The Long View 2009-03-20: The Iron Laws of History (Annotated)
John posted some bangers here:
...Hegel did retain the memory that the state was not merely a fence to keep out the state of nature, but a positive expression of the higher potentialities of human sociality. It is possible to imagine a state whose citizens are entities among whom violence is impossible. That may seem a fantastic proposition, but it is less fantastic than the inability, so often found on the Right these days, to distinguish a gasoline tax from highway robbery.
John was the guy who taught me the idea that in Catholic political theory, the state can be a positive good, even though it is usually run by crooks.
In this one he is quoting David Warren:
In my own humble yet authoritative opinion, an absolutely overt advertisement for atheism is a Godsend, but not for the atheists. How could this be? To explain, I must (hardly for the first time) invoke Warren's Iron Law of Paradox, which holds, among other things, that the more clearly you state the case for a false proposition, the better you undermine it.
Which John follows up with:
That is why the wise demagogue attacks people rather than ideas.
The Iron Laws of History (Annotated)
The appalling thing about the AIG bonuses is that the evening news shows were still tittering about them yesterday, a few hours after the Federal Reserve had announced a trillion-dollar asset-bailout initiative that really could turn the US dollar into Weimar money. It’s as if the media on September 11, 2001, had scarcely mentioned the destruction of the World Trade Center so they could continue to talk about the chief pseudo-news story of the day, which concerned whether a Congressman whose name I forget had murdered his girl friend.
Still, far be it from me to break up the canasta tournament on the Titanic.
I’ve taken a look at the principal bill now before Congress to get those bonuses back from the AIG executives, which is H. R. 1586. The idea is to supertax the recipients of the bonuses from companies that have received substantial support from TARP, the recent bailout bill. The objections to the bill, aside from it being a waste of everyone’s time, are that it may be an ex post facto law (a law that penalizes an act after it has been committed) or a bill of attainder (essentially a law passed to penalize an individual or a group of particular persons).
The ex post facto question seems to have a relatively clear answer. The federal prohibition on ex post facto laws does not apply to taxes, as the Supreme Court reiterated as recently as 1994 in United States v. Carlton. It may be possible to argue that this tax is really a fine dressed up as a tax, but this does not seem to be an area where the courts are keen to find nice factual distinctions. Concerning the bill of attainder question, it does not seem to me that the bill defines the class to be taxed in a way that points too specifically to identifiable individuals. At least, the bill is not too specific for a tax law; that kind of statute often picks out people who work on the east side of a building but excludes those on the west. The problem, I think, is that even tax legislation must have a rational basis, and it is hard to argue that this statute was passed without at least a measure of personal animus.
Constitutional law is not supposed to be this much fun. In any case, I rather doubt that any version of the various anti-bonus laws will be passed. We don’t have time for this.
* * *
Jerry Pournelle, having so recently led his readers on another merry romp through Hell, this week directed his blog viewers to the political-theory version of that locale, Joseph Sobran’s essay The Reluctant Anarchist:
My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations... Though I disliked Rand’s atheism (at the time, I was irreligious, but not anti-religious), she had an odd appeal to my residual Catholicism. I had read enough Aquinas to respond to her Aristotelian mantras. Everything had to have its own nature and limitations, including the state; the idea of a state continually growing, knowing no boundaries, forever increasing its claims on the citizen, offended and frightened me. It could only end in tyranny... In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label “anarcho-capitalists” — and even met [Murray] Rothbard himself... Murray’s view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government... [H]is brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe . . . finish[ed] my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard... Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street... R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates that in the twentieth century alone, states murdered about 162,000,000...of their own subjects. This figure doesn’t include the tens of millions of foreigners they killed in war. How, then, can we speak of states “protecting” their people?... The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman
These views are degenerate, in a not merely polemical a sense: they are the lifeless ashes of the tradition of Thomas Hobbes. In today’s intellectual environment, they are also lazy common-places. Sometimes I wonder whether it would be possible to get a political science degree from a reputable university today without ever having encountered the suggestion that there may be a way to define the state that does not begin with a “monopoly of force.” For an alternative, consider what Hegel had to say in The Philosophy of History:
All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity. For Law is the objectivity of the Spirit.
There are problems with the Hegelian theory of the state, to put it mildly, starting with the fact it does not trouble to strongly differentiate the state from society. It also does not distinguish between the quite different concepts of “state“ and “government.” However, Hegel did retain the memory that the state was not merely a fence to keep out the state of nature, but a positive expression of the higher potentialities of human sociality. It is possible to imagine a state whose citizens are entities among whom violence is impossible. That may seem a fantastic proposition, but it is less fantastic than the inability, so often found on the Right these days, to distinguish a gasoline tax from highway robbery.
Hobbes’s notion of the state as essentially a violence-moderator is nonetheless a clarifying approximation, like the Newtonian physics we all use every day in an Einsteinian world. So, for instance, the short answer to Sobran’s question about the alleged death-toll from state activity in the 20th century is that prestate society is a condition of continuous war, often resulting in genocide, in which the leading cause of death for an adult male was violence.
We may also note that the regimes under which the deaths to which Sobran alludes occurred were ideologically anti-state regimes: both Fascism and Communism subordinated the state to the party. They rejected the state precisely because it implied limitations of precedent, due process and predictability on collective action.
Sobran’s anarchy is a condition of maximum intellectual entropy: that is, an idea system from which no work can be derived, and in which no transformation is possible. One can regard only with dismay the fact that this condition is often equated with “conservatism.”
* * *
Speaking of clarifying approximations, here’s a universal law from David Warren that would warm the heart of Hegel himself:
The fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God," according to the Psalmist; or as an advertising standards council in Britain ruled, the line should read, "There's probably no God," when it appears on the sides of transit buses. Ottawa's city council voted last week to make OC Transpo the latest carrier of this message, which is already appearing on buses in other Canadian cities, and across former Christendom.... In my own humble yet authoritative opinion, an absolutely overt advertisement for atheism is a Godsend, but not for the atheists. How could this be? To explain, I must (hardly for the first time) invoke Warren's Iron Law of Paradox, which holds, among other things, that the more clearly you state the case for a false proposition, the better you undermine it.
That is why the wise demagogue attacks people rather than ideas.
* * *
And as if that were not enough, that insufferable Spengler at Asia Times has had the temerity to do a review of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’s last book, American Babylon, before my copy even arrived (which it did yesterday).
Here are Spengler’s views about America and the historical manifestation of Divine Reason:
A red line connects the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 to the Second Thirty Years War of 1914-1945. Whether the Puritans were right to conclude that Europe already had been lost for Christianity is a matter for historians to debate. But it is hard to imagine how Europe might have avoided the victory of communism or fascism were it not for the United States, now the only major nation in which Christianity remains at the center of public life. If the Puritans had not sailed to America in emulation of Israel leaving Egypt, the Gates of Hell well might have prevailed over St Peter... Ultimately, the Puritan hope of forming a new chosen people in a new promised land only could fail, but it is hard to see how Christianity could have prevailed in the West without it.
These things may or may not be true. The goal of a genuine conservatism, however, may be to preserve a world in which they are at least sayable.
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