see that my favorite bureaucrat, Lane McFadden, has restarted his blog now that he has finished his clerking duties. Lane promises to post pictures. I’m excited.

So, I’m going to the IHS/Reason blog panel like right now, and there’s a good chance that this is it for the evening. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Freeman’s paper lead me to check whether the Objectvist political philosophy reserves any room for legislative bodies or legislative authority. Peikoff in OPAR is equivocal.

On the one hand he says:

The only system of laws that excludes every element of the nonobjective–of the indefensible and the unknowable–is one that confines legislation to the protection of rights.

[OPAR, 365}

This, along with other things Peikoff says, seems to imply that a political body may legitimately legislate "objective" law. Yet, turn the page, and we get this:

This purpose [barring the use of initiatory coercion] entails three and only three governmental functions. In Ayn Rand’s statement, these are: “the police, to protect men from criminals–the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders–the law courts, to settle disputes among men accoding to objective laws.” Any additional function would have to involve the government initiating force against innocent citizens. Such a government acts not as man’s protector, but as a criminal.

So does the state have a legislative function or not? Where do we get objective law? I know Objectivists like the constitution, and that’s legislation. The common law, maybe? But how are judges nominated and appointed? It would be helpful in assessing the Objectivist political philosophy if they would say something about legislatures and their view of the conditions under which legislative powers are justified. Is there any discussion of this in the O’ist literature, or oral tradition?