The reason why it's somewhat paradoxical coming from libertarians is for precisely the reasons we've been discussing in the comment thread of this post. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that forecloses many potential emergent orders in the non-market realm. Most pro-market economists who are non-libertarians have political philosophies that are much more amenable to ideas about spontaneous order. For the most part, we are constitutional democrats, right? We think that governments should be limited because we know about the incentive structures facing politicians and the distortions of government power. But we also know that you want to give the public a chance to shape their own laws, the way their society is organized, and you want to give the public the chance to experiment with that and change that and try new things over time. Most pro-market non-libertarian economists are of this view: constitutions are good and democracies are good, and there is no over-arching necessary political order that we pursue besides that. We all have our preferences for what we want the political order to look like, of course. But we don't take it as a philosophical necessity that the actual political order conform to that. The real important things are constitutionalism and democracy.
One would think that that is the environment where theorizing about spontaneous orders would flourish: an environment that is pro-market but also more democratic than libertarian. Libertarianism simply has too detailed plans about how the political order has to look: it's not spontaneous enough to be a natural home for spontaneous order.
So why did spontaneous order find a home among libertarians? I have a couple ideas.
- First I'm going to propose a "great man theory of history" - Hayek was simply a smart guy that got very interested in this stuff and wrote a lot of great stuff on it. Hayek was a libertarian, so it found a home among libertarians.
- Second, a lot of libertarian intellectuals were preoccupied with the socialist calculation debate at a time when non-libertarian pro-market economists were preoccupied with other research agendas. Ideas about spontaneous order were very relevant during this debate, so it found a natural home among libertarians - who were the most active in it.
- Third - again for historical reasons - a lot of libertarian economists were less concerned with developing predictive models, which made spontaneous order a more valid thing to talk about. If you're looking for predictive models, spontaneous order is going to interest you less - not because you think it's wrong but because it's hard to do anything predictive with it. Anyone who got excited about the Santa Fe Institute and that stuff found this out. One of the unfortunate outgrowths of this is that many libertarians have incorrectly concluded that modeling and appreciation of spontaneous order are mutually exclusive - which of course is ridiculous.
Anyway - if you think about it it's somewhat strange that a group of people with a very planned out view of what the political sphere should and shouldn't look like would have latched on to spontaneous order. But there you have it. The question is - in the future will the idea be claimed by non-libertarians? I think there's a broad enough appreciation of complexity that it will be - maybe not always with Hayek's language or with Hayek citations, but I think it is there already and it will only grow.
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I don't like the word "spontaneous order", since it has a metaphysical, supernatural element, just like "spontaneous combustion".
ReplyDeleteLibertarianism is a political philosophy that forecloses many potential emergent orders in the non-market realm.
ReplyDeleteJust like abolitionism is a moral philosophy that forecloses many potential emergent orders in the slavery realm. This is a good thing, Daniel.
The real important things are constitutionalism and democracy.
Democracy is probably the worst form of government. Of this, I am in agreement with Plato.
Libertarianism simply has too detailed plans about how the political order has to look: it's not spontaneous enough to be a natural home for spontaneous order.
You're joking, right? There's one rule: Aggression against person or property is forbidden. How many rules, or principles, or axioms have to be made to create the detailed plans for a constitutional democratic society?
And I'm really shocked you suggest libertarianism has "detailed plans." Really? It's a position against the legal use of force. Nobody offers a manifesto on what society should look like, or how people should behave - apart from that principle. But it's the cheerleaders for democracy who have all the details.
If someone presented their philosophy or anarcho-communism - and they said, "Well nobody can own property" - that wouldn't conjure up richly detailed blueprints for society. We could speculate about how people would live, but there is nothing inherent about getting rid of force or property that makes it "detailed." You're doing yourself a strong intellectual disservice.
Anyway - if you think about it it's somewhat strange that a group of people with a very planned out view of what the political sphere should and shouldn't look like would have latched on to spontaneous order.
I do think that's somewhat strange. Glad it's not the libertarians who hold this contradiction.
It's a very silly game to play, but if we wanted to test which side was more "spontaneous order," it's absolutely clear the libertarians (Austrians) would win. No other economic school favors market chosen money (gold), for instance.
I'm not an Anarcho-Capitalist, so I can relate to a lot of what Daniel has written here. I don't really agree with Mattheus.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion Hayek's view is more appropriate to moderate Classical Liberalism than Anarcho-Capitalism or Social-Democracy. But I would think that as I'm a moderate Classical Liberal :). There has always been a tension here, Rothbard and Hoppe, for example, have been very critical of Hayek's later work.
"Spontaneous Order" views are complicated and point in all sorts of directions.
Yeah, Mattheus is right. This is a bad criticism of the relationship between libertarianism and spontaneous order. Democracy is just as dictatorial as non-democracy. Better to point out that democracy is the thing which emerged, and that it emerged for reasons, and that libertarians can never be entirely confident that eliminating it is desirable.
ReplyDeleteA few other things:
Hayek was hardly the first libertarian (well, he wasn't a libertarian, but we'd call him one today) to get excited about spontaneous order. It's from a tradition of liberalism going back to the Scottish enlightenment, which produced, among other things, libertarianism.
The point about the socialist calculation debate seems dependent on the point about Hayek, which is wrong, or alternatively I'm pretty sure this speculation is baseless.
Libertarian economists like Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, Coase, Alchian, Knight, Friedman, Stigler, Becker, Schumpeter, John Bates Clark, etc. (really, most economists from the late 19th to early 20th century who weren't socialists probably qualified as libertarian by modern terminology) were obviously very interested in predictive models but also very interested in spontaneous order (as are many non-libertarian economists). Although, it is true that some libertarians will use "spontaneous order" as a way of attacking predictive models they don't like.
Basically, democracy emerged to solve various problems. If not-democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead.
ReplyDeleteStravinsky -
ReplyDeleteArrgh - actually you make one of the points that first got me thinking about this but that I didn't add.
What originally sparked this thought was the point that it's supremely ironic for libertarians of all people to claim spontaneous order, when it's precisely a libertarian polity that has never emerged spontaneously. It's like Marx hanging on desperately to the brevity of the Paris Commune - but at least Marx knew communism would take a revolution. He never made any arguments about spontaneous order.
A constitutionally limited, federal, democratic republic that manages its economy while placing tremendous importance on guaranteeing the liberty of its inhabitants is the sort of polity that most non-libertarian pro-market economists support. THAT polity has spontaneously emerged in one form or another all over the place.
And yet it's the libertarians - the one political philosophy that hasn't spontaneously emerged - that claim to champion emergent order.
I call "B.S."...
...when I'm cynical. Otherwise I call "interesting paradox that's worth a blog post".
re: "It's from a tradition of liberalism going back to the Scottish enlightenment, which produced, among other things, libertarianism."
ReplyDeleteProduced libertarianism... and also produced pro-market constitutional democracy, let's not forget.
Basically, democracy emerged to solve various problems. If not-democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead.
ReplyDeleteI prefer "imposed." Democracy was imposed on people. It is not an organic phenomena of free people.
Mattheus you can't still be making THAT argument. Hasn't Gene taken you out to the woodshed enough on this?
ReplyDeleteA libertarian polity would be imposed too. No social order is unimposed. Life is coercion. We should all be thankful we figured out much more civilized ways to coerce each other that actually take each others interests into account... we're not hitting each other on the head with clubs anymore.
Anyway - I wouldn't go there. It's extremely transparent. I know democratic capitalism is coercive and I still support it. You still seem unable to accept that libertarianism is coercive too.
"Basically, democracy emerged to solve various problems. If not-democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead. "
ReplyDeleteYes. But this is always the problem with spontaneous order arguments.... If we say that something has emerged because it's good that doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. That brings up the question *how* it should be improved upon, and that's the tricky question. Can "systematization" be an improvement? Or to put it more subtlety: in what cases is systematization beneficial and in what cases should it be avoided?
I agree with Daniel's last post, life is coercion, political philosophy is about finding the best way to deal with that limitation.
"And I'm really shocked you suggest libertarianism has "detailed plans." Really? It's a position against the legal use of force. Nobody offers a manifesto on what society should look like, or how people should behave - apart from that principle."
ReplyDeleteThat's right! No libertarians would ever offer a detailed manifesto of what society should look like. They leave that to people like Rothbard and Hoppe.
Gene, my understanding of Rothbard is that he described how a libertarian society could work, not what a society should look like. In fact, both Hoppe and Rothbard have stated that they have no clue as to what a libertarian society would look like.
ReplyDeleteLibertarianism deals with initiation of force on persons and property, that's all. If certain people want a democracy, a monarchy, communism, etc, that is fine with libertarians, just so long as you don't force people to be a part of it if they don't want to.
I think we need to distinguish between libertarianism and classical liberalism. The spontaneous order is a classical liberal concept and that fits perfectly well. The same could be said about liberal democracy.
ReplyDeleteThe key justification for a political order is not that it has evolved, (That could be said about Stalinism as well. It wasn't the best one for the people in the Soviet Union though and certainly not okay on spontaneous order grounds.) it is the degree to which it allows the adaption of society. The potential problem of the political process is the underlying selection mechanism and the fact, that a lot of gov. action replaces developed by designed institutions.
But you're right, it's a trade-off, coercion is necessary and the question is how much and how.
P.S: Aggregation can illuminate and conceal. Lumping everything between ordo-liberalism and anarcho-capitalism is of the second sort.
I think we can all stop reading Mattheus after he opens with two non sequitirs in a row.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the assertions could use a bit more explanation, including the first one Mattheus cited, however.
My problem is with this section:
"Libertarianism simply has too detailed plans about how the political order has to look: it's not spontaneous enough to be a natural home for spontaneous order."
What are those plans? What constitutes enough spontaneity to be a "natural home for spontaneous order?" And, following after Franz, is this critique still applicable to classical liberalism?
In this sentence you've covered too much ground, and too swiftly do any of the multiple subjects justice.
I like Franz's comment very much, although I am unclear on what is being said in both "the fact, that a lot of gov. [...]" and the final sentence.
Mattheus,
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems democracy emerged to solve is the whole "imposed" bit. People are jerks who like to mistreat other people and coerce them. Democracy is what happened as a result of that. Although, "solve" in the evolutionary sense isn't the same as "solve" in the engineering sense. Humans usually use the word in the latter sense, which I think is the cause of some confusion here. Basically, all equilibria are Pareto optimal, but not all equilibria are good.
Current,
Ye--es. We're all part of the equilibrium. Libertarianism hasn't emerged yet (although some very libertarian things have emerged). But maybe enough people shouting about it every day will make it happen. Or any other political philosophy, of course, except the stupid ones like socialism which demand beings other than humans to operate (which is why, of course, hardcore socialists are free to cry that it's never been tried).
I should get a blog sometime. It's just that economics is inundated with them, and political philosophy tends to be dominated by sophisticated idiots who can toss out the subtle logical fallacies and abuses of reason faster than they can be stopped. And no one reads blogs about classical music.
ReplyDeleteStavinsky -
ReplyDeleteYou and anyone else are always welcome to toss me guest blog proposals at dan.p.kuehn at gmail. I will accept arguments I disagree with as long as I don't think they're badly made.
"Basically, democracy emerged to solve various problems. If not-democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead. "
ReplyDelete... in all those Asian/African countries non-democracy (or "dictatorship") emerged. If democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead.
Joseph: "In fact, both Hoppe and Rothbard have stated that they have no clue as to what a libertarian society would look like."
ReplyDeleteBut then they lay out out book length what its laws should be. So they are talking from both sides of their mouths.
"Basically, democracy emerged to solve various problems. If not-democracy solved those problems better, it would have emerged instead."
ReplyDeleteYes, Stravinsky, this just isn't going to work at all. Evolutionary process don't guarantee what arises is "good" at all: what they anything that *becomes* seriously maladaptive will be eliminated. So democracy might be prevalent for 100 years... and then be totally wiped out.
Professor Callahan
ReplyDeleteHoppe and Rothbard are minorities among their intellectual community, right?
Take an example of an average libertarian: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Presumably, if he were a consistent libertarian, he would take his principles to their complete end conclusion, and say that Assange's Wikileaks is justified, because there is no such thing as a state's rights, and hence there is no state right to secrecy.
INSTEAD, Jimmy Wales said that Wikileaks was wrong, dangerous, and tampering with things that perhaps should not be tampered. In this sense, he is representative of most of his common brethren in that when he looks at a problem of our day and time, he sets aside abstract principle and simply looks at what the reality of the place and time are.
That is, in fact, what almost anybody would do.
Yes let's keep in context exactly what an evolutionary order guarantees. It guarantees fitness, persistence and robustness... until it doesn't anymore. That doesn't mean that predatory orders aren't emergent. It doesn't mean that emergent orders are always good.
ReplyDeleteBut clearly, there's something of value in the observation that planned social orders suffer from serious disadvantages associated with the limits of the planner.
The important insight, I think, is that whenever anyone gives you a laundry list of what a perfect society ought to be and rules out the opportunity for the society to experiment and try new things, you risk these planners' blind spots. That doesn't mean utopia will evolve.
A dictatorship, it seems to me, may emerge naturally but it has broad planned elements and the elements that are planned often (not always) don't work pretty well.
It's not a matter of throwing darts and seeing what works out. Human beings aren't stupid. We know - either intuitively and implicitly or rationally and explicitly - what works better to plan socially and what doesn't. Libertarianism often seems to me to fail to take into account this knowledge.
Gene,
ReplyDeleteYes, in the evolutionary sense, solving a problem could mean evil men imposing their evil will over disorganized and stupid but good men. Or vice-versa. Or anything else, potentially.
"Solving a problem" isn't really the right phrase in the general sense. It's just optimization and equilibrium, really (It's terrible how many modern so-called Austrians fear those words, when there's no economics and indeed no Mises or Hayek without them).
Essentially, if libertarianism could have worked, it would have worked. Optimizing agents optimize. If libertarianism doesn't result, then it must not have been optimal.
On Rothbard and Hoppe,
I don't know much about Hoppe, but Rothbard was candid about being willing to give up intellectual integrity in order to advance the aims of libertarianism. In that sense, he might have been willing to offer plans for society which he knew were BS in order to attract more people to the philosophy. After all, when people unfamiliar with free markets first hear about it, one of the first things they wonder is "But how would X work in a free market?" It's no good telling them about markets and spontaneous order and the laws of economics. They want a concrete plan, or else they cling to the status quo (this is true outside of debates over economic systems). So Rothbard might have offered fake plans to comfort people uncertain about a libertarian future.
Daniel,
I know you're addressing the people who read your blog, not dead men, but I want to add that libertarian planning is a fairly modern phenomenon. The tradition from Hume to Hayek wasn't guilty of it.
In general, in both religion and political philosophy, there are a few people here and there who truly understand the thing, hopefully the ones at the top who are listened to and revered, and a lot of followers who think they understand it but quite plainly do not. This does not bother them much, and the truth of the thing they think they understand would quite disturb them.
"...libertarian: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame."
ReplyDeleteOk, we have to get our terms straight here. I have always thought of Wales as an Objectivist, which is quite different than Austro-libertarianism.
Libertarianism in the general sense has varying philosophies contained within it, for instance, you wouldn't file Chomsky, Rand, and Rothbard into the same categories of libertarianism (many Objectivist would object to being called a libertarian at all). I would like to think that what we are discussing with regard to libertarianism is in fact Austro-libertarianism. Is this correct?
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteDibs on the guest post about the historical travesty that is Austro-libertarianism.
Austrian economics used to be cool, man. Look through the archives of old economics journals. Austrian economists everywhere. They were the mainstream doing cutting edge work. And now....
Daniel
ReplyDelete"Emergent" is a compliment used by libertarians for processes when they like the outcome. Hayek more often talked about it as evolution and was one of the very first to realize it made long term prediction impossible. That is what is now usually referred to sensitive dependence on initial conditions. That was a brilliant insight but beyond that he was very inconsistent on the issue.
He wants to call the developments he likes (rule of law, protection for private property etc.) "evolution." The developments he doesn't like (financial regulation, social safety net) he wants to call interfering with the evolution. Any Darwinian would see, in an instant, it's all evolution.
FYI: The theory of spontaneous order in the West got its first serious appraisal in the Scottish Enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that forecloses many potential emergent orders in the non-market realm."
So?
So does any ideology. This really isn't a big deal.
re: "FYI: The theory of spontaneous order in the West got its first serious appraisal in the Scottish Enlightenment."
ReplyDeleteYes, and that's not particularly surprising to anyone I don't think Gary. More of a puzzle is why Austrians have taken it up in recent years.
re: "So does any ideology. This really isn't a big deal."
It's a big deal for precisely the same reason that a centrally planned economy is a big deal, Gary. Are you really arguing this point?
BTW, and this ought to be obvious, there can be very bad spontaneous orders; that doesn't keep a libertarian from arguing that on average spontaneous order as a method of doing stuff gets better results than the jacobin politics of modern liberals.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDeleteYes, because libertarianism isn't some exotic "other." Once you start treating libertarianism like any other ideology it quickly becomes old hat to say it forbids and accepts certain things, ideas, etc.
No, it's not some "exotic other". I'm really not sure where you're going with this.
ReplyDeleteObviously ideologies impose orders. Any spontaneous order imposes certain orders and restrictions - that's why it's called spontaneous order!
You really need to read peoples' arguments more closely Gary. No one has said "libertarianism is unique in that it restricts people". What has been argued is "libertarianism provides a much more detailed plan than most other ideologies, so it's unusual that of all people it's libertarians who have latched on to emergent order".
As far as its function, etc. is concerned it looks just like any other ideology, even if its content is different - and once you start arguing over content it becomes an issue of values and other more subjective stuff. In other words, libertarianism isn't any more foreclosed to certain avenues and ways of actions than any other ideology I can think of any popularity in modern politics.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDeleteNo, you really need to stop presenting such facile arguments.
Daniel,
ReplyDelete"...libertarianism provides a much more detailed plan than most other ideologies..."
This claim is non-sense on stilts actually.
Go away Gary, please. People have been telling you to for weeks now.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDelete(a) No one has been telling me to go away.
(b) Whenever anyone starts saying X ideology is uniquely Y you know there is probably something strange going on. It is a very good general rule of thumb.
(c) I can point to vast arrays of literature by modern liberals which goes into great detail about said ideology; about plans, about modes of being, etc. You can check this out in your university library I am sure.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteParting shot. There are plenty and rather numerous things wrong with libertarianism; this blog has never really gotten at that though.
re: "Whenever anyone starts saying X ideology is uniquely Y you know there is probably something strange going on."
ReplyDeleteI agree. I say that sort of thing all the time. My concern is you are arguing against my "facile" posts as if I've said something like that, which I haven't.
All I'm saying is that if you ask the question "how much flexibility is there in the structure of X polity", you have some ideologies like communism and fascism on the very high end, others like libertarianism and democratic socialism that are pretty high, but not quite as high, and some like constitutional republicanism on the low end.
Of course any given libertarian or communist is going to give you a more or less ordered ideology. Indeed - there are a lot of constitutional republicans who just like relatively smaller government and choose to call themselves "libertarian". Every single time we talk about libertarianism on here we note that that's not who we're talking about - we're not talking about "libertarians on the margin".
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteNo, what you're talking about generally is the libertarian in your head - the ideas you have about libertarians. They don't look like the average libertarian for me and for a lot of people (this explains much of the pushback I would say).
My sole suggestion is if you're going to talk about libertarians as much as you do is to read the flagship libertarian website/magazine daily (amongst other things) or even weekly.
re: "No, what you're talking about generally is the libertarian in your head - the ideas you have about libertarians."
ReplyDeleteOf course! I'm not sure what else I could talk about!
re: "My sole suggestion is if you're going to talk about libertarians as much as you do is to read the flagship libertarian website/magazine daily (amongst other things) or even weekly."
Do you mean Reason.com? I can add that to my blogroll, but the thing is I do read major libertarian websites. We on this blog discuss a lot of the thinking of libertarian economists and libertarians who talk a lot about economics. Maybe that's not what you're interested in, but that's what we do here.
I haven't found Reason particularly interesting in the past but I can give it another shot. There's a lot of taking things I agree with them on but am not particularly interested in, like eminent domain, problems with health reform, criminal justice issues - and making the libertarian case. Fine, but I don't need libertarianism to come to that conclusion and it doesn't really add anything. They also talk a lot about partisan politics which is relatively boring to me.
Anyway - I read a lot of prominent libertarian websites. I don't think the problem here is with me - I think a lot of the time its your rose-colored glasses.
No, what you're talking about generally is the libertarian in your head - the ideas you have about libertarians. They don't look like the average libertarian for me and for a lot of people (this explains much of the pushback I would say).
ReplyDeleteI second this claim. I experience a lot of pushback when I read about libertarianism from you and I think "Gee, I'm not like that, and I don't know a single soul who's like that." Not that you make sweeping generalizations about libertarian habits or anything - but the way you characterize libertarianism, it's like this big detailed conspiracy to impose on people. We just want to be left the hell alone.
I would be wary of getting your source material on libertarianism from Gene Callahan. He's been missing his brain for a while now.
Mattheus I've never promoted the idea that its some big detailed conspiracy to impose upon people - this may be your own sensitivity talking.
ReplyDeleteBut you don't want to "just" be left along - that's my whole problem. You want to tell people they can't build their own society, or at least you have very specific and restrictive understandings of when you approve of people building their own society and when you don't. That's obnoxious and it's hard to take seriously your claim that you just want to be left alone with that sort of attitude.
I don't get my source material on libertarianism from Gene - I have found that he agrees with me on a lot of it, though.
What Daniel is arguing here is something close to the argument against Natural Rights from Jeff Friedman and Gerry Cohen. I generally agree with him.
ReplyDeleteI'll use an argument here I've made before on Thinkmarkets.... Let’s suppose that I trade something with a lord, say Viscount Ridley. Now, natural law says that what I trade and he trades must not be acquired through coercion. However, Viscount Ridley’s ancestors got their land through coercion. I may not be descended from nobility, but that doesn’t mean that my ancestors didn’t get their wealth entirely from trade. So, if all property is “polluted” in this way, and it all is, then how can any trade occur as natural law describes?
We may say “we should forget about who coerced who centuries ago”. In my view that’s a valid argument. But, it’s a utilitarian argument. What we’re arguing is that everyone would be better off now to forget about the earlier “pollution” of property through coercion.
"But you don't want to "just" be left along - that's my whole problem. You want to tell people they can't build their own society, or at least you have very specific and restrictive understandings of when you approve of people building their own society and when you don't. That's obnoxious and it's hard to take seriously your claim that you just want to be left alone with that sort of attitude."
ReplyDeleteThis is the problem as I see it. You see libertarianism as a prescriptive ideology, whereas libertarians see it as a non-prescriptive ideology.
Gene did allude to Rothbard and Hoppe as stating what the "laws should be", or what a "libertarian society should look like". No, that is not the case at all. I'll explain.
The principles of Austro-libertarianism (of which most libertarians who post on your blog indeed are) can essentially be expressed in a sentence or two. Obviously, you aren't going to write a one-page book. So, Rothbard (I am not as studied on Hoppe) does elaborate upon from whence these ideas came and also provides examples of how such a thing could work. Further, he attempts to show cases in which libertarian ideas would result in a better outcome. This isn't prescriptive, it is entirely descriptive.
As I stated earlier (above), I don't know many libertarians that would impose a system upon anybody else, all that we ask is that you don't impose your systems upon us.
It would represent a great contradiction in Austro-libertarian thinking if we would actually impose ANYTHING. Thankfully, this contradiction does not exist.
But you don't want to "just" be left along - that's my whole problem. You want to tell people they can't build their own society, or at least you have very specific and restrictive understandings of when you approve of people building their own society and when you don't. That's obnoxious and it's hard to take seriously your claim that you just want to be left alone with that sort of attitude.
ReplyDeleteI've never told people they can't have a state. I've never told communists they can't abolish their claims to property. Etc etc.
It's different to say that the state is a criminal organization, and as such morally illegitimate. And another to tell everyone they cannot have it. I don't intend or want to impose statelessness on everyone; I hope they want it for themselves. At the heart of the debate, I want to be left alone from the extorting, kidnapping, burglaring mafia. I presumed everyone else would be as well, but you are more than welcome to keep it.
Sorry.. meant to say:
ReplyDelete"It's one thing to say that the state is a criminal organization, and as such morally illegitimate. And another to tell everyone they cannot have it."
Just going to skip the comments...
ReplyDeleteFor a non-libertarian spontaneous order theorist, look at Jane Jacobs. Libertarians like her, of course, but I don't know that the feeling was mutual. (except for Hayek).